Lamin Sanneh

Biographic Data

ID85693
NAMELamin Sanneh
GIVEN NAMESLamin
FAMILY NAMESanneh
SIGNATURESANNEH L
AFFILIATIONSYale University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS64
TOTAL CITATIONS67
AUTHOR COUNT62
EDITOR COUNT2
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1975
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
H-INDEX4

  • The CMS and the African Transformation

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERChurch Mission Society2019

    It was two Hausa Africans, themselves former slaves who had been emancipated in Trinidad and had decided to return to Nigeria, who took steps to take the antislavery movement beyond Sierra Leone to Nigeria. In the intervening years when government and mission were still wary of any reckless scheme of territorial overreach, the recaptives bought ships and traveled up and down the coast, demonstrating that expansion beyond Sierra Leone was viable a…

  • Encountering Empire

    Lamin SannehARTICLEJournal of American History2017

    Now that the dust has settled some fifty years after the end of empire in Africa, historians can examine the record of what happened. Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Deny set out the issues in 1961 in their influential book, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. Liberal doctrines and the evangelical movement, attuned to movements of national awakening, influenced Britain's role in the colonization of Africa. They…

  • The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity

    Open AccessLamin Sanneh, Michael J McclymondBOOKWiley Blackwell Companion to…2016

  • Beyond Homeland

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    The dispersion trail forged the image of the peaceful cleric as an itinerant for whom any motherland is a foreign country and any foreign country a motherland. At home anywhere, the cleric everywhere is a sojourner and a supplicant of local hospitality and goodwill. With Muhammad Rumfa, the ruler, as his patron, the career of Abd al-Rahman Jakhite in Kano demonstrates both clerical range and appeal. After the breakup of Diakha-Bambukhu, Bundu bec…

  • Beyond Consensus

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    This chapter examines the challenge to the pacifist tradition of difference and division within clerical ranks, in particular how in Senegal and the Gambia Muslim militants and warlords ranged themselves against pacifist counsel to undertake warfare. Responsible British colonial officials tried to maintain a neutral position in the conflicts, intervening where necessary to contain the outbreak, offering conciliation to propitiate opposing faction…

  • Beyond the Veil

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    This chapter examines routes and kingdoms as an explanation for the introduction of Islam to sub-Saharan Africa with particular attention to the kingdoms of Ghana and Mali. Al-Bakri, the Arab historian, describes this historical process of coexistence between Muslims and the followers of traditional religion in Ghana, at the center of the gold trade that attracted Muslims. Arabic sources describe networks connecting Ghana and later Mali with Saha…

  • Beyond Confrontation and Crisis

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    This chapter focuses on the crisis of the pacifist clerical tradition in its confrontation with the encroaching French colonial power. Administrative policy breached the rule of sanctuary under which clerical settlements long existed and forced the leaders to assess the new aggressive terms by which they were now required to abide. The chapter calls attention to the role slaves and slavery played in clerical religious life and how emancipation im…

  • Beyond Desert Trails

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    Environmental factors of climate and desert life left an imprint on the face of Islam as it penetrated societies south of the Sahara where clerics as religious professionals assumed responsibility for the religion’s dissemination. Al-Bakri describes the conversion of the king of Mali after a visiting cleric staged a prayer ritual for rain. The conversion transformed Mali into a Muslim stronghold without upsetting the gold trade with Ghana whose r…

  • Beyond Routes and Kingdoms

    Lamin SannehCHAPTERBeyond Jihad2016

    As fountainhead of tradition and custom, the ruler of Mali guided Islam’s expansion, a process marked by the systematic gradual introduction of religious materials and practices and by peaceful accommodation with prevailing pre-Islamic religious beliefs and rituals. Under Mansa Músá, whose famous pilgrimage to Mecca opened a new chapter of Mali’s international standing, Islam resumed its vigorous peaceful course in the societies of Mali and its t…

  • Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity

    Lamin Sanneh, Michael McClymondBOOKWiley Blackwell Companion to…2016

  • Beyond Jihad

    Lamin Sanneh, Lamin O SannehBOOKBeyond Jihad2016

    Beyond Jihad describes how trans-Saharan trade and traffic facilitated the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa where merchants, rulers, and clerics ensured its successful establishment. From North Africa Islam followed routes and kingdoms to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa where religious professionals undertook the religion’s peaceful propagation. Under al-Hajj Salim Suware, the charismatic pilgrim-scholar who founded the pacifist movement, cleri…

