ABSTRACT
Islamization in West Africa reached a dramatic climax in the militant reform movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The introduction of Islamic elements into African societies was in symbiosis with traditional customs and beliefs, the dynamics of which may be seen in terms of a continuum between two opposing poles: tradition and Islam. There are numerous accounts, the earliest going back to al-Bakri of the eleventh century, of the Muslim who succeeded in winning over a ruler by demonstrating the omnipotence of Allah. Praying to Allah saved the state from drought or brought a victory in war after the local priests had failed. In Africa the Muslim scholars lived in a society for which the sociopolitical model of Islam was completely unknown and irrelevant. Islam succeeded in winning ground in West Africa only because its representatives, the rural Muslim clerics, did not articulate a model as an alternative to the African sociopolitical order.
