Mohamed Shahid Mathee is a senior lecturer in the Department of Religion Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He graduated from Al-Azhar University in Egypt with a BA/Honours in Islamic law and Modern Civil Law. He obtained a Masters from the Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town and a PhD in Historical Studies from the same university. His current research focuses on the social and intellectual history of Timbuktu and Muslim West Africa working on marriage, divorce and paternity-dispute fatwas from the colonial era and Timbuktu’s twentieth-century chronicles