Falola, others appraise history of Islam in Africa

The erudite historian led a penal of scholars at the last edition of the Toyin Falola Interview Series with the theme on the history of Islam in Africa. The panelists were Professor Cheikh Anta Babou of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, he is a historian of Islam and the modern West African Muslim diaspora; Professor Yahya Sseremba, a research fellow at Makarere Institute of Social Research, with focus on interdisciplinary, and special interest in political thought, political identity, and political violence; Professor Fatima Seedat, Head of Department of African Feminist Studies, Director of the African Gender Institute and Co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Islam at the University of Cape Town; Professor M. Oloyede AbdulRahmon who is a teacher, university administrator, with specialization in Arabic literature and Islamic cultural studies at the University of Ibadan; and Dr Mustapha Abdul-Hamid is an Islamic scholar and the Chief Executive of the National Petroleum (NPA) of Ghana.  

A rather passionate Professor Babou stated that “When you think of Islam in Africa, there is epistemic bias inherited from Orientalism. This is shaped by race, geography and ethnicity. This bias considers Islam as a set of morals, ideals and best represented by Arabs. They believe that it is only among Arabs and Berbers that you can find the purest expressions of Islam. Sub-Saharan Africa has been seen in this perspective as learners but not as producers of Islamic knowledge, so that in the global narrative of Islam in Africa, you don’t see Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu. Sometimes you might see him but he is only one that is featured here. West African Muslims are wrongly labeled bad practitioners of Islam because it is argued that the kind of Islam that is practiced in West Africa is a tainted Islam. They refer to this as the Islam that struggles to understand the complexity of Allah because Africans are unable to have a conception of an abstract God. They insist that West Africans have to have a tangible, touchable representation of God. But when you look at the history of Islam from below, what you will see is not the unidirectional articulation of knowledge but an exchange of the circulation of knowledge between Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. From that perspective, you will see that Sub-Saharan Africa was never a barrier between the South and the North. The Sahara has always been a bridge between the South and the North especially when you think of knowledge.”

Earlier in his submission, Babou had argued that the history in Africa was lopsided as it only reflected state-building and Jihad. According to him, “The foundation of the Islamic identity in Africa is located at the intersection of global Islam and local African identities. I see these local Islamic identities as discursive. They are neither diluted in the global Islamic ummanor confined to the margins of Islam. But these are Islamic identities that reflect the lived Islam; this is the Islam that we study. This is not the Islam of the Oriental that think of Islam as a set of ideas and moral values that are confined into a book, and which does not reflect reality in itself. We study the Islam of real people. This is not about a reflection of poor Islam of Africa which is seen to be different from the global Islam. It is Islam as it is, whether in Africa or anywhere else. It responds to people’s existential and spiritual needs. There is an emerging scholarship about Sub-Saharan Africa which really prioritises African voices, African sources, and very much preoccupied with offering an understanding of Islam from below. We have this scholarship which is developing and which is actually led by Muslims themselves. They are writing their history and by doing so, they are centering African voices of Islam.

“Despite this hopeful change, we can argue certainly that the scholarship on Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa is still dominated by studies of state building and Jihad. This scholarship to a large extent reflects the classical historiography of Islam that was pioneered by Europeans and Americans. This is articulated around two major temporary moments. One of those is the golden age of Islam: 14th and 15th centuries, I6th century Songhai and Mali. Then we have a long silence where you don’t hear anything about Islam until the 19th century. This was when we began to have the so-called age of Jihad. This seemed to have been used as a means of inscribing Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa in the global narrative of the history of Islam. You might even see it as a way of Islam making Africa itself relevant to global history by articulating those Jihads that were happening in Africa with revolutions happening around the world.

“My problem with this approach is that is that it is the history of the elite. It is a political history of Islam. Its sources are mostly classical Arabic sources. Its discourse only talks about state builders and Jihadists. It is a theology that does not really look at, in my view, what is really Islam. For me, Islam is the Islam of Quranic education; it is the Islam of mosque building; it is an Islam that reflects on ways of solving real people’s problems. It is the Islam that allows us to look at the long history of Islam in Africa. There is a history of Islam that allows us to see continuities, rather than focusing on big moments. There are Muslims who continue to live, to produce scholarship.

