Beyond Jihad is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of Islam in Africa. At a time when discourses about Islam in the popular media and some academic circles increasingly focus on religious intolerance and violence, Lamine Sanneh’s book is a refreshing and timely intervention that explores the long history of peaceful expansion of Islam across West Africa. The book challenges established narratives that construe “jihad of the sword” as the most significant instrument of conversion and vehicle of reform in West African Islam and emphasizes the agency of teachers, quietist clerics, traders, and Sufi saints. In this view conversion is achieved through shared knowledge, high morals, ethical behavior, and peaceful accommodation rather than coercion. By shifting the emphasis from violence to education as the foundational basis for conversion, Sanneh is able to write sub-Saharan Africa and Africans into the global narrative of the expansion of Islam, erasing the boundaries between core and periphery, folk and orthodox Islam, and emphasizing the role of local agents of Islamization, drawing both from universal Islamic ethos and local experiences. From this perspective, West Africans cease to be mere imitators of ideas and models crafted elsewhere and become innovators who consciously reshaped Islam to accommodate local circumstances. According to Sanneh, Islam was successful in sub-Saharan Africa not because it was forced on people, but precisely because it was made African by African Muslims who negotiated its adaptation to a variety of contexts across time and space without injuring its integrity.

Sanneh’s reconstruction of the history of Islam in West Africa focuses specifically on the experience of the Jakhanke, a diaspora of Muslim clerics that originated from the Mali Empire. The book is composed of fourteen chapters divided into three parts. The first part deals mostly with historical developments beyond West Africa and the implications of those developments in the emergence and expansion of the empires of Ghana and Mali. Relying on the works of Arab travelers and writers, Sanneh revisits the contested scholarship on the interactions between the Almoravids and the kingdom of Ghana, and the roles of trade, pilgrimages, and political patronage in the early establishment of Islam in West Africa.

The second part constitutes the heart of the book. Here Sanneh focuses squarely on the emergence and dispersal of the Jakhanke clerical diaspora. Arguments in the seven chapters in this section revolve around the ideas, memory, and legacy of Alhaj Salim Suware, the initiator of the Jakhanke clerical tradition between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Sanneh conceives of the Jakhanke as a “Jesuit-like” order, bound not by ethnicity but by an evangelical vision. This vision allowed the dispersal and peaceful settlement of minority clerics within non-Muslim communities and the gradual expansion of Islam from the bottom up. The cornerstone of Jakhanke evangelical vision is that conversion happens according to God’s own timing, that religion should be the province of clerics and not of rulers, and that the pen and tongue are more powerful than the sword in bringing people to the path of Islam. The chapters follow the journey of Jakhante clerics across the modern nations of Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia from the fifteenth century to the postcolonial era, documenting their labor to expand Islam and the response of communities and rulers to their ideas and actions.

Sanneh argues convincingly that the Jakhanke clerical vision is not peripheral but rather integral to Islam. He makes this argument forcefully in the last, and arguably the most insightful, part of the book. Drawing from al-Ghazali, Ibn khaldun, and al-Suyuti, but also from sub-Saharan learned Muslims such as al-Kanemi and contemporary scholars of Islam, Sanneh demonstrates that debates about the legitimate (or unlawful) use of violence for the sake of religion is not new in Islam. He discusses theologically based critique of “jihad of the sword,” the entanglement between political and religious motives, and mainstream support for peaceful expansion of Islam.

The book is based on a rich body of evidence, including texts by Arab travelers and writers of the medieval era, reports of European explorers from different nations, colonial archives, biographies, chronicles, and the author’s own interviews. But the strength of the book is also a weakness. Processing all this information required painstaking work to stitch the evidence together, and the result is a particularly dense and detailed text, which would be challenging to the nonspecialist reader. One may also quibble with the underlying assumption of Jakhanke exceptionalism that emerges from the author’s narrative. These complaints should not, however, distract from the great achievement of this erudite book, which is a must read for any scholar interested in the history of Islam in West Africa.