Reinterpreting the Role of Muslims in the West African Middle Ages

Abstract

Recent research points to a renewed scholarly interest in the West African Middle Ages and the Sahelian imperial tradition. However, in these works only tangential attention is paid to the role of Muslims, and especially to clerical communities. This essay tackles theoretical and historiographical insights on the role of African Muslims in the era of the medieval empires and argues that the study of Islam in this region during the Middle Ages still suffers from undertheorizing. On the contrary, by using a ‘discursive approach’ scholars can unravel access to fascinating aspects of the history of West African Muslims and in particular to the crucial role played by clerical communities, who represented one node of the web of diffused authority which is characteristic of precolonial West African social and political structures.

Mobility, Knowledge Transmission, and Authority in West Africa: Re-Reading Ivor Wilks’ Fieldnotes “Conversations about the Past”

“…64 Migration and mobility then led to the establishment of complementary and entangled sets of authority in the different Muslim towns that is not always accounted for in studies on West Africa. 65 The Case of the Saghanughu 67 Wilks explains that all the chains "converge upon one Mu _ hammad al-Mus : _ taf a b. ʿAbb as Saghanughu, who flourished in the mideighteenth century, and whose grave at Boron in the northern Ivory Coast is still a considerable center of pilgrimage."…”