West Africa

While the Nile valley was one obvious, though very late, conduit for the passage of Islam to tropical Africa, the central and western Sahara boasted numerous routes between the lands of the Mediterranean and the lands of the Sahel and some of these were exploited from the late second century of Islam.

After conquering Egypt the Arab armies pushed westwards into Cyrenaica and in a second wave in the 660s reached the former Roman province of Africa (roughly the area of modern Tunisia) and founded Qayrawan in 670.

From there further expeditions were launched westwards leading to the pacification of all of North Africa up to the Atlantic Ocean. Then, instead of turning southwards across the inhospitable Saharan wastes, the Arab armies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar (711 ce) and began the conquest of the Iberian peninsula. An important consequence of this was that West Africa was never, in part or whole, involuntarily incorporated into the Islamic imperium or Arabised culturally or linguistically. Islam was introduced instead by the agency of North African traders, both Arab and Berber, who followed older trans-Saharan trails from oasis to oasis and from well to well until they made contact with settled peoples associated with established polities on the Sahelian fringes of the south.

The principal routes used in the period 800-1200 were, from west to east: a route from Sijilmasa via the Dra valley and the Mauritanian Adrar down to Awdaghast (site at modern Tegdaoust) and thence to Ancient Ghana in the south-east (in the area of modern south-east Mauritania) and the kingdom of Takrur (astride the lower Senegal River) in the south-west; a central route from Warghla (where routes from Qayrawan, Tahert and other central and eastern Maghribian centres met) down the Mzab valley, across the barren Tanezrouft, the Adrar-n-Ifoghas and down the Tilemsi valley to Gao on the banks of the Niger; and thirdly, a route from Tripoli through Jabal Nafusa, the Fezzan and the Kawar oasis towards Lake Chad.

The effect of this trade on the progress of Islam is clear, if slow. Though the ruler of Ancient Ghana refused to abandon the faith of his fathers, he allowed Muslim merchants to settle close to his town of residence and even to build a mosque within his town. Soninke merchants who traded the gold obtained from beyond the River Senegal were among the earliest West Africans to become Islamised and their descendants, known variously as Wangara, Dyula or Jahanke, carried the faith far and wide in the course of their trading activities and were, within specialised clans of theirs, to nurture a lively tradition of Islamic learning. By the second half of the fifteenth century they were to be found in modem Ivory Coast and Ghana, in Gambia and Guinea, in the cities of the Middle Niger (notably Jenne and Timbuktu) and in Kano and other urban centres in northern Nigeria. A ruler of Takrur embraced Islam shortly before the middle of the eleventh century and the area he ruled (later known as Futa Toro) became a place of settlement for Muslims of surrounding areas. The ancestors of the great nineteenth-century reformer of northern Nigeria, Shaykh Uthman b. Fudi originated from there as did the Sufi scholar and empire-builder al-Hajj Umar b. Sa'id (d. 1864).

Gao’s role in the implantation of Islam seems at first less obvious. A ruler of the Za dynasty there became a Muslim probably about the middle of the tenth century and his successors and those of the following Sunni dynasty (c. 1275-1493) were at least nominally Muslims. Evidence from tombstones also points to an apparently short-lived dynasty of‘kings’ and ‘queens’ at Gao in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and perhaps of Sanhaja (Almoravid) origin, lauding themselves with Islamic epithets including the term mujahid—‘warrior for the faith’. But, to whatever extent it was practised (and often practice must have been minimal), Islam was essentially a religion of the elite—rulers, courtiers and long-distance traders.

Among the Songhay living downstream from Gao, indigenous cults were still flourishing in the mid-twentieth century, while Gao itself was never, even in its heyday under the Askia dynasty (1493-1591), a noted Islamic centre. That honour belonged to Timbuktu, some 250 miles to the west, which grew into a major commercial centre in the second half of the fourteenth century and in the fifteenth attracted to it a coterie of Muslim scholars—Arab, Sanhaja, Dyula and Fulani—who settled themselves around the Sankore mosque and established there a tradition of teaching by no means inferior to that of the great North African centres. Under the Askias the city enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy and its qadis were respected and honoured by most of them. The pattern of aloofness of the scholars from centres of political power is a common one in the Sudanic belt. It perhaps began when Muslims began to trade with non-Muslim rulers, at first at a distance of several days’ journey—Awdaghast to Ghana, Tadmakka to Gao, Bilma to Kanem—and later in twin towns two or three hours distant, as in Ancient Ghana and at Sane-Gao. Even when rulers were self-proclaimed Muslims the most scrupulously pious among the scholars put little trust in such professions of faith. Holy men and scholars would thus often cluster in towns apart: Setico on the River Gambia, Diakhaba on the River Bafing and Goundiouro on the River Senegal in Ancient Mali, Timbuktu in Songhay, Kalumfardo in Borno, Jadid al-Sayl in Dar Fur and Arbaji in the Funj kingdom. Sometimes a whole town such as these was ‘privileged’ and custom forbade the ruler to enter without permission or to send his men there in pursuit of his enemies.

The scholars who, in best Islamic pietist tradition, held themselves aloof from the rulers, castigated those who lived at court or serviced the monarch’s‘spiritual needs as ‘venal scholars’ (ulama al-su). Al- Maghili, a scholar from Tlemcen who, after counselling the rulers of Kano and Katsina, wrote replies to religious questions posed by Askia al-hajj Muhammad of Songhay (1493-1528), had harsh words for the venal scholars and even called for a jihad against them.

The tradition of Islamic reform he inspired also proclaimed that soi-disant Muslim rulers who oppressed their subjects, were negligent of Islamic rituals or patronised indigenous cults, were to be branded ‘unbelievers’ (kuffar) and should be overthrown by the nearest true Muslim ruler to them. These doctrines of Islamic revolution were later invoked by Shaykh Uthman b. Fudi in his struggles against the rulers of Hausaland and Borno and by al-Hajj Umar in his justification for jihad against the Bambara rulers. Al-Maghili was also responsible for popularising (if not actually introducing) the concept of the ‘regenerator’ of religion (mujaddid) who would be sent by God at the beginning of every

Islamic century to purify men’s faith and practice, a doctrine that was taken up and developed by later West African scholars such as Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu (d. 1627) and al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (d. 1811).

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Source: Clarke Peter et al. (eds.). The World's Religions. Routledge,1988. — 995 p.. 1988

West Africa

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