Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (Islam in Africa, 6)

Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa

Islam in Africa Brill’s “Islam in Africa” is designed to present the results of scholarly research into the many aspects of the history and present-day features of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. The series will take up issues of religious and intellectual traditions, social significance and organization, and other aspects of the Islamic presence in Africa. It includes monographs, collaborative volumes and reference works by researchers from all relevant disciplines. Editors

John Hunwick Rüdiger Seesemann Knut Vikør VOLUME 6

Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa Edited by

Benjamin F. Soares

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISSN 1570-3754 ISSN-13: 978 90 04 15264 9 ISBN-10: 90 04 15264 4 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Note on Transliteration ............................................................ Acknowledgements ....................................................................

vii ix

Introduction: Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa ............ Benjamin F. Soares

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Chapter One: African Muslims and Christians in World .... History: The Irrelevance of the “Clash of Civilizations” John Voll

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Chapter Two: Flesh Soaked in Faith: Meat as a Marker .... of the Boundary between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia Éloi Ficquet

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Chapter Three: Missionary Legacies: Muslim-Christian ........ Encounters in Egypt and Sudan during the Colonial and Postcolonial Periods Heather J. Sharkey

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Chapter Four: A Fifty-Year Muslim Conversion to .............. Christianity: Religious Ambiguities and Colonial Boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 1906–1963 Shobana Shankar

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Chapter Five: The Time of Conversion: Christians and ...... Muslims among the Sereer-Safèn of Senegal, 1914–1950s James F. Searing

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Chapter Six: Christianity as Seen by an African Muslim ...... Intellectual: Amadou Hampâté Bâ Ralph Austen

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Chapter Seven: Fundamentalism and Outreach Strategies .... in East Africa: Christian Evangelism and Muslim Da'wa John A. Chesworth

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Chapter Eight: In My End Is My Beginning: Muslim .......... and Christian Traditions at Cross-Purposes in Contemporary Nigeria Patrick J. Ryan S.J.

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Chapter Nine: An Opportunity Missed by Nigeria’s ............ Christians: The 1976–78 Sharia Debate Revisited Philip Ostien

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Chapter Ten: The “Sharia Factor” in Nigeria’s 2003 Elections Franz Kogelmann

..................

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Chapter Eleven: From Resistance to Reconstruction: ............ Challenges Facing Muslim-Christian Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa A. Rashied Omar

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Contributors ................................................................................

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Index ..........................................................................................

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION Transliteration of the Arabic follows the system in the Encyclopaedia of Islam with the exception of the letter qàf, which is transliterated as q. However, words such as jihad, sharia and ulama that commonly occur in English and are found in dictionaries are not transliterated or italicized. For personal names in Arabic and other languages, orthographic self-representation has been followed. For transliteration from other languages, including Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Wolof and so forth, the individual authors have generally used the standard transliteration rules for those languages, which in some cases have been simplified.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of the essays in this volume were first presented to the colloquium “Muslim/Christian Encounters in Africa” of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) held at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston in May 2003. The Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa has received generous funding from the Ford Foundation and institutional support from Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies, which helped to make the colloquium and production of this volume possible. John O. Hunwick and Sean O’Fahey, the co-founders of ISITA, along with Rebecca Shereikis, the ISITA program coordinator, have centered many of the core activities of ISITA around the intellectual production of African Muslims and their written traditions, particularly in Arabic. In bringing together a group of scholars interested in the complex ways in which Muslims and Christians have encountered each other in Africa, this colloquium helped to broaden the perspective of ISITA and its analytical focus. I would like to thank John O. Hunwick and Sean O’Fahey for the invitation to edit a selection of the papers from the colloquium for publication, as well as the individual contributors, with whom it has been a pleasure to work. Although Phil Ostien did not participate in the original colloquium, he agreed to let us include some of his important work in this volume. I am grateful to Trudy Kamperveen from Brill for her encouragement of the project. Jan Abbink, Rosalind I.J. Hackett, John Harrelson, Franz Kogelmann, Ann Reeves, Rüdiger Seesemann, Heather Sharkey, and Rebecca Shereikis helped enormously in the preparation of the volume, and their assistance, input and advice have been invaluable.

INTRODUCTION

MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS IN AFRICA1 Benjamin F. Soares For many centuries, Muslims and Christians have encountered each other in Africa. From the time of the Prophet Mu˙ammad, when Muslims from Mecca are reported to have sought refuge in Christian Ethiopia, through the age of European imperial expansion into Africa, the era of modern colonial rule, and the postcolonial period, Muslims and Christians have interacted in all sorts of complex and changing ways. However, their interactions in Africa are still not properly understood. In light of recent conflicts in such places as Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Sudan, Kenya, and Tanzania where religion seems to have been a factor, it seems all the more imperative that scholars devise new and better ways of understanding interactions between Muslims and Christians on the African continent. The present book takes up that challenge. To adopt an analytical perspective that focuses on encounters between Muslims and Christians in Africa is to move in important ways beyond some of the existing studies of Muslims, Christians, and religion in Africa more generally. Until recently, many of the studies of Muslims and Christians across space and time, including some in missiological and theological studies, have looked at what they have tended to call “Christian-Muslim relations”. Some have focused on how certain Christians and Muslims relate to each other in particular, often narrowly circumscribed locations.2 But such an approach assumes, often implicitly, that Christians and Muslims are identifiable and distinct groups with relatively neat boundaries, whose relations or interactions as groups or even blocs

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I am grateful to Rosalind I.J. Hackett, Marie Nathalie LeBlanc, Caroline Osella, Rüdiger Seesemann, Martin van Bruinessen, and especially Heather Sharkey for their comments and suggestions. 2 For examples based on research in Africa, see Lissi Rasmussen, Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa: The Cases of Northern Nigeria and Tanzania Compared (London: British Academic Press, 1993); Klaus Hock (ed.), The Interface between Research and Dialogue: Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004); and Johann Hafkens,

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can be studied in various contexts. It is surely a mistake to treat Muslims and Christians as monolithic communities that interact as blocs. Some of these studies have other important analytical limitations as well. Notably, because they operate within the analytical frame of Christian-Muslim relations it is difficult for them to take into account the broad range of ways in which Muslims and Christians have interacted with each other over time. Indeed, such studies frequently rely upon untenable theoretical assumptions of the stability of society and notions of social order, assumptions that have been associated with functionalism in the human sciences. In addition, many studies, particularly those in theology and missiology, employ a decidedly outmoded social model that assumes that the “normal” state of affairs is one of peaceful coexistence or mutual tolerance of Muslims and Christians.3 While such attempts to understand and possibly even to promote religious “tolerance” are perfectly understandable in a world where conflict between members of different religious communities seems increasingly prevalent, interactions between Muslims and Christians, in Africa or elsewhere, cannot be understood as simply existing at a point on a one-dimensional continuum that runs from coexistence to conflict. There is a vast array of possibilities between the idealized notion of the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Christians and Bernard Lewis’s notion of the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington has popularized and made to seem inevitable.4 Indeed, interactions between Muslims and Christians in Africa must be understood in their full complexity. Pace the many practitioners and advocates of nonsecular styles of religion who often get denounced as “fundamentalists,”5 the boundaries between Muslims and Christians have not always been rigid, fixed or unchanging. In contrast to their relations in some other places in the world, Muslims and Christians

“The Direction of Christian-Muslim Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa”, in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Zaidan Haddad (eds), Christian-Muslim Encounters (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 301–13. See also the journals Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations and Bulletin on Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa. 3 See Rasmussen, Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa. 4 See Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, The Atlantic Monthly 266, 3 (1990): 47–60; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72, 3 (1993): 22–49; and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 5 Cf. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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in Africa have often lived side by side, have sometimes converted to each others’ religions, have shared much in the way of culture in its anthropological sense, and have learned, appropriated and borrowed from each other. This is of course not to deny or downplay the fact that they have also competed and been in conflict with one another. But to focus exclusively on either conflict or peaceful coexistence would be equally erroneous. Moreover, it is worth emphasizing that the analyst should not focus only on religion, since religion is just one of the many possible constituent elements of social identities.6 The contributors to this volume are not trying merely to understand the relations between groups (Muslims and Christians), or even between religions (Islam and Christianity). Rather, they concentrate on the notion of encounter, one of the main organizational themes of this collection. The roots of the English word “encounter” can be traced to the Latin contra, meaning “against”, and to the Old French encontrer, which refers to the meeting of rivals.7 In current usage, “encounter” can mean “an unexpected or casual meeting” or “a confrontation or difficult struggle”.8 It is this broader and subtler range of meanings of the word encounter in contemporary usage that captures some of the complexity of the phenomena explored by the individual essays in this volume. Adopting a perspective that focuses on the encounters of different individuals and groups is clearly not in any way novel. Talal Asad’s collection of essays, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, used the notion of encounter to point to the ambiguity of the relationship between anthropology and colonialism.9 Since the 1990s the notion of encounter seems to have become a central organizing trope in academic studies, not least in studies of Africa.10 However, the notion of encounter in the study of Africa and in the study of different religious communities on the African continent has a longer history, on which it is useful to reflect. Some scholars

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I am grateful to Heather Sharkey for help in clarifying this point. See The Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/encounter?view=uk. 8 Ibid. 9 Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973). 10 See Karen Tranberg Hansen (ed.), African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and Maria Grosz-Ngaté and Omari H. Kokole (eds), Gendered Encounters: Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa (New York: Routledge, 1997). 7

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trying to advance ecumenical ideals and objectives, including both Protestant and Catholic theologians, have long been concerned with what they have called Christian-Muslim “understanding” and interfaith “dialogue”.11 For several decades, certain Christian theologians and scholars of religion have employed the notion of encounter to talk about the meeting of Christians and Muslims at different times and in different places. Since the 1970s, for example, the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome has published Encounter, an English-language publication that deals with issues of Christian-Muslim dialogue and understanding,12 and some mainline Protestant theologians who seem to share certain ecumenical objectives with the Roman Catholic Church have also utilized the notion of encounter. In fact, in the 1960s and 1970s the World Council of Churches published a journal titled Study Encounter that on occasion dealt specifically with Christian-Muslim relations.13 In recent years, some Muslims, including those who have embraced the terms “liberal” and “progressive”, have also used the notions of dialogue and encounter to promote their own ecumenical endeavors.14 The relationship of the present collection of essays on MuslimChristian encounters to such ecumenical projects is clearly not unambiguous. Several of the authors represented here have been actively and publicly involved in interreligious dialogue and/or conflict resolution, and such experiences undoubtedly inform both their description and their analysis.15 However, the contributors to this collection do not necessarily begin from positions of faith. Unlike some studies whose authors have explicit theological and/or ecumenical objectives, all of the authors here are located in an academic discipline (anthro-

11 See for example one missionary’s attempt to think through issues of “understanding” and “dialogue” based on a field report to the Church Missionary Society and the Methodist Missionary Society in J. Spencer Trimingham, The Christian Church and Islam in West Africa (London: SCM Press, 1955). 12 See also the same Pontifical Institute’s journal Islamochristiana. 13 See also some of the contributions to Haddad and Haddad, Christian-Muslim Encounters. There is also the long-running Project for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa or PROCMURA, organized by mainline Protestant churches, which has worked in several countries in Africa. 14 See, for example, Charles Kurzman (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Source-Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Omid Safi (ed.), Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003). 15 See Hock, The Interface between Research and Dialogue, for a discussion of practitioners involved in religious dialogue and their research.

