Jihad in West Africa: early phases and inter-relations in Mauritania and Senegal

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip D. Curtin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Religious History ◽  
West African ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Early Phases

The tradition of religious revolution directed against partially Muslim rulers is traced to the religious reform movement among the zwāya of Mauritania in the 1660s, and to the jihad that brought them briefly into control of Futa Toro, Cayor, Walo, and Jolof in the 1670s. In spite of the reconquest of these states by their secular rulers and the re-establishment of Hassānī control in southwestern Mauritania, the tradition of religious revolt and the aim of establishing an imamate under religious leadership lived on, to reappear in other Fulbe states. It came a generation later, with the jihad of Malik Sy in Bundu during the 1690s, and direct connexions can be traced between the leadership in Bundu and the leadership in the later jihad in Futa Jallon. The jihad in Futa the 1770s and 1780s followed in the same tradition. This evidence suggests that the external influence of the mid-eighteenth-century revival of Islam in Arabia and the Middle East has been overemphasized in West African religious history. Forces working for the reform of Islam based in Africa itself were already at work.

scholarly journals The Middle East and Brazil

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 102-107
Author(s):  
Philipp Bruckmayr
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
South America ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Political History ◽  
West African ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
American Power ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arab States

The title at hand is a valuable and timely edited volume that sheds light onthe economic, political, literary, social, cultural, religious, and historical connectionsbetween Brazil and the Middle East. Whereas the Middle East in thisrespect primarily means the area historically referred to as bilād al-shām (i.e.,Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel), the book also tackles the historicallinkages among Brazil, Muslim Andalusia, and West Africa. Structurally,the volume is divided into three parts, which are preceded by anintroduction by the editor.Part 1, “South-South Relations, Security Politics, Diplomatic History,”includes five papers, the first four of which are more or less straightforwardtreatments of political history/science. Paul Amar sketches the dynamic strategicchanges in policy toward the region and hegemonic American power duringthe early presidency of Dilma Rousseff (2010-13) in the face of majorchanges in the Middle East that rendered her continuation of the “handshakepolitics” that her predecessor Lula had extended toward the now-crumblingdictatorial regimes unfeasible. In the following chapter, Paulo Daniel EliasFarah discusses one of the fruits of Lula’s endeavors: the formation of theSummit of South America-Arab States in 2003. He situates this diplomaticconcord within a long history of contacts between Brazil and the Arab/Muslimworld as well as the transnational flows of forced and free migration, as epitomizedby the presence of enslaved West African Muslims and then, later on,Syro-Lebanese settlers in Brazil.Carlos Ribeiro Santana’s contribution sheds light on Brazil’s pragmatismin fostering relationships with the Middle East to secure its oil supplies againstthe background of the energy crises of the 1970s. This thread is also pickedup in the following paper by Monique Sochaczweski, which details how thesevery configurations caused Brazil to abandon its “equidistance” policy ...

Foundations of Religious Reform (Islah) and Cultural Revival (Nahda)

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-67
Author(s):  
Dyala Hamzah
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
The Press ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the foundations of hegemonic reform and cultural revival discourses in the Arabic-speaking lands of the modern Middle East from the perspective of the most recent forays in scholarly fields such as Islamic and Ottoman studies. Teasing out periodization and geographies, it grounds the thought and practice of canonical and less canonical actors in the historical public sphere in which they operated, questioning the relationship between the Nahda and the Tanzimat, the Nahda and eighteenth-century revivalism, the Nahda and the seventeenth-century Arab-Islamic florescence, as well as the special status accorded “Islamic” reform within the Nahda. Finally, it probes the larger questions of modernity, subjectivity, and citizenship between the onset of the protectorates and the termination of the mandates, as these became encrypted within the major ideologies (pan-Islam, pan-Arabism, territorial nationalisms) and enacted through the most significant technologies mobilized by the actors (the press, the associations, the parties, and the schools).

scholarly journals Islam in West Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-93
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sheikh Bangura
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Volta Basin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Systems

Islam in West Africa is a collection of nineteen essays written by NehemiaLevtzion between 1963 and 1993. The book is divided into five sections. dealingwith different facets of the history and sociology of Islam in West Africa.The first section focuses on the patterns, characteristics, and agents of thespread of Islam. The author offers an approach to the study of the process of thatIslamization in West Africa that compares pattems of Islamizacion in medievalMali and Songhay to patterns in the Volta basin from the seventeenth to thenineteenth centuries. He also assesses the complex roles played by Africanchiefs and kings and slavery in the spread of Islam.Section two focuses on the subject of lslam and West African politics fromthe medieval period to the early nineteenth century. Levtzion identifies twotrend in African Islam: accommodation and militancy. Islam's early acceptancein West African societies was aided by the fact that Islam was initially seen asa supplement, and not as a substitute, to existing religious systems. Levtzionanalyzes the dynamics of Islam in African states as accommodation gave wayin time to tensions between the ruling authorities and Islamic scholars, callingfor a radical restructuring of the stare according to Islamic ideals. The tensionsbetween the Muslim clerics of Timbuktu and the medieval Songhay rulers. andthe ultimately adversarial relationship between Uthman dan Fodio and the Gobirleadership in eighteenth-century Hausaland, are singled out for sustained analysis ...

