Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa by Ousmane Oumar Kane, and: Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition of West African Islam by Lamin Sanneh (review)

During the months when Timbuktu was under Islamist rule and the centuries-old shrines of its patron saints were hammered down, the fear that its "manuscripts" would be also destroyed and lost was widely expressed. The "Timbuktu manuscripts" became a commonly used phrase in the press as international opinion came to realize that there were indeed centuries-old texts kept in that legendary city which bore testimony of a tradition of written erudition in West Africa in need of protection. "Written erudition" is not an unnecessarily tautological expression, as the notion that sub-Saharan Africa is the continent of orality is the premise, still largely unquestioned, upon which colonial and postcolonial literature on African societies and cultures has been built. As a consequence, the existence of an African library made of books and manuscripts that were studied, taught, and written by local clerics was ignored and obscured: a division of labor was established according to which "Orientalists" would study Islam in "Oriental" societies and cultures while "Africanists" could pay little to no attention to Islamic scholarship and education in their studies of cultures and societies south of the Sahara. Against that view, or rather beyond it, two excellent books converge in bringing to light the history of written erudition in West Africa, a region historically known in Arab chronicles as Bilād as-Sudān (or simply Sudan), "the land of the Black people": Ousmane Kane's Beyond Timbuktu and Lamin Saneeh's Beyond Jihad.

In Beyond Timbuktu Kane argues convincingly that the study of the literary tradition that developed in West Africa in Arabic language, but also in local languages using the Arabic script (a literature known as ajami), is necessary not only in order to reconstitute the different aspects of the intellectual history of the region, but also to shed light on current issues facing modern West African nation-states, such as the development of a dual system of education at all the different levels, or the rise of Islamic associational life and the challenges it poses to secularism, or even militarized Islamist militancy of the Boko Haram type.

As an epigraph to the first chapter of his book, Kane quotes a well-known passage from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History in which the philosopher declares that sub-Saharan Africa, which he calls "Africa proper," is a self-enclosed land, cut off from the routes of exchange and scholarship, and therefore undeveloped and wrapped in the "dark mantle" of an eternal night of the spirit. What the current development of "Timbuktu studies" manifests (meaning here the study of African literature in Arabic, or using the Arabic script) is precisely that the Sudan, contrary to such a view of the "black continent," was an integral part of the larger world of Islam: that the Sahara was not a wall between two worlds but a space crossed by multiple routes by which all sorts of goods and merchandises, but also Muslim students and scholars, traveled back and forth. The expansion of Islam in the Sudan starting with the Almoravid period in the eleventh century meant the development of a tradition of teaching and writing in the different disciplines that had been constituted during centuries in the Muslim world as Islamic sciences. That tradition was carried on through the influence of certain ethnic groups who became "messengers of Islam" such as the Sanhaja Berbers, the Djula, the Zawaya, the Fulbe, and the Wolof. This development was generally a slow process. It became tumultuous at the time of the...