Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
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CHAPTER
4
ISLAM
Islam was still a new faith when it was carried across North Africa
and down the East African coast. Within six hundred years of the
Prophet's death it had penetrated the Sahara to the Sudanic belt
stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. By the late nineteenth
century the range of Islamic institutions in Africa's Muslim
communities resembled the complexity of those in the heartlands
of Islam; indeed, the northern third of Africa was firmly integrated
into the Islamic world, both through the faith itself and through
its overlapping economic networks. The region that was to
provide a testing ground for Islam during our period was the
middle third of the continent. There the combined forces of
Christian missions and colonial governments generally sought to
mitigate or at least control the advance of Islam, and Muslim
communities were thereby spurred on to answer this challenge,
occasionally under the aegis of the Europeans but also in
contradiction to the Western values associated with the colonial
order.
The particular adaptations of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa were
typical of the variety of Muslim communities on other frontiers
of the Islamic world. There were a few Shi'ite communities in
North Africa and along the East African coast, but nearly all
African Muslims were 'orthodox' Sunni. Islamic law
(sharfa)
and
the scholars ('u/ama') and jurists
(qadis)
who interpreted it served
as the foundation for each community, whether a cluster of
nomads' tents or a polity of several million souls. Among the four
schools of Islamic law, two were widely represented in Africa:
the Maliki rite predominated in North Africa and West Africa,
and the Shafi'i school in East Africa. Treatises from the other
schools were found in libraries and were noted in legal decisions
of the day, and adherence to differing schools of law rarely led
to political confrontation as did controversies over legal inter-
pretation, or compromise between the sharfa and pre-Islamic
practices.
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More important still in providing group identity were the
mystic Sufi orders or brotherhoods (turuq, sing, tariqd). These
were generally known by the founder's name, taken on by
adherents who observed a litany and teachings of the saint and
his disciples or holy men (shaykhs) who served brotherhood
members as intercessors between this world and the next. Im-
portant orders in Africa included some of the oldest, such as the
Qadiriyya (named after the twelfth-century Baghdad mystic 'Abd
al-Qadir) and the Shadhiliyya (after the thirteenth-century
Maghribi saint al-Shadhili); and one of the most recent, the
Tijaniyya (founded by the Algerian mystic Ahmad al-Tijani who
died in 1815). The Muslim brotherhoods have traditionally been
in the vanguard of Islam, and this was no less true in Africa where
shaykhs on the frontiers of the Muslim world imaginatively
adapted the teachings of the Prophet and of their own orders to
incorporate local religious sensibilities. The inherent tension
between a highly personalised Sufism and an often rigid shari'a,
and between the advocates for each, was also found in Africa's
Islamic communities. The most important and sensitive arena of
cultural influences across Muslim Africa was the educational
system. Religious education began (and for most ended) in
Koranic schools where youths memorised the holy book of Islam;
students seeking advanced training in the Islamic sciences sought
out
'ulama'
and libraries at a centre of scholarship
(madrasa).
Such
training developed informal regional and transcontinental
networks amongst the
'u/ama',
as did the pilgrimage
(Kajj)
to the
holy city of Mecca, though relatively few believers from distant
lands found this obligation practicable before the mid-twentieth
century.
The significance of the thirteenth century after the Prophet's
bijra
or flight from Mecca in AD 622 (from which time the Islamic
calendar begins) deserves special mention, for Islamic literature
had widely announced the arrival then of an 'awaited deliverer'
{mahdi)
who would prepare the world for the end of time. The
end of the thirteenth century AH marked the appearance of a
mahdi in the Sudan, Muhammad Ahmad b. 'Abdallah, in AH
1299/AD 1881, but during the nineteenth century numerous
other mahdist predictions, expectations, self-declarations and
denials had affected Muslim communities throughout the Sudanic
belt. Muhammad Ahmad died in 1885, but there was speculation
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that the Mahdi might in fact appear soon after the thirteenth
century AH, and amid the political uncertainties following the
partition of Africa mahdism retained a populist appeal which
lasted into the late 1920s.
The European conquest of Algeria (1830), of Tunisia (1881)
and of Egypt (1882) led to change in many Islamic institutions.
