In his piece in the General History of Africa, Volume 4, p. 133, Djibril Tamsir Niane alludes to Sundiata being a Muslim.[39] According to Fage, there is nothing in the original epos that supports the claim. Sundiata is regarded as a great hunter and magician whose subjects predominantly adhered to traditional beliefs, as did Sundiata.[4][5][6] However, some of Sundiata's successors were Muslim, with Mansa Musa Keita being one of the most widely known.[40] The explorer Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali during the reign of Sundiata's great-nephew Suleyman, claimed that Mansa Musa's grandfather was named Sariq Jata and had converted to Islam.[41] This may be a reference to Sundiata, though if so Ibn Battuta was apparently mistaken about the genealogy, as Musa's grandfather was Sundiata's brother Mande Bory. Other medieval Arabic sources claim that a ruler before Sundiata named Barmandana was the first ruler of Mali to convert to Islam.
Some Muslim griots later added to the epic of Sundiata by claiming that Sundiata has "an ancestral origin among the companions of Muhammad in Mecca" (namely, Bilal Ibn Rabah)[42] and speaks of himself as a successor to Dhu al-Qarnayn, a conqueror and king mentioned in the Quran, commonly regarded as a reference to Alexander the Great.[43] Claims such as these are referred to by scholars like G. Wesley Johnson as nothing more than "Islamic legitimacy" - in African countries where Islam is now the predominant religion such as Senegal, and where Muslim griots try to link historical African figures to Muhammad either through a line of descent or by claiming that the ancestor of the historical figure belonged to Muhammad's tribe or was one of his followers (an attempt to distance them from their traditional African religious past).[44][45] Although Sundiata was not a Muslim, it is clear that the original epic of Sundiata was later affected by what Ralph Austen calls "Islamicate" culture—that is, the integration of Islamic and Arab culture.[43]
