Islamic Literature in Africa
Kenneth W. Harrow
What is “Islamic literature”? In this literary overview we seek to locate Muslim identities in actors whose awareness of themselves, as purveyors or critics of the faith, is reflected in their words as well as their acts. For the literary critic, this is reflected in the texts’ participation in a discourse that identifies itself as Islamic.
Of necessity, the meaning of “Islam” here, or of a “Muslim discourse,” is best seen in terms that are relative to the text as well as the culture. Islamic literature arose from the intersection between culture, discourse, text, and reader; that is, as relative to particular texts as well as to particular readers, and to the ways in which language has been used to construct related texts and ideas.
However the discourse on “Islam” is constructed, what any study of its literature in Africa demonstrates quite simply is the multivalent nature of what is meant when the term Islam is employed. Despite the common understanding of the term, it varies considerably with time, place, and text—sharing all the generic diversity of African culture, as well as particular idiosyncrasies of individual authors.
The history of Islamic writing in Africa might be conceived as that thought whose development was directly linked to Arab civilizations—that is, the Middle East and North Africa—as well as that which developed at a greater distance from the Islamic heartland and that therefore was more marked by syncretism or “foreign” incursions. The frequent privileging of the former rests upon a vision that might be termed Arabocentric, in which the “pure” tradition of Islam is seen to have unfolded within the core of Arab civilizations, in contrast to that of the “impure” ways of al-mukhlit, the “mixers” whose sub-Saharan traditions marked the processes of naturalization of Islam in Africa. In Africa, as elsewhere, the tension between the path of purity and that of mixing continues to inform the debates over the development of Islamic literature. However, on close inspection, one soon perceives that the processes deemed syncretic, the mixing deplored by the purists, have characterized the development of Islamic thought in general throughout history. The pejorative characterizations of Africanized forms of Islam might be deemed the result of prejudice.
Sub-Saharan Chronicles, Epics, and Oral Traditions
The ties between North African Islam and sub-Saharan Africa were multiple. The traders and religious leaders of the Maghrib carried Islam and Islamic thought across the desert into sub-Saharan Africa, especially from the eleventh century on. With the ascendancy of Musa as ruler of the Mande empire of Mali in the fourteenth century, Islam came to enjoy great prominence. The accounts dealing with the rise of Songhay in the fifteenth century and its powerful rulers—their reigns and great deeds, and their fall—are to be found in the major literary forms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including both oral epics and written chronicles.
Two of the principal sources of our knowledge about this period are the Arabic-language chronicles known as the Taʾrikh el-Fettach, or “The history of the researchers,”1 and the Taʾrikh es-Sudan, or “The history of the blacks,”2 written by Abderrahman es-Saʿdi (1596–1655), a religious leader and political figure in the administration of Timbuktu. These two extensive works describe the Sudanic kingdoms from the point of view of the educated Muslim scribe. The written tradition of Arabic chroniclers and historians like Ibn Battuta is continued in the Taʾrikh es-Sudan, which is considered by historians to be the best account of the Songhay empire and the Moroccan protectorate that followed. However, the narratives of oral historians and praise-singers, known generally in West Africa as griots, also influenced the scribes, as we can see in the focus upon the genealogy of the Sonni dynasty and in the recounting of their origins and heroic accomplishments.
African epics such as Sundiata, Askia Mohammed,3 and the Taʾrikhs were all marked by their deference to the supremacy of Islamic traditions. In addition to the written historical account of the rise and fall of the great Sudanic empire of Songhay that is provided in the Taʾrikh es-Sudan, there also exists an oral account of the dynasty of Askia Mohammed, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, that has survived for almost five hundred years. It celebrates the reign of the second great ruler of Songhay, Askia Mohammed, who supplanted the dynasty of his successor, Sonni ʿAli Ber (also known as Sonni ʿAli in the Taʾrikh es-Sudan).
It is often the case that when one ruler supplants another, the legitimizing account of the usurpation forms the basis of a dynastic epic. Such is the case here, where Askia Muhammad is portrayed as the legitimate and rightful ruler, despite his having to overcome his uncle, the king, as well as other cousins, to assume his role. Like Sundiata, he is oppressed at birth, and must prove his worth and establish his suzerainty by eliminating other pretenders. The epic echoes the historical facts in which Sonni Ali Ber died mysteriously on his return from a war. According to Thomas Hale, the transcriber of Nouhou Malio’s 1981 recitation of the epic, Askia Muhammad then challenged Sonni ʿAli Ber’s son to embrace Islam more fervently, and when the son refused, Askia Muhammad attacked and took over as ruler of the Songhay empire. Historical fact and epic account meet in the broad outlines of the events that followed: Askia Muhammad went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and on his return undertook to expand his rule through a series of military expeditions that were justified in the name of the expansion of Islam.
Although Islam was not to be broadly accepted in the Sahel for many years, in oral and written texts Islam provided the principle of legitimizing rule on religious grounds, and of spreading the rule through jihad. Most of all, Muslim traditions and scholarship permitted the construction of epics and chronicles that elevated a dynasty to a regal stature. In The Epic of Askia Mohammad, one finds much evidence of traditional Soninke formulations and beliefs, as seen in the presence of sorcerers termed sohanci, in the powers of hunters, and especially in the social formulations that continued to define the world of the epical hero. The resulting epic is textured with layers of belief and discourse that reflect not only the original historical setting but the changes brought to the Songhay community in the years that followed.
No African epic has received more attention than Sundiata.4 Multiple versions of the epic have been recorded and transcribed, the two best-known being D. T. Niane’s (1965) freer adaptation of Mamadou Kouyaté’s version, and John Johnson’s transcription of Fa-Digi Sosoko’s recitation.5 In all of the versions, the most striking episodes in the narration are grounded in a Malinke religious tradition that appears to be at a remove from Islamic beliefs. This is apparent in the role played by Sundiata’s mother, Sogolon, the “buffalo woman” of Do. The tale of her conquest by two hunters is informed by magical events and practices that appertain to Malinke traditional beliefs. The Malinke dual hunting deity, Kondolon Ni Sané, whom Niane describes as guardians of the bush and forest, would seem to be the model for the two hunters who kill the totem buffalo whose spirit is transformed into Sogolon.
