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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253007889 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2013 |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.20(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Muslim Societies in Africa
A Historical Anthropology
By Roman Loimeier
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Roman LoimeierAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00788-9
CHAPTER 1
Is There an "African" Islam?
The Diversity of Islam in Africa
Sometimes, old patterns of thought die hard. Even in the most recent literature on Muslim societies in Africa, such as Coulon and Cruise O'Brien (1988), Evers-Rosander and Westerlund (1997), or Quinn and Quinn (2003), it is possible to find the concept of an "African" Islam or, in French, Islam "Noir." This African Islam is presented as peaceful and syncretistic, accommodating, and less orthodox than "militant Arab Islam." The discussion of Muslim societies and Islam in Africa has to take into account, however, that there is no uniform and singularly "orthodox" form of Islam, either in Africa or in the Islamic world as a whole. The continent is not only much too vast to harbor just one continental expression of Islam, but African historical experiences with Islam have also been much too diverse to support the notion of a single, African Islam. When visualizing the expansion of Muslim societies in Africa in geographical terms and their multiple entanglements, the force of this argument becomes immediately clear.
Traveling counter-clockwise through Africa from the north to the south, we encounter at first Egypt (Misr), which has always had, due to her central position in the Islamic world, an important role as a broker for many Muslim societies. Egypt has consequently been in contact with many interpretations of Islam. The famous al-Azhar University in Cairo was established in 988 by the Fatimid Caliph 'Abd al-'Aziz as a center of Ismaili learning, yet became a center of Sunni teaching after 1171. Since the thirteenth century, al-Azhar has been home to dozens of student convents, arwiqa (sing. riwaq), and among these were three arwiqa housing students from sub-Saharan Africa, namely Bornu, Ethiopia, and Funj. Apart from her importance for the Muslim world, Egypt has also always been a major center of Orthodox Christianity, forming, from the sixth to the sixteenth century, a belt of Orthodox churches stretching from Armenia via Lesser Armenia, Palestine, Egypt, and the Nile Sudan to Ethiopia.
This strong Christian influence was largely absent in the Islamic west, the bilad al-maghrib. Yet the bilad al-maghrib were influenced by numerous Jewish communities of considerable size that settled as far south as the oasis of Tuwat in the central Sahara. After the demise of the great Berber empires of the Almoravids and Almohads that dominated the bilad al-maghrib and large parts of the Sahara as well as al-Andalus (Spain) from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the bilad al-maghrib disintegrated into essentially two zones of political organization: the lands administered by a central government (the bilad al-makhzan) and the lands beyond government control (the bilad al-siba). These political frame conditions favored the emergence of religious brokers and thus specific forms of saint veneration and Sufism that later spread, through trans-Saharan trade, to sub-Saharan West Africa. The development of Muslim societies in the bilad al-maghrib as well as the oasis of the Sahara and sub-Saharan West Africa has to be understood as being connected through the trans-Saharan trade. Saharan as well as sub-Saharan Islamic scholarship were consequently interwoven with the important centers of Islamic learning in the bilad al-maghrib, such as the Zaytuna in Tunisia, the Qarawiyyin in Fes, and other schools in Tilimsan (Tlem^en) and Marrakish.
