The empire's founding is preserved not in a chronicle but in an epic, recited by griots of the Mande world and written down in the twentieth century from the performance of Mamadou Kouyate. In it Sunjata Keita, a boy who cannot walk until he pulls himself upright on an iron rod, returns from exile to defeat the sorcerer king Sumanguru Kante at Kirina, and the decisive weapon is not an army but knowledge: an arrow tipped with a white cockerel's spur, obtained by finding out the secret on which his enemy's invulnerability depends.
That is a religious world, and it is not the world of the mosque. It runs on nyama, the force in things and words that hunters, blacksmiths and griots handle professionally; on the sanctity of hunters' associations; on the oath that binds clans; and on the ancestors of the founding lineages. The Mande charter recited alongside the epic sets out obligations between clans and toward the land.
Islam and this older order did not replace one another. The kings were Muslim, took Muslim titles, built mosques and made pilgrimage, and continued to be surrounded by the ceremonial of Mande kingship, including practices Arab visitors found scandalous. The empire's religious life is best described as two systems held together in the same court, and the fact that both left durable records, one in Arabic manuscript and one in performance, is unusual for medieval West Africa.