1 - The African Roots of a Global Eighteenth-Century Islamic Scholarly Renewal

Summary

Islam noir, the notion that ‘black’ Muslims inherently practise a different (less orthodox, less scriptural, less warlike) form of Islam than their Arab coreligionists, cannot be fully destabilized without a deeper intellectual history of African Muslim scholarship. Many African and Islamic Studies researchers continue to ignore black Muslim scholars as constitutive participants in global Islamic discourses. Failing to insert a global Islamic perspective, appropriately historicized, persistently localizes and trivializes African Muslim scholarship inconsonant to the ways African Muslim scholars see themselves.

The current academic excitement surrounding African ‘Ajamī literatures, for example, ignores the high probability that a greater percentage of Islamic scholarly production in Senegal, for example, happens in Arabic versus Wolofal, than does Arabic versus Persian in Iran, or Arabic versus Urdu in Pakistan. Islamic scholarship among West African Muslims is arguably more Arabicized than any other non-Arab Muslim population. As Ousmane Kane has observed, ‘Islam and the Arabic language are no more foreign in Africa than they are in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq … Arabic is by far the most widely spoken African language.’ The translation and articulation of Islamic identity in local African languages remain important, especially for a non-scholarly audience, but this process is no more pronounced in West Africa than is Muslim scholars’ use of Arabic vernaculars to explain Islamic learning in Egypt, Morocco, or other Arabicspeaking countries. Another example of the misleading localization of African Islam would be studies of Islamic talismanic sciences in African Muslim societies that very seldom take up the challenge of comparing such practices to similar ‘occult’ expressions in Arab, Turkish, or Iranian societies. The enduring strength of shaykh–disciple relationships in many African Muslim communities can also be misinterpreted: my earlier work on the community of Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse demonstrated that such practices were in fact at the core of classical Islamic pedagogical techniques throughout the Muslim world. The disciple's willing submission to his shaykh was an attempt to fully actualize Islamic identity; it did not invoke some sort of African authoritarianism said to define ‘Islam noir’.

Like other stories of Islamic intellectual history since the spread of Islam in Africa, the dramatic scholarly activity of the eighteenth century involved Sudanic Africa in significant ways.