Jihad of the Pen. Rudolph Ware

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      The Context of Islamic Intellectual Production in West Africa

      This volume focuses on texts that have played seminal roles in the constitution of West Africa’s largest Muslim communities, but with some apology. These texts are admittedly almost exclusively situated within the discipline of Sufism. They mostly speak to a form of Sufism that emphasizes the practical inculcation of an ethical disposition. Moreover, they were written by men. Ironically, these same communities can be used to argue against three related misconceptions about Muslim identity in Africa: that African Muslims practice Sufism at the expense of Shari‘a law, that the metaphysical language of theoretical Sufism is absent from African Muslim articulations, and that African Muslim women are silent in the Islamic intellectual history of the region. This section considers the broader literary production of West African Islam in order to argue against these stereotypes, and then to situate such observations within the communities under discussion. We hope that successive efforts can build on the outlines provided here to fill the void that this volume is unfortunately, owing to reasons of space, unable to adequately address.

      Islamic Law in West Africa

      The percentage of West African Arabic literature concerned with jurisprudence and legal studies, based on a representative sampling from Mauritania and the Western Sahara, far exceeds that centered on any other discipline. Roughly 35 percent of all such writings concern Islamic law.⁴⁷ By way of comparison, only 8 percent concerns Sufism. Much of this literature is “derivative” or explanative of earlier texts, serving to “document the creation of a self-sustaining body of scholarship.”⁴⁸ Successive generations of Timbuktu scholars, for example, composed numerous commentaries on Khalil al-Jundi’s (d. 1365, Egypt) versified summary (al-Mukhtasar) of Maliki jurisprudence.⁴⁹ Such foundational texts became a veritable “social–cultural currency” in West Africa that marked intellectual maturity.⁵⁰ Unpacking the complex dialectic between texts, written explanations, and oral teaching in African historical contexts is a challenge that has as yet remained mostly unanswered in academia. While several studies have demonstrated the complexity of African legal understandings in specific contexts,⁵¹ there remains a need for a broader thematic overview that allows formative voices from the region to speak for themselves. There is good evidence, based on secondary sources and a cursory reading of the rich primary materials, that West African legal traditions drew on a nuanced understanding of Maliki jurisprudence to make the shari‘a an enduring force for social good in both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts.

      Many observers continue to misread the multivalent dialogue between Islamic legal understandings and non-Muslim African cultures. Academics often seize upon a few reformist movements and, inevitably taking them out of context, make them resonate with their understanding of Islamic law’s rigidity based on a narrow text base. Such approaches silence centuries of broader (and ultimately more interesting) legal debate in Africa, much of it preserved in writing; they take as normative reformist voices that actually departed from or challenged mainstream legal understandings. Many have thus considered the Algerian ‘Abd al-Karim al-Maghili’s (d. 1505) arrival in the Songhay Empire as formative to the development of Islamic orthodoxy in West Africa.⁵² Al-Maghili supplies the new Sultan Askiya Muhammad Touré with several legal rulings justifying the excommunication (takfir) and killing of disobedient Muslims, as well as incitement against non-Muslim communities (in this case, North African Jews present in West Africa). For John Hunwick, such opinions appear to reflect a supposed (Arab) Islamic orthodoxy, obsessed with theological reproach and minority castigation. Shehu ‘Uthman’s later use of al-Maghili to justify jihad in Hausaland, according to Hunwick, thus “closely resembles” the justification used by extremist elements of the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel.⁵³ The actual context for Dan Fodio’s endorsement of armed struggle—namely, as a last resort against the enslavement, plundering, and murder of Islamic scholars (the latter long considered constitutive of Islam’s very survival)—disappears behind the alleged normative violence of Islam. Al-Maghili himself was rather marginal to mainstream scholarship in West Africa. Charlotte Blum and Humphrey Fisher observe a “positive chasm” between al-Maghili and the Timbuktu scholarly establishment, and a “total news blackout” surrounding his visit to the sultan of Songhay.⁵⁴ Timbuktu scholars disagreed with al-Maghili over the permissibility of killing (Muslim) Berber allies of Timbuktu, and the prominent Timbuktu judge Mahmud Aqit overturned al-Maghili’s fatwa demanding the expulsion of Jews from Songhay.⁵⁵

      Following the lead of text-based orientalist assumptions of Islamic legal orthodoxy, anthropologists of African Muslim societies often relish relating the heterodox practices of African Muslim subjects. Here, for example, is the conclusion of an ethnography examining contemporary practices surrounding death in Mauritania:

      Despite the commitment of Mauritanian religious scholars to spread . . . the true values of Islamic law to gradually replace existing traditions, the traditions have obstinately survived . . . one can observe that the religious aspects are interwoven with the social and tribal customs. This explains why the majority of the population seem unaware of the rules governing the status of death.⁵⁶

      As proof of such departure from “the true values of Islamic law,” the author cites “Wahhabi” texts (by the Saudi cleric Muhammad Albani, for example) prohibiting emotional expression at funerals, or the recitation of the Qur’an over a dead person. This type of ethnography seems little concerned with the complexities of Islamic legal discourse in West Africa, or the fact that local African practices may be reflective of well-argued legal opinions challenging more rigid juristic opinions produced elsewhere. Many of the practices that are supposed to be evidence of the imperviousness of African culture to Islam, such as talismans or the appearance of women in “public” (not to mention reading the Qur’an over the dead), are actually based on “orthodox” interpretations of Islamic law by African scholars. One West African Muslim scholar thus reprimanded Ibn Battuta for protesting against women’s presence in learning circles: “The association of women with men is agreeable to us and a part of good conduct, to which no suspicion attaches. They are not like the women of your country.”⁵⁷ These disparate examples point to the constitutive place of custom or culture (‘urf) in formulating Islamic law according to traditional jurists.⁵⁸ The assumption that whatever does not appear in a restricted set of textual referents is actually “un-Islamic” seems more of a circular argument shared by modern Islamists and orientalists, rather than the position of mainstream Islamic scholarship.

      The challenge in narrating the history of Islamic jurisprudence in Africa is to excavate those legal opinions that defined mainstream orthopraxy for centuries. For example, what were the legal opinions upon which the West African scholar mentioned above argued against Ibn Battuta’s assumption of gender norms in Islam? What were the legal methods by which al-Hajj Salim Suwaré, of the seminal Jakhanké clerical lineage, argued against the viability of jihad as a means of conversion to Islam?⁵⁹ How did African jurists justify the ecumenical incorporation of diverse medicinal and esoteric methods for the treating of Muslim patients, or the use of the Qur’an to heal non-Muslims? What did it mean for scholars like Momar Mbacké or Muhammad Niasse to work “in the court” of Ma Ba Dioukhou during the nineteenth-century Senegambian Jihad? What were the legal grounds on which the children of these scholars (Ahmadu Bamba and ‘Abdallah Niasse) gave up that armed struggle? How did scholars conceive of executive authority in communities where a just imam or amir was absent?⁶⁰ These questions, and others, are the stories of Islamic law in Africa that have only begun to be told by narrators with the requisite training to appreciate the complexities of Islamic legal discourse in Africa.

      Questions of Islamic law were never absent in the foundation of West Africa’s largest Sufi communities. Dan Fodio’s daughter, Nana Asma’u, spread Islamic learning and Sufi practice among Hausa women as a replacement for Bori possession СКАЧАТЬ