Introduction

Summary

Islamic learning in Africa has always been in fruitful dialogue with broader developments in Islamic intellectual history elsewhere in the world. African Muslims travelled or migrated to the Middle East and other places in the Muslim world. Arabs and others visited or came to live in Africa. Africans read the literatures of Muslims around the globe, and sometimes studied under the great scholars of their time in Cairo and the like. So too did non-Africans read the works of African Muslim scholars, and apprentice themselves to them when given the chance. Historical dynamism, travel, and circulation have been consistent themes of African Islamic intellectual history.

This story is important because understandings of African Muslim societies often privilege the reading of local contexts in preference to global exchanges. Of course, local contexts, in Africa and elsewhere, ultimately remain indispensable for understanding the reception and performance of Muslim identities. But sometimes the artificial circumscription of African places returns us unwittingly to older colonial mentalities of an Islam Noir: a ‘black Islam’ that, unlike its Arab counterpart, was thought to be illiterate, superstitious, static, and servile. It is thus important to recognize African Islam as scripturally informed, unbound by place, responsive to racial stereotypes, adaptive to changing pedagogical priorities, and often self-perceived as authoritative.

It is related, by way of example, that the formative black African (sūdānī) scholar of Timbuktu, the fifteenth-century Muḥammad al-Kābarī, was once slandered by a Moroccan scholar jealous of the Timbuktu scholar's renown, and called ‘al-Kāfirī ‘ (infidel) instead of al-Kābarī. According to al-Saʿdī's Tārīkh al-sūdān, God punished the Moroccan man for his affront against one of God's saints, afflicting him with leprosy. The man became desperate and consulted a soothsayer who advised him to eat the heart of a young boy to cure himself. This he did, and for this lapse into the ways of infidels, God caused him to die in a ‘most pitiable condition’. From the perspective of some West African intellectuals, then, Arabs or others disrespected the scholarly credentials and sainthood of black African Muslims at their own peril.

Zachary Wright's ‘The African Roots of a Global Eighteenth-Century Islamic Scholarly Renewal’ highlights the importance of African scholars in articulating the central ideas debated at the dawn of the modern era in the Muslim world.