Islam in Africa

The Jamaican government reconsidering the Obeah Act in the summer of 2019 highlighted the legacy of prejudice and criminalization of Africana religious systems and practices left by colonization across ethno-linguistic borders and the broader Black Atlantic. It also highlighted how some traditions such as Béninois Vodun, Candomblé, Santería, and oriṣa worship in parts of Nigeria have successfully managed to combat state policing and prejudice to gain official recognition and legal protection. However, this article analyzes the way even the legal and conceptual success of Africana religions in the modern world places them in a Catch-22. Drawing attention to the fundamental differences between modern conceptions and assumptions of what constitutes “religion,” the article traces the history of how modern political and legal structures either exclude and oppress Africana traditions or exert subtle pressure on them to conform to conceptions of “religion” that are more intelligible and ac...

The article offers a close analysis of the media performances of a particularly successful preacher in Mali, Sheikh Chérif Haidara, to study how authority is generated in the interaction between a leader and his followers, and to examine the role of mass mediation in this process. Informed by Weber’s reflections on the nature of charismatic authority, the article takes charisma as a form of appeal that is mediated through aesthetic forms, and remediated and ‘channeled’ by virtue of particular media strategies and formats. By raising questions about the nature of charismatic attraction and by illustrating under what conditions it becomes effective, the article contributes to recent scholarship that addresses the role of the aesthetic in the validation or ‘authentication’ of religious experience.

Divorce is not uncommon among Muslims in Senegal and tends to take place outside of court, even if the Senegalese Family Code has made out-of-court divorce illegal. Yet little is known about how women in particular may obtain divorce outside of the court. This article provides ethnographic material on the way women divorce out-of-court,
and the repertoires of justification they draw on. In line with scholarly work on women’s use of Islamic courts in other countries the article foregrounds women’s agency, yet in a different out-of-court context. First, it is shown that women draw on multiple, gendered, repertoires. Second, it is argued that because family members play a central role in the divorces studied, the analysis of women’s agency requires an attentiveness to kin and women’s “kinwork”.

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/

Islam in World Cultures gathers the work of ten eminent scholars, each of whom has expertise in the Muslim culture of a particular country or geographical area. Individual chapters explore contemporary developments in the Islamic experience in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United States. This broad treatment provides an introduction to the full range of issues relating to Islam in the context of globalization.

Highlights
Of use to the general reader seeking a broad introduction to modern Islam
More than just an examination of a set of religious beliefs, this work emphasizes the social dynamics of both majority and minority Islamic cultures
A glossary of key terms, with emphasis on comparative usage and how common terms differ in definition from place to place

n recent years, Muslim associations in Burkina Faso have undergone a major transformation, driven by the development of the transnational dimension of Islam and a more direct involvement of this religion in the socio-political life of the country. In this paper, through the description and analysis of three different Islamic associations, we will try to understand the reasons for such an evolution, and study the strategies put in place by the religious authorities in order to restructure their zawiyas and reposition them in the public sphere. In this framework, we will also describe the personal trajectories of some religious leaders and suggest a possible classification of the aforementioned associations.

« Dans une démarche rigoureusement scientifique, rompant d’avec la fadeur du descriptivisme et prenant le soin de s’éloigner de l’apologétique souvent orientée vers une affirmation de conformisme à la lettre d’une « orthodoxie » écartant la dimension mystique d’une œuvre multidimensionnelle, Seydi Diamil Niane plonge ses lecteurs, dès l’entame de cet ouvrage, dans les recoins longtemps ignorés de l’univers poétique de Cheikh Elhadji Malick Sy de Tivaouane (Sénégal).
Cet excellent ouvrage donne une intéressante amorce de ce travail de vulgarisation du spécifi que grâce à une fi ne maîtrise des arcanes de la langue arabe et de la littérature islamologique classique comme moderne doublée de la nécessaire intelligence d’un contexte et d’un univers surprenants voire méconnus de nombre de spécialistes en Occident comme en Orient. »
Dr Bakary Sambe
(Extrait de la préface)

A study of the idea of the Fayda, probably the central theme in the development of the branch of the Tijaniyya tariqa led by the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). It highlights the roots of the term in the longer history of Sufi epistemology and discusses its special importance in Tijani eschatological discourses.

