Lamin Sanneh

The Origins of Clericalism in West African Islam

This article describes the independent contribution of pacific clerics to Islamic diffusion in West Africa. The particular role of Serakhulle (or Soninke) clerics, better known as Jakhanke, is examined in detail. The Jakhanke became a distinct clerical caste among the Serakhulle, initially through the work of al-Ḥājj Salim Suware who led them first at Diakha-Masina and eventually at Diakha-Bambukhu, where they lost a good deal of their Serakhulle cultural traits. Henceforth they acquired a self-consciously Islamic image alongside an increasing identification with the Manding culture. Al-Ḥājj Salim ( floruit twelfth–thirteenth century) founded the clerical vocation on a principled disavowal of jihād and withdrawal from political/secular centres. He also established travel as essential to the clerical life. Since his time the Jakhanke have been characterized by dispersion, although the dispersion trail has also connected numerous centres into an effective network of clerical expansion. The career of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jakhite, a member of the Jakhanke community, illustrates the range of clerical outreach. He and his community eventually settled in Kano in the reign of Muḥammad Rimfa (1463–99) and helped consolidate Islam in Hausaland. On this kind of evidence, it is suggested that the pattern of Islamic clerical diffusion can be discerned at an early stage, although historical sources have tended to fuse the themes of Islamic expansion, commercial activity and a resident foreign Muslim community. However, the Jakhanke clerical tradition is sufficiently secure for it to be studied independently, without assuming a corresponding degree of commercial or foreign Muslim influence. In conclusion, the implications of these findings for research into Islamic diffusion in West Africa are outlined.

The domestication of Islam and Christianity in African societies: A Methodological Exploration

A critical question facing the student of religion in Africa is the continuing vitality of indigenous religions and their status in Muslim and Christian Africa. The picture has been complicated by attempts to project models of traditional religions on the basis of what Islam and Christianity appear to tolerate, or find tolerable. In spite of the positive yield of such an approach it has not seriously moved us beyond assumptions rooted in the ancient competition between Islam and Christianity, a competition now being fostered on the unstated ground that the African religious heritage offered little challenge and was consequently abolished by whichever of the two religions first came on the scene. The rival claims to superiority of Islam and Christianity have followed these religions into Africa where the lure of numerical prizes stiffened the competitive resolve. Without necessarily abandoning such a competitive view of religious encounter some Western scholars, with a scarcely concealed prejudice against Christianity, in which they have been imitated by scores of educated Africans, grant to Islam in Africa the capacity for tolerance and adaptation which they refuse to a begrudged Christianity. In addition to belittling the role of African religions, this approach sedulously propagates old religious rivalries and thus gravely distorts the process of religious change and adaptation in which the African environment has continued to play a formative role. The challenge thus facing Islam and Christianity in Africa is not the facile one of carving up the continent between them but one that demands creative involvement. We should therefore now apply to these two religions the crucial test of responsiveness to Africas religious traditions. This produces a wholly different situation whose implications should make us less complacent about accepted designations.

Shari'ah Sanctions as Secular Grace? A Nigerian Islamic Debate and an Intellectual Response

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the US sparked a wide-ranging debate on inter-cultural relations between the East and the West. Nearly everyone seems agreed that these attacks opened a new phase of the relation between Islam and the West and the need, therefore, to recognize retreat and isolation as impossible. The attitudes of people however, vary greatly. Some argue that conciliation will advance dialogue and inter-cultural solidarity, and isolate the untamed radical fringe. Others assume confrontation to be inevitable in a world of irreconcilable difference and hostility with war and armed vigilance the terms of engagement. There are still others who fault the global imbalance of economic resources and opine that the solution lies in programmes of debt relief and poverty alleviation. Material security, they argue, would make potential terrorists more amenable to reason and moderation, and by implication, make them that much easier to wean from religious fanaticism. All these views represent an attempt to respond to the recent upsurge of terror. Many analysts have tried to look to past experience as a guide and have found an analogy in what went before rather than seeing the crisis as something new. The closest analogy they find is the Cold War and its totalitarian ideology. The comparison now is between truth, jihad, and martyrdom in the Muslim world, and liberal democratic values in the West. The anachronism of Islamic utopianism is opposed to the progressivism of western liberalism. As Paul Berman expressed it in his Terror and Liberalism, what is happening today is a ‘war of ideas’, every bit as fierce as the anti-totalitarian struggles of the twentieth century. The same weapons of vigilance and containment are needed to deal with the Islamic threat.

Can Europe Be Saved? A Review Essay

July 2007 D a visit to London in 1969 I remember an English friend taking me to Great St. Margaret’s in central London, saying that this was the church of T. S. Eliot. In a stroll through Kensington Park afterward, I remember asking my friend what role he saw for Christianity in Britain in view of the looming challenge of Islam. I had just arrived from studying in the Middle East, which was what prompted my question. Christian minorities there have had to learn to lie low for a thousand years or more. My friend said he thought secularization would tame Islam the way it had Christianity, and the matter then subsided into the sylvan mood of the park. I resolved, however, to find out what, if anything, Eliot might have said on the question.

