Islam, Ethics, Revolt: Politics and Piety in Francophone West African and Maghreb Narrative (review)

Donald Wehrs has provided a valuable addition to comparative literary scholarship with his recent volume on a group of novels from Northern and Sub-Saharan West Africa. Wehrs has conspicuously left out the work of Anglophone West African writers. He has also tightly defined his purview by focusing on only novelistic expression (albeit with frequent and extensive references to other expressive forms integral to Judaic and Christian ethical identity). It is clear that these scholarly circumscriptions were necessary to his project and prevent his observations from ranging too widely and thus losing their intellectual force. We can only hope that some other enterprising scholar will see fit to carry on Wehrs's endeavor by looking at Islamic narratives from this region (and possibly others) in other languages and other forms such as poetry, popular song, and drama. Wehrs's work stands as an important remedy to a lacuna in contemporary scholarship on West African literature. Stephanie Newell's recent volume entitled West African Literature: Ways of Reading (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), to take one current example, is a wide-ranging and well-organized volume which tackles important practical and theoretical issues in both Anglophone and Francophone West African Literatures, although its scholarship on other languages of expression is less thorough. An additional weakness is Newell's treatment of Islam in literature. As Alioune Sow has noted in his recent review in African Studies Quarterly: "[Newell's] chapter on Islam is relatively short for what is an important and yet neglected aspect of West African literatures . . . the absence of figures such as Amadou Hampâté Bâ . . . or Yambo Ouologuem, with his devastating response to Islamic values in Le devoir de violence is questionable" (10. 1 [Spring 2008]).

Even a cursory glance at Wehrs's table of contents reveals the extent to which his study remedies these oversights. His text considers the socio-cultural implications of works by authors who emerge from an Islamic environment. He devotes a chapter to unpacking the complicated messages of Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1968) and although Wehrs does not deal with Ahmadou Ba's famous novel The Fortunes of Wangrin (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999), his choice not to include him in his analysis may have to do with the content of the novel and its inefficacy vis à vis his present project. Of more significance is Wehrs's ability to demonstrate the overlap between North and Sub-Saharan Africa through creative discourse. This is a task which he carries off admirably.

That his focus on varied and intellectually divergent accounts of Islamic propriety and the systems of action that emerge from them is of a crucial, timely nature at present is underscored by recent events throughout the globe. The newly instated American president in his inauguration speech simultaneously expressed a willingness to "extend a hand" to governments willing to "unclench [their] fist[s] and emphasized his determination to crush Islamic insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere throughout the globe." President Obama also stated that "To the Muslim world we seek a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect." At other points, however, he invoked a strongly Christian tone; claiming that "God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny," and that "our security emanates from the justness of our cause." He even went so far as to claim that America's democratic ideals were spread because "we did not turn back nor did we falter and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations." All of this of course before he closed his speech with the following: "God Bless You and God Bless The United States of America" (my transcriptions).

The mixed feelings and responses that Muslims are left with upon hearing such pronouncements are the logical outcome of this...