RELIGION, CULTURE, AND THE CIVILISATIONAL BIAS

Apart from the well-studied riverain cultures along the Nile, one inroad into trans-Saharan connections in pre-Islamic times is the study of the Garamantes, a society that inhabited the present-day Libyan Fezzan in Roman times, connecting the North African coast to the sub-Saharan shores. But for a number of reasons, the Garamantes have largely remained the concern of archaeologists and classicists, rather than Africanists. First, there are hardly any written records, even for their interaction with the Roman Empire, making them the domain of archaeologists, and although the interactions between archaeology and history are abundant for the classical world – including North Africa – the interdisciplinary interactions for areas south of the Sahara still remain shallow. Second, archaeological research on the Sahara and Sahel in the classical period has been held back because there is still abundant work in exploring the internal local histories of the North African coastal areas, which is both easier and more rewarding to do (in terms of findings), and generally seen (in Europe) as of greater relevance. Third, the combined civilisational biases (old and new) play their part. The ever-present Eurocentric bias in the study of the classical period means that Roman (and subsequently Byzantine) North Africa are largely studied in their connections with Europe, neglecting the trans-Saharan connections. This leaves few resources for archaeological research south of the Sahara. As an example of the civilisational bias, the findings from the famous tomb at Abalessa, ascribed to queen Tin Hinan, were long interpreted as necessarily Roman in origin, though this has been shown not to be the case.Footnote ⁶ Lastly, Saharan and Sahelian archaeological research is hampered by the hardships of the terrain, the logistics of the excavations, and the costs of certain types of analyses. Despite these barriers, a number of recent archaeological research projects in the Sahel have discovered material evidence of trans-Saharan interaction in the classical period and this material is finding its way into historical studies.Footnote ⁷ This is perhaps one of the most exciting developments in trans-Saharan history at the moment.

The hypothesis that Islam as a world religion with a written culture facilitated trade across the Sahara is, in principle, equally valid for Christianity and Judaism. Both religions have a long history in North Africa as well as in the Sahara. Common linguistic evidence shows that Saharan communities have enough of their cultural origins in Christian North Africa through trade contacts or migrations, to have adopted particular religious and social economic notions from that world. In Tamasheq, the language of the Tuareg people, the words for god (massinagh), angel (anjelus), and market town (agherem), to name only a few, are still of clearly recognisable Latin origin. That these words have not been replaced with Arabic loan words suggests a prolonged intensive commercial and religious contact with Christian North Africa.Footnote ⁸ There is some research on the Jewish trade networks in the Sahara that long existed alongside, and in partnership with, Muslim trade networks, but which could well predate the latter by centuries.Footnote ⁹ So far, little research has been carried out on possibly surviving sources within the Jewish communities of North Africa on the existence of trans-Saharan Jewish trading houses.

In any case, most studies take the advent of Islam as their point of departure. One reason is that there are simply more (and more translated) sources available for this period. However, I suspect that the civilisational bias plays its part as well. By and large, sub-Saharan civilisations are seen as receiving developments from the north. A recent contribution to the debate on the Saharan divide still approvingly quotes Ali Mazrui's old observation: ‘The relationship between Arabs and Black Africans has always been asymmetrical – with the Middle East usually the giver, and Black Africa usually the receiver.’Footnote ¹⁰

A last reason I suspect for this focus of study on the Islamic period is the impact of African political independence. From that moment until only recently, African history has been enlisted in the service of national identity in most North African states; the history of some states in the Sahel (Mauritania and Sudan) has similarly been largely constructed as Arabic and Muslim. Most scholarly interest in the Garamantes within North Africa itself comes from the side of North African scholars with an interest in the position of Berber identity and culture in North African societies. The best and most recent example is Dida Badi ag Khammadine's excellent study of the Tassili n Ajjer mountains and their inhabitants, which attempts to establish the historical continuities from the classical period until the present.Footnote ¹¹

Religion has been described as both a divisive and a connecting factor in the history of relations between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Islam spread mostly peacefully by way of trans-Saharan commerce and was adopted for commercial and political reasons first by the inhabitants of the Sahel, who spread it slowly southwards to the West African coast by way of commerce, or by state formation and jihad. This old and well-established vision of Islam as a peaceful connector can be found in the foundational works by Bovill, Roland Oliver and John Fage and, especially, Harry Norris.Footnote ¹²

