Is there something distinctive about Islam south of the Sahara? This question has been the subject of endless debate and has given rise to a distinctive category in French, islam noir (black Islam). Both the category and the name have been continuously deployed and reappraised. Before turning to more contemporary developments, we must go back to the very beginnings of Islam to note the development of the earliest systems of categorization and evaluation, for this will form the basis of much that developed later.
From earliest times the blackness of sub-Saharan Africans presented a striking difference, even a mystery, for the neighboring mediterranean peoples. Two accounts were made of this mystery. The first and most familiar emerged from an interpretation of the biblical story of Noah's curse upon the son of Ham (or Shem). While this is not explicitly stated in the Koran, theologians and Muslim historians took it up and applied it to black peoples.
The second account developed from the second CE Ptolemaic theory of climates, adopted by Arab geographers and among others, by Ibn Khaldoun in the fourteenth century. According to this theory, humans are most balanced physically and mentally where temperatures are moderate. Humans living at the extremes of hot and cold suffer a life of handicap, and are physically inferior in a variety of ways. These two different explanatory systems were readily combined to justify the devaluation of black people doubly disadvantaged by the curse of their ancestors and an unfavorable climate.
The founding texts of Islam did not in themselves introduce any differentiation between humans – the distinction between believers and unbelievers was the only one of any importance. At the time of the conquest of the Maghreb in the seventh century, Arab Muslims came into contact with ‘black’ Africans (in Arabic, Sudan), who were reputed to be idolaters and magicians. In their eyes, the pagan practices of these populations, combined with the stigma they already suffered, confirmed their inferiority and destined them to servile status.
A new problem arose when a certain number of these Sudan themselves became Muslims as a result of contact with Maghrebi merchants. Was it legal to enslave them? How could they be distinguished from their pagan neighbors? These questions prompted Ahmad Baba, the famous cleric from Timbuktu (1556–1627), who had been himself carried off to Morocco, to write his treatise Mi'raj al-Su'ud. Footnote 1 Ahmad Baba offered a geopolitical solution to the problem by distinguishing Islamic territories from infidel territories, and enumerating those regions of West Africa in which the sovereigns were Muslim and whose subjects could not as a result be taken into slavery. These comprised essentially, with slight modifications, the territories of the ancient Sudanese empires and some of the Hausa states.
The orthodoxy of these Islamized blacks nevertheless continued to be called into question, particularly by those who had an interest in using them as slave labor. In this context, Bruce Hall cites al-Sharif Hama Allah, an eighteenth-century Beydan legal scholar from Tichit (Mauritania), who judged these geopolitical criteria inadequate and argued that they should be complemented by an evaluation of the beliefs and practices of the relevant peoples.Footnote 2 The Muslim identity of black Africans, who by and large were not Arab in culture or language, therefore remained suspect in the eyes of Arabo-Berber Muslims. In the identification of a peculiarly sub-Saharan Islam, the stigma of color entangled with suspicion of paganism and the slave economy, constituting the basis for particularly intense and enduring scrutiny. Arab-speaking Muslims took, for all these reasons, a condescending attitude towards their sub-Saharan coreligionists.
Yet learned sub-Saharan Muslims continously sought inspiration from Arab Muslim scholars with whom they maintained close relationships, through pilgrimage and itinerant study. They perceived these Arab Muslims as their role models. Running counter to the racial divide, one can then trace a shared cultural space along the two coasts of the Sahara, sustained by shared writings and a Sunni (and largely Maliki) environment. Nevertheless, the affinities between religious scholars and the literate along the shores of the Sahara did not erase the generally pejorative representation of the Sudan.