In terms of the epic’s overall structure, Sundiata’s relationship with his mother governs the first half of the narrative, and it is not until her death that he is able to begin his return from exile, leading to his conquests and ascension to greatness. However, even before Sundiata or Sogolon appear as characters in the epic, we are presented with a characteristic mixture of Islamic and non-Islamic Malinke elements. Thus, Kondolon Ni Sané (the dual hunting god) is mentioned first not in Sogolons story but in the recitation of Sundiata’s genealogy on his father’s side. Although the male line is traced back to one of Muhammad’s companions, Bilali, “faithful servant of the Prophet Muhammad,” it is also one of those paternal ancestors, Mamadi Kané, who is called a “hunter king” and is “loved by Kondolon Ni Sane.”6 The descendants of Mamadi Kane are honored by the title of Simbon (hunter), and through that same paternal lineage Sundiata earns the honorific Son of the Lion. As grace, power, and stature are joined in the person of Sundiata, so, too, are brought together the Malinke and Islamic traditions that confer such qualities. Niane explains that the word rendered as “grace” in the text is actually baraka, a term commonly employed in the Arab world to designate a divine blessing or the power that derives from it. Here it is baraka that assures the gifted Malinke hunter his success: “By the [baraka] of my master the great Simbon my arrows have hit her and now she lies not far from your walls.”7
Sundiata is infused with a sense of mission—destiny, fate, determined by Allah—while all the major steps taken to accomplish that fate are marked by Malinke spiritualism. The principal opponent Sundiata is to overcome is an evil magician, Soumaoro, who can be conquered only by a greater spiritual force. That force can be unleashed by Sundiata only after his sister acquires the secret of Soumaoro’s magic, and after Sundiata reacquires his own personal griot, Balla Fasséké. The destruction of Soumaoro’s “fetishes” is not represented as the conquest of monotheistic Islam over polytheistic Sosso, but as the apotheosis of the Son of the Buffalo.8 Although Mamoudou Kouyaté evokes Mansa Moussa, “beloved of God,” in his final chapter, it is the eternity of Mali, not God, that is stressed, and the epic ends on the injunction to the listener not to seek to know the secrets to which only the initiated griots have rights—“secrets” belonging to Malinke tradition, not Islam.
Throughout the epic, Muslim beliefs are naturalized, as we can see every time Sundiata gives thanks to God. Equally natural are the sacrifices that he would have known to make as Son of the Buffalo. The blurring of the lines between Malinke tradition and Islam suggests the longevity of the syncretism.
South of the kingdoms of Mali and Songhay, there arose a series of cities in which Islam gradually began to take hold, especially from the fifteenth century. In northern Nigeria, the Hausa cities of Kano and Katsina became important centers of Islamic activity. The oral traditions of Hausaland have retained the memory of earlier reformist movements, as we can see in the development of labarai (oral tales). In a tale, recorded and analyzed by Priscilla Starratt (1996), a conventional struggle is recounted: a traditional bori priest is pitted against a Muslim holy man (malam) in a contest staged by the ruler. The ruler has placed a horse inside a house; he is the only person to know the house’s contents. What, he asks, is in the house? The bori priest divines his answer: a horse. When the malam is asked the same question, he prays to Allah for guidance and is provided with a different answer: a white bull with horns. The ruler, expecting to find the horse still there, orders the walls of the house demolished. To the ruler’s amazement, a white bull is found. Though the ruler waits years for the bull to change back to a horse, it remains a bull. Through this miracle, God insures the successful transplantation of the true faith to Katsina.
The confrontation between the Hausa bori priest and the Muslim malam establishes the tale’s framework, providing a setting frequently found in many African oral traditions: magical contestation of power forms the central action. The first level of meaning to emerge from this dialectical contest involves God’s greatness, to which the triumph of the malam attests. The magical transformation of the beast suggests a further hermeneutical level, one in which God’s intervention entails greater issues of struggle, or jihad, and interpretation (ijtihad). The subordination of the identities of the beasts to God’s will and the demolition of the walls surrounding the miraculous transformation both suggest mystic meanings commensurate with the traditions of Islamic wisdom literature. Finally, the insertion of this timeless parable into the specific context of the labarai with the issue of the conversion of the Hausa at Katsina, and with the accommodation of the ruler to Islam in this important urban center of northern Nigeria where the major nineteenth century jihads took place, mark the tale’s dialogical quality. The labarai, when considered as a Muslim text, may be viewed as containing both the message of the religious victory of Islam along with the intertextual elements of a pre-Islamic Hausa universe intertwined in the language, structure, and expression of the tale. The tale concludes on this note: “Islam entered our land. That’s what I know.”9 But along with this triumphant entry, the tale reminds us of the strength of the bori specialist (he was, after all, “correct” in his divination).
Interestingly, the version of the tale that we have was recited by someone who was himself a malam, Malam Sabo Lawan Kabara. In his account, the narrative both communicates and performs the actions that are translated into the triumph of Islam over traditional Hausa beliefs. At the beginning of the account, the storyteller makes mention of the “ruler from Katsina,” whose name, we are told, Sabo Lawan Kabara cannot remember. The arrival of Islam in Katsina is rehearsed in the tale itself by the actions of the traders whose movements echo the advance of Islam: “These servants of God [the malamai] who kept coming to trade were bringing Islam, until Islam spread in the land.” The receptiveness of Katsina to the faith was imaged in the desire of the unnamed ruler for the truth: “So this Ruler said he wanted to see what was the truth. Was Islam the truth? Or was it this Bori here that was being practiced?”10
The malam’s defeat of the bori is allegorized by the actors themselves. Thus, as the malam gathers his followers to “exert themselves” in prayer to overcome the bori, he tells them, “If we don’t do it with our effort, Islam will never be able to spread here.” The narrator concludes his account of the malam’s triumph on a wonderfully ambiguous note. Although the horse was transformed into a white bull, just as the bori’s power was supplanted by that of the malam, the permanence of the triumph cannot be guaranteed by the malam-narrator himself: “The bull was put aside for many years as he [the ruler] was thinking that it would change back into a horse, until he grew tired of keeping it. I don’t know, but I never heard about the day that it changed back into a horse.” Although irony informs the malam’s victory statement, that victory itself contains its own ambiguities: the ultimate spread of Islam depends upon convincing a “pagan” ruler; the figure that comes to represent the triumph of the faith, a white bull, is nevertheless a transformed version of an earlier figure. Many boris of Kano, in competition with the malams of Katsina, are themselves also Muslim. The tale eschews absolutist solutions all the while proclaiming, “Only Islam. Islam alone.” Islam would then appear to be portrayed on the surface as a victorious conqueror from abroad, while the subtext suggests the transformation of an already existent religious discourse (“Don’t revert to listening to the talk of the Bori”).11
The oral tale can be read on two levels: that provided by the immediate circumstances of the actual performance and that of the original pattern of the story. As such, this bi-level narration can be read as a surface mythic historicization of the conquest and spread of Islam by the malams, as well as an unstated repetition of the victory of Katsina over Kano. This pattern is repeated in the tale’s own history, as Starratt demonstrates:
Despite the well worn oft repeated nature of the tale, it would appear that its ultimate Islamic motif comes from another legend of a mental duel between a Bori priest and a malam. The setting for this legend was, however, in Gobir where the Islamic reformer Shehu dan Fodio and a Bori priest contest to identify the true religion. Sarkin Gobir finds that God changed a female calf into a male calf. It would appear that the miracle of God changing an enclosed animal in a Bori priest versus malam contest has been moved from Gobir to Katsina.12
Thus we see the intersection of a preexistent discourse, an oral text, and its implied readers celebrating the triumph of the Islamic text.
East African Literature
The Swahili language was employed in the creation of a rich literary tradition, both oral and written. The earliest of the Swahili poets is a legendary poet-warrior-hero, Fumo Liyongo [fumo means king, or chief], whose origins lay in the state of Shanga, located on Pate Island. The oldest level of ruins at Shanga dates to the eighth century A.D. and the most recent to the fourteenth century. If Fumo Liyongo lived at the height of Shanga’s power, it would have been in the tenth century, and the oral tradition that eventually gave birth to the epic or heroic poem (utendi) that celebrates his life would have dated to around that period. Scholars differ greatly on this dating; some set the epic at a later period.
