History
C. Explain the impact of Islam as a result of the Gold-Salt Trade using this excerpt:In some capital cities, such as Ghana and Gao, the presence of Muslim merchants resulted in theestablishment of mosques. The Malian king Mansa Musa (r. 1312-37) brought back from a pilgrimage toMecca the architect al-Sahili, who is often credited with the creation of the Sudano-Sahelian buildingstyle...Islam brought to Africa the art of writing and new techniques of weighting. The city of Timbuktu, forinstance, flourished as a commercial and intellectual center... Timbuktu... On the continent's eastern coast,Arabic vocabulary was absorbed into the Bantu languages to form the Swahili language. On the other hand, inmany cases conversion for sub-Saharan Africans was probably a way to protect themselves against being soldinto slavery, a flourishing trade between Lake Chad and the Mediterranean. For their rulers, who were notactive proselytizers, conversion remained somewhat formal, a gesture perhaps aimed at gaining politicalsupport from the Arabs and facilitating commercial relationships.