History of Islam in Africa

The web of unexamined opinion about Islam in the West holds even when transposed into Africa and many Africanists, first and foremost Europeanists, have copied their script over from European learning, from what has historically been a dogmatic vision of Islam as a uniform and timeless superstition. My aim in these remarks is to discuss the effects of the reduction of the prismatic complexity of Islam has upon African and Africanist writing and thought.

Neste artigo, é analisado o desenvolvimento de traços de uma cultura intelectual islâmica na bacia dos rios Senegal e Gâmbia, a Senegâmbia, amparada pela valorização da escrita, produção e difusão de livros, e pelo caráter performático da leitura e posse de escrituras. O conceito de capital cultural, proposto por Pierre Bourdieu, é a principal ferramenta a orientar a abordagem do exercício de saberes islâmicos na Senegâmbia. O conceito é compreendido como dimensão da realidade social que implica produção, distribuição e consumo de bens culturais capazes de proporcionar benefícios (econômicos e simbólicos) a seus detentores. O capital cultural, neste sentido, representa recurso de poder numa sociedade estratificada, uma vez que bens econômicos não constituem a única forma de estratificação social.1 É, por isso, encarado como meio de dominação, visto que implica a legitimação da superioridade de elementos culturais provenientes de grupos sociais hegemônicos sobre os demais estratos da sociedade. Para fins analíticos, e acompanhando a proposta de Pierre Bourdieu, apontamos a existência do capital cultural sob três estados: objetivado, incorporado e institucionalizado.

Επίσης:
Χασάν Β’ του Μαρόκου “Οι Αναμνήσεις ενός Βασιλιά”
Σκιαγραφόντας την κουλτούρα του Μαρόκου μέσα από τον ηγέτη του, όπως αυτός παρουσιάζεται στο πρόσφατο βιβλίο “Hassan II La mémoire d’un roi”

Also:
Hassan II of Morocco “The Memories of a King”
Outlining the culture of Morocco through his leader, as he is presented in the recent book “Hassan II La mémoire d’un roi”

Άρθρα του Μουχάμαντ Σαμσαντίν (τότε Κοσμά) Μεγαλομμάτη στο περιοδικό Τρίτο Μάτι, 32 (Φεβρουάριος 1994), σελ. 48-54 και 56-57

Articles by Muhammad Shamsaddin (then Cosmas) Megalommatis in the monthly review Trito Mati (Third Eye), 32 (February 1994), p. 48-54 and 56-57

First published online on 6th June 2021 here:
https://profmegalommatistextsingreek.wordpress.com/2021/06/05/μαρόκο-ταξίδι-στην-άκρη-του-κόσμου/

In his book 'A demolidora das prazeres' ('A demolisher of the pleasures', 1993), the Mozambican Islamic scholar Shaykh Aminuddin Mohamad Ibrahimo deals, amongst others, with the Islamic concepts of death and life in the hereafter. He provides his insights into one of the long-standing historical debates in Mozambique over funeral rites, and what is permitted or forbidden. Most of the critique of the book is directed against the funeral practices of the Sufi orders, especially the Qadiriyya. The Shaykh criticizes them from a religious standpoint, using the Wahhabi language, as well as from a rational modernist position. In short, Shaykh Aminuddin Mohamad asserts himself as a 'legitimate' Islamic authority in the face of competition from the 'traditional' African Islam represented by the person of a Muslim chief, embodying the spiritual world of the ancestors, and from the Sufi order.

This paper explores the conflict between Abdullahi dan Fodio and his nephew, Muhammad Bello, over the origin of their ethnic group, the Torobbe-Fulani. Initially open to his uncle's theories of an Arabocentric migration narrative, Bello went on to change his views abruptly and undermine his uncle's work. Through sketching the background to the conflict followed by a close reading of the documents themselves– Abdullahi's īdāʿ al-nusūkh and Bello's critical commentary to it, the ḥāshiya–I suggest these documents offer different models for political legitimacy. Prefaced by a critical analysis of the use of the Fodiawa's Arabic writings in Sokoto historiography, I suggest that future approaches must take into account the political nature of these documents, the specific contexts in which they were produced and the personal relationships of their authors.