The utendi is a long poem in Swahili consisting of four-line stanzas with end rhymes. It was originally intended to be sung or chanted with musical accompaniment in a public recital. According to Abdulaziz, it was first recorded in the eighteenth century in the Pate region, and was based on Arabic models.13 The form has survived and is today used for pedagogical or moral instruction as well as for recitation of classical, historical legends and epics. Arabic legends, Islamic beliefs, and traditional African hero stories all appear in the poems.
The Utendi wa Liyongo reflects the dual cultural heritage of the Swahili. At the beginning of the narrative, the sultan of Pate, Daudi Mringwari, fears that the handsome and fearless warrior Fumo Liyongo will usurp his throne. According to some versions, Daudi (Liyongo’s cousin), rules by virtue of Islamic laws of succession, having been the son of the previous ruler, Mringwari I; however, Liyongo would have succeeded to the throne following the African tradition of matrilinear succession (descent through the female line). Other versions reverse the situation, claiming Liyongo’s rightful place by virtue of Islamic patrilinear customs, and Daudl’s rights according to traditional African matrilinear customs. In all cases, the two customs are in conflict, and would seem to represent an older African matrilinear system in conflict with the new Islamic patrilineage.
Sultan Daudi arranges a marriage between Liyongo and a Galla woman, hoping that Liyongo would leave Shanga, following matrilocal marriage customs of the day, and reside with his wife’s people on the mainland. While Liyongo is away, the sultan plots with conspirators in Liyongo’s new forest home to have him assassinated, but the plan is foiled by the hero. Liyongo is then tricked into returning to Pate for a dance-tourney, where he is captured and imprisoned. With his mother’s help, Liyongo escapes, only to be betrayed by his own son and killed.
The figure of the warrior who meets his fate joins the Muslim emphasis on man’s relationship with God and traditional African praise-singing that celebrates the man of strength. The two meet in Liyongo’s own self-praise, sung in The Song of Liyongo:
I made my breast into a shield I unblock where there is a blockage,
I do not fear thorns, nor sharp stings that might sting me.
Dying for God and that ship that goes to meet Him,
Do not fear the people of the world even if they hit you with ten thousand arrows.
Like Sundiata, the Son of the Lion, Liongo also metaphorizes courage in the form of the fearless beast:
The lion roars with a thundrous roar;
A tremendous roar, which kills pity in man.
The best male lions carry shield and sword;
fighting for their luck until their eyes shut.
They take the bodies, feeding swords and rapiers,
heroic lions piercing skin and flesh.
Arabic influences seem distant from these lines, which conclude rather tamely with a coda that appears to be tacked on, as if submitting to a formal requirement to have an acceptable Muslim perspective:
[The poet] will receive a reward [which] the generous God will pay him on the day of retribution when He will pay the wicked and the good.14
Death and the poet meet at the edges of transcendental self-overcoming: the lion consumes not only fear and human weakness, but the very instruments of mortality conceived and shaped by the human hand, “feeding swords and rapiers” with his breast. The familiar line concerning the day of retribution, read against the image of heroic lions, echoes the violence of teeth tearing into flesh, reducing the ethics to pitiful proportions when compared with the ravenous forces of the beast. The poetic figure of the hero is marked by strength, not goodness.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Swahili poets developed verse marked by Islamic exhortations and laments. One of the major Swahili poets, Sayyid Abdallah (d. 1810), presents us with a powerful homily on the inevitability of death, the transitoriness of wealth, and the dangers of damnation facing the human soul for those who disregard divine injunctions. His treatment of the inevitability of death suggests a less heroic stance than that of the lion. Rather, he advances a philosophic notion of acceptance for the inevitability of a force that governs nature as well as human life. The imagery he employs in the following lines of his Inkishafi delineates these aspects of death, while the poet’s intimate relationship with the reader is suggested by the first-person point of view in which he addresses the reader:
Hear the meaning when I speak to you:
life resembles a lamp-flame in the wind;
it cannot be stopped when it goes out;
one moment one sees it, then it has gone out.
Or it resembles a roaring fire,
in a clearing, in the bushes;
there descends a cloudful of rain in the woods,
and it is extinguished; you could not blow it into life again.15
Other Swahili poets deal with the beauty of their beloved, the joys of loving, and sorrows over failed love. One finds common the belief among the Swahili Muslims that the preservation and propagation of Islamic doctrine, as in the form of homiletic verse, are “believed to give the mortals thawab—or Heavenly credit—that is expected to help them enter Paradise.”16
Not surprisingly, the vibrant poetic traditions of Somali literature17 bear resemblances to the Swahili. Islam and poetry meet in several ways in Somalia. The poet often shares in the power of the judicial council whose rulings are based upon customary law (the judgments of the “tree of customary law”). In contrast, the shaykh is the dispenser of the judgments of “the tree of truth”—that is, Islamic jurisprudence. Somali culture meets at their intersection; according to Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, “Somali culture [is] firmly based upon a dual structure: Islam and Somali poetry.”18 Until very recently, the poetry in question was entirely oral, and this had its impact upon Islamic practices in Somalia.
The oral tradition creates a reverence for the word, for recitation, and for the one who memorizes text: the passage through the gateway of faith is begun with the learning and recitation of the shahada—the credo—and culminates with the night of the recitation, in which the youthful initiate recites the entire Quran by heart. Additionally, reverence for the spoken word, when viewed from the Islamic context, is common to Somali as to Swahili beliefs: thawab is obtained by repetition of the holy verse. Conversely the power invested in the oral curse springs equally from the ability of the shaykh to evoke Allah’s punishment for transgressors. Here poetry itself becomes, in the words of the Prophet addressed to the poet Hassan Ibn Tabit, “more potent than falling arrows in the darkness of dawn.” A beautiful Somali version of this concept can be seen in the words of the poet Qamaan Bulxan (d. 1928): “O Cali, the Everlasting One has driven on the words of your poem/the rustling wind of the warm breeze has carried them.”19 It is no surprise that the poet’s vaunting is hedged by the shaykh’s accusations of irreverence, summed up in the Quranic warning, “Poets are followed by none save erring men” (26:227).
One of the great Somali poets of the nineteenth century, Mahammad Abdullah Hasan (d. 1921), celebrated in verse the defeat of the English forces led by Richard Corfield.20 (This poem was central to one of Somali’s major novels, Close Sesame [1983], by Nuruddin Farah.) Hasan extols traditional Muslim values, here set in the context of resistance to colonial invasions—similar to the exhortations in the religious writings of Muslim religious leaders in West Africa of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Religious values lend legitimacy to the expression of powerful anticolonial sentiments:
You have died, Corfield, and are no longer in this world
A merciless journey was your portion.
When, Hell-destined, you set out for the Other World
Those who have gone to Heaven will question you, if God is willing;
When you see the companions of the faithful and the jewels of Heaven,
Answer them how God tried you.
Say to them: “From that day to this the Dervishes never ceased their assaults upon us.
The British were broken, the noise of battle engulfed us;
With fervour and faith the Dervishes attacked us.”21
The personal voice of the poet is heard in the poet’s direct address to Corfield, in the biting tone that builds a powerful rhetoric of self-righteousness. Most striking is the oral dimension in which an implied/commanded performance is invoked in the words the poet places into the mouth of the defeated British officer. The repetition of the line, “With fervour and faith the Dervishes attacked us,” crosses the borders of character and narrator, as if the officer’s voice were obliged to echo a truth beyond its power to control.
