Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2022-05-20DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01202008
D. Schulz
{"title":"Studying Muslim Minorities in Subsaharan Africa: Preliminary Remarks","authors":"D. Schulz","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01202008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01202008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The introduction to the special issue on Muslim minorities in Subsaharan Africa argues that a focus on the circumstances and challenges faced by them opens up productive lines of inquiry into forms of religious coexistence and plurality, in Subsaharan Africa and elsewhere. Starting from a conceptual reflection on different forms of religious plurality, the article enters a plea for more a sustained reflection on the effects of state regulation of religious coexistence and how it is lived in everyday life. To this effect, the introduction invites readers to take the different case studies of the special issue as a way to assess and compare the genealogies and legacies of state regimes of religious governance in Subsaharan Africa.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87554008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01201004
P. Naylor
{"title":"Muhammad Bello’s Curriculum of Study, as Detailed in Ḥāshiya ʿalā muqaddimat Īdāʿ al-nusūkh and Shifāʾ al-asqām: the Books and Teachers of Sokoto’s Second Ruler","authors":"P. Naylor","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01201004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01201004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In Muslim West Africa it is common practice for scholars to make a note of their teachers and the books they studied with them. Such bibliographical records both certify academic credentials and, in the nineteenth century, were a vital part of political legitimacy as a series of scholar-warriors took power across the Sahel region. Muhammad Bello, who ruled Sokoto between 1817 and his death in 1837, is one such example. However, a precise record of Bello’s education is not widely known. This article features the first English translation and critical edition of Bello’s own bibliography, Ḥāshiya ʿalā muqaddimat Īdāʿ al-nusūkh (A Commentary to the Preface of the Repository of Texts), as well a second, later account he gave in a text entitled Shifāʾ al-asqām. These documents add to our understanding of educational practices in nineteenth century West Africa, while shedding light on several important events in Sokoto’s early history.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79175825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01201005
A. Peacock
{"title":"An Embassy from the Sultan of Darfur to the Sublime Porte in 1791","authors":"A. Peacock","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01201005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01201005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article presents documents relating to the embassy sent by Sultan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān of Darfur to the Ottoman Sultan Selim III in 1791. These include an original Arabic letter which is an unusually early surviving example of sultanic correspondence from the Sahel. The documents permit a new interpretation of the purposes of the embassy, as well as an examination of chancery practice in Darfur, and offer an insight into Darfuri views of the outside world. To aid the analysis, the article compares this letter with a second surviving letter from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān addressed to Napoleon Bonaparte around 1800, of which the Arabic text has not previously been published.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82396730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01201003
James R. Brennan
{"title":"Print Culture, Islam and the Politics of Caution in Late Colonial Dar es Salaam: A History of Ramadhan Machado Plantan’s Zuhra, 1947–1960","authors":"James R. Brennan","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01201003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01201003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the history of Ramadhan Machado Plantan’s newspaper Zuhra, an independent African weekly newspaper that served as both an advocate for Dar es Salaam’s Muslim African community, as well as a kind of spiritual advisor and diviner. The content of Zuhra engages with a host of issues that were germane to its reading public, some of which were conventionally nationalist (segregation, land rights) and others which seem particularly religion (cemeteries, dream interpretations, religious counsel). Plantan’s Zuhra was often out of step with the rising nationalist movement embodied in the Tanganyika African Nationalist Union (tanu), which ultimately led to its estrangement and opposition to the country’s victorious nationalist party. Finally, this article explores how these disjunctions between Zuhra and tanu played out, first as a matter of a changing newspaper political economy, and second as a mouthpiece for a new Muslim opposition party.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"1608 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86510184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2022-03-03DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01201002
Caitlyn Bolton