The Arabized Saharan Berber populations, benefitting from genealogies claiming ancient or more recent links to the Orient, were, for their part, spared such representations even though some of their members could have dark skin. In effect the quality of being ‘black’ in the Saharo-Sahelien regions didn't refer exclusively to skin color. As Hall notes, ‘although racial labels might correlate with observable differences of skin color, they often did not. This is because ideas about race came to adhere to notions of lineage and descent that did not necessarily correspond to observable – or “present” – skin color.’Footnote 3 The social construction of the ‘black’ engaged, in the words of Hall, ‘not the perception of the difference per se, but the ways in which difference was rationalized into larger ideologies that organized social and political distinctions’.Footnote 4
Yet despite their Arabized geneologies, the Fulani Muslim leaders who founded Islamic states in the nineteenthth century did not escape scrutiny. Hall offers the example of a legal question directed to shaikh Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Saghir al-Kunti (d. 1847), who had succeeded his father as the head of la Qadiriyya Mukhtariyya in 1826. The question, which had probably been posed by merchants who traversed Masina to conduct trade, concerned the legal status of the newly founded Muslim state of Masina also known as Dina, product of a jihad, and which was now governed by black Fulani. Did this state have legitimacy in Islamic legal terms? Were merchants obligated to show allegiance and pay zakat (Islamic legal tax)? Or should they treat the Fulani as mutaghallibin, that is as populations that had been subjugated in the past by Muslims and, therefore lacking the legitimacy to rule over them? Hall emphasizes that the word ‘black’ is never stated, but is implicit.Footnote 5
Other nineteenth-century sources confirm this general persistence, from the Maghrebi and Saharan perspective, of a conflation of black color and servile status. In this context, J. O. Hunwick cites the Kitab al-Istiqsa’ of the Moroccan historian al-Nasiri (1835–97): ‘al-Nasiri remarked that “many common folk believe that the reason for being enslaved according to the Shari'a is merely that a man should be black and come from those [Sudanic] regions”’.Footnote 6 Hunwick then goes on to offer the example of a Timbuktu manuscript of the same period in which ‘The author says: “When I travelled to the land of the Farther Maghrib … I found some of the uncouth Maghribis claiming that all blacks without exception were slaves who did not deserve to be free, for how should they deserve that being black of skin?”’.Footnote 7 Thus taking part in Islam did not truly obliterate the racial stigma attached to sub-Saharan Muslims.
The colonial partition of the late nineteenth century in turn left its own mark. In particular the gradual French occupation of the Maghreb (with the exception of Libya) and much of West Africa generated its own territorial logics, introducing new distinctions. Algeria, including the Saharan portion, fell under the Interior Ministry. It was the most ‘worthy’ of the possessions, a settler colony destined to become an extension of the metropole. Algeria eventually became the principal center for Islamic studies in the French language. French West Africa (along with its own portion of the Saharan), on the other hand, fell under the Ministry of Colonies.
As a result, these internal borders within French territories instituted a concrete and practical divide. While there was, in particular in the context of Muslim Affairs, some border crossing from time to time (among others the administrators Robert Arnaud and Paul Marty, whom I will cite later on, traversed the divide from Algeria), administrative careers were almost entirely separate. So too were the militaries (with the Armée d'Afrique in Algeria and the Troupes de marine or Troupes coloniales to the south of the Sahara), with all the competition and conflict of authority that would inevitably ensue. The protectorates established in Tunisia and Morocco, which fell under the ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave rise to yet another administrative enclave. For our purposes here, the significance of these separate administrative bureaucracies is that each generated its own distinctive and often competing research on ethnology, archaeology, and Islam, with the effect of reinforcing the pre-existing separation between the Maghreb and the ‘Western Sudan’, between the Islam of North Africa and the Middle East and that of the distant and denigrated Sudanic periphery. The colonial theme of l'islam noir is therefore embedded in this hierarchy of representations and knowledge production.