ISLAM, RACE, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND OTHER ACROSS THE SAHARA

While trade, secured in a shared use of Islamic law, connected the Sahel to North Africa economically, that same economy generated social and racial divides as a result of the slave trade. Just as in Europe, and more or less at the same time, the slave trade with sub-Saharan Africa became justified in a racial discourse, legitimated through the Abrahamic tradition of the story of Noah and his son Ham.Footnote ¹³ Discourses on heterodox Islamic praxis in the Sahara, where Khariji Islam still exists to the present, and south of the Sahara, where syncretic practices were common, added to this legitimation by expanding the idea of an ‘impure’ Muslim praxis, which made Africans into heretics or idolaters who could legally be enslaved. The North African scholar Ibn Khaldûn was one of the first to theorise the sub-Saharan African racial ‘other’ in his Muqaddimah, discussing both the curse of Ham and classical Greek theories on climate as explaining factors for African black physiognomy and the inferiority ascribed to them.Footnote ¹⁴ Of course, Ibn Khaldûn's discussion of classical Greek theories explaining racial difference out of climatic conditions is a reminder that racial conceptualisations of Africans, and even by Africans, largely predate Islam, but ancient notions of race in Africa are an issue only recently explored.Footnote ¹⁵ Discussions of the Islamic heterodoxy of sudani – black Africans – became especially important in the Maghreb from the sixteenth century onwards, when the famous Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba was asked his opinion on the legal validity of enslaving black Africans, who were clearly not seen as good Muslims.Footnote ¹⁶ The tendency to equate black Africans with slaves and therefore with infidels, or inferior Muslims at best, became legally formalised with the creation of Sultan Moulay Ismael's slave army in 1705.Footnote ¹⁷ This army conscripted all slaves in the Sultanate; as all blacks were seen as by definition slaves, they became perforce conscripted. These historical racial constructions still influence relations between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and within North African and Saharan societies.

The number of studies of the history of the slave trade, internal slavery in North Africa and the Sahel, and especially of its justification through a racial discourse, is negligible compared to the works written on these subjects in the context of the Atlantic world. For the eastern Sahel the conflict in the Republic of Sudan between north and south, which revived slave trade and racial discourses, led to a number of historical studies on the legacy of slavery and its racial construction, notably by Amir Idris, Jok Madut Jok, Sharon Hutchinson, Heather Sharkey, and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga.Footnote ¹⁸ For North Africa and the western parts of the Sahara and Sahel, the historical study of slavery or its racial dimensions only took off in the last decade, but it has since flourished.Footnote ¹⁹

I think the neglect of this topic until recently has three main reasons. The first is the contention that slavery was formally ‘colour blind’ in the Muslim World. ‘White’ European slaves – Circassians, northern Europeans, as well as American sailors – were traded alongside ‘black’ Africans in North Africa until well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Second, the idea that black Africans were better off as slaves in Muslim societies than at home in their ‘barbarous lands’ developed in nineteenth-century European scholarship as part of a larger colonial racial discourse on the hierarchical evolutionary nature of civilisations (the foundation of the civilisational bias discussed above). Consider, for example, the following concluding remarks in a treatise on Muslim slave trade in Africa by the famous nineteenth-century Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snouck-Hurgronje in his seminal work Mekka:

Although the racial character of this discourse was later abandoned, the concept of benign slavery stuck until quite recently.Footnote ²² The third reason for the neglect of racism as a factor in the relations between North and sub-Saharan Africa, has been the reluctance among Western scholars to engage with the notion that African peoples, who had for so long been racialised and associated with each other as racially inferior in the West, could in fact entertain similar notions towards each other.

