Routledge Handbook of Islam in Africa

Terje Østebø, Terje Østebø

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, this handbook argues that despite often being overlooked or treated as marginal, the study of Islam from an African context is integral to the broader Muslim world.

Challenging the portrayal of African Muslims as passive recipients of religious impetuses arriving from the outside, this book shows how the continent has been a site for the development of rich Islamic scholarship and religious discourses. Over the course of the book, the contributors reflect on:

• The history and infrastructure of Islam in Africa
• Politics and Islamic reform
• Gender, youth, and everyday life for African Muslims
• New technologies, media, and popular culture.

Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions examine the connections between Islam and broader sociopolitical developments across the continent, demonstrating the important role of religion in the everyday lives of Africans. This book is an important and timely contribution to a subject that is often diffusely studied, and will be of interest to researchers across religious studies, African studies, politics, and sociology.

1Introduction

Terje Østebø

DOI: 10.4324/9780367144241-1

Introduction

To put together an anthology on Islam in Africa is not an easy task. The vast size of the African continent, its many states, and diverse cultures are some issues, but the rich variety of Islamization processes, the existence of so many Islamic communities with all their particularities, and the ways they are intertwined with numerous of local religious cosmologies and cultural universes all make this seem even more impossible. This book Handbook on Islam in Africa is therefore not in any way or form a complete overview of the complexity we call Islam in Africa. The many chapters included reflect each author’s particular expertise and geographical area of research, which means that certain areas are more covered than others. The handbook and the chapters do, however, provide state-of-the-art research and a broad overview of the main features of Islam in Africa along with key case studies covering certain themes not addressed in previous collections.

The aims of this handbook are twofold. First, to provide an overview of the characteristics of Muslim communities in Africa, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The different chapters deal with both historical and contemporary dynamics, covering themes like processes of Islamization, literacy and Islamic scholarship, religious infrastructure, the relevance of local religious cosmologies, media, youth, reformism, and the role of Islam in contemporary politics. The second aim of the book is to contravene the all too common notion that Islam in Africa holds a peripheral position in relation to an assumed heartland of Islam in the Middle East. Furthermore, it demonstrates and underscores the constant interactions between African Muslims and the rest of the Muslim world, thus pointing to their relevance in the production of Islam as a global religion.

This introductory chapter builds off this latter point. It engages in a discussion of how Islam in Africa has been treated as marginal and how African Muslims to a large extent have been seen as devoid of agency; reduced to passive recipients of developments arriving from the outside. As Islamic Studies tend to ignore the African continent, scholars of Islam in Africa are left with the job of making Islam in Africa visible, and this chapter surveys recent scholarship that has attempted to reenvision Islam in Africa as integral to the broader Muslim world. In relation to this, this introduction scrutinizes the all too common notion of a particular “African Islam”, assumed as “traditional”, “syncretistic”, and thereby separate from an assumed dislocated, essentialist form of Islam. This issue also relates to debates about global-local and high-low Islam, debates that have gained renewed relevance through the polemics of reformist movements in Africa which portray their opponents as deviating from their ideas of proper Islam. Such reformists are, in contrast, often viewed by policy makers and political analysts as outside impetuses – foreign to an imagined tolerant African Islam.

Islam in Africa

Islam arrived in Africa seven years before the official birthday of the new religion. In 615 CE, Prophet Muhammad sent some of his early followers to Axum, in today’s Tigray region in Ethiopia, where the Christian king gave them protection against persecution they faced in Mecca (Trimingham 1952). The Axumite hijra remained an isolated episode, however, and it was not until the eighth century that Muslims started to settle along the coast of the Horn of Africa. The larger process of the spread of Islam in Africa was uneven and complex, and is moreover a continuous project, as Islam still gains new adherents on the continent.¹

Islam initially arrived in North Africa, or the Maghreb, as a result of the expanding Arab Muslim forces from the seventh century, before gradually making its way to West Africa – following well-established trade routes across the Sahara. The further expansion of Islam in these areas was enabled by several trading empires, including Takrur, Ghana, Kanim-Bornu, Mali, and Songhay. It was, however, merely the rulers and the political elite that embraced Islam at that time, and the larger populations continued their earlier religious practices. The north-south spread of Islam was also noticeable in the Nile Valley, arriving from Egypt. Islam also made landings along the coast of East Africa, through trade routes across the Indian Ocean and through migration from the southern Arabian Peninsula. In contrast to the Horn of Africa, where Muslims gradually penetrated the hinterlands, the new religion remained contained to the littoral zone of East Africa for centuries; it was not until the nineteenth century that Islam made its way into the interior. While earlier scholarship has commonly referred to the Sahara and the Indian Ocean as gateways for Islam, a more accurate perspective is to understand them as connective spaces (Loimeier 2013, 12; Lydon 2015; Lecocq 2015). Muslims in southern Africa constitute small minorities, and the first Muslims to arrive at the Cape were laborers, slaves, and captured rebels from Dutch colonies in the East Indies in the seventeenth century, followed by migration from India from the nineteenth century.

