The epic depicts Askia Mohammed's authority as resting simultaneously on Islam (pilgrimage, conversion, holy war) and on inherited magical and supernatural power, including a spirit-world father. The oral tradition does not resolve these into opposition; the ideal ruler commands both the mosque and the occult at once.
The jeseré (griot) preserves and performs the genealogy and deeds that make a ruler's power intelligible and legitimate to the community; the story exists because a praise-singer keeps it. Political memory here is not archived in documents but held in a trained performer whose recitation can be elicited, varied, and ended.
The epic organizes history as a chain of named begettings, so that who a ruler descends from carries more explanatory weight than what policies he enacted. Reading power through lineage rather than institutions reveals legitimacy as something inherited and recited rather than constructed through office.