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Many deep baptisms: reflections on religious, chiefly Muslim, conversion in Black Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Humphrey J. Fisher
Humphrey J. Fisher
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

The primary purpose of this paper—apart from a personal concern to offer a token of affection and respect to a friend and colleague of many years’ standing—is to consider two analytical models (one drawn from early Christian history, the other from the history of science), and to suggest ways in which these may help us to interpret the data of religious, and in particular Muslim, change in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 68 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1994

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References

1 This paper derives from a Workshop on Conversion held in May 1988 at the Center for the Study of World Religions, at Harvard University. Twice substantially revised since then, it is here finally published. The Harvard link is many-stranded. The two scholars who provide the analytical models on which I have chiefly drawn here were both Harvard figures: A. D. Nock, for many years Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion, and Thomas Kuhn, for three years a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows—and it was James B. Conant, then President of the University, who first introduced Kuhn, trained as a theoretical physicist, to the history of science. I received my own A.B. degree from Harvard in 1955—and John Wansbrough did his first degree there, in Comparative Romance Languages.

2 Nock, Conversion, 7. All page references are to the Oxford University Press paperback first printed in 1961Google Scholar.

3 ibid., 6–7.

4 ibid., 7.

5 ibid., 12–3.

6 Nock, alas, was not as consistent in his terminology as he might have been: he applied the term ‘adhesion’ to those who ‘are prepared to stake all on the truth and fundamental importance’ of any particular prophet's teaching, and who are eager ‘to convey to others what they have come to regard as saving truths’ (p. 4); and, a little later, he wrote of ‘the adhesion of the will to a theology, in a word faith, a new life in a new people’ (p. 14). Both these passages obviously refer to the phenomenon of ‘conversion’, not adhesion.

7 ibid., p. 7; my italics.

8 Katumba, A. and Welbourn, F. B., ‘Muslim martyrs of Buganda’, Uganda Journal, 28, 1964. 151–63Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Mahibou, Sidi Mohamed and Triaud, Jean-Louis (ed.), Voilà ce qui est arrivé: Bayân mâ waqaՙa d'al-Hâğğ ‘Umar al-Fûtî: plaidoyer pour une guerre sainte en Afrique de I'Ouest au XIXe siècle (Paris, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983), 16 (line 24)Google Scholar, 77 (line 18), 81 (line 24—see also line 7 from the bottom), 97 (line 4 from the bottom), 123 (line 3). Some of these references are to the mixing of religions, some to mixing in terms of the company one keeps.

10 See, for example, Mahibou and Triaud, Voilà ce qui est arrivé, 98.

11 See below, n. 56.180

12 Kuhn, Structure, p. viii; for some other meanings, see his p. 23.

13 ibid., 10.

14 ibid., 15.

15 ibid., 18.

16 ibid., ch. ii.

17 ibid., 11.

18 ibid., 24.

19 ibid., 6.

20 There has been extensive discussion and criticism of Kuhn's views; see for example, Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (ed.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge (Cambridge, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comprising nine papers including in effect an ‘Introduction’ and ‘Reply’ by Kuhn. Such discussions about paradigms within natural science may help refine our application of the basic concept to social science, but they are unlikely to be as radical and far-reaching in the social scientific context as they may perhaps be in the natural.

21 Horton, R., ‘On the rationality of African conversion’, Part I, Africa, 45, 3, 1975, 219–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 It may even have worried Horton, who at one point cuts back to ‘the “basic” West [my italics], African cosmology’ though even this is sweeping enough; ‘Rationality’, Part II, Africa, 45, 4, 1975, 381Google Scholar. See also my ‘The juggernaut's apologia: conversion to Islam in black Africa’, Africa, 55, 2, 1985, 162Google Scholar.

23 From the ‘Concluding summary’, in Petersen, Kirsten Hoist (ed.), Religion, development and African identity (Uppsala, 1987), 151Google Scholar.

24 ibid., 152; my brackets.

25 Kuhn, Structure, 15; see also §111 at n. 14 above.

26 Nock, Conversion, 1; see also §11 above. At the Harvard Workshop, objection was raised to the identification of African traditional religion as pre-paradigmatic, this seeming reminiscent of earlier, condescending and rather dismissive attitudes towards the original African heritage. I acknowledge the strength of this reservation, whilst remaining very much drawn by the symmetry of Kuhn's equal relevance of all possible pertinent facts, Ranger's creative and resilient pluralism, and Nock's useful supplements.

27 See also my ‘Conversion reconsidered: some historical aspects of religious conversion in black Africa’, Africa, 43, 1, 1973, 33Google Scholar.

