AFRICA Being a paper presented at the International Symposium on the event of celebration of the 14 th Hejira Century of Islam in Africa hosted by the International University of Africa (original) (raw)
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Islam in Africa/Africans and Islam, Journal of African History v. 55 no.1
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.
Islam in Africa/Africans and Islam
The Journal of African History, 2014
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 globalecumeneof 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.
The Past and Present of African Islam
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.
Introduction: Islam and Muslim Life in West Africa – Practices, Trajectories and Influences
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
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.
Islam and Traditions in Africa: Friends or Foes
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.
The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History, 2018
is frequently, but unjustly, seen as the periphery of the Muslim world, in terms of both geography and religious influence. By contrast, North Africa is considered to be directly linked to the alleged center of the Muslim world, that is, the Arab Middle East. In fact, Islam has had a presence in sub-Saharan Africa since the earliest days of its history. This chapter tries to redress the periphery bias in the analysis of African Muslim societies-a bias that, as Loimeier (2013: ix-x) points out, is long overdue. After all, Africa is home to one of the largest agglomerations of Muslims in the world today. 1 Stretching south across the Sahara, the vast savannah zone-known as the Sahel-is Muslim until it reaches the forest belt of West and Central Africa. Moving south, the Horn of Africa represents a second major zone of Muslim influence. Via contact with seafaring traders in the Indian Ocean, Islam came to dominate in what is now known as the Swahili coast, stretching as far south as Mozambique and the island of Madagascar. From these areas, the religion spread gradually over the centuries, moving south and west into more tropical zones, and the expansion continues today (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000; Loimeier 2013). At present, Muslims constitute a majority in North Africa and in most of the countries in the Sahel. In Sudan, Chad and Tanzania Muslims are the largest group. The population is almost equally divided between Muslims and Christians in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria. Even where Muslims are a minority, they constitute large majorities in certain regions, as for example on the Cape in South Africa, 2 northern Benin, northern Cameroon, northern Ghana, and in highland Ethiopia and coastal Kenya (Otayek and Soares 2007: This is the author's un-edited original manuscript of a chapter that will appear in Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History edited by Martin Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola, due for publication 2017.