Chinguetti

Occupied for thousands of years, the Chinguetti region was once a broad savannah; rock paintings at Agrour Amogjar, in the nearby Amogjar Pass, feature images of giraffes, cows, and people in a green landscape. It is quite different from the sand dunes of the encroaching desert, which make up most of the region today.

The city was founded in AD 777 and, by the 11th century, had become a trading center for a confederation of Berber tribes, known as the Sanhaja Confederation. It was a crossroads of trade routes. Soon after settling Chinguetti, the Sanhaja first interacted with (and eventually melded with) the Almoravids, represented by Abdallah ibn Yasin. The Almoravids would eventually control an empire stretching from present-day Senegal to southern Spain, called al-Andalus (the modern-day Andalucia). The city's stark, unadorned architecture reflects the strict religious beliefs of the Almoravids, who spread the Malikite rite of Sunni Islam throughout the Western Maghreb.

After two centuries of decline, the city was effectively re-founded in the 13th century as a fortified trading-center for nomadic trans-Saharan caravans, and as a means of connecting the Mediterranean with Sub-Saharan Africa. Although the walls of the original fortification disappeared centuries ago, many of the buildings in the old section of the city date from this period.

For centuries, the city was a principal gathering place for pilgrims of the Maghreb to gather, on their way to Mecca. It became known as a holy city in its own right, especially for pilgrims unable to make the long journey to the Arab Peninsula. It also became a center of Islamic religious and scientific scholarship in West Africa.[2] In addition to religious training, the schools of Chinguetti taught students rhetoric, law, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. For many centuries, all of Mauritania was commonly known in the Arab world as Bilad Shinqit, "the land of Chinguetti." Chinguetti is sometimes said to be the seventh-most holy city of Islam,[3] but there is no formal recognition of this claim outside of West Africa. The city remains one of the world's most important historical sites both in terms of the history of Islam and the history of West Africa.

Although largely abandoned to the desert, the city features a series of medieval manuscript libraries without peer in West Africa. The area around the Rue des Savants (or “street of intelligent ones”) was once famous as a gathering place for scholars, and as a place to debate the finer points of Islamic law. Today, the quiet city still offers the urban and religious architecture of the Moorish empire as it existed in the Middle Ages.[4]

In 1996, UNESCO designated Chinguetti, along with the cities of Ouadane, Tichitt and Oualata, also in the dunes area, as a World Heritage Site.[5]

The Friday Mosque of Chinguetti is widely considered by Mauritanians to be the national symbol of the country. The recently discovered offshore oilfield was named Chinguetti in its honor.

In 2021 Chinguetti was featured in a BBC documentary Life at 50 degrees C, which looked at ordinary people living in increasingly inhospitable areas.[6]

• 
  The Great "Friday Mosque"
• 
  Inside a Qur'anic Library
• 
  New town architecture of Chinguetti
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  Massive hand hewn door cut from acacia trees

• Ahmad ibn al-Amin al-Shinqiti (1863–1913), who was born and lived here, is one of Mauritania's most famous writers.
• Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti (1887–1973), an Islamic scholar.

• Chinguetti oil field, Mauritania's first offshore oil field
• Greater Mauritania, (بلاد شنقيط; Bilād Šinqīṭ; Bilad Chinguetti)
• The Chinguetti meteorite is a find reputed to come from a large unconfirmed “iron mountain”, located in the nearby of the town.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chinguetti.

• Map showing Chinguetti: Fond Typographique 1:200,000", République Islamique de Mauritanie: Chinguetti Sheet NF-28-VI
• UNESCO on Chinguetti
• Mauritania Today – Chinguetti
• Chinguetti's manuscripts, Saudi Aramco World
• U.S. Department of State Reports – Mauritania
• Palin's Travels – Chinguetti
• Desert libraries
• Shinqit Forum