Salafi Theology and Islamic Orthodoxy in West Africa

Approaches to the Qur’an in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2019

This work aims to open up new discourses about Islam in sub-Saharan Africa through the examination of how Muslims in this geographical and socio-cultural context have engaged with the Qur’an. Covering a period from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century, this multidisciplinary volume examines a variety of geographical locations in sub-Saharan Africa including Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. The book’s twelve case studies use different frameworks and methodological approaches from the academic disciplines of anthropology, art history, historiography and philology. They explore a variety of media and modalities that Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, use in their engagements with the Qur’an. This volume moves well beyond the materiality of the Qur’an as a physical book to explore the ways in which it is understood, felt and imagined, and to examine the contestations and debates that arise from these diverse engagements. The volume covers textual culture (manuscripts, commentaries and translations); aural and oral culture (recitations and invocations, music and poetry); the lived experience (magic squares and symbolic repertoire, medicinal and curative acts, healing and prayer, dreams and spirit worlds); material culture (textiles, ink, paper, and wooden boards); and education. In seeking to understand the plurality of engagements that Muslims from diverse communities of interpretation and from different parts of sub-Saharan Africa have had with Qur’an, this volume adds to the scholarship on the Qur’an as well as the scholarship on Islam and Muslims in Africa.

2006

Religion Compass, 2008

Among Muslims across the African continent, there is a noticeable turn towards greater compliance with globalizing norms of Islamic behaviour. Beginning from this widespread observation, this article interrogates the changes that lie concealed under the veil of homogeneity. It identifies a complex pattern of identity formation and power politics, cultural conservativism, marginalized syncretism and symbolic exchange. The emergence of a public sphere has propelled the production of Muslim identity formation in the service of established elites and youth searching for an authentic approach towards Islam. But a turn to Islam also takes a conservative and isolationist turn that thrives in the context of the failure of modern schooling and economy, and provides a haven of dignified marginalization around the great cultures of the past. A syncretist approach to Islam and African cultures is pushed to the background. But there is reason to believe that such an approach thrives on the margins of the society. A global politics of identity and globalization provide the context for a continued exchange of Islamic symbols among Africans in general. The politics of resistance is accompanied by the politics of identity and global conflicts.

Islamic Africa, 2024

Qurʾān exegesis (tafsīr) in African Muslim societies represented the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and public explanation of the Qurʾān was the event that marked the emergence of one of Africa's most successful Sufi revivals, the "Community of the Flood" of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975). Niasse's network of knowledge transmission, foregrounding the direct experiential knowledge of God (maʿrifa bi-Llāh), continued to emphasize Qurʾān learning, but Niasse's own recorded Arabic tafsīr demonstrated a shift away from traditional West African sources in this field. Prior understandings of the West African tafsīr discipline locate the fifteenthcentury Egyptian Tafsīr al-Jalālayn as the primary influence on West African understandings. But Niasse's tafsīr exhibits a clear preference for an early eighteenthcentury Ottoman multivolume work, Ismāʿīl Ḥaqqī's "Spirit of Explanation" (Rūh al-bayān), one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sufi understandings of the Qurʾān. This paper not only demonstrates the globally-connected nature of Islamic knowledge production in West Africa but also argues that Niasse's emphasis on gnosis built on the Rūḥ al-bayān to ultimately occasion a noteworthy addition to the existing literary corpus of Qurʾān exegesis.

Abibisem: Journal of African Culture and Civilization, 2015

This paper examines the interplay of Islam and traditional African ideas, institutions and cultural practices. It reviews some cultural aspects of Islam and African traditions aiming to find-out how African cultural, i.e. religious, political, social and even linguistic values have either been accommodated by or have accommodated Islam. The framework involves the theories of inculturation, acculturation and enculturation. The method used was a critical analysis of some values of Africans and Muslims. Islam has accommodated and has been accommodated by some African traditions. Although, the two traditions have had some frictions such as the Muslim jihad which took away political power from some of the indigenous people, yet, they have generally coexisted peacefully as some African chiefs either became Muslims or African Muslims have become chiefs and sometimes even made Islam a state religion. The paper, therefore, concludes that Islam and African traditions have been friends and not foes.

An appraisal of two written works of tafsir by twentieth-century West African scholars, the Salafi-oriented Gumi and the Sufi Niasse. Highlights the importance of the Jalalayn as the shared core of both works, as well as on the opposing agendas of the two in explaining the differences between the two.

2006

Religions, 2020

In the nineteenth century, African Muslim societies were marked by the emergence of a reformist Sufi Islamic discourse aimed at changing and moving away from traditional Islamic practices. Although this discourse was influenced, to some extent, by external sources of inspiration, it was linked to the local African context. This study demonstrates that the reformist discourse of major Sufi figures such as Sheikh Amadu Bamba in Senegal and Sheikh Usman Dan Fodio in Nigeria reflects a number of common features of Islamic reform in Africa, yet their reform programs were shaped by the conditions of the local context. This research contribution aims to understand the actual role that the discourse of Sufi spirituality played—and still does—in the religious, economic, and political life of Muslim societies in Africa. This study has shown that despite the prevailing belief that Sufi discourse does not tend to politicize as it tries to maintain a safe distance away from matters of politics a...

