The colonial-era Senegalese Muslim intellectual Shaykh Musa Kamara is best known for his over 1,700-page Arabic-language text about the history and social organization of the greater Western Sahel, Zuhūr al-basātīn fī tārīkh al-Sawādīn (Flowers in the Gardens in the History of the Blacks). Long celebrated by nationalist historiography as proof of an autochthonous historical consciousness and a spirit of tolerance, his status as a point of reference has been renewed in the contemporary context of Islamist political violence in the region. However, these receptions do not account for Kamara's own intellectual project, nor do they exhaust the possible readings of him in the present. In addition to thinking about Senegal in terms that cohere with the modern, Kamara also offers a way of thinking about the Muslim-majority West African country, and the greater Western Sahel more generally, in terms that have emerged from the historical specificity of the region. These include saintly subjectivity, notions of power irreducible to either the religious or the political, and a method of genealogical criticism. Importantly, he developed these ideas at the moment when a consensus about the place of Islam in colonial governance was being elaborated. Revisiting his body of work permits us to consider an analytical language about an African society with deep histories of Islam and an intellectual elaboration that was expressed within and sought to intervene in a colonial context.

The attention paid to the security threats hanging over Burkina Faso, while legitimate, has overshadowed the underlying transformations in Islamic associational life since the fall of President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014. This major political upheaval had a significant impact on the participation of Muslims in socio-political debates, the relations between generations and, more widely, the bases upon which religious authority is claimed. This article analyses the competition for religious leadership between Islamic actors in the public sphere in Burkina Faso by focusing mainly on francophone ‘Muslim intellectuals’. First, the study shows the gap between the gerontocracy at the helm of the main Islamic associations and the Burkinabe youth, which widened throughout the 1990s and 2000s and came strongly to the fore after the popular uprising of October 2014. Second, taking advantage of the space left vacant by traditional community leaders during the transition process, some young francophone ‘Muslim intellectuals’ actively sought to portray themselves as the vehicles of a ‘civil Islam’ and strove to promote new forms of civic engagement through religion. Other Muslim organizations have also tried to take advantage of the new political context to strengthen their presence in the socio-political arena.