The extreme water scarcity and inhospitable climate that characterize the Sahara Desert form a natural barrier. However, since ancient times, the Sahara has been a transit route and the setting for exchanges between the Maghreb and the Sahel regions. Arab geographers created a metaphor of the desert as a sea, the camel as a vessel to cross it, and the lands to the south of it as the other “shore” (“sāḥil” in Arabic). 

In the medieval era, Arabic textual sources refer to the Masūfa, Ŷudāla, Lamtūna, Hawwāra and others as the main population groups driving mobility and settlement dynamics in the Saharan region, connecting it with the peoples to the south, establishing trade links that allowed key sub-Saharan goods to reach Mediterranean and global trade networks, and in turn spreading the Islamic religion among the peoples of the Sahel. The gold trade was the primary driver of these contacts, with routes documented as early as the ninth century between the central Maghreb region and the Kingdom of Gao, located on the central bend of the Niger River, and between Maghreb al-Aqsa and the kingdoms of Ghana, Sama, Silla and Takrūr in the western Sahel. 

Although some of the clichés about the Sahel which have been passed down by colonial historians persist today—especially those which portray trans-Saharan exchanges as one-way movements from north to south, denying the agency of sub-Saharan societies—the most recent research highlights their active participation in trade and intellectual ties, as well as their place in the medieval and modern Islamic world. Thus, the empires and sultanates of Mālī, Songhay and Kānem are examples of Islamic political entities which were fully connected with their counterparts in the northern part of the continent, with the Mediterranean and Eastern worlds, as well as with other African states outside the Dār al-Islām.

This scientific outreach activity has resulted from the coordinated research project MAGNA II: “Transits and transformations in Maghreb space and population” (TRAMAGHIS. PID2021-122872NB-C21 and DIANA. PID2021-122872NB-C22), funded by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF. A Way to Make Europe. 

Marta G. Novo holds a PhD in Arab and Andalusi Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and is a tenured professor with the Department of Arab and Islamic Studies and Oriental Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is a member of the research groups IEXCUL (Arab Ideologies and Cultural Expressions, UAM), MASYG (Society and Geography of the Maghreb, University of Alcalá), and GEA (African Studies Group, Autonomous University of Madrid). 

Her research focuses on the history of the pre-modern Islamic West (Al-Andalus, Maghreb, Sahel), and more specifically on West Africa and its historiography. She has authored several articles on slavery and the socio-political role of the “ulema” in the works of Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbuktī (1556–1627), as well as chapters in collective works on the biographical literature of the pre-modern Islamic West. She has taken part in the DHUNA Research Project (“Human Dynamics in North Africa: Population and Landscape in Historical Perspective,” HAR2017-82152-C2-2-P, MINECO, part of the coordinated MAGNA project “Cultural Geography of the Maghreb and Human Dynamics in North Africa (MAGNA),” Principal Investigator M.Á. Manzano, USAL), and is currently participating in DIANA (“Transits and Migrations in North Africa: Diachronic analysis of the population and its environment,” Principal Investigator Helena de Felipe, UAH, which forms part of the coordinated project MAGNA II, “Transits and Transformations in Maghreb Space and Population,” MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Principal Investigator M. Á. Manzano, USAL).