This volume is intended to pioneer an approach to the history of Islam in Africa on a continent-wide scale. The editors are gratified that the balance has been redressed between East and West Africa. Although the study of Islam in West Africa is by far more advanced than the study of Islam in East Africa, the two regional sections of this volume, Part II on West Africa and Part III on Eastern and Southern Africa, have been given roughly equal weight. The editors do not know any other work on Islam in Africa in which Islam in East Africa achieves such prominence in a continental context.
We have been particularly concerned with the dynamics of religious interaction between the “essentials” of Islam—those elements that fostered unity and continuity within a discernible community of discourse—and the particular historical, cultural, and environmental factors that produced diversity and local forms of Islam. Our aim was to provide comprehensive studies of the experience of Muslim communities all over Africa.
In Africa, diversity has produced rich traditions of widely varied religious meanings, beliefs, and practices. Islam energized, enlivened, and animated life in African communities, and at the same time Islam has been molded by its African settings. As a result of the interaction between Muslim and African civilizations, the advance of Islam has profoundly influenced religious beliefs and practices of African societies, while local traditions have “Africanized” Islam. The ways Islam has thrived in the rich panoply of continent-wide historical circumstances have fostered discord at least as often as these ways of Islam have helped realize unity and agreement.
The main challenge for all of us who participated in this project has been to limn specific ways in which Islam and Muslims have played creative roles in the story of Africa’s development. Muslims were important in the process of state-building, in the creation of commercial networks that brought together large parts of the continent. Muslims introduced literacy that, in addition to its religious significance, also made Muslims scribes to African rulers in charge of state records, as well as exchanges of inter-state diplomacy, inside Africa and beyond.
The twenty-four chapters of this volume have been written with the personal authority of the best scholarship in the history of Islam in Africa. Some of our authors began writing on Islam in the 1960s, when African history in general, and the history of Islam in Africa in particular, were first recognized as academic disciplines in their own right. Other authors joined the ranks in the seventies and eighties, and the youngest authors bring the fresh fruits of scholarship derived from their recent dissertations.
The volume greatly benefited from a conference sponsored by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. We met after the first drafts of most of the chapters had been circulated among all participants. The dynamics of the conference enabled interaction at two complementary levels: among authors who wrote on adjacent regions or on consecutive periods, as well as among authors who wrote regional chapters and those who wrote the general thematic chapters.
Following an introduction by the editors, who chart the principal themes of the volume, there are two very special chapters brought together as Part I, “Gateways to Africa.” Those gateways are Egypt and the Maghrib from the north and the Indian Ocean from the east. Hence, the history of Islam in the continent of Africa is further expanded by presenting it in the wider context of the rest of the Muslim world. The next fourteen chapters (Parts II and III) are regional and chronological in scope, while the last nine chapters (Part IV) are summary and integrative. The authors of the chapters in Part IV, “General Themes,” have been encouraged to draw on the regional and chronological chapters in order to enrich and to enliven their comparative studies.
The editors wish to express their deep gratitude to the contributors to this volume, who in addition to their excellence in scholarship have also proved their comradeship and devotion to the idea of producing this comprehensive volume.
We extend our thanks to the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute for generously hosting the conference in June 1997.
Finally, our thanks go to Gillian Berchowitz, senior editor at the Ohio University Press; to the copyeditor, Dennis Marshall; the typesetter, Karol Halbirt; the cartographer, Chris Akers; and all those at the Press who contributed to the production of this unique volume.