Islam in sub-Saharan Africa

Islam in sub-Saharan Africa is often overlooked, even ignored, in contemporary times as a serious home of Islamic thought and practice. The reality was that this region was also a centre of learning. When it does make the news it is for all the wrong reasons. To slightly redress the balance, here is a discussion by a Nigerian scholar on the legacy of Shaykh Uthman dan Fodio, a mujaddid from the 19th-century CE.

A few small excerpts:

Like all the scholars in Western Bilad al-Sudan, Shaykh Uthman was raised a maliki [sic] and so he remained, but he saw nothing hard and fast about these schools of fiqh. In his book, Hidayat al-Tullab, addressed to students, he appreciated the need for the ordinary people to keep to one madhhab, it is easier and practical. But for the students and scholars there is nothing to stop them from accessing any of the rulings of the other schools, for they all have their roots in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and as he further argued neither the Qur’an or the Sunnah specified any particular madhhab so no one was bound to have to follow any, it is all a matter of maslaha, public good. This, in his days as indeed today, is quite novel and courageous.

[...]

But perhaps it was in the way he pulled women out of the abyss of society, boosted their position and transformed them into useful tools of transformation of society, that Shaykh Uthman displayed his courage and foresight. He insisted that it is husband’s cardinal responsibility to ensure that his wife is educated, if he can’t teach her himself, then he has to permit her to go out for the search of knowledge. His brother Abdullahi went further to say that if the husband should fail to give her permission she could still go out, for Allah has already given her the permission. He championed the cause of women education and he demonstrated that in his wives who were learned and his daughters like Nana Asmau’ and Maryam who were scholars and left literary works behind. More importantly Asmau’ created a women’s wing of the movement and took the leadership of this wing which survived until decades after British colonisation.

[...]

Even more interesting perhaps is the echo of [the] jihad [of Shaykh Fodio] in far away Caribbean Islands. Some of the Africans caught in the heinous European slave trade and ended up in the plantations of the Caribbean Islands happened to be Muslims. Some of them may have been caught up while on transit in search for knowledge or while engaged in jihad, for they arrive their final destinations with Arabic manuscripts, concealed to avoid seizure from the ever suspecting white slave masters. A number of them appear to have come from West Africa; the case of Abubakar who was a scholar of some appreciable learning who eventually got freed and even returned to his native Jenne in Masina, in contemporary Mali, has been well documented. It was not unusual for Arabic manuscripts from new arriving slaves to be circulated discreetly among Muslims in the plantations. One such document called the Wathiqah, from all the descriptions, the Wathiqat Ahl Sudan of Shaykh Uthman, arrived Jamaica in the late 1820’s. This document, written by Shaykh Uthman, on the eve of the jihad in Sokoto, was aimed at mobilising the Jama’a for the jihad. It therefore contained the reasons that necessitated jihad in Hausaland and a passionate appeal to Muslims to come out to make hijra and fight jihad. Some of the injustices and oppressions in the slave plantations must have had some resemblance to the ones addressed to in the Wathiqa, for it got a great reception among the slaves in the Jamaican plantations. It was secretly circulated and though in Arabic its message of jihad got through and was well received. In 1832 the slaves in Manchester, an area in Jamaica, under the leadership of Muhammad Kaba, rose up in jihad against their tyrannical white masters. This jihad triggered similar jihads among slaves in these plantations and for the next few years the whole area became restive. These jihads were known by the white plantation owners as the famous slave riots [emphasis in original]. This posture of Islam as a liberating force has endured to this day and remains one of the most motivating factors for the increasing conversions to Islam among the black Diaspora.

What is worth noting is that Shaykh Fodio was a member of a Sufi order, and part of a general trend during this period. From Libya, to Egypt right through to Central Asia, Sufi orders were at the forefront of resistance against colonial penetration in this period. This appears different from the reality presented to us today.