Women have also developed an oral tradition in Somali culture. Working with Mariam Omar Ali, Lidwien Kapteijns (1996) recorded a series of Somali sittaat, or women’s praise-songs, for the “mothers of the believers,” the early women of Islam. Recordings made at sessions of recitations of the sittaat in Djibouti revealed a tradition of community gatherings of the women in which Amina, the Prophet’s mother, his foster-mother, Hagar, Mary, and the Prophet’s wives and daughters were praised, extolled, and supplicated. “Oh God, you, Fatima, best of women, aren’t you residing in the light and won’t you quickly take us there?”22 The pattern inscribed into the praise-singing is recognizably one of an oral tradition more closely aligned to the Somali than to that of the written Arabic text; this can be noted in its techniques of intensification, emphasis and stress through repetition, parallel structure, and powerful, short, declamatory lines. And at the same time, its lexicon is purely Islamic, beginning with the conventional blessing “Peace be upon you,” and the imagery of Eve as a gift and a light:
Peace be upon you, Grandmother Eve
Peace be upon you, she is [Adam’s] rib
Peace be upon you, she is his wife
Peace be upon you, a gifi to him
Peace be upon you, his light
Peace be upon you, God loved her
Peace be upon you, God was good to her
Peace be upon you, God elevated her
Peace be upon you, God was good to her
Peace be upon you, and gave her to Adam,23
Originally serving as the basis for Somali feminist sensibility as well as spirituality, the sittaat sessions now face an uncertain future due to the pressures of more culturally “pure” approaches derived from the Islamic heartland.
Contemporary Literature: Critics and Defenders of Islam
In contemporary Islamic literature, much of which is written in European languages, Islam may be presented in a positive or negative light. When the work casts Islam in a positive, light, as an ethical faith, often the action takes the form of a jihad with twin meanings—struggle against external evil, and against evil impulses and weaknesses within. The latter conflict is commonly represented in a novel or short story in which the struggle within is intended to lead to self-overcoming. In narratives cast in the form of a quest, mythic projections of this theme are seen in the tales and epics that depict man or woman in a state of weakness or ignorance, overcoming obstacles to greater self-fulfillment. Islamic virtue is then a matter of inner strength, the key to self-transformation and to self-realization. On a quieter note, it is associated with those models of deportment or self-control whose character had been formed by this struggle.
On the other hand, when Islam is depicted in a negative light, the inner struggle is absent, and corruption takes an external form: hypocritical behavior, contradictions between word and deed, and typically base motivations of power and greed betray the absence of any inner strength or outward opposition to evil. Jihad is absent. With this emphasis on morality, and, implicitly, on obedience to higher moral principle, if not to higher authority, corrupt or hypocritical Muslim authorities are presented as archvillains, often standing accused of harboring a spirit of fatalism, projecting a message of inertia and passivity. A number of Sembène Ousmane’s films and novels have set the tone for francophone “iconoclasts,” those most critical of Islam.
Shaykh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë,24 set in northern Senegal during the late-colonial period, offers a classic example of the positive depiction of Islam. Like many other Islamic texts, the novel reflects structures of power through its discourses, continuing traditions that date back to pre-Islamic times and that were maintained by generations of griots, “Masters of the Word.” Similar to the basic conflict that has animated Somali poetry, the struggle between shaykh and poet for authority over the spoken word, Kane’s “ambiguous adventure” can best be viewed in terms of a triangular struggle among secular and sacred authorities for control over representations of the word. At one corner of the triangle are the forces of secular modernism, represented by the French, and more particularly by the administrator Paul Lacroix, for whom civilization is associated with progress, and who finds incredible the Muslim notion of the end of the world. At a second corner is to be found traditional African worldly authority, occupying a position identified by Coulon as that of the prince.25 Here it is the rulers of the Diallobe clan, and especially the Grande Royale, who occupies this place. Lastly, there are the marabouts, as Coulon calls the leaders of the various sufi brotherhoods—religious leaders who also mobilized mass opposition to oppressive power. At the extreme end of maraboutic, spiritual opposition to secular power is to be found Le Maître, the spiritual guide to other-worldly comprehension and faith. His outward appearance, like his stern pedagogical practices, belies an esoteric asceticism grounded in the mystic apprehension of God’s nature. For the family of Samba Diallo, secular power matters only so as to better enable the believer to practice his faith: “We are among the last men in the world to possess God as He veritably is in his oneness.”26 The Maître’s thoughts convey the opposition between spiritual and secular power: “The Maître profoundly believed that the worship of God was incompatible with any exaltation of man. Now, at heart all forms of nobility were pagan. Nobility is the exaltation of man; faith is above all humility.”27
For the mystic, the Divine is approached through the Word, as it is expressed in the evening prayer, the liminal moment when awareness of death is at its greatest and when one’s smallness before the immensity of what sufis refer to as Reality or the Truth—attributes of God—are most sensibly felt. In contrast to the Europeans’ alphabet, to the printed word associated with the conquering colonialists’ earthly power, is to be found “la Parole,” the creative, generative matrix whose force is manifested in the baraka of the Maître. The Word is the sword of the Maître with which he conquers not only earthly opponents but death itself: “He has the Word which is made of nothing, but which lasts and lasts.”28 More intriguingly, for the Maître, “la Parole” is the architecture of the world, and even the world itself. By extension, “paradise was built with the Words he recited, with the same brilliant lights … the same power.”29 Lastly, the image of word/world creativity is given striking form as an act of weaving, an image duplicated by the Dogon in their traditions: “The Word weaves that which exists.”30 Often mistaken as a purely existential period novel, Kane’s masterpiece cannot be understood except as an expression of sufi mystical values.
The focus on the holy man—saint or marabout—provides the center for much literature tinged with mysticism. The individual mystic appears most prominently in the Sudanese Tayeb Salih’s Wedding of Zein (1968); the marabout, or master, features in Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961). In the Guinean Camara Laye’s Le Regard du roi (1954), the classic text of the sufi way, it is the murshid, the guide or spiritual teacher, who figures prominently, while the notions of tariqa and dhikr (see earlier chapters) inform the novel. All three novels portray Islam in a positive light.
On the surface, one might think that Laye chose an unlikely subject with which to convey sufi values in Le Regard du roi, a modern allegory whose setting vaguely corresponds to Laye’s native Guinea. The protagonist, Clarence, is a somewhat arrogant white man who finds himself in reduced circumstances somewhere in Africa. He is skeptical, but inquisitive about what he encounters. Although he does not understand much of what he sees, he is an ideal figure for the initiate or pilgrim who starts on the religious journey from the lowest of levels.
One can find elements of Kafka that mark the incoherence of Clarence’s initial state—his sense of being lost; and one can identify the setting, however as clearly that of a Sahelian landscape not unlike the Guinea uplands, with the march south into the forest. Yet these features tend to remain peripheral to the central religious imagery and meaning of the novel. Laye’s upbringing in Kouroussa, Guinea, would have exposed him to many of the spiritual elements that found their way into this novel: various Islamic brotherhoods, including the Tijaniyya, had existed in the region for a long period of time.
