Niger

In the description of Jean-Louis Triaud, Niger has a new Islam in an area of old Islamic contact. This expression is apt and has interesting implications for understanding of the country. For many centuries, future Niger was a zone of contact between North African Islam and the Sudan, but it did not undergo any real process of Islamisation before the advent of colonialism. Colonialism removed the roadblocks to Islamisation in the early 20th century. Throughout their rule in Niger, the French very closely monitored the development of Islam. Niger in the 1960s was a secular society by default, given that the cultural homogenisation that came from large-scale Islamisation did not then translate into cultural hegemony. Niger's Islamists are better understood as Salafi nationalists. Salafi nationalism never became an active ideology. Sandwiched between areas of violent Salafi radicalism in northern Mali and north-eastern Nigeria, Niger has remained a quiescent country despite the growth of politicised Islam in the 1990s.