ABSTRACT
The Iranian revolution of 1979 placed Islam on the international political agenda. Equally, the dissolution of the USSR as a super-power has reinforced the importance of Islam as a major global force. Attention has focused on the potential influence of Islam in Africa, and more recently, central Europe and the successor states of the Soviet empire. The raising of Muslim political consciousness and the moves towards democratisation in the developing world have highlighted the necessity of understanding how long-established cultural and religious affinities affect contemporary relationships between Muslims in the Arab world and those living elsewhere. In the case of Africa, what did and indeed, what does it mean to be an African Muslim? How is the Arab world perceived and is its historic role in Africa as a perpetrator of slave traffic acknowledged? Does Islam mean something very different to African Muslims than to their co-religionists in the Middle East? Has Islam been denied, restricted and controlled by colonial powers and the African secular political leadership which emerged in the post-Independent period who adopted and practised variants of Marxist-Leninist theory? In common with a number of works on contemporary politics of the developing world this chapter considers the historical resonance of the past. It adopts what Fernand Braudel refers to as the ‘longue durée’ (Braudel 1969; Bayart 1992; Manor 1991). In other words, in tracing the early spread of Islam in Africa to the years of the post-independence period it seeks to understand the changing relationship between Africa and the Middle East. Its purpose, then, is to illuminate the discussion and provide an historical framework for the following chapters in which the recent resurgence of Islamic movements and their political agendas is examined.
