Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social and economic change in the ...region. It highlights the role that intellectuals played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas and political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.
The concept of culture, in the Boasian sense of the learned, variable, and mutable “structures” underlying “the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually,” ...has played an important role in the production of knowledge about many human societies. As a conceptual heuristic, Franz Boas’s method facilitated the introduction not just of new facts but also new ideas and theories into the Western intellectual canon.¹ As contributors to this volume suggest, Boas’s willingness to allow his own thinking to be infl uenced by that of his interlocutors, along with the willingness of those interlocutors to take Boas
The Muslim population of southern Ghana had been highly diverse for centuries before British occupation. Small numbers of Muslim merchants were present on the coast as early as the 1500s, and the ...eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw increasing numbers of Muslim kola traders active in the south. Portuguese-speaking Muslims expelled from Brazil after 1835 arrived in Accra and quickly merged with the autochthonous Ga community, while preserving a sub-identity as taboms. Here, Hanretta looks at the issues of being Muslim in public in colonial Ghana.
In 1929, French colonial officials in Mauritania began monitoring a young man named Yacouba Sylla, the leader of a religious revival in the town of Kaédi. A Sufi teacher (shaykh), Yacouba Sylla had ...incurred the hostility of local administrators and the disdain of Kaédi's elite for preaching radical reforms of social and religious practice and for claiming authority out of proportion to his age and his rather minimal formal education. He claimed to derive his authority instead from a controversial shaykh named Ahmed Hamallah, then in exile from his home in Nioro, French Soudan (now Mali).
After an ill-fated religious revival, the Sufi teacher Yacouba Sylla and his followers became wealthy and politically influential in post-Second World War Côte d'Ivoire. They argued for an ...understanding of democratization and development that defined both ideas in terms of their community's own mystical experiences and world-historical significance, rather than in terms of modernity. As a way of making sense of their own past and defending their place in an increasingly tense political environment, these efforts achieved their most explicit articulation in a powerful story about Yacouba Sylla's refusal of a gift from Ivoirian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
Muslim Societies in African History by David Robinson and The History of Islam in Africa, edited by Nehemia Levtson and Randall L. Pouwels, are reviewed.