RELATED POLITICAL CULTURES AND DIVIDED POLITICAL REALMS

Racial and religious divisions do not per se preclude political unity across the Sahara. The most important manifestation of this political unity has been a common culture of political organisation, which the inhabitants of the Sahara – both nomads and oasis dwellers – share with the inhabitants of North Africa and the Middle East. In fact, from Mauritania and Morocco in the west, through the Sahara, across the Red Sea, continuing through the South and Central Asian steppes, the main political unit was (and is) the tribe. These tribes, as authors from Ibn Khaldûn onwards teach us, create and recreate political federations and alliances, which are always flexible and changing, but always opposed to other tribal alliances. The study of tribal history in North Africa and the Sahara remains a fruitful subject.Footnote ²³ It is probably this homogenous political culture that precluded a territorial political unity over the Sahara, as it still precludes this unity today. Of course, various attempts have been made, beginning with the Almoravids' unification of a territory stretching from the river Senegal northwards to Andalusia in the eleventh century; via Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur's famous ‘conquest’ of the Songhay Empire in the late sixteenth century; and perhaps one day ending with the UN-organised referendum on the political future of Western Sahara. The difficulties in ruling the Sahara have been known to Africans for a long time. In the historiography of Morocco, the difference between the Bilâd al-Makhzen – the realm of governance – and the Bilâd as-Sibâ' – the anarchic mountain and desert edges of the realm – is of great importance. The idea of this divide thus comes from Maghrebi historiography itself, which in turn reflected the perceived political realities of the area, although some authors warn us that the distinction should not be overstressed and that the term Sibâ' – anarchy – seems partly extraneous to the local political language.Footnote ²⁴ Further east, the triangular conflicts between Sudan, Libya, and Chad over parts of the eastern Sahel and Sahara (notably the Aouzou strip, a disputed stretch of Sahara that came into being through the differences in border delineations in various Franco-Italian treaties) from the 1970s, down to the war in Darfur in the 2000s, seem to be a colonial legacy. But here too, political divisions predate European colonialism and go back to Ottoman times. However, the history of the political relations between Ottoman North Africa and the eastern Sahara and Sahel remain largely unexplored, whether by Africanists or Ottomanists. The main works on this subject focus on the nonstate actors in these relations, especially the Sanusiyya brotherhood, although a recent doctoral dissertation is dedicated to the official relations between Istanbul, Libya, and the Lake Chad area.Footnote ²⁵ With few exceptions, studies on Saharan societies, old or recent, stress the political independence of these societies from any state power outside the Sahara.

COLONIAL ACADEMICS AND THE WIDENING OF THE SAHARAN DIVIDE

European colonial conquest brought new dimensions to the already existing perception of differences in race and Islamic praxis between North Africa, the Sahara, and sub-Saharan Africa. The French colonial administration in particular came to believe in fundamental differences between an ‘Arab Islam’ in North Africa and a ‘Black Islam’ in sub-Saharan Africa. This opposite pairing was complemented with a ‘Saharan Islam’ or ‘Moorish Islam’ that stood in between. ‘Arab Islam’ in North Africa was perceived to be orthodox, based in scripture, and legalistic and fanatic in nature as most effective armed resistance against colonial conquest in North Africa had been organised by Sufi brotherhoods. ‘Black Islam’ in sub-Saharan Africa was seen as syncretic, infused with magical praxis, more tolerant and less fanatic, despite the fact that West Africa had witnessed a series of jihads in the nineteenth century, some initiated by branches of the same Sufi brotherhoods that organised resistance in North Africa. ‘Saharan’ or ‘Moorish Islam’ was seen as orthodox and scripture based, like ‘Arab Islam’, but not so fanatic and much influenced by the magical piety of ‘Black Islam’.Footnote ²⁶ The idea of a difference between ‘Black Islam’ and ‘Arab Islam’, first expressed in the 1910s by colonial scholars like Paul Marty and Robert Randau, became strongly interwoven with the French politique des races discussed below.Footnote ²⁷ The belief in the existence of a distinctively ‘black’ tolerant syncretic Sufi Islam remained a colonial political and scholarly doctrine until well in the 1960s. It is still strong today, obfuscating our understanding of the much less studied but always present orthodox scriptural Islam, which is nevertheless celebrated as African heritage.Footnote ²⁸ The investments in recent decades by the South African state, the Ford Foundation, the Norwegian Government, and a number of private organisations, in the various manuscript collections in Timbuktu bear witness to this celebration. That these collections largely consist of fatwas – Muslim legal rulings – and books on Islamic Malikite law, is then overlooked.Footnote ²⁹

