History of Sudan Rousseau was the first to point out the existence of this book. The German traveler Barth was the first to know it in some detail. He drew a large part of the information he used in narrating his journey to Africa from it. But the people of Abyssinia deceived him, and the book was mistakenly attributed to Ahmad Baba. The error is that the entire cultural heritage of Sudan is frozen in that famous personality, and every work is attributed to him. The error is also that the biographies of the era confuse the names of the scholars with the names of the historians. But Ahmad Baba's biography, in the eyes of the Arabs, was considered the history of Sudan.

If we were able to easily interpret the error made by Barth, then Ratzel, who translated a number of passages from the history of Sudan and who really worked on the whole work, did not find a specific indication of the author of the book. He expressed his doubt about the truth of the authorship when he saw some of Ahmad Baba's sayings. It is not uncommon for an author to mention his own works, but it is not common for him to speak of them in the third person. Furthermore, the name Ahmad Baba was always followed by the phrase "May God have mercy on him," a phrase that, although used only for a deceased person, could be attributed to a successor who completed the work after the author's death. Finally, regarding the death of Ahmad Baba, we find in the book the following phrase: "And on Tuesday, the tenth of Dhu al-Qi'dah al-Haram in the year six hundred and ten, the Sheikh, the scholar, the paragon of his time, the unique of his age, the jurist Ahmad Baba, son of the jurist Ahmad, son of Al-Hajj Ahmad, son of Muhammad, may God have mercy on him, passed away in the city of Timbuktu, to which he was sent by the Emir and Wali Zaydan, who was promised him in 1010."