Islamic Eduction and Scholarship in Sub-Saharan Africa
Stefan Reichmuth
In many African states and societies, Islamic education and its various institutions have held for long and still continue to hold a significant place in both individual and public life. The influence of this education was by no means restricted to Muslims alone but extended to patterns of general culture well beyond their communities. To be sure, Islamic learning is first and foremost supposed to provide the believer with access to the Quran, the Word of God, and to specific rituals, ethical norms, and patterns of behavior that are derived from God’s message and from the words and deeds of his prophet. But besides that, it also transmits much broader patterns of learning, which, beyond basic literacy, equally include a wide range of subjects: law, theology and mysticism, Arabic grammar, poetry and literature, Islamic history, and finally a good deal of arithmetic, astronomy-cum-astrology, and medicomagical therapeutics. This intricate complex of learning, which involves children as well as young and aged adults and has a history of more than a thousand years in sub-Saharan Africa, came to have important differential and mediating functions for African societies.
Differential and Mediating Functions of Islamic Learning
Islamic learning, even at the elementary level of Quranic education, creates and reinforces basic differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. In many African regions, it provided the earliest pattern of schooling, setting Muslim children apart from those of other people, and gradually changing the prevailing attitudes to childhood and education, as well as to time and dress. Graduation from Quranic school frequently came to be celebrated as an initiation ceremony firmly embedded in Muslim communal life. At the same time, Islamic learning served to distinguish status, honor, and prestige among Muslims themselves. After long-standing contacts with Muslim foreigners, local groups of professional Islamic scholars came into their own, in a process that recurred time and again in various social settings.
Apart from this, although Quranic education was in most cases provided for both boys and girls, higher Islamic learning frequently came to be a male domain. Even if female learning, especially within the scholar families themselves, was by no means negligible, the basic pattern in this field reinforced separation between the sexes. Male predominance in public life was to prevail for a long time among African Muslims.
Another important differential provided by Islamic learning is communal and regional. This can be studied in the growth and development of important political and commercial centers in sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic scholars and traders contributed in no small way to the emergence and stability of such centers. Quite often, they would have their own distinct quarters or settlements, centered around their local mosques. In other cases, they were able to transform whole towns into distinct religious centers of their own. The religious and educational reputation of such places sometimes far outlived their political and commercial bloom. With their scholarly elite and their Islamic patterns of public life, centers of this kind provided important models for the political and cultural development in different parts of Africa.1
The mediating and integrating functions of Islamic learning and education are equally varied. This education is, first of all, designed to shape the believer’s attitude toward God, cosmos, and time, and to relate it to the different stages and experiences of his life. In this respect, teachers and scholars very often perform crucial functions as advisers, spiritual guides, and healers. The concepts of sainthood that became widespread among African Muslims were largely based on these mediating functions of the Islamic teacher and scholar. At the social level, Islamic learning and its institutions made up a framework for different kinds of relations among Muslims themselves. They often brought together people from different ethnic and linguistic communities, as well as from different age groups and social layers. Institutions of Islamic learning became part of the prevailing social structure, in urban as well as in rural and nomadic contexts. As they provided an important source for the development of common ethical and legal norms, they also made an impact on the mutual relations between different professional and political classes and on the legitimation of public authority. Apart from this, Islamic scholars and students, being a highly mobile and sometimes truly cosmopolitan group, provided important links to the outside world for the communities they were living with.
These mediating functions at the social level were by no means restricted to Muslims alone. In many regions where Islam was established, Islamic learning not only distinguished Muslims from their non-Muslims neighbors, but also came to provide important patterns of common culture for both groups. Traces of this longstanding communication can be found in language, folklore, and historical legends, in dress and common festivals, and also in a widely shared range of therapeutical and divinatory practices, partly derived from local, partly from Islamic patterns. Many societies developed their own arrangements and institutions for social and cultural interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. Motifs and topics derived from the scholars’ literary culture sometimes played a crucial role in this process of cultural bargaining and exchange. For non-Muslim communities and states, Islamic scholars with their extended connections to large-scale trading networks provided vital links to the outside world, and they were often given important court positions. This cooperation found public and ritual recognition even in pagan royal festivals; certain important functions sometimes came to be reserved for Islamic scholars and dignitaries.2
Both differential and mediating functions of Islamic learning can be found at work in periods of social unrest and political upheaval. In such crises, groups of Islamic scholars with their students sometimes figured as conservative and loyalist elements. Not infrequently, however, they stood at the center of opposition and political change. This can be observed with particular clarity for the large Islamic movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in West Africa. Such movements often started out as religious-reform and preaching movements before they became directly involved in political and military struggles. With confrontation growing, full-scale ideologies of difference between believers and unbelievers were elaborated for the justification of violent or military action. Islamic learning, now gradually becoming a mass phenomenon, was used for this, but it also served to stabilize the resulting social and political arrangements once a new order was established. Commercial expansion in the Nile Valley and in East Africa since the eighteenth century equally made Islamic learning increasingly important for the articulation of commercial interest and political aims of the Muslim communities.