The vibrant tradition of West African Arabic poetry is dominated by the genre of madih, that is, poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. This genre of poetry has been mostly ignored in Western scholarship and dismissed as mere ‘pious praise’ lacking any significant intellectual content. In Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection, Dr Oludamini Ogunnaike challenges the misconceptions around West African madih poetry and addresses the scope and depth of this genre; he not only explores its rich lyrical nature and its foundations in the Qur’an, Hadith, pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, but also its inextricable link to Sufism and Sufi doctrines of cosmology, ontology and epistemology. Drawing on Sufi traditions and practices, the author expounds on the various ways in which West African madih poetry both describes and facilitates the ultimate fulfillment of the human potential, the Perfect Human (al-Insan al-Kamil) or the attainment of the Praiseworthy Station (al-Maqam al-Mahmud) of which the Prophet Muhammad is the highest example.

Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection includes translations of numerous extracts from madih poetry (accompanied by the original Arabic); while the Appendix presents a selection of complete poems—the most popular and influential poems of this tradition. Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection is an opportunity for readers to gain access and appreciation of a unique genre of spiritual Islamic poetry, and, given that it includes the original Arabic, also enables the recitation of the poetry for devotional purposes.

https://its.org.uk/catalogue/poetry-in-praise-of-prophetic-perfection/

The composition and performance of Arabic Sufi poetry is the most characteristic artistic tradition of West African Sufi communities, and yet this tradition has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In this article, I sketch an outline of a theory of Sufi poetics, and then apply this theory to interpret a performance of a popular Arabic poem of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975), founder of the most popular branch of the Tijāniyya in West Africa.

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.

« Soufisme et wahhabisme en Afrique : trajectoires croisées », dans Bava Sophie, Koulagna Jean & Niane Seydi Diamil (éds.), Mobilités humaines et trajectoires des monothéismes en Afriques, (Actes de colloque,  Rabat, 21 et 22 novembre 2019), Rabat, Les Éditions Africaines,  2021, pp.35-65

Take 30% off with code NR20 when you order at:

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08690-3.html


This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from—rather than merely about—these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they contain sophisticated epistemologies that provide practitioners with a comprehensive worldview and a way of crafting a meaningful life.

Using theories belonging to the traditions themselves as well as contemporary oral and textual sources, Ogunnaike examines how both Sufism and Ifa answer the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is verified. Or, more simply: What do you know? How did you come to know it? How do you know that you know? After analyzing Ifa and Sufism separately and on their own terms, the book compares them to each other and to certain features of academic theories of knowledge. By analyzing Sufism from the perspective of Ifa, Ifa from the perspective of Sufism, and the contemporary academy from the perspective of both, this book invites scholars to inhabit these seemingly “foreign” intellectual traditions as valid and viable perspectives on knowledge, metaphysics, psychology, and ritual practice.

A biography of Shaykh Ja'far M. Adam, the most outstanding figure of the Salafi/Wahhabi da'wa in Nigeria during the last two decades, who was tragically murdered in 2007 (with all likelihood, by order of his former student Muhammad Yusuf, founder of Boko Haram).

The Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (1900–1975), known to his disciples as as Baye Niasse, was the founder of the most popular branch of the Ṭarīqa Tijāniyya (called the Ṭarīqa Tijāniyya-Ibrāhīmiyya, or more commonly, the Fayḍa), which is one of the largest Muslim movements in the world.1 In this paper, I propose to give a brief overview of his recently published Fī riyāḍ al-tafsīr li’l-Qurʾān al-karīm,2 a contemporary work of tafsīr transcribed from Shaykh Ibrahim’s annual Ramaḍān tafsīr sessions. The tafsīr is unique for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is a transcription of an oral tafsīr performance. This raises interesting questions about the relationship of oral performance to textuality and intertextuality, not to mention the relationship between spiritual practice and Qur’anic hermeneutics, and challenges certain received notions about Islam in West Africa and the place of West Africa in the Islamic world. While Fī riyāḍ al-tafsīr has previously been discussed in an excellent article by Andrea Brigaglia,3 this paper builds on, and complements, Brigaglia’s work by conducting a close reading of Shaykh Ibrahim’s tafsīr of Q. 6:75–79, the story of Abraham and the setting star, moon, and sun, and comparing it with its ‘source material’ and other Ṣūfī tafsīrs of the same passage. I will also argue that this work should be considered a contemporary, traditional tafsīr because of the specific reflexive approach to Qur’anic hermeneutics it exemplifies.

