References
1
Estimating the global Muslim population is an exercise in approximation, but there are likely around 1.9 billion to 2 billion Muslims worldwide. The combined Muslim populations of North and sub-Saharan Africa exceed 500 million—Nigeria alone likely has at least 95 million Muslims and Egypt 85 million or more.
2
Namely, Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, and Sudan.
3
See, for example, Abdelkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (University Press of Florida, 1999); and Brannon Ingram, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018).
4
For one example of such framings, see Yaroslav Trofimov, “Jihad Comes to Africa,” Wall Street Journal, 5 February 2016, wsj.com.
5
For one example of these colonial discourses, see Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, Third Edition (William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 1926), especially 77 and 210.
6
See Fallou Ngom, Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjamī and the Murīdiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016).
7
Roman Loimeier, Muslim Societies in Africa: A Historical Anthropology ( Indiana University Press, 2013); Ousmane Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Harvard University Press, 2016).
8
On Muslim women in Africa, see, for example, Ousseina Alidou, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Ousseina Alidou, Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, and Social Change ( University of Wisconsin Press, 2013). On Islamic education, see Robert Launay, ed., Islamic Education in Africa: Writing Boards and Blackboards (Indiana University Press, 2016). On shariʿa in postcolonial Africa, see Brandon Kendhammer, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Mark Fathi Massoud, Shari‘a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
9
See, for example, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, nos. 1245, 1317, 1318, 1320, and 1333.
10
For a summary of different theories, see Loimeier, Muslim Societies in Africa, 27-34.
11
Brian Peterson, Islamization from Below: The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880-1960 (Yale University Press, 2011).
12
Loimeier, Muslim Societies in Africa, Chapter 3. See also Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Judith Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
13
See Roman Loimeier and Rüdiger Seesemann, eds., The Global Worlds of the Swahili: Interfaces of Islam, Identity and Space in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century East Africa (Lit Verlag, 2006). See also Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2006).
14
See Rabiat Akande, Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
15
See, for example, G.J.F. Tomlinson and Gordon Lethem, A History of Islamic Political Propaganda in Nigeria (Colonial Office, 1927).
16
One book that captures such diversity well is Benjamin Soares, Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (University of Michigan Press, 2005).
17
Bruce Hall and Charles Stewart, “The Historic ‘Core Curriculum’ and the Book Market in Islamic West Africa” in The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, ed. Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon (Brill, 2010), 109-174.
18
Muḥammad al-Amīn al-Shinqīṭī, Riḥlat al-ḥajj ilā bayt Allāh al-ḥarām (Dār ʿĀlam al-Fawāʾid, 2005).
19
See Chanfi Ahmed, West African ʿulamāʾ and Salafism in Mecca and Medina: Jawāb al-Ifrῑqῑ - The Response of the African (Brill, 2015).
20
Al-Shinqīṭī, Aḍwāʾ al-bayān fī iyḍāḥ al-Qurʾān bi-l-Qurʾān, 9 vols. (Dār ʿĀlam al-Fawāʾid, 2012), 1:7.
21
Al-Shinqīṭī, Aḍwāʾ al-bayān, 1:8.
22
For a comparison of the methodologies used in these translations, see Andrea Brigaglia, “Two Published Hausa Translations of the Qur’ān and Their Doctrinal Background,” Journal of Religion in Africa 4:35 (2005): 424-449.
23
Quoted in the introduction to Al-Tashīl wa-l-takmīl, 6 vols. (Dār al-Riḍwān, 2012), 1:43.
24
The French word “marabout” is a corruption of the Arabic murābiṭ, meaning one stationed at a frontier post.
25
On Bamba, see Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853-1913 (Ohio University Press, 2007). On Niasse, see Rüdiger Seesemann, The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Zachary Wright, Living Knowledge in West African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (Brill, 2015).
26
27
Rudolph Ware, Zachary Wright, and Amir Syed, Jihad of the Pen: The Sufi Literature of West Africa (The American University in Cairo Press, 2018).
28
See Ousmane Kane, The Homeland Is the Arena: Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants in America (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Cheikh Anta Babou, The Muridiyya on the Move: Islam, Migration, and Place Making (Ohio University Press, 2021).
29
See Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria: A Study of the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition (Brill, 2003) and Ramzi Ben Amara, The Izala Movement in Nigeria: Genesis, Fragmentation and Revival (Göttingen University, 2020).
30
Abubakar Gumi with Ismaila Tsiga, Where I Stand (Spectrum Books, 1992).
Cite this paper
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