Some Aspects of Islam in Africa

UTHMAN SAYYID AHMAD ISMAIL AL-BILI

Some Aspects

of        

Islam in            

Africa

SOME ASPECTS OF ISLAM IN AFRICA

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Copyright © Uthman Sayyid Ahmad Ismail al-Bili, 2008

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First Edition

ISBN: 978-0-86372-459-6

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Contents

Introduction

1 The Historiographical Tradition of African Islam

2 As-Sudan and Bilad as-Sudan in Early and Medieval Arabic Writing

3 A Survey of Primary Literary Sources for the Modern Period of Sudan’s History, 1898–1956

4 The Growth and Impact of Islam in Africa

5 The Literature of Dan Fodio’s Jihad and the Sokoto Caliphate of Northern Nigeria, 1804–1903

6 Muhammad Bello and the Tradition of Manuals of Islamic Government and Advice to Rulers

U. S. A. Ismail and A. Y. Aliyu

7 The Discourse Presented in Answer to the Questions of Amir Yaqub

Muhammad Bello

8 The Abundant Rain: In Advice to Amir Yaqub

Muhammad Bello

9 Documentation and Sources: Some Observations on Progress, Problems and Concepts

10 Quo Vadis, Africa? Africa, the World, the Arabs and Islam

Index

Introduction

This book’s ten chapters are a collection of papers, most of which have been published before in books or learned journals. Some of them (Chapters 1, 5, 9 and 10) were read and discussed in conferences in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in Sokoto, Nigeria and in Khartoum, Sudan. One of them (Chapter 2) was read and discussed at the graduate seminar of the History Department of the University of Khartoum. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 have appeared together in one volume, as they form a unit in themselves. Chapter 3 was written as research notes, and Chapter 4 was a contribution to the festschrift in honour of the late Ihsan Abbas. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 are of a general nature; the rest deal with specific subjects.

I shall let the chapters speak for themselves. However, it is important to mention that they are part of an effort to establish an independent and indigenous school of African history that sees the continent’s history through African eyes and presents it giving central place to internal written and oral traditions without sacrificing the truth or academic integrity. It is the school for which the late Professor Abdullahi Smith wrote papers on ‘The Forgotten Themes’ and ‘Neglected Sources’, Professor T. Ranger edited his book Emerging Themes of African History, Professor Jan Vansina worked on Oral Traditions and Professor Lewicki produced his work on Arabic External Sources for the History of Africa South of the Sahara. The ten chapters of this volume are a tribute to these pioneering professors as well as to my former colleagues and students at A.B.U. Zaria, Nigeria and the University of Khartoum, Sudan.

Uthman S.A. Ismail

1

The Historiographical Tradition of African Islam

To early and medieval Muslims, Africa did not have the meaning it has today. Ifriqiya was the name they used for the eastern part of Barbary; the name Maghrib was for its western part. Ifriqiya in this sense was described as stretching from Barqa in Tunisia in the east to Tangier in the west, from the Mediterranean in the north to the sands that mark the beginning of the lands of the black Africans in the south. Thus the name that the Romans used for the province they organized after the destruction of Carthage was used by Muslims in that restricted sense. For the origin of the name Ifriqiya Arabic sources give some interesting explanations. Common among these is the suggestion that the province was called after the town which had that name, from its founder Ifrigish. Ifrigish is said to have come from Yemen. The sources do not tell this story without touches of art: the support of poetry is invoked to give it ring and credence.

Restricted as the meaning of Ifriqiya might have been to Muslims, the rest of Africa was known to them to some extent. Even before the advent of Islam, the Arabs knew a good amount about the African provinces of the Byzantines and the lands of the eastern coasts of Africa. Knowledge of these places came to them through travel by land and sea and through their trading connections. The Arabs witnessed the clashes between the Byzantines and the Persians to the north of their lands, but it was in southern Arabia itself that the head-on collision between the warring satellites of those two powers took place. The commercial and religious conflicts between Christian Abyssinia and Jewish Yemen were won by the former, which virtually occupied Yemen and, as a result, threatened the very existence of Mecca and its trading power shortly before the advent of Islam.