Islamic learning and education came under new challenges in the colonial and postcolonial period. The colonial powers oscillated in their policies between suppression of Muslim resistance and cooperation with Muslim groups—even to the extent of creating Muslim army units for both conquest and control of their domains. This also affected the position of Islamic scholars and educational institutions. For the Muslims themselves, Islamic learning and its reform became of primary importance, especially since new types of school education were being introduced by colonial administrators and Christian missionaries. As the political and military leaders of the Muslims lost power, the Islamic scholars on the whole gained in communal influence and public reputation. In most Muslim regions, Islamic schools continued to be run as private institutions, with or without recognition by the government, thus creating a private school sector subsidized by local Muslim communities. This sector existed alongside the public school system that was taking shape. Muslims also became increasingly committed to Western forms of education. Tension between the two systems found expression in different legal and organizational ways. Some countries ignored the Islamic sector; others gave it some recognition and tried to integrate it into the public educational system. From the two systems, and shaped by the manifold tensions between them, a new class of younger Muslim scholars and intellectuals came up. Many of them had already studied in Islamic institutions in the Arab countries. Since the 1980s, this younger Muslim elite group of mixed educational background has often become a cultural and political factor of its own, apart from the older generation of Islamic scholars and Muslim leaders. The struggle of the Muslim commmunities to cope with the different strands of learning and education in their countries is still going on. In this struggle, Islamic learning, increasingly geared to Arabic-language skills and strongly influenced by international models, has remained both a distinctive element and a forum for mediating social and political reform.
Variations in the Development of Quranic Learning
It is not easy to establish the historical depth of the patterns of Quranic learning that have been described for sub-Saharan Africa since the nineteenth century. Arab travelers and geographers were only casually interested in this form of education, which for them was just a familiar part of Muslim religious and communal life, not worth any closer attention.
The earliest black African group to be exposed to Islamic learning might have been the Ijnaw, among the Ibadis of the Jabal Nafusa in the early ninth century, who even produced a prominent Ibadi scholar and governor of the region. This man still spoke the language of Kanem, which shows the close links of the Ibadis to the Lake Chad region.3 North African patterns of Quranic education can perhaps also be assumed for the trading communities of Awdaghust, Ghana, and others—although we know virtually nothing about the traders’ children staying there.4 Al-Bakri’s famous account of the conversion of the king of Malal5 shows that learning some pieces of the Quran for use during prayer was part even of a rather rudimentary conversion procedure. According to the same author, a copy of the Quran—allegedly sent by the caliph—had already become part of the regalia of the king of Kawkaw, suggesting recognition of the sacrality of the Quran within the states and societies of the sub-Saharan zone.6 The first truly learned rulers in that region, according to one tradition of mixed black African and Berber origin, were the Banu Tanamak of Tadmakka, as reported by Ibn Hawqal (d. 988).7 Ancient Tadmakka (most probably to be identified with present-day Essuk) and the Niger region of Kawkaw and old Kukiya are also the sites where the earliest traces of Arabic writing in sub-Saharan Africa, graffitis and tombstones dating from 1014 onward, have been identified.8 It seems significant that the Essuk area also shows a concentration of inscriptions in the old Berber Tifinagh script, suggesting a long-standing cultural interaction of Berber and Arab culture in that region.
A further stage in the spread of Quranic education is reflected by Ibn Battuta. After his visit to Old Mali (1352–53), he praises the inhabitants of its capital: “Another [good feature] is their assiduity in prayer and their persistence in performing it in congregation and beating their children to make them perform it. … Another is their eagerness to memorize the great Koran. They place fetters on their children if there appears on their part a failure to memorize it and they are not undone until they memorize it.”9 He observed this several times, even in the family of the qadi, whose children he saw fettered with chains on the day of the great festival. The sometimes rather severe discipline forced upon children, especially boys, in Quranic schools, typical also of more recent ages in West Africa, thus finds its earliest witness in Ibn Battuta. It seems to have developed along with the establishment of congregational prayer as a public institution of major importance.
A particularly close connection of Quranic learning with a royal court can be reconstructed for the kingdom of Kanem/Bornu.10 The founder of the Saifawa dynasty, Hummay b. ʿAbd al-Jalil (c. 1075–86), is already celebrated in a praise-song (of unknown date) as a studious warrior: “The friend of youth, whose writing slate is of kabwi wood—At night a warrior on a coal-black horse; but when day dawns he is to be seen with his Quran in his hand.”11 The descendants of his alleged teacher Muhammad Mani played a prominent role as leading imams and kingmakers in the legends of origin as well as in the religious and political setup of the Sefuwa kingdom. The court and the capital of the Sefuwa kings in Kanem and later in Bornu became famous for their Quranic learning and for the calligraphic script that was developed there. Dated Quranic manuscripts from Bornu, in some cases with interlinear translations and glosses in the local language, are extant already for the seventeenth century, when local scholarship had come fully into its own.12 Apart from the court, a tradition of rural school settlements (mallemti) had developed in the kingdom. These settlements were run by teachers of various origins and often granted considerable autonomy. Several migrant groups of different ethnic origins were absorbed into the kingdom by giving them chartered privileges for such semi-autonomous scholar settlements with a recognized ʿalim as leader. The refined didactic method—divided into five clearly distinguished stages—for the training of the Quranic students in the rural Sangaya (“cornstalk hut”) schools, which makes Bornu famous even today, is probably unique in West Africa: it transmits the ability not only to recite but also to write the Quran from memory with all the peculiarities of the Quranic orthography. Bornu attracted many students from the neighboring regions. From the eighteenth century onward, migrant scholars from Bornu traveled widely and obtained offices as teachers and imams in Hausaland and even within the Muslim settlements in Yorubaland, Borgu, and further west.