In embracing these administrative divisions, researchers aligned themselves along the opposite shores of the Sahara: North and sub-Saharan Africa. The certified and accredited arabisants (specialists in Arabic language and culture) of the University of Algiers considered the Islam to the south of the Sahara to be a degraded version of l'islam central, often using criteria for evaluation that were inappropriate to the region. The major works of orientalists and anthropologists on Muslim societies, the more ‘worthy’ studies, were devoted to the study of northern Africa. Only a handful of specialists on Islam in the Maghreb had marginal interest, in the Saharo-Sudanese areas.Footnote 8
In West Africa it was ethnology that took pride of place, fostering a perception that Islam was either foreign to sub-Saharan Africa, or that it had been ‘négrifié’. J.-L. Amselle thus discerns in the French school of anthropology identified with Marcel Griaule an inclination ‘to depoliticize, to de-historicize and de-islamize Islamic societies of sub-Saharan West Africa’.Footnote 9 This meant that the production of knowledge about Islam, which went hand in hand with surveillance, was left to officers and administrators in the field, particularly those in the bureau of Muslim Affairs.
Two enduring epistemological divides were to result within the colonial and postcolonial francophone scholarly world: on the one hand between specialists of the Maghreb and those of sub-Saharan Africa; and on the other hand, within West Africa, between the major figures within the discipline of anthropology and those associated with Muslim Affairs who were charged with developing practical knowledge of Islam within West Africa. The effects of these territorial, administrative, and scientific partitions superimposed themselves over older racialized cleavages, overdetermining them.
It is in this context that the services of Muslim Affairs in French West Africa constructed the concept of islam noir and raised it to the status of a principal interpretive framework. The term designated a separate sui generis domain that escaped the authority of the official Islamic specialists of Algeria and Morocco, and it gave a name to their own field of expertise. And thus was a peculiarly sub-Saharan Muslim identity elevated and validated. Contrary to the pejorative and condescending judgements of the specialists of islam central, this islam noir was henceforth valorized for precisely the reasons it was under scrutiny to the north – little Arabization, purportedly little learning, and presumed or exaggerated contamination from an animist environment. The shortcomings of orthodoxy attributed to sub-Saharan Muslims were inverted to become positive qualities. An Islam that was seen to be imperfect, and therefore more malleable, was reassuring to authorities.
The first appearance of this concept to my knowledge is to be found in the writing of Alfred Le Chatelier in 1899, which refers to islam soudanien, but here the adjective appears to describe a pre-existing geographical or perhaps geopolitical category.Footnote 10 The term is taken up again in 1910, by Alain Quellien, a civil servant in the Ministry of Colonies, who unlike Le Chatelier, gives it an explicitly racial coloration: ‘Sudanic Islam has the advantage of losing its fanaticism as the color of the Black increases; fanaticism persists only among those mixed race blacks resulting from the conjoining of Arab and Fulani …. This Islamism, shapeless and heterodox, will not become dangerous so long as it is permitted to keep to itself and suffers no major modifications as a result of intrusion from external influences.’Footnote 11 The text, the first Muslim policy manual applied in French West Africa, is worth reading in its entirety. One finds here a number of commonplaces that were to become habitual in debates within the administration concerning the ‘Islam question’, such as the failure of Christianity to convert the populations of West Africa and the perception of the Islamized black as belonging to a more ‘civilized’ society.Footnote 12 The theory of islam noir in effect became conjoined with a discourse on the hierarchy of civilisations that ranked black Muslims above fétichistes.
Robert Arnaud,Footnote 13 the first administrator to oversee Muslim Affairs for the gouvernement général de l'A.O. F, was to elaborate upon this notion in 1912 in referring to an islam africain: ‘it is very much in our interest to nurture and develop in West Africa a purely African Islam’, calling for a kind of Muslim Ethiopianism in West Africa.Footnote 14 Paul Marty was to see something of the kind in the Mouride order when he took over the Bureau of Muslim Affairs. Mouridism, he wrote in 1913, ‘should be thought of as a sort of new religion descended from Islam’; he went so far as to comment ‘we are dealing here with an openly errant Islam’ (‘nous sommes ici en plein vagabondage islamique’), a pronouncement that was to have enduring effects on the image of the brotherhood while at the same time facilitating its rapprochement with the administration.Footnote 15
It was precisely because Marty understood it to be ‘heterodox’ that Mouridism could be seen as an acceptable form of Islam.Footnote 16 Marty, who opened his work L'islam au Sénégal with the declaration that ‘the Islamized blacks of Senegal organize themselves voluntarily and without exception under the religious banner of the marabouts’, thereby enunciated one of the specificities deemed to be characteristic of the Islamized blacks, rounding it out with a yet more vivid image: ‘the clothing of Islam, however simple and comfortable it might be, is not cut to fit the blacks; they recut it to suit themselves and they decorate it to their own taste’.Footnote 17 If the term islam noir is not yet in evidence, all the elements are already there.