In Algeria, even the Arabic language was replaced by French for
official use. In Tunisia and Egypt, the westernisation of state
institutions was under way well before the French and British,
respectively, began their rule, and leading Muslim intellectuals
debated the issue of modernisation. Neighbouring Libya, at the
same time, remained under vestigial Ottoman control, although
for the last quarter of the nineteenth century the province of
Cyrenaica was largely administered by the Sanusiyya, a Muslim
brotherhood founded by a mid-century Algerian holy man.
Morocco was governed by a centuries-old Muslim dynasty where
the office of sultan was one of the few institutions holding
together disparate economic and ethnic groups.
Across the southern Sahara and Sudanic belt European
intruders in the late nineteenth century encountered a number of
Islamic states that had mostly been founded earlier in the century.
Some overlaid centuries of Islamic culture. Some, such as Futa
Toro in the Senegal river basin and the Sokoto caliphate in what
became Northern Nigeria, traced their origins to eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Islamic reform movements that predated
European colonial interests in the region. Others, such as al-Hajj
'Umar's state at Segu and the Mahdist state in the eastern Sudan,
were stimulated by the challenge of infidel incursions as well as
by their leaders' call for a purified Islam.
Islam had also spread along trade routes into the West African
rain forest, as in Asante, and in south-western Nigeria it was well
established by 1905 in several Yoruba towns. On the eastern
fringes of Ethiopia, Islam had long been dominant, and there was
another string of Islamic communities along the East African
coast, from the Horn to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.
In the later nineteenth century Muslim influence reached inland
from the east coast to Lake Nyasa (Malawi) and the Congo basin.
Further south, in Natal, some Indian immigrants followed Islam,
while the small Muslim community in the western Cape originally
derived from Malay slaves and political prisoners. Between and
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ISLAM
beyond all these centres of Muslim settlement moved Muslim
traders; they were often accompanied by teachers associated with
the Sufi brotherhoods who implanted Islamic institutions where
previously there had been only cursory knowledge of the Prophet's
message.
By the end of our period, Muslims may have constituted nearly
half the population of Africa and were bound together by their
common colonial experience. They had witnessed movements of
resistance to infidel rule; they had evolved mechanisms to reject
that rule where it intruded upon fundamental aspects of Islam;
and they were experiencing
a
regeneration and expansion of Islam
within their regions. The form and content of this resurgence
varied according to the interplay of several factors: the nature of
contacts between Muslim communities and European colonisers
early in the century, the policies of colonial administrations, and
the communications between particular communities and other
parts of the Muslim world. By the early 1940s there were broadly
parallel developments within Islamic communities on a regional
basis throughout the continent and a linking of those communities
and regions across Islamic Africa. Our survey of these changes
will consider first the hostility of Muslim communities towards
European invaders during the first quarter of the century; it will
then examine the attitudes of colonial administrators towards
Islamic communities; and it will conclude by reviewing the signs
of expansion and regeneration of Islam in Africa between the
wars.
The focus will mainly be upon sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic
institutions and trends in North Africa are surveyed in chapter
6, and other regional chapters provide further information re-
garding topics treated here.
RESISTANCE
Appeal to jihad (holy war) against backsliders and infidels was
frequently synonymous with reform and expansion in Islamic
polities during the nineteenth century in Africa. During the first
quarter of the twentieth century in the Maghrib and across the
Sudanic belt, jihad continued to provide powerful motivation for
diverse Muslim communities, although its focus was not so much
internal reform as a defence of Muslim lands against the
encroachments of European infidels. Most of these militant
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Islamic movements sought to maintain or re-establish an Islamic
state that was either under attack or had been recently occupied
by the European powers. They tended to be led by officers or
descendants of notables in the former regimes, although some
drew inspiration from religious visionaries who stepped into the
void of Muslim leadership in conquered territories. Their
resilience was due as much to their inaccessibility and the lack of
resolve by colonial powers during the early years of the century
as to their ideological cohesion and belief in a divine ordination.
They shared a belief that the occupation of Muslim lands by
Europe might be stemmed by a frontal attack and that military
action constituted the only correct response for the Muslim whose
country was being invaded by infidels. In view of the modest
number of European troops seen in many parts of the continent
during the opening years of the century, the success of jihads in
the recent past, and the number of such movements affecting the
continent, it is understandable that holy war held a widespread
appeal for Muslim communities confronted with European
occupation.