The rural Quranic school settlement, with families of teachers and scholars surrounded by a large number of students of different ages who served them and helped them about the household and in the fields, was a feature of not only Bornu: camps of scholars and students sharing the itinerant ways of life of nomadic and seminomadic groups became a common phenomenon in the western Sahara and among the Tuareg.13 Rural school settlements were also widespread among the Juula and Fulbe scholars in the western Sudan. The Jakhanke communities,14 the Juula of Ghana and Togo,15 and the Torodbe of the Futa Toro16 provide typical examples. Sometimes their teaching activities involved a considerable mobility of both scholars and students. The rural traveling school was already noticed by a European observer in Senegambia in the early seventeenth century.17 It became an important institution shaping urban-rural relations in western and central Sudan. Many of the Islamic movements of the eighteenth century in West Africa had their origins in such, nearly autonomous, rural scholar communities, which often became places of resort in times of economic and political crises.
Descriptions of Quranic schools and their educational aims and customs were recorded by Islamic teachers and scholars themselves in the late nineteenth century. Especially, the detailed account given for Hausaland by Imam Umaru of Salga (1858–1934) shows the extent to which Quranic education had become embedded into social and cultural life among the Hausa.18 In Kano, the majority of the inhabitants sent their sons to a Quranic school when the boy knew how to count up to ten. The teacher, with full authority over the student given to him by the father, would at first have him learn the opening sura (al-fatiha) and the last suras of the Quran by heart. The pupil then began to learn how to read and spell the Arabic letters and vowel signs. From this, he would be taught to read and recite the whole Quran, starting from the last hizb (sixtieth) and moving to the first. Celebrations used to be held for the finishing of every ten ahzab. The graduation ceremony (walima) would terminate the instruction period. The student, turbaned and beautifully dressed, had to recite the first part of the Quran in front of his teacher and a large crowd of other scholars, schoolmates, and relatives. The occasion was marked by the slaughtering of a bull and lavish feasting. The teacher was rewarded by the father of the student with payment and new clothes. (Lavish graduation ceremonies had already been mentioned—and criticized—by the Tuareg scholar Muhammad al-Lamtuni [fl. 1493] in his letter to al-Suyuti.)19 The student, king of the occasion, would after that be regarded as fully initiated into adult life. Training in some of the available crafts and professions often having gone along with his Quranic instruction, marriage would soon follow. Further instruction might also be given.
This pattern of Quranic education, still existing in northern Nigeria (cf. McIntyre 1983) and in much similar ways in other West African Muslim societies, also involves elementary instruction in the obligatory rituals and in the symbolic and protective use of the Quranic verses as prayers for all sorts of personal needs and public occasions. Each community would follow its own pattern in this.20 Writing is also part of the advanced stages of Quranic instruction, followed up to a varying extent according to personal interest and commitment of the student. For the spelling procedure, names of the Arab letters in local languages are still widely used. These names seem to be firmly rooted in ethnoreligious consciousness: in the case of the Fulbe in Ilorin, they remain the last trace of the Fulfulde language, which has been otherwise largely replaced by Yoruba, even within Fulbe families.
Girls’ attendance at Quranic schools equally varies according to ethnic and local custom. Among the Yoruba of Ilorin, it has been very considerable, even in the past, and the walima ceremony, celebrated on the day before the wedding, is an important event for the bride. In Nigeria, the entrance age of Quranic schooling, formerly highly variable, has undergone a remarkable reduction in recent decades. This was most probably related to the spread of primary-school education, which has left many Quranic schools with additional nursery-school functions.
The West African patterns of Quranic education and its communal significance fully compare with the Quranic school (chuo) of the Swahili coast, and also with the eastern Sudanese khalwa.21 The major role played by female Quranic teachers in Brava (see chapter 18) deserves further study: it shows that, in East Africa, female contribution to Islamic instruction has been an important factor, even if for the most part taking place only in privacy. Shinqit, in the western Sahara, provides a similar example for elementary literary education being handled largely by women. In any case, Quranic education had by the nineteenth century largely become a basic element of social status for many Muslim communities throughout sub-Saharan Africa, part of their sphere of public knowledge, and it was often complemented with a rich oral culture of religious poetry and praise in local languages.22
International Links
At the end of the fourteenth century at the very latest, Islamic learning had been fairly developed in several parts of West Africa and the East African coast. This can be gleaned from the accounts given by Ibn Saʿid (d. 1286), Ibn Battuta (d. 1368), Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and others. A prominent faqih from Ghana, al-Shaykh ʿUthman, who visited Egypt in 1394, became Ibn Khalduns authority for the history of Mali and its neighbors—perhaps the first substantial contribution of a West African scholar to Arab historiography.
