Contesting Islam in Africa: Homegrown Wahhabism and Muslim Identity in Northern Ghana, 1920–2010 by Abdulai Iddrisu (review)

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the radical transformation of Islamic identities in Muslim West Africa. From being a hegemonic discourse, Sufi Islam became hotly contested by new religious movements, and especially by those inspired by the teachings of the revivalist Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (d. 1792). With the founding of the third Wahhabi state in 1932, the Al-Saud and the Al-Shaykh (descendants of Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab) took control of the Muslim Holy Lands and imposed their views on the new dynastic kingdom. In subsequent decades, Saudi Arabia strove to spread Wahhabism in the rest of the world. In West Africa, returned pilgrims from Mecca and African graduates from Middle Eastern theological schools and universities played an important role in promoting Wahhabi ideas. They set up thousands of schools, wrote and distributed pamphlets in Arabic and African and European languages, organized preaching sessions through radio and TV programs, and succeeded dramatically in promoting Wahhabi views in rural and urban West Africa. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, graduates of local schools founded by returned students from Middle Eastern colleges were making an even greater impact in West Africa. Several monographs and dozens of articles have documented the spread of Wahhabism in Mauritania, Nigeria, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso in the last few decades. The story of their expansion in West Africa is now well known and understood. Since September 11, and particularly between 2011 and 2014, another substantial body of literature looking at Wahhabism through the security lenses has documented the emergence of a jihadi wing within the Wahhabi movement and particularly its impact on the Sahel. Thus, experts of West African Islam will take serious issue with the claim in the blurb on the back cover of this book that Wahhabism is “one of the least studied aspects of African studies.” In fact, Wahhabism has become the most crowded subfield in the study of Africa.

Abdulai Iddrisu’s book addresses the emergence of Wahhabism in Ghana as well as the conflicts between Wahhabi and Tijanis. He provides a historical ethnography of Islam in northern Ghana in the last century (1920–2010), using a variety of sources including colonial archives, scholarly books, and articles, as well as oral interviews essentially with Ghanaian Wahhabi. He provides a rich documentation of the transnational linkages between Muslims from Ghana and the educational institutions that they attended in Saudi Arabia, as well as their role in modernizing Islamic education and disseminating Wahhabi ideas in Ghana. The author argues that the Sufi/Wahhabi divide overlaps with preexisting local conflicts within Muslim society in northern Ghana. With the notable exception of Ousman Kobo’s comparative work on Wahhabism in Ghana and Burkina Faso, which the author does not engage in any significant way, no other major monograph is available on Wahhabism in northern Ghana. In that respect, the book fills a void. However, in its present form, the book contains many imperfections that could have been avoided with a more rigorous peer review process and professional copy editing.

Although the ethnography is rich, the author fails to adopt a herme-neutics of suspicion in analyzing his material. In other words, he accepts uncritically the claims of his Wahhabi informants as facts. For example, he writes that non-Wahhabi Muslims dress in Muslim clothes, but are not able to recite the fatiha or opening surat of the Qurʾan (212). Anybody with a minimum familiarity with Muslim societies of Africa knows that this claim is absurd. In the same vein, the author caricatures the traditional Islamic curriculum as “not systematic or organized and unscientific” (196). The author claims that the Tijaniyya fraternity restricted access to knowledge (batin or hidden knowledge) to particular groups such as imams and shaykhs (215) when in fact the specific Tijaniyya which is the focus of his...