The presence and significance of Africa and Africans was indeed apparent in pre-Islamic Arabia. The narratives of the Arabs have much that shows how prominent the African element was in their community, not as servile individuals but as persons such as Antara bin Shaddad, the Seven Black Arabs (Aghribatu al-Arab al-Saba) and Abraha, who threatened Mecca with his troops. For Mecca, the trading and religious centre of Arabia, the Ahabish were vital to the trade and defence of the Qurashite community. At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, there was the famous Bilal, the first muezzin of Islam. Nor is it to be forgotten that the first migration of Muslims was to the lands of the Christian Negus of Abyssinia.

Very soon after the advent of Islam, the Muslims found themselves commanding a very large empire. Their conquests carried them to the north, to the east and to the west. By the time of the Umayyads (AD 661–750), the whole of the north of Africa, from Egypt to the Atlantic, was under Muslim rule. By then the boundaries of the classical Muslim world, except for the additional lands won by the Abbasids, were defined. Those of Islam were not. Islam and Muslim communities were finding roots in many of the adjacent lands. The various hindrances to armies were not insurmountable to traders, pilgrims, refugees and the religious men who dedicated their energies to the cause of Islam.

The Abbasid period (AD 750–1258) was one of consolidation rather than conquest and expansion. It witnessed the flourishing of trade, the flowering of culture and the rise of a civilization distinct and original despite the seams that showed in its diverse and complex parts. It was an age of travel and commercial activity on a very large scale. The Muslim community was becoming conscious of history in general, of its own history in particular and of its place in the world. With the writing of history, one finds writing on geography, on travel and on trade, all reflecting the interests of the community in knowledge, commerce and exploration.

Interest in Africa and the Africans increased in this period, and an African element was present in the Abbasid world. To name but three famous persons of some African origin, one readily recalls Jahiz, the great essayist and religious philosopher; Ibrahim the singer, the brother of Harun al-Rashid who became caliph in Baghdad for a short time; and Kafur al-Ikhshid, the governor of Egypt. The African element was numerous enough to stage the famous revolt of Zanj in the neighbourhood of Basra from AD 869 to AD 883. The literature of the period, if tapped properly and patiently, will prove to be very fruitful to students of Africa.

The Abbasid era also saw the beginning of the gradual infiltration of Islam and Muslims into eastern and western Africa, across the whole of the Sudanic belt and along the connecting trade and pilgrimage routes. Politically there was the rise of regional powers: the focus of rulers and regions, in Egypt, in North Africa and elsewhere, was more upon themselves than upon the caliphs in Iraq. The consequence was the rise to prominence of regional cultural centres such as Cairo and Qairawan and their regions in Africa.

Present-day Africa is usually divided for convenience (academic and otherwise) into two main parts. These are North Africa, including Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa. The student of Islam in Africa notes that this division is useful for the purpose of tracing the historical development of Islam in Africa. The northern part of the continent belongs to the classical world of Islam. It was, until the time of the decay of the caliphate and the rise of local dynasties, part of the domains of the caliphs, the Umayyads and the Abbasids. Sub-Saharan Africa was never a part of that world. All the same, Islam there is not a recent or an artificial growth, nor is it without glory.

In western Sudan, the turning point in the spread of Islam and its rise to power came as a result of the movement initiated by Ibn Yasin, who based himself among the Berbers of present-day Mauritania. His empire (AD 1056–1147) spread as far south as the River Niger; and his followers were known as the Moravids, from the Arabic word murabitun (armed guards), which reflects the character of the state and the nature of its mission. It was in its wake and largely in its tradition that the western Sudanic empires of Mali, Songhai and later Fulani rose.

In eastern Sudan (the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), Islam made contact shortly after the Prophet’s death. It had already reached the eastern coasts of Africa. Muslim penetration, light as it was, became noticeable in the ninth century. The changes, political, social and economic, in the status of the Arabs after the Abbasid revolution in AD 750, particularly in Egypt, made some tribes look southwards to the plains beyond Nubia and along the Red Sea coast. This trend increased from the eleventh century. By the fifteenth century, Islam had become well established in eastern Sudan. The stage was set for the final collapse of the decaying Christian kingdoms there and the rise of Muslim kingdoms such as the Fur, the Funj, the Abdallab, the Shaigiyya and the Gaaliyin. The rise of Muslim power in Somalia and East Africa was soon to follow; and from these quarters Islam followed the trade routes and spread into the coastal hinterlands of modern-day Kenya, Tanganyka and as far inland as Uganda.