In general, Islamic devotion is expressed through the submission of one’s will to that of God. The adoration and prostration of a crowd before the figure of the king at the beginning of Le Regard du roi is only the outward manifestation of the Muslim belief: when a beggar informs Clarence that “one is not allowed to breathe”31 as the king makes his salutation, he is expressing the absoluteness of its nature. Clarence is unaccustomed to such absoluteness.
For the mystic, white is black and black is white: the world of appearance is deceptive, ultimately unreal, in comparison with spiritual reality. The beggar whom Clarence encounters wears ragged clothes and has uncouth ways. Yet he can show Clarence the way to the path he is seeking, answers his questions, and acts as his guide. He is Clarence’s first spiritual teacher, and from the start he takes it upon himself to explain the significance of what is happening. It is the beggar who tells Clarence he is not allowed to breathe when the king makes his salutation, and that the gold worn by the king is “one of the signs of love … the purest kind of love.”32
Clarence’s thoughts are set in motion by the beggar’s words and he accepts the beggar’s offer to represent him before the king. Soon the beggar tempers and corrects Clarence’s inexperience and impatience as he explains, “There are always certain obstacles.”33 Although Clarence can see the king at a distance, he knows that “never before had he been so far from his goal as he was now.”34 Unable to cross the barriers between himself and the king, Clarence accepts the beggar’s advice to seek the king in the south, presumably where he will be traveling, and to allow the beggar to act as his guide. The journey thus begins with the basic sufi elements: a way, or tariqa, a guide, or murshid, and a goal of perfection to be won at the end in union with the divine.
Clarence passes through various stages, as is to be expected in such a journey; stages of ignorance, of life sunk in fleshly pleasures, and other states ultimately constitutive not only of the human condition, but of the obstacles between the human and the divine. The greatest of these obstacles ultimately proves itself to be legalism itself, the tendency established within Islam, as within all human societies, to ground notions of self-fulfillment in moral conduct—what are termed “rights” in the novel. Clarence has to learn that it is divine favor, not human rights, that will bring him closer to his goal. In the end it is not justice but love that brings Clarence to enlightenment. According to Trimingham, sufism developed mystical techniques that would “enable the seeker to arrive at ma‘rifa”—the direct perception of God.35
When one considers the stages through which Clarence passes, the succession of guides he encounters, beginning with the beggar; when one considers the imagery, including whirling dancers who evoke the figure of dervishes, details of acts of devotion, or dhikr, such as salaaming, the prominence of Muslim imagery like a crescent-shaped ax forged in devotion to the king, the negative attitude toward merit and the importance of love, and finally the entire metaphor of the journey along a path, a way that resembles the sufi Way of Purification,36 it becomes evident that the principal features of the allegory are grounded in sufi Islam.
In his collection Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba (1947), Birago Diop has also given memorable features to these Islamic mysteries, drawing upon mostly Wolof traditions in Senegal. We can see mystic elements in many stories, such as “L’Héritage” and “La Biche et les deux chasseurs” (1947). In “La Biche,” a marabout’s spittle is ingested by a deer when it chews some grass, and thus the deer acquires the knowledge and the power of the marabout’s word. The marabout, whose Wolof title is serigne, can infuse his spittle with his baraka because “good or bad words dissolve in the saliva, like honey in water, so that it retains a certain measure of their power.”37 In this story, Diop succeeds in appropriating and synthesizing Islamic and Wolof elements. The serigne is portrayed as returning from his pilgrimage to Mecca, the spiritual source of his power. However great the merit of that power, it subsists alongside another, the ancestral, which Diop is careful to present as even more venerable and puissant. Diop’s images of ancestral presence—in the wind that blows, in the water that flows, as his poetry would have it—is here evoked in terms of its antiquity: “M’bile’s knowledge, though great, was of too recent date; and if she knew that the earth was old, very old, and that the trees were old, very old, and that grass had existed since time immemorial, she did not know that the pact concluded between the ancestors of N’Dioumane [the hunter] and the earth, the trees and the grass was as old as the race of huntsmen.”38 From the power of the Word, to the marabout’s spittle, to the ancestors’ pact, Diop traces the declension of the forms of power through which African forms of Islam are joined to traditional patterns of belief.
In a thousand ways of representing the paradoxes, the illusions, the mysteries, the ambivalences of life, African writers have constructed a distinctively African Islamic edifice with their words—by stringing the pearls of their verses, as the Swahili conceit would have it. Swahili and Somali textual traditions, like their Songhay, Hausa, and Wolof counterparts, and often like those developed in Europhonic texts as well, converge at the one central point of the Islamic discourse—the special powers of the poetic, spoken, recited, chanted, evocatory word. Its esoteric properties rest upon exoteric form, allowing for the interplay between outward and inner meanings. Unlike the printed sign, whose primary quality is its interchangeableness, its capacity to be translated and telegraphed, the baraka, or power/blessing of the word, is inseparable from the status of the agents who articulate it: poets, shaykhs, marabouts, murshids, fuqaha (legal scholars)—as Mamadou Dia (1980) has said, these voices that can be traced from the distant past to the present have elaborated an anthology, a discursive tapestry, with “so many dazzling manifestations of a creative spirit and of a philosophical subtlety that owes its flourishing to Islam.”39
Mysticism versus Scripturalism
The imagery that Mamadou Dia employs in extolling the tapestry of Islamic texts in Africa is well suited to reflect the spiritualism of African Islam. However, it fits less well the austere, formalistic features of the Islamic legalism, sometimes termed scripturalism.
Geertz identifies sayyid and zawiya complexes as forms of maraboutism, and indeed they are particular kinds of sufism found in Morocco, though with variants located elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. They provide contrasting models for the dominant trends of Islamic practice that Geertz named “scripturalist,” and that are marked by an exoteric, legalist approach to religion. We can understand the sufi’s view of scripturalism by considering the figure of the grandfather in Tayeb Salih’s “A Handful of Dates”:
I loved to give rein to my imagination and picture to myself a tribe of giants living behind that wood, a people tall and thin with white beards and sharp noses, like my grandfather. … [A]s for his beard, it was soft and luxuriant and as white as cotton-wool—never in my life have I seen anything of a purer whiteness or greater beauty. My grandfather must also have been extremely tall, for I never saw anyone in the whole area address him without having to look up at him.40
Purity, height, and respect can all serve as metaphors for moral stature.
In this story, the grandfather is placed in opposition to Masood, an imprudent neighbor who loses his property to the grandfather. Masood is blessed with a beautiful singing voice, a gurgling laugh, and by the ability to love—but according to the grandfather, he is “indolent.” The austerity of the grandfather, so impressive to the child, is shown to be hard-hearted and unforgiving. The grandfather loves the methodological process of achieving religious stature: the memorization of the words of the Quran, the obligations that are met in prayer, the cleanliness in ablutions. This is the outward show of scripturalism, that form of Islam that Geertz sets in opposition to maraboutism.
In many works, mysticism and legalism, baraka and scripture, marabout and faqih, are often at odds with each other. In his collection The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories (1968), Salih gives sympathetic and spontaneous portrayals of sufi mystical values, especially as seen in the simple villager Zein, in contrast to the legalism characteristic of the ruling religious authorities. Zein, the village fool, comes to be engaged to the village belle, Nima. How does this “miracle” come about? The differing versions—some emphasize the influence of a dream, others the stubbornness of Nima in deciding to make a sacrifice—reflect the differences within the community.