Accurate numbers on the size of the Muslim population in Africa are hard to obtain. A Pew Research Center report from 2010 listed the total number of African Muslims to be around 400 million (43 percent of the total African population), while in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number is said to be around 234 million (29 percent). In contrast, the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa was said to be 470 million (57 percent) (Pew Research Center 2010, i). More current numbers are not readily available, yet the Pew Research Center estimated in 2011 that the number of Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa would be at 330 million (30 percent) in 2020.² The largest concentration of Muslims is, unsurprisingly, found in North Africa, followed by West Africa, or the Sahel, where Muslims constitute the majority in most countries.³ Muslims are also in majority in countries like Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan,⁴ while large minorities are found in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. Smaller Muslim minorities are found in other eastern and central African countries, with even fewer Muslims in southern Africa – with the exception of Mozambique, Namibia, Madagascar, and Malawi (see Figure 1.1).⁵

Figure 1.1Muslim presence in Africa (Map: Eric Ross).

As this handbook demonstrates, the religious landscape of Islam in Africa is characterized by immense diversity, diversity that is a result of the nature of Islamization, local histories, and current developments. While recognizing this, one should not, as I will return to, reduce Islam in Africa to locally contained idiosyncrasies – but rather understand how these variations, together with trans-local interactions, play an important role in the constant production of what is commonly referred to as Islam. It is moreover important to think of African Muslims as more than only Muslims, and to recognize and pay attention to other markers of identity, to their situatedness in broader societal and cultural contexts, and their interactions with non-Muslims – both in the past and the present. All these factors have been crucial in the continuing (re)making of Islam in different African localities, and in the production of identities, negotiation of authorities, and in dealing with constant winds of change.

The study of Islam in Africa – and the Muslim world

Roman Loimeier’s (2009b) article in Die Welt des Islams is a fruitful point of departure for a discussion of current research on Islam in Africa.⁶ Loimeier identifies four generations of scholars, going back to the colonial period when research on Islam on the continent was largely undertaken by colonial officers cum scholars. As expected, this work was firmly situated within an orientalist framework. Research on the early colonial period, carried out during the 1960s and 1970s, saw a continued focus on the history of Islam in Africa, as well as on topics like Islamic law, inter-religious relations, and Sufi brotherhoods. An important development during this stage was the contributions to the field by an increasing number of African scholars teaching at newly established African universities. The study of Islam in Africa started to mature from the early 1980s, broadening in scope, adding new perspectives, and venturing into new terrains. While earlier historical research tended to concentrate on medieval West African empires, new studies turned the attention to Sudan, Somalia, East Africa, and, later, Ethiopia. The 1990s saw a stronger interest in Islam and politics, democratization, and Islam in relation to broader sociocultural contexts. The impact of the “cultural turn” brought, according to Loimeier, the study of Islam in Africa into new directions and included an increasing number of topics like gender, education, youth, the public sphere, religious reform, and media. This also produced more interdisciplinary approaches which allowed for far more fine-tuned studies on a variety of issues. The study of Islam in Africa has, as of today, become a well-established field and continues to grow. The field is increasingly benefitting from a variety of academic disciplines, and congruent with broader scholarly trends, we see how interdisciplinary perspectives are producing important and fine-tuned results that are attentive to complexities, nuances, localities, and trans-local interactions.

The latter topic, the interconnectivity between Islam in Africa and the wider Muslim world, is particularly important in order to reformulate the locus of Islam in Africa – which was, as noted, long considered peripheral to the broader Muslim world, and which hence received little scholarly attention. This marginal position was not only a product of academic obliviousness, but also due to Arab Muslims’ attitudes towards fellow Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa. Seen as backward and primitive, the latter’s religious identity was also questioned on the basis of how Islam there was perceived as entangled with “paganism” (Triaud 2014). Such attitudes were in turn intertwined with the slave economy and racial stigma from the side of the Arab Muslims, augmenting condescending insolences (Hall 2011). The lack of interest in the continent thus contributed to isolating Islam in Africa from the rest of the Muslim world (Trimingham 1968, 3f.).

Scholars in the field of Islamic Studies largely continue to view Islam in Africa as marginal and treat the area as confined and compartmentalized and as having little or no relevance to the larger Muslim world. The burden of making it relevant has been placed on scholars working on Islam in Africa. This peripheral position could partly be explained by the fact that many scholars working on Islam in Africa are associated with African Studies as part of the broader “area studies” category, leading to a certain degree of a “regionalist primordialism, which endows regions with some essential identity” and which overlooks the existence of longtime, interregional interactions (Voll 2009, 196). There has, however, also been a tendency to compartmentalize the study of Islam in Afri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Formation of Islam in Africa: Islamic scholarship, literature, and Sufism
• Part II Dynamics of religious infrastructure
• Part III Islam and African intersections
• Part IV Islam, politics, and reform
• Part V Patterns of Islamic reform in Africa
• Part VI Everyday Muslim life: Practice of piety and new Muslim subjects
• Part VII New technologies and new connectiveness
• Index