Islam in Black and White

Journal of Africana Religions, 2022

Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse on Africanité emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900–1975).

Souls, 2010

Although the West Indian-born West African intellectual Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden praised the societies of Africa and the Orient, he was actually a lifelong Christian whose thought followed Orientalist templates, from his acquisition of “Oriental” languages, to his use of Orientalist learning to evangelize Muslims, to his advocacy of Islamic education as a means of strengthening British imperialism in West Africa. While Blyden’s view of Islam was far more Orientalist and far less positive than most accounts portray, it nonetheless played an important part in the formation of Afrocentrism and in Black appreciation of Islam.

MFS Modern Fiction …, 2005

The chapter delves into the plural ways in which colonial encounters transformed the course of Islam and Muslim societies both north and south of the Sahara. Though it focuses specifically on the imperial age set forth by the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, it also favours a long duration approach — making incursions into both pre- and post-colonial periods — to better delineate the dialectic of continuity and change brought about by the colonial situation. The chapter analyses the changing perceptions and policies that the various colonial powers, most importantly the French and the British, developed vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims, and how colonial actors and Muslim leaders eventually worked out subtle patterns of accommodation. But it calls for even more attention to how Islamic thought and Muslim societies were transformed from within in the course of the twentieth century, with emphasis on Sufism, Salafism, the challenge of Islam vs. Western modernity, and the colonial phenomenon of conversion to Islam. The chapter combines historiography, historical analysis, and an Islamic-studies approach to present key themes and debates of relevance to those subjects.

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2009

In order to understand the present problems in Islamic Africa one is obligated to have a deep comprehension of its history. No prognosis about Islamic Africa can be formulated about it except after understanding the cultural, spiritual, political and social factors that underpin its history. The fact is that Islam was the foundation of the emergence of the most enlightened period in African history and civilization. Under Islam, Africa produced an exhaustive, matchless, fresh and succulent civilization, able to unite diverse ethnicities while showing regard for the distinctive personalities of each. Islam contributed to the civilization and development of Africa, and Africa contributed to the dissemination and preservation of Islam.

Economy and Society, 1999

Asian and African Studies 2022