Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants (ISBN 1558763058)

Culturally informative:
This is a "greatest hits" distillation of culturally informative passages from the writings of some 22 Muslim scholars from the ninth to the 15th century, drawn largely from Lev-tzion's comprehensive Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (2000, Mar-kus Wiener). These were centuries when West African kingdoms grew wealthy on growing trade with the Muslim world, which then reached from Morocco to China, and the climate in much of West Africa was more temperate than today. This compact, 125-page volume is a useful introduction to the best writing that has survived, from the well-known passages of Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun to many that will be new to all but the most dedicated scholars. DD