Several local centers of learning had emerged. Tadmakka, mentioned above, named after Mecca and closely resembling the Holy City,23 seems to have been one of the earliest. Walata, the Massufa trading center visited by Ibn Battuta, inhabited by “Muslims who observe the prayer and study fiqh and memorize the Quran,” had apparently emerged not too long before, being mentioned for the first time by him and by his contemporary al-ʿUmari (d. 1349).24
Perhaps the most important center further south was Zagha, in the Massina, which is largely identified with Ja/Dia and holds a prominent place as the original center of the Soninke scholarly diaspora, traced back to the days of ancient Wagadu/Ghana.25 Ibn Battuta described the people of Zagha as already old in Islam, pious and interested in learning. The alleged tomb of the foundation figure of Juula Islamic scholarship, al-Hajj Salim al-Suwari, is shown to this day in Ja/Dia (see chapter 4). Ja seems to be quite typical also in the discontinuity of its local historical and scholarly traditions. With the change of its fortunes under Malian and Songhay rule, it lost its central position and came under the control of non-Muslim warrior clans (the Jawara), but nevertheless remained a city of marabouts with a strong reputation for spiritual and magic powers. Its traditions of origin were now projected further backwards, right into the times of the Prophets. Current local legend has it that even Moses and the pharaoh sought the assistance of the people of Ja in their magical competition, and Muhammad himself saw Ja’s light shining in the darkness when he ascended to heaven with Jibril.26 Historical traditions about other early centers like Tadmakka and, especially, Kukiya on the Niger, the alleged center of Songhay paganism with its old Arabic tombstones, show comparable disconuities and transformations.27
The city of Timbuktu, already touched by Ibn Battuta in 1353, came to absorb many of the scholarly traditions of the surrounding lands and of different ethnic groups. It also inherited Ja’s older status as an inviolable center of learning and commerce and became a largely autonomous City of Scholars under Malian and Songhay rule, governed by its own patriciate of scholar families (see also chapter 3). As Timbuktu’s rise and slow decline are uniquely documented by local Arabic historiography, the city may serve as a model center of Islamic scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa, running through different stages of attraction and diffusion of population and of Islamic influences, building up and transmitting a religious and urban tradition of lasting qualities.28 Around 1500, Timbuktu had also established firm links to Islamic scholarship in the Middle East and North Africa. A similar consolidation of higher Islamic learning can be followed in Kanem-Bornu, whose ruler had even established a madrasa in Cairo. In the case of this kingdom, the royal capital itself became the main center of Islamic scholarship, especially after the foundation of Birnin Gazargamo and the shift of power eastward to Bornu.
The strands of Islamic scholarship that developed in West Africa at first largely followed trends in North Africa, then increasingly those from Egypt and the Hijaz. From the seventeenth century onward, they even fed back upon these centers themselves. The initial Ibadi impact, well attested in the early Arabic sources, does not seem to have left substantial traces south of the Sahara, if not for the famous Saghanughu scholar clan, who might perhaps be identified with the Ibadi sect called Saghanaghu, mentioned by Ibn Battuta for a place called Zaghari in the vicinity of the Niger.29 Shiʿi and Fatimid influences are even less visible. A lasting heritage of the Almoravid period is the predominance of the Maliki school in West Africa, but also one of the most widely used books about the Prophet, al-Qadi ʿIyad (d. 1149), Kitab al-shifa, which holds a very prominent place in scholarly training as well as in public recitation.30 A direct impact of the Almoravids on developments in ancient Ghana is attested (cf. Ibn Khaldun in Levtzion and Hopkins, Corpus, 333); it is also probable further east for Kawkaw31 and perhaps even for the kings of Kanem-Bornu, whose ancestry was still traced to the Veiled People (al-mulaththamun) by Mamluk scholars in fifteenth-century Egypt.32
Traces of relations with the Almohads can also be identified, especially for Kanem-Bornu. The earliest known scholar and poet from that kingdom, Ibrahim b. Yaʿqub al-Kanimi (d. c. 1212), made a career as a grammarian and poet at the Almohad court in Marrakesh.33 Kanem-Bornu also maintained close relations with the Almohad Hafsids in Tunis.34 The most striking Almohad heritage in the south is Ibn Tumart’s short creed al-Murshida, which is still widely used as an introductory tawhid text in Nigeria, even if its author is never mentioned;35 it was translated into Hausa by a contemporary of ʿUthman b. Fodio. Other traces of Almohad theological and didactical tradition are yet to be identified (see below).
In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the religious and scholarly relations of the West Africans with Egypt and the Hijaz apparently became much closer. Students and visitors from the Bilad at-Takrur are mentioned for several prominent Egyptian scholars and sufis of that period.36 Scholars from the Middle East also tried to develop relations with West Africa, entering into correspondence with its rulers and scholars and sending their writings to them. Most influential among West African scholars was Jamal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 1505), whose assistance and mediation was even sought by the kings of Bornu and Songhay for obtaining formal recognition as vicegerents of the Abbasid caliph in Cairo.37
Some scholars traveled from the Middle East to the Bilad at-Takrur. The Meccan Abu Bakr b. Qasim al-Khazraji (d. 1404) became famous for his successful prayers for rain among his hosts. Al-Maqrizi met him after his return to Mecca. A later example of such travels were those of the Andalusian emigrant Shams al-Din Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Andalusi, who, having been appointed Qadi ʾl-qudat of the Malikis in Damascus, was banned to upper Egypt. He went from there to Takrur, where he died in 1514.
Local Islamic scholarship was strongly influenced and sometimes even initiated by the diffusion of the Mukhtasar of Khalil b. Ishaq (d. 1365), which after 1500 become the most authoritative textbook of Maliki fiqh and was much commented upon in the western and central Sudan and also in the western Sahara. Two figures were crucial for the spread of this book: One was Mahmud b. ʿUmar Aqit (1463–1548), qadi of Timbuktu, who went on pilgrimage and visited the scholars of Cairo in 1509–10;38 he propagated the Mukhtasar in his teaching and produced the first known local commentary on it. The other was the famous North African scholar al-Maghili (d. c. 1504), who visited West Africa during this period; he, too, wrote about the Mukhtasar.
