Islam’s Relations with Africa’s New Religions
Compared with the colonial setting of much of the relation of Christianity to the peoples of Black Africa Islam has enjoyed considerable freedom in its dealing with African peoples.
At certain points it has stood over against African traditions, especially where divinities were represented by images, where ancestor cults challenged the prerogatives of Allah, or secret societies stood for independent authorities in face of Islam’s emphasis on the unitary community. At other points Islam has been able to accommodate readily to a wide range of African practices. Polygamy has been accepted and regulated, and the traditional male dominance in most African societies has been confirmed. Much divinatory practice has been retained, together with reHance on dreams as revelatory and the use of various forms of magic.Traditional spirit-possession cults where the spirit power was present in human embodiment rather than in cultic image or object could develop in new ways by adding Islamic spirits, as found in the Qur’an. Many of the Islamic-related movements have been of this form and have exhibited the further novelty of being voluntary societies of adherents and initiates rather than public cults of the whole community, and of appealing especially to women. Among these cults we may mention the Zar cults of Ethiopia and the Nilotic Sudan, the various Bori cults among the Hausa of Nigeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the spirit-possession movement among the Lebu women of Senegal, which operates alongside the more orthodox mosque religion of the men.
The Lebu people have also provided a more distinctive new religion founded by an ilfiterate fisherman, Seydina Limamu. In 1883 he experienced a call from God to fulfil the mission of Muhammad by reviving and expanding orthodox Islam through new fraternities of Godfearers (hence their name lay ens, from the Lebu word for God). As a charismatic saint, miracle worker and preacher, he imposed a strict ethic upon his followers and he himself was accepted by the orthodox and learned Muslims.
Opposition, however, arose from his more Africanising teaching, which rejected the obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca, the limitation of wives to four and the rigours of the Ramadan fast. The dominance of Arabic gave way to the religious use of the Lebu vernacular, Wolof, with a repertoire of songs and poems still widely used. He suffered much persecution from the French authorities. Since his death in 1909 the leadership has been held by two sons and then a grandson. The Laye movement survives as a small but religiously intense community being reintegrated into Islam. Limamu remains perhaps the most notable example of an African prophet inspired by Islam but equally concerned with the Africanisation of the faith.