Most accounts of the Su  practice of annihilation in the Messenger (fanā’ fī’l-rasūl) have presented it as a step in the process to annihilation in God (fanā’ fī’llāh). However, this article will examine contemporary and classical Su  accounts of annihilation in the Messenger (fanā’ fī’l-rasūl) that describe this state or station coming a er the state of annihilation in God (fanā’ fī’llāh), constituting the beginning of the station of subsistence (al-baqā’). A er analyzing these accounts, and the relationship between these two schemas of annihilation (annihilation in the Messenger leads to annihilation in God; annihilation in God is prior to annihilation in the Messenger), this article will conclude with an examination of some of the doctrinal implications of this alternate schema and its significance for debates surrounding the evolution and interpretation of Su  practice and theory.

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.

This paper presents an accessible introduction to the life and thought of Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba (d. 1927), one of the most prominent and iconic Islamic scholars and Sufi saints of 19th/ 20th C Africa. Focusing on the epistemology and pedagogy outlined in his Masālik al-Jinān (Paths to Paradise), the paper highlights Bamba's unique contributions in these fields and their relation to the wider Islamic intellectual tradition.

A brief discussion of the main genres of religious literature produced by the Ulama of the Tijaniyya Sufi order in Nigeria. Highlights how this literature has to be understood in the context of the role of the Tijani scholars as teachers of the traditional Islamic corpus. Argues that from the point of view of its impact on the literary history of Islam in Nigeria, the Fayda Tijaniyya of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse can be compared to the nineteenth-century Jihad of Shaykh Usman Dan Fodio.

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.

There has been an increase in the number of Muslim women who embraced prophetic practices regarded as Sunna in Yorubaland since the late 1980s. Many of them abandoned the local Muslim women dressing for the hijab (headscarf) and niqab (veil), contested local beliefs and practices, and became more engaged in learning about their religion. But they face several challenges as they seek to break institutional and social boundaries that confront them in the expression of their new Islamic identities. This affects those who seek for jobs, and young women in educational institutions who either abandon their veils, drop their desired course of study or change school. This merged into another experience regarding ambivalence and negotiation in their way of life which results from the expectations to be both pious and live in uncertain circumstances. The women’s turn towards the Sunna is part of the global Muslim revivalist movement between the 1980s and 1990s that saw many Muslims ordering their lives toward piety, which often produced Islamophobic reactions in many parts of the world. Based on ethnographic data collected between 2016 and 2017, this paper discusses the challenges of those women who adopted the Sunna in Yorubaland.

Discusses the Hausa translations of the Qur'an by the Salafi-oriented Shaykh Abu Bakr Gumi (d. 1992) and by the Sufi Shaykh Nasiru Kabara (d. 1996). Highlights the importance of the Jalalayn in both texts. Shows how the preoccupation with attacking/justifying Sufism and Sufi practices, as well as As'hari theological doctrines accounts for most differences between the two translations.

Abstract:
Contemporary poet and scholar Joshua Bennett recently wrote, “If black studies is indeed the rewriting of knowledge itself, an ongoing critique of so-called Western civilization—as Wynter and Robinson and others remind us—then poetry will be absolutely essential. Like the field of black studies more broadly, the teaching of black poetry is not simply additive nor is it a niche concern. Historically poetry is at the center of black social and intellectual life.” Of no literary or intellectual tradition is this more true than that of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya, inaugurated by the Senegalese Sufi Shaykh and scholar, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975). Described by its initiates as a “flood” of ma‘rifa (divine knowledge) and wilāya (sanctity), the Fayḍa has also produced a veritable outpouring of Sufi literature in Arabic (as well as African and European languages) among its adherents, particularly Arabic poetry in praise of the prophet that both expresses and facilitates access to ma‘rifa in a particularly effective manner. Through close readings of three short treatises and poems of Ibrahim Niasse, this paper attempts to outline Niasse's prophetic poetics of spiritual realization: the closely-linked cosmology, epistemology, and anthropology converging on the Muhammadan Reality (al-ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiya) that animates and structures his literary oeuvre and shapes the spiritual, social, and intellectual lives of the members of the Fayḍa Tijāniyya. Building on earlier studies of the Tijānī tradition and Maghrebi/West African Sufism, this article concludes with an examination of the implications of this prophetic poetics for the conception of the “human,” and the intervention literature such as Niasse's has made and can make in contemporary debates surrounding the ethics of knowledge and the re-evaluation of the modern, “Western” category of the “human.”