The march of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa still goes on. Students of the subject notice that this third wave, slow and unspectacular in nature, is different from the two previous ones, which occurred when Islam represented (military and economic) power, politics and culture in the continent. This is the wave of Islam in Africa under foreign domination and of Africa freeing itself, body and soul, and doing its best to cope with all the isms of politics and culture.

For our purposes, the differences in African Islam discussed above were, first, of time: the first wave was in the northern part of Africa; the second was, and the third wave is, in sub-Saharan Africa. The second difference was of administration: the northern parts of Africa belonged to the classical world of Islam; the sub-Saharan parts did not.

Important as these differences are, they are neither the only nor the main ones. Three other differences are more important. First, in the northern parts Islam was orthodox Islam. Sufism, which came later as part of a wave that enveloped the whole of the Muslim world, was a reaction to that orthodoxy the roots of which were deep. In sub-Saharan Africa, Islam was a result of that Sufi movement and of Sufi jihad activities. It was the Islam of the murabitun, the holy men and the mahdis. The admirable survey of Arabic literature in Nigeria to 1804, published by Bivar and Hiskett in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1962, shows clearly how orthodox Islam of the Maliki ulama was desperately trying to establish itself in the face of the highly Africanized and Sufi-influenced Islam of the period. In eastern Sudan, the rift between the two schools was illustrated in the hostility of the ulama of Khartoum to the Mahdi, whose following was drawn largely from the nomadic west.

In the northern parts of Africa, where there is a heavy presence of Semites and Hamites, Islamization went hand in hand with Arabization. Islam was spread by Arab communities, which, although small in number compared to the indigenous populations, succeeded in giving their religion, language and some of their taste to the regions they conquered. These regions were thus readily open to all the cultural currents, orthodox and otherwise, of the classical Muslim world of which they were a part. Indeed, their contribution to it forms a great deal of its heritage, a part that is of great value to African history. Today these regions and eastern Sudan, deeply committed to Africa, represent numerically the majority of the Arab world. Arabic is, and has been for a long time, their official and cultural language.

Sub-Saharan Africa, whether Muslims are the majority or the minority, was not Arabized. It hardly contributed to the cultural currents of the classical Muslim world, nor was it much open to it. However, it must be kept in mind that there the influence of Arabic, if not of the Arabs, was great. It was the language of the learned and educated, as it was the language of the Quran and of Islamic culture. The impact of this was that many Arabic words expressing Muslim concepts or resulting from cultural borrowing found their way to become part and parcel of many African languages and also that Arabic characters became the alphabet adopted for writing African languages. Such was the case with Swahili, Somali, Hausa and the Fulfulde languages. Later, under the impact of the West, Latin characters replaced the Arabic ones. But for the study of pre-colonial periods in sub-Saharan Africa, knowledge of Arabic is essential because the educated of its areas used Arabic or Arabic characters for their writing. And of course various other contributions to regional culture were made in that language.

At the same time, the basic historical and cultural differences between the peoples of the regions of Africa must not be overlooked. Islam, like many other religions, has been very much influenced by the human environment in which it exists, and perhaps, unlike some of them, it has proved its capacity for adaptability and acclimatization. The historical tradition of African Islam of the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of sub-Saharan Africa is different from that of the peoples of the northern parts of Africa who had been part of Mediterranean civilization before becoming part of orthodox Islam. Like all Muslims, nonetheless, those of sub-Saharan Africa have their own self-image and their own conception of the history and place of Islam. The history of the Muslim states that dominated the scene all across the belt of Sudan in pre-colonial Africa is evidence of this. So too is the history of the resistance that the Christian West faced politically, culturally and sometimes militarily from Muslim communities when it came to dominate the African scene. In both cases, one cannot fail to notice that it was the tradition of the Sufis, the holy men of the baraka (divine blessing), the mahdis and the shaykhs of the turuq (the heads of religious orders) that made the popular and, indeed in many cases, the