Islam in Africa and African Islam: An Overview

Islam spread in different parts of Africa through a number of means, routes, and agents, from the initial conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, to gradual diffusion through trade and economic networks, the work of charismatic preachers and sufi (mystic) masters, conversion of political elites, and so forth.

In tropical Africa generally, Islam spread along trade routes. North African caravans moved south along the west coast, inland and down the Nile. The Red Sea coast provided direct access to Eastern Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, while trade routes along the Indian Ocean led inland into tropical Africa. Muslim traders and artisans “seem often to have been the first bearers of Islam and to have at least prepared the ground for a later expansion of their faith, even where they made no efforts at direct proselytization” (Lewis 1980: 26). Teachers and holy men came with the traders to teach their children, and often married into the local communities.

The process is sometimes described in terms of three stages of conversion to Islam by nomads who settle in a particular place. The first stage is the quarantine stage in which these newly settled nomads live separately from the local population. The second stage is mixing in which the “local people begin to adopt Islamic ideas and Muslim clothes; the court begins to celebrate Islamic festivals as well as traditional ones and so on” (Hiskett 1984: 305). The third stage, which seems to come in cycles, is reform, in which puritan reformers seek to end the mixing stage, forcing everyone to observe “true” Islamic practices. The scope and manner of the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa included local political, social, historical, and geographical factors, as well as the strength of traditional beliefs in an area before the introduction of Islam. In coastal East Africa, however, with long traditions of welcoming immigrants from great distances, cultural change was an inescapable fact of life (Pouwel 1987: 2). Although conversion to Islam may have been a conscious decision to distinguish oneself from other native Africans, the local understanding and practice of the religion not only was influenced by African culture, but also exhibited elements of Asian influence that created a culture distinct from coastal East African culture.

Trimingham proposed a model for the spread and integration of Islam in Africa that consists in juxtaposing African traditional religions which are assumed to precede the advent of Islam and historically independent from it, on the one hand, and Islam as a more or less alien, coherent body of beliefs and practices, on the other (Trimingham 1970, 1980).

I find this view more helpful in evaluating the contingent role of Islam in Africa because the kinds of social, and political, and cultural changes and transformations associated with Islam cannot be reduced solely to either an “African” or “Islamic” agency or motivation. Moreover, to view the spread of Islam in a given context primarily in terms of its appeal as a religious ideology may draw on certain assumptions regarding the role of “religion” for the society in question. In contrast, I am using the phrase “contingent role of Islam” in this chapter in order to suggest that there are multiple possible directions and a complex set intersections leading to different outcomes of the relationship in different times and places. Within each context, the roles and meanings of Islam can be apparently contradictory and ambiguous, which is exactly my point. The notion of contingency means that a particular outcome can be simultaneously viewed as, on the one hand, local, African, and Islamic, and on the other hand, religious, ideological, social, cultural, and/or political. Indeed, the diversity of patterns of the spread of Islam indicates the different roles and purposes it served for different social segments, such as specific local communities, groups defined by vocation as traders or artisans, and so forth. In this long process of diffusion and growth, Islam played various pragmatic, ideological, political, cultural roles and functions, or a combination of some of them, in different contexts.

In Africa, diversity has produced rich traditions of widely varied religious meanings, beliefs, and practices. Islam energized, enlivened and animated life in African communities, and at the same time Islam has been molded by its African settings. As a result of the interaction between Muslim and African civilizations, the advance of Islam has profoundly influenced religious beliefs and practices of African societies, while local traditions have “Africanized” Islam. The ways Islam has thrived in the rich panoply of continent-wide historical circumstances have fostered discord at least as often as these ways of Islam have helped realize unity and disagreement. (Levtzion 1994: ix)

