a long tradition of homegrown Islamic radicalism, despite any role played by pan-Islamic influences.2 The dynamic forces that have arisen as a response to globalization and military solutions that are far more devastating than the evil that is targeted are not necessarily revolutionary in what they prescribe. One has only to look at the attitudes toward women to see that misogyny is a central feature of the response. In a postsocialist world, polarization has produced a new dialectic whose outcome is far from certain. That dialectic is associated with the Muslim concept of jihād as justifiable holy war against non-Muslims and indeed against Muslims who are considered lax and unsupportive of a strict adherence to Islamic law as understood in reference to the Sharīʿa.
The focus of this book is on the past, not the current manifestations of jihād and the global contradictions of enormous population growth, the tremendous advances in technology and scientific discovery, and the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tiny elites who have the means to perpetuate their position. Understanding the past jihād movement in West Africa is essential because the evolution of human society seems determined to find new ways of not learning from the past and relying on ignorance and subterfuge when the amount of new knowledge that has emerged is actually accelerating without any significant corresponding impact on the body politic. The more we learn through scientific enquiry, the less we seem to understand. The exposition of past jihād is essential in understanding how jihād continues to have strong appeal in West Africa, as does the intensive militancy of Islam in other contexts in the Middle East, in East Africa, and indeed in Great Britain, North America, and elsewhere.
This book attempts to situate the historical attraction of jihād in the context of the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century in West Africa, and specifically in the region south of the Sahara that is often referred to as the western and central Sudan and here is referred to as Bilād al-Sūdān, from the Arabic, the “land of the blacks.” This period is often labeled the age of revolutions in western Europe and the broader Atlantic world to highlight the series of revolutionary movements that produced the political and economic configuration of the modern world. The corresponding changes in Africa, and specifically in Islamic Africa, are almost entirely ignored or silenced. Whether or not the age of revolutions is thought to have begun with the independence of North American colonies from Great Britain in the 1780s or the outbreak of the French Revolution after 1789, the momentous events of the era resulted in the slave uprising in St. Domingue and the formation of independent Haiti in 1804, the Napoleonic Wars and subsequent attempts at restoration of monarchies in Europe, the independence of the mainland colonies of the Spanish Empire, the emergence of Brazil as an American nation, and the equally important and numerous slave uprisings and acts of resistance that followed Haitian independence. Notably absent from this focus on the age of revolutions are events and transformations that occurred in Africa, particularly Africa south of the Sahara. The focus here is on Islamic West Africa, not other parts of Africa, but the same questions of why we do not understand more when we know more can be directed at changes that occurred elsewhere on the continent. I argue in this book that the global transformations associated with the age of revolutions have to be reconceptualized to include other movements that were contemporaneous with the transformations that occurred in western Europe and the move toward independence of the European colonies in the Americas.
In examining Islamic West Africa and the background to the contemporary spread of al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Maitatsine, and Boko Haram, I draw heavily on my earlier work, in which various aspects of my argument in this book have been elaborated.3 The orientation of my many publications has been directed at overcoming the neglect of African history that underlines this book. The proposition that is pursued here is simple: how are we to understand the age of revolutions from the end of the eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century without considering the course of jihād in West Africa during the same period? Why is it that parallel developments are not examined? Why do scholars continue to interpret the West African experience in simplistic terms, unless they are specialists, when there is a vast literature that is accessible and easy to understand? Why do scholars talk about people in Senegambia as “converts to Islam” when they were simply Muslims who had not converted from anything because they were born into societies that had been Muslim for centuries and when there is no proof of any “conversion”? Why do scholars refer to “Islamicized Africans” who were actually Muslims when the same scholars do not use the same conceptual framework and do not refer to “Christianized Europeans” when they discuss Europeans who not only might be Christians but also might be Jewish? Why is such conceptual weakness tolerated when the same scholars make sure that sound historical standards are applied in accepting articles for learned journals like the American Historical Review or the William and Mary Quarterly? Common sense dictates that such biased, terminological slippage should not be allowed to determine the achievement of tenure and promotion when in fact such bad scholarship and inept thinking have impeded scientific advancement. Somehow, breaking through the conceptual blockages of perceiving the Atlantic world as a framework that does not incorporate Africa into the picture has to confront the failure of scholarly discourse.
The age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas transformed political structures and laid the foundations for economic development in western Europe and the Atlantic world, but also, despite the failure to include an analysis of Africa in the Eurocentric paradigm, it was challenged and transformed from within Africa. These transformations emanating from Europe and the Americas led to European colonial imperialism and imposed racialized interpretations of history that prevail to this day through the terminology that is employed in discussing the “other” and the means of verifying distorted methodology. The changes that emerged during the age of revolutions introduced what has been called a “second slavery” in the Americas, particularly in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, despite revolutionary changes that undermined monarchies, sometimes promoted more representative governments, and propelled economic change and technological advancement. Yet the analysis stops abruptly when a global view is required. How are we to understand the contradiction between revolution and intensified exploitation without examining what can also be called a “second slavery,” to use a term coined by Dale Tomich,4 which emerged in the jihād states of West Africa in the same period? How can we explain the contradictions of political reform and restorative reaction in Europe and the Americas without considering Muslim countries and the parallel and equally contradictory movements that prevailed in the regions dominated by Islam? The impact of industrialization and economic growth was indeed global, but there were countervailing forces at work in the world that attempted to achieve similar intensified economic growth, as outlined in this book with respect to the many Muslim countries of West Africa. To the extent that such transformations occurred during a time at which political revolution was current throughout the broad Atlantic world that includes West Africa, one has to account for the expansion of economies in areas dominated by Muslim governments in West Africa and elsewhere. This is not to say that the various trajectories were the result of the same causes or shaped the course of events in a common global pattern, but any attempt to understand contemporary Muslim extremism has to consider that there was a period in the past when the age of revolutions was shadowed by the age of jihād.
A number of articles and book chapters that I have previously published have prompted particular arguments in this book. I want to fully acknowledge the extent to which this analysis draws on my previous and ongoing research that has been central to my scholarly career. Moreover, a number of my students have been influential in the development of my thinking. Their research has expanded on some of my ideas, and I have drawn considerable inspiration from working in the collegial atmosphere that graduate teaching promotes. In some cases I have published essays in collaboration with students and former students, as well as editing collections of essays that draw on cooperation and intellectual discussion. I have also developed my ideas in concert with colleagues with whom I have long interacted and with whom I have sometimes published, if not always agreed. It is often difficult to distinguish the sources of ideas and the specific contributions of primary materials that underlie this book. I have shared rare source materials and have borrowed from others in ways and at times that would require a detailed autobiography to uncover. The primary materials that I have amassed over