28 Ranger, ‘Concluding summary’, 153

29 ‘Religion and politics in Zimbabwe’, in Petersen, Religion, 59

30 Quoted by Ranger, ‘Concluding summary’, 153; no paper by Rubenson is included in the published volume.

31 See my ‘Population mobility, especially in Islamic black Africa’, in Hair, P. E. H. (ed.), Black Africa in the time perspective (Liverpool, 1990), 38–56Google Scholar.

32 The story of Elisha and Naaman is rich in parallels with African religious experience: for a brief discussion of some of these, in the Muslim context, see my ‘Juggernaut’, n. 4 on p. 171 (referring back to p. 158). I used to introduce my undergraduate teaching about Islam in black Africa with this story, on the assumption that the familiar may facilitate a first approach to the unfamiliar. I soon discovered, however, that today's student is all too likely to know as little about Naaman and Elisha as about Askiya Muhammad and al-Maghīlī. I still begin with the story, but now because some knowledge, however limited, of the Bible is a proper part of liberal education. See also Nock, Conversion, 6, though it was Elisha, not Jehovah, of whom the lass spoke to Naaman.

33 The Muslim community in black Africa has managed to combine a well-defined, exclusive religious definition with demographic growth. This is partly because the ‘mixing’ or ‘adhesion’ stage leaves ample scope for ‘complex, multi-layered, dynamic,… creative and resilient pluralism’; and partly because, in later ‘reform’ stages, a variety of devices, such as hijra, Qur՚ān and higher schools, master-and-disciple relationships, trading networks, and the like, as well as slaving, all encourage immigration. Ironically, the most important demographic device of all, the Mecca pilgrimage, threatens a net outflow, and it is not surprising that in a number of instances Muslim local authorities have taken steps to control, on occasion even to block, the pilgrimage (see my ‘The Mecca pilgrimage in black African history: counting the demographic cost’, Africa Events, 2, 7–8, 1986, 92–5Google Scholar, for a brief preliminary discussion).

34 I take the reference from Goody, J. (ed.), Literacy in traditional societies (Cambridge, 1968), 50–51Google Scholar, citing Phaedrus, 275–7. Much of Goody's encyclopaedic analysis of literacy is relevant tomy argument in this paper; see for example his The logic of writing and the organization of society I (Cambridge, 1986), especially pp. 1–13Google Scholar.

35 It is of course also true that, had Plato heeded Socrates's strictures against the written word, it is quite likely that none of us would ever have heard of either man.

36 Peel, J. D. Y., Aladura: a religious movement among the Yoruba (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

37 am not sure whether Kuhn regards literacy as an essential prerequisite for a scientific paradigm: one might expect that it is, but he does remark that ‘the first firm paradigms’ in mathematics and astronomy ‘date from prehistory’ (Structure, 15). Were we literate in prehistory?

38 What follows is the barest approximation to a summary of the whole rather complex argument: for a fuller picture, see my review article, ‘Early Arabic sources and the Almoravid conquest of Ghana’, Journal of African History, 23, 4, 1982, 549–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Addicts should turn to the still more complete discussion in Conrad, David C. and myself, ‘The conquest that never was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076’, History of Africa (Part I: ‘T h e external Arabic sources’, vol. 9, 1982, 21–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Part II: ‘The local oral sources’, vol. 10, 1983, 53–78). After ten years, the discussion has been reopened: see Burkhalter, Sheryl L., ‘Listening for silences in Almoravid history: another reading of “The conquest that never was”,’ History in Africa, vol. 19, 1992, 103–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 I have defined the paradigm above in very general terms; it was to some extent activated by particular historical circumstances. In the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries (exactly the time when the conquest-of-Ghana myth was becoming more and more prominent in the Arabic sources), the Merinids were endeavouring to establish themselves in north-western Africa, in succession to (and at a considerable ideological distance from) the Almohads. The Merinids, lacking independent historical authority of their own, relied to some extent on explicit parallels between themselves and the Almoravids, the still earlier dynasty whom the Almohads had overthrown. Shatzmiller, Maya discusses all this with great perspicacity (L'historiographie mérinide: Ibn Khaldūn et ses contemporains, Leiden, 1982, esp. 116–18)Google Scholar; what she does not realize, I think, is that Merinid historians were not only exploiting actual Almoravid precedents for Merinid action, but they were also rewriting Almoravid history in order to illustrate the Merinid ideal of the conquest paradigm.