One of two Berber scholars who studied with al-Maghili and who are known for their notes and comments on the Mukhtasar was Mahmud b. ʿUmar Aqit’s fellow traveler to Egypt Muhammad at-Tazakhti (d. 1529). This scholar later settled in Katsina. Here the Egyptian connection comes in again. The first introduction of the Mukhtasar Khalil by a scholar from Egypt is also mentioned for Kano in the Asl al-Wanghariyyin; thereafter, the Egyptian influence upon Islamic learning gradually superseded that of the Maghrib. It can be observed that the fuqaha of West Africa and of the western Sahara always remained in touch with the development of Maliki scholarship in Egypt, as can be seen from the Mukhtasar commentaries that they studied and quoted in their own writings.39
By the seventeenth century, the scholars of Timbuktu had gained considerable authority for the whole Maliki school. They took full part in the tobacco controversy that for a long time was fiercely disputed in Islam.40 They also were important in spreading another key text of Islamic scholarship in West Africa, the Umm al-Barahin, by the famous theologian and ascetic of Tilimsan, Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Sanusi (d. 1490). This short creed, one of three theological treatises by al-Sanusi, apparently became well liked both for its rational outlook and for the promise it made, to the faithful reader, of unfailing orthodoxy and salvation. Al-Sanusi’s call for a rational understanding of one’s faith and his strong condemnation of any unreflected imitation (taqlid) in matters of belief closely resemble earlier positions of the Almohads, whose didactic approach he seems to share. He claims to have developed a new way to sum up all the points of belief necessary for being saved during a difficult time, deducing them from the shahada; this, according to him, encompasses all necessary knowledge.41 Umm al-barahin was to become the most authoritative creed in many parts of West Africa, especially among the Fulbe scholars, who even translated it into Fulfulde and regarded its learning-by-heart to be a basic obligation for the believer. Similar importance was given to al-Sanusi’s three treatises in the Qibla region of the western Sahara.
The Timbuktu scholars Ahmad b. Ahmad b. ʿUmar Aqit (d. 1583) and his famous son Ahmad Baba (d. 1627) were among the earliest commentators on this creed.42 A student of Ahmad Baba, Muhammad b. Ahmad Baghyuʿu, versified the creed in 1611, and the resulting Rajaz poem was probably the first Arabic text written by a West African to be commented upon by a Middle Eastern author: ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (d. 1731), the famous Syrian sufi, wrote a commentary on it—al-Lataif al-umiyya ala nazm al-Aqida al-Sanusiyya. He did this at the request of a scholar-friend from Timbuktu (also called Ahmad al-Timbukti) who taught at the Haram. The two men had become friends during al-Nabulusi’s stay in Medina in 1694.43 Reception and spread of both Mukhtasar Khalil and Umm al-barahin illustrate perhaps more than anything else the West African connections with Middle Eastern and North African Islamic scholarship.
Developments in eastern Africa took a more diverse turn. What perhaps comes closest to the happenings in West Africa, except for the process of continous Arabization that marks that period in the Funj and Dar Fur kingdoms, was the rise of rural centers of learning, combining legal teaching with sufism; such a development is attested for the Nile region from the sixteenth century on.44 Some direct scholarly contacts with central Sudan can be identified, and the connection with Egypt was even stronger. The works of Khalil and al-Sanusi came to inspire Islamic learning and Arabic writing in eastern Sudan after the sixteenth century.
Islamic learning in Ethiopia and northern Somalia grew from Mamluk times in close relation to the Hijaz and Yemen, with lesser links also to Egypt. The size of the large group of Jabartis, Habashis, and Zaylaʿis mentioned by the Egyptian biographer al-Sakhawi for the fifteenth century looks impressive; this topic deserves a fuller study. Several in the group were famous sufis; others were slaves, often eunuchs who, in some cases, carved out considerable careers—for example, as wardens (khuddam) of the Haram in Medina. Sometimes they became strongly committed to Islamic education and learning. Most remarkable in this respect are three pious women: Khadija al-Sahrawiyya (d. 1480) from the Zaylaʿ hinterland; and Safiyya bint Yaqut al-Habashi (d. 1468) and Yahib Allah al-Habashiyya (d. 1477), both of Ethiopian slave origin. They became scholarly authorities and transmitted their ijazat to al-Sakhawi himself.45
After the Muslim sultanates of Yifat (from the end of the thirteenth century to the early fifteenth) and Adal (the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth) and the jihad movement of Imam Ahmad Gran (1529–43), the city of Harar, capital of Adal since 1520, remained as an important commercial and religious center in southern Ethiopia, famous for its saints and Islamic schools.46 This religious character remained at the basis of public order when Harar became again an independent emirate (1647–1875). A local tradition of fiqh scholarship—with considerable rivalry between Hanafites and Shafiʿites—appears with Hamid b. Siddiq, a Harari author of the eightenth century.47 He defended the old legal tradition of the Madhahib against its neglect by the moderns, echoing controversies common elsewhere at this time.
