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Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa
The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.
This book brings together scholars for their fresh perspectives on religious conversion, transnational migration, economic globalization, and the politics of education, power, and femininity in African Islam in Senegal.
The Swiss missionaries played a primary role in explaining Africa to the literate world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book emphasises how these European intellectuals, brought to the deep rural areas of southern Africa by their vocation, formulated and ordered knowledge about the continent. Central to this group was Junod who became a pioneering collector in the fields of entomology and botany. He would later examine African society with the methodology, theories and confidence of the natural sciences. On the way he came to depend on the skills of African observers and collectors. Out of this work emerged, in three stages between 1898 and 1927, an influential cla...
Writing boards and blackboards are emblematic of two radically different styles of education in Islam. The essays in this lively volume address various aspects of the expanding and evolving range of educational choices available to Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa. Contributors from the United States, Europe, and Africa evaluate classical Islamic education in Africa from colonial times to the present, including changes in pedagogical methods—from sitting to standing, from individual to collective learning, from recitation to analysis. Also discussed are the differences between British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese education in Africa and between mission schools and Qur'anic schools; changes to the classical Islamic curriculum; the changing intent of Islamic education; the modernization of pedagogical styles and tools; hybrid forms of religious and secular education; the inclusion of women in Qur'anic schools; and the changing notion of what it means to be an educated person in Africa. A new view of the role of Islamic education, especially its politics and controversies in today's age of terrorism, emerges from this broadly comparative volume.
Africa is likely the only continent with a Muslim majority. More than a quarter of the world's 1.7 billion Muslims live in Africa, and Islam is the religion of more than 200 million West Africans. When and how did this come to be? How has the acceptance of Islam by West Africans shaped their history? And, conversely, how have West Africans shaped Islamic thought and practice? This book provides answers by exploring-from an internal perspective-what it has meant to be a West African Muslim. It charts the past from within Islam as a system of religious meaning, showing how West Africans have utilized the doctrines and dogmas of the faith to shape history. By focusing on theology and history, this book shows how ordinary men and women have made the core principles and practices of Islam meaningful.
This book places context at the core of the Islamic mechanism of iftā’ to better understand the process of issuing fatwās in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, thus highlighting the connection between context and contemporaneity, on one hand, and the adaptable perception of Islamic law, on the other. The practice of iftā’ is one of the most important mechanisms of Islamic law that keeps Islamic thought about ethical and legal issues in harmony with the demands, exigencies and developments of time. This book builds upon the existing body of work related to the practice of iftā’, but takes the discussion beyond the current debates with the intent of unveiling the interaction between Is...
Muslim Societies in Africa provides a concise overview of Muslim societies in Africa in light of their role in African history and the history of the Islamic world. Roman Loimeier identifies patterns and peculiarities in the historical, social, economic, and political development of Africa, and addresses the impact of Islam over the longue durée. To understand the movements of peoples and how they came into contact, Loimeier considers geography, ecology, and climate as well as religious conversion, trade, and slavery. This comprehensive history offers a balanced view of the complexities of the African Muslim past while looking toward Africa's future role in the globalized Muslim world.
Captures the essential political, cultural, social, and economic developments that shaped the black experience.
Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and ...