LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      This book had its genesis in the realization that scholarship has not necessarily been crossing boundaries, particularly in the incorporation of African history into mainstream global history, and therefore the nature of the discourse on important subjects has frequently been neglected.¹ This is a particularly serious problem in the contemporary world, when militancy and aggressive confrontation have characterized the relations between Muslims who refuse to accept complacency and toleration when global capitalism and Western domination perpetuate inequities and injustice. Ignorance and simplistic interpretation characterize the CNN approach to the coverage of the news. Efforts to control resources—petroleum, minerals, agricultural production, labor migration—reinforce the wealth of the few who control companies and receive the support of countries who advance the interests of capitalist resources in the name of free enterprise in what is factually restrictive and monopolistic concentration of wealth in the elites that profit from corruption and secret arrangements that benefit the few, whether or not altruistic motives or occasional acts of generosity are implemented through donations that cleanse dirty money by attaching the names of the rich to institutions that guarantee a place in history.

      The role of Islam in the modern world is often misunderstood, and the role of Islam in West Africa even more so. The terrorism of al-Qaeda and its affiliates in northern Mali and southern Algeria is attributed to an infusion of foreign ideas from the Middle East without recognition of the long tradition of Muslim resistance and political fervor in the region itself that stem from the poverty imposed by political decisions. Similarly, the murderous path of Boko Haram and the earlier Maitatsine movement in Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon is approached with a shocking sense of discovery that fails to recognize a long tradition of homegrown Islamic radicalism, despite any role played by pan-Islamic influences.² The dynamic forces that have arisen as a response to globalization and military solutions that are far more devastating than the evil that is targeted are not necessarily revolutionary in what they prescribe. One has only to look at the attitudes toward women to see that misogyny is a central feature of the response. In a postsocialist world, polarization has produced a new dialectic whose outcome is far from certain. That dialectic is associated with the Muslim concept of jihād as justifiable holy war against non-Muslims and indeed against Muslims who are considered lax and unsupportive of a strict adherence to Islamic law as understood in reference to the Sharīʿa.

      The focus of this book is on the past, not the current manifestations of jihād and the global contradictions of enormous population growth, the tremendous advances in technology and scientific discovery, and the increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tiny elites who have the means to perpetuate their position. Understanding the past jihād movement in West Africa is essential because the evolution of human society seems determined to find new ways of not learning from the past and relying on ignorance and subterfuge when the amount of new knowledge that has emerged is actually accelerating without any significant corresponding impact on the body politic. The more we learn through scientific enquiry, the less we seem to understand. The exposition of past jihād is essential in understanding how jihād continues to have strong appeal in West Africa, as does the intensive militancy of Islam in other contexts in the Middle East, in East Africa, and indeed in Great Britain, North America, and elsewhere.

      This book attempts to situate the historical attraction of jihād in the context of the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century in West Africa, and specifically in the region south of the Sahara that is often referred to as the western and central Sudan and here is referred to as Bilād al-Sūdān, from the Arabic, the “land of the blacks.” This period is often labeled the age of revolutions in western Europe and the broader Atlantic world to highlight the series of revolutionary movements that produced the political and economic configuration of the modern world. The corresponding changes in Africa, and specifically in Islamic Africa, are almost entirely ignored or silenced. Whether or not the age of revolutions is thought to have begun with the independence of North American colonies from Great Britain in the 1780s or the outbreak of the French Revolution after 1789, the momentous events of the era resulted in the slave uprising in St. Domingue and the formation of independent Haiti in 1804, the Napoleonic Wars and subsequent attempts at restoration of monarchies in Europe, the independence of the mainland colonies of the Spanish Empire, the emergence of Brazil as an American nation, and the equally important and numerous slave uprisings and acts of resistance that followed Haitian independence. Notably absent from this focus on the age of revolutions are events and transformations that occurred in Africa, particularly Africa south of the Sahara. The focus here is on Islamic West Africa, not other parts of Africa, but the same questions

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