The development of the Muslim groups at the Swahili coast after 1500 is marked by strong discontinuities caused by immigration from the hinterlands, by the Portuguese conquests, and by the struggles against their rule and their missionary activities. The struggles thoroughly transformed the coastal communities themselves. Political and cultural leadership went in many places to South Arabian migrants, especially to the Shurafa, from Hadramaut. The religious and cultural revival brought about by these migrants after 1600 is described in chapter 12. The most significant was the rise of a written coastal literature in ki Swahili, whose earliest surviving manuscripts date from the eighteenth century but whose beginnings reach back well beyond that. Translations from Arabic religious and didactic poems belong to the earliest texts committed to writing. The contribution of the Hadramis stands out: the author of the oldest known poem (a translation from Arabic, al-Busiri’s Hamziyya) belonged to the branch of the famous Sharifian family, of the Aydarus, resident in Lamu.48
In addition to these translations of Arabic poetry in praise of the Prophet, a new genre of epic poems (utendi) was created in the early eighteenth century, the contents being drawn from the life of Muhammad and other prophets. The oldest, Utendi wa Tambuka (1728), written by Bwana Mwengo Athmani, in Pate, tells the story of the Prophet’s Tabuk campaign against the Byzantines.49 The topic might reflect the historical experience of struggle against a Christian power; the genre itself marks a new stage in the adaptation of Islamic lore to the interests of a broader local public. Swahili Mashairi poetry was widely used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a medium of public controversy and even legal dispute.50 The Arabic religious literature of that period was dominated by Shafiʿi fiqh under direct influence from Arabia. It firmly belonged to that Indian Ocean corpus of South Arabian scholarship that also came to prevail in the Malayan archipelago.51
The Swahili case, with its parallels to the religious and literary development in Southeast Asia, seems to fit into more general cultural trends within the Islamic world. It is striking that even the religious literature in Hausa in West Africa also had its beginnings during the same period. Here, too, a religious epic poem about the Prophet’s battle of Badr (Waakar Yaakin Badar) marks the earliest sample so far recorded (apparently it came down in oral form). The author is alleged to be a scholar from Katsina, Muhammad Dan Masanih (d. 1667), who is known to have written a number of Arabic texts. The seventeenth century also marks the beginning in Hausaland of a local Axabic poetry for social and moral admonition and critique (waʿz), with authors like Abdullahi Suka (fl. mid-seventeenth century), who became a legendary figure as a preacher in Kano.52 Although no further examples of Hausa religious poetry are attested until around 1800, Arabic and Hausa samples together suggest some widening of Islamic cultural and public life that prepared the way for the Islamic movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (chapter 3).
Islamic Learning’s Relations with the Modern State
By the nineteenth century, Islam had gained in political and cultural weight in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Most significant were the Islamic revolutions in West Africa that brought several groups of religious scholars, mainly of Fulbe origin, to political power. Perhaps for the first time in West African history, these movements led to the merger of the warrior and scholar classes, which had been often allied but never before fused.
For the states that emerged from the jihad movements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political authority was formally derived from Islamic concepts and norms, and Islamic scholars who had been the guardians of these norms had now largely come to power themselves. This changed the character of public life and the role of Islam in it. Sometimes the rulers took on Islamic titles, and even if they later founded their own dynasties, adopted older titles and court ceremonies, and delegated their religious functions, Islam had now gained a central place in the political fabric. Founding scholars like ʿUthman b. Fodio and others frequently came to be regarded as saints, focusing general loyalties and religious emotions even after their demise far beyond the political loyalty paid to their heirs.
Another heritage of the jihad movements can be seen in the huge mass of devotional, didactic, and legal literature in Arabic and in several local languages that was produced by the movements’ leaders and followers and their descendants. If there had been a trend toward creating a religious public culture since the seventeenth and eighteenth century, this was far superseded in the poetic and literary explosion sparked by the jihad. Under the rule of the Almamis of Futa Jalon, a large corpus of religious and didactic poetry in Fulfulde was created. The Arabic writings of the Sokoto caliphate far outnumber the whole former literary production in the central Sudan. Many of the poems and didactic works of the caliphate leaders are still in use today. Arabic became widely used for diplomacy and correspondence. The tradition of Quranic scholarship in Bornu still retained its reputation after the consolidation of the rule of the Shehus, but on the whole the center of gravity for Islamic learning in the central Sudan had clearly shifted to the west.
Other highly significant developments were connected with the preaching activities of the jihad movements. Local languages were increasingly used for religious and didactic purposes. The jihad leaders had already preached in several languages, if necessary with translators, during their preaching campaigns, and translation remained an integral part of teaching activities within the cities and schools of the Sokoto caliphate. Waʿz poems in Fulfulde and Hausa became a major tool for the propagation of Islamic morals and doctrines and also for the treatment of other public issues.53 It was this impact of the jihad that largely created Hausa written literature, especially in the field of religious and moral poetry. The spread of the Tijaniyya brotherhood was later to add to this. Another important result was the establishment of Islamic preaching as part of the public order. Public preaching, mainly during Ramadan and often in combination with Quranic exegesis (tafsir), became a recognized practice, and the preachers even managed to secure their liberty of critique vis-à-vis the rulers. Preaching culture—as an expression of public norms and values, but also of opposition—became especially strong in urban society, as in Kano and among the Yoruba in Ilorin and even further south, beyond the frontiers of the caliphate.54 This recognized tradition of public preaching, dating back to the jihad, was to have far-reaching consequences for the cultural and political development in the colonial and postcolonial era.