The most important transmission belt for the spread of Islam south of the Sahara into sub-Saharan West Africa was, as has been mentioned above, trans-Saharan trade. It would be easy to pass over this sea of sand and to move on to the next region of Islam, yet such a move would underestimate the importance of the Sahara as a major space for the development of independent centers of Islamic learning, such as the western "Mauritanian" Adrar, the central "Malian" Adrar, the oasis of Tuwat, Ghat, Ghadamis, the Air mountains and Agadez, Kufra, and numerous other Saharan centers of settlement that were of paramount importance for the maintenance of the trans-Saharan trade for more than one thousand years. Muslim states and empires both north and south of the Sahara have tried to gain control over these Saharan centers of trade and scholarship, yet more often these islands in the desert were able to maintain their autonomy, often in alliance with the populations of the Sahara that also fought for the control of the trade routes. Due to its mediating role in long-distance trade, the Sahara (as well as the East African coast) has been called a "gateway" (Robinson 2004: 32ff., Levtzion/ Pouwels 2000: 1). This term suggests a one-sided direction of agency into some other place, however, and does not explicitly address the mutuality of exchanges between the northern and the southern shores of the Sahara (or the different shores of the Indian Ocean). It would be more appropriate to stress the role of the Sahara as a connective space, linking both shores, the bilad al-maghrib in the north and sub-Saharan West Africa in the south, in interfacing and mutual ways.
Probably from the eighth century, and possibly earlier, networks of trade, scholarship, and pilgrimage connected sub-Saharan West Africa, the "lands of the blacks" (arab.: bilad al-sudan) across the Sahara with the bilad al-maghrib. As a consequence, Islam was presented to the countries of sub-Saharan West Africa primarily as a religion of traders. Muslims were highly esteemed at the courts of the Sudanese kings as representatives of the most advanced civilization of the time. The rulers of the kingdoms of the bilad al-sudan such as Takrur, Ghana, Mali, Gao-Songhay, or Kanim-Bornu converted to Islam in order to become part of this civilization and supported the development of Islamic teaching. At the courts of the Sudanic kings, Muslim scholars were appreciated as experts in administrative, legal, and financial matters, as scribes and interpreters. New centers of Islamic learning such as Jenne, Timbuktu, Gao, Kano, or Katsina developed, and in the late sixteenth century Ahmad Baba, a scholar from Timbuktu, could remark that Islamic learning in the bilad al-sudan had not only reached the same quality as in the famous schools of the bilâd al-maghrib but surpassed these schools, in particular in the sphere of jurisprudence (Arab. fiqh). Yet, although the new religion found quick acceptance among sub-Saharan rulers and traders, Islam did not become, until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the religion of the vast majority of the population. Peasant farmers and artisan groups, in particular, remained attached to communal religions, and local cults continued to coexist with Islam at the courts of the Sudanese rulers, even if most people in the bilâd al-südân, including non-Muslims, recognized Islam as a powerful source of blessing.
The paradigm of the peaceful spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa by traders was equally valid for the areas of tropical West Africa south of the Sudanic belt. Here, Muslim traders did not come from the bilâd al-maghrib anymore, but from the trading centers of the bilâd al-südân: since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Hausa and Mande traders started to establish Muslim trading entrepôts in the forest regions. And although these traders gained considerable influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the courts of the states in the tropical forest regions, such as Asante or Yoruba, Islam has remained until today a religion of a minority in contemporary Ghana, Togo, or Benin. At the same time, Muslim societies in tropical West Africa have acquired multiple experiences of interaction with Christian missions and churches of different orientations as well as an array of African religions.
Whereas Islam reached sub-Saharan West Africa by way of the trans-Saharan trade routes, the lands of the Nile came into contact with Islam through Arab tribes migrating south from Upper Egypt along the axis of the Nile. Again, Islam was to develop in a different way in these regions of sub-Saharan Africa: Nile Sudan was dominated until the thirteenth century by Nubian kingdoms, such as Dongola and Aiwa, that, like Egypt, Ethiopia, and Armenia, formed part of a string of Christian orthodox churches. Until the fourteenth century, Greek was, in fact, the language of the church in Nubia, and last vestiges of Christianity continued to exist in Nubia until the late fifteenth century. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Nubian kingdoms started to disintegrate, however, and were replaced by Muslim Arab-Nubian principalities that fought for regional predominance until the early sixteenth century. Their constant rivalry enabled the rise of another power, the Funj-federation. Since 1505, the lands of the Nile Sudan were ruled by the Funj-empire of Sinnâr, and although the rulers of Sinnâr were nominal Muslims, the court of Sinnâr as well as the majority of the sedentary population continued to practice pre-Islamic communal cults. The process of Islamization gained impact in the eighteenth century only and was connected with the establishment of Muslim traders and local saints who came to form new local centers of power and blessing.