Numerous powerful empires emerged in the Sahelian and Sudanian Zone of West Africa during the Medieval Period. Their trade networks extended as far as India, the Middle East and Europe. Wealth was based on the export of gold, slaves, and ivory. Islam and the Arab World had a considerable influence in this region but the political entities also retained a very distinctive African character.
During the nineteenth century the region came into the focus of the economic expansion of the European powers, among them Germany. Despite the following colonial conquest some of the traditional African states persisted until today as for instance the Hausa city states and the Borno Emirate in Northern Nigeria.
The volume introduces to the general area and examines the emergence and the expansion of these empires over the last one thousand years. A particular focus is laid on spectacular finds from a high-status burial site which illustrate the role of West Africa within the global economy at the turn from the Medieval to the Post Medieval Period.

The article aims to monitor the political history of the Empire Ghana, starting with the founding, the factors of the establishment of the empire, whether natural, economic or religious, and then review the stages of its rule from the period of the rule of bayan to the era of Sonink, highlighting the capital of this empire, and determine the structure of the state in terms of nature The political system, the administrative division, the traditions of governance, the army and the police, and finally the seal of the circumstances of the collapse of this state.
The research aims to reveal an important aspect of the history of Africa, the political history of West Africa, in particular the Empire of Ghana, wich many aspects of its history is still vague, and poses many question marks, which require research and study.
The research was based on the historical methodology based on a set of basic elements, including definition, interpretation, criticism and composition, in addition to openness to the historiography related to the subject.

The Somali nationalism has emerged as anti-colonial and cultural nationalism and its  beginning was romantic and idealistic, aiming for the liberation of the Somali people under the rule of multiple colonial powers and uniting them in one Greater Somalia state.  It was also a modernizing project against tradition, which aimed to reform segmented clannish society by diminishing its role, marginalizing its leadership. The formative period of Somali nationalism coincided with the poisonous atmosphere of the Cold War after WWII and was implicated by the competing super powers and regional states interested in the Somali strategic geographic location. Moreover, successive Somali governments pursued moderate approaches to realize nationalist goals, nonetheless, the war with Ethiopia in 1977-78 was suicidal and marked the beginning of the downfall and the ruinations of the first fruits of Somali nationalism, the Somali state. Consequently, the Somali state was collapsed in 1991. Even so, Somali nationalism did not die but suffered great losses as a result of the flawed emotional approaches and elite competition for political power. It possesses natural and organic ingredients that sustain its viability and rejuvenate its identity, such as in Somalia’s ethnic and linguistic homogeneity and common Islamic faith. The new revival of Somali nationalism is mounting with cultural sensitivities and new conception for Greater Somalia.

Event-oriented history-writing (histoire événementielle) is not dead and even quite necessary while working with big and fuzzy concepts (empire, territoriality, centre-periphery relations, etc.). This does not imply, however, a revaluation of pre-Annales positivism which focuses mainly on decisive acts, actors and moments. We claim that one may have a better understanding of the nature of political power and international relations in the pre-modern period by unearthing new documents that enable the historian to display the machinations of small or middle-term strategies-eventually, their failures-and by deciphering the careers and strategies of minor figures in the margins of Empires.

This study examines the testamentary waqf of Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghūl (1853-1919), a prominent merchant and communal leader in the cosmopolitan Red Sea port town of Massawa in Eritrea during the period of Italian colonial rule . We provide an annotated translation of the document and a detailed socio-legal analysis of its fea-© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 |

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This paper discusses the politics of religious affiliation and inter-tariqa conflict in northern Nigeria from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, in the light of the competing agendas of the Sultan of Sokoto Abubakar III (d. 1988); of the Sardauna and Premier of Northern Nigeria Ahmadu Bello (d. 1966); and of the Senegalese Sufi leader Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). While the political agendas of the first two had immediate ramifications on the religious sphere, the agenda of religious revival of the third, conversely, also had political undertones. The combined effects of the three, played out in the volatile arena of late colonial and early postcolonial Nigeria, created shifting configurations of religious and political alliances. Studies on the history of religious networks, the paper argues, need to take both religion and politics seriously.