The designation, islam soudanien along with its variant islam soudanais was to remain in usage until the early 1920s. Thus Benjamin Soares notes the expression in a 1917 political report: ‘Nioro and Timbuktu are the two centers of islam soudanais.’Footnote 18 Speaking of the same region in his 1920 work on Soudan, Marty manages to conjoin islam soudanais and islam noir. He describes Nioro as ‘the boulevard of islam noir in the Haut-Senegal region’ between Saint-Louis and the Niger River and, on the following page, as ‘the center of islam soudanais’.Footnote 19 The expression islam noir is henceforth on the scene.
In 1924 Captain Pierre-Jean André published, for the first time, a work in which the expression islam noir appeared in the title; the term was to become a topos in colonial writing of the following decades.Footnote 20 Custodian of this legacy, Jean-Claude Froelich, despite assigning his work a more neutral title, was to offer a striking formulation of this idea as late as 1962: ‘there is therefore a unique islam noir very different from that of the Mediterranean or the Middle East, different as well from the Islam of the Moors, an Islam that has been revamped, reshaped, negrified, and adapted to the psychological characteristics of the blacks’.Footnote 21
Although he wrote in a different spirit and with empathy towards his subject, Vincent Monteil used the expression islam noir in the title of his own much reprinted book.Footnote 22 It is possible that Monteil took the title on the advice of his publisher for its clarity, simplicity, and commercial appeal. He was, at any rate, quite aware of the connotations of the term. In a paragraph under the heading, ‘The africanization of Islam’, he writes: ‘the expression islam noir certainly does not find favor with Africans. This distaste makes sense given the tendentious manner in which the term has been used’, citing among a host of others the works of Le Chatelier, Robert Arnaud, Capitaine André, Marcel Cardaire, and J.-C. Froelich.Footnote 23 He remarked critically, ‘these questionable views, highlighting as they do “leaders”, “seditious propaganda”, and good and evil spirits, irritate and even exasperate Africans'. At the April 1961 Colloquium in Abidjan, Cheikh Touré,Footnote 24 the president of the Union Culturelle Musulmane, himself of a reformist bent, rejected outright the concept of islam noir: ‘It is an idea that has done so much harm to Africa through marabouts and Muslim Affairs’.Footnote 25 Monteil also cited Amadou Hampaté Bâ, who rejected the concept as well (‘there can be no islam noir any more than there can be a Black christianity or a Black judaeism’), proposing instead a lovely image: ‘in Africa Islam has no more color than does water … it is tinged with the hues of the surrounding earth and stone’.Footnote 26
It is nevertheless the case that the publication of Monteil's book with a press of high repute (les Éditions du Seuil) validated definitively the expression islam noir in the eyes of journalists, the public, and officialdom. Thus it is common to hear, in the context of contemporary events in the Sahara, reference to a specific sub-Saharan Islam, a black Islam characterized by membership in Sufi orders, by saint worship, by certain proximity with animist practices, and a generally tolerant attitude. This age-old and constantly recycled stereotype, which emphasizes local idiosyncracy (whether real, exaggerated, or imagined) and which moreover draws together extremely varied situations, still influences the popular perception of Islam to the south of the Sahara.
