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THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ISLAM IN WEST AFRICA: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST'S VIEW*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2014

Benjamin Soares
Benjamin Soares*
Affiliation:
Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden
*
Author's email: bsoares@ascleiden.nl
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Abstract

In this article, I focus on the historiography of Islam in West Africa while also reflecting upon and assessing existing scholarship in the broader field of the study of Islam in Africa. My position as an anthropologist who conducts historical research informs my perspective in evaluating the current state of the field and my suggestions for directions in which I think future research might move in order to advance our understanding of Islam and Muslim societies and the history of religious life in Africa more generally.

Keywords

IslamreligionhistoriographyanthropologyWestern Africa
Type
JAH Forum: Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 27 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to John O. Hunwick for the many stimulating exchanges that have informed this essay and to Robert Launay, Rüdiger Seesemann, and four anonymous reviewers for their critical readings of earlier drafts.

References

1 The already existing essentialist thinking about Islam and Muslims both within and outside the academy that has proliferated even further in the post-September 11, 2001 era has had implications for the study of Africa that are beyond the scope of this essay. See Soares, B. F. and Otayek, R. (eds.), Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (New York, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Launay, R., ‘An invisible religion?: anthropology's avoidance of Islam in Africa’, in Ntarangwi, M., Mills, D., and Babiker, M. (eds.), African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice (Dakar, 2006), 188–203Google Scholar; and Saul, M., ‘Islam and West African anthropology’, Africa Today, 53:1 (2006), 3–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See, for example, Lewis, I. M., Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (London, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For West Africa, see Stoller, P., Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; and Masquelier, A. M., Prayer has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger (Durham, NC, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 In contrast, see the work in religious studies by Patrick J. Ryan on Yoruba Muslims, Ryan, P. J., Imale: Yoruba Participation in the Muslim Tradition: A Study of Clerical Piety (Missoula, MT, 1977)Google Scholar.

6 See Robert Launay's overview of the study of Islam in Africa, which has informed my own thinking about this topic, in Launay, R., Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (Berkeley, CA, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. 14–22.

7 See, for example, Cuoq, J., Histoire de l'islamisation de l'Afrique de l'Ouest: des origines à la fin du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1984)Google Scholar; Froelich, J.-C., ‘Essai sur l'islamisation de l'Afrique noire’, Le Monde Religieux, n.s. 29 (1966), 281–93Google Scholar; and Trimingham, J. S., A History of Islam in West Africa (London, 1962)Google Scholar.

8 On traditions of Islamic reform in Africa, see Loimeier, R., ‘Patterns and peculiarities of Islamic reform in Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 33:3 (2003), 237–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Loimeier, R., ‘Traditions of reform, reformers of tradition: case studies from Senegal and Zanzibar/Tanzania’, in Hirji, Z. A. (ed.), Diversity and Pluralism in Islam: Historical and Contemporary Discourses Amongst Muslims (London, 2010), 135–62Google Scholar.

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16 Triaud, ‘Le thème confrérique’, 277.

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18 Hargreaves, ‘Tokolor empire’.

19 One important exception is Brenner, L., West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal (Berkeley, CA, 1984)Google Scholar, which drew upon Amadou Hampâté Bâ's earlier and more hagiographic study of the same figure. See Bâ, A. H., Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar. A more recent, deeply compelling study that takes religious discourse in the study of Sufism seriously is Seesemann, Divine Flood.

20 Two recent notable exceptions are Umar, M. S., Islam and Colonialism: Intellectual Responses of Muslims of Northern Nigeria to British Colonial Rule (Leiden, 2006)Google Scholar; and Seesemann, Divine Flood.

21 Babou, C. A. M., Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens, OH, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 Trimingham, History of Islam; Fisher, H. J., ‘The juggernaut's apologia: conversion to Islam in black Africa’, Africa, 55:2 (1985), 153–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Miran, M., Islam, histoire et modernité en Côte d'Ivoire (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar.

25 Brenner, L., Controlling Knowledge: Religion, Power and Schooling in a West African Muslim Society (Bloomington, IN, 2001)Google Scholar.

26 Hall, B. S., A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600–1960 (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Ware, R. T. III, The Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014)Google Scholar.

28 Peterson, B. J., Islamization from Below: The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880–1960 (New Haven, CT, 2011)Google Scholar; O'Brien, S. M., ‘Spirit discipline: gender, Islam, and hierarchies of treatment in postcolonial northern Nigeria’, in Pierce, S. and Rao, A. (eds.), Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2006), 273–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Kobo, O., Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West African Islamic Reforms (Leiden, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hanretta, Islam and Social Change; Seesemann, Divine Flood.

30 Peel, J. D. Y., Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN, 2000)Google Scholar.

31 Shankar, S., ‘A fifty-year Muslim conversion to Christianity: religious ambiguities and colonial boundaries in northern Nigeria, c. 1906–1963’, in Soares, B. F. (ed.), Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (Leiden, 2006), 89–114Google Scholar. See also Barbara Cooper's important study of converts to Christianity in Niger in Cooper, B. M., Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Bloomington, IN, 2006)Google Scholar.

32 See also Sean Hanretta's insightful discussion of new religious movements in Africa in Hanretta, S., ‘New religious movements’, in Parker, J. and Reid, R. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford, 2013), 298–315Google Scholar.

33 I have written about some of these processes in Soares, B. F., ‘Islam and public piety in Mali’, in Salvatore, A. and Eickelman, D. E. (eds.), Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden, 2004), 205–26Google Scholar; and in a forthcoming book provisionally entitled, Dogon Muslims and Pagan Saints.