The four regions in which militant Muslim resistance to
colonial rule proved to be the most determined — the Sudan,
Somaliland, Libya and Morocco — were also among those
territories in which Islamic states flourished at the time of
European conquest. In Libya and the Sudan those states were
recent, late nineteenth-century creations, and colonial forces faced
opponents who were among the vigorous first- and second-
generation leaders in those polities. In Morocco, it was the
compromises forced upon the venerated office of sultan, first by
the French and then by the Spanish administration in the north
of the kingdom, that precipitated two calls to jihad.
The Sudanese resistance took its inspiration from the Mahdist
state founded by Muhammad Ahmad in 1882, which fell with the
British victory at Karari (Omdurman) in 1898. For the next
eighteen years the western sultanate of Darfur remained an
autonomous regime under 'Ali Dinar who maintained his in-
dependent slave army, and an administration modelled on that of
the Mahdist state. 'Ali Dinar successfully retained control over
Darfur until 1916, despite French advances in Wadai and along
the western marches of Darfur. From his capital at El Fasher he
entered into correspondence with young Turkish leaders and
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remonstrated over the British deposition of Khedive Abbas II.
The final British action against El Fasher, complete with air
support, came after the British concluded that 'Ali Dinar was
about to launch an invasion of the Sudan. Of lesser significance
were the 'Kaffiyya Rising' in 1908 led by the Mahdist 'Abd
al-Qadir in the Gezira and the jihad announced in southern Darfur
in 1921 in response to British taxation schemes.
During the first two decades of the century the British were
also preoccupied with a movement in the Horn of Africa which
owed its inspiration in part to the Sudanese Mahdiyya. This was
the jihad launched by Muhammad 'Abdallah Hasan, called by the
British the 'Mad Mullah', who preached holy war against all
infidels, including Somalis who did not recognise his claims or
who had not joined his branch of the Salihiyya brotherhood. His
strict discipline, and his efforts to create a Pan-Somali allegiance
transcending clan loyalties, gave particular force to his anti-
European sentiments. The British sent four expeditions against
him between 1900 and 1904, and in 1909 he was denounced by
the leader of the Salihiyya, but his reign over northern Somaliland
continued until 1920.
In Libya and the central Sahara it
was
the Sanusiyya brotherhood
that served as a focal point for Muslim resistance to alien
intrusion. Between 1879 and the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911,
the Cyrenaica province of that territory had been administered
jointly by Ottoman officials and Sanusi shaykhs. Their common
combat against the infidel forces of
France,
Italy and later Britain
was an extension of this collaboration, despite the uneasy tolerance
each party maintained toward the other. Sanusi forces held out
against Italian advances into the interior from the departure of
Ottoman troops in 1912 until 1916. Sayyid al-Mahdi (d. 1902), the
successor to the brotherhood's founder, had expanded the
Sanusiyya into the central Sahara where another theatre of Sanusi
warfare developed in the first two decades of the century. Sayyid
al-Mahdi's successor, Sayyid Ahmad
al-Sharif,
tried unsuccessfully
to defend the order's settlements against French incursions in 1906
at al-Kawar and Bilma and in 1909 in Wadai. During the First
World War the Sanusis were able to recapture French and Italian
posts in the region, only to lose them again during the French
reconquest between
1917
and 1920. The second Italian-Sanusi war
(1923—32) was a popular uprising fought in the name of Islam for
an independent Cyrenaica.