Islam was again expressed in different terms in the highlands of Ethiopia. Here, Muslims had first appeared as refugees from heathen Mecca, in 615, seven years before the hijra of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. Their short stay at the court of Axum, Ethiopia's ancient capital city, did not have any consequences, however, and Ethiopia remained an orthodox Christian empire. Ethiopian Muslim communities that started to form in the ninth century traced their ancestry to these early migrants, however, and Ethiopia was often seen, in Muslim historical traditions, as a "dar al-hiyad," a neutral land, a sanctuary even, that according to a prophetic tradition (Arab. hadith) was exempt from jihad. After a long history of ups and downs between the seventh and thirteenth centuries, Ethiopia's Christian emperors were able to conquer vast territories in the central, western, and southern highlands. Ethiopia's efforts to gain control over the eastern highlands as well as to gain access to the rich markets of the south led to a series of wars with the Muslim trading principalities of the eastern highlands that had developed in these regions since the ninth century. In the early sixteenth century, Imam Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Ghazi united these Muslim emirates and subsequently inflicted a number of defeats on the Ethiopian armies. Between 1528 and 1542, Muslim armies conquered almost all of Ethiopia and were defeated only in 1542, when Imam Ahmad was killed in a battle with the reorganized Ethiopian army. The century-old struggle between Muslim and Christian Ethiopia continues to inform Ethiopia's historiography until today: while Ethiopia's Christian elites portray Ethiopia as being "surrounded by a sea of Islam," Ethiopia's Muslims point out their marginal role in Ethiopia.
While Ethiopian history came to be marked by the influence of the Christian orthodox church as well as a history of rivalry between Christian and Muslim states and principalities, the arid lowlands of the Horn of Africa could be seen, like the Sahara, as a region marked by stateless societies, mostly Somaal nomads. In the port cities of Berbera, Mogadishu, Marka, and Brawa, traditions of Islamic learning developed since at least the early fourteenth century, as attested by the famous traveler Ibn Battuta, who visited Mogadishu in this period of time.
Whereas a sea of sand connected the northern and southern coast (Arab. sahil) of the Sahara, the Indian Ocean and the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean connected the East African coast with the coasts of India and Arabia. This regional orientation toward India as well as Southern Arabia and even Persia also characterized the specific development of East Africa's Muslim societies since probably the eighth or ninth centuries. Thus, the Shafi'i school of law came to predominate in East Africa, whereas the Nile Sudan as well as sub-Saharan Western Africa, the Sahara, and the bilad al-maghrib joined the Maliki school of law. In contrast to North and West Africa, Islam in East Africa also remained confined to the littoral zones. Muslim traders started to penetrate into the East African interior only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At this point in time, an old Islamic culture had come into existence on the coast, characterized by a common language (Kiswahili) and a culture of seafaring and long-distance trade. In contrast to the bilad al-sudan, however, the trading centers of the East African coast never formed empires until they were united in the nineteenth century by the Sultanate of Oman. Thus the history of the East African coast has to be viewed as a history of competing trading centers that were rather oriented toward the sea than toward the bush (Swa. nyika). In fact, it is possible to differentiate between a long history of the Muslim societies on the coast and a short history of Islam in the East African interior. The East African upcountry regions are informed today by a multitude of interfaces between Islam, Christianity, and African religions.