European scholars only started to see North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa as politically disconnected in the colonial period. Precolonial European explorers and scholars like Heinrich Barth, Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs, or Gustav Nachtigal still described these regions as politically coherent and connected. This observation was based on their own experiences as they travelled from Ottoman-ruled Libya to the Lake Chad region. Men like Barth and Rohlfs largely depended on African traders and their networks who guided their travels along trade roads through African polities, where local Muslim rulers passed them on through their political and economic relations, or blocked their passage on political grounds. Some of Barth's travels were even partly financed by loans from local rulers, while Rohlfs's later travels were sponsored by the Egyptian state. The Egyptian Khedive's financing of Rohlfs's expedition was a direct consequence of the nineteenth-century political unification of Egypt with the Bilâd as-Sudân through Egyptian colonisation. These experiences shaped their idea that North Africa was connected to the rest of the continent by trade, religion, language, and politics.Footnote ³⁰

In the French tradition, where the study of sub-Saharan Africa partly grew under the aegis of classical orientalist scholarship, the study of North and West Africa remained connected until the end of the nineteenth century. A number of important scholars of sub-Saharan African history and ethnography started their careers as orientalistes, the most famous example being Maurice Delafosse who studied Arabic with his father-in-law Octave Houdas, who made the first translation of the Tarîkh as-Sudân.Footnote ³¹ However, from the early twentieth century onwards, the divisions between disciplines and geographical regions became strongly pronounced in European academic practice, and was reflected in the scholarly output on Africa.Footnote ³²

The colonial partition of Africa through the works of various scholarly disciplines, which partly reflected the colonial administrative carving-up of the region, remains an important heritage today. North Africa was considered an integral part of the Arab Muslim world and consequently became the domain of Arabists and Islamologists, with their philological traditions and fascinations for the Muslim past. Sub-Saharan Africa became the domain of ethnographers and anthropologists, and was gradually stripped of its historicity by the core practices of these disciplines.Footnote ³³ Both the academic and administrative divides were then further solidified by geographers who followed these lines of thinking in the making of colonial maps. In the French domains, the line between scholar and administrator remained blurred throughout the colonial period. Early colonial historians and ethnographers like Octave Depont and Louis Massignon writing on Algeria, Charles Monteil and Maurice Delafosse writing on the French Sudan, or Xavier Coppolani and Paul Marty, who described Berber North African, Saharan, and Sahel societies, did so with the aim of governing them. All these men served in the colonial administration alongside their academic careers.

The ideas of these scholar/administrators and their colleagues informed the two main French colonial policies that made the Saharan divide a perceived and ultimately formal political reality: the politique des races developed in French West Africa under Governor William Ponty, and the politique berbère developed under Marshall Resident General Hubert Lyautey in Morocco. The essence of both policies was one of divide and rule. In North Africa, Berbers and Arabs were constructed as entirely different races with entirely different qualities through linguistic and anthropological studies.Footnote ³⁴ The academic foundations of the politique berbère were laid by Paul Marty, who would later write substantive ethnographies of the populations of the Sahara and the Sahel. The politique berbère was ultimately adopted in Mauritania and Algeria as well, where it was further developed by Louis Massignon and his pupils.Footnote ³⁵ In West Africa, the politique des races made the ethnic homogenisation of all societies an instrument of colonial domination. Both policies were developed in the 1910s, almost simultaneously and in relation to each other. The politics of divide and conquer solidified already existing notions of otherness held by African populations toward each other, strengthening the political divisions across the Sahara, or so the current consensus has it. How exactly this process unfolded is still unclear. To date we still wait for a solid study of the relations between these two policies with closely linked aims and impacts, that developed a coherent body of colonial thought on Islam, the Arabic language, and ‘indigenous African cultures’, including ‘Berber culture’.Footnote ³⁶

