Africans and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The Salafi canon took shape in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, and it exists primarily in Arabic. Yet it radiates beyond the Arab world, including to Africa, where there is widespread Arabic literacy among Muslim scholars. From Senegal to Sudan, the canon informs debates about the nature of Islamic authority, sometimes from the margins of the debate and sometimes at its center. In some Muslim communities, the lack of a broad and indigenous Islamic written tradition facilitates the spread of Salafism, but in much of Africa, well-developed Islamic textual traditions hold sway. In northwest Africa, a Mālikī-Sufi canon remains dominant. Where the Salafi canon has made some headway, its dissemination owed much to the institutional and intellectual backing it received, both locally and from abroad. This chapter argues that the spread of the canon to Africa was enabled by two developments: the increasing sophistication of Saudi Arabia's institutional outreach to Africa starting in the 1960s (enabled partly by the contributions of Africans resident in the Kingdom), and the emergence of local African partners who, over time, built networks from which Saudi Arabia could recruit potential Salafis. As these developments intersected, material and intellectual forces reinforced one another. Salafism should not be seen as a crude Middle Eastern “export” to Africa. Recent studies have examined the localization of Salafism in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia, calling attention to ways in which preachers shaped their discourses to address the concerns of local audiences and ways in which Salafism became implicated in local struggles. Building on these studies, I emphasize not just localization, but also dialogical exchanges between localities. Compared with previous studies of Salafism in Africa, however, I pay greater attention to the internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East. Saudi Arabia, in popular discourse, is often seen as a quasi-medieval kingdom that uses its oil wealth to disseminate an unchanging “Wahhābism.” Yet as Stephane Lacroix has argued, “It is necessary to effect a kind of Copernican revolution in the accepted approach: although Saudi Arabia is often considered solely as a power that exports Islam, it also has to be seen as the recipient of influences emanating from most currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century revivalism.”