One domain of the mutual transformation that might be called the dynamic of Islamization in Africa and Africanization of Islam can be seen is relation to political authority, where different elements of Islam appear to have had varying degrees of importance in different locations. In West Africa, for instance, which had political traditions of centralized states, the legal traditions of Islam took root, whereas in North East Africa, with comparatively less centralized political organization, sufi (mystic) traditions were established. There is also evidence of the adoption of Shariʿa by nomadic people because it offered them some “political cohesion” despite their “geographical mobility” (Lewis 1980: 36). Leaders in centralized societies used various aspects of Islam to reinforce their power before they actually adopted Islam, which also gave them a legitimate reason to expand their territory in the name of conversion. Unlike indigenous African systems that lacked a cohesive unit to hold the polity together, “Islam provided a more cohesive pull and a stronger basis for empire building. It was no accident that the Islamic empires, such as Ghana and Kanauri, lasted the longest in Africa’s history.

Hiskett argues that Islamic states in West Africa have been established by influencing existing states or by creating states where none had existed before (Hiskett 1984: 311). Pilgrimage to Mecca also helped increase the status of rulers and allowed them to create links with other Islamic states. Although in many cases states had existed before the introduction of Islam, Shariʿa played a role in creating empires out of these states in places like Mali, Songhay and Kano. However,

Islam was, of itself, never the sole agent in forming these states and empires. Many other factors such as conquest, trade, incoming strangers, slave-raiding and slave-trading, were also involved; what mattered was whether the persons engaged in these activities were Muslims or non-Muslims. If they were Muslims, the political organisations they created, whether simple states or more complex empires, naturally bore the marks of Islam to a greater or lesser extent. Otherwise, these organisations remained non-Islamic. (Hiskett 1984: 314)

Hiskett also points out that literacy played a most important part in the process of conversion to Islam and the establishment of an Islamic state (314–15).

Military conquest was also part of the processes of Islamization in Africa. For instance, the Almoravid Islamic sect, which flourished in the eleventh century in what is now Mauritania, “overwhelmed much of the western Sahel” (Griffiths 1995: 14). Their conquest “set the pattern for the ebb and flow of Islamization, of adaptive and reforming Islam, which remains a characteristic of Muslim communities ever since” (Quinn 2003: 19). The Maliki school, which was introduced into the region by the Almoravid movements as a fundamental framework of West African Islam, gave the region “a shared intellectual-legal frame of reference with the Maghrib (in a wide sense), Spain and (later) the Sudan” (Sannen 1997: 30).

However, jihad was also a basis for anticolonial struggles in northwest Africa and the Sahel region across sub-Saharan Africa during the first quarter of the twentieth century, where it “continued to provide powerful motivation for diverse Muslim communities, although its focus was not so much internal reform as a defense of Muslim lands against the encroachments of European infidels. Most of these militant Islamic movements sought to maintain or re-establish an Islamic state that was either under attack or had been recently occupied by the European powers” (Stewart 1990:194–95). Yet, by the mid-1920s, ‘jihad had been rejected as an anachronism in Muslim Africa. Islamic leaders and communities who sought to distance themselves from their Christian rulers joined others who, from the advent of colonial rule, had simply withdrawn from the political realities of colonial occupation” (200). Strategies of withdrawal included migration from colonially occupied territories, and calls by some reclusive religious leaders for non-involvement in temporal affairs as a way of ignoring the European presence (201, 202).

An important characteristic of African Islamic political authority is prophetic and charismatic leadership among sufi brotherhoods (tariqas). Although tariqa literally means “method” and is used to indicate a mystical path to Islam, the English translation “brotherhood” depicts another connotation of the word in Sufism as an identifiable, corporate group, though this quality varied and did not necessarily follow a specific formula. “The nature of this corporateness, and the extent to which it is employed for social and political ends, varies considerably among Sufis. And these variations depend less on the particular doctrine or religious rule of the tariqa than upon the intentions of a given leadership in the context of a given set of social, political, and religious conditions” (Brenner 1988: 34). Thus, it was the leader of a tariqa who would engage the brotherhood in social and political arenas, though in different ways, as illustrated by the following two cases.

Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1811) “clearly perceived the social and political, as well as religious, potential of the tariqa as a corporate entity” (Brenner 1988: 36). He saw himself as the religious leader who would renew Islam, but he did not believe in doing so by force. Instead, he believed that he could achieve renewal “by establishing a religious community which could serve as a refuge for those Muslims who wished to renew their own faith” (38). Al-Mukhtar’s tariqa remained an independent religious brotherhood, unaffiliated with the secular state. This fact was probably facilitated by the fact that he lived among scattered desert communities. In contrast, SheikhʿUthman b. Fudi (1754–1817), who lived in a more centralized state, did not establish an exclusive religious community, and required less absolute loyalty to his religious system while resisting the existing state at the same time. Brenner attributes the differences in these examples to the leaders’ different “ideas about tariqa as a corporate organization, and differences in the socio-economic milieux in which they operated” (50).

The tariqas are described by Hunwick as a kind of pan-Islamic network, which “stress spiritual rather than intellectual knowledge, a feature that has enabled them to become mass movements—in a sense the ‘churches’ of Islam.” In sub-Saharan Africa, the most extensive networks have been “(a) in the west, the Qadirriya and the Tijaniyya, and (b) in the Nile valley and the east, the various tariqas deriving from the teaching legacy of the early-nineteenth-century Moroccan mystic Ahmad b. Idris—notably the Sanusiyya in Chad, the Kahtmiyya in the Sudan/Eritrea and the Salihiyya in Somalia” (Hunwick 1997: 31–32).

Cruise O’Brien (1986) argues that Islam has benefited from its participation in democracy and locates democratic elements in West African Islam in three forms, namely, traditional or sufi, reformist, and revolutionary. Regarding traditional or sufi Islam, although critiques of Sufism have often focused on the complete subservience of the disciple to the master, teachers usually have “conditional authority” in which they provide services to their disciples in return for their devotion. Many tariqas are pan-Islamic but have had difficulty retaining a centralized authority over a wide area, especially as the colonial powers “remained distrustful of the interterritorial links of Sufism with a particular vigilance reserved for any ‘pan-islamic’ associations” (75). Sufis have participated in West African politics, but have also opposed existing authority. Reformers who want to “return to the original principles of Islam” are often directly opposed to traditional Islam in West Africa, while using instruments of modernity and the European-created territorial state to disseminate their message. One of the primary models of this type is the Wahabiyya, which was brought to French Sudan (now Mali) in the 1920s and 1930s by merchants returning from the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, where the Wahaby Saudis were taking control of Arabia. The revolutionary Islam of the jihad movements prior to the consolidation of colonial powers in West Africa had a “charismatic democracy... in the fervent devotion of the charismatic following to the leader of holy war” (80).

For our purposes here, it is interesting to note that the constitutional model of the Medina state of the Prophet continued to influence the political thinking of African Islamic leaders, especially during the jihad periods in West Africa. As noted in the preceding review, they often tried to resurrect that model as the ideology of the states they established, or for the reform movements they initiated. At the same time, however, a different model of Islamic political organization was often attempted by Sufi leaders who sought to reconcile their followers with living under a secular state that did not attempt to enforce Shariʿa as the positive law of the land. In this sense, the Sufi tradition, which is the more popular approach among African Muslims, appears to be more consistent with modern principles of constitutionalism. It is also clear, it seems to me, that the contingency of the ideological and political role of Islam throughout the region has reflected a dialectic relationship among internal and external actors and factors, ranging from the possibilities of transregional pan-Islamic networks earlier, whether traditional, sufi, or militant Wahaby doctrine of Saudi Arabia, to the impact of confrontation with European colonialism. Some elaboration on the impact of the colonial encounter may be particularly relevant for its impact on the contingent role of Islam in the postcolonial context.