Other Explanations of Islam’s Expansion

Others, and most notably Robin Horton, have attempted to explain Islam’s, and Christianity’s expansion in Africa during the period under discussion not in terms of colonial policy but because these religions answered needs that had arisen within Africa’s traditional religious system as a result of the increasing modernisation and consequent opening-up of political and economic frontiers that began to occur in the late nineteenth century.

It is difficult to do justice to Horton’s complex argument by attempting to summarise it in the small amount of space permitted here; nevertheless, what he seems to be suggesting, albeit some­what paradoxically, is that to understand Islam’s development—we will confine the discussion for the most part to Islam, though much of what is said applies to Christianity also—the principal object of study should be the rituals, ethics and belief system of the local, ‘indigenous’ religions and/or traditional religions as they are sometimes called and not those of Islam.

These religions, he suggests, have a dual character or two-tier structure, the first or lower tier being that of the lesser spirits and the higher or top tier that of the Supreme Being. In a particular socio-economic and political context (that is in those local, small-scale African societies that are relatively isolated from and have little contact or exchange, political, economic and cutural, with other societies), the people tend to acknowledge and have recourse consistently to the lesser spirits to explain, interpret, control and predict what happens and will happen in their world. By way of contrast, the inhabitants of those societies where the economic, political and cultural frontiers have been greatly widened through extensive trade and in other ways, tend to give far more significance to the role and importance of the Supreme Being in their life.

This opening-up and consequent shift from depen­dence on the lesser gods to the Supreme Being is characteristic, Horton seems to be arguing, of much of Africa from the second half of the nineteenth century, and was stimulated by the development of nation-states, the crea­tion of new road and rail networks and the extension of the modern sector of the economy. These developments in particular prised open the boundaries, cultural, political and economic, of small-scale societies, greatly enlarging in the process their scale of economic, cultural and political interaction with the wider world. The response of people to these changes in the socio-economic organisation of their communities was to turn their attention in a more systematic way to the top tier of their cosmology, the Supreme Being, to explain, predict and control the wider world which they now inhabited. For, according to Horton’s theory, while the principal sphere of activity of the lesser spirits is the microcosm or small-scale, enclosed society, that of the Supreme Being is the macrocosm of open, pluralist and structurally more differentiated and complex society.

This understanding of religious change and development suggests that there exists an intricate interdependence between patterns of belief and patterns of social organisation and that shifts of emphasis or changes of belief are more than anything else a response to changes in social organisation. Horton is adopting here what is termed in philosophy and social science circles an intellectualist approach to African belief systems, that sees them primarily as theoretical systems for the purpose of explaining, predicting and controlling space-time events.

Previously insulated from the wider world people were forced by these changes to confront and adjust to it as the stable boundaries of their local societies began to crumble under the impact. But they did not have to turn to Islam or Christianity to provide themselves with a sense of meaning and community in this wider world or for an explanation of the new order or the means to deal with it for they were already in possession of the substance of an explanatory system in that the traditional cosmology was grounded in the notion, albeit largely unelaborated, of a Supreme Being as moral guardian and underpinner of this wider world. And it was to the development and application of this notion that they turned in the new situation. From being at the periphery of their lives in the local, insulated community situation, the Supreme Being is now brought to the centre of the stage, as it were, being moved from a position of moral neutrality to one of moral concern, while rituals previously few and far between are devised for the purpose both of approaching and securing his guidance and assistance.

For its part Islam, and in a somewhat different way from Christianity, while it cannot claim to have initiated this shift in emphasis in the traditional cosmology, turning people away from their concern with the lesser spirits to a more active belief in and worship of the Supreme Being, and thereby advancing its cause in Africa, did, nevertheless, contribute something to the process. For, as we have seen, this shift, as Horton explains it, was due to a great extent to the economic and political developments which broke down the boundaries that had kept local com­munities isolated from each other and dependent on the lesser spirits. There­fore what Islam and Christianity did in their different ways was to act not as innovators, bringing to Africa a new concept of God, but as ‘catalysts’ or ‘triggers’ for changes that were ‘in the air anyway’.