But this stereotyping is not exclusive to sub-Saharan Muslims – it is consistent with a method for classifying and distinguishing between human groups that was characteristic of the ethnography of the colonial period. Thus in Morocco (although the phenomenon is visible in Algeria as well), the construction of a regularly reinforced structural opposition between the Berbers, as first occupants, and Arabs, as conquerors, serves as the interpretive frame for an entire literature in the service of developing the various ‘Berber policies’ of the French authorities. Islam becomes, in these representations, the key issue. ‘The concept of maraboutism’, Vincent Cornell observes,
was well-suited to creating an artificial dichotomy between the supposedly ‘natural’ religious syncretism of the Berbers and an ‘Arab’ Islamic orthodoxy. Until the end of the colonial period, the official French policy toward religion in the Maghrib was to distinguish the supposedly sober, authoritarian, and culturally alien ethos of classical Islam from the affective, syncretistic and Mediterranean ethos of the Berbers.Footnote 27
Alluding to this passage, Cheikh Anta Babou demonstrates the similarities between the two interpretive frames: the one opposing Berber Islam (local and syncretic) to Arab Islam (foreign and orthodox), the other juxtaposing a Black Islam (local) with an Arab Islam (once again foreign).Footnote 28 Was there a transmission and diffusion of this model from North Africa? It may be possible to show this but it is not actually necessary. The same techniques for domination rooted in a policy of divide and rule are at work: separate, make distinctions, and classify.
I noted above that the ‘Mouride question’, that is, how the administration understood Ahmadou Bamba and the Muridiyya, is closely related to the construction and development of the concept of islam noir. The two conceptions illustrate and legitimize one another, to the point that as an ensemble they showcase the colonial and later postcolonial theory of islam noir. A passage from a 1981 publication by the well-known scholar of Mouridism, Donal Cruise O'Brien, illustrates how the Mouride question supports the islam noir model: ‘To counter the humiliation that spiritual subordination to an Arab religion might signify, the Sufi brotherhoods developed religious autonomy in black Africa’, he writes.Footnote 29 Later he returns in the conclusion to his opening problematic, namely ‘that of the injured pride of Africa and its Sufi brotherhoods as symbols of African autonomy in the house of Islam’.Footnote 30
I have elsewhere noted that there is an overemphasis on works on Islam in Senegal in interpreting Islam to the south of the Sahara:
[I]t is true that the development of Sufi orders here has been particularly extensive. But this unusual geography can lead to ‘Senegalocentrism’, or even to ‘Mouridocentrism’. This is certainly the impression produced by a provocative essay by Donal B. Cruise O'Brien in which, under the writer's pen, this brotherhood becomes the keystone of African Islam, the central theme of its history.Footnote 31
Drawing attention to Mouridocentrism need not call into question the merits of the many studies of the brotherhood, including those of Cruise O'Brien, but it does underscore the risk of generalizing and normalizing one particular case as a kind of standard model. Cruise O'Brien's claims here are a very good example of how the Senegalese, and more specifically the Mouride, example are extrapolated to refer to the whole of ‘Black Africa’. We may admit that Cruise O'Brien's systematic presentation, offered as a think piece, simply echoed debates within Senegal (to which I will return later), but this only highlights the Senegalocentrism to which I refer. In any case this text represents a major link in the chain of transmission of this concept, along with all its central elements: conflict and rupture of islam noir from islam arabe; an aspiration towards autonomy on the part of this islam noir; Sufism (understood as the brotherhoods) as the instrument of this autonomy, assumed to be present across the whole of black Africa.
Twenty years after independence, the concept of an autonomous African Islam or an islam noir remained powerful. One might have thought that this model, linked as it was to the political interests of the time – the issue under colonial rule being the separation of sub-Saharan Muslims from an Arab world rife with subversive influences – ought to have lost its utility and relevance with changing circumstances. In reality it has been continually reactivated, as shown by Cruise O'Brien's article, which is both an illustration and a relay in the transmission of this concept. The representation the article offers is in any case sufficiently seductive and powerful to survive on its own terms. This is why even now we can see evidence of the revitalization of this nomenclature, albeit in modified form.