“There must be continuity in the history of Islam. We must write the people’s history of Islam in Africa. How do we write that history? What tools do we need to write that history? The people’s history of Islam in history will be a history that prioritises local sources of Islam; those local sources will include classical Arabic. They will also include local stories in local languages in Arabic; it will also include oral history in local languages. It will include non-textual culture or sources of Islam. I am thinking of architecture, the long tradition of mosque building in Africa that reflects the environment, Islamic identities depending on the region of Africa. I am also thinking of inscriptions. I am also thinking of this history of Islam that is based on new types of sources. This is a type of history that tells the stories of the people themselves. The elite will be part of it but the story must not only be about them. I am also thinking about Muslim intellectuals who are not always associated with the state; I am talking about Ulammas. I am thinking about itinerary teachers, traders. It is always difficult to separate these itinerary teachers from traders. I am thinking of those who open Quranic schools, those who presided over christenings, celebration of eids; I am thinking of Muslim saints who travelled across Sub-Saharan Africa and made possible the spread of Islam, particularly in areas where Muslims were a minority. This people’s history of Islam will provide us a narrative that really moves us beyond elitism, state building and Jihad.”

Reflecting on what he termed the ‘production of Islamic truth in Uganda’, Sseremba opined that Muslims have always rejected America’s accusation of the Madrassa Islamic school system as fueling political violence. For him, “By the production of Islamic truth, I mean the ways in which Islam is interpreted, the way Islam is taught in Islamic schools. Who has the authority to say this is Islamic and this is not Islamic. Specifically in that book, I am looking at the contestation between the American government and Ugandan Muslims on how to define Islamic education, on how to determine the content of the Madrassacurriculum on what constitutes good or bad Islam through Orientalist and Islamaphobic categories that the American war on terror espouses. My research focuses on the colonial character of modern power and the kinds of subject that this power shapes and how these subjects challenge and produce the logic of this colonial power. I am particularly being interested in how the colonial state governs society as ethnic subjects, as religious subjects and gendered subjects. I am interested in the intersection between culture, history and politics.

“My earlier work examined the making of so-called native tribes in Uganda. The colonial concept of tribe has persisted in the discourse and structure of the colonial state, signifying the continued politicization of ethnicity. My more recent work focuses on the making of religious subjects, especially Muslim subjects in Uganda. There are striking similarities in the ways in which tribal subjects and Muslim subjects have been produced since the colonial era. Part of the production of tribal subjects was to introduce customary law as a corruption of custom. Similarly part of the production of Muslim subjects was to introduce the so-called Muhammedan law as the corruption of the Sharia. Both in the making of tribal subjects and Muslim subjects, the so-called native authorities were deployed in the name of preserving native customs and native religion. In the name of governing Africans according to native customs and religion, these native authorities as we all know assume the power to define customary law and Muhammedan law. This was a serious departure from ancient practice when society based authority through centre-stage in the definition of custom and in the interpretation of the Sharia.

“Both tribal and Muslim subjects were allocated the homelands and governed not as citizens but as members of their respective tribal or Muslim homelands. This governance of Muslims as members of a Muslim homeland applied especially in contexts in Uganda where Muslims were a political minority in colonial Uganda. But there are also differences between the making of subjects and the making of Muslim subjects, at least in Uganda. The colonial state actively participated in the definition of customary law. The state appointed native judges and often interfered in how these native judges defined and interpreted native customs. But the colonial state was reluctant to define Muhammedan law in Uganda. It neither established nor recognized Islamic courts even if it allowed the Muslims to conduct their marriages and domestic life generally according to Muhammedan law. Thus, the so-called Muhammedan law in Uganda that evolved and operated formally outside of state institutions instead of seeking to shape the Muslim subject by defining Islam through the production of Muhammedan law, the colonial and postcolonial state governed the Muslims by the use of naked violence and by co-opting Muslim leaders through patronage.