The East African coast, too, witnessed a widening of Islamic learning and a growing depth of local standards of literacy and scholarship under Omani rule. The Swahili language was already becoming a lingua franca for many ethnic groups in East Africa. The sultans of Zanzibar, especially Barghash (1870–88) tried to develop an Islamic judiciary and a unified administration for both the islands and the parts of the hinterland that had come under their rule. Demands for Islamic learning and literacy in Arabic and Swahili increased. This was the time when the term ustaarabu (to be Arab-like) became synonymous in Swahili with being cultured or civilized (see chapter 12). A new generation of Islamic scholars of southern Arabian origin—mainly from the Banadir coast and the Comoros—came to settle in Zanzibar, and they made the island an attractive center of learning. Toward the end of the century, local scholars of coastal origin began to play an increasing role, especially within the sufi brotherhoods that were spreading throughout the sultanate. Islamic scholars also engaged in disputes and controversies with the Christian missionaries. At the same time, these men also contributed to the collection of Swahili poetry and to linguistic studies and Bible translation projects that were being undertaken by Christian missionary scholars.55 These activities, like those of West Africa’s Imam ʿUmaru Saiga mentioned earlier, highlight the crucial role played by Islamic scholars in the development of African studies in Europe.
The colonial conquests in sub-Saharan Africa had ambiguous results for the development of Islamic learning in Africa. As the Muslim states were conquered and incorporated into larger empires, the unchallenged patronage of Islamic scholars and schools was ended. Colonial administrations and Christian missions collaborated in the establishment of European forms of education, with the missions coming to set up and run, to a large extent, the educational institutions in non-Muslim areas. Although Muslim reservations about Western education—as it often came to be called—were less pronounced and enduring than often assumed,56 there can be no doubt that the unequal educational development led to social imbalances between Muslim and non-Muslim regions and communities that continue to haunt some African states even today.57 On the other hand, some recognition of the Muslims’ cultural and religious interests had often to be given, for collaboration with them was sought both in the administration and the military forces. Forms of Islamic religious and legal training were therefore developed and supervised by colonial administrators, sometimes leading to the establishment of new kinds of institutions that came to have a communal dynamics of their own.58 This implied some formal recognition of Islamic religious instruction and of Arabic. Even if the development of public education in the colonial and postcolonial states for the most part followed European patterns and was largely based on the European languages, a beginning had been made that would lead in several cases to the full establishment of Arabic and Islamic studies in the public education system at all levels up to university. This development depended very much on the numerical and political weight of the Muslims in any given country. Some Muslim groups were quite successful in setting up their own educational societies, and these established and ran Western schools for their children. They were of particular importance among the Muslims of Lagos and Yorubaland, where associations like the Young Ansar-Ud-Deen Society (founded in 1923) contributed to the rise of an influential Muslim middle class in several urban communities.
Despite the educational and cultural challenges, Islamic learning continued to develop; it even expanded into those regions and towns where Muslims came to settle anew in the colonial period. The colonial period saw a rise and diversification of the literary production in Arabic, often in connection with the development of the sufi brotherhoods, but also with the increasing travel activities of the Islamic scholars, both within and outside sub-Saharan Africa. A growing interest in the Arabic language and the expanding contacts with the centers of Islamic learning in the Arab world led to the introduction of new types of Arab schools in several African countries. This process, started mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, gained momentum in the 1960s after many of the former colonies gained independence.
From the 1970s onward, a dense network of Arabic schools emerged in many regions with a Muslim population. It continues to expand and has by now become a full educational sector of its own in many African countries.59 Organized by local scholars and associations and funded to a large extent by communal effort, these schools are an impressive witness to local involvement in educational and communal development projects, at a time when state activities in this field have been running into deepening crises. Principals and graduates of these schools often struggled very hard to obtain some recognition by their governments. Some countries did recognize them and tried to bring them under government control. Issues of cultural and communal autonomy and diversity are frequently at stake here, especially in francophone Africa, where the Arabic orientation of these schools is frequently viewed by state authorities and administrative elites as a threat to the prevailing French patterns of public education. The reformed Arabic schools developed in close contact with Arab models and institutions, being partly attached to them (for example, the al-Azhar Institute in Ilorin, Nigeria). But this new school sector clearly maintains its connections with the older local institutions of Islamic learning, which a review of the educational books used brings out clearly. The books show a distinct blend of local and Arab materials.
In contrast to the older Islamic schools, female attendance and participation in the Arabic schools is very high, often reaching more than half of the student population. Local production of Arabic and Islamic literature has also strongly increased due to these schools’ efforts. Several translations of the Quran into African languages have been undertaken by leading educational figures. The new Arabic schools and the writings produced by their founders and graduates demonstrate again both the distinctive and mediating functions of Islamic learning in the African setting: they both contribute to a distinct socialization of the younger generation of Muslims and, at the same time, create a discourse with clearly modernizing tendencies.60
In recent decades, a new type of Islamic organization and educational institution has grown that brings graduates of both public schools and the Arabic school sector into common fields of action. Many of their founders and members studied in Arab countries, and the organizations themselves are often in close contact with international Islamic bodies. Their enterprises fall mainly into the daʿwa category, which includes educational, missionary, and, not infrequently, political activities. Their leaders are official Islamic dignitaries, university lecturers and graduates, and students. They are particularly active in the field of students’ and women’s organizations and in the development of Islamic media programs. Their political activities range from educational lobbying and the production of religious publications to interreligious dialogue and polemic and public participation in political demonstrations and controversies.61 A central issue for many of them is the foundation of an Islamic university, something that has been discussed for a long time in several countries but that so far has been realized only in Mbale (Uganda) and Say (Niger) in cooperation with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) (see chapter 16).
