ABSTRACT
The History of Islam in Africa (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000a) is a remarkable collection, many years in the making, which assembles voices of key scholars working in the area of Islam and history in Africa. And thanks to the vision of its editors, it is even more. The introduction (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000b) 1 echoes the understanding Nehemia Levtzion developed over a long career of how and why Islam became rooted throughout the continent over many millennia. 2 This lifetime of exploring different facets of Islam’s history in Africa clearly fashions the lens through which readers are asked to read Islam in Africa’s subsequent twenty-four chapters. It is a lens that, in turn, focuses attention on a combination of patterns of Islamic expansion and varieties of Islamic experience: it has a strong geographical character (patterns as they emerge in different regions of Africa) and an equally strong emphasis on process (experience as measured through conversion). Across time and space, readers encounter stories of how and why African merchants, politicians, diplomats, scholars, and “holy men” — Africa’s royal, upper and middle classes — became Muslim and in turn shaped African history. 3 These are, without exception, stories of “progress” in which the processes of Islamization move Braudelian-style — in simultaneous historical “moments” moving at different speeds and different societal levels — towards fully Muslim societies. What this means in any given moment or place varies greatly; as the introduction states: “the advance of Islam has profoundly influenced religious beliefs and practices of African societies, while local traditions have ‘Africanized’ Islam” (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000a, ix [my emphasis]). Nevertheless, Levtzion and Pouwels (2000b, 2–4) make it clear that, ultimately, “progress” is achieved when the traditional or the pre-Islamic can be overcome. “Africanized Islam” — in spite of the attention given to the dynamics of conversion—remains a less-clearly articulated concept than “Islam in Africa.” And “Islam in Africa,” Africanized or not, remains firmly within the domain of trade, politics, and war (Levtzion and Pouwels 2000a, ix).