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pology, history, law, Islamic studies, or religious studies) and frequently work creatively between and across those disciplines. While it would be tendentious to claim that the main objective of these essays is to foster interreligious dialogue or understanding between Christians and Muslims in Africa, better-informed understandings of religious encounters might arguably help to prevent future religious conflicts. If this collection of essays must be understood in relation to existing research on Christians and Muslims, the way it departs from much of the research on religion in Africa needs to be underscored. There is an enormous body of literature on Christianity in Africa. While historians and scholars of religion have produced much of this work, social scientists, and anthropologists in particular, have written many important and influential studies of African Christianity.16 Historians have also produced an impressive corpus on Islam in Africa, and there is a much smaller, though not insignificant, body of literature on the anthropology of Islam in Africa.17 However, it is truly astonishing how much less academic research there has been on the actual interactions of Christians and Muslims in Africa. With a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Lamin Sanneh, to which I shall return later in this introduction, most scholars have thus far not been able or willing to discuss Christians and Muslims in Africa within the same analytic frame. After reflecting on some of the lacunae in existing research, I shall point to some promising lines of research on Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, which the present collection helps to develop. If one considers, for example, the Journal of Religion in Africa, the leading journal devoted to the academic study of religion in the continent, one can see that since publication began in the late 1960s the journal has published almost no articles on Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa.18 This is merely part of a larger trend. In his

16 For an excellent recent overview of this literature, see Birgit Meyer, “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 447–74. 17 For reviews of that literature, see Robert Launay, Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Benjamin F. Soares, “Notes on the Anthropological Study of Islam and Muslim Societies in Africa”, Culture & Religion 1, 2 (2000): 277–85. 18 Two exceptions are articles by Lamin O. Sanneh, “The Domestication of Islam and Christianity in African Societies”, Journal of Religion in Africa 11, 1 (1980): 1–12; and Joseph Kenny, “Sharia and Christianity in Nigeria: Islam and a ‘Secular’ State”,

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impressive study of five hundred years of the history of Christianity in Africa, Adrian Hastings devotes very little attention to Islam and Muslims.19 In one of the book’s rare sections considering them, he unfortunately recycles some of the Orientalist stereotypes of “decay” and decline in the Muslim world.20 Moreover, there is scant discussion of actual encounters between Muslims and Christians in this wideranging study of the Christian church in Africa.21 Similarly, Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels’s recent attempt to compile a more or less comprehensive history of Islam in Africa makes only passing reference to Christianity, Christians, and their encounters with Muslims in Africa.22 The references to Christianity in their edited volume include Sudan and Ethiopia, where Christianity was present for centuries before the arrival of the first Muslims, and European Christians’ interactions with Muslims on the coast of East Africa, in the interior, most notably in the kingdom of Buganda, and in contemporary East Africa.23 Much of the discussion of Christians and Christianity in Levtzion and Pouwels’s book seems rather perfunctory. Moreover, it is reminiscent of a tendency among some scholars of Africa to consider colonialism as the vehicle that brought Christianity to Africa and to regard some of the subsequent conflicts with Muslims during colonial conquest and the colonial period as the most significant for understanding Muslim-Christian interactions.24 Such an approach also Journal of Religion in Africa 26, 4 (1996): 338–64. See also the article on Ahmed Deedat’s religious polemics by David Westerlund, “Ahmed Deedat’s Theology of Religion: Apologetics through Polemics”, Journal of Religion in Africa 33, 3 (2003): 263–78; and David Westerlund, “An Outline for Research on Christian-Muslim Relations”, in Hock, The Interface between Research and Dialogue, pp. 125–44. 19 Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 20 Ibid., pp. 188–94, passim. 21 For a brief but rather illuminating discussion of Christian-Muslim “engagement” in nineteenth-century Africa, see Andrew F. Walls, “Africa as the Theatre of Christian Engagement with Islam in the Nineteenth Century”, in David Maxwell with Ingrid Lawrie (eds), Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 41–62. 22 Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press and Oxford: James Currey, 2000). 23 See for example Lidwien Kapteijns, “Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, The History of Islam in Africa, pp. 227–50; Randall L. Pouwels, “The East African Coast, c. 780 to 1900 CE”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, The History of Islam in Africa, pp. 251–71; and David C. Sperling, “The Coastal Hinterland and Interior of East Africa”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, The History of Islam in Africa, pp. 273–302. 24 See I.M. Lewis (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa, 2d edition (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press for the International African Institute, 1980).

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largely ignores how colonialism actually helped to facilitate the spread of Islam in many places in Africa.25 Even those rare studies that purport to study both Islam and Christianity in Africa, and Muslims and Christians together, have been less than satisfactory. For example, Toyin Falola and Biodun Adediran actually divide their short history textbook, Islam and Christianity in West Africa, into two completely separate parts, the first of which treats Islam and the second Christianity, without ever considering the two religions or religious communities together.26 This is an extreme but telling example of the way many historians have approached the topic of Muslims and Christians in Africa. It is worth emphasizing that serious academic consideration of Christian-Muslim encounters has not been lacking only in studies of sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, although the production of academic books about Islam and Muslims in contemporary Egypt seems endless, few of these works deal seriously, if at all, with Egypt’s large Christian community, which may constitute as much as 10 per cent of the population.27 Studies of southeast Asia also tend to ignore Christianity, despite the fact that large numbers of Christians and Muslims live side by side in the Philippines and in parts of Indonesia. But because Christianity and the Christian Other have featured prominently in contemporary Muslim discourse in such places as Indonesia, some scholars have indeed begun to consider Muslims and Christians there within a common analytical frame.28 A crucial question is why scholars have for so long been unwilling or unable to take up such an important area of research. The paucity of serious and in-depth studies of Christian-Muslim encounters in 25 See Robert Launay and Benjamin F. Soares, “The Formation of an ‘Islamic Sphere’ in French Colonial West Africa”, Economy and Society 28, 4 (1999): 497–519. 26 Toyin Falola and Biodun Adediran, Islam and Christianity in West Africa (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1983). 27 One exception is the study by Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 28 See, for example, Robert W. Hefner, “Of Faith and Commitment: Christian Conversion in Muslim Java”, in Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 99–125; Martin van Bruinessen, “Post-Soeharto Muslim Engagements with Civil Society and Democratization”, in Hanneman Samuel and Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds), Indonesia in Transition: Rethinking “Civil Society”, “Region” and “Crisis” (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2004), pp. 37–66; and HyungJun Kim, “Unto You Your Religion and unto Me My Religion: Muslim-Christian Relations in a Javanese Village”, Sojourn 13, 1 (1998): 62–85.

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Africa (and elsewhere) may be due in part to the very nature of academic training and specialization. In many European and North American graduate training programs, PhD students who plan to conduct research on Africa and on religion have long been encouraged to specialize. This usually means that students choose a particular group or region to study. Anthropologists in particular often prefer to study small-scale, local communities in Africa, and, therefore, tend to focus on one religion or religious group, Muslims or Christians. In some cases, they have studied the encounter between adherents of African “traditional” religion and Islam or Christianity. The lack of studies considering both Muslims and Christians must also be due to the difficulties of gaining expertise in more than one area. Indeed, it is rare to find a scholar trained in the study of religion who is equally at home with the religious texts of Islam and Christianity, as well as the situation on the ground where the encounters between Muslims and Christians may be multi-faceted and changing. However, Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa have not been completely ignored in the academic literature. For more than three decades, historian Lamin Sanneh has been one of the few scholars examining both Muslims and Christians in Africa. He has written about their encounters in a range of publications, some of which are addressed to historians and scholars of religion in Africa and others to theologians. Beginning in the 1970s, Sanneh began to publish a series of works that pointed to the complexity of interactions between Muslims and Christians in Africa. In these works, he has raised important issues—both theoretical and methodological—involved in studying Muslims and Christians in Africa both in the past and closer to the present.29 Indeed, he writes with great sensitivity and ease about the difficulties of making sense of Christian-Muslim interactions in Africa, sometimes drawing on his own experience as an African Muslim convert to Christianity to illuminating effect. However, if there is a shortcoming to some of Sanneh’s research, it is his idealistic view of a “traditional Africa” that he expects, or at least hopes, will have beneficent effects in the realm of Muslim-Christian relations.

29 See for example L.O. Sanneh, “The Christian-Muslim Encounter in Africa”, in Kenneth Best (ed.), African Challenge (Nairobi: Transafrica Publishers, 1975), pp. 101–10; and Lamin Sanneh, Piety & Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).