Another historical tradition, again different from other contextualizations of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, may be found in South Africa. In 1658, only six years after the establishment of a Dutch colony in Cape Town, first Muslims from India and the East Indies arrived in Cape Town on board of Dutch ships. These Cape Muslims started to form a community that developed, due to the rigid policies of the "Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk," as an underground community. Constant growth connected with the ongoing settlement of political prisoners from India as well as the East Indies, but also conversion of black slaves, allowed the Cape Muslim community to grow to considerable strength in the nineteenth century. In 1850, about 40 percent of Cape Town's population was Muslim, among them a considerable number of marginalized European immigrants. Under British rule, the Cape Muslim population gained religious freedom and the number of mosques increased. The growing size of the Cape Muslim community triggered, however, a number of communal disputes that were often connected with the question as to who would be entitled to lead a specific mosque community. As a result, the Cape Muslim community was never able to achieve the kind of political unity that would have been necessary to influence Cape Town's political development in decisive ways in the late nineteenth century.
Unity within Diversity
Muslim communities and societies in Africa thus can be viewed as characterized by variegated historical experiences, their integration into different geographic settings as well as varying modes of interaction with Christianity, Judaism, and a multitude of African religions and communal cults. These trans-religious interfaces have influenced the development of local traditions of Islam and are reflected in the way in which Muslim traditions are integrated (or not) into respective Christian, Jewish, or African religious traditions or, vice versa, the way in which Muslims have integrated non-Muslim social and religious customs into their own religious and social traditions. In some regions such as the bilad al-maghrib, Egypt, or Ethiopia, Muslims share the cult of Jewish or Christian saints (and vice versa) and have adopted, in varying ways and degrees, aspects of Christian, Jewish, or African cosmologies. Such influences are particularly clear in the development of the disciplines and sciences of astrology, astronomy, numerology, and/or divination, often subsumed under the term 'ilm alfalak, where references to Jewish traditions (Kabbalah) have been important.
However, the differences among the Muslim communities in Africa are to be explained not only by these historical, regional, geographical, or cultural forces or their respective modes of interaction with other religious traditions. Their diversity is also connected with the fact that the acceptance of "Islam" as a religion is and has always been a selective process. In this process of selective and situational adoption and enculturation of Islam, specific elements of the faith have been taken over completely in some regions but were stressed less in others. Thus, the Imasighen tribes of the western Sahara accepted the norms of Islamic law as a program of reform under the influence of the Almoravid movement in the eleventh century, whereas they have found less or only marginal acceptance in other parts of Africa. Local (pre-)Islamic customs have also been incorporated, in the context of processes of conversion, into local practices of Islam as customary law and practice (Arab. 'urf or 'adat) in particular, when these customs did not contradict the prescriptions of the sharf a. Numerous local practices thus came to form part of Islamic 'urf. This explains the formation of multiple ways of living "Islam" in Africa and Asia, which came to be challenged, from time to time, by Muslim reformers who questioned the normativity of local customs, attacking them as "un-Islamic innovations" (Arab. bida', sg. bid'a). As often, local scholars have risen to defend local practices. Cyclical debates about the Islamic or un-Islamic character of local 'urf practices are thus part of an ongoing history of disputes which has characterized the development of Muslim societies since the time of the Prophet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Muslim Societies in Africa by Roman Loimeier. Copyright © 2013 Roman Loimeier. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Geographical and Anthropological Setting 1. Is there an African Islam? 2. The bilād al-maghrib: Rebels, saints and heretics 3. The Sahara as connective space4. Dynamics of Islamization in the bilād al-sÙdān 5. The dynamics of jihād in the bilÁd al-sÙdÁn6. Islam in Nubia and Funj7. Egyptian colonialism and the Mahd in the Sudan8. Ethiopia and Islam9. Muslims on the Horn of Africa10. The East African Coast11. Muslims in Cape Town: Community and Dispute12. Muslims under Colonial RuleConclusionAppendixGlossary of Arabic terms NotesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
A comprehensive introductory history of Muslim Africa at once accessible to students and filled with scholarly insights in various registers.
A masterly synthesis of scholarship on Islam and Muslim societies in Africa by one of the leading scholars in the field.