{"title":"“Useful” Knowledge and Moral Education in Zanzibar Between Colonial and Islamic Reform, 1916–1945","authors":"Caitlyn Bolton","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01201002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01201002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The introduction of colonial schooling in Zanzibar was aimed at improving economic productivity, drawing on an exchange of educational theory with the American South to ensure a labor supply for the post-emancipation plantation economy. Yet colonial officials faced a key problem: students did not attend, preferring instead to continue studying in Qur’anic schools, institutions roundly derided by colonial officials. To secure attendance, colonial officials engaged local Muslim leaders to create an Islamic studies syllabus. While reflecting transnational Islamic reformist trends, this syllabus ultimately backfired as local parents protested its lack of moral content. Based on research in the Zanzibar National Archives, this article recounts the tensions and overlap between colonial officials, Islamic leaders connected to transnational discourses of reform, and local Muslim parents over what constitutes truly “useful” knowledge. It argues that colonial education was not particularly successful in forming students into the hard-working agricultural subjects it envisioned. It was successful, however, in orienting public institutions towards economic progress, and shifting public discourses on morality and religion to suit that goal.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73296205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2021-11-17DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01201001
Kimberly T. Wortmann
{"title":"Reading Ibāḍī Women’s Legacies through Stone Town’s Built Environment","authors":"Kimberly T. Wortmann","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01201001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01201001","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how women of means in nineteenth-century Zanzibar used their built legacies to convey their piety and authority even though they were not active in public religious life. The focus of the study is an old Ibāḍī mosque named after its founder, ‘Aisha bint Jumʻa al-Mughayri, and the tombstone of her younger female relative Muhayra bint Jumʻa al-Mughayri. While the details of the two women’s lives, works and property do not appear prominently in the written record of Zanzibar, this article asks what we can glean about their religious and economic commitments from the built legacies and religious endowments they left behind, as well as from the writings of their male contemporaries, British colonial officials and their descendants. The article also demonstrates how the conservation and upkeep of historic religious institutions in Zanzibar today depends greatly on collaborations between local family members, state institutions and transnational faith-based organizations (fbo s).","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78976440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01101016
Fulera Issaka-Toure, O. Alidou
{"title":"Introduction: Current Perspectives on Islamic Family Law in Africa","authors":"Fulera Issaka-Toure, O. Alidou","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01101016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01101016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This special issue of Islamic Africa brings together new critical perspectives on the status of Islamic Family Law, commonly referred to as sharīʿa, within four African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Senegal – each reflecting distinctive gendered cultural, colonial and postcolonial realities. The introduction provides a general overview of the state of the art on Islamic family law in Africa and highlights the significant thematic focus of each contribution and the new areas for further inquiry that the volume opens. These topics and questions include among others: (a) the ways in which European colonialism and contemporary democratization processes have opened spaces for religious pluralism, thereby shaping the articulation of Muslim personal law within different African postcolonial state judicial systems; (b) how Islamic judicial practices, institutions, and authorities such as malamai and/or Kadhis engage themselves with the secular state and/or are constrained by both the state and by the legal pluralism encountered within both Muslim majority and minority African countries; (c) the gendered implications of the hierarchical relation between Kadhi Courts and a national High Court; (d) the benefits and/or shortcomings of harmonizing Islamic Family Law; (e) what is to be learnt from women choosing to settle marital disputes and divorce within and/or outside the “legal protective space” afforded by the state judicial system and its inclusion of Islamic Family Law; (f) the role of human agency in influencing the administration of Islamic family law and/or interpreting the law; how judicial systems that are shaped by European and Islamic patriarchal systems confronted by the resilience of indigenous matrilineal Customary Law within contemporary African societies; and (g) the compatibility between the various articulation of African Islamic family laws with universal human rights and individual freedom. Ultimately, this special issue of Islamic Africa offers an insightful reflection on how Islamic Family Law plays an important role in democratic constitution-making or testing processes.","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89940087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01102005
Khaled Esseissah
{"title":"Katherine Ann Wiley, Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania","authors":"Khaled Esseissah","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01102005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01102005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87080311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01101013
Fallou Ngom
{"title":"Mamadou Lo, Un Aspect de la Poésie “Wolofal” Mouride: L’Éducation Morale et Spirituelle de l’Aspirant (al Murid) dans la Production de Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate.","authors":"Fallou Ngom","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01101013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01101013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89216617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Islamic AfricaPub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1163/21540993-01101014
Tabea Scharrer
{"title":"Sarah Hillewaert, Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya","authors":"Tabea Scharrer","doi":"10.1163/21540993-01101014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21540993-01101014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41507,"journal":{"name":"Islamic Africa","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80811066","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}