Africa south of the Sahara to the First World War

Abstract

Introduction In the long perspective of historical development, as well as the nineteenth century, which is the prime focus of this chapter, sub-Saharan Muslim societies have developed different expressions of ‘Islamic religious culture’. In the spectrum of possible realisations of Islam, the movements of jihad in sub-Saharan West Africa could be seen to represent one extreme, while the Muslim citizens’ rights movements in Cape Town/South Africa or in the Quatre Communes of Senegal formed another expression of Muslim society. In between these extremes we find a number of other translations of Islamic religious culture into different historical experiences as well as different geographical and cultural settings such as Ethiopia, the Nilotic Sudan, tropical West Africa or the East African coast. Muslims in sub-Saharan West Africa: crisis and jihad In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sub-Saharan West Africa experienced a series of wars which led to the establishment of new states and empires that were ruled, for the first time in the history of West African societies, by Muslim religious scholars. The wars that ended with the victory of these religious scholars were legitimised in religious terms and came to be regarded as jihads, while the new ‘Islamicate’ states that arose from these movements of jihad were legitimised in religious terms as imamates or emirates.