The History of Islam in Africa

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Chapter One

Egypt and North Africa

Peter von Silver

In May 1989. an eighteen-year-old woolcarder set fire to the Husayn Mosque in Cairo. The incident was written up in an Islamic newspaper by a journalist who deplored the act. The article began by asking why this young man would travel from his northern suburb all the way downtown to pray in a mausoleum-mosque--a place where, because of his stance on saint veneration, he believed prayer would be invalid; could he not instead have gone to any of the many mosques of Cairo that did not have tombs? In the remainder of the article, the journalist presents authoritative opinions by establishment figures on the specific requirements of order and decorum during mausoleum visits and on ordinary Muslims wrongly taking the law into their own hands. The article concluded that the woolcarder's act was indefensible.

    This incident illustrates a typically modern conflict in northern Africa. A Muslim accepting the teaching of absolute separation between God and his creation literally takes drastic action to end the deeply rooted popular tradition of saint veneration in Egypt. And a believer in the traditionally broad Sunni orthodoxy defends saint veneration, provided it occurs in an orderly fashion according to accepted custom ( adab ). The conflict is not without precedent in earlier centuries, but it is only today that the two positions are seen as irreconcilable.

    This chapter deals with, first, the formation (700-1250 C.E.) and dominance (1250-1800 C.E.) of a broad Sunni orthodoxy as the religion of the majority of the inhabitants of northern Africa; and second, modern efforts at political centralization and a narrowing of orthodox Sunnism, both of which have contributed to the rise of contemporary Islamism (1800 to the present).

The Formation and Dominance of Sunni Orthodoxy

(700-1800)

    The promotion of a specific religion as orthodoxy by an empire is a relatively late phenomenon in world history. The first to be so promoted was Zoroastrianism, adopted by the Persian Sasanids (224-651 C.E.) as their state religion. Islam, supported by the Arab caliphal dynasties of the Umayyads and Abbasids as the religion of their far-flung empire after their rise in the seventh century C.E., was the most recent. In all cases--be it Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, or Islam--the endorsed religion was attributed to a founding figure who preceded the empire. These religions went through more or less extended formative phases in the empires before they crystallized into dominant orthodoxies and a variety of heterodoxies that either died out or became marginal.

    Christianity, the state religion of the Roman-Byzantine Empire from the fourth century C.E., was in the last stage of its doctrinal evolution toward imperial orthodoxy when the Arabs occupied Byzantine Syria and Egypt in 634-55. It appears that it was the still unsettled question of a Christian orthodoxy for the Byzantine Empire that inspired the rulers of the new Arab empire to search for their own, independent, religion. Caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) was the first to leave us an idea of the beginnings of this new religion in the inscriptions of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (691). He called this new religion "Islam" and proclaimed its superiority over Christianity.

    During the early seventh century, Byzantium had been racked by the controversy between the patriarchs of Constantinople and Alexandria over the orthodox interpretation of Christology. Constantinople advanced the doctrine of Christ's mysteriously double nature, divine as well as human (the Nicene Creed). Alexandria insisted on the more rational doctrine of God's single, divine nature descending into the human form of Jesus (Coptic monophysitism). While the emperors vainly sought to impose a compromise formula, the caliphs took advantage of their disarray. "Do not speak of three (gods)," warns one of the inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, disposing of Christology altogether. Islam was presented as the new, superior religion, built on a clear, rational separation between a single, non-Trinitarian God and the world.

    Proclaiming a new religion was one thing; turning it into an orthodoxy was another. Inevitably Islam underwent the same process of rancorous divisions as did Christianity before orthodoxy eventually emerged. The rancor began over the nature of the caliphate and its ability to define doctrine. The caliphs interpreted themselves as representatives (caliphs) of God, and said that their decisions, therefore, were divine writ. On the other hand, it was claimed that because the divine word was laid down (probably by the 700s) in scripture, in the Quran, no one was privileged over anyone else to make law; the interpretation of scripture was held, in this view, to be a collective right.

    At first the caliphs continued to issue laws and formulate dogma as they saw fit, but in the ninth century the tide turned. Pious critics, claiming to speak for all Muslims, increasingly gained the initiative. What had hitherto been caliphal law now was turned into the alleged precedents (hadiths) established by the prophet Muhammad. Ad hoc dogmas promulgated by the caliphs were replaced by a progressively systematic theology formulated by the critics. By the mid-thirteenth century, the separation between religion and state was complete: the critics, now officially recognized as the autonomous body of "religious scholars" (`ulama') , controlled dogma and law; the rulers had been demoted to the position of executive organs of religion.