There has been a recent burgeoning of new scholarship related to the development of Muslim traditions of learning in West Africa. Much of this work has highlighted the important role played by an extended kinship network known as "the Kunta." This network rose to prominence in the Western Saharan region known as the Azawad-directly north of Timbuktu in presentday Mali-in the second half of the eighteenth century under the leadership of a man named Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī. Several scholars have noted that the writings of both Sīdi al-Mukhtār and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥ ammad al-Kuntī, express significant engagement with a contested set of practices that they call "the sciences of the secrets" (ʿulūm al-asrār) or "the sciences of the unseen" (ʿulūm al-ghayb), and which include the production of amulets, the numerological manipulation of the names of God, and communicating with the jinn. 1 As a result, scholarship on the Kunta network intersects with the growth of academic interest in these practices within Islamicate

[Please excuse typos in the text...]

West Africa has been home to and contributed to the development of several important Islamic intellectual traditions, including logic (manṭiq), theology (kalām), Sufism (taṣawwuf), legal philosophy (uṣūl al-fiqh), and even philosophy (falsafa)-all of which influenced the distinctive forms of pedagogy that emerged in West Africa, in which ritual practice, physical presence, and the cultivation of virtue and adab (manners, a particular habitus) played an important role. The 20th and 21st centuries CE (14th and 15th centuries AH) witnessed the emergence of radically different forms of pedagogy and epistemology in Muslim West Africa, because of both increasing exposure to texts and ideas from other Muslim societies and the colonial encounter with Western philosophy and institutional education in the context of nation-states, which profoundly altered the intellectual landscape of the region. The contemporary situation in West Africa is quite plural and dynamic, in which traditions of Sufism, Salafism, Shiʿism, Western philosophies and pedagogies, Pentecostalism, and traditional African religions coexist, compete, interact, and influence each other across a wide variety of domains of life. Nevertheless, Sufism remains an important and prominent feature of many dimensions of life in Muslim West Africa, including Islamic education.

ʿAjamī (also Ajami or A{jami, hereafter Ajami) comes from the Arabic ʿajam, which originally denoted obscure or incomprehensible speech, unclear or improper Arabic, or non-Arab or foreigner. The term evokes a whole family of literary traditions in various languages, spanning Africa but also including historical traditions of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus). Each
language with an Ajami tradition has its own name for the practice, which may be derived from the same root (e.g., ki-ajamiya in Swahili, aljamiado in the Spanish of alAndalus) or may use indigenous names
(e.g., wolofal in Wolof ). Today, Ajami generally refers to African languages written in a modified Arabic script.

Kate fleet, Gudrun Krämer, denis matringe, John nawas, and everett rowson With roger allen, edith amBros, Thomas BaUer, sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, ruth daVis, eve feUilleBois-pierUneK, maribel fierro, Konrad hirschler, alexander Knysh, corinne lefÈVre, roman loimeier, andrew neWman, merle ricKlefs, emilie saVaGe-smiTh, ayman shihadeh, susan specTorsKy, and Gotthard sTrohmaier leiden • BosTon 2015 library of congres cataloging-in-publication data a c.i.p. record for this book is available from the library of congress. EI3 is published under the patronage of the international union of academies. adVisory Board azyumardi azra; peri Bearman; farhad daftary; emeri van donzel; Geert Jan van Gelder (chairman); r. stephen humphreys; remke Kruk; Wilferd madelung; Barbara metcalf; hossein modarressi; James montgomery; nasrollah pourjavady; and Jean-louis Triaud EI3 is copy edited by linda George, alan h. hartley, alex mallett and Brian Johnson. issn: 1873-9830 isBn: 978-90-04-28213-1 © copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nV, leiden, The netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill nijhoff and hotei publishing.