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In his collection of essays, Piety & Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa, Sanneh writes: The fact is that Christian and Muslim Africa is for the most part enfolded within the larger setting of the old Africa, with its deep-rooted hospitality, tolerance, and generosity, and it would be surprising if nothing of that admirable heritage did not survive in the new religions. Both sides are involved in a creative transformation process, and it cannot be stressed enough how much Christian and Muslim Africans owe to traditional Africa, whatever the rhetoric of religious propaganda.30

Such romantic yearnings for an idealized Africa seem inadequate to the task of advancing our understanding of religious encounters in Africa, where examples of religious intolerance not only abound but also seem to be increasing in some places.31 In addition, as Abdulkader Tayob has argued, some of Sanneh’s writings about Islam and Christianity in Africa take the rather questionable and partisan position that Islam in its modern, presumably reformist, forms is necessarily further removed from and less compatible with Africans and their culture than Christianity.32 Such an untenable position illustrates how the theologian can sometimes part ways with the social scientist, historian, and scholar of religion. If Sanneh was one of the first to write extensively about ChristianMuslim encounters, he has recently been joined by other scholars working in various academic disciplines, most notably anthropology, history, and religious studies. In fact, it is only since the late 1990s that scholars have begun to focus very closely on the encounters of Christians and Muslims in Africa. It is perhaps not at all surprising that much of this research is conducted in places such as Nigeria, where there are large numbers of Muslims and Christians living side by side. In Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba, J.D.Y. Peel provides us with an exemplary model for thinking about religious

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Ibid., pp. 23–24. See Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Prophets, ‘False Prophets,’ and the African State: Current Issues of Religious Freedom and Conflict”, in Philip C. Lucas and Thomas Robbins (eds), New Religious Movements in the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 151–78. 32 See Abdulkader Tayob, “John Spencer Trimingham (*1904) on Islam in Africa: Integrative or Isolationist”, in Frieder Ludwig and Afe Adogame (eds), European Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2004), pp. 237–43. 31

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encounter and the practitioners of different religions in Africa.33 Peel’s study of the spread of Christianity among the Yoruba shows in great detail the richness and complexity of religious encounter and, perhaps most importantly in his particular study, the key role of African Christians in both the encounter of Africans with Christianity and the making of the people who today call themselves Yoruba. Peel’s work is one of the rare studies of the oft-studied Yoruba to consider the “traditional” African religion that existed prior to the arrival of Christianity alongside Yoruba encounters with Christianity and Islam, Christians and Muslims. While Peel treats Islam and Muslims in depth in only one chapter, “Engaging with Islam,” in what is his third book about the Yoruba, it is truly remarkable that other scholars have taken so long to broach the subject of Muslim-Christian encounters among the Yoruba, many of whom have long been Muslims and Christians, and in Africa more generally. Another important contribution to the study of Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa can be found in some of the recent work of Rosalind Hackett, a scholar of religion and anthropologist.34 Building on her earlier studies of new religious movements and the importance of transnational connections for Africa, Hackett was one of the first scholars to systematically document and analyze the use of new media technologies by various religious actors in Africa. Using an innovative combination of anthropology and religious studies, she focuses on religious conflict in Nigeria, Ghana and beyond. Hackett has identified the central role of the electronic media in various forms of religious transformations—mass-mediated religion—in religious encounters, conflict and violence among Christians and Muslims in Africa. Aside from such recent work, it has still been relatively rare for scholars outside religious studies to consider and analyze Muslims and Christians in Africa together. However, historian Barbara Cooper has also looked at the importance of the media in her analysis of a

33 J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 34 See Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Managing or Manipulating Religious Conflict in the Nigerian Media”, in Jolyon Mitchell and Sophia Marriage (eds), Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003), pp. 47–64; Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Radical Christian Revivalism in Nigeria and Ghana: Recent Patterns of Conflict and Intolerance”, in Abdullahi A. An-Na’im (ed.), Proselytization and Communal Self-Determination in Africa (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), pp. 246–67.

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2000 riot in Niger in which Muslims attacked some Christians in addition to unmarried, mostly Muslim women and those involved in spirit possession, a presumably “traditional” African religious practice.35 Anthropologist Marie Nathalie LeBlanc has suggestively compared Muslim and Christian youths in an urban center in northern Côte d’Ivoire, analyzing their shared and different social and religious experiences.36 Given the recent history of conflict in Nigeria, several other scholars (such as Toyin Falola, Umar Danfulani and others) have produced works that deal with the very complex Nigerian scene for Muslim-Christian encounters.37 Others have begun to write the history of Christian missionaries among Muslims in Sudan and Egypt.38 These scholars offer us useful tools for thinking about Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, which they are showing to be more varied and complex than a simple continuum of relations running from coexistence to conflict. It almost goes without saying that the topic of encounters between Muslims and Christians everywhere in the world has gained significance because of world events since the Cold War came to an end. When the Cold War was finally over, a few commentators argued that a triumphant West might try to find a substitute for the now-absent Soviet menace, and some prescient observers noted that the religion of Islam was likely to be one such substitute. At the time, such cautionary voices were barely audible, given the prevailing triumphalist mood in the West. Some policy advisors tried to encourage this

35 Barbara M. Cooper, “Anatomy of a Riot: The Social Imaginary, Single Women, and Religious Violence in Niger”, Canadian Journal of African Studies 37, 2–3 (2003): 467–512. 36 Marie Nathalie LeBlanc, “Les trajectoires de conversion et d’identité sociale chez les jeunes dans le contexte postcolonial ouest-africain: Les jeunes musulmans et les jeunes chrétiens en Côte-d’Ivoire”, Anthropologie et sociétés 27, 1 (2003): 85–110. 37 See Toyin Falola, Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998); and Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani, The Sharia Issue and Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Nigeria (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2005). 38 John O. Voll, “Imperialism, Nationalism and Missionaries: Lessons from Sudan for the Twenty-first Century”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8, 1 (1997): 39–52; Heather J. Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims: The Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan”, Journal of African History 43, 1 (2002): 51–75; Heather J. Sharkey, “Arabic Antimissionary Treatises: Muslim Responses to Christian Evangelism in the Modern Middle East”, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, 3 (2004): 112–18; and Heather J. Sharkey, “Empire and Muslim Conversion: Historical Reflections on Christian Missions in Egypt”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16, 1 (2005): 43–60.

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replacement of the red with a green menace.39 But with the collapse of repressive governments in Eastern and Central Europe and the embrace of democracy and economic liberalization, it did seem as though the triumph over some forms of tyranny was at hand. In the post-September 11th 2001 era in which we all live, however, the world seems very much a changed place. This world seems both more complicated and more difficult to analyze than in that era of a Soviet bloc and two superpowers. Such changes have tangible bearings on the study of Christian-Muslim encounters and even on how such an object of study might be conceptualized. At this writing the United States, now the world’s lone superpower, has as its president a self-professed “born-again” Christian who, in the wake of the September 2001 attacks on the US, actually referred to US actions as a “crusade”. As large numbers of troops from the US and its allies have been involved in such Muslim-majority countries as Iraq and Afghanistan, many of George W. Bush’s supporters and even some of his detractors have discussed US policy in ways that are reminiscent of Christian millenarianism. One obstreperous American television commentator has even called on the US government to “invade” its presumably Muslim enemies and “convert” them to Christianity.40 With the waning of Cold War-era certainties about enemies and threats, a search for new certainties has begun. Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilizations” is now many people’s preferred template for understanding the relations between “the West” and its Others, including its Muslim Others. Since the events of September 2001, such ways of thinking have received even more attention and gained even more currency. However, it is important to remember that it is not only “the West” thinking about its (Muslim) Others. Indeed, many Muslims are also thinking about their (non-Muslim) Others. Few scholars today would accept the validity of talking about a “clash of civilizations”, especially if this way of thinking were to exclude from consideration other ways in which Muslims and Christians have encountered each other, interacted and indeed sometimes even clashed.

39 See John Esposito, “Political Islam: Beyond the Green Menace”, Current History 93 ( January 1994): 19–24. 40 See syndicated columnist Ann Coulter’s column “This Is War: We Should Invade Their Countries”, http://www.nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter.shtml (13 September 2001; accessed 3 January 2006).

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The contributors to this volume take up the challenge to locate Muslims and Christians within a common analytical frame. They have produced a set of studies exploring the multi-faceted and changing encounters of Muslims and Christians in a variety of different settings in Africa. In this collection, we learn about both face-to-face encounters between Muslims and Christians and those that are massmediated, particularly in the present era of increased global interconnections. The authors consider some of the ways in which Muslims and Christians have borrowed and appropriated from each other and tried to make sense of or debate each others’ religious traditions. They also explore the making and transgressing of boundaries: for example, how some Christians have become Muslims and vice versa, how Christians and Muslims have sometimes united in efforts to advance various political projects, and the ways in which boundaries between Muslims and Christians have sometimes become more rigid. In response to the persistent claim that the world must now be understood within the optics of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, John Voll (chapter 1) surveys the long history of African Muslim and Christian encounters in Africa to argue that the model of a clash is largely irrelevant to understanding the African context. In his view, there have been many “constructive encounters” between Muslims and Christians in Africa, which he usefully outlines. In his contribution, Éloi Ficquet (chapter 2) also takes the perspective of the longue durée and draws on the tools of both anthropology and history to consider “modes of competition, conflict and coexistence” between Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia. Using as a lens the important issue of commensality, specifically the prohibition on the sharing of meat between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia, he considers the maintenance and occasional transgression of religious boundaries and identities in Ethiopia from the distant past to more recent times. Considering the activities of European and North American Protestant missionaries in Egypt and Sudan since the nineteenth century in relation to global imperialism and Christian evangelism, Heather Sharkey (chapter 3) traces some of the specific and varied responses by Egyptians and Sudanese to these missionaries, including the Muslim appropriation of the organizational methods of Christian missionaries. If Western scholars like Voll (and many others) might deny the relevance of the “clash of civilizations”, as Sharkey points out, those writing contemporary anti-missionary works in Arabic

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actually use comparable ideas; in Sharkey’s words, such “works contribute to the tensions” between Muslims and Christians, which have sometimes been “low-grade” and “chronic” but also sometimes marked by violent conflict. The chapters by Shobana Shankar (chapter 4) and James Searing (chapter 5) both focus on conversion during colonial rule and the important question of religious boundaries. In her study of a Muslim man’s conversion to Christianity in colonial Nigeria, Shankar illustrates the ambiguities of conversion, a process that by her estimation took decades, and the fuzziness of the boundaries—between Christianity and Islam, Christian and Muslim, colonizer and colonized, evangelist and evangelized—that this particular man crossed. Searing recounts the spread of both Roman Catholicism and Islam among a group of Sereer in Senegal who had been non-Muslim until the period of French colonial rule. Exploring agency during conversion, he shows how some converts to Catholicism eventually converted to Islam; one stated reason for doing so was the Catholic Church’s slowness to impart knowledge relevant for carrying out lifecycle rituals, which young Muslims were learning much more quickly than their Catholic peers. Key to understanding both cases is the hierarchy of believers that converts faced in their respective colonial contexts. Ralph Austen (chapter 6) considers the life and career of Amadou Hampâté Bâ (d. 1991), one of Africa’s most celebrated men of letters and widely known Muslim intellectuals. Austen demonstrates how this particular African Muslim intellectual’s encounters with colonialism and Christianity, as well as his broader involvement with his own religion, Islam and the Tijàniyya Sufi order, led him to engage with ecumenical efforts that seem to have been Christian-inspired, as well as to develop his own ecumenical Muslim perspective on Christianity. Hampâté Bâ’s ecumenical engagement as a Muslim with Christianity seems quite far removed from the case of East Africa that John Chesworth (chapter 7) presents. Looking at the long history of Christian mission and Islamic da'wa, or the propagation of Islam in East Africa, Chesworth shows how certain Muslims and Christians, each with long and complex transnational connections, sometimes use aggressive strategies against members of the other religion. “Born-again” Christians look outside Africa for resources and methods, such as the open-air “crusade”, to evangelize Muslims and other Christians, and so-called Muslim Bible scholars sometimes master knowledge of the Bible in order to engage in debate with Christians to show the superiority of