This essay discusses some of the recent trends in the scholarship on Islam and Africa that contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the historical relationship between African Muslims and the global ecumene of believers. Rather than looking at the faith as an insular African phenomenon, this piece examines the links between Africans and the wider community of believers across space and time. Such an approach has important ramifications for our understanding of the dynamics of Islam. However, it also challenges many of the assumptions underpinning the geographic area studies paradigm that has dominated the academy since the Second World War. This essay suggests the adoption of a more fluid approach to scholarly inquiry that reimagines our largely continental attachment to regions in favor of a more intellectually agile methodology where the scope of inquiry is determined less by geographic boundaries and more by the questions we seek to answer.

Islamic Africa, 2015

Rudolph Ware has written a most insightful and stimulating book about the preservation of Islamic values and knowledge-transmission in West Africa. The principal purpose of his study, as articulated in his Introduction, is "to highlight and historicize an embodied approach to knowledge that was once paradigmatic but now thrives in few Muslim societies. It is ironic-considering the racial and spatial logics at work-that many of these societies are far from Arabia in the African West" (29). In this quest he highlights the distinction between 'Islam in Africa' and 'African Islam' and argues persuasively that many scholars have fostered an inaccurate description of the qualities of Islam in West African communities. His analysis is based on a wide variety of sources, including-most importantly-"autobiographical narratives, and archival accounts of dozens of students who grew up in Senegambian Qurʾān schools during the twentieth century" (p. 41), and supplemented by Arabic texts about education, his three years as a participant observer, fifty-two interviews, seven archival collections, newspapers published in Senegal, and more than four hundred scholarly studies. Furthermore, because of his extensive linguistic skills, he translated all of the documents used to support his scholarship. The book is well illustrated by four maps and thirteen fine photographs by the author. In the first chapter Ware illustrates the intimate relationship between the 'embodiment' of the Qurʾān and the reception of its knowledge, that is to say, a person does not fully 'know' the Qurʾān without experiencing it physically: "Knowledge had a powerful allure for many students, often sparked by the sensory experience of hearing the Qurʾān recited" (52). He provides many examples of physical techniques (joyful, uncomfortable, even painful) used by teachers to experience the texts. Through physical discipline, rewards and the model provided by teachers, students came to embody knowledge and to understand the importance of behaving in a righteous manner: "ʿIlm was inseparable from ʿamal" (55). He traces the origin of embodiment and modelling in West Africa to the introduction of the Mālikī madhhab: "Māliki teaching came to stress practical, personified, human, embodied example in the transmission of knowledge" (56). Such embodiment is the key to the incorporation and transmission of both spiritual awareness and practical knowledge. After developing this thesis Professor Ware criticizes the development of disembodied education found in modern Islamic schools in which deep knowledge of the texts and ability to use reason to understand them unfortunately

The paper is presenting a brief history of Islam in Africa. It includes the contribution of Islam in Africa in terms of it impact on languages, cultures, civilization and education.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2022

Islam has become one of the main themes of research in African studies in the last two decades. In academic engagement with West Africa, in particular, only a few topics have attracted more interest and contributions. Consequently, the literature has grown diverse, multidisciplinary and engaging, while examining topics such as pietism, gender relations, authority, activism and, increasingly, violence and security. On the ground, Islam is highly visible in the media and at the centre of public life because of so-called jihadi attacks on state institutions, widespread religious entrepreneurship, the emergence of new authoritative figures and a dynamic challenge to traditional power structures that shape the experiences of being Muslim. What can we learn from these developments? What dynamics do they draw attention to? What new and local research perspectives are they inspiring? What do these perspectives add? This volume is informed by these questions and adds to a history of academic engagement with Islam in West Africa. Inspired by a locally framed agenda, it offers the floor to scholars from the region, providing them with visibility and urging them to elaborate on their insights. As the initiators of major political entities (e.g. Ghana, Mali, Macina, Songhay, Sokoto), Muslim communities in West Africa have been shaped by their encounters with European imperialism, which organized their lands into possessions, protectorates, territories and then colonies. Imperialism was a process of social subjugation that led to the establishment of the modern state: an institution that subordinated political logic to its regulatory power. Prior to European imperialism, however, Muslim traders and scholars developed ties and connections across and beyond West Africa, illustrating the fact that Muslims have regularly engaged in educational networks, economic exchanges and cooperation beyond the confines of their polities. While historic ties with the Maghreb, Egypt and the Hijaz contributed to the making of Muslim West Africa, connections with modern

Review, 2023

SOUNAYE Abdoulaye, CHAPPATTE André (eds.), Islam and Muslim Life in West Africa: Practices, Trajectories and Influences, ZMO Studien 42, De Gruyter, Berlin Boston 2022, vi + 236 pp.