Bringing together cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, this handbook argues that despite often being overlooked or treated as marginal, the study of Islam from an African context is integral to the broader Muslim world. Challenging the portrayal of African Muslims as passive recipients of religious impetuses arriving from the outside, this book shows how the continent has been a site for the development of rich Islamic scholarship and religious discourses. Over the course of the book, the contributors reflect on: The history and infrastructure of Islam in Africa Politics and Islamic reform Gender, youth, and everyday life for African Muslims New technologies, media, and popular culture. Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions examine the connections between Islam and broader sociopolitical developments across the continent, demonstrating the important role of religion in the everyday lives of Africans. This book is an important and timely contribution to a subject that is often diffusely studied, and will be of interest to researchers across religious studies, African studies, politics, and sociology.

This handbook generates new insights that enrich our understanding of the history of Islam in Africa and the diverse experiences and expressions of the faith on the continent. The chapters in the volume cover key themes that reflect the preoccupations and realities of many African Muslims. They provide readers access to a comprehensive treatment of the past and current traditions of Muslims in Africa, offering insights on different forms of Islamization that have taken place in several regions, local responses to Islamization, Islam in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and the varied forms of Jihād movements that have occurred on the continent. The handbook provides updated knowledge on various social, cultural, linguistic, political, artistic, educational, and intellectual aspects of the encounter between Islam and African societies reflected in the lived experiences of African Muslims and the corpus of African Islamic texts.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.

The history of the Islamic faith in Africa spans 14 centuries. This book provides a detailed mapping of the cultural, political, geographic and religious past of Islam in a single volume. Intended as a reference and textbook, it does not assume prior knowledge of the subject.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In a series of essays this collected volume challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding the intellectual history of Muslim Africa. Ranging from the libraries of Early Modern Mauritania and Timbuktu to mosque lectures in contemporary Mombasa the contributors to this collection overturn many commonly accepted assumptions about Africa's Muslim learned classes. Rather than isolated, backward and out of touch, the essays in this volume reveal Muslim intellectuals as not only well aware of the intellectual currents of the wider Islamic world but also caring deeply about the issues facing their communities.

The Encyclopedia of Africa presents the most up-to-date and thorough reference on this region of ever-growing importance in world history, politics, and culture. Its core is comprised of the entries focusing on African history and culture from 2005's acclaimed five-volume Africana - nearly two-thirds of these 1,300 entries have been updated, revised, and expanded to reflect the most recent scholarship. Organized in an A-Z format, the articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religions, ethnic groups, organizations, and countries throughout Africa. There are articles on contemporary nations of sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic groups from various regions of Africa, and European colonial powers. Other examples include Congo River, Ivory trade, Mau Mau rebellion, and Pastoralism. The Encyclopedia of Africa is sure to become the essential resource in the field.

The book uses the main body of Lovejoy’s work to speak to core African and economic history issues. It thoroughly examines Lovejoy's contributions to the study of Africa, particularly in exploring issues around production and exchanges at local, regional and international levels. The book offers readers a fresh perspective on the discourse of slavery and colonialism while simultaneously introducing them to the quality of work already accomplished by a stellar scholar. As the book argues, Lovejoy presents verifiable historical data that nudges us to reconsider our perception of Africa’s growth trajectory, especially before its encounter with the Americas. A chapter examines the various ways by which the people experienced slavery before it became proliferated during the time Europeans entered into the business. Another chapter addresses questions about the progressive efforts of slave traders to access the interior to drive more victims who would be shipped to the Atlantic for the business of servitude to advance the European economy. Alongside this exploration, a provides the background as to the contributions of Africans to ensure the continuity of this business. Lovejoy notes, for instance, that Muslims were found in every region in the Americas during slavery, which indicates that they were being taken there through transatlantic slavery. While Muslims were found in these areas, it was not true that they were there in large numbers. This is underscored by their resistance to all forms of forced extraction of the people from their homeland. In essence, they challenged the system in ways that redefined their participation in the exercise. The book analyzes how Muslims ensured that economic and political power were withdrawn from the hands of the victims and how they systematically created institutions that promoted that very inequity. Lovejoy’s extensive knowledge allows us to develop theories and establish applicable methodologies for understanding African reality since the precolonial era. He presents original perspectives about addressing issues of African-American engagements and the roles of critical voices in the diaspora. Consequently, the book is an invaluable educational resource, particularly for people who want to deepen their understanding of African social and economic history.

In Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions, a preeminent historian of Africa argues that scholars of the Americas and the Atlantic world have not given Africa its due consideration as part of either the Atlantic world or the age of revolutions. The book examines the jihād movement in the context of the age of revolutions—commonly associated with the American and French revolutions and the erosion of European imperialist powers—and shows how West Africa, too, experienced a period of profound political change in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Paul E. Lovejoy argues that West Africa was a vital actor in the Atlantic world and has wrongly been excluded from analyses of the period. Among its chief contributions, the book reconceptualizes slavery. Lovejoy shows that during the decades in question, slavery expanded extensively not only in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil but also in the jihād states of West Africa. In particular, this expansion occurred in the Muslim states of the Sokoto Caliphate, Fuuta Jalon, and Fuuta Toro. At the same time, he offers new information on the role antislavery activity in West Africa played in the Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora. Finally, Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions provides unprecedented context for the political and cultural role of Islam in Africa—and of the concept of jihād in particular—from the eighteenth century into the present. Understanding that there is a long tradition of jihād in West Africa, Lovejoy argues, helps correct the current distortion in understanding the contemporary jihād movement in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Africa.

Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.