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Militant confrontations with European infidels in Morocco
came first from the Sahara where by the turn of the century Shaykh
Ma' al-'Aynayn had collected some ten thousand followers at
Samara in territory to the south of Morocco that was soon to be
claimed by Spain. His status as the most revered figure in the
northern Sahara, a region famous for its holy men, persuaded the
Moroccan sultan, 'Abd al-'Aziz, to despatch to him a deputy and
arms for the defence of the Sahara in 1905 as the French began
their advance northwards from the Senegal valley. Two years later
the shaykh helped to precipitate the sultan's deposition in favour
of 'Abd al-Hafiz who would, he believed, offer sterner resistance
to French inroads in the kingdom and seek closer ties with the
Ottomans. In 1908 Ma' al-'Aynayn declared a jihad against the
French; when French advisers obliged the sultan to sever relations
with the shaykh in 1910, Ma' al-'Aynayn declared himself sultan
and advanced through Marrakesh towards Fez. Here he was
decisively defeated by the French and in September of that year
he retired to his retreat at Tiznit where he died the following
month. His son and successor, al-Hayba, continued the struggle
against the Christian infidels and for a unified Morocco and
Sahara. In 1912 he declared himself both mahdi and sultan and
temporarily regained Marrakesh, but he was forced to retreat to
the desert. His guerrilla warfare continued during the First World
War with the help of arms obtained through traders in the Rio
de Oro. At his death in 1917 one of his brothers took up leadership
of the struggle until 1926, and in 1929 another of his relatives,
Muhammad al-Mamun, revived the shaykh's cause by preaching
jihad and taking the offensive against French outposts. Not until
1934 could the French claim that their 'pacification' campaigns
had successfully crushed the last of
this
Islamic resistance in their
Saharan territories. In the north of Morocco yet another genre
of militant resistance to European occupation emerged in 1922
with the creation of the Rif Republic under the leadership of'Abd
al-Karim (1882-1963). He had been educated both in Islamic and
in Spanish Catholic schools, after which he worked until 1919 in
the Spanish colonial administration. Thus 'Abd al-Karim was able
to bring some knowledge of Western methods of government and
warfare to the task of creating an Islamic republic which might
defend its own against the infidel. He leased mineral concessions
to European firms in return for arms and military technicians, and
launched devastating military offensives against the Spanish forces
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ISLAM
before being defeated by French and Spanish troops in 1926. This
warfare, reinforced by news of Islamic militancy from elsewhere
in the Maghrib and the Sudanic belt, served to identify Islam with
an anti-colonial stance amongst those Africans who sought such
an ideology.
This last point can be illustrated from several other parts of
Africa in the first quarter of the century. Conversions followed
in the train of French campaigns against Samory Toure's state in
the West African Sudan during the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, strengthening Islam among the Mandinka
despite the casual adherence of Samory
himself.
In German East
Africa, the savage repression of the Maji Maji revolt in 1905—7
induced the Ngindo and other peoples in the south-east to espouse
Islam as a modern belief-system which owed nothing to
Europeans. In 1908 an Arab trader in Zanzibar, Rumaliza, whose
business had been ruined by the Germans, caused the distribution
on the mainland of a letter, supposedly written in Mecca, which
promised an early anti-colonial millennium. During the First
World War the Central Powers further promoted the image of a
militant, anti-colonial Islam, allied through the Ottomans to
Germany and against the British and French occupation of
Muslim lands. This accounts in part for the alliance in 1915
between Muhammad 'Abdallah Hasan and the Ethiopian emperor
Iyasu, whose own flirtation with Islam contributed to his deposi-
tion in 1916.
The feature that distinguishes the militant Islamic movements
of the early twentieth century from preceding jihads, and the
feature that most alarmed the colonial powers, was the Pan-Islamic
links between them. For
example,
regular communication between
the Sudanese Mahdi's camps and potential religious reformers in
Bornu at the end of the nineteenth century promoted a number
of declarations of mahdis which the British in Northern Nigeria
regarded as among the chief threats to their early administration.
In 1906, British officers reported mahdis in Bauchi and Gombe
as well as Kontagora; German intelligence uncovered a likely
mahdi in Adamawa. Another mahdi was said in the northern Gold
Coast and Ivory Coast to have come from Bornu in 1904-5. But
the major challenge to British rule in Nigeria was the offensive
taken in Satiru, a village near Sokoto, in 1906, when a mahdist
force successfully attacked a British column and acquired con-
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siderable weaponry as well as open pledges of assistance from the
emir of Gwandu. Within a month punitive expeditions had
dispersed the Satiru threat and razed the village. But subsequent
investigations by French officers pointed to possible links between
the Satiru affair and a wider conspiracy against French forces in
nearby Zinder, and possible collaboration in such an offensive by
the emir of
Kano.