In the meaningully titled, African Islam and Islam in Africa, Eva E. Rosander and David Westerlund propose a two-part schema in which African Islam corresponds principally to Sufism (‘to which the majority of African Muslims belong’) while Islam in Africa refers to the impact of Islamism (‘the rise of Islamism’).Footnote 32 Although in his own contribution Westerlund elaborates that ‘the dividing line between Islamism and Sufism need not be sharp,Footnote 33 it can be assumed the concepts employed for analytical purposes have the effect of reactivating older divides. Westerlund is aware of some measure of filiation with islam noir without actually naming it: ‘The French colonial authorities much preferred “African Islam” … because of [its] alleged passivity.’Footnote 34 The editors present the problematic of the book in the following terms in the introduction:
When speaking about African Islam, we refer to to the ‘contextualized’ or ‘localized’ forms of Islam which are found particularly in Sufi contexts … the expression ‘Islam in Africa’ we use to designate Islamic tendencies, which could also be called reformist/activist tendencies. Their aims are to ‘purify’ Islam from local or indigenous ideas and practices as well as Western influences …. In part the book deals with Islamization as a kind of mediator between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in Africa, being at the same time an interface and a ‘dividing line’ between local and global Islam.Footnote 35
While it is not made explicit, Islamism seems here to come from the exterior in/to Africa. It is in any case associated with ‘global’ Islam, while according to Rosander, African Islam is to be applied to more ‘contextualized’ or ‘localized’ forms of Islam, and in particular to those associated and conflated with Sufism. Participation in Sufism, having been attributed to ‘the majority of African Muslims’ in the introduction (northern Africa included), later seems to be a particular characteristic of Muslims to the south of the Sahara (‘probably an overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan-Muslims are still Sufis’).Footnote 36
We see here once again, as in Cruise O'Brien, a generalisation about the ubiquity of Sufism across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. By the way, what is meant when it comes to ‘Sufism’: is it a matter of belonging to the brotherhoods, is it the practicies of ‘popular Islam’, is it taking part in the veneration of saints, or, more likely, is it in some vague way all of the above ? The use of the word ought to be more precise. As for Islamism, which purportedly belongs to the realm of the ‘global’, one might reasonably object that a longstanding tradition of radicalism culminating in endogenous jihads was present to the south of the Sahara from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, a tradition very much rooted in the ‘local’. In other words, the binary set out by Rosander and Westerland should be treated as a working hypothesis that merits further scrutiny.
There are certain recognizable differences between the colonial conceptions of Islam and the approach taken in Rosander and Westerlund's book: the separation of Arab North Africa and the Sahel fades here in favor of a continental vision, with the Maghreb and Egypt the subject of three of the contributions. Thus this model no longer includes the racializing elements of the earlier iterations, but treats all of Islamic Africa as a single cultural area in which the distinction between African Islam and Islam in Africa is applied.
Still hints of the concept of islam noir remain just below the surface without being named. Ahmed An-Na'im, who distances himself somewhat from any binary schematization of Islam, writes of Sudan in his contribution:
The more Islam is identified with sharia in popular belief and practice under an ‘Islam in Africa’ model, the less likely will human rights norms be accepted and implemented by the Muslim population at large. Conversely, the prevalence of values and institutions of ‘African Islam’… should mean better prospects for human rights.Footnote 37
The author promptly adds that these two models are merely theoretical categories in a social reality in which interactions between the two poles abound (there are ‘elements of one model in the other’) and in which shifts in roles are always possible. He prefers to use the term ‘continuum’ revealing thereby the function of the two models as ideal types of two Islams that serve as interpretive reference points in a broader field of forces rather than as firm structures. It's a reasonably good way to navigate through difficult terrain. In any case, apart from the debate over conceptual and semantic issues in the introduction, the contributions in the collection are quite stimulating.Footnote 38
A second example of the endurance of this concept is a textbook by David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History, which is clearly aimed at university students.Footnote 39 One finds once again two crosscutting concepts, ‘The Islamization of Africa’ (in chapter 3) and ‘The Africanization of Islam’ (in chapter 4). Robinson briefly relates the colonial usage of islam noir and explains why he takes the approach he does, making a sharp distinction between his own pedagogical aims and the earlier approaches with a different object:
The companion process to the islamization of Africa was the africanization of Islam. By this I mean the various ways that, at different times over the past 1,400 years, Islam has been appropriated or articulated in particular societies; to put it in another way, how African groups have created ‘Muslim’ space or made Islam their own … There is nothing pejorative about the africanization of Islam or … ‘whatever-ization’ of Islam. There is something pejorative about the way that Europeans and many Mediterranean-based Muslims have perceived ‘African Islam’ and the africanization of Islam.Footnote 40
The argument is impeccable. The theme of appropriation is certainly the best way to circumvent more divisive constructions.