This article is a historical overview of two issues: first, that of the dynamics of Islamic religious transformations from pre-Portuguese era up until the 2000s among Muslims of the contemporary Cabo Delgado, Nampula, and to a certain extent, Niassa provinces. The article argues that historical and geographical proximity of these regions to East African coast, the Comoros and northern Madagascar meant that all these regions shared a common Islamic religious tradition. Accordingly, shifts with regard to religious discourses and practices went in parallel. This situation began changing in the last decade of the colonial era and has continued well into the 2000s, when the so-called Wahhabis, Sunni Muslims educated in the Islamic universities of the Arab world brought religious outlook that differed significantly from the historical local and regional conceptions of Islam. The second question addressed in this article is about relationships between northern Mozambican Muslims and the state. The article argues that after initial confrontations with Muslims in the sixteenth century and up until the last decade of the colonial era, the Portuguese rule pursued no concerted effort in interfering in the internal Muslim religious affairs. Besides, although they occupied and destroyed some of the Swahili settlements, in particular in southern and central Mozambique, other Swahili continued to thrive in northern Mozambique and maintained certain independence from the Portuguese up until the twentieth century. Islam there remained under the control of the ruling Shirazi clans with close political, economic, kinship and religious ties to the Swahili world. By establishing kinship and politico-economic ties with the ruling elites of the mainland in the nineteenth century, these families were also instrumental in expanding Islam into the hinterland. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese rule took full control of the region as a result of military conquests of the ‘effective occupation’, and imposed new legal and administrative colonial system, called Indigenato, impacting Muslims of northern Mozambique to a great extent. After the independence in 1975, and especially since 1977, the post-independence Frelimo government adopted militant atheism and socialist Marxism, which was short-lived and was abolished in 1983 owing to popular resistance and especially, because of government’s perception that its religious policies were fuelling the opposition groups to take arms and join the civil war. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by an acute rivalry and conflicts between the two emerging national umbrella Islamic organizations, the Islamic Council and the Islamic Congress, each representing largely pro-Sufi and anti-Sufi positions. In the 2000s, these organizations became overshadowed by new and more dynamic organizations, such as Ahl Al-Sunna.

The transition from socialism to the neo-liberal model after the end of the civil war in Mozambique prompted a public debate about the meaning and memories of the liberation struggle. While the Frelimo party has been re-assessing and reaffirming its 'ownership' over the collective memory of the nation-state, whose foundational myth is based on the independence struggle, the professional historians, veterans and disenfranchised groups have been attempting to insert their own insights and memories into that debate.
This article addresses memories of the liberation war by the ordinary Muslims, including male and female guerrilla fighters and political prisoners interviewed in the Paquitequete neighbourhood of Pemba City, Cabo Delgado province, which was one of the pivotal regions of the war. Through their stories the article attempts to give voice to marginalized groups and bring the agency of the forgotten into the public and ongoing contemporary debate in order to re-inscribe them into the national narratives of the independence struggle.

paru dans  « L’Islam des marges : mission chrétienne et espaces périphériques du monde musulman , XVIe-XXe  siècles. »
Ouvrage sous la direction de Bernard Heyberger et Rémy Madinier, Paris, IISMM-Karthala, coll. « Terres et gens d'islam », 2011

Although Islam has a long history in coastal northern Mozambique, the question of how Muslims manage family life there is little understood. Based on the analysis of historical, ethnographic and legal records, and a case study of a bairro (Port., ward) called Paquitequete in the contemporary coastal city of Pemba in Cabo Delgado province, this article focuses on Muslim family and gender relations in northern
Mozambique. It argues that Muslims of this region maintain concurrent legal identities as Muslims, matrilineal Africans and citizens of the modern state. While women benefitted from matriliny by accessing the land and support from their maternal side, upon widowhood and divorce they lost access to their husband’s or common assets because the husbands’ matriclan claimed them. The perseverance of matriliny made
local Muslims seem to abide less by Islamic norms, but historically they have combined the Shāfiʿī madhhab (Islamic legal school) with matrilineal custom. In contemporary Pemba, family and gender relations are regulated not only by Sharīʿa or by African ‘traditions’, but by a blend of elements from these two alongside modern legislations.
Moreover, it could be said that this arrangement is endorsed by a kind of popular consensus, which is particularly salient in the Community Courts.