A poisonous plant of the genus Datura (Solanaceae) in an eighteenth-century Danish garden in West Africa

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-159
Author(s):  
Daniel Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Ornamental Plant ◽  
Poisonous Plant ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

There was disagreement among colonialists about whether the Africans around the Danish West African forts made use of native poisons in the early nineteenth century, but it appears that the Danes themselves may have introduced a poisonous ornamental plant of the genus Datura in one of their own gardens on the Guinea Coast.

The Script

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Dyonne Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Black Body ◽  
West African ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
African Music ◽  
West Africans ◽  
Cultural Expressions

This chapter examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European and American travel journals to reveal the manner in which they portrayed West Africans in order to create the moral and social justifications for slavery and racial stereotypes. It argues that European travelers often ignored the ritualistic purpose of West African music and dance and instead reduced West Africans to servants, prostitutes, and entertainers. These societal positions were developed on the premise of European hegemony and aimed to create an African commodity. Throughout West Africa, music, song, and dance were important cultural expressions. However, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, European and American travelers distorted these expressions in order to project and fulfill their own desires. This chapter shows how travel narratives presented the identity of West Africans as malleable and capable of being shaped according to the desired purpose of the gazer. Through their creation of the innate dancers and singers, it contends that travel journals contributed to the subjugation and reconfiguration of the black body through its neglect of the actual culture and tradition of the performing arts.

Takrūr The History of a Name

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
'Umar Al-Naqar
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
West African ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
West Africans ◽  
History Of

The generic term Takarīr (also Takarna) is a popular Middle Eastern concept applied to all West African Muslims. The progenitor of the name, to which the attribution Takarīr is made, is the ancient state of Takrūr, which existed briefly on the Senegal basin from ca. a.d. 1OOO and which was the first West African chieftaincy to accept Islam. This paper suggests that probably the earliest West African Muslims to be seen in the Middle East in recognizable numbers may have come from that state. Because the milieu of the Hijaz and the diversity of races frequenting the annual pilgrimage ceremonies encouraged generalizations, the name Takarīr was conveniently applied to West Africans. The ambiguity of the term may thus be seen to have progressively increased with the expansion of Islam in West Africa, while the name itself became sufficiently entrenched in popular usage for it to survive the fame of great West African empires like Mali and Songhay. The term ‘Bilad al-Takrūr’ is essentially the extension of the Middle Eastern concept of Takrūr and has therefore received various territorial definitions.

The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century

1980 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Coastal Areas ◽  
West African ◽  
Sharp Reduction ◽  
Intense Competition ◽  
West India Company

The records of probably the biggest Birmingham gun-making firm specializing in the African trade and records of the Dutch West India Company are used in this article to throw more light on the quantities, types and quality of the guns imported into West Africa and on their effects in the eighteenth century. Inikori's estimate of 45 per cent as the proportion of English firearms in the total annual West African import of between 283,000 and 394,000 guns per annum is probably an underestimate because of the unknown quantities of English guns which were re-exported from Continental ports to West Africa. It is estimated tentatively that 180,000 guns per annum were being imported into the Gold and Slave Coasts by 1730, and that some of the most dramatic effects of the import of guns occurred between 1658 and 1730. A revolution in warfare began in the 1690s in the Senegambian coastal areas and along the Gold and Slave Coasts. The trebling of slave prices and the sharp reduction in gun prices between 1680 and 1720 enabled large militarized slave-exporting states to develop along the Gold and Slave Coasts. There was a strong demand for well-finished and well-proved guns as well as for the cheapest unproved guns, and the dangerous state of many of the guns imported into West Africa has been exaggerated. The reputations of European nations for the quality of their guns fluctuated. There was probably no steady deterioration in the quality of English guns imported between 1750 and 1807, but the quality of the cheapest guns deteriorated during periods of intense competition.

Secrets on the Muhammadan Way: Transmission of the Esoteric Sciences in 18th Century Scholarly Networks

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-105
Author(s):  
Zachary Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Actual Content ◽  
Scholarly Networks ◽  
Sufi Order ◽  
Unpublished Manuscripts

The eighteenth century witnessed a flurry of Islamic scholarly exchange, connecting North and West Africa to the Middle East and even India. The Islamic sciences transmitted through these networks have had lasting resonance in Africa, particularly in chains transmitting Ḥadīth and Sufi affiliations. Academics have been justly skeptical as to the actual content of these often short meetings between scholars, suggesting such meetings tell us little about shared scholarly understandings. Study of unpublished manuscripts detailing the acquisition of “secrets” (asrār), apparently widespread in these eighteenth-century networks, can add new understanding to the affinities between scholarly legacies emerging in the period. This paper considers such questions in relationship to Aḥmad al-Tijānī (d. 1815, Fez), the founder of the Tijāniyya Sufi order prominent in West Africa today.

scholarly journals The English Establishments on the Gold Coast in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

1922 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 167-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eveline C. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
National Pride ◽  
West African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.

Archaeological Research in West Africa

Antiquity ◽  
1944 ◽  
Vol 18 (71) ◽  
pp. 147-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. J. Arkell
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Tropical Forest ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
West African ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
West Africans

The pilgrimage to Mecca made on foot across Africa from west to east between the desert and the tropical forest keeps many West Africans in close touch with the valley of the Nile. The pilgrims follow a route along which culture must from the earliest times have been spread by refugees, traders, military expeditions and the like. (In these latter days motorized convoys of West African troops and aerial reinforcements for the Middle East have followed the same route).Over twenty years’ service in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (of which twelve years were spent in Darfur, where the cultural and political influence of West Africa was strong in medieval times, and is still felt today), has left me much interested in West Africa, although I have never been there.

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