Islamic West Africa Research Articles

Plagiarism, Forgery, and Political Invention in Islamic West Africa - Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa By Mauro Nobili. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. $105.00, hardcover (ISBN: 9781108479509); $31.99, paperback (ISBN: 9781108789820); $26.00, e-book (ISBN: 9781108858854).

Plagiarism, Forgery, and Political Invention in Islamic West Africa - Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa By Mauro Nobili. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. $26.00, e-book (ISBN: 9781108858854). - Volume 63 Issue 3

(En)countering Orientalist Islamic Cultural Heritage Traditions: Theory, Discourse, and Praxis

West African Islamic cultural heritage is recurrently overlooked or marginalized in scholarly, museological, and popular imaginaries, despite contemporary burgeoning Western attentiveness to Islam. Historically, Orientalists and/or Islamicists exclude West Africa, and anthropologists study West African Islam due to its alleged lack of written Arabic andAjamitexts (Loimeier 2013; Saul 2006), despite textual and material evidence to the contrary. Existing literature on the material expressions of West African Islam, largely edited volumes and museum catalogues, direct attention to Islamic West Africa, rather than IslaminWest Africa, in other words, predominantly West African Muslim societies, and not those for whom Muslims comprise a minority (Adahl 1995; Insoll 2003; Roberts and Nooter Roberts 2003; for exceptions cf. Bravmann 1974, 1983, 2000). Analytically, the “Islamization of Africa” and “Africanization of Islam,” standard nomenclature customarily employed to describe the simultaneous processes at play in West African Islam (Loimier 2013), note the reciprocal relationship between Islam and pre-existing West African religious traditions shaped by local contexts, circumstances, subjectivities, and exigencies (Fisher 1973; Trimingham 1980). Accordingly, West African Islam's material manifestations labeled “inauthentic,” “syncretic,” “vernacular,” and “popular” are considered, inter alia, antithetical to “classical” Islam. Notwithstanding, so-called classical Islam represents the embodiment of a locally synthesized form that, over time and with repetition, has come to be conceptualized as “classical.” Yet, Islam has incorporated and translated an assortment of pre-existing ideals to adjust in ways viewed as neither regression, apostasy, plurality nor heterodoxy. And, West Africa proves no exception. Indubitably, West African Islamic cultural heritage is the heritage of the “‘Othered’ religion par excellence” (Preston-Blier 1993:148).

Jihad and the Era of the Second Slavery

The concept “second slavery” as applied to the resurgence of slavery as a factor of production in the Americas in the nineteenth century emphasizes radical changes in the economies of the Atlantic world. The expansion of slavery in the southern United States, Cuba and Brazil occurred in the context of the emergence of an independent Haiti, where slavery had once been dominant but was now abolished, and where the British shifted from being the most important nation in the slave trade to the champions of its abolition, ultimately emancipating the slaves in their colonial empire. The comparable expansion in slavery that occurred in Islamic West Africa as a result of jihad in the same era must be placed in the context of other developments in the Atlantic world. Unlike second slavery in the Americas, developments in the jihad states resulted in economic autonomy, not the growth of the global economy.

Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti and his Islamic critique of racial slavery in the Maghrib

This essay examines the life of Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (1556–1627) and his efforts to end racial slavery and to persuade Maghribi scholars to accept the Islamic status of self-professed Muslims in West Africa. Towards this end, Ahmad Baba wrote a legal treatise that criticised the association of ‘Black’ Africans with slaves, especially through the racialised version of the curse of Ham. This treatise, entitled Mi‘raj al-Su‘ud, drew upon a century of jurisprudence produced in Timbuktu and set Islamic standards for enslavement that defined as illicit a substantial portion of the trans-Saharan slave trade as it then existed. However, the treatise also defined much of West Africa as non-Muslim or lightly Islamised, and thereby sanctioned the targeting of these peoples for enslavement. In a similar effort, Ahmad Baba also publicised the scholarly achievements of West African Muslims by compiling a huge biographical dictionary of scholars from West and Northwest Africa. This book, entitled Nayl al-Ibtihaj, could have substantiated the fact that many self-identified Black West Africans had been producing serious Muslim scholarship for at least a century, but it did not. On the contrary, Ahmad Baba included only one Black scholar in his biographical dictionary and instead featured nine scholars from his own ‘Berber’ patriline, including himself. The ironic characteristics of the Mi‘raj al-Su‘ud and Nayl al-Ibtihaj may best be explained by Ahmad Baba's own ambiguous status in Timbuktu and the broader society of Islamic West Africa – as a ‘White’ Berber living in the ‘land of the Blacks'. The fact that his scholarship was ground-breaking, but not radical, facilitated its reception in the Maghrib while perhaps mitigating its practical effect on the slave trade and enslavement in that region as well as in West African trading towns such as Timbuktu.

Protecting Freeborn Muslims: The Sokoto Caliphate's Attempts to Prevent Illegal Enslavement and its Acceptance of the Strategy of Ransoming

This article builds upon previous work on the discourse of legal and illegal slavery in Islamic West Africa and on the issue of illegal enslavement as a major cause of the Sokoto jihad. It argues that the protection of freeborn Muslims was a major policy concern for the Sokoto government but that, due to internal factors, the government could not stop the enslavement of freeborn Muslims nor enforce the legally preferred remedy of free release. The government's acceptance of the ransoming of illegally captive individuals by family and friends is interpreted as a demonstration of the weakness of the Sokoto Caliphate government.

New religious movements in Islamic West Africa

Christianity and Islam have interacted extensively with traditional African faiths to engender innovative religious developments known as 'New Religious Movements in Africa'. Although the majority of these movements have arisen out of the interaction with Christianity, a number of them have been inspired by Islam. The article, following an established paradigm for New Religious Movements, covers 'African-Related Movements' which are neo-primal, i.e. movements where the inner dynamic and basic structure derives from traditional faith to enable them to cope with new situations and the 'Synthetist movements' which reflect a real assimilation of Islamic elements, but are less ethnocentric and more universal in outlook. The former are referred to as 'Africanized neo-Islamic Movements' whereas the latter are called 'Orthodox New Islamic Movements'. Between these two are the 'traditional movements'. Reasons for the different effects of Islam and Christianity on African tradition and a comparison of Islamic and C...

The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate (Islamic West Africa)

Journal Article The Characteristics of Plantations in the Nineteenth-Century Sokoto Caliphate (Islamic West Africa) Get access Paul E. Lovejoy Paul E. Lovejoy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 84, Issue 5, December 1979, Pages 1267–1292, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/84.5.1267 Published: 01 December 1979