Islam in West Africa and the Context of Jihād
One of the reasons that Africa is usually not included in a conceptualization of the Atlantic world arises from a failure to appreciate the long history of Islam in Africa, other than the region along the shores of the Mediterranean and the desert oases of the northern Sahara. A false division is thereby thrust on Africa that sees the Sahara Desert as a divide between the Mediterranean and “black” Africa, as is forcefully argued by Ann McDougall, among others. According to McDougall, the people who inhabited the Sahara might identify with communities south of the Sahara, in North Africa, or in the Sahara itself.11 I have argued elsewhere that the “desert-side economy” was characterized by the flow of people between the Sahara and the savanna, as well as trade into and across the Sahara.12 In the Muslim context, the region south of the Sahara was identified as the Bilād al-Sūdān, the land of the blacks, but it was long recognized that the major states of the region, from Ghana in the eleventh century to Mali in the fourteenth century to Songhay in the sixteenth century, were Muslim states, as confirmed by the allegiance of the ruling aristocracies of these states to Islam. Kanem, in the Lake Chad region, and its successor state of Borno were identified with Islam; its ruling dynasty, the Sayfawa, was recognized as Muslim for a thousand years until its final demise in the nineteenth century during the era of jihād. The Senegal River valley was solidly Muslim from the eleventh century, while the Hausa states between the Niger River and Lake Chad were Muslim by the thirteenth century, if not earlier. Paulo F. de Moraes Farias has documented the long-standing interactions across the Sahara from Andalusia in what is now Spain to the Niger River valley, as reflected in Arabic texts, archaeological artifacts, and inscriptions on tombstones.13 Even the so-called non-Muslim Bambara states of Segu and Kaarta, located between the Niger and the Senegal Rivers, have been mistakenly associated with “paganism” because the ruling elites were warriors who violated many of the precepts of Islam, but many Muslims, especially merchants, resided there, and to some extent the term “Bambara” was used conveniently to justify the enslavement of people from these states, whether or not they were Muslims.
The antiquity of Islam in West Africa and its persuasive influence are not in question, therefore, which raises a number of issues of interpretation and misinterpretation that are sometimes to be found in the scholarship of historians who are not specialists in West Africa and even more frequently in public discourse that treats Islam as if it were a recent introduction. One false conception relates to the idea of conversion: that somehow the people there converted to Islam at various times when in fact people had been Muslims for generations. When this mistake is applied to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, it takes on a peculiar meaning, as if Islam were a new introduction, although the Gambia River societies had been associated with the broader Muslim world since the incorporation of the valley into the Mali Empire in the fourteenth century.14 It is true that people did convert to Islam during this period, but the way in which conversion is often used as a descriptive term suggests that Islam was a foreign, alien religion of recent intrusion. Nothing could be further from the historical context, however. When the reference to conversion is made, moreover, there is usually no documented proof that individuals actually became Muslims through conversion. References to contemporary European accounts that assess the religion of local societies at the time have to be treated with caution. There certainly were people along the Atlantic coast who were not Muslim, but the identification of people and places as “Mandingo,” Jolof/Wolof, and other ethnic labels almost always implied some kind of association with Islam.
Another misconception that has to be confronted in understanding the importance of Islam in the West African savannah and the Sahel relates to the extent of urbanization that was characteristic of the region well before the emergence of jihād as a factor in the late seventeenth century and certainly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the medieval empires and continuing through the fall of Songhay in the last decade of the sixteenth century, West Africa was heavily urbanized, although by modern standards the size of towns and cities was small. This urbanization was identified frequently with city walls that were constructed for defensive purposes and with public spaces associated with mosques and city markets. The governments of these urban spaces built palaces, as well as overseeing the maintenance of mosques, markets, and defensive walls. These towns and cities were connected through long-distance trade, commercial networks that were Muslim, and locations of craft production, especially cotton textiles, leather goods, and ironware. Well before the spread of the jihād movement, these centers were closely associated with Islam and Muslims who had migrated from elsewhere but had settled to pursue economic opportunities. Wherever there was an indigenous, non-Muslim society, the urban centers were usually divided into twin cities, one that housed the local community and the other that was home to Muslims and the center of trade and craft production. As Paulo Farias has emphasized, the separation between Muslims and non-Muslims that was realized through distinct urban quarters spatially separated from each other was more than symbolic. Muslims honored a tradition that tolerated non-Islamic practices and religious worship but specifically avoided syncretism and insisted on orthodoxy with respect to the basic tenets of Islam.15
The Muslim networks were tied together through commercial interaction and also education and religious study that were common features of Muslim society not only in West Africa but throughout the Islamic world. Travel and distant learning were valued in the Muslim context because of the emphasis on pilgrimage and the obligation to visit the holy places of Mecca and Medina if possible. The glorification of this tradition was symbolized in West Africa by the legendary pilgrimage of the Malian emperor Mansa Mūsā, whose famed visit to Egypt and the Holy Lands is remembered because of the vast quantities of West African gold that he took with him. Similarly, the coup d’état that brought Askia Muhammad Ture to the throne of Songhay in 1493 was sanctified through his pilgrimage to Mecca as a step in the imposition of Muslim government and adherence to Islamic law. Study abroad (taghrīb) was encouraged as a means of acquiring an education and also promoted connections among Muslims, sustained orthodoxy, and linked communities.16
The Islamic sciences flourished in West Africa for many centuries before the advent of the jihād movement.17 This can be seen with respect to historical scholarship, which flourished in such places as Timbuktu and is displayed in such histories as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saʿdī’s Taʾrīkh al-Sūdān (History of the Sudan) (ca. 1655) and Taʾrīkh al-fattāsh fī akhbār al-buldān wa ’l-juyūsh wa-akābir al-nās (The chronicle of the researcher into the history of the countries, the armies, and the principal personalities), attributed to Maḥmūd Kaʿtī (d. AH 1 Muḥarram 1002; 27 September 1593) and continued after his death, with the surviving version ending in AH 1074 (1654–55 CE).18 The legal tradition was historical in orientation because of the practice of citing previous fatwa in issuing opinions on contemporary legal questions. The intellectual tradition of quoting the Qurʾān and the Ḥadīth privileged historically documented chains of authority in the construction of arguments and establishing