According to this version of events, then, what has taken place is not so much an advance of Islam as something distinctive and new but a development in traditional African belief systems and/or cos­mologies. If Islam has spread rapidly in Africa in recent times, and it has, the explanation for this (and the same applies to Christianity) is not to be found in its own message and missionary endeavours, but in the revolution in com­munications linked with the above-mentioned economic, educational, social and political innovations. These created the conditions in which it became far more meaningful for people to become in practice more thoroughgoing monotheists in the sense of explaining and acting out their lives in what was a different and expanding world by reference and recourse to the Supreme Being rather than to the lesser spirits. In pushing the belief in and worship of the Supreme Being to the fore in the traditional African cosmology in the sense of giving it greater intellectual, emotional, psychological and practical relevance, these changes facilitated the acceptance of some of the beliefs and practices of the two world religions and in particular those which coincided with the responses of that cosmology to the new or modem situation.

In modern times, then, Islam’s progress in Africa can be accounted for by the fact that as a monotheistic religion, centred on a belief in the oneness and uniqueness of God, yet tolerant of mixing and syncretism and concerned with the explanation, prediction and control of space-time events, it has responded to the rapid changes that have opened up local African communities in a way that is largely compatible with the develop­ments within the traditional African cosmology. In other words, becoming a Muslim has not involved a radical shift in perspective, or, to put it another way, the rejection of essential elements within or the underlying purpose of the traditional cosmology as it began to develop in response to profound socio-economic and political change.

This is not to suggest the existence of complete harmony and compatibility between the two belief systems in theory or even in practice but rather of a number of important and significant equivalences which made it possible for Islam to expand by accommodating itself or by being accommodated to an African society experiencing great change which affected the way people related to and interpreted the role of the Supreme Being.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking expla­nation of religious change in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and should, therefore, be taken for what it is intended to be, that is a very general theory based as much on ‘an imaginary situation’, to use Horton’s own words, as on hard fact. The situation is an imaginary one in the sense that one cannot assess the actual developments in the African traditional cosmol­ogy resulting from its encounter with the modern, as Horton attempts to do, while at the same time leaving Islam and Christianity to one side, for in their different ways they were also an integral part of the genesis of that modern­ity, contributing not only religious ideas and practices but also as the pioneers of some of its basic economic, social, educational, political and more gener­ally cultural ingredients.

However, Horton’s theory has not only challenged but has also been challenged by a number of historical, philosophical, theological and other interpretations of religious development in general and of Islam and Christianity in particular in the African setting. Some critics have argued that, among other things, it is all very circular setting out to prove what has already been decided is the case, or that it presents a mono- causal and highly reductionist explanation of religious development. It is also, in this writer’s opinion, a very passive, mechanistic view of conversion, presenting the convert as someone who merely adapts her/his religious beliefs in response to social change without ever actively pursuing, in a positive, creative sense a different or alternative understanding and explanation of reality.

Moreover, is it the case that the Supreme Being assumed the active, interventionist role in people’s lives as a result of the opening-up of African society in the way Horton suggests and almost exclu­sively in that context? The evidence for this, as Fisher in particular has shown in his detailed set of replies to Horton, indicates otherwise. Fisher points out, among other things, that following Horton, there are examples of African societies where one would expect to find the Supreme Being at the centre of a people’s worship yet one does not and where one does not expect to find this, it happens to be the case. So Fisher would maintain that Islam, and Christian­ity, were far more dynamic and innovative than Horton’s theory suggests, and that their progress has to be explained with this in mind.

Furthermore, in linking religious change so closely to change in social structure Horton seems to pay too much attention on the one hand to the idea of a causal relationship between the social order and the conceptual order and too little to the actual findings of scholars such as Evans-Pritchard who, in for example his study of the Nuer, convincingly argues that the evidence is against this kind of positivist interpretation of religious development.

Other explanations of Islam’s progress in Africa include what we might call the ‘market value’ theory of Islamic expansion along the lines of Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis. The ethic of Islam, it is claimed, is a commerce-oriented one (see Qur’an Sura 198), and the alliance of market and mosque has facilitated this religion’s phenomenal advance in Africa especially in more recent times. This, however, does not explain why some communities unassociated with trade converted to Islam and why others that were did not.

Then there are those who, starting from a different perspective and premiss from Horton, maintain that Islam’s development is attributable in the main to the fact that it is, more so than Christianity, an ‘African religion’. Certainly it must have appeared to many but by no means all to have been less bound up with colonialism than Christianity and to have fitted in better with, among other things, African family patterns. But these were not the only criteria or measuring-rods used by Africans to determine the relative merits and demerits of these two world religions. Moreover, Islam is proving no less attractive today in areas where polygyny has become a rarity and Christianity has been thoroughly indigenised. It seems worth­while considering here in a little more detail, in the light of this view of Islam as an African religion, the interaction between these two religions.