  • Summoned from the Margin

    Lamin Sanneh, Lamin O SannehBOOKSummoned from the margin2012

    Sanneh's fascinating journey from his an impoverished village in West Africa to education in the United States and Europe to a distinguished career teaching at the Universities of Yale, Harvard, Aberdeen, and Ghana. Burning theological questions about God's nature and human suffering eventually led Sanneh to convert from Islam to Christianity. He recounts the unusually varied life experiences that have made him who he is today

  • In Search of Brightest Africa

    Lamin SannehARTICLEJournal of American History2011

    Journal Article In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 Get access In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936. By Jeannette Eileen Jones. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. xviii, 296 pp. $44.95, ISBN978-0-8203-3320-5.) Lamin Sanneh Lamin Sanneh Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut [email protected] Search for other works by this…

  • Persecuted Post-Western Christianity and the Post-Christian West

    Lamin SannehARTICLEThe Review of Faith & International…2009

    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 i…

  • Christianity in Africa

    Open AccessLamin SannehCHAPTEREnlightenment, reawakening and…2006

    Led by Catholic Spain and Portugal, and later joined by Protestant England and the Netherlands, the explosion of maritime exploration from the late fifteenth century made for a shift from land-based power to sea-based power. In the era before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape in 1498, the dominant world powers had been land-based. After 1500, the dominant powers were those with unchallenged suzerainty over the sea lanes, from Lisbon and Genoa, or Pl…

  • The changing face of Christianity

    Lamin O Sanneh, Lamin Sanneh et al.BOOKThe changing face of Christianity2005

    Over the past century, Christianity's place and role in the world have changed dramatically. In 1900, 80 percent of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, more than 60 percent of the world's Christians live outside of that region. This change calls for a reexamination of the way the story of Christianity is told, the methodological tools for its analysis, and its modes of expression. Perhaps most significant is the role …

  • Sacred Truth and Secular Agency

    Open AccessLamin SannehARTICLEStudies in World Christianity2002References: 6

    THE BACKGROUND: CONTAINMENT OR DIALOGUE The terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 have pushed people to reflect on the deeper issues involved in the violent collision of East and West. Assuming confrontation to be inevitable in a world of irreconcilable hostility, many see military response now and vigilant security measures in the long term to be sufficient in disposing of the radical fundamentalist challenge. It is not difficult to s…

  • Exodus

    Lamin Sanneh, Eddie S Glaude et al.ARTICLEJournal of American History2002

    Slavery, the system of human bondage, is as old as the human race, but slavery in the New World, though relatively recent on the chronological chart, was unique in its internal ironies, in its persistent stereotypes, in the historical scope and intensity of its social and moral effects, and in the ambivalent legacy it bequeathed concerning race and ethnicity. Being black became a prickly ideological subject, and being white, a self-justified if w…

  • Abolitionists Abroad

    Open AccessG Ugo Nwokeji, Lamin SannehARTICLECanadian Journal of African…2002

  • A Resurgent Church in a Troubled Continent

    Open AccessLamin SannehARTICLEInternational Bulletin of…2001

  • Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa

    Lamin Sanneh, M A KleinARTICLEThe American Historical Review2001Cited by: 1

  • Abolitionists Abroad

    Penelope Campbell, Lamin SannehARTICLEThe Journal of Southern History2001

  • Abolitionists Abroad

    Claude A Clegg, Claude A Clegg III et al.ARTICLEJournal of American History2001

    In this study of religion and activism, Lamin San neh argues that eighteenth and nineteenthcentury evangelical Christianity, in the hands of black American settlers and African recaptives (people rescued from slave ships and returned to Africa), revolutionized the social milieu and cultural ethos of littoral communities in West Africa. Starting at the founding of the British colony of Sierra Leone, African American immigrants brought to Africa a …

  • The Crown and the Turban

    John Parker, Lamin SannehARTICLEJournal of Religion in Africa2000

  • Abolitionists Abroad

    Lamin SannehBOOKAbolitionists Abroad1999Cited by: 19

    In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Thus began an unprecedented movement with critical long-term effects on the evolution of social, religious, and political institutions in modern Africa. Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates the story of freed slaves wh…