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Islam and the Qur"àn. In many cases, these Muslim and Christian “fundamentalists”, as Chesworth labels them, borrow and appropriate methods and strategies from each other. In the following three chapters, the authors present us with different but complementary perspectives on Muslim-Christian encounters in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, whose population many claim is nearly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Taking a long-term view of both Islam and Christianity in Nigeria, Patrick Ryan (chapter 8) employs William Cantwell Smith’s notion of religious “traditions” to consider how Muslim and Christian traditions seem to be at “cross-purposes” in Nigeria. Contrasting and comparing the history of Igbo Catholics with that of Hausa Muslims, he considers intra-religious tensions in both Christianity and Islam, as well as tensions between Muslims and Christians, which have increased over time. Philip Ostien (chapter 9) reexamines and reinterprets the now infamous 1976–78 sharia debate in Nigeria. The debate resulted in the denial to Nigerian Muslims of a federal sharia court of appeal to which cases could be appealed from the state level. He argues that this denial eventually led to the extension of sharia law in states in northern Nigeria, beginning in 1999 in Zamfara State. Not uncontroversially, Ostien states that the blame for this “debacle” should be placed squarely on Nigerian Christians for their opposition to such an appeals court. In his contribution, Franz Kogelmann (chapter 10) looks at what he calls the “sharia factor” in the Nigerian 2003 presidential elections and the politicization of religion in Nigerian politics. Kogelmann argues that, contrary to what many would have predicted, sharia was not actually a national factor in the 2003 elections, but a regional factor. He also warns that the Nigerian federal state’s presumed neutrality in religious matters is one of the most serious problems facing the country. As Kogelmann warns, the Nigerian federal state’s policy of religious neutrality and its “laissez-faire attitude” to proselytization in the country might actually lead to future religious conflict. Finally, drawing on theoretical work on religion and violence, Rashied Omar (chapter 11) reflects on how a once-thriving antiapartheid interreligious movement in which Muslims and Christians were active participants seems to have lost momentum in the postapartheid era. Paradoxically enough, while the post-apartheid state has tried to foster interreligious tolerance and cooperation, there are

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now very vocal conservative religious groups and individuals who look suspiciously upon efforts to promote interreligious solidarity and pluralism. Taken together, the essays in this volume chart new territory, helping to develop our understanding of the long and complex history of religious encounters in Africa. In their exploration of specific encounters between Muslims and Christians, some of the studies do point to the fact that in many places in Africa Muslims and Christians are increasingly concerned with boundaries between their religious communities. Despite the absence of any real “clash” in civilizational terms, one can see tension, conflict, and frequent misunderstandings between different groups of Muslims and Christians in many places in contemporary Africa. It is clear that much further research is needed in this area. Indeed, this collection is just one small part of a much-needed and overdue effort to understand Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa and elsewhere in the world.

CHAPTER ONE

AFRICAN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN WORLD HISTORY: THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”1 John Voll Muslim-Christian encounters in history involve Crusades and Jihads, wars and conflicts. The record also shows times of constructive interaction and peaceful togetherness. In recent years, the conflict relationships have received the greatest attention. In the debates about the “clash of civilizations”, Muslim-Christian tensions are at the heart of most of the discussions.2 Islam and the West are viewed as the two major antagonists in the global wars of civilizations. The major battles in these wars are thought to be along the great “fault lines” of conflict between civilizations. It is said that “fault line conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims” and that Islam has “bloody borders”.3 In this vision, the “fault line” between Islam and Christianity in Africa is seen as being especially important.4 The “clash of civilizations” hypothesis might appear to be important for a broad discussion of “Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa”. However, despite the fact that books defining relations between Islam and the West in terms of civilizational clash remain on the bestseller list for long periods of time,5 the relevance of the “clash of civilizations” perspective for understanding the long-term interactions of Muslims and Christians in Africa (and elsewhere) is limited. If

1 The author expresses his gratitude for the many helpful observations made by participants at the colloquium on “Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa” sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, Northwestern University, 22 May 2003. 2 The basic statement of the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis is Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72, 3 (1993): 22–49. 3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 208 and 254. 4 Huntington, Foreign Affairs, p. 33. 5 One might note the continuing popularity of Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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one goes beyond the contemporary journalistic over-simplifications of clashes to examine the underlying dynamics of world historical interactions, the rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations” approach becomes at best irrelevant, and may possibly be dangerously misleading. In a number of ways, an examination of Muslim-Christian relations in Africa in the broader framework of world history provides the basis for an alternative view in which conflicts and constructive interactions can be seen as being something very different from the encounters of “civilizations”. Definitions and Contexts The basic terms in the topic “Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa” would seem to be self-evident and not requiring definition. “Islam”, “Christianity” and “Africa” are terms that are widely used in general and scholarly discourse. Few people stop to define them before engaging in an analysis of issues involving these terms. However, each of the terms is used to cover a wide range of human experiences and it is necessary to bear in mind that they are not monolithic entities with single descriptive definitions. One needs to ask “which Christianity”, “which Islam” and “which Africa” in what time period, if one wants to understand the dynamics of their encounters in world history. In the contemporary debates about global conflicts, there is a frequently made, if sometimes unconscious, assumption of the identity of “the West” with Christianity and Christianity is thought of as a “Western religion”. While Christianity played an important and possibly essential role in the definition of Western European society and culture, not all Christianity is Western. In world historical terms, Christianity is Middle Eastern in origin and one can even speak of the Christianization of Western Europe as the “Middle-Easternization” of the West in classical times. At the same time that Christianity was becoming part of Western European life, it was also becoming a part of life and society in Africa. Axum in Ethiopia became a Christian state by the early fourth century CE, about two centuries before the firm establishment of Christianity in England by St Augustine of Canterbury. Similarly, distinctive traditions of Christianity emerged in what has been called “late antiquity” in Egypt, with important local traditions in Upper Egypt and Nubia. By the beginning

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of the second millennium of the Christian era, African traditions of Christianity were well established and reflected the non-monolithic diversity of Christianity in the pre-modern era. Even Western Christianity became a source for diverse Christian traditions when it came to Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The missionary churches provided important themes and symbols for distinctively African Christian traditions. There are important independent African Christian movements arising out of the context created by Western missionaries, like the uprising of John Chilembwe (d. 1915) or the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth established by Simon Kimbangu and now a member church in the World Council of Churches. Within the mainstream traditions of Western churches in Africa there are distinctively African expressions of faith, like the Mass of the Luba whose music is distinctively African even though the ritual is the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.6 In Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, the relevant Christianity may be very different from the post-Reformation Protestant and Catholic versions dominant in Western Europe and the United States. Similarly, the definition of “Islam” opens the way to recognizing the diversity of expression of Islamic experience in Africa. In its historical forms, Islam is not identical with “Arab” or “Middle Eastern”. Like Christianity, Islam is a “Middle Eastern religion” in origin but it has expanded far beyond its regional origins. The majority of the world’s Muslims live outside the Middle East and an important part of the non-Middle Eastern global Muslim community is in Africa. Islamic religious experience is expressed in many different ways in Africa and the mode of that expression is often distinctively African. One example of a complex and cosmopolitan format for this expression is the music of Sheikh Ahmed Tijani, who was born in Ghana, traveled and studied in many places in the Muslim world, and then settled in Chicago. His music and recitations reflect the varieties of expression of Islamic experiences.7 The diversity of expressions of Muslim and Christian faith and tradition suggests that it is necessary to recognize an important third 6 In the oral presentation of this paper, the Kyrie from this mass was played to illustrate this point. “Missa Luba: An African Mass”, Philips Classic Productions 426 836–1 (1990). 7 In the oral presentation, a selection was played from a CD of Tijani’s songs: “Praise”, Interworld Music Associates, 1998. Sheikh Ahmed Tijani is the leader of the Universal Islamic Center in Chicago.

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element that needs definition: Africa. One important set of dynamic encounters is the set of Muslim and Christian encounters with Africa. People sometimes speak of Christianity or Islam “in Africa”.8 This is a recognition that these two religious traditions originated outside Africa. However, as Africans became Muslims or Christians, they quickly created distinctive syntheses of religious and faith experiences and traditions. This set of encounters gives shape to the nature of Muslim-Christian encounters. Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa increasingly become interactions and encounters between African Christians and African Muslims. In this context, distinctive local African elements give rise to distinctive syntheses. East African Muslim societies are different from those in West Africa, and South African Christian communities are different from those in Ethiopia. These complex interactions emphasize the importance of recognizing that the three factors—Islam, Christianity and Africa—are not independent abstract absolutes. They are interacting elements in broader patterns of relationships among individuals, groups and societies. Old-style definitions of “civilizations” as separate entities that are essentially complete, which then interact with other such entities, do not help in understanding the nature of Muslim-ChristianAfrican interactions. Instead, it may be more useful to view these relationships as dimensions of complex webs that are sets of “connections that link people to one another”.9 Muslim-Christian-African Encounters in Late Antiquity The networks of Muslim-Christian-African interactions emerged and developed in the contexts of distinctive local encounters. However, these encounters are part of broader global and hemispheric webs that define great eras in world history. The more general currents of long-term history are an important factor in determining the nature of the many different encounters in time and space.

8 See, for example, some of the discussions in David Westerlund and Eva Evers Rosander (eds), African Islam and Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997); and Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995). 9 J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), p. 3.

