Conclusion
What, finally, has been the legacy of Islam in tropical Africa? Firstly, in those societies which were already reaching out to wider horizons, whether through trade, war and conquest, nomadism or other factors, the transcendent monotheism of Islam provided a more appropriate spiritual support system than ethno-specific polyspiritual systems operating within a micro- cosmic environment.
Though Islam could not tolerate indigenous ancestor and spirit cults, it could fill the void with parallel forms of its own: the scholarly genealogy (isnad), the Sufi ancestry (silsila), the cult of the Prophet or the tariqa founder, belief in a chief spirit of evil—Iblis—and lesser such spirits (shaytan, ifrit etc.) as well as a host of task-oriented spirits (jinn) which, as possession spirits, became almost indistinguishable from their African counterparts (e.g. in thezar in Ethiopia and the Sudan, thebori in Hausaland and the holey among the Songhay).Secondly, Islam claimed, and was widely believed, to have superior methods for harnessing cosmic forces: through the Qur’an itself, the ‘Word made Book’ which could, in part or whole, be read, written, hung about the person or dwelling, drunk off a slate or wrapped in goatskins as a community talisman; and through the mediator of the Word, the imam, the teacher, the Sufi shaykh and, above all, the ubiquitous ‘holyman’ (variously called Alfa (Songhay and Yoruba), Karamokho (Manding), Malam (Hausa), Feki (Sudanese Arabic), Wadaad (Somali) etc.) who acted as chaplain, medicine-man, rain-maker, arbitrator, protector, preceptor of boys and supervisor of rites de passage in the communities he dwelt among.
Thirdly, Islam introduced many societies to a linear as opposed to a cyclical view of creation. For Islam reincarnation is anathema. Man is born, lives his life in accordance with or in opposition to divine law, dies, is judged and rewarded with paradise or punished with hell.
He has no second chance; hence the stress placed upon scrupulous observance of rituals and taboos expressed with a self-discipline which outside observers have often castigated as fanaticism.Fourthly, the advent of Islam opened up for communities in tropical Africa a macrocosm which took them not merely beyond the confines of village or tribal society, but incorporated them into a vaster pan-Islamic cultural system and into a world economy. In the Sahelian belt from the Atlantic to the Red Sea long-distance trade was in the hands of Muslim merchants and the goods they introduced from the Mediterranean, Europe and the Middle East were themselves vectors of social and economic change, fostering in urban centres forms of pre-industrial capitalism and the growth of elites. The principal goods they exported northwards were the products of exploitation and oppression: gold and slaves. The interchange between tropical Africa and the worlds of the Mediterranean and south-west Asia was not only a material one. The pilgrimage to Mecca took men and women on international travels and exposed them to new cultures, new ideas, new foods, forms of dress, architecture, cropsand so on, whilethe return home established for them a new and higher social status. Men also travelled in search of learning, both within the Sahelian lands and up and down the East African coast and further afield to North Africa, Egypt, Jerusalem, Medina and other cities of Islam. Books travelled even further and it is no surprise to find books written in Baghdad, Cordoba, Bukhara or Nishapur being studied in Mombasa, Arbaji, Timbuktu or Katsina, just as works by Fulani or Sanhaja scholars might be read in Morocco, Egypt or India. The multifaceted exchanges which Islam facilitated in tropical Africa find their permanent reflection in Arabic loan words which have been absorbed by many African languages, the heaviest borrowings being in Swahili, Somali, Hausa, Fulfulde and Manding. The Arabic script was also borrowed (sometimes slightly modified) to write a number of languages spoken by African Muslims during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even today, despite the Europeanisation of education, this art is not altogether lost.
Lastly, Islamisation has tended to foster certain social attitudes, practices and organisational patterns. In the first place, medieval interpretations of Islam (which are still current in many areas) have favoured a patriarchal form of social organisation and stark dichotomies between free and slave, Muslim and non-Muslim. In such a system free Muslim males monopolise political and economic power, women are excluded from the forces of production and generally kept in seclusion, while slaves form a prominent part of the labour force and sometimes of the military. The patriarchal system is reflected in the jurisprudence of medieval Islam which rarely allowed a woman to act in her own behalf, but required her to act through a guardian (wait), often classifying her, from the point of view of legal competence, along with slaves, minors and lunatics. Tropical African societies responded in varying ways to the explicit or implicit social norms of the wider Muslim world. In some societies (e.g. Dar Fur, Borno, Hausaland and among the nomadic Tuareg) women had considerable political influence and social freedom; in some societies (e.g. Songhay, the Hausa states, Borno) slaves could attain to administrative office and (as in Songhay) there might be elaborate emancipation systems which over the course of three or four generations integrated slaves into the societies they served in.
But the stronger the influence of self-styled apostles of orthopraxy became, the more likely those societies were to emphasise sharp differentiations of role and status between men and women, sharp social distinctions between free and slave and to stress the ‘uncleanness’, barbarousness and enslaveability of non-Muslims, this latter process being sanctified through the doctrine of jihad—struggling for the dominance of the faith of Islam. Hence, in the name of Islam (though contrary to its actual teachings) clitorodectomy has been practised almost universally in Muslim tropical Africa as a means of controlling women’s sexuality, while in the Sudan and Somalia older and harsher forms of genital mutilation (including infibulation) are evidence of the extremes to which patriarchalism can be taken.
Hence too, in the name of Islam (though contrary in most cases to the letter of its law) certain African societies (e.g. in Central Africa, the southern and south-western Sudan, the ‘Middle Belt’ of West Africa) have been decimated or at least severely disrupted and degraded by the activities of Muslim slave-raiders and traders. Over the centuries (c. 800-1900 ce) many millions of men and women in the prime of their lives were uprooted from their own societies and forcibly reimplanted in alien societies either within tropical Africa or in distant societies on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula or in India. Slavery is, of course, now a thing of the past, but some of its effects still finger in the social stigma attached to slave ancestry in some African societies and the general social inferiority of persons of tropical African origin in Arab-Muslim societies. The status of women in African Muslim societies, however, remains an area of intense debate as the increase of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam tends to reinforce a harsh patriarchalism which women, from their educationally and economically disadvantaged position, are likely to find it increasingly hard to combat.Further Reading
Clarke, Peter B. West Africa and Islam (Edward Arnold, London, 1982)
Hiskett, Mervyn The Sword of Truth: the Life and Times of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio (Oxford University Press, New York, 1973)
----- The Development of Islam in West Africa (Longman, London, 1984)
Holt, P.M. The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898, 2nd edn (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970)
----- and Daly, M.W. The History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day, 3rd edn (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado)
Hun wick, John O. Shari'a in Songhay: the Replies of al-Maghill to the Questions of Askia al-Hdjj Muhammad (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, London, 1985)
Levtzion, Nehemia Ancient Ghana and Mali (Methuen, London, 1973)
Lewis, I.M. (ed.) Islam in Tropical Africa (Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, London, 1966)
Martin, B.G. Muslim Brotherhoods in 19th-Century Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976)
O’Fahey, R.S. and Spaulding, J.L. Kingdoms of the Sudan (Methuen, London, 1974) Pouwels, R. Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800-1900 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987)
Saad, Elias N. Social History of Timbuktu: the Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983)
Trimingham, J.S. Islam in the Sudan (Oxford University Press, London, 1949) Islam in Ethiopia (Oxford University Press, London, 1952) Islam in West Africa (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959) Islam in East Africa (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964)
----- The Influence of Islam upon Africa, 2nd edn (Longman, London, 1980)