Research on Africa and Its Diasporas at York University, amount to an enormous quantity of data. Rather than cite the various articles, chapters, and sections of my books that have influenced the writing of this book, as well as the extensive materials from archives in more than twenty countries, I refer instead to the bibliography and the discussion in the book itself. Similarly, the publications of my students, where relevant, are also referenced in the bibliography and in the annotations.
My approach relies on a methodology that I have characterized as an alternative perspective to a Eurocentric bias that can discuss Muslim converts when there is no proof of any conversion or “Islamized” structures and people when nothing was “Islamized” in the way that is intended in such descriptions, because things, institutions, and people were already Muslim. There was no process under way that can be described as “Islamization,” even if what was emanating from Europe was justification of imperial ambitions through claims to “Christianization” and “Europeanization” that were intended to justify subjugation and domination. It was and is easy to determine who was a Muslim and who was not, even if Muslims disagreed over whose interpretation of Islam was legitimate and whose was not. People did convert. That is not the issue, but when, where, and why conversion occurred requires an understanding of historical context.
The relevant historical questions relate to interpretation of the impact of Islam, not to conversion. In West Africa, the Qādiriyya ṭarīqa or brotherhood that adhered to a ṣūfī or mystical order of interpretation became dominant during what can be called an era of jihād, at least until the emergence of Tījāniyya and then the Mahdiyya extended the influence of jihād beyond the period that was contemporaneous with the European age of revolutions. The primacy of Sufism does not mean that everyone was an adherent of the Qādiriyya or accepted its wird or path. Depending on context, people behaved as Muslims in some contexts and might not in others. Behavior was defined by prayer in Arabic, profession of monotheism, and recognition of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the practice of certain customs relating to Ramaḍān, fasting, and communal celebration. Religious leaders who were literate in Arabic and taught children and adults the rudiments and advanced sciences had to be acknowledged as leaders of the community, whether it was seen locally in the specific context of a town or section of a town or broadly in terms of the world of Islam. Relations between males and females were subject to norms that were written and based on the Sharīʿa. Local customs and practices were also respected, however, although there was a strong tendency to condemn human sacrifice, the veneration of spirits associated with trees, rocks, hills, and other natural phenomena, the eating of pork, drinking, smoking, and human greed through the collection of interest, speculation, and hoarding. Individuals in situational contexts sometimes acted in ways that others might condemn as unorthodox. Slavery was a complicating factor in understanding how Islam was understood because of the emphasis on the status of freeborn Muslims as being inherently protected from enslavement and the social ostracism associated with the lack of kinship. However, to discuss societal relationships in terms of conversion or a process of “Islamization” does not grasp the historical context and only imposes a discourse that is foreign and that cannot be documented.
The jihād movement was revolutionary, as I document in this book. Interpretations of Islam were fundamentally changed as a result of jihād. Not only were existing governments overthrown and new states established, which were revolutionary acts in themselves, but also the centrality of Islam to society and social relationships was consolidated in ways that had not been the case previously. Most of the savanna and the Sahel had long been part of Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, but the establishment of the jihād states intensified the practice of Islam among elites, merchants, and the general population in ways that affected the meanings of ethnicity. I have previously attempted to present a more sophisticated analytical approach and perspective on understanding identity in the context of West Africa, which I have characterized as a “methodology through the ethnic lens.” As I have explained, ethnicity is a complicated phenomenon that is situational. References in the sources to what is considered “ethnic” require explication to discover what is meant and what is not. Ethnicity is complex, both changing and not changing. Hausa and Mande had existed as identities related to language and culture for hundreds of years before the period that is the focus of this book. Patterns of scarification and cultural upbringing reinforced these identities over very wide geographical regions involving very large populations. Recognition of the ethnic factor is only the first step in understanding the revolutionary impact of the jihād movement on political structures and economic underpinnings that once may have been referred to as modes of production and social formations.
Many scholars have attempted to confront the perplexing dilemma of ethnic terminology that sometimes seems to confuse attempts to understand African history. This perplexity especially applies to scholars of the Atlantic world and scholars of slavery in the Americas; a comparable dilemma of ethnic terminology does not seem to affect the analysis of European history, when there was no such identification in the ongoing frictions among France, England, Spain, Portugal, and other “European” countries. The origins of people, how they have identified in different contexts, and the languages individuals have spoken are repeatedly confused and often fused. The same methodology should be employed in the disaggregation of context and the explanation of relationships for people of European and African background. If we examine the age of revolutions as a unifying feature of history in the world of western Europe and the Americas, we need to understand the age of jihād in West Africa during the same period. The implications for appreciating the seriousness of contemporary jihād in the Islamic world, whether in West Africa or elsewhere, are profound.
1
THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Eric Hobsbawm described the period between around 1775 and 1850 as the “age of revolution” that marked a turning point in modern history.1 For Hobsbawm and subsequent historians, revolution altered the course of world history, or at least the history of that part of the world centered on Europe and by extension the Americas and what has come to be known as the Atlantic world. The political transformations that undermined autocratic and aristocratic governance were matched by economic change, especially the intensification of industrialization and the emergence of the modern global economy. The powerful arguments supporting this view of historical change challenge scholars of Africa and the African diaspora to understand how people of African descent fitted into this period of history. Clearly, the St. Domingue revolution and many slave revolts that occurred during the age of revolutions can be understood to be part of the historical trend identified by Hobsbawm. Indeed, Eugene Genovese has argued as much, envisioning the St. Domingue revolution as a turning point in the history of resistance to slavery. According to Genovese, resistance before the St. Domingue uprising idealized a politically independent African past, while subsequently the enslaved population concentrated on overthrowing the system of slavery rather than on establishing enclaves of restoration of some reconstructed African past.2 As David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have noted, the identification of the “age of revolutions” is one of “the most enduring period markers known to modern historians and has often been used by scholars invested in identifying pivotal moments in the emergence of a putatively modern world.”3
What is not clear is how the African regions that bordered the Atlantic and the people who constituted the African diaspora in the Americas related to the global pattern that is identified as the age of revolutions in the Atlantic world. According to Joseph C. Miller, the age of revolutions was only “one phase in a longer cycle of militarization and commercialization in the greater Atlantic world that becomes visible when the dynamics of African, rather than Euro-American, history are used to define and calibrate the dimensions of transformation.”4 My purpose is to expand on Miller’s conception of the longue durée by focusing on jihād in West Africa as a means of establishing a clearer outline of the periods in African history. In this perspective, a large part of West Africa witnessed revolutionary changes at the same time as the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas, which help establish how the homelands and regions