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Muslim-Christian-African encounters begin in the world of “late antiquity”. Both Christianity and Islam developed within the context of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world and their first encounters—in the Middle East and elsewhere—occurred during this time of great transition. In the now-classic description of late antiquity, Peter Brown notes the disappearance of major features of the historical landscape and the emergence of significant new ones: “It is only too easy to write about the Late Antique world as if it were merely a melancholy tale of ‘Decline and Fall’: of the end of the Roman Empire as viewed from the West; of the Persian, Sassanian Empire, as viewed from Iran. On the other hand, we are increasingly aware of the astounding new beginnings associated with this period. . . . Looking at the Late Antique world, we are caught between the regretful contemplation of ancient ruins and the excited acclamation of new growth.”10 The new growth and new world that was emerging was the world of post-Roman Empire Christianity and the new world of Islam. These two new world-communities did not emerge in isolation from one another. Their constant interaction was, in fact, a significant element in their histories. One aspect of this interaction is that the two worldviews and communities were part of a shared major tradition of worldview and faith: the traditions of Middle Eastern monotheism. Christianity and Islam share fundamental elements of the basic repertoire of symbols and concepts through which the faith traditions are articulated and expressed—and these elements distinguish both of them (along with other Middle Eastern monotheistic traditions) from the other major modes of religious faith and experience. These elements include—beyond the basic shared emphasis on one, not many, divinities—the concepts of revelation by the One God, prophethood and scriptures. This shared heritage of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities of late antiquity meant that their interactions were both constructive and competitive as believers worked to define their worldviews and their desired communities. While each community worked to win adherents, an important second line of expansion was among non-monotheistic people. For Christians, this expansion initially involved the conversion of literate urban people in the traditions of 10 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150–750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 7.

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classical Greco-Roman “paganism”; only later did it include interactions with agricultural and nomadic peoples outside of the boundaries of urban classical civilization. Islam, in contrast, began in a less-urbanized context and faced from the outset the challenges of incorporating non-urban peoples with natural religions into the community of the faithful. Most studies of these complex networks of interaction concentrate on the worlds of “classical” urban societies. Such an emphasis continues the perspective of Peter Brown who argued: “Throughout this period [of Late Antiquity], the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia are the main theatres of change. The world of the northern barbarians remained peripheral to these areas. . . . [ The] account ends more naturally at the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid than at the remote Aachen of his contemporary, Charlemagne.”11 It is useful to note that, in this perspective, regions in Africa beyond the Mediterranean coast do not even get mentioned as part of a barbarian periphery. By the seventh century CE in Africa, there were important Christian communities not only in the Mediterranean coastal regions but also in most of the Nile Valley and Ethiopia. The Kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia is traditionally reported to have become Christian around 350 CE and laid the foundations for the Christian identity of subsequent Ethiopian states and imperial systems. During the sixth century CE, missionaries from Constantinople worked on the conversion of the peoples between Axum and Byzantine Christian Egypt. A series of medieval Nubian states was established and remained an African Christian presence for almost a thousand years in some places. This “Eastern” Christianity of late antiquity is the form with which Islam most profoundly interacted in this early era of relations, in the Mediterranean as well as in Africa. The Western, Latin mode of Christianity was only beginning to be articulated and it had little opportunity for participation in Muslim-Christian relations. The first Christian-Muslim encounter in Africa is an important part of the traditional historical narrative of the early Muslim community. In the very early days, the community of believers was a small and persecuted group in the city of Mecca. At a time of extreme suppression, Mu˙ammad sent some of the most vulnerable

11

Brown, Late Antiquity, p. 9.

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believers to find refuge with the Christian king of Ethiopia. They were followed by some of their Meccan persecutors who tried to persuade the ruler to turn the Muslims over into the Meccans’ custody. In an account that is often cited in Muslim history, the Ethiopian ruler questioned the Muslims and their Meccan opponents, and declared that the Muslim faith was virtually the same as his own.12 This Christian-Muslim encounter provides one of the important affirmations in Muslim tradition that Islam and Christianity share a basic repertoire of religious concepts and symbols, in the tradition of Middle Eastern monotheism. The real expansion of the Muslim community and the faith of Islam in Africa south of the Mediterranean coastal countries were limited in the early era. As Richard Lobban shows, while the spread of Islam across northern Africa was rapid, its expansion to the south in the Nile Valley (and elsewhere) was remarkably slow. Already by the middle of the seventh century CE, Muslim military efforts to conquer the kingdoms of Nubia were replaced by a long-standing non-aggression arrangement that reflected long historic interregional relationships as well as current power realities.13 Traditional histories identify this arrangement with a particular treaty or pact (baq†) that was negotiated in the mid-seventh century, although the nature of this pact and its particular provisions are the subject of continuing debate among scholars. The result of these historical developments is that the first era of Muslim-Christian relations in Africa was one of relatively stable and limited impact. The initial Muslim conquests of North African territories resulted in the establishment of Muslim-ruled societies in which the majority of the people became both Muslim and Arabicspeaking in the following two to three centuries. South of this line of states, interactions with Christian Africans and other Africans were largely determined by trade, product exchange and occasional migrating groups or itinerant teachers.

12 The traditional account is presented in Ibn Is˙àq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Is˙àq’s Sìrat Rasùl Allàh, translated by A. Guillaume (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 146–53. 13 The paper presented by Richard Lobban at the ISITA conference “MuslimChristian Relations in Nubia” on 23 May 2003 examines these issues.

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john voll The Era of Medieval Transitions and Transformations

Gradually more informal networks began to reshape the nature of local societies in the Saharan and nearby Sub-Saharan regions. Through most of this region, the interaction was between Islam and local faith traditions and did not involve Muslim-Christian relations. The Muslim entry into these societies was, most importantly, through the development of major trade networks and the establishment of Muslim commercial communities in the midst of non-Muslim societies. In the non-Christian areas, the rulers were open to a gradual Islamization of their courts and states in a situation where the rulers “accepted Islam, whereas the commoners remained loyal to their ancestral religions. Situated between the majority of their pagan subjects and an influential Muslim minority, kings adopted a middle position between Islam and the traditional religion.”14 The Muslim merchants were joined by itinerant teachers and preachers and the result was a long-term and gradual intensification of the influence of Islam in these societies. In the Christian areas, there were two different results to the longterm processes. In Nubia and the Nile Valley, merchants, itinerant teachers and migrating peoples gradually changed the nature of the Nubian Christian states. The old frontier became increasingly porous and, by the fifteenth century, the last of the Christian kingdoms had disappeared. In these states, in contrast to the non-Christian African states in other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the rulers tended not to adopt explicitly Islamic practices and not to convert to Islam. However, the basic similarities between Christianity and Islam meant that religion does not appear to have been the cause of major wars or conflicts. Instead, the older Christian states were gradually replaced by Muslim-led states built on the growing presence of Arab groups that had been migrating into the region in increasing numbers.15

14 Nehemia Levtzion, “Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800”, in Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 66. 15 A helpful summary of these developments is Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800 (revised edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 98–100. The standard discussion specifically dealing with the Nilotic Sudan is Yusuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan from the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967).

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In contrast to the gradual Islamization of the Christian regions of the Nile Valley, the Ethiopian Christian state and society maintained its distinctive Christian identity. Following the decline of the Kingdom of Axum, Muslim merchants were active in the region and a number of Muslim trade centers developed. However, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian central power was revived by the Zaghwe dynasty and the subsequent consolidation of the central monarchical system, with the establishment of the Solomonic dynasty by Yekuno Amlak (1270–1285).16 This set the framework for more conflictual Muslim-Christian relations, since “a series of Islamic principalities had risen along the long-distance trade routes from the coast to southern Amhara and Shäwa in the north to the Rift Valley lakes in the south”.17 A series of wars between Muslim and Christian states occurred during later medieval times, reaching a climax in the jihad of Imam A˙mad b. Ibràhìm of Harar (called Ahmad Grañ in most Western sources) in the sixteenth century. These Ethiopian wars are the only wars between formally Christian and formally Islamic states from the early Muslim conquests until the era of modern European imperialism. The jihad of Ahmad Grañ marks an important transition from the older dynamics of conflict to the early modern era because of the involvement of a European imperial power (Portugal) and the Ottoman Empire in the fighting. Early Modern Globalizations The Ethiopian wars of the sixteenth century signaled the real beginnings of the globalization of Muslim-Christian relations in Africa. As European entrepreneurs, slave traders, explorers and early imperialists traveled throughout the continent, issues of Muslim-Christian relations emerged wherever they met Muslims. By this time, distinctive Muslim societies had developed, giving special character to relations with outsider Christians. In each of the emerging Muslim African regions, there were distinctive issues of relations with Christians. In this era, outside Ethiopia and some small immigrant communities, there were

16 Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 53–57. 17 Lidwien Kapteijns, “Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, p. 228.

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few Africans who were Christians. As a result, the Muslim-ChristianAfrican framework for understanding relations shifts to being more of a study of relations between Muslim Africans and European Christians in Africa, sometimes in contexts that included important groups of local non-Muslim/non-Christian peoples. In the years before the more formal European imperialisms, with their emphases on territorial control and state formation, MuslimChristian encounters in Africa took forms that were distinctively different from the later encounters in the contexts of formal imperialism and independence. In most cases of Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa during the period from the sixteenth century until the late nineteenth century, these encounters were basically a part of the encounters between Europeans (Christians) and Africans who were Muslim. In most regions of encounter, Islam had become, or was becoming, a dimension of particular local African cultures. Even in “a very small place in Africa”, like Niumi in the Gambia River Valley, society represented a synthesis that was both distinctively African and Muslim.18 These encounters were not shaped by the asymmetry of economic and military power that was characteristic of the later imperial era. The Portuguese experience in the early years of encounters with the small state of Niumi reflects the different power realities of the earlier era. “The lessons the Portuguese learned from [Nuno] Tristão’s experience [in 1446] were ones that Europeans trading in West Africa were loath to forget over the next three and one-half centuries: surrounding them were complex societies. . . . In virtually every situation, power was in the hands of the Africans. . . . Survival and success depended not on force of arms but on finding mutuality of interests.”19 It is easy for people who are aware of the later European imperial conquests to forget the power symmetries of the early modern era when there were few encounters between Europeans and Africans that can specifically be identified as “Christian-Muslim encounters”. Christianity was not commonly an explicit part of early European encounters with African Muslims. In non-Muslim areas, there were

18 The dynamics of the creation of this cosmopolitan identity are examined in Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). See especially chapters 2–3. 19 Ibid., p. 60.

