This article provides a select reading of the British Africanist Ivor Wilks’ unpublished field notes, “Conversations about the past, mainly from Ghana, 1956–1996.” Specifically, it focuses on Wilks’ notes on the migration of Muslims in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso, including his collection of interviews, diary entries, anecdotal observations, and ethnographic data. It offers new perspectives on the entanglements between mobility, knowledge transmission, and authority in the history of Muslim communities in West Africa that are normally taken for granted. While this article is not meant to be exhaustive, it highlights the possibility of using disparate notes and observations to stitch together the beginnings of a compelling story that centers mobility as a crucial aspect of the history of Islam in Africa.
In 1862, al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Fūtī Tall (d. 1864) conquered a prominent Muslim polity of the Middle Niger valley, the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. Several months earlier, he had penned a long polemical work, Bayān mā waqaʿa, where he outlined his conflict with Ḥamdallāhi's ruler, Aḥmad III (d. 1862), and presented a legal justification for his eventual conquest. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one of several West African Muslim intellectuals who articulated a new vision of power in the region. These intellectuals linked legitimate political rule with mastery over Islamic knowledge that they claimed only they had. Yet these linkages between religious authority and political power remain understudied. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar's Bayān offers one example of political theology in nineteenth-century West Africa. In this article, I trace his arguments and explain how he constructs his authority and claims to sovereignty in this work. In the process, I conceptualize two theoretical frameworks — the ‘political geography of belief’ and the ‘political theology of knowledge’ — to demonstrate how a careful engagement with Arabic sources can help develop new approaches to the study of Muslim communities in African history and beyond.
The previous volume of Islamic Africa (vol. 8, 2017), guest-edited by Fallou Ngom and Mustapha H. Kurfi, was devoted to seven essays addressing ʿajami texts in Africa. Like the four articles that follow, they were presented at the 2016 Symposium held in the memory of Professor John O. Hunwick (1936-2015) at Northwestern University, "Sacred Word: Changing Meanings in Textual Cultures of Islamic Africa."1 The four essays here feature a close analysis of the internal meanings of texts from Islamic Africa.2 The symposium's emphasis was on research that is now reshaping our use of Arabic and Arabic-script manuscripts in Africa. Participants were asked to reflect on both Arabic and ʿajami writing (African languages written in the Arabic alphabet), as well as textual analyses. Within those foci, the symposium call-for-papers specified an interest in the meaning and the sanctity of the Word in the lives of African Muslim authors and their communities, and it asked how these may have changed across time. This set of papers highlights some of the most significant contributions that can be obtained from a close-reading
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