Rethinking Islam and Muslim societies in Africa

Are the Sufi orders—especially in the reified form in which we often learn about them—as important to Senegalese Muslims as everyone seems to insist? Such a question might seem counter-intuitive to anyone who has ever visited Senegal. There is, after all, that ubiquitous image of Amadou Bamba (which appears on the cover of both books under review), the founder of the Senegalese Sufi order, the Mourides. However, one should be careful not to mistake such public displays (or ‘visual hagiography’ to use the language of Allen Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts) as evidence that Sufism is all one needs to know about Islam or even the most important feature of Islam in Senegal or elsewhere in Africa. Since the 1960s, a number of scholars have taken a special interest in the study of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa, and some of that early scholarship has rightly earned a place among the classics in African studies.1 That first generation of scholars frequently employed a particular set of analytical optics for understanding Islam that continues to exert an influence on how we study Islam and Muslim societies in Africa today. The conventional wisdom was (and often remains) that Sufi orders are the most important form for the practice of Islam in Africa. One can see this particularly in studies of Senegal where there has been considerable research on Islam and especially on the Mourides, a Sufi order, which is the main subject of one of the books under review and a major focus of the second. The historical importance of Sufi orders in many places in Africa notwithstanding, if one limits the analysis of Islam in Africa to Sufi orders (or their purported opposites, Muslim ‘reformists’ or ‘Islamists’), one is arguably not well equipped to make sense of Islam in much of contemporary Africa. Over the last few decades, African Muslim societies have experienced major socioeconomic and political changes that have also influenced the practice of Islam. Given the ideologically charged post-September 11, 2001 context for writing about Islam and Muslims, there is a real urgency to devise new tools and analytical optics for studying Islam and Muslim societies in Africa. In order to understand how African Muslims actually practice Islam, one needs to think beyond the longstanding and ongoing preoccupation with Sufi orders like the Mourides whether in Africa or in the diaspora.