Muslims beyond the Arab World

The stereotypical division of the Muslim world into the ‘mainland’ (Arab Middle Eastern) and the ‘periphery’ (non-Arab world) is being continually thrown from the twilight of the last century into the side-line of political and intellectual correctness as evidenced by two phenomena. First, the enormous intellectual legacy of the ‘peripheral’ Sudanic (I am unimpressed with the pejorative ‘sub-Saharan’, p. 25) Africa, as established in the multivolume Arabic Literature of Africa series (general editors John Hunwick and R. S. O’Fahey) and, secondly, the rich, ‘alternative’ truth and source of history and knowledge which is found in the indigenous, African sources, specifically materials which are written in local languages but in the Arabic script (ʿajamī). Both phenomena have emphatically proven the uniqueness of the African heritage under the Islamic dispensation. The five-chapter book being reviewed here is an eloquent representative of the latter. Up till now, the academic discussion on Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853–1927) has focused more on his confrontations with the French colonialists and their local collaborators, gracefully side-stepping other key events in his life and movement, and sources on both. This book sets out to correct this. The enlightening and enlightened introduction (pp. 1–40) gives an account and analysis of the missing links which include an examination of Bamba’s encounters with the aristocracy and the intelligentsia from the founding of his Murīdiyya in 1883 until his first exile to Gabon in 1895, and a new interpretation of the doctrines and practices of his Murīdiyya Sufi movement, among others. Those missing links, as articulated across the book, are provided by the participant-observer field notes by the author, the electronic multi-media ephemerals and recordings. Other resources utilized in this regard are chirographic prose and poetry materials, recited and cantilated hagiographical texts, didactical and historical writings and digital resources, largely in Wolof ʿajamī, a source hitherto unutilized, either out of ignorance or contempt (cf. p. 3). Of course ʿajamī poetry has traditionally been an effective tool for mass mobilization and popularization of religious ideals in Muslim West Africa since the eighteenth century, as amply demonstrated in Usman dan Fodio’s (1754–1817) reform movement (see ʿAbdullāh Ibn Muḥammad Fūdī, Tazyīn al-waraqāt [ed. M. Hiskett, Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1963], 85). But as with other existing studies on and reference to ʿajamī, Ngom is equally unaware of such other languages, for instance, (Nigerian) Nupe, Ebira, Yoruba (noted en passant) and Afemai with long-attested history of ʿajamī tradition.1

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