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the beginnings of the Christian missionary movements that opened the way for a wide range of Christian-African encounters. However, there were no Christian movements in Muslim areas similar to the African Christian movement in response to Christian missions like the Antonian Movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) in the Kingdom of Kongo.20 There were, however, Muslim movements in West Africa that had some similarities to the Antonian Movement, and they reflect an emerging new mode of Muslim-Christian encounters. By the end of the seventeenth century, the development of the Atlantic slave trade represented a significant disruption in coastal African societies. One dimension of the Antonian Movement in Kongo is that it was a “popular movement directed against the slave trade in Africa at the time of the export slave trade”.21 Similarly, while the rise of militant jihad movements in West Africa was the result of many diverse factors, contact with European powers and the disruptive impact of the rapidly growing slave trade were also important. “The slave trade, with its corollary of manhunts, engendered violence in relations between states and the militarization of power and promoted the advance of militant Islam. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, a widespread marabout-led movement had developed which sought to unify the states of the Senegal valley to fight the noxious effects of the overseas slave trade.”22 However, as some of the jihad states developed later, they were directly involved in the slave trade. In the Fulbe state in Futa Jalon, “the political economy was based on a thorough integration into the internal and Atlantic slave trades”.23 In the early modern era, encounters between Muslims and Christians in Africa were defined more in terms of political economy than religion. The dynamics of interaction were shaped more by the “insideroutsider” identities of Europeans and Africans than by an awareness of religious issues. This situation changed during the nineteenth century with formal European conquests and the arrival of Christian missionaries in significant numbers. 20 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony, Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 21 Ibid., p. 1. 22 B.A. Ogot (ed.), General History of Africa V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (abridged edition; Paris: UNESCO, 1999), p. 139. 23 David Robinson, “Revolutions in the Western Sudan”, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, p. 134.

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john voll The Imperial Age

European imperialism took many different forms in Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provided a broad spectrum of contexts within which Muslim-Christian encounters took place. There are many important dimensions and a great diversity of experiences. Two aspects of this wide range of encounters help to illustrate the changing dynamics of Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa during the era of European imperialism: the heritage of conflicts and the nature of Christian missionary experience in Muslim areas. The first aspect of Muslim-Christian encounters in the imperial age that is often noted is that in areas where there were Muslim majorities, Islam frequently provided the conceptual and symbolic tools for organizing resistance to European imperial expansion. While this opposition was mostly framed in terms of opposition to foreign conquest or rule by unbelievers, these movements were basically encounters between Muslims and Christians. Even when the basic issues involved in the warfare were not theologically defined, the sense of Muslim-Christian conflict was an important part of the tone of the encounters. In Muslim regions of Africa, opposition to European expansion by ethnically defined groups was limited. This is in interesting contrast to the non-Muslim peoples of Africa. In other areas, the wars of resistance were identified with major ethnic groups like the Zulus or the Ashanti. In Muslim areas, the line extends from the Amìr 'Abd al-Qàdir in Algeria, through al-Óàjj 'Umar al-Fùtì in West Africa, to the Sudanese Mahdi, and Mu˙ammad 'Abdallàh Óasan in Somalia.24 These experiences set the stage for European powers to view any major Islamic movement as a security threat. The experience of the French with the Sanùsiyya †arìqa (Sufi order) is one of the best documented. Although the Sanùsiyya never declared a jihad against France, French policy-makers viewed the Sanùsiyya as the core of a militant pan-Islamic opposition to European (especially French) expansion. However, despite the exaggerations of French military analysts, movements of Islamic renewal and Sufi brotherhoods

24 An important and wide-ranging discussion of resistance movements can be found in Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

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usually did provide the most effectively organized opposition to European imperialist expansion in Muslim areas during the nineteenth century.25 This first aspect of Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa during the age of imperial expansion sets a tone of conflict relationships. These encounters did not involve a “clash of civilizations” as much as different types of conflicts that take place when there is an asymmetry of power—stronger powers conquer weaker ones. The Islamic resistance to European conquests was not primarily framed in “antiWestern” terminology and was not usually opposed to contemporary “modern” technology. From Amìr 'Abd al-Qàdir in Algeria to the Sudanese Mahdi, modern weapons and means of communication were welcomed and utilized when available. The clash was with “foreign” conquerors or “outsiders”, and when the difference was defined more explicitly in cultural terms, the conflict was with “unbelievers”. The imperial invaders were visibly Christian and often advocates of what some have called “muscular Christianity”. The conflicts of European expansion tended to identify Christianity with the imperialist cause, opening the way for the charge that Christianity was a “foreign” religion being imposed on Africa by “foreign” imperialists. In the context of European imperial control, this charge was persuasive and influential. Despite the long history of Christianity in Africa before the age of imperialism, the idea of Christianity as a foreign and imposed faith was influential in many areas during the twentieth century. The experiences of Christian missionaries in Muslim majority areas under European imperial rule present a second aspect of MuslimChristian relations in Africa. Complex relationships developed between imperial rulers, their European co-religionists, and local Muslim communities and leaders. Christian missionaries had clear advantages in areas under European rule. However, imperial policy-makers often feared that Christian missionary activities would arouse the sensitivities of local Muslims and they therefore set restrictions upon missionary activities in Muslim areas, while encouraging such activities among adherents to local African religious traditions.

25 See the more general discussion in John O. Voll, “Foundations for Renewal and Reform: Islamic Movements in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, in John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford History of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 509–47.

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The definition of the imperial government’s role in religious affairs was difficult. Important aspects of encounters between imperial Christianity and Islam are highlighted in the development of policies in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan after the conquest of the Mahdist state in 1898–1899. The new local administrators were instructed in a special “Memorandum to Mudirs” issued by Lord Kitchener, the military commander and new Governor-General, on a variety of matters from taxation and law enforcement to religious matters. The basic policy, similar to imperial policy in many areas, was to avoid offending religious sensibilities while suppressing possible agents of “fanaticism” and “rebellion”. Kitchener told the District Officers: “Be careful to see that religious feelings are not in any way interfered with and that the Mohammedan religion is respected. At the same time, Fakis [local rural teachers] teaching different Tariks, and dealing in amulets, etc., should not be allowed to resume their former trade. In old days, these Fakis, who lived on the superstitious ignorance of the people, were one of the curses of the Sudan and were responsible in a great measure for the rebellion [the Mahdist movement]. Those among the people who desire to study religion should do so at the capital, where a school will be established, under proper supervision.”26 Within the framework of wanting to avoid offending local Muslim feelings, British administrators opposed significant church and missionary activities. Lord Cromer, the de facto British ruler of Egypt who was ultimately responsible for Sudan as well, stated in 1900, “the present time is, in my opinion, most inopportune for the encouragement of missionary enterprise in the Soudan, and . . . those who do encourage them will incur very grave responsibility”.27 Part of these discussions involved relations with the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem who was proposing a bishopric for Egypt and Sudan. G. Popham Blyth, writing to Cromer from Jerusalem, supported his position: “It is wise to restrain the undisciplined invasion of the Soudan by missionary agents who owe allegiance only to the Society which sends them out, or are actuated very much more by sentiment than by real information as to the quest they have undertaken.”28

26 Lord Kitchener, “Memorandum to Mudirs”, Enclosure No. 1 in Lord Cromer to Lord Salisbury submitting “Report on Sudan, 1899”, 20 February 1900, Public Records Office [in subsequent references, PRO], FO78/5086, No. 35. 27 Lord Cromer to Lord Salisbury, 8 February 1900, PRO, FO78/5086, No. 25. 28 Quoted in Lord Cromer to Lord Salisbury, 21 February 1900, PRO, FO78/5087, No. 36.

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The general result was that “Cromer set down the principle that was to govern missionary activity during the Condominium: that it would be allowed only in the non-Muslim south”.29 Even in the southern Sudan, there were important restrictions. Both missionaries and colonial administrators hoped to avoid a situation where the various Christian groups would be competing for converts and influence. The result was that Christian missionary organizations were given special territorial spheres for operation, with Roman Catholics being allotted Bahr al-Ghazal, American Presbyterians getting much of the Upper Nile, and British missionary societies, especially the Church Missionary Society (CMS), being allocated most of the rest of the southern Sudan.30 These policies were long-term actions associated with a clear administrative distinction between northern and southern Sudan under British control. This separation was formalized in British policy by the 1930s. A report on “disturbances” in the South in 1955 noted that, “translated into practical politics”, the result of the policy was the removal of virtually all northern Sudanese from the South and that “the Mohammedan religion was suppressed” in the South.31 The South was “isolated from events in the North” and developed “its own distinctive identity, eclectically combining its traditional characteristics with modernizing Christian and Western elements”.32 In this context, it was possible for a prominent Northern Sudanese political intellectual like Muhammad Saleh al-Shingeiti, a High Court judge who became speaker of Parliament after independence, to say that he had had virtually no contact with Southern leaders until a conference in Juba in 1947.33 These developments shaped Muslim-Christian encounters. For most practical purposes during the era of British control of Sudan, there was very little contact between Sudanese who were Christians and Sudanese who were Muslims. Muslim-Christian encounters primarily involved the relationships between imperial rulers—who were

29 M.W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 251. 30 Ibid., pp. 252–53. 31 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disturbances in the Southern Sudan during August, 1955 (Khartoum: McCorquedale & Co., 1956), p. 16. 32 Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995), p. 87. 33 Conversations with the author in August and September 1963.