40 Chroniques de la Mauritanie sénégalaise (Paris).

41 Paris, vol. 2, 54. Slightly earlier brief mentions occur in Chatelier, A. le, L'lslam dans VAfrique occidental (Paris, 1899), 80Google Scholar, and in Shaw, Flora L. (Lady Lugard), A tropical dependency: an outline of the ancient history of the western Soudan with an account of the modern settlement of northern Nigeria (London, 1905), 110Google Scholar. The immediately previous source or sources upon which these three authors, in 1899, 1905 and 1912, presumably drew have not yet been precisely identified.

42 A history of Islam in West Africa (London, 1962), 29–30Google Scholar.

43 I do not wish to imply that everything worked out under that paradigm is misguided: Kuhn says, of every scientific paradigm, that ‘at least part’ of its achievement ‘always proves to be permanent’ (Structure, 25). The same is likely to be true of paradigms in the social sciences, though we cannot be quite so confident.

44 See Blum, Charlotte and myself, ‘Love for three oranges, or, the askiya's dilemma: the askiya, al-Maghili and Timbuktu, c. 1500 A.D’, Journal of African History, 34, 1993, 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Froelich, J.-C., in Lewis, I.M. (ed.), Islam in tropical Africa (1st ed., Oxford, 1966), 169Google Scholar; Froelich, and some other contributors, are omitted (without mention) in the 2nd edition.

46 Cohen's, Abner excellent book, Custom and politics in urban Africa: a study of Hausa migrants in Yoruba towns (London, 1969)Google Scholar, is a good example, though concerned with many other themes as well as the relationship between Islam and trade. (The title is a little expansive: the book is mainly about Ibadan.)

47 By Christopher Hurst of London in the U.K. a nd the University of California.

48 ‘Prayer and military activity in the history of Muslim Africa south of the Sahara,’ Journal of African History, 12, 3, 1971, 391–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Hassebu: Islamic healing in black Africa’, in Brett, M. (ed.), Northern Africa: Islam and modernisation (London, 1973), 23–47Google Scholar; ‘Dreams and conversion in black Africa’, in Levtzion, N. (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York, 1979), 217–35Google Scholar.

49 See, for example, my ‘Juggernaut’, 169–70.

50 This applies equally to Kuhn's paradigm-directed ‘normal science’ (which comes quite close to that prediction which is one of the main functions of African traditional religions according to Horton—see §IV above), and to the process of more continuous, more fundamental, testing which Kuhn's critics emphasize.

51 It is interesting that Kuhn himself attaches importance to the human aspect of his scientists; see, for example, his remarks in Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism, pp. 19–22. As an experimenter, too, the scientist is likely to be personally involved.

52 Kuhn, Structure, 10; see §111 at n.13 above.

53 See my ‘Juggernaut’, 158–62; and also §11 above.

54 Kuhn, Structure, 1–2.

55 See also §11 at n. ll above.

56 Not so familiar that I did not need the help of Friends House in London in tracking it down. I am grateful indeed to Tabitha Driver, Assistant Librarian there, for her long, detailed and very helpful letter of 22 April 1988. The earliest usage of the phrase which she could find is 1731. Rather to my surprise, I learnt that eighteenth-century Friends often coupled such baptisms with illness or other trouble: ‘many sore Engagements and Baptisms of Spirit’, ‘after many conflicts and deep baptisms of spirit, he gave up to what he believed to be the Divine requirings’, and so on; much of this descriptive material could be applied, with hardly a word changed, to cults of affliction in Africa such as have been the subject of various modern studies. The shift of emphasis away from the nature of baptism as affliction, to the recurrent experience of baptism as normally understood today, seems much later: see, for example, To Lima with love (1987), the Society's response to the World Council of Churches document, Baptism, eucharist and ministry:

Our understanding of baptism is that it is not a single act of initiation but a continuing growth in the Holy Spirit and a commitment which must continually be renewed.

Neither Tabitha Driver nor I knows whether the phrase, many deep baptisms, had an earlier, pre-Quaker origin.

57 Emefie Ikenga-Metuh has correctly grasped the essential point: ‘Fisher's brilliant [!] historical analysis of conversion within Islam in Africa highlights the fact that conversion itself is a continuous process. There are many types of, and different stages in, religious change.’ See his ‘The shattered microcosm: a critical survey of explanations of conversion in Africa’, in Petersen, Religion, 17, referring to my ‘Conversion reconsidered’.

58 For a spirited Saharan complaint against militant reform, see my ‘The vanquished voice: Shaykh Muhammad's defense: a case study from the western Sahara’, in Henige, David and McCaskie, T.C. (ed.), West African economic and social history: studies in memory of Marion Johnson, University of Wisconsin, 1990, 47–61Google Scholar.

59 See also §111 at n.18, above.