This article examines two letters sent by the head of the Kunta family in the Azaouad region, al-Muḫtār al-Ṣaġīr al-Kuntī (d. 1847), to Aḥmad Lobbo (d. 1845) at the time of the Ḥamdallāhi imamate’s expansion into the Niger Bend during the 1830s. The aim is to investigate how the science of law in Islam (fiqh) acts as a versatile tool of political communication that intervenes directly in local power relations. On the one hand, I analyze how Islamic contractual mechanisms affected the management of conflictual relations between lineage groups. On the other, I shed light into a more global process of juridification of politics in the region perceptible in both letters. Al-Muḫtār al-Ṣaġīr envisions Ḥamdallāhi’s conquest of the Niger Bend essentially through a conceptual framework forged by Muslim jurists after the tenth century to lay down the institutional foundations of public order, beginning with the judiciary (al-qaḍāʾ). By exploring this performative dimension of Muslim scholarly discourses, I hope to provide new insights into the question of how the spread of Islamic law and literacy reconfigured social, cultural, and political interaction in post-1400 Sahelo-Saharan societies.

В центре данной работы стоят взаимоотношения власти и народа в их институциональном оформлении, а именно проблематика соотношения власти правителя, действующей общественной нормы и ее носителей. На широком конкретно-историческом материале, включающем традиционные и модернизирующиеся общества, прослеживаются такие аспекты данной проблематики, как характер представлений о непогрешимости или, напротив, несовершенстве правителя и политической системы, возможности правителя по отношению к действующим социальным нормам, возможности критики в адрес правителя и принудительных общественных санкций в его адрес, понятия о легитимности правителя и ее источниках, концепция высших целей существования института верховной власти и др. Используемый конкретно-исторический материал обобщается на основе формализованного выделения ключевых параметров, характеризующих данные феномены с установлением корреляций между ними, что позволяет осуществить типологизацию социумов с точки зрения исследуемой тематики.

Despite the fact that the liberation war occurred in northern Mozambique, where a considerable number of Muslims lived, their contribution to the independence struggle has been little studied. This paper focusses on their participation in two nationalist liberation movements, Mozambican African National Union (MANU) and Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), and demonstrates that the prevailing idea in scholarship about Muslims’ aloofness from the liberation struggle is unjustified. It argues that Muslim support and participation in the liberation movements stemmed primarily from grassroots African nationalism. Like most Africans, Muslims wished to end colonialism and recover their land from the Portuguese. African Muslims of northern Mozambique were well suited to support these movements, because Islam and chieftainship were linked to each other. Chiefs were believed to be the ‘owners’ and ‘stewards’ of the land, and a majority of Muslim leaders, whether traditional chiefs (régulos, in Portuguese) or Sufi leaders (tariqa khulafa’, in Arabic), were from the chiefly clans. Most importantly, Muslims of northern Mozambique had close historical and cultural ties to Tanganyika and Zanzibar, especially through Islamic and kinship networks. The involvement of Muslims in the liberation movements of those regions, in particular in Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), inspired and encouraged the Muslims of northern Mozambique to support MANU and FRELIMO, especially since these two movements were launched in Tanganyika and Zanzibar with TANU backing and the participation of Muslim immigrants from northern Mozambique.

Islamic education penetrated the area now administratively referred to as Ghana, signicantly after the nineteenth century Jihad Movements in Northern Nigeria, primarily as an arm of Islamic proselytization. However, with the passage of time and especially after the independence of Ghana and the rising demand for a skilled workforce, there emerged a much greater need for change in the focus of Islamic education. This paper will dwell on the ‘conservative’ and ‘modernizing’ approaches at forging a meaningful interaction between Islamic and Western secular education in the Northern Region of Ghana

Este artigo visa analisar o conflito de Cabo Delgado sob prisma do jihadismo transnacional, uma ideologia e um movimento político que se apoderam de demandas e agravos locais, sobretudo contra o Estado, despoletando a insurgência ou canalizando a resistência já existente. O conflito representa também uma resistência contra a ordem mundial dominada pelo Ocidente. A primeira parte do artigo debruça sobre o conceito e a história do jihadismo transnacional, salientando as transformações na ideologia e na ação dos seus protagonistas, e sua expansão geográfica. A segunda parte analisa o contexto sociopolítico e econômico de Cabo Delgado que contribuiu para o início de insurgência, destacando a resistência contra o Estado moçambicano e contra a hegemonia ocidental na forma do extrativismo conduzido por corporações transnacionais que se instalaram em Cabo Delgado a partir de 2010.

