Textually Created, Orally Mediated: Islamic Landscapes in West Africa and the Case of Christian-Muslim Religiosity in Sierra Leone

In West Africa, the spread of Islamic monotheism was shaped by historical, political, and cultural factors such as conquests, trade routes, and the rise of powerful empires in Ghana, Malí and Songhay landscape. The pursuit of ʿilm (knowledge) through journeying (riḥla) has also been a powerful force in West African Islam, where oral and written traditions coexisted in diverse religious practices.
Unlike the text-based centers of early Abbasid Islam in the Middle East, West African Islam developed an aural character (Schoeler, 2009), leading to hybrid expressions of faith. Sierra Leone offers a unique example of this phenomenon where Christian-Muslim practices have merged over centuries.
The "Chris-Mus" community embodies a distinctive form of monotheism. Islam spread through the region in the 17th century, with the Fula as key missionaries (Jalloh, 1997), while Christianity arrived later via Afro-descendant populations who settled in Freetown. While Islam spread inland across Africa and Christianity arrived by sea, a significant point is that in Sierra Leone, both religious communities were already somewhat distanced from the more dogmatic principles of their respective monotheisms (Samba-Campos, 2024).
Sierra Leone’s distinct religious pluralism has become a cornerstone of the country's renowned religious tolerance. In the digital age, this pluralism continues through the digital Chris-Mus community, which navigates complex intersections of orality, text, and digitality.
My paper explores the Chris-Mus phenomenon as a hybrid religious identity and how premodern Islamic epistemologies rooted in textuality and orality created unique religious learning landscapes.
The journey of ʿilm was based on the oral adaptation of text-mediated Islamic monotheism. In this sense, intermedial approaches to the historiography of creed in West African Islam can illuminate early "written" testimonies prior to the historiographical developments of the 11th-17th centuries.