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Renowned for its madrassas and archives of rare Arabic manuscripts, Timbuktu is famous as a great center of Muslim learning from Islam’s Golden Age. Yet Timbuktu is not unique. It was one among many scholarly centers to exist in precolonial West Africa. Beyond Timbuktu charts the rise of Muslim learning in West Africa from the beginning of Islam to the present day, examining the shifting contexts that have influenced the production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge—and shaped the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Muslim intellectuals—over the course of centuries. Highlighting the significant breadth and versatility of the Muslim intellectual tradition in sub-Saharan Africa,...
Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the europhone/non-europhone knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa.
"This book was written as a working paper when I was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern University"--Acknowledgements.
As Senegal prepares to celebrate fifty years of independence from French colonial rule, academic and policy circles are engaged in a vigorous debate about its experience in nation building. An important aspect of this debate is the impact of globalization on Senegal, particularly the massive labor migration that began directly after independence. From Tokyo to Melbourne, from Turin to Buenos Aires, from to Paris to New York, 300,000 Senegalese immigrants are simultaneously negotiating their integration into their host society and seriously impacting the development of their homeland. This book addresses the modes of organization of transnational societies in the globalized context, and speci...
This book deals with Muslim modernity in a country with the largest single Muslim population in Sub-Saharan Africa. It provides much needed new grounds for comparative study. Until now, virtually all socio-anthropological works about any specific African country are either authored by nationals of that country or by Western scholars. This book is an exception because its author is an Islamicist and a social scientist from Senegal trained in the French social science tradition. Therefore, his work does offer an original perspective in the study of Nigeria. In addition, the study of Islam south of the Sahara has so far focused on Sufi orders, which form the mainstream of Islam, but which by no means, covers the whole Islamic field; socalled Islamic fundamentalist movements are also part of the religious landscape. This book is devoted to the study of the largest single Muslim fundamentalist organization in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa, the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition.
This book is a lively life and times of Nana Asma'u (1793-1864), a West African woman who was a Muslim scholar and poet. As the daughter of the spiritual and political leader of the Sokoto community, Asma'u was a role model and teacher for other Muslim women as well as a scholar of Islam and a key advisor to her father as he waged a jihad to convert the population of what is now present day northwestern Nigeria to Islam. Asma'u's literary legacy, consisting of 65 poems in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa, constitutes one of the largest existing collections of 19th-century material from the region. Her poetry has been transmitted - even forged - over the years and is familiar to Hausa Muslims today, attesting to the power and continued relevance of her convictions and achievements. One Woman's Jihad provides a fascinating glimpse into the West African Muslim community at a pivotal point in its history.
Annamaboe--largest slave trading port on the Gold Coast--was home to wily African merchants whose partnerships with Europeans made the town an integral part of Atlantic webs of exchange. Randy Sparks recreates the outpost's feverish bustle and brutality, tracing the entrepreneurs, black and white, who thrived on a lucrative traffic in human beings.
Offers unique insights into the inner workings of jihadist organisations over the past three decades in North Africa and the Sahel.
Covers the history of the entire African continent, from prehistory to the present day A Companion to African History embraces the diverse regions, subject matter, and disciplines of the African continent, while also providing chronological and geographical coverage of basic historical developments. Two dozen essays by leading international scholars explore the challenges facing this relatively new field of historical enquiry and present the dynamic ways in which historians and scholars from other fields such as archaeology, anthropology, political science, and economics are forging new directions in thinking and research. Comprised of six parts, the book begins with thematic approaches to A...
Examining a series of processes (Islamization, Arabization, Africanization) and case studies from North, West and East Africa, this book gives snapshots of Muslim societies in Africa over the last millennium. In contrast to traditions which suggest that Islam did not take root in Africa, author David Robinson shows the complex struggles of Muslims in the Muslim state of Morocco and in the Hausaland region of Nigeria. He portrays the ways in which Islam was practiced in the 'pagan' societies of Ashanti (Ghana) and Buganda (Uganda) and in the ostensibly Christian state of Ethiopia - beginning with the first emigration of Muslims from Mecca in 615 CE, well before the foundational hijra to Medina in 622. He concludes with chapters on the Mahdi and Khalifa of the Sudan and the Murid Sufi movement that originated in Senegal, and reflections in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.