Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-gtxcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T10:55:25.749Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ISLAM IN AFRICA/AFRICANS AND ISLAM*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2014

Scott S. Reese
Scott S. Reese*
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Islamhistoriographyregionalglobal
Type
JAH Forum: Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 17 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Author's email: scott.reese@nau.edu

References

1 Niane, D. T., Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (rev. edn, Harlow, UK, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 Reese, S. S., ‘Islam in Africa: challenging the perceived wisdom’, in Reese, S. S. (ed.), The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa (Leiden, 2004)Google Scholar, 1.

3 Launay, R., Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (Berkeley, CA, 1992), 5–6Google Scholar.

4 Asad, T., The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, D. C., 1986)Google Scholar.

5 Masquelier, A. M., Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Bloomington, IN, 2009)Google Scholar, 25.

6 For example, see Lapidus, I., A History of Islamic Societies (2n edn, Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; and Bulliet, R. et al. , The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, Volume. I: To 1550 (5th edn, Boston, 2009)Google Scholar. Indeed, Mansa Musa was recently declared to be the ‘wealthiest person in human history’. ‘Meet Mansa Musa I of Mali – the richest human being in all history’, The Independent (London), 16 Oct. 2012.

7 Lydon, G., On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge, 2009), 99–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Bang, A. K., Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925 (London, 2003)Google Scholar; Reese, S. S., Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir (Leiden, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Abushouk, A. I., ‘An African scholar in the Netherlands East Indies: al-Shaykh Ahmad Surkitti (1876–1943) and his life, thoughts, and reforms’, Islamic Africa, 2:2 (2011), 23–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Reichmuth, ‘Murtadā al-Zabīdī (1732–91) and the Africans: Islamic discourse and scholarly networks in the late eighteenth century’, in Reese, The Transmission of Learning, 121–53.

10 Ward, K., Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar for the Colony, Cape and Vahed, G., ‘Constructions of community and identity among Indians in colonial Natal, 1860–1910: the role of the Muharram Festival’, The Journal of African History, 43:1 (2002), 77–93Google Scholar as well as; Green, N., ‘The dilemmas of the pious biographer: missionary Islam and the oceanic hagiography’, Journal of Religious History, 34:4 (2010), 383–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for Natal and the Eastern Cape.

11 A. C. Ahmed, ‘The migration (Hijrah) of Muslim scholars from West Africa to Mekka and Medina after colonisation’, unpublished seminar paper delivered at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany, 3 Dec. 2009.

12 Gelvin, J. and Green, N. (eds.), Global Islam in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, CA, 2014)Google Scholar.

13 E. Tagliacozzo, ‘Hajj in the time of cholera: pilgrim ships and contagion from southeast Asia to the Red Sea’, in Gelvin and Green (eds.), Global Islam, 103–20; and Low, M. C., ‘Empire and the Hajj: pilgrims, plagues, and pan-Islam under British surveillance, 1865–1908’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40:2 (2008), 269–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Cole, J. R. I., ‘Printing and urban Islam in the Mediterranean world, 1890–1920’, in Fawaz, L. T. and Bayly, C. A., (eds.), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York, 2002), 344–64Google Scholar.

15 See, for example, Cole, Ibid.; Green, N., Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robinson, F., ‘Technology and religious change: Islam and the impact of print’, Modern Asian Studies, 27:1 (1993), 229–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 P. Sadgrove, ‘From Wādī Mīzāb to Unguja: Zanzibar's scholarly links’, in Reese (ed.), The Transmission of Learning, 184–211.

17 Reese, Renewers of the Age, esp. ch. 5; Matthews, N., ‘Imagining Arab communities: colonialism, Islamic reform and Arab identity in Mombasa Kenya, 1897–1933’, Islamic Africa, 4:2 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Kobo, O., Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms (Leiden, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Østebø, T., Localising Salafism: Religious Change among Oromo Muslims in Bale, Ethiopia (Leiden, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Dumbe, Y., ‘The Salafi praxis of constructing religious identity in Africa: a comparative perspective of the growth of the movements in Accra and Cape Town’, Islamic Africa, 2: 2 (2011), 87–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Asad, Anthropology of Islam.

21 Most notable among non-Africa works are Cooke, M. and Lawrence, B. B. (eds.), Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005)Google Scholar; Haj, S., Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford, CA, 2009)Google Scholar; and M. Q. Zaman, ‘The scope and limits of Islamic cosmopolitanism and the discursive language of the “Ulama” ’, in Cooke and Lawrence (eds.), Muslim Networks, 84–104.

22 Loimeier, R., Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2.

23 Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival, 24.

24 Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills; Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival; Tayob, A., Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (Gainesville, FL, 1999)Google Scholar.

25 I would like to thank one of the four anonymous reviewers of this piece for this especially useful insight into the interplay between the global and the local within the discursive tradition.

26 A comprehensive examination of the literary legacy of Nana Asma'u can be found in the underappreciated work by Mack, B. B. and Boyd, J., One Woman's Jihad: Nana Asma'u, Scholar and Scribe (Bloomington, IN, 2000)Google Scholar.

27 Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival, 9.

28 Lewis, M. W. and Wigan, K., The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA, 1997)Google Scholar.

29 Voll, J. O., ‘Pensée 3: Reconceptualizing the “regions” in “area studies” ’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 41:2 (2009), 196–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Appadurai, A., ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Public Culture, 12:1 (2001), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Ibid. 7.

32 Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails; Seesemann, R., The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Bang, Sufis of the Sea; Prestholdt, J., Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2008)Google Scholar.

34 Green, N., ‘Africa in Indian ink: Urdu articulations of Indian settlement in East Africa’, The Journal of African History, 53:2 (2012), 131–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.