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Christian—and Sudanese Muslims. The separate development of the Muslim and Christian communities in Sudan became a major factor shaping the dynamics of politics and conflict in the era of independence. The most important aspect of encounters between Muslim Africans and Christian Africans in the era of imperial rule in Sudan was the limited—in fact almost non-existent—nature of such encounters. When encounters occurred, they tended to be shaped and mediated by the imperial rulers. Independence resulted in the removal of this separating and mediating entity and the direct encounter quickly became a framework for conflict. While the case of Sudan may be extreme, the general framework is similar in other parts of Africa. Christian missionary activity resulted in the conversion of virtually no Muslims but it did convert many from indigenous religious traditions, creating new Christian communities. In much of Sub-Saharan Africa this different experience was not of major importance. However, in a number of the colonial political-administrative constructs that became independent states, the new states included both established (and expanding) Muslim communities and new, missionary-created Christian communities. The limited nature of African Muslim-African Christian encounters in the era of European imperial rule was replaced by relations in which two different communities confronted each other directly within the framework of newly independent states. Conflict and separation were two basic aspects of Muslim-Christian encounters. There were many other ways that Muslims and Christians encountered each other in the era of imperial rule but the tone was frequently set by situations of conflict and isolation. Successful efforts at establishing cooperative projects and effective relationships between Muslim and Christian groups were relatively limited in scope and visibility. In terms of Muslim-Christian relations in Africa, the legacy of the imperial era is a difficult one. Independence and Globalization As African states gained independence in the second half of the twentieth century, the framework for Muslim-Christian relations was transformed in many ways. As in the era of imperial rule, there was a wide range of experiences with multiple dimensions. Within this complex matrix of historical developments, two themes can provide a

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sense of the changing nature of Muslim-Christian encounters following independence. One is the evolution of the relationship between Islam and the processes of definition of “national” identity, and the other is the Africanization of Christianity in the post-imperial era. These developments have two phases: the first phase of early independence and the second phase of developments in the contexts of new issues of political stability and survival in the context of the intensification of globalization at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In the first years (and decades) of independence, there is a continuity of many elements of the era of late imperial rule. The fundamental concepts in the movements for independence were “nation” and “nation-state”. Regardless of whether or not there was, in socio-historical reality, an actual nation, the units that became independent were thought of as “nations” achieving independence as “new” nationstates. Immediately following independence, nation-building and national unity were primary elements of the visions underlying “national” policy in the newly-independent states. In the world of the 1960s, in the words of an influential scholar at the time, “the nation is for great portions of mankind the community with which men most intensely and most unconditionally identify themselves, even to the extent of being prepared to lay down their lives for it, however deeply they may differ among themselves on other issues”.34 This attitude was strong among the new leaders of independent African states and shaped their policy visions. In this conceptual framework, religious identities were secondary to “national” identities. In the new contexts of independence, individuals were expected to subordinate their religious loyalties or their “tribal” identities to their “national” responsibilities. In most of Sub-Saharan Africa, while this was a conceptual ideal of the new ruling educated elite, it had little correspondence to social and political realities. Instead, local ethnic loyalties and religious affiliations continued to be major elements in the definition of the basic units of political action and social power. This situation shaped the nature of Christian-Muslim encounters in important ways. Continuities from the era of imperial rule meant

34 Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 95.

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that Christian institutions continued to be seen as a legacy of imperialism. In many different countries, even where the new “nationalist” ruling elite was Christian or educated in Christian missionary schools, restrictions were put on missionary activities and attempts were made to control Christian church institutions and organizations.35 In the first years of independence, foreign missionaries were expelled from a number of countries. These policies were reflected in the writings of Muslim historians who studied the history of Christian missions. For example, in the “Arabic literature on AngloAmerican missions written since the mid-twentieth century”, there is a central polemical thesis “that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian evangelism was a vehicle of Western imperialism, that it was an act of cultural assault, and that it has represented a profound and continuing threat to Islam and Muslims”.36 In another continuity from the age of imperialism, Islam continued to be identified with opposition to imperial conquest. However, the tradition of Islamic opposition was frequently redefined in nationalist terms and Islam came to be viewed as a part of the “nationalist” tradition of opposition to European imperial rule. Leaders like Amìr 'Abd al-Qàdir in Algeria, Mu˙ammad A˙mad al-Mahdì in Sudan, and Mu˙ammad 'Abdallàh Óasan in Somalia were claimed as early nationalists. In these narratives, Islam was part of the “nationalist” story instead of being an independent variable in the evolution of political and social institutions. In this first era of independence, Muslim-Christian encounters were usually subordinate to the encounters and conflicts viewed within the framework of national unity and independence. In this way, the expulsion of foreign missionaries from Sudan reflected the clash between issues of national identity and old-style missionary conceptualization. The old dynamics of encounter as being between Muslim Africans and foreign Christians shaped policies and responses.37 In the final decades of the twentieth century this general situation began to change in significant ways. In terms of relationship to the 35 Some examples of these restrictions are cited in John O. Voll, “Imperialism, Nationalism and Missionaries: Lessons from Sudan for the Twenty-first Century”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8, 1 (1997): 45–46. 36 Heather J. Sharkey, “Empire and Muslim Conversion: Historical Reflections on Christian Missions in Egypt”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16, 1 ( January 2005): 54. 37 This development is discussed in Voll, “Imperialism, Nationalism”.

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earlier dynamics, it is possible to discern the emergence of postnationalist Islamic features and post-imperialist Christianity. In more positive terms, the new developments reflected the growing significance of a more clearly African Christianity and an Islam less tied to nationalist priorities. Both of these developments were important in shaping at least some crucial elements in Muslim-Christian encounters at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By the end of the twentieth century, Islam was re-emerging as an independent and often transnational element in the history and politics of Sub-Saharan Africa. The old assumptions of modernization theory that were so important in shaping scholarship and policy in the early years of independence were disproved in significant ways by the actual histories of states and societies. The secularization of politics and society was clearly not inevitable and religion did not disappear from the public arena in the new states. Instead, there was increasing disillusion with many aspects of the nation-building project as led by the first generations of leaders after independence. In Muslim majority areas, Islam continued to be an element in the definition of national identity. However by the 1990s, processes of globalization had resulted in a growing awareness of the transnational dimensions of Islamic life. The association of Muslim organizations and individuals with national issues and structures continued, but new ties that were more regional and global also gained significance. In Sudan, for example, the old national political parties that were tied to the major Islamic organizations in the country—the Mahdist and Khatmiyyah associations—continued to be a major part of the Sudanese political scene at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, the Muslim Brotherhood and organizations associated with the Brotherhood tradition were less identified with the older traditions of nationalism in Sudan and they had visible connections with broader transnational Muslim networks. This was visible when a coup in 1989 led to the establishment of a government tied closely to the Muslim Brotherhood. It was especially associated with the vision and policies articulated by Hasan al-Turabi, who was a partner with President Bashir in the National Islamic Front (NIF) system until 1999. Diasporas also established Muslim identities that went beyond the older-style local and “national” ones. Groups like the Mourides in Senegal are distinctively Senegalese in origin and history. However, the group is now significantly transnational, with important branches

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in many cities around the world. Teachers in other Sufi traditions, like Sheikh Ahmed Tijani, reflect this trend of Islamic sensibilities and visions that are not tied to “national” boundaries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an informed observer could conclude: “For many African Muslims, their religious identity is more important than their national identity. . . . Many African Muslims would agree with the conservative Indian Islamic cleric Kalim Siddique: ‘The greatest evil that stalks the modern world [is] nationalism’.”38 As the Mourides vividly show, while “African Islam is first of all local Islam”, it needs to be remembered that “African Islam is also global in scope”.39 The development of Christian institutions and communities reflects a similar transformation. While many Muslims still articulate the old narratives of identifying Christianity with imperialism, even in the clearly post-imperial era, the reality is different. There has been a significant Africanization, both of Christian organizations in Africa and of modes of expression of faith. In many areas, these processes were accelerated by the expulsion of foreign missionaries in the early years of independence. In some areas, like Southern Sudan, there has been a remarkable rate of conversion of Africans from local religious traditions to Christianity. The elevation of a Nigerian Archbishop to Cardinal in 1985 is a reflection of these developments and the fact that Francis Cardinal Arinze was mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II points to the more global networks of African Christians. One important new dimension of the changing nature of Christianity in Africa is the growing strength of Pentecostal and evangelical churches. While such groups have long been active in missionary activities in a number of areas, they have historically not been as strong a presence as the major Christian groups like the Roman Catholic, Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. However, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the more evangelical branches of Christianity were expanding in Africa at a dramatic rate. This expansion involves large transnational networks of activists and reflects the globalization of Christian activity that shows little of the old-style mission activity of the era of imperialism. Rather than being a oneway effort of European and American missionaries going to Africa, 38 Charlotte A. Quinn and Frederick Quinn, Pride, Faith, and Fear: Islam in SubSaharan Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 10. 39 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

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the enterprises are now frequently multinational in character. One activist in this development notes that now, in contrast to the old days, “the tables have turned. Instead of Africa’s being the mission field needing American missionaries, America is now the mission field needing African missionaries. Indeed, one African church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) is one of numerous African churches currently sending missionaries to America. At this writing [2004] the RCCG has planted over 150 churches in America, many of which have over 500 members.”40 These trends of Africanization of Christianity and the transnationalization of Islam in Africa shape the nature of contemporary ChristianMuslim encounters in Africa. In this new era, the basic issues involved in Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa have been changed or significantly redefined. The issues involved in the struggle against imperialism and the definition of nationalism now have an anachronistic aspect when they are raised. In terms of contemporary conflicts, for example, the very definition of the clash is changing. In the days of imperialism and early independence, activist Muslims identified the primary enemy as the imperialist powers. This had changed by the late 1990s. While most Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa have little or no affiliation with alQaeda or the more informal networks of terrorists associated with Usama bin Ladin, bin Ladin defines the global conflict as being between true believers and Crusader-Zionist efforts for global domination. While the rhetoric of this clash concentrates on issues of power and domination, little remains of the old vocabulary of anti-imperialism and nationalism. There is a strong sense of competition and potential open conflict among both activist Muslims and activist Christians in Africa. Conflicts that may have many different causal elements sometimes become defined and articulated in terms of religion. The civil wars in Sudan and Nigeria (the Biafran conflict in the 1960s) are frequently identified as being wars between Christians and Muslims. Increasingly, by the end of the twentieth century, local conflicts that might previously have been identified as ethnic or communal were being viewed as Muslim-Christian conflicts in a religionization of local and political

40 C. Peter Wagner, “Introduction”, in C. Peter Wagner and Joseph Thompson (eds), Out of Africa (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 2004), pp. 8–9.