In the high colonial period, administrators received excellent training in these policies and the colonial scholarly disciplines, supported by institutes such as the Centre des Hautes Etudes d'Administration Musulmane and l'Ecole d'Administration Coloniale. Many with a deeper fascination for the region they governed put these studies to good use in scientific work. The most famous example is probably Yves Person, whose Samori remains the solid basis for much study on Guinée.Footnote ³⁷ Less well known but perhaps even more important is the orientaliste Vincent Monteil, who was a direct student of Louis Massignon, one of the principal scholars developing the politique berbère in Algeria.Footnote ³⁸ Monteil himself spent most of his early career as a military administrator and diplomat in Algeria and the Middle East, while continuing to publish scholarly works on Islam. In the 1960s, however, Monteil directed the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire in Dakar, where he wrote his famous l'Islam noire, in which he expounded the ideas of an African Islam, different from an Arab Islam, which his teacher Massignon had taught him decades before.Footnote ³⁹ Less well known than Monteil's work, but at the time perhaps even more influential in continuing the Islam noire trope, was that of Monteil's colleague in the colonial military Marcel Cardaire, the first patron of later United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) director, historian, and novelist Amadou Hampaté Bâ. Although Cardaire's Islam et le terroir africain is rather obscure, his collaborations with Bâ on the teachings of Tierno Bokar, the sage of Bandiagara, are now world-famous and itself the object of Africanist study.Footnote ⁴⁰

After independence, many of these well-trained colonial administrator/scholars sought academic careers. Monteil taught Islam at the University Paris Diderot. Yves Person joined the Sorbonne as professor of African history. Roland Colin, who started his career as administrator in French Sudan, became professor of development anthropology in Bordeaux.Footnote ⁴¹ Jean Chapelle, who served as colonial officer in the Chadian Borkou Ennedi Tibesti in the 1950s, and then stayed on as administrator in independent Chad, wrote a seminal study of the Tubu that is yet to be rivalled.Footnote ⁴² Of course, these former colonial administrators brought the logic of colonial scholarship and administration along in their further career paths, with a lasting impact.Footnote ⁴³ This influence was even stronger in the former colonial research and educational centres that continued to exist in France. In 1960, the Centre des Hautes Etudes pour l'Administration Musulmane was renamed Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l'Afrique et l'Asie Moderne. This institute offered university-level courses until the 1990s, and was dissolved only in 2000. When the present author took classes there in 1994, the classroom wall was still decorated with a map of the French Empire dating from the 1950s.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN BRIEF

Since colonial times, research on the Sahara has made impressive strides toward a more integrative history, reconnecting the southern and northern shores. In recent years, the Sahara has gained new attention as a gateway between Africa and Europe. With the rejuvenation of trans-Saharan trade roads – which now bring various drugs and African and Asian migrants to the Mediterranean shores of Europe, and foodstuffs, electronics, cars, and weapons to the Sahel – social, geographical, and anthropological studies on the Sahara have likewise seen an upsurge.Footnote ⁴⁴ A number of edited volumes have come out in recent years combining historical, anthropological, and social geographical studies on trans-Saharan space, stressing the connections and encounters.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, although the latter contain a number of historical contributions, historians seem still a bit behind. Apart from the genuine academic interest researchers have in these subjects, the growth in the number of these studies is partly the result of the research-funding climate in Europe which encourages ‘socially relevant’ studies, while being less interested in fundamental research set in the remote past. A more important, and more hopeful development is the flourishing of Saharan studies in Africa itself, with the creation of a number of new research centres and the boosting of older ones, as described by Lydon in this Forum.

Political developments in North Africa, the Sahara, and the Sahel in recent decades including the rise of militant Salafi Islam in Egypt and Algeria and now the Sahel; the Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger; the wars and genocide in northern Chad and Darfur; the Arab Spring, all point not so much to a recent globalisation, but to the continued political interconnectedness (if not territorial unity) of these regions.Footnote ⁴⁶ This interconnectedness, shaped over the centuries through both a theory of politics based in Islam and a political praxis based in tribal alliances, will undoubtedly become a new field of study (if it hasn't already become one) fuelled by policy-oriented research funding programmes. And who among us could resist? All these future (and present) studies will need to take the deeply-connected histories of the whole region into account, which is not an easy task. The question is whether academic and geopolitical policymakers will understand the significance of these deep connections well enough to renew support for fundamental research, or whether academia instead will be forced further to furnish ever larger quantities of bibliometrically-significant quick fixes.