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11 1 Is There an “African” Islam? The Diversity of Islam in Africa Sometimes, old patterns of thought die hard. Even in the most recent literature on Muslim societies in Africa, such as Coulon and Cruise O’Brien (1988), Evers-Rosander and Westerlund (1997), or Quinn and Quinn (2003), it is possible to find the concept of an “African” Islam or, in French, Islam “Noir.” This African Islam is presented as peaceful and syncretistic, accommodating, and less orthodox than “militant Arab Islam.” The discussion of Muslim societies and Islam in Africa has to take into account, however, that there is no uniform and singularly “orthodox” form of Islam, either in Africa or in the Islamic world as a whole. The continent is not only much too vast to harbor just one continental expression of Islam, but African historical experiences with Islam have also been much too diverse to support the notion of a single, African Islam. When visualizing the expansion of Muslim societies in Africa in geographical terms and their multiple entanglements, the force of this argument becomes immediately clear. Traveling counter-clockwise through Africa from the north to the south, we encounter at first Egypt (Mis ˙ r), which has always had, due to her central position in the Islamic world, an important role as a broker for many Muslim societies. Egypt has consequently been in contact with many interpretations of Islam. The famous alAzhar University in Cairo was established in 988 by the Fāt ˙ imid Caliph ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as a center of Ismāʿīlī learning, yet became a center of Sunni teaching after 1171. Since the thirteenth century, al-Azhar has been home to dozens of student convents, arwiqa (sing. riwāq), and among these were three arwiqa housing students from sub-Saharan Africa, namely Bornu, Ethiopia, and Funj. Apart from her importance for the Muslim world, Egypt has also always been a major center of Orthodox Christianity, forming, from the sixth to the sixteenth century, a belt of Orthodox churches stretching from Armenia via Lesser Armenia, Palestine, Egypt, and the Nile Sudan to Ethiopia. This strong Christian influence was largely absent in the Islamic west, the bilād almaghrib . Yet the bilād al-maghrib were influenced by numerous Jewish communities of considerable size that settled as far south as the oasis of Tuwāt in the central Sahara. After the demise of the great Berber empires of the Almoravids and Almohads that dominated the bilād al-maghrib and large parts of the Sahara as well as al-Andalus (Spain) from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the bilād al-maghrib disintegrated into essentially two zones of political organization: the lands administered by a central government (the bilād al-makhzan) and the lands beyond government control (the bilād al-sība). These political frame conditions favored the emergence of religious 12 | Muslim Societies in Africa brokers and thus specific forms of saint veneration and Sufism that later spread, through trans-Saharan trade, to sub-Saharan West Africa. The development of Muslim societies in the bilād al-maghrib as well as the oasis of the Sahara and sub-Saharan West Africa has to be understood as being connected through the trans-Saharan trade. Saharan as well as sub-Saharan Islamic scholarship were consequently interwoven with the important centers of Islamic learning in the bilād al-maghrib, such as the Zaytūna in Tunisia, the Qarawiyyīn in Fes, and other schools in Tilimsān (Tlemçen) and Marrākish. The most important transmission belt for the spread of Islam south of the Sahara into sub-Saharan West Africa was, as has been mentioned above, trans-Saharan trade. It would be easy to pass over this sea of sand and to move on to the next region of Islam, yet such a move would underestimate the importance of the Sahara as a major space for the development of independent centers of Islamic learning, such as the western “Mauritanian ” Ādrār, the central “Malian” Ādrār, the oasis of Tuwāt, Ghāt, Ghadāmis, the Aïr mountains and Agadez, Kufra, and numerous other Saharan centers of settlement that were of paramount importance for the maintenance of the trans-Saharan trade for more than one thousand years. Muslim states and empires both north and south of the Sahara have tried to gain control over these Saharan centers of trade and scholarship , yet more often these islands in the desert were able...

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