Two central characters in the story, the imam and the saintly Haneen, embody opposing principles. The imam is represented negatively: gloomy, serious, unfrivolous, continually evoking the fear of death, he tells the assemblage of believers about their moral obligations, but inspires only uneasiness or vague sentiments of guilt or self-righteousness in them. In Martin Lings’s terms,41 he stands for exoteric, legalistic, formalistic Islam, and is limited in his understanding of things to their outer level of meaning. (By way of contrast, note Lings’s evocative line suggesting the mystic’s hermeneutic credo: “Every verse of the Koran has ‘an outside and an inside’” [29].) For the Imam, Haneen’s truth does not exist: “Haneen … represented the mystical side of the spiritual world, a side he did not recognize.”42 The imam has had ten years of university training and is the only one in the village to concern himself with the politics of the outside world. For Salih, he is a prisoner of the world of forms, trapped by the most insidious of lures, moral righteousness grounded in literal interpretations of texts—the limitation of the exoteric. As such, his insistence on one pure, correct Truth blinds him to the productive textuality of the mystic’s contradictory perspectives, summed up by Lings as a double consciousness: “The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner of a world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably out-weighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from another, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions.”43
In contrast to the imam, Haneen is the image of the sufi saint. His word is wholly oral: as with the common people, God’s blessing is always on his lips, an expression whose mechanical expression is transformed by his life into genuine spiritual power. Unlike the imam, he is not attached to material things: for six months of the year he wanders with only his prayer rug and pitcher (page 44); he eats at the home of the poor people, has no visible wealth or position of importance, no discernible family ties. The villagers venerate him, in his life and in his death. In his relationship to Zein, he functions as the sufi guide. Haneen represents an idealized form of the Sudanese mystic. But in a larger sense, he highlights the two approaches to the text, to the word, that inform much of African Islamic writing: written versus oral; literal, moral, learned, exoteric readings versus popular, hidden, esoteric approaches.
Taken negatively, scripturalism provides a focus upon hypocrisy or failed ethical behavior, and as such it is represented in a wide range of critical writings: Sembène Ousmane’s criticism of Islam (at this level) in works like Vehi Ciosane and Xala is obviously a criticism of the unethical deployment of religious authority; the censuring of Islam as seen in Yambo Ouologuem’s Devoir de Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons is also best understood in this way.44 Other depictions of Muslim models of righteousness are numerous. The majority of Muslim characters in much recent African fiction—as in Wole Soyinka’s The Swamp Dwellers, The Interpreters, A Season of Anomy, the more recent works of Nigerian writers, such as Ibrahim Tahir’s The Last Imam, Zaynab Alkali’s The Virtuous Woman, as well as popular Hausa fiction—testify to a growing desire of writers to focus entirely upon comportment as defined according to a Muslim ethos.45
A key text that problematizes the social codes of Islam in contemporary Senegalese society is Manama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre (1980). Manama Bâ’s novel is one of the first francophone African novels to be written by a woman. It takes the unusual form of an epistolary novel—one not commonly seen after the eighteenth century. By taking this approach, Bâ is able to provide the reader with a certain closeness to the protagonist, Ramatoulaye, almost as if we were sharing in her diary.
The novel begins with a letter written by Ramatoulaye to her close friend Aissatou. The letter recounts the events surrounding the death of Ramatoulaye’s husband, Modou. Ramatoulaye records the moment when she received the news of his death, her reactions, and especially the details of her actions and thoughts during the period of mourning. The account provides us with a portrait of the Muslim practices of dealing with death, and more particularly the Senegalese Wolof version of those practices.
The invocation of Quranic verses as the instrument of Allah’s compassion for the widow is given in moving terms, although the first-person point of view has the strange effect here of creating a distance between the narrator and the scene: “Comforting words from the Koran fill the air; divine words, divine exhortations to virtue, warnings against evil, exaltation of humility, of faith. Shivers run through me. My tears flow and my voice joins weakly in the fervent ‘Amen’ which inspires the crowd’s ardour at the end of each verse.”46 The conventionality of the sentiment is marked by the sets of rhetorical oppositions—virtue/evil, comforting words/warnings.
Unsurprisingly, she soon is questioning tradition. As the relatives and friends paying condolences make financial contributions, she reflects, “A disturbing display of inner feeling that cannot be evaluated now measured in francs! And again I think how many of the dead would have survived if, before organizing these festive funeral ceremonies, the relative or friend had bought the life-saving prescription or paid for hospitalization.”47 The disturbing thought, couched here as an abstract reflection, grows as her questioning of the ceremonial pattern is laid out:
Alas, it’s the same story of the eighth and fortieth days, when those who have “learned” belatedly make up for lost time. Light attire showing off slim waistlines, prominent backsides, the new brassiere or the one bought at the second-hand market, chewing sticks wedged between teeth, white or flowered shawls, heavy smell of incense and of gongo, loud voices, strident laughter. And yet we are told in the Koran that on the third day the dead body swells and fills its tomb; we are told that on the eighth it bursts; and we are also told that on the fortieth day it is stripped. What then is the significance of these joyous, institutionalized festivities that accompany our prayers for God’s mercy? Who has come out of self-interest? Who has come to quench his own thirst? Who has come for the sake of mercy? Who has come that he may remember?48
Ramatoulaye sets the scene for us to judge the social standards of contemporary Muslim society in Dakar, and in the process she elaborates a Muslim code of righteousness that she holds up as the model for her own comportment. “I hope to carry out my duties fully. My heart concurs with the demands of religion. Reared since childhood on their strict precepts, I expect not to fail.”49
Given this rigorous introduction to the character, and to Muslim practice, it comes as something of a surprise when we learn that Ramatoulaye’s husband had totally abandoned the religious standard upheld by his wife, and that that standard served not only to comfort her, but as an instrument to condemn him:
The mirasse commanded by the Koran requires that a dead person be stripped of his most intimate secrets; thus is exposed to others what was carefully concealed. These exposures crudely explain a man’s life. With consternation, I measure the extent of Modou’s betrayal. His abandonment of his first family (myself and my children) was the outcome of the choice of a new life. [Modou took a second, young wife.] He rejected us. He mapped out his future without taking our existence into account.50
It is after this point that we learn that Modou had secretly married one of his daughter’s best friends, after which he abandoned his old family and ignored all responsibilities to them.
The Ramatoulaye who takes this stern position toward her wayward husband is not the image of the traditional, submissive Muslim wife. We learn that Modou and Ramatoulaye, in their youth, had considered themselves part of a new generation of “évolués”—that is, modern, emancipated Africans. They had adopted European education and mores as their own, all the while joining in the struggle for independence when the time came. Strikingly, it is Ramatoulaye who depicts her education as an “emancipation.” In describing herself and her female schoolmates from different parts of West Africa, she writes, “We were true sisters, destined for the same mission of emancipation.”51 The language she employs in elaborating on that “emancipation” is decidedly colonialist: “To lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us: these were the aims of our admirable headmistress.”52 Ramatoulaye’s celebration of this education, so much in contrast with the conflicted accounts of Shaykh Hamadou Kane in his L’Aventure ambiguë, strongly echo the themes of negritude, especially as propounded by Leopold Senghor. They demarcate the path of what she terms the “New Africa” that lies ahead “for the promotion of the black woman.”53 But at the same time, she recognizes that that path “has not been at all fortuitous,” just as her marriage to the New African Modou declined into a sad account of betrayal and rejection.