During the First World War, the youngest son
of the Sudanese Mahdi was recognised by the British as a religious
leader, since they saw him as a natural ally against the Ottoman
Empire.
1
The ensuing revival of Mahdist organisation in the
Sudan gave
a
new impetus to mahdist activity in northern Nigeria,
and Fulani from Bornu and Gombe rallied in 1923 around Malam
Sa'id, son of Muhammad Bello's descendant, Hayatu, who had
acted as the Mahdi's agent in Sokoto at the close of the nineteenth
century. Malam Sa'id was deported, but as late as 1927 British
officers detected mahdist activities in Katsina.
The Pan-Islamic network within Africa also linked the Sudanese
Mahdi's legacy with Sanusi leaders and, during the second decade
of the century, both briefly with Northern Nigeria. One of the
most effective Sanusi chiefs in the central and southern Sahara was
Kawsen ag Muhammad, a Tuareg who in 1904—5 left his exile in
Kanem to fight against French incursions in the southern desert.
He affiliated with the Sanusi in 1909 and two years later travelled
to Darfur where he contemplated joining 'Ali Dinar's forces
before returning to the Fezzan with his troops to join a Turkish
garrison. By 1916 his forces were laying siege to Agades and could
claim control over the main commercial entrepot of the central
Sahara, having rallied Tuareg compatriots against the French
throughout the Fezzan, Ahaggar and Air. In a rare display of
co-operation, British administrators in Kano were prompted by
the Kawsen threat to provide military supplies to French troops
as they took the offensive against him in 1916; three years later
Kawsen was caught and put to death at Murzuk.
During the first two decades of the century the most pervasive
Pan-Islamic influence associated with militant Islam in Africa was
that of the Ottoman Turks. Sultan Abdiilhamid II, who reigned
from 1876 to 1908, attracted an allegiance from many African
Muslims who acknowledged Turkey as the only remaining
Islamic power of consequence in a world of aggressive Christian
1
See chapter
15,
pp.
760-1.
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states.
Thus the sultan had been addressed by and replied to the
Muslim community of Lagos in 1894 on the importance of
Western education; from the 1870s there were links between
Istanbul and Cape Town Muslims. The sultan of Zanzibar, Sayyid
'Ali b. Hamud (1905-11) was entertained by Abdiilhamid; and
as late as 1910 Friday prayers in Dar es Salaam were still being
said in the name of the Ottoman sultan. During the period of the
Young Turks (1908-18) there emerged a Turkish intelligence
service with African ties that provided substance to previous
vague notions of fealty. At the outbreak of the First World War,
the Ottomans issued
a
call to jihad against the Allied powers which
was widely distributed in North Africa. It surfaced also in East
and Central Africa, where in 1915 the British arrest in Nyasaland
of
a
Muslim from Mozambique uncovered Swahili tracts bearing
Istanbul's call for holy war against the English. During the war
Ottoman and German arms and technicians were provided for the
Sanusi movement after Turkey formally withdrew from Libya,
and an attempt was made by Germany to smuggle arms to Ma'
al-'Aynayn's successor; 'AH Dinar had representatives in Istanbul,
and Ottoman recognition was extended in 1916 to Muhammad
'Abdallah Hasan, who also received a Turkish adviser at his
headquarters in northern Somaliland.
If the extent of these Pan-Islamic ties and sentiments set these
militant movements apart from the jihads of earlier times, their
avowed aim of maintaining Muslim authority in the face of threats
to a rightly guided practice of Islam united them with a centuries-
old tradition which was at once their main strength and their chief
liability. Popular support for calls to jihad against the Christian
infidels is evident from the tens of thousands of believers who
joined these movements. But in the end their success in opposing
European armament depended upon their own access to such
armament. By the mid-1920s, apart from the continuing Sanusi
war and minor skirmishes in the Sahara, jihad had been rejected
as an anachronism in Muslim Africa. Islamic leaders and com-
munities who sought to distance themselves from their Christian
rulers joined others who, from the advent of colonial rule, had
simply withdrawn from the political realities of infidel occupation.
The most dramatic form of withdrawal was emigration from
European-occupied lands. The little information that is available
suggests that this option was taken up by individuals and
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