“The failure of the colonial state dominates the definition and interpretation of Islam as closely as it did with the customs allowing Muslim societies to enjoy considerable autonomy in defining Islamic truth for themselves. One aspect in which the Muslims have enjoyed autonomy is the aspect of Islamic education, in the determination of what to teach. We can therefore say that Muslim societies have lived in some state of self-governance, in significant aspects of their affairs like Islamic education, marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so on. The International Centre for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) and by extension the American government it represents has recycled the old culturalist, racist and Islamophobic assumptions of colonial anthropology by claim that the politics and violence of Muslim actors is posed by Islam or a certain interpretation of Islam, especially Salafism. The ICRD has no explanation for political violence apart from pointing to the Quran. Such culturalist, racist and Islamophobic narratives are founded by a laughable distinction between the West and East, between reason and tradition, between the secular and the religious as we all know.”

While navigating the texture of the interaction, Professor Falolainquired of Professor Seedat to interrogate the role of feminism in reforming Islam. To this, Professor Seedat stated that “My work has been about Muslim family reform. This is because of the ways in which Muslim family law itself conceptualizes the female subject. Who is the female subject of the Islamic law? For example, I had an experience this week. It is not a singular experience but it is exemplary of the kinds of experiences that I have when we deal with Islamic law on the continent. I had a call from a rather prominent woman who had been in a marriage for about 30 odd years, whose husband had taken a second wife without her permission or knowledge and she found herselfunable to take this and is now ready to leave the marriage. She had no assets in her name; she was quite sure that any asset that she asks for would not be granted. Further to the proprietary of the marriage, she was in a situation where she will not be able to be sure that she would leave the marriage. This is because as a couple, they were only married under Islamic law. The nature of Islamic law marriage is generally, unless a couple has negotiated it in their contract, unilateral. The exit from the marriage is primarily unilateral; it is unequal. Such is the nature of the contract and we are often very proud of the idea that in Islam, marriage is a contract because it suggests that two parties require consent and can enter into this as active agents.

“What is important to note is that, the kinds of rights couples have getting into a marriage are not exactly similar when they choose to exit the marriage. Technically though there are facilities available for this, they are however not widely used in our communities. In fact if you ask most people about the nature of divorce in marriage, they will tell you about Talak. And Talakin itself is about pronouncement, that a man can say Talak. In Islam, the man holds Talak in his hands. He may at the point of marriage delegate the Talak.

“The other way to end a Muslim marriage is a judiciary pronouncing a separation. There is another way of ending a Muslim marriage in Egypt where the woman returns what was paid on her at the point of marriage; by this she releases herself from the marriage. This is one of the ways that Muslim family laws have been working and operating which is behind the push for reforms. To be able to get into a contract and not be able to exit that contract is problematic. The ideas of reform stem from the nature of the marriage contract which once might have suited societies and communities but doesn’t appear to be working right now for us. Some of this comes from the nature of the marriage contract. The legal contract of the marriage does not restrict a husband to exclusive intimacy with his wife even though it restricts the wife to exclusive intimacy with her husband. Most young people don’t know this and when they get married, they assume that if they don’t give consent to their husband getting into a second marriage that he will not, cannot or he may not. But that is not true. Technically within most systems of Islamic law, a man may contract a second, third and fourth marriage with or without the consent of his first wife. These are some of the issues that lie at the base of the calls for reform.”

In a twist to the conversation, Dr Abdul-Hamid advanced reasons for differences in the experience of religious conflict in Nigeria and Ghana. According to him, the history of Islam in Ghana had always been embedded in state formation. “In the case of Ghana, Islam came into Ghana not in a uniformed fashion but through various ethnic and political formations. We saw the conversions of paramount chiefs and founders of ethnic polities. Because of the conversion of political heads of these ethnic polities, somehow the religion of Islam became state religion for the people. So right from the formation of this state, Islam became embedded in its structure, mores and practices. When you come to Asante, you will see the roles of Muslims in the formation of the Asante kingdom especially in form of amulet making and soldiers of war. Islam came into the various states embedded in state formation before all these states became the larger Ghana.