Christians in the Age of Islamic Enlightenment: A Review Essay

International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 34, No. 3 E bedraggled from imperial repression and reeling from the sudden inrush of Greek science and philosophy, Christianity achieved at the hands of Constantine a measure of guarded cohesion before splintering further under Justinian in the sixth century. The Christological controversy, which had taken its toll by the time of the rise of Islam in the seventh century, survived into the Islamic phase with renewed vigor. Rather than flinching, the fledgling Islamic movement set upon the Christian world from two different directions: from without, by the sequestration of territory, in the east against Byzantium and in the west against Spain; and from within, by Islamic criticism of Christian Scripture and of Christian doctrines. In the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christianity was consolidating its hold on the Mediterranean before the rise of Islam in the seventh century challenged it seriously. In time, the caliphate proceeded to hold the papacy to ransom for a hundred years, and for much longer Europe danced to the tune of the caliph and, later, to that of the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. Meanwhile, Islam held tenaciously to the view that Christianity is a corrupted religion whose doctrines are invalid. Muslims may for expedience tolerate Christians, but they may not countenance the religion. Split in that fashion, Christians were granted protected status as a matter of social policy while the religion remained under legal restriction. Nowhere is the double fact of territorial disinheritance and religious disqualification more evident than in Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace and for centuries belonging in the Muslim sphere. It continues to lie on the remote, exotic rim Christians in the Age of Islamic Enlightenment: A Review Essay

The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism

* Introduction Islam And The African Context: Social And Religious Synthesis * Muslims in Non-Muslim Societies of Africa * Islam and the African Religious Synthesis: Society and the Religious Outlook * Slavery, Clerics, and Muslim Society Islam, Africa, And Colonialism: Religion In History * Tcherno Aliou, the Wal of Goumba: Islam, Colonialism, and the Rural Factor in Futa Jallon, 18671912 * Saints, Virtue, and Society in Muslim Africa: The History of a Theme Education And Society: The Roots Of Muslim Identity * A Childhood Muslim Education: Barakah, Identity, and the Roots of Change * The Arabic Language in African Education * Action and Reaction Among Freetown Muslims: Factionalism, Pluralism, and Muslim Agency Muslims And The Secular National State in Africa: Politics And The Religious Potential * Religion and Politics with Reference to Africa: A Comparative Religious Critique * The Crown and the Turban: Public Policy Issues in Christian-Muslim Relations, with Special Reference to Africa

Pluralism and Christian Commitment

“In the early centuries, the new Christian religion moved forward like an oriental caravanserai, with its complex baggage of exotic teachings, baffling mysteries, and an eclectic ethical code. In the jumble and tumble of social encounter, Christians spoke a bewildering variety of languages. … Christian missionaries assumed that since all cultures and languages are lawful in Gods eyes, the rendering of Gods word into those languages and cultures is valid and necessary. … Far from suppressing indigenous cultures, the effect of missionary translation has been to stimulate indigenous renewal.”

The Last Great Frontier: Currents in Resurgence, Convergence, and Divergence of Religion

April 2013 Lamin Sanneh, a contributing editor, is D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity, Yale Divinity School, and Professor of History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author, most recently, of Summoned from the Margins: Homecoming of an African (Eerdmans, 2012). —lamin.sanneh@yale.edu I the minds of many, the events of 9/11 are associated with the unwelcome return of religion on the assumption that modern society has outgrown the religious habit, and what remains of religion can be reduced to polite weekend ceremonies for the recovering few. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the triumph of the liberal West, leading Francis Fukuyama to venture a triumphalist thesis about “The End of History and the Last Man,” the title of his popular 1992 book. Few observers exempted the Muslim world from the new secular alignment of world order in spite of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its widening repercussions around the world. After all, Europe could now resume its march toward a new dawn of freedom and prosperity unimpeded by the Cold War. President George H. W. Bush had an intuitive sense of an unfolding watershed in the new world order but balked at venturing a prescription for the shape it would or should take. In retrospect his hesitation seems uncannily prescient in view of the subsequent turmoil.1

PERSECUTED POST-WESTERN CHRISTIANITY AND THE POST-CHRISTIAN WEST

Abstract The startlingly rapid growth of Christianity outside the West (particularly Pentecostal Christianity) has been met with significant religious persecution, and radicalized versions of Islam are implicated. Neither the radical secularism nor the radically liberal Christianity that is so common in the contemporary West (especially in Europe) is likely to inspire realistic and effective responses to the problem of religiously-motivated violence. As it seeks the “hearts and minds” of global neighbors, the West should observe Christianitys positive impact in China, African nations, and elsewhere. This may inspire the West to reconsider its secularist habits and more sensitively and creatively contribute to positive realignments of the religio-political landscape.

Slavery and Islam

In the course of field investigations I once found myself in the midst of a clerical Muslim community in Senegambia whose ideas on slaves and slavery were in open conflict with the scruples I had acquired from reading, among others, John Woolman, Thomas Clarkson, and William Cowper. I suddenly felt ill equipped and unprepared, to the ironic interest of my informants. To much fanfare, I had arrived in the community trailing an open-minded, objective, scholarly interest in the history and practices of the clerical center, including slavery, and yet my undeclared reservations and qualms on the subject showed I had something up my sleeve, which was to depict the slave owning clerics as cruel and benighted. As a consequence, I faced a swarm of pestering questions. In the interest of true