Argues that the Arabic scripts of the "Central Sudan" (roughly corresponding to today's Nigeria, Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon) constitute a typology of their own, with little in common with other West African scripts. Focuses on the script popularized by the calligraphers of Kano (Nigeria), arguing that this is probably a recent development of the older calligraphic tradition of Borno.

This dissertation analyzes how the worship of traditional Yoruba deities has now become a modern “religion,” but was previously understood and practiced very differently. A growing body of research emphasizes how the concept of “religion” is largely unique to the modern West, and while such work usually examines how interactions with the West changed religious life in other societies in historical perspective, this work also addresses those whose religious life can presently be described as “pre-religious.” As the Yoruba word ẹsin—usually translated as “religion”—is more akin to “form of worship,” the dissertation examines how an understanding of religious traditions (indigenous, Muslim, and Christian) as various “forms of worship” as opposed to reified “religions” might change the way religious identity, practice, and dynamics could be understood in a contemporary and historical perspective.
By developing more indigenous models for religious phenomena based on fieldwork carried out in Ẹdẹ, Nigeria, I enlist this religious perspective to account for dynamics that have attracted a great deal of attention from scholars of Yoruba society and religion such as the high degree of religious tolerance, syncretism, and interaction before the 1970s-80s. Furthermore it tracks the subtle and largely unperceived shift in religious orientation towards more modern, closed, and reified conceptions of religion and the types of complications that arise as a result. At the same time, the dissertation addresses the role Yoruba-inspired religion in Brazil has played in the formation of a traditional Yoruba religion, and brings this process of transition from “forms of worship” to “religion” to bear on the important discourse on authenticity in Salvador, Brazil, offering a new historical perspective on the tradition of syncretism with Roman Catholicism.

Amina Wadud, an Islamic feminist scholar whose written work focusses on the lives of Muslim women through an active engagement with the Qur'an, has been widely celebrated by Muslim feminists across the globe. Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist who studied the Muslim women's movement in Egypt in the late 1980s as a part of the larger Islamic revival movement, is a widely cited scholar in feminist and post-colonial scholarship. Both of these scholars have contributed significantly to the way in which contemporary issues of Islam and gender are problematised and articulated. This essay is a comparative examination of their contribution and theoretical approaches to gender debates in Islam and offers a critique of their response to feminist values deeply embedded in a liberal secular ethos in the context of the politics of invasion in/of the Muslim world.

Published in: Gérard PRUNIER and Eloi FICQUET, editors, 2015, Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi. London: Hurst: 93-122.

Abstract: This chapter considers the case of Ethiopian Muslims, who make up approximately one third of the population (according to disputed statistics) and are spread over the eastern half of the country. Islam is also the common religion, albeit in significantly varying forms, of several of Ethiopia’s neighbours. Since the early days of Islam, when companions of the Prophet took refuge at the court of the Ethiopian king, the participation of Muslims in the construction of Ethiopian nationhood has been an important issue. For a long time, in an imperial state originally built upon the supremacy of Christian values, Muslim subjects were discriminated against and marginalized. After the downfall of imperial rule the authorities moved towards more secular orientations. Muslims have been gradually recognized as having equal rights in a pluralistic society, but they are still the target of insinuations hinting at the idea that they could represent a security threat due to their links with competing interests abroad. This misunderstanding was at the core of the recent protests by Ethiopian Muslims who claimed the right to be treated as genuine citizens in a pluralistic society. They argued that the state should focus on specific policies against extremist threats instead of relying on generalizations.