Based on archival and fieldwork research, this paper outlines in its first part the history of the formation of various types of Muslim religious leaderships during pre-colonial and colonial periods. Islam in Mozambique, especially in the northern part of the country, existed among Africans long before the arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was linked to the World of Swahili, i.e. the East African coast and the Comoros, from the time of its formation. However, European colonial expansion drove the immigration of Indian Muslims from the Portuguese territories of Gujarat, India and later from British East Africa. How the resulting social, ideological, and racial differences among this leadership have been reflected and played out in relation to the state, the competing Muslim religious groups, and the international Islamic organisations in the post-colonial Mozambique, is the focus of the second part of this article

This article aims to tackle three fundamental dimensions in Abyssinia-Ottoman friction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First, whether the sixteenth-century friction was the product of Ottomans and/ or Portuguese involvement induced or not; second regarding the binary opposition that framed this friction as foreign vs. indigenous or as a Christian Abyssinians vs. Muslim outsiders discourse; and third, whether behind the success of Muslims' conquest was local resource and strong leadership or external support. Utilizing Turkish, Arabic, and other pertinent sources, the article concludes the war was the product of historically evolved frictions sustained over time between Christian rulers and Muslims in Abyssinia and the Ottomans which helped to restore a relative peace and stability in Abyssinia.

Neste artigo, abordarei discussões iniciais de uma pesquisa em curso
acerca do processo de islamização na
África Ocidental, destacando a bacia dos
rios Senegal e Gâmbia, como espaço de
observação. Partindo de narrativas luso--africanas, apontarei a presença islâmica
na Senegâmbia e discutirei a emergência
de mesquitas e escolas corânicas como
instituições caras à islamização, apresentadas nos Cinco Pilares.

Using gender as the major line of difference, the paper examines the diversity within Islam in northern Mozambique, in which, despite strong historical ties to the Swahili world and waves of Islamic expansion, as well as attempts to establish and police an Islamic 'orthodoxy', matriliny continues to be one of the main cultural features. Concentrating on two coastal regions, Mozambique Island and Angoche, and on three urban zones of the modern provincial capital, Nampula City, the paper addresses the reasons for the endurance of matriliny, through historical processes that brought about different currents of Islam, and discusses the ways in which the colonial and post-colonial state, while attempting to control the often conflicting Islamic and African 'traditional' authorities, have contributed to the perpetuation of this conflict as well as to the endurance of matriliny.

A symposium on Shari'ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria's Islamic Revolution, with review essays by Professor Elias Bongmba, Professor Corey Williams, and Professor Dianna Bell.

Based on a live book symposium held in Lukasa, Zambia in August 2018.

Sufi identity and rituals became widespread among local Muslims during the colonial era due to the expansion of the Shadhuliyya and the Qadiriyya orders. But the history of Sufism in Mozambique has been little explored. Portuguese colonial officials began paying closer attention to Islam in general and Sufism in particular only toward the end of the colonial period, especially in the late 1960s. This sudden interest was prompted by the independence war that took place mostly in northern Mozambique, where significant numbers of Muslims lived. The colonial Secret Service was mandated to find out how and why Muslims were involved in the independence struggle and in which ways they could be subverted. Otherwise there has been very limited research on Sufism, especially since Mozambique achieved independence. This article examines the historical context into which the orders arrived, and what prompted their significant expansion, as well as the reasons why they subsequently split up into eight autonomous branches. It is based on archival research in Mozambique and Portugal and fieldwork conducted at Mozambique Island, and in Angoche, Nampula, Pemba and Maputo cities.