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So, for those who've never heard of it before (and all likelihood, virtually no-one will), the Pashalik of Timbuktu was an independent African state created by the Armas people, descended from the Moroccan expeditionary force which had defeated the Songhai army at Tondibi and conquered Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné in 1591 (made up of four thousand Moroccan, Morisco Refugees and European renegades, armed with European-style arquebuses- introducing gun warfare to Sub-Saharan Africa for the very first time). They were unable to exert their control outside their large fortifications to take over the majority of the territories and tributaries formerly held by the Songhai Empire, and within a decade, the expedition's leaders were abandoned by Morocco.

Left to their own devices, the men of the 1591 expedition intermarried with the Songhai, became small scale independent rulers, and from 1618 onwards, they began to elect their leaders (who had previously been appointed by the Sultan of Morocco), establishing an independent republic with its capital in Timbuktu. However, IOTL, while the Pashalik was governed as an independent republic, the Armas still continued to recognize Moroccan sultans as their leaders. During the Moroccan civil war the Pashalik supported the legitimate Sultan, Zidan al-Nasir (deceased in Sept 1627), and they would pledge their allegiance to the Alaouite dynasty in 1670, after it came to power and re-unified Morocco.

So, I've been seriously contemplating doing an alternate TL, focused upon the history of a far more successful Pashalik of Timbuktu, for some time- though I'm kind of in two minds about which POD to use (should the elected leader of the Armas return to Morocco as a faction in the Civil War, eventually emerging victorious and unifying a greatly expanded trans-Saharan Morocco under the world's first Islamic Republic? Or should the Armas break all ties with the Moroccans, and extend ties to the breakaway former provinces and tribuary states of the collapsed Songhai Empire, re-unifying most of them under a relatively Republican Confederation, and using its key military advantage of gunpowder weaponry to conquer the rest?), I just wanted to get people's opinions on the plausibility of such a TL.

Just how powerful, how advanced, how enduring and how democratic do you think that the Pashalik of Timbuktu (and/or its future direct descendants) could potentially become in an ATL, without stretching the limits of plausibility beyond breaking point? And what do you think would be the most probable and/or most interesting long-term changes which could be explored in such a TL?
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