Several daʿwa organizations maintain strong links to Arab and Islamic countries (for example, to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Iran, and Pakistan) and to international bodies like the Muslim World League, the Islamic Call Organisation, and ISESCO.62 These connections, and their local constituencies, are not without influence on the Islamic issues they propagate—issues that sometimes cause serious challenges to the state and to other Muslims. The daʿwa organizations represent a new stage in the educational development of the Muslims, as they merge different educational experiences within and outside their countries into a new public presence of Islam. In their divergent and sometimes quite controversial outlook, they reflect the internal and external challenges faced by Muslim societies today. Islamic education and scholarship have remained crucial fields for the Muslims’ response to these challenges.
1. See Eisenstadt, Abitbol, and Chazan 1988.
2. For Borgu, see Farias 1998.
3. Levtzion 1978, 643.
4. Abu Yazid, the North African Khariji leader born in Kawkaw around 883, had his Quranic instruction back home in Tawzar; cf. Ibn Khaldun 1968, 7, 26f.
5. Levtzion and Hopkins 1981, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (hereafter, Corpus), 82.
6. Corpus, 87.
7. Corpus, 51.
8. Farias 1990.
9. Corpus, 296.
10. For Kanem/Bornu, see Bobboyi 1992, 1993.
11. Hodgkin 1975, 90.
12. Bivar 1960, 1968.
13. al-Shinqiti 1958, 517ff.; Norris 1975, 109–17.
14. Sanneh 1989.
15. Wilks 1968.
16. Willis 1978.
17. Jobson 1623, quoted in Sanneh 1989, 163.
18. Mischlich 1908, 20–31; Ferguson 1973, 116–19, 260–66.
19. Norris 1975, 45.
20. Sanneh 1989, chapters 7 and 8; Mommerstegh 1991; Reichmuth 1993a, 180ff.; 1998 101–13.
21. Velten 1898, 56–59; Pouwels 1987, 80–88; al-Bayli 1972.
22. Pouwels 1987, 85.
23. al-Bakri, Corpus, 85.
24. Corpus, 276; 284ff.
25. Saad 1983, 31; Salvaing 1983; Sakai 1990.
26. Sakai 1990, 219.
27. Farias 1990, 1993a, 1993b.
28. Reichmuth 1997, 230.
29. Wilks 1968, 173ff.; Saad 1983, 59. Saghanughu is an alternate spelling of the Saganogo in Chapter 4.
30. Reichmuth 1993a, 171.
31. Hunwick 1980; Forias 1990, 75ff.; Lange 1991.
32. Ibn Hajar 4:168f.; quoted in full by al-Sakhawi 5:126.
33. Bencherifa 1991; Hunwick 1995, 17f.
34. Cf. Ibn Khaldun, Corpus, 332.
35. Reichmuth 1998, 120.
36. Winter 1982, 223f.; Levtzion 1986.
37. Norris 1975, 412f.; Levtzion 1986, 200ff.; Hunwick 1990, 85–89.
38. Ahmad Baba 1989, 607f.; al-Saʿdi 1981, ar.38/fr.63.
39. Bivar and Hiskett 1962, 130ff.; Osswald 1993, 19.
40. Batran 1995.
41. al-Sanusi. Introduction to his own commentary; cf. also Zouber 1977, 53, n. 3; Brenner 1985, 58ff.
42. Zouber 1977, 42, 103ff., 121f.
43. al-Nabulusi 1996, 366, 429; Brockelmann 1937–49, Suppd. II, 355.
44. Chapter 5; Ibn Dayf Allah 1974, 40–45; O’Fahey 1994, 13; Norris 1990, 2ff.;
45. al-Sakhawi 12, 30, 71, 133.
46. For Harar’s early historical and hagiographical tradition, see Wagner 1978.
47. Brunschvig 1976.
48. Poem dated 1062/1652 according to Knappert 1979, 103f.
49. Knappert 1979, 11f.; Dammann 1993.
50. Dammann 1993, 15.
51. Pouwels 1987; Becker 1967, 87.
52. Hunwick 1995, 32f.; cf. Burdon 1908, 38, 93.
53. Boyd and Furniss 1996.
54. Reichmuth 1997, 1998.
55. O’Fahey 1994, 9ff.; Topan, 918.
56. See, for example, Tibenderana 1983.
57. Kiyimba 1990, 94ff.
58. E.g. the School of Arabic Studies (SAS) in Kano, Nigeria, Reichmuth 1993a, 188ff.
59. For Mali, see Kaba; Brenner 1986, 1993; for Nigeria, Reichmuth 1993a, 172–83; for southern Kenya since the 1970s, Sperling 1993.
60. For studies on particular Islamic reformists and educationists in Senegal, Loimeier 1994; for Kenya, Lacunza Balda 1991, Kagabo 1997; for a case study of Ilorin, Nigeria, Reichmuth 1998, chapter 4.
61. For the whole spectrum of organizations and their international links, see Otayek 1993; for educational and missionary daʿwa in Nigeria, see Reichmuth 1993a, 195ff.; see Loimeier 1997, chapter 5, on the Izala movement; for radical daʿwa in East Africa, see chapter 16 of this volume.
62. For a short overview, see Hunwick 1997.
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