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77 The Ink of Scholars At the end of the eighteenth century, near the end of the period examined in this chapter, Mungo Park, a Scotsman, was traveling through Senegambia. Most Europeans who came to know West Africa well during this period were slavers, but Park was not. He was indeed there in service of commerce, however , working in conjunction with British groups interested in discovering the sources of the Niger River and the city of Timbuktu, famed in Europe as a city of learning—and especially wealth in gold—since the late fourteenth century. Traversing the predominantly Muslim regions of Senegambia and heading inland into parts of West Africa that were still religiously mixed, he spent two years (1795–97) in the region. In 1799, he published an account of his West African odyssey, Travels in the Interior of Africa, which commends its author as an astute observer, fine writer, and reflective thinker. In it, Park noted the preference for teaching over militancy in deepening and spreading the faith among West Africans: Religious persecution is not known among them, nor is it necessary; for the system of Mahomet is made to extend itself by means abundantly more efficacious. By establishing small schools in the different towns, where many of the Pagan as well as Mahomedan children are taught to read the Koran, and instructed in the tenets of the Prophet, the Mahomedan priests fix a bias on the minds, and form the character of their young disciples, which no accidents of life can ever afterwards remove or alter. Many of these little schools I visited in my progress through the country, and observed with pleasure the great docility and submissive deportment of the children, and heartily wished they had had better instructors, and EMBODYING ISLAM IN WEST AFRICA THE MAKING OF A CLERISY, CA. – The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. —Saying attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad 2 78 | Embodying Islam in West Africa a purer religion. With the Mahomedan faith is also introduced the Arabic language.1 In spite of his evident biases of race and religion, Park was obviously a practiced observer whose account captures a number of key elements of Qurʾan schooling in a pithy way. He shows the centrality of instilling submissive postures of obedience and connects them to instruction in Arabic literacy and the formation of durable character traits and habits of mind. Park’s claim that religious persecution was unknown suggests that in the places he had traveled, Muslim scholars took seriously the Qurʾan’s command to preserve freedom of conscience—There is no compulsion in the religion (Q 2:256). But a historical narrative is also embedded in Park’s account. He clearly suspects that by visiting these humble schools, he is bearing witness to the process through which the religion had spread throughout West Africa. CLERICS AND CLERISIES Park’s instincts were correct. Islam reached most West African communities not via jihad but via African Muslim intellectuals. The conquests of the first Islamic century did not reach sub-Saharan Africa, so whether or not the Prophet actually said that the “scholar’s ink is more sacred than the martyr’s blood” (some say those words instead came from early mystic and scholar Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, d. 728), ink was clearly far more important than blood to the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa. Armed with reed pens, wooden slate boards, and the Book they carried within their bodies, clerics brought Islam to sub-Saharan West Africa. It is often said that Islam has no clergy, and it is true that in Sunni Islam there is no officially sanctioned body of religious specialists. But Islam has had many clerics and many clerisies. The Oxford English Dictionary defines cleric as “a priest or religious leader . . . especially a Christian or Muslim one” and clerisy as “a distinct class of learned or literary people.” Throughout this volume, I often use these terms to refer to Muslim religious specialists in West Africa. In most academic works on Islamic scholarship, ʿālim (scholar, person of knowledge) and ʿulamāʾ, its plural, are used in this way. Both terms now carry a strong connotation of textual scholarship that does not fully capture the social roles of learned people in earlier eras in West Africa or beyond. Furthermore, in West Africa, ʿulamāʾ was not necessarily the preferred term for religious leaders in the centuries under study in this chapter...

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