The period of mourning comes to an end. Une si longue letter, having begun with the portrait of the Muslim wife forced to deal with abandonment and death, reliant upon her faith and its practices to see her through, now shifts: Ramatoulaye finds herself forced to deal more and more with her children’s problems rather than her own, and increasingly she turns to traditional Wolof practice—to her griot and her fortunetelling. She also turns to her “emancipated” friend Aissatou, who is able to afford her the necessary financial assistance to achieve a degree of freedom on her own. In short, as she passes from the portrayal of herself as daughter and wife to mother, Islamic practices and beliefs fade into the background; considerations of identity—national identity and female identity—come to the fore. Islam is thus contextualized as a facet of the identity for the modern Senegalese woman, not as the governing principle by which her life is to be lived and her values determined. Islam’s moral imperatives enable her to lay to rest her old life. But in her final thoughts recorded in the novel, it plays no role in her elaboration of her hopes for the future.
Here we shift the focus of our reading from mysticism versus scripturalism to purism versus syncretism. This will enable us better to note the tensions and divisions that arose as a consequence of the processes by which various African societies appropriated and modified Islamic practices and beliefs.
An example of the intermingling of Islamic and traditional Soninke beliefs can be seen in the Taʿrikh es-Sudan’s description of the battle for Gao, where Askia Mohamed’s descendants relied on three protective spirits, incarnated in a snake, a hen, and an ox, “thanks to whom the city maintains its invulnerability.”54 When Askia Mohamed was endangered in battle with the Bargantche, however, he sought salvation by addressing a prayer to Allah: “Oh my God, I implore you in memory of that day when I stood next to the head of your messenger in his mausoleum.”55 What emerges is a syncretic portrait of two systems of belief.
Similarly, a close study of Fulani oral literature and of the sufi orders (especially the Tijaniyya) of the region of Mali, brings us to Hampâté Bâ’s project to remain faithful to both the Islamic and the Fulani traditions. For Bâ (1972), the meeting of the two was not confrontational but harmonious, mutually stimulating because of the capacity of the Fulani base to grow and incorporate Muslim values. Affirming that strong compatibilities may be shown to exist between Islam and the tenets of traditional African religions, Bâ concludes that “Islam took hold and grew in sub-Saharan Africa upon the foundations of traditional religion.”56 Bâ himself illustrated this in his masterly epic poem Kaïdara, a quest tale of Fulani initiation.
In the African francophonic novel, a type of “dual consciousness” emerges characteristic of al-Mukhlit writing. We can see this in Kamara Layes semi-autobiographical novel L’Enfant noin in which the culture’s “magico-religious syncretism” recurs repeatedly in ritual and practice.57 The central episodes of the novel revolve around the Malinke practices of initiation, including the night of Konden Diara and the actual initiation itself, along with evocations of Allah and recognition of the observance of Ramadan. When Laye prepares to leave his home for the coast, the celebration is depicted as involving a mixed company of those associated with Muslim ties and others with traditional Malinke practices: “On the eve of my departure all the marabouts and witchdoctors [feticheurs], friends and notables, and indeed anyone else who cared to cross our threshold attended a magnificent feast in our concession.”58 To insure her son’s protection, Laye’s mother consults the wisest marabouts while his father makes sacrifices to the ancestors. His mother obtains an elixir from Kankan, prepared by the marabout from water used to wash a slate on which appropriate Quranic verses have been written. This is a familiar example of “popular” Islam, although careful attention to the characters’ speech, as well as to the calendar, offers more striking examples, particularly ones relating to views of illness and death.
At times, an expression such as “thanks be to God” can evoke a familiar Muslim sensibility. The confrontation with death, so carefully constructed and circumscribed in traditional non-Islamic Africa—in the case of this novel, in Malinke terms—reveals basic beliefs: the novel’s youthful protagonist experiences fear before the spirit of his departed companion Check; for the more mature narrator of the novel, a conventional Muslim sensibility guides his thoughts as he asserts that the soul of Check was preceding them on the path of God: “Quand je songe aujourd’hui à ces jours lointains, je ne sais plus très bien ce qui m’effrayait tant, mais c’est sans doute que je ne pense plus à la mort comme j’y pensais alors: je pense plus simplement. Je songe à ces jours, et très simplement je pense que Check nous a précédés sur le chemin de Dieu, et que nous prenons tous un jour ce chemin.”59 The patterns of this passage, so typical of the novel, are decidedly oral, with their repetitions and simple syntax. The naturalization of the doctrine of destiny suggests the ease with which Islam came to be accepted within a Malinke universe.
In a number of novels, the conflict between traditional beliefs and Islamic ones has revealed skeptical attitudes toward traditional ways increasingly regarded as retrograde. In Les Soleils des indépendances (1968), Ahmadou Kourouma of Côte d’Ivoire depicts a Malinke universe in which the forces of traditional religious as well as Muslim authority are intertwined, both equally impotent in the face of the corrupt and powerful state. Kourouma is the master ironist: in the fallen world of postindependence Togobala (generally the region of Côte d’Ivoire), both Islam and Malinke traditions are portrayed as desiccated, impotent. Nevertheless, they are what frame the world and inform reality for the believers. As Fama, the novel’s protagonist, leaves the city to return to his ancestral homeland, he reflects upon the nature of the Malinke: “Malinke are full of duplicity because deep down inside they are blacker than their skin, while the words they speak are whiter than their teeth. Are they fetish-worshipers or Muslims? A Muslim heeds the Koran, a fetish-worshiper follows the Koma; but in Togobala, everyone publicly proclaims himself a devout Muslim, but everyone privately fears the fetish. Neither lizard nor swallow!”60 For Kourouma, social identity is constructed like a mask; that is why he employs irony to demystify both Muslims and “fetish-worshipers.” The narrator does not stand, as does the European missionary, outside and above the narration: his laughter is directed toward the sources of his own painful awareness, an awareness that is informed by the sense of an identity that is marked by fragmentation. For the purist, this incompleteness is a sign of the failure to free oneself from Jahiliyya, pre-Islamic darkness. For Kourouma, there is no earlier golden age of the Prophet and his companions by which the allegory of life can measure a standard of perfection.