    While the `ulama' were busy establishing the basics of scriptural orthodoxy, a parallel development was occurring on the level of religious practice. Early evidence comes from what began as a military institution during the period of the Arab conquests--the sentry post (ribat) . Such posts--towers, forts, castles--existed by the score in northern Africa, along the Mediterranean coast, and in Anatolia, for protection against Byzantine counterattacks. In the ninth century, many of these posts lost their military purpose and evolved into autonomous religious foundations (waqfs) , in conjunction with agricultural enterprises, mosques, and meeting rooms, and supported by alms and gifts. In the ribats, committed Muslims met for Quran recitation and ascetic practices, imitating the prophet Muhammad's life. (The Quran and the biography of the Prophet became available as scriptures probably in the early 700s and 800s, respectively.) Many were mystics (Sufis) and wrote manuals on how to acquire divine knowledge (ma`rifa) , or were revered as "friends of God" (walis) --that is, saintly figures whose prayers and rituals for rain, healing, or exorcism were reported as effective and who attracted pilgrims and religious fairs to their ribat.

    As orthodoxy was being hammered out during these early centuries, dissenters essentially had two choices. Either they rejected the authority of caliphs and scholars altogether, a position taken by the so-called Kharijis ("Seceders"), and made the fulfillment of all laws and duties incumbent on Muslims as individuals. Or they deplored the caliphal retreat from law and dogma as a betrayal and labored for the reestablishment of the true caliphate, or "imamate" [(true) leadership], whose holder was held to be divinely empowered. The latter position was taken by the Shi`is ("partisans" of `Ali, who is traditionally listed as the fourth caliph). At the center of the Islamic Empire, adherents of both positions were ruthlessly persecuted and they therefore generally mounted their oppositional movements on the periphery.

    North Africa, or the Maghrib (the "West"--that is, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) was one such peripheral refuge for dissenters. It was a sparsely inhabited imperial province of limited agricultural resources located on the coastal plains along the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the adjacent mountains (the Kabylia in eastern Algeria, the Atlas in northern Morocco), and the oasis clusters of the northern Sahara. The steppes of the vast interior high plateau supported only pastoralists. The sedentary, mostly Christian population of indigenous Berbers in Byzantine Tunisia and Morocco (Tangier and Ceuta) had officially surrendered to the Arabs by 711 after half a century of intermittent fighting. The mountain villagers, high-plateau pastoralists, and desert nomads, fiercely devoted to their independence, either avoided the new Arab conquerors or fought them, stirred into action by Khariji refugees from the Arab heartlands.

    In the middle of the eighth century, the Khariji refugees and local Berber converts founded a number of small mountain and oasis states that quickly supplemented their limited agricultural resources with camel-borne trans-Saharan trade. Baghdad, the capital of the `Abbasid Empire, was in the process of developing into a cosmopolitan cultural and economic center with intensive trade interests in East Africa, India, China, Scandinavia, and the western Mediterranean. Cordoba, the capital of the Spanish Umayyads, was an almost equally impressive rival. The trade in both empires was based on a bimetallic monetary system of gold and silver coins. Most of the gold was obtained from Nubia, on the upper Nile to the south of Egypt, and West Africa, in the region of the upper Niger and Senegal Rivers. Nubia and West Africa were outside the Islamic empire. The merchants were Egyptian Copts and North African Kharijis who traded cloth and copperware for gold, ivory, and slaves. The Kharijis maintained permanent residences as well as mosques in the northern market towns of the Sudanic kingdoms and thus were the first carriers of Islam into West Africa.

    As opponents of any strong central political authority, the Kharijis were content with small realms, far removed from the caliphs and religious scholars in Baghdad. By contrast, the Shi`is favored a return to the original concept of the caliph as the sole representative of God--a concept that was being transformed in emerging Sunni orthodoxy into the caliph-`ulama' coregency. When their emissaries preached the message of the mahdi to establish a realm of justice, peace, and unity on earth, they clearly had the replacement of the `Abbasid caliphate and its clerical scholars in mind.