Still, in these two cases the terms utilized have a life of their own. Despite the intentions of the authors, readers tend to reify the interpretive frames. Polemicists and hasty observers very quickly transform African Islam or Africanized Islam into islam noir, more Sufi, more tolerant, etc. However, at the same time, it becomes ever more difficult to imagine an African Islam that is distinctive given that the situations and cases so precisely described by the authors of these two works are so various. Therefore nothing emerges as a uniform African Islam, not that these authors would themselves ever claim that such a thing exists.
One final example of the persistence of this phenomenon, if not of the concept: the reappropriations and reinterpretations made by sub-Saharan actors themselves, particularly the Senegalese, in staking a claim to an identity in opposition to islam arabe (the flip side of islam noir). The Senegalese environment certainly at least partly influenced, as I have suggested above, the thinking of Cruise O'Brien, whose formulation will find echo here. Abdourahmane Seck has shown how islam noir, négritude, and even Afrocentrism, have criss-crossed one another to give rise to an entirely new entity.Footnote 41 The presuppositions behind the theory of islam noir no longer find favor, whether they be the ‘very old discourse convicting islam noir of a deficit of orthodoxy’ or ‘the depicton of islam noir as an Islam outside of history’.Footnote 42 Rather, new contents are being injected into it to revitalize an existing tag. Seck offers as an example, among others, Saliou Kandji, a Senegalese intellectual who strove to demonstrate the sound linkages between Africa's Islamic pathways and the ‘authentic spirit of Islam’, thereby proving its ‘indisputable continuity with Islamic orthodoxy’.Footnote 43 In this way Kandji inverts the terms of the old accusations of unorthodoxy – the sub-Saharan ‘periphery’ becomes a better guarantor of the Koranic heritage than the Arab ‘center’.
Concerning more specifically the Mouride brotherhood, Cheikh Anta Babou offers other examples of these Africa-centered claims which, paradoxically, revitalize Marty's representations: ‘some Senegalese scholars … wanted to see in the Muridiyya a sort of “national Islam” with its own scriptures and philosophy … its own holy site … and its own pilgrimage’.Footnote 44 The argument is different from that of Kandji but it too is inspired by the theme of négritude. Babou cites former president Senghor, who, in a speech at the inauguration of the mosque at Touba in 1963, declared:
What Amadu Bamba wanted, once again, what he wished to accomplish was to implant Islam in the land of the Blacks, by Africanizing it, let me dare say, by negrifying it. He wanted to adapt Islam to our situation of a developing country of negro-African peasants. This is what explains his enlightening conception of work, particularly farm work, as a functional dimension of prayer.Footnote 45
Babou also associates this thinking with one of the central figures of Afrocentrism: ‘The best representatives of this tendency are L. S. Senghor, who saw the Muridiyya as a form of expression of his idea of “African socialism” and his intellectual and political rival Cheikh Anta Diop, who conceived of the Murid tariqa as a sort of Senegalese national Islam.’Footnote 46
All this is to show the degree to which the concept of islam noir, or African Islam, with all its avatars and reincarnations replenished and reappropriated in various forms, continues to have the power to seduce, inspire, and mobilize; all the while it reintegrates and revitalizes older arguments and motivations, constantly rejuvenating them. It is the tale of these multiple lives, no doubt as yet unfinished, that this article has attempted to recount. Could it be that the ghost of islam noir roams yet today?
