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267 12 Muslims under Colonial Rule Comparative Perspectives on Colonial Modernity in Africa European encounters with Africa had been confined for a long time to trading stations on the coast. In North Africa before the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans were mostly unable to travel beyond the coastal towns and their immediate hinterlands, mainly due to fears of espionage or policies of economic blockade. In sub-Saharan Africa, European endeavors to penetrate the coastal hinterlands inevitably failed, due to the toll that tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, and yellow fever took among the European sailors, soldiers, and traders. These conditions changed only in the second half of the nineteenth century, with medical research into tropical diseases, the development of superior firepower, and the disintegration of African polities which were unable to overcome the crisis triggered by the end of the slave trade in the early and mid-nineteenth century. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, European colonial conquest of Africa became an increasingly realistic enterprise. Colonial conquest had in fact begun in 1830, in the context of the French intervention in and the subsequent conquest of Algeria. This conquest was completed in the 1870s, against the resistance of major parts of the Algerian population, but with the support of other groups which saw in the French intervention a welcome relief from Ottoman domination. The Algerian experience provided France with a testing ground for further conquests in both North and West Africa, while the British had already acquired such testing grounds in India in the eighteenth century. The scramble for Africa from 1885, and the ultimate conquest and division of the continent by the early 1900s, was started by King Leopold II of Belgium, who aspired to the acquisition of a private colonial empire in the Congo, and the efforts of the European nations to confine these aspirations and to define terms of colonial occupation. The key to acceptance of claims to a specific territory was the effective presence of the respective colonial power in the territory , and thus effective control in situ. This requirement started a mad race through the continent, which lasted for approximately fifteen years and resulted in the military occupation of the continent and the definition of colonial boundaries in an impressive number of colonial boundary agreements. The only territories which remained free of European control were Liberia, which had acquired U.S. protection as a settlement of freed slaves from America, and Ethiopia, which had decisively defeated an Italian army in 1896 and had forced Italy to accept Ethiopian independence. By 1900, most of Africa had come under European colonial domination, although in some regions, such as Mauritania or Somalia, the establishment of a proper 268 | Muslim Societies in Africa administration took until the late 1920s or mid-1930s. In most cases, European colonial rule came to an end by the early 1960s. In this comparatively short period of time, Muslims developed a number of strategies for coming to terms with European colonialism , which included armed resistance in the form of a jihād, but also withdrawal and hijra to distant lands and numerous “paths of accommodation” (Robinson 2000). Seen from a longue durée perspective of more than 1,300 years of Muslim history in Africa, the question can be asked as to why such a short period of time, sixty or seventy years for most colonial territories, deserves our attention at all. The answer, of course, is that the colonial period not only created new boundaries in Africa and redefined the role of Africans, but also gave birth to political and religious legacies that continue to haunt both Muslims and non-Muslims until today. This chapter focuses on the role of Muslims in those European colonial possessions in Africa which had sizeable Muslim populations, namely, the British, the French, the German, and the Italian colonial empires. As the Cape Muslim community has been discussed in the last chapter, this chapter does not address the role of Muslims in twentieth-century South Africa, nor does it discuss the colonial policies of Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, the other European colonial powers. Muslim populations in their colonial realms were relatively small, with the exception of the Muslim minorities in eastern Congo as well as the Muslim populations of northern Mozambique . Also, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium did not strive to present themselves as Muslim powers and protectors of Islam, as did Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. In my analysis I do not differentiate between...

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