In examining Islamic West Africa and the background to the contemporary spread of al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Maitatsine, and Boko Haram, I draw heavily on my earlier work, in which various aspects of my argument in this book have been elaborated.3 The orientation of my many publications has been directed at overcoming the neglect of African history that underlines this book. The proposition that is pursued here is simple: how are we to understand the age of revolutions from the end of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century without considering the course of jihād in West Africa during the same period? Why is it that parallel developments are not examined? Why do scholars continue to interpret the West African experience in simplistic terms, unless they are specialists, when there is a vast literature that is accessible and easy to understand? Why do scholars talk about people in Senegambia as “converts to Islam” when they were simply Muslims who had not converted from anything because they were born into societies that had been Muslim for centuries and when there is no proof of any “conversion”? Why do scholars refer to “Islamicized Africans” who were actually Muslims when the same scholars do not use the same conceptual framework and do not refer to “Christianized Europeans” when they discuss Europeans who not only might be Christians but also might be Jewish? Why is such conceptual weakness tolerated when the same scholars make sure that sound historical standards are applied in accepting articles for learned journals like the American Historical Review or the William and Mary Quarterly? Common sense dictates that such biased, terminological slippage should not be allowed to determine the achievement of tenure and promotion when in fact such bad scholarship and inept thinking have impeded scientific advancement. Somehow, breaking through the conceptual blockages of perceiving the Atlantic world as a framework that does not incorporate Africa into the picture has to confront the failure of scholarly discourse.
The age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas transformed political structures and laid the foundations for economic development in western Europe and the Atlantic world, but also, despite the failure to include an analysis of Africa in the Eurocentric paradigm, it was challenged and transformed from within Africa. These transformations emanating from Europe and the Americas led to European colonial imperialism and imposed racialized interpretations of history that prevail to this day through the terminology that is employed in discussing the “other” and the means of verifying distorted methodology. The changes that emerged during the age of revolutions introduced what has been called a “second slavery” in the Americas, particularly in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, despite revolutionary changes that undermined monarchies, sometimes promoted more representative governments, and propelled economic change and technological advancement. Yet the analysis stops abruptly when a global view is required. How are we to understand the contradiction between revolution and intensified exploitation without examining what can also be called a “second slavery,” to use a term coined by Dale Tomich,4 which emerged in the jihād states of West Africa in the same period? How can we explain the contradictions of political reform and restorative reaction in Europe and the Americas without considering Muslim countries and the parallel and equally contradictory movements that prevailed in the regions dominated by Islam? The impact of industrialization and economic growth was indeed global, but there were countervailing forces at work in the world that attempted to achieve similar intensified economic growth, as outlined in this book with respect to the many Muslim countries of West Africa. To the extent that such transformations occurred during a time at which political revolution was current throughout the broad Atlantic world that includes West Africa, one has to account for the expansion of economies in areas dominated by Muslim governments in West Africa and elsewhere. This is not to say that the various trajectories were the result of the same causes or shaped the course of events in a common global pattern, but any attempt to understand contemporary Muslim extremism has to consider that there was a period in the past when the age of revolutions was shadowed by the age of jihād.
A number of articles and book chapters that I have previously published have prompted particular arguments in this book. I want to fully acknowledge the extent to which this analysis draws on my previous and ongoing research that has been central to my scholarly career. Moreover, a number of my students have been influential in the development of my thinking. Their research has expanded on some of my ideas, and I have drawn considerable inspiration from working in the collegial atmosphere that graduate teaching promotes. In some cases I have published essays in collaboration with students and former students, as well as editing collections of essays that draw on cooperation and intellectual discussion. I have also developed my ideas in concert with colleagues with whom I have long interacted and with whom I have sometimes published, if not always agreed. It is often difficult to distinguish the sources of ideas and the specific contributions of primary materials that underlie this book. I have shared rare source materials and have borrowed from others in ways and at times that would require a detailed autobiography to uncover. The primary materials that I have amassed over the past forty years, which are on deposit at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas at York University, amount to an enormous quantity of data. Rather than cite the various articles, chapters, and sections of my books that have influenced the writing of this book, as well as the extensive materials from archives in more than twenty countries, I refer instead to the bibliography and the discussion in the book itself. Similarly, the publications of my students, where relevant, are also referenced in the bibliography and in the annotations.
My approach relies on a methodology that I have characterized as an alternative perspective to a Eurocentric bias that can discuss Muslim converts when there is no proof of any conversion or “Islamized” structures and people when nothing was “Islamized” in the way that is intended in such descriptions, because things, institutions, and people were already Muslim. There was no process under way that can be described as “Islamization,” even if what was emanating from Europe was justification of imperial ambitions through claims to “Christianization” and “Europeanization” that were intended to justify subjugation and domination. It was and is easy to determine who was a Muslim and who was not, even if Muslims disagreed over whose interpretation of Islam was legitimate and whose was not. People did convert. That is not the issue, but when, where, and why conversion occurred requires an understanding of historical context.
The relevant historical questions relate to interpretation of the impact of Islam, not to conversion. In West Africa, the Qādiriyya ṭarīqa or brotherhood that adhered to a ṣūfī or mystical order of interpretation became dominant during what can be called an era of jihād, at least until the emergence of Tījāniyya and then the Mahdiyya extended the influence of jihād beyond the period that was contemporaneous with the European age of revolutions. The primacy of Sufism does not mean that everyone was an adherent of the Qādiriyya or accepted its wird or path. Depending on context, people behaved as Muslims in some contexts and might not in others. Behavior was defined by prayer in Arabic, profession of monotheism, and recognition of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the practice of certain customs relating to Ramaḍān, fasting, and communal celebration. Religious leaders who were literate in Arabic and taught children and adults the rudiments and advanced sciences had to be acknowledged as leaders of the community, whether it was seen locally in the specific context of a town or section of a town or broadly in terms of the world of Islam. Relations between males and females were subject to norms that were written and based on the Sharīʿa. Local customs and practices were also respected, however, although there was a strong tendency to condemn human sacrifice, the veneration of spirits associated with trees, rocks, hills, and other natural phenomena, the eating of pork, drinking, smoking, and human greed through the collection of interest, speculation, and hoarding. Individuals in situational contexts sometimes acted in ways that others might condemn as unorthodox. Slavery was a complicating factor in understanding how Islam was understood because of the emphasis on the status of freeborn Muslims as being inherently protected from enslavement and the social ostracism associated with the lack of kinship. However, to discuss societal relationships in terms of conversion or a process of “Islamization”