“When you look at the coastal part of Ghana, the colonial British were the first to bring in Hausa soldiers and police to form the nucleus of Ghana’s army and police force. It was called the Gold Coast Hausa Constabulary. This originally numbered about 200 police people brought from Hausa land and settled in the coast of Ghana. They were Muslims and they came with their religion, same with the army. Up till today, the southern command of Ghana’s army has as its motto the Hausa terminology: ‘Kulumsiri’ which means always ready. This is so till this day. This tells you the role that Islam played in the formation of the nation-states of Ghana. As the years rolled by, Muslims felt that they were not being given their due in respect to their contributions to the formation of Ghana. They formed in 1932 what they called the Gold Coast Muslim Association. Later on, it was transformed into a full-fledged political party known as the Muslim Association Party in 1954. Even though it was a Muslim party, they brought into their fold a lot of Christian intelligentsia. At that time not many Muslims had secular education.

“For a long time, there was a suspicion by the Muslim population against secular education. This was because secular education was brought in by Christian missionaries. To accentuate the Muslim phobia for education, Muslim children were required to take up Christian names when they went to school. This Christian intelligentsia came in to help the Muslim party which also had an axe to grind with Kwame Nkrumah’s political party. One of the Christian members of the Muslim party when asked to speak noted that “the Muslims form about 60 per cent of the police force, about 90 per cent of the army, and about 80 per cent of the Labour Force in the country and yet they are treated like dirt in the ground.” Since 1969 when a law was passed asking foreigners particularly Nigerians to leave the country, Muslims have been very politically active. To the extent that today Ghana established a ministry that caters to the needs of Muslim communities. This is because the argument of their forebears still applies,” he revealed.  

Earlier in his submission, Professor AbdulRahmon had asked the Nigerian government to acknowledge the role of the Arabic language in the history of Nigeria, noting that the government must do all things possible to get actively involved in the Madrassa system of Islamic education. According to him, “Madrasa is so important to Nigerian Muslims that the government should not leave it in the hands of private persons. We are faced today with banditry, Jihadist extremism and others. We must start thinking of how to cut the supply routes of the enlistment into those extremist groups; that is by carrying out a radical reform in our Madrassa system. I served on a committee at the federal level on the integration of the Madrasss system into the Universal Basic Education (UBE) policy of the Federal Government. I did mention then, although I was a lone voice, that it is not integration that would solve the problem but that the Federal Government must acknowledge the role Arabic has played in the history of Nigeria.

“I am happy Professor Falola as a historian knows very much that even in Ibadan, many of the historical sources that were germane to the early history of Ibadan are in Arabic manuscripts. There is this manuscript by Shehu Katibi which describes what transpired when the late Baale Opadere of the late 20th century was deposed. What transpired that day was captured in the manuscript of Katibi who wrote around 1903. He told the world what Oba Akinyele said about Usman Apampawho took over from Opadere. In that account by Oba Akinyele, he mentioned that Apampa was the one who instigated the riot that led to the dethronement of Baale Opadere. But this writer came out to say that Obadere himself admitted that there were a lot of reports of thievery in Ibadan, and because of that Ibadan was unsafe and people rioted and rebelled against him. This shows the importance of Arabic in tracing our early history. Arabic is very much respected by many people; it should be looked into and revolutionized.

“To some extent, Arabic can be integrated into the Western style of school system because we are very much concerned with what is happening in the North East and North West, perhaps that axis to Central Africa. What led those people there away from literacy in English was the fear of what English literacy could cause to their cultures and norms. For you to integrate the same Western style of education into their local educational system will scare them aware. This is why we have not been successful in the integration of Madrassa into UBE. The government must intervene by providing modern structures and rehabilitate those children rather than these children going out and begging for food. After all the government carries out school feeding in public schools; why can’t the same gesture beextended to children in Madrassa school systems?”