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disputes. Conflicts, for example, in the Jos Plateau region in central Nigeria in the past have been described in terms of the ethnic identities of the peoples involved. However, in clashes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, fighting was described as being between Christian and Muslim villages. Similarly, in Côte d’Ivoire during the 1990s, civil tensions that began as a part of opposition to authoritarian rule changed their nature with the advent of elections. First, the tensions were identified in ethnic and regional terms, but by the time of the election protests in 2000 and subsequent coup attempts and other incidents, the conflict was not simply between northerners and southerners in the country but between Christians and Muslims, with churches and mosques being attacked. The old issues and causes have tended to fade. Nationalistic fervor has weakened and the cause of anti-imperialism seems now increasingly irrelevant. Similarly, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist parties throughout Africa have changed the contexts of conflict. Frequently conflicts in areas containing significant populations of both Muslims and Christians came to be expressed in religious terms, to the benefit of religious organizations. In Southern Sudan there was a significant surge in conversion to Christianity among peoples from local religious traditions. In other areas, the call to defend the faith was a way of mobilizing Muslims. Many of the most visible Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa in the era of independence involved confrontation and conflict. These clashes were not clashes of “civilizations” but tensions and conflicts shaped by the changing conditions of the times. Similarly, there were constructive encounters that have not been directly covered in this chapter. One of the challenges facing Muslims and Christians in Africa is to develop ways of enhancing positive dimensions of their encounters and to reduce the elements of conflict. From the early days when Muslims sought refuge in the court of the Ethiopian king and received support up until the twenty-first century, there have been foundations on which Muslims and Christians could build positive relations. Contrary to the assumptions of the theory of the clash of civilizations, Muslim-Christian conflict is not inevitable. However, to reduce or resolve conflicts, the first step is to see those conflicts as parts of a broader pattern of interactions over the centuries.

CHAPTER TWO

FLESH SOAKED IN FAITH: MEAT AS A MARKER OF THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS IN ETHIOPIA Éloi Ficquet An Old Religious Boundary Ethiopia1 offers an ideal place to study encounters between Christians and Muslims in Africa, located as it is at the crossroads of the Nile Basin, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. In political, economic and cultural configurations, the relations between these two groups of adherents of world religions can be observed in the longue durée well before the colonial period that dominates analyses of other African settings. Widely known in Islam but also present in the Christian world, the famous episodes of the ˙adìth,2 recounting the exile of some of the first adherents of Islam who were persecuted in Mecca and found refuge in the Christian Kingdom of Abyssinia,3 serve to emphasize the possibility of harmony between the two religions. Since this first appearance of Islam outside Arabia, such relations have continued in Ethiopian territories from the coast to the heart of the highlands.

1 “Ethiopia” covers several geographical spaces. In the contemporary era, Ethiopia is a state in the Horn of Africa with international borders that were negotiated between various European colonial powers. In a long historical perspective, it refers to a group of territories linked by relations of exchange and conflicts in the highlands region where the Christian kingdom was established. 2 The well-founded traditions about these events are contained in the biography (sìra) of the Prophet Mu˙ammad by Ibn Is˙àq, The Life of Muhammad. A Translation of Is˙àq’s Sìrat Rasùl Allàh, translated by A. Guillaume (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1985 [first ed. 1955]). For their meanings in other collections such as al-ˇabarì and al-Bukhàrì, see A.J. Wensinck, A Handbook of Early Muhammadan Tradition, Alphabetically Arranged (Leiden: Brill, 1927), pp. 10, 175. See also Maxime Rodinson, Mahomet (Paris: Seuil, 1994 [1968]), pp. 142–7. 3 This toponym is derived in European languages from the ethnonym ˙abasha, which refers to the cultural characteristics shared by the populations of the central Ethiopian highlands.

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They have historically been constructed through modes of competition, conflict and coexistence. Today, orthodox Christians, tewahedo,4 make up half of the Ethiopian population and Muslims about a third.5 The schematic view that is commonly used to show the distribution of religious groups in geographic, political and economic configurations tends to reduce this issue to a simple situation of oppositions: government dominated by one group, and trade dominated by the other. In reality, these groups overlap through diverse forms of interactions creating interstitial mixed zones, spaces of exchange and cohabitation that cover the whole region but are concentrated in the cities. In daily relations between Ethiopian Christians and Muslims, the arguments about dogma that divide them are very rarely mentioned.6 Material objects, including clothing as well as dietary, linguistic and architectural particularities, index the identity of each group. Social occasions at which the adherents of the two religions interact are not lacking but tend to be limited by the double restriction of commensality that covers the type of food and drinks consumed during festive occasions; alcohol and khat 7 on the one hand and meat on the other.

4 The official appellation of the Ethiopian Christian Church. The qualifier “orthodox” is a confusing reference to the status of this church within a Christendom that is neither Catholic nor Protestant, but without any connections to the Greek and Slavic Orthodox Churches except ritual similarities and recent rapprochements. The qualifier tewahedo means “an advocate of unity” in the Ge’ez language (classic Ethiopian language) and refers to the united front of that church against schismatic movements that overthrew it and the defense of its principal dogma, which is the faith in a doctrine that states the union in one nature of the two natures of Christ (divine and human). The “monophysite” appellation commonly used for this dogma is rejected because it is inaccurate and pejorative. 5 Official estimates of Ethiopia’s religious diversity were published in the 1994 population census. 6 The controversies around doctrinal issues that helped to draw a line of separation have been rephrased in national languages by Christians and Muslim Ethiopian intellectuals. They are spread in popular representations in the form of jeers and distorted characterizations but do not decry Islam or Christianity. See Éloi Ficquet, “Une apologie éthiopienne de l’islam”, Annales d’Éthiopie 18 (2002): 7–35. 7 Khat (qà† in Arabic, c’at in Amharic) is a shrub whose leaves, when chewed, act as a stimulant. It is used in Yemen, Djibouti and Somalia, and by Ethiopian Muslims. See Ezekiel Gebissa, Leaf of Allah: Khat & Agricultural Transformation in Harerge, Ethiopia, 1875–1991 (Oxford: James Currey, 2004).

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This chapter first offers a general and comparative perspective on restrictions on commensality, involving meat between Christians and Muslims, and then examines Ethiopian practices that have emphasized this issue to turn it into a powerful interdict, the marker of an interreligious boundary. Like any boundary, this “dietary boundary” has been the site of confrontations, readjustments and transgressions, whose effects have contributed to the building of contemporary Ethiopian national space. A Recurrent and Sensitive Question In Islam, the rules of the Qur"àn (v, 5) do not forbid Muslims from consuming the meat of “The People of the Book” (ahl al-kitàb), but this tolerance is counterbalanced with the sùra (vi, 146) that declares only carrion, blood and pork illicit but also that which “has been devoted to someone else besides Allah”. Moreover, as Maxime Rodinson argued: The law [ jurisprudence] was even more restrictive than the Kur’an . . . It was not forbidden but reprehensible (makruh) . . . to eat what a Kitabi has slaughtered for himself. . . . It was advisable to make sure that the name of Allah has been invoked and not the Cross, or Jesus, etc.8

Analyses of the many debates about such jurisprudence deserve to be examined in more detail. However, these debates fall outside our framework here which is limited to the observation of the interreligious relations that come into play during the process of preparing and commercializing meat. First, let us define the issue with a few examples taken from France, Lebanon and East Africa. Mohammed Benkheira in his discussion of Muslim butchers’ shops in France underscores the fact that the prohibition of pork is no longer sufficient to draw a clear boundary between communities. If Muslims are no longer concerned with prohibiting meats that are “non-ritual” [not ˙alàl] but only concerned with pork; it is certainly because the possibility of confusing “ritual” meats with “non-ritual” ones is obviously greater when it comes down to licit animals such as poultry, cattle and sheep. . . . This is where the resemblance is by far the strongest, hence a stronger possibility of getting mixed up with the 8

Maxime Rodinson, “Ghidhà"”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (1965), p. 1065.

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éloi ficquet French; that is the reason why it is necessary to delineate the limits separating them from the Muslims.9

Sometimes, non-Muslim French people, Christians included, are happy to eat ˙alàl or kosher products and do not even read the label. They simply want to taste a different kind of food. The use of meat as a religious marker enables a separation, which in this context defines the contours of a minority religious community, not only through an explicit inscription in the public space of the market but also through a demarcation of the space occupied by the body. Based on observations made from the distribution and production channels for meat in southwestern France, Florence Bergeaud studied the pragmatic and economic implications of the issue in the French context.10 In French slaughterhouses, animals’ throats are slit and bled but some Muslim organizations do not consider this sufficient to acknowledge the legality of the meat according to Islamic jurisprudence. Some consumers assign stricter ritualistic codifications to the ˙alàl label since they require that the slaughtering be done by a Muslim in the name of God (Allah). They also require the head of the animal to be turned towards Mecca. The above-mentioned debate around jurisprudence is to be added to the vague and constantly changing definition of ˙alàl meat between the people involved in this market. To respond to the great and sustained demand and to dismiss suspicions of selling meat falsely classified as ˙alàl, specific slaughter groups have been set up in which the Muslims who are to sacrifice animals are appointed by three mosques (in Paris, Lyon and Evry) and recognized by the state. Such adjustments can be compared to those set up in the kosher channel but, unlike in it, there are no supervisors to certify the religious conformity of the slaughtering process. There is still room for doubt; hence the debates help to maintain a situation where boundaries do matter. The interreligious situation in Lebanon, studied by Aïda KanafaniZahar in a village located in the region of Mount Lebanon, also exhibits conditions of restricted commensality, however, these are organized in a convivial manner. The Shiite Muslims only eat meat 9 Mohammed H. Benkheira, “La nourriture carnée comme frontière rituelle. Les boucheries musulmanes en France”, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 92 (1995): 67–88. 10 Florence Bergeaud, “Le chevillard et le sacrificateur: La viande halal entre logiques économiques, légales et religieuses”, Cités (Paris: PUF, 2004), pp. 537–45.

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they know to be ˙alàl, which means that the meat is the result of a complete slaughtering process performed by a Muslim and done according to specific ritual requirements. Maronite Christians do not have such rigorous codifications other than the requirement that the animal be cut and bled.11 During their celebrations, the Maronites delegate the slaughtering of their animals to the Shiites in charge of religious sacrifices in order for the meat to be shared by all village residents. In this context, the consumption of meat during festivities is a way to go beyond religious differences because it creates a “sublimation of the religious which aims to guarantee the coexistence of bi-confessional groups”.12 In Uganda, the butchers’ trade has been dominated by Muslims since the colonial era. This religious configuration of the meat market also results from a modus vivendi logic whereby Christians—Catholics and Protestants—indifferent towards the issue of the ritual preparation