For Ahmed Sheikh Bangura, the central conflict in the Nigerian Ibrahim Tahir’s The Last Imam (1984) involves “the social crises that result from the conflict between puritanical concerns with orthodoxy and accommodationism.”61 In this rich and complex novel set in northern Nigeria, the figure who strives to bring a pure form of Islam into the lives of the people of Bauchi is a brilliant and unbending imam. His purism leads him into conflict with his father, the preceding imam who had less difficulty accommodating traditional custom, the political authorities, Islamic creed, and the community. His own desires for a woman named Aisha, whom he takes as a concubine after having married four wives, and his struggle for his son’s loyalty, all complicate the initial conflict between orthodox Islam and what the imam calls “Hausa heathen custom.” At one point in the novel, the inhabitants hear a supernatural hyena moan, a moan that had always served as an evil omen. The novel’s narration does not identify the moan for the reader as being a true or false omen, but the imam reads it in strictly scripturalist fashion: “To show Moses his power, Allah had turned the Mount Sinai into dust, to protect him he had parted the sea and to save Joseph he had sent down a ram from the sky … the miracles of the past had nothing to do with superstitions. Certainly not with the moan of a hyena.”62
We read the imam as a man who is a believer, an uncompromising absolutist—but not a hypocrite, and not an evil figure. Unlike the religious charlatans of much of the earlier West African literature by authors like Sembène Ousmane, Ahmadou Kourouma, Aminata Sow Fall, or even Wole Soyinka, this imam is generally portrayed as admirable, but tragic. He refuses to see where his rigidity condemns him and leads to his failure. Between syncretism of any form and the pure truth of his faith, there is no accommodation. As he puts it when contesting his father’s request that he make a public display of taking his wife’s chastity, “So you want me to disobey the laws of my faith just to satisfy a common Hausa heathen custom?” (page 22). The narrator remarks, following the imam’s question, “It was more of an accusation than it was a question.”
The novel does not itself share in the imam’s accusations. Like Kourouma’s “neither lizard nor swallow,” the people of Bauchi are mostly just human, open to past ways while embracing the new order and its hegemony. The reasonableness of the emir when he speaks to the imam, whom he both respects and attempts to save, sets off the rigor of the purist’s unaccommodating faith:
Learned men, books, the Word of God—forget about them now and talk to me as a man. That is why I called you here and not to a meeting of the Elders with the Vizir and all the rest. And I speak to you now as a man, a friend and a brother. That is how I think of you, for if you would only remember, your father taught me and educated me as his own son. And when my father, the late Emir died, I relied on him for advice. His counsel was always good, prudent and wise and we never did anything, even if it did not touch upon the spiritual health of the land, without asking him. These things I have not forgotten.63
But when the imam replies, it is clear that he cannot bend to the appeal of reasonableness: “My lord, I find it impossible to speak simply as a man. My duty to you, to the people of this land and above all to the kingdom of Allah and His Word forbid that I should” (page 196). The use of such terms as “idols” and “fetish priests” harks back to the reformist movements that swept across northern Nigeria and West Africa, and is effectively captured in the words employed by Askia Muhammad in his report to Al-Maghili on the conquest of the Dogon:
Then I released everyone who claimed that he was a free Muslim and a large number of them went off. Then after that I asked about the circumstances of some of them, and about their country and behold they pronounced the shahada: “There is no God save God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.” But in spite of that they believe that there are beings who can bring them benefit or do them harm other than God, Mighty and Exalted is He. They have idols and they say: “The fox has said so and so, and thus it will be so and so. …” So I admonished them to give up all that and they refused to do so without the use of force.64
Askia Muhammad’s lapidary conclusion must be set over against the humanism of the emir in The Last Imam, whose attempt to speak to the imam as a “man, a friend, a brother” evokes the contemporary reader’s sympathies far more than Askia Mohammed’s casual reference to conversion by the sword.
A final example of a postmodern version of cultural cross-fertilizing syncretism might be seen in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps,65 wherein Farah informs dreams and memories, mixed fantasies, and collected world visions with Islamic figures like the winged white horse, al-Buraq, that bore Muhammad aloft, and pre-Islamic Somali images of the deity like the crow. In his works, the personal, the fantastic, and the transcendental all intersect. Farah brings us to the limit where the devotional and the postmodern word, richly textured with the mix of traditions and languages, serves to express multiplicity and ambiguity, plurality and uncertainty.
This quality of recent Europhonic African literature must be read against the thoughts expressed by the Senegalese poet Moussa Ka, who sums up the positive acceptance of the role of Islamic values within the context of African-language literature:
Wolof, Arabic, and all other languages are equally valuable:
All poetry is fine, that aims at praising the Prophet.66
1. Kaʿti 1913.
2. al-Saʿdi 1900; Gérard 1981; Hale 1990.
3. Niane 1965; Hale 1996. The version of The Epic of Askia Mohamed under consideration was recited by the griot, or praise-singer, Nouhou Malio, and was recorded and transcribed in 1980–81. It is included in Thomas Hale’s Scribe, Griot, and Novelist 1990. For a collection of twenty-five African oral epics, see Johnson, Hale, and Belcher’s 1997 Oral Epics from Africa.
4. Niane 1965; Johnson and Sosoko 1986.
5. Although Niane 1965 is a freer adaptation, we are focusing upon it because of its widespread usage. In fact, the Johnson version demonstrates similar qualities showing both Islamic and traditional Malinke influences.
6. Niane 1965, 2, 3.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid., 70.
9. Starratt 1996, 164.
10. Ibid., 163.
11. All quotes are from Starrat 1996, 164.
12. Ibid., 165.
13. Pouwels 1992, 270; Abdulaziz 1979, 55. The earliest written Islamic literature in KiSwahili dates to the seventeenth century, with Arabic writing predating it (Knappert 1979). The earliest poem is Aidarusi’s Hamziyya, which dates to 1652 (Knappert 1979).
14. Knappert 1979, 94.
15. Ibid., 165.
16. Shariff 1991, 42.
17. Samatar 1982; Ahmed 1991.
18. All quotes from Ahmed 1991, 79.
19. Quotes from Ahmed 1991, 85.
20. Andrzejewski and Lewis, 1964.
21. Ibid., 72.
22. Kapteijns 1996, 129.
23. Ibid., 127.
24. Kane 1961.
25. Coulon 1981.
26. Kane 1961, 9.
27. Ibid., 33. My trans.
28. Ibid., 75. My trans.
29. Ibid., 53. My trans.
30. Ibid., 131. My trans.
31. Laye 1954/1971, 35.
32. Ibid., 33–34.
33. Ibid., 37.
34. Ibid., 36.
35. Trimingham 1971, 145.
36. Ibid., 151.
37. Diop 1947, 34.
38. Ibid., 36.
39. Dia 1980, 36.
40. Quotations from Salih 1978, 23.
41. Lings 1977.
42. Salih 1978, 94.
43. Lings 1977, 14.
44. Sembène Ousmane 1965, 1973; Ouologuem 1968; Armah 1973.
45. Soyinka 1958, 1965, 1973; Tahir 1984; Alkali 1987.
46. Bâ 1980, 5.
47. Ibid., 6.
48. Ibid., 8.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 9.
51. Ibid., 15.
52. Ibid., 16.
53. Ibid.
54. Hale 1991, 137.
55. Ibid., 136.
56. Bâ 1972, 138.
57. Laye 1953. The term is Lemuel Johnson’s, used in an essay on al-Mukhlit writing entitled “Crescent and Consciousness” (in Harrow 1991), in which he focuses on Camara Laye and Cheikh Hamidou Kane.
58. Ibid., 136.
59. Ibid., 180. “When I remember now those distant days, I no longer know exactly what frightened me so, but it is certain that I no longer think about death as I thought then; I think more simply. I remember those days, and quite simply I think that Check preceded us on the path to God, and that we all take that path one day” (my translation).
60. Kourouma 1968, 72.
61. Bangura 1996, 182.
62. Tahir 1984, 207.
63. Kourouma 1968, 196.
64. Hunwick 1985, 77.
65. Farah 1986.
66. Cited in Gérard 1981, 73.
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