    But even the Shi`is had to start their proselytizing far away, in the mountains of Lesser Kabylia in eastern Algeria. There, at the end of the ninth century, a missionary from Iraq converted the Kutama Berber villagers to the cause of the Isma`iliyya, a Shi`i branch devoted to immediate revolutionary action. The missionary Abu `Abdallah was part of a worldwide network of missionaries ( da`i , plural du`at ). They carried a religious message in the name of the descendants of Isma`il, the eldest son of Ja`far the sixth imam of the Shi`a. Isma`il died before his father and his supporters, the more militant among the Shi`is, rallied around his son Muhammad, and split from the main stream of the Shi`a.

    In the early 900s, the Kutama Berbers conquered Tunisia from a local dynasty of `Abbasid governors. The original missionary relinquished leadership to `Ubayd Allah the Mahdi, who had lived in an Isma`ili center in Syria before he was forced by `Abbasid persecution to flee to the Maghrib. Once in power, the first Fatimid caliph began to implement his idea of the utopian realm of justice on earth (909-34). He and his descendants interpreted this to mean no less than the vanquishing of the `Abbasid Empire--a feat they in fact almost accomplished. In 969, they conquered Egypt, Syria, and western Arabia; and in 1058/59, a Fatimid general briefly held power in Baghdad. Impressive as these conquests were, however, reality soon fell short of utopia: the justice of the Fatimids was no more equitable than that of the `Abbasids. They collected the same heavy taxes from the peasants and confiscated the properties of merchants and officials with the same arbitrariness. Furthermore, in spite of major propaganda and conversion efforts, they never succeeded in supplanting the nascent, but tenacious, Sunni orthodoxy in their empire. When the Fatimids eventually collapsed in 1171, their version of Islam disappeared rapidly from the central Islamic lands.

    Not surprisingly, while Fatimid imperialism was still dangerous it instilled militancy into the rising Sunni orthodoxy. From the mid-eleventh century onward, newly converted ethnic groups--Turks from Central Asia and Berbers from northern Africa--made themselves the champions of nascent Sunnism against the Shi`is, the Christian Crusaders in Palestine, and the Christian reconquistadores in Spain.

* * *

    The rural Berbers in northern Africa had barely been touched by Islam prior to the eleventh century. However, camel-breeding nomads such as the Sanhaja Berbers in the western Sahara had been involved in the trans-Saharan trade ever since the Kharijis pioneered this trade. The Saharan merchant city of Awdaghost, which had Muslim residences and mosques, was initially in the Berbers' pastural territory, but around the turn of the tenth to the eleventh century it recognized the authority of the king of Ghana, a non-Muslim.

    In 1035-36, a Sanhaja chief from near Awdaghost went on his pilgrimage to Mecca. On his return journey, seeking an Islamic instructor for his tribe, he met a Sunni scholar in Qayrawan, Tunisia. He recommended to him another scholar, the head of a school in southern Morocco, a sunni stronghold in the midst of a country infested with heresies. One of his disciples, Abdallah Ibn Yasin (d. 1059), accompanied the Sanhaja chief to the Sahara.

    Ibn Yasin succeeded in harnessing the Sanhaja into a disciplined movement, the murabitun , known in Europe as Almoravids. They were committed to strictly observe the letter of the law, according to the Maliki madhhab . At its height, the Almoravid empire (1042-1148) encompassed Mauritania, Morocco, western Algeria, and the southern half of Spain. However, both Almoravid military power and religious orthodoxy were on shaky foundations: The original tribal troops were not easily transformed into a professional army, since most troops preferred settlement over continued service, and their nontribal replacements, recruited in the conquered territories or from abroad, failed to coalesce into effective units. As for Almoravid orthodoxy, "guardsman" Islam proved too narrow in comparison with theological developments in Islamic civilization generally. In the twelfth century, eminent scholars (e.g., Abu Hamid al-Ghazali; d. III) were proposing the limited use of philosophy, mainly for the interpretation of dogma, so as to combat more easily the counterorthodoxy of Shi`ism; they wanted to explain with the help of rational arguments the superiority of Sunni Islam. The Almoravid scholars, unfamiliar with philosophy, lacked theological sophistication and therefore found it difficult to defend their narrow Sunnism.

    On both military and religious grounds, the Almoravids were thus unable to consolidate their empire. Their regime was challenged at the beginning of the twelfth century by the Almohads. The founder of the Almohad movement, Abu `Abdallah Muhammad Ibn Tumart (d. 1130), a Masmuda Berber from the Anti-Atlas mountains in southern Morocco, staunchly supported Ghazali's theological position within rising Sunnism. Ibn Tumart's central doctrine was that of the unity of God as distinct from the multiplicity of the things making up the world. Since all-encompassing divine oneness is rationally incomprehensible Ibn Tumart proposed to interpret it with the help of the theological tool of analogy ( ta`wil ). The followers of this theological interpretation, called al-muwahhidun ("Unitarians"), or Almohads, built an empire that at its height was even more impressive than that of the Almoravids, comprising all of the Maghrib as well as Islamic Spain (1148-1269). Like its predecessor, the Almohad empire disintegrated during the transition from fielding conquering armies to garrisoning troops, although its religious legacy--a broad Sunni orthodoxy--proved to be a lasting accomplishment. The empire was succeeded by a set of regional successor states in the Maghrib and Spain.

    By this time (mid-thirteenth century), Sunni orthodoxy had reached its mature phase: law and theology had been fully formulated and the mystics and saints who had hitherto practiced Islam in the ribats began to move into lodges ( zawiyas ; lit. "retreats") in the countryside. Scriptural Islam was taught and studied in urban colleges, such as the Qarawiyyin in Fez and the Zaytuna in Tunis. Mystical and popular Islam began to include the population outside the cities and away from the coast. The zawiyas in the countryside, with their saint's mausoleums, guardian families, and religious rituals were supported by alms from the surrounding peasants or nomads and provided basic education in reading and writing to promising young men. The rituals were named after their patron saints and often became the distinctive practices of entire brotherhoods of lodges, called tariqas , with branches throughout the Islamic world.

    The earliest saint whose full biography and writings we possess was Abu Madyan Shu`ayb Ibn al-Husayn (1126-90), a Spaniard who became the patron saint of Tlemcen in western Algeria. One of his disciples was Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1256), a Moroccan whose Shadhiliyya tariqa became one of the most influential and widespread brotherhoods in the Islamic world (today it has its own website). Thus it is only from the thirteenth century and the establishment of Sunni orthodoxy onward that we can speak of the full Islamization of the Maghrib.

    In Egypt, the final establishment of Sunni orthodoxy occurred when the Kurdish-descended Saladin (Salah al-Din; ruled 1171-93), with his Turkish cavalry troops, destroyed the Fatimid empire in 1171. Saladin was a champion of the Turkish-endorsed version of broad Sunni orthodoxy that Ghazali had formulated half a century earlier. Two types of new urban institutions were devoted to the promulgation of this orthodoxy, the college (madrasa) for the teaching of scripturalism and the seminary (khanqa) for the teaching of mysticism. Both were religious foundations similar to the ribats mentioned above, financially independent from the government and maintained by rents collected from urban real estate or villages. Both madrasas and khanqas maintained salaried professors and instructors and provided lodging and scholarships for their students. As in the Maghrib, the ribats gave way to zawiyas that dotted city neighborhoods and the countryside. Here the general population received oral instruction in the basics of Islam and congregated for the practice of local religious customs.

    Saladin's descendants, the Ayyubids (1193-1250), and the Turkish Mamluks (1250-1517) further broadened orthodoxy by endowing sufi seminaries and encouraging the teaching of the Shafi`i law for the people of lower Egypt, the Maliki law for the people of upper Egypt and Alexandria, and the Hanafi law for Syrian residents and for the Turkish-speaking elite. The same broad orthodoxy was maintained by the Turkish Ottomans who conquered Egypt in 1517 and established tributary regimes in Algeria (1518), Libya (1551), and Tunisia (1574). In fact, under the Ottomans the previously distinct career paths of `ulama' and sufi shaykhs in Cairo and Alexandria merged, and only brotherhoods and lodges with distinctly local practices and customs remained separate. During the Ottoman period (1517-1798), religious scholars at the prominent Azhar University could be enrolled in as many as two dozen sufi circles, and many sufi shaykhs were distinguished teachers of law.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The History of Islam in Africa by . Copyright © 2000 by Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.