The last two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in the study of Islamization processes in West Africa in the light of new, more critical and less ethnocentric perspectives for the analysis of textual evidence up to the s. XI/XVII. The works of Hall (2013), Masonen (2000), Nobili (2020a) and Collet (2022), among others, have been instrumental in dismantling the traditionally settled view, both in Arabic and Islamic studies and in African studies, centered on the Ghāna-Mālī-Songhay “trinity” (Collet 2020). A vision that responded to the assumption of the representation of the history of the Sahel that medieval Arab travelers and geographers, often without knowledge of the region, were successively transmitted, and which in turn was incorporated into the first historiographical projects of the western Sahel, from the mid-century onwards, and which, in turn, was incorporated into the first historiographical projects of the western Sahel, from the mid-century onwards, and which, in turn, was incorporated into the first historiographical projects of the western Sahel, from the mid-century onwards. XI/XVII.
Contrary to the problems posed by the meager textual evidence prior to the composition of the first written accounts of Islam in West Africa, composed at the end of the 20th century, the evidence of Islam in the West African region is still very limited. X/XVI in Timbuktu (Novo 2024), given its external, fragmentary character and its profoundly ethnocentric point of view, the material evidence clearly shows the existence of Islamized populations in the central and western Sahel at least from the s. VI/XII (Insoll 2023). The absence of documentation, however, prevents to date to know in greater detail how the processes of Islamization take place and how the Islamic intellectual traditions arise south of the Sahara, whose first written works are later by at least four centuries.
In this sense, while it is possible to affirm that in the area of the middle bend of the Niger River there is a tradition of Islamic jurisprudence fully integrated in the mālikí legal school in the s. IX/XV (Nobili 2020), the hypotheses about linking the spread of mālikism in the Sahel with the Almoravid movement, which are widespread in academic circles (Ware 2014, Sanneh 2016, Wright 2023), are not sufficiently substantiated because of the impossibility of tracing the chains of transmission of this juridical current in the area. Similarly, the textual evidence available to date does not allow us to delve deeper into the geographical and temporal distribution, nor into the characteristics of the arrival of Islam in the region as of the s. III/VIII, in times of the political entity (or entities) known as Ghāna, the location of which continues to be debated (Gestrich 2019). Nor is it possible through Arabic sources to know in depth how the emergence of the intellectual tradition of Sahelian mālikism took place, possibly during the period of the heyday of the Mālī empire or sultanate, nor the circumstances under which ibāḍism developed in the region (Lewicki 1971, Prevost 2008).
This panel raises a series of questions about the processes of exchange between the northern and southern shores of the Sahara in the medieval period, with special interest in the human groups involved and the religious and intellectual traditions in which they are inscribed. The main objective is to identify new historiographical strategies to deepen the knowledge of the genesis of the Islamic tradition in the central and western Sahel, overcoming the models built on the uncritical interpretation of the known textual evidence and the apriorisms of French colonial Africanism.
– Specifically, following in the footsteps of Collet (2022) and Ware (2023) in their uncovering of unknown sources for the study of the medieval Sahel, this panel aims to review the biographical and legal literature of Maghrebi ibāḍism and mālikism in search of possible traces of the presence of scholars of Islamic sciences of Sahelian origin between the ss. III/VIII and XI/XVII.
– Similarly, and in the absence of Sahelian textual evidence prior to the s. XI/XVII, this panel seeks to reflect on orality as a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge of Islam and Islamic jurisprudence in West Africa, as well as on the causes of the irruption of a very abundant manuscript culture from that time onwards.
– In addition to this, it is also essential to incorporate the analysis of the material evidence and the climatological conditions in which the settlement of the Sahara-Sahelian areas developed, along the lines of Webb (1994), in order to better understand the implications of the different processes of desiccation and humidification in the late-antique and medieval periods on the dynamics of exchange of the human groups that settled or moved on both sides of the Sahara.
This panel is part of the activities of the R&D project “Transits and migrations in North Africa: diachronic analysis of the population and its environment (DIANA)”, a project that is part of the coordinated MAGNA II (Coord. M. Á. Manzano) “Transits and transformations in the Maghrebi space and population”, MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER A way of doing Europe.
References:
Collet, Hadrien. 2020. “Landmark Empires: Searching for Medieval Empires and Imperial Tradition in Historiographies of West Africa.” Journal of African History, 61(3): 341-357. https://doi.org/:10.1017/S0021853720000560.
— 2022. Le sultanat du Mali. Histoire régressive d’un empire médiéval XXIe-XIVe siècle. Paris: CNRS Éditions.
Gestrich, Nikolas, 2019. “The Empire of Ghāna. In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African History, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.396.
Hall, Bruce S. 2013. “Arguing sovereignty in Songhay”. Afriques: débats, méthodes, et terrains d’histoire 4, https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.1121 (29/03/2024).
Insoll, Timothy. 2023. “‘Becoming Muslim’: A Comparative Archaeological Approach to the Material Markers of Islam in the Niger Bend, Mali and Eastern Ethiopia”. Journal of Islamic Archaeology 9 (2): 135-171. https://doi.org/10.1558/jia.25864.
Lewicki, Tadeusz. 1971. “The Ibadites in Arabia and Africa.” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 13: 3-130.
Masonen, Pekka. 2000. The Negroland revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages. Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Nobili, Mauro. 2020. “Reinterpreting the role of Muslims in the West African Middle Ages.” Journal of African History 61(3): 327-40. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853720000584.
— 2020a. Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-fattāsh and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (African Studies).
Novo, Marta G. 2024. “Writing the history of Islamic law in West Africa: Sahelian Scholars in Aḥmad Bābā al-Tinbuktī’s Biographical Works”. Die Welt des Islams 64 (2), in press.
Prevost, Virginie. 2008. L’aventure ibâḍite dans le sud tunisien. Effervescence d’une région méconnue (VIIIe XIIIe siècle). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.
Sanneh, Lamin O. 2016. Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ware, Rudolph T. 2014. The walking Qurʼan: Islamic education, embodied knowledge, and history in West Africa. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Ware, Rudolph T., Zachary Wright, and Amir Syed. 2018. Jihad of the pen: the Sufi literature of West Africa. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press.
Webb, James L.A. 1994. Desert frontier. Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Wright, Zachary. 2023. “Scholars, Secrets, and Sultans: Clerical Authority in West Africa, 1450-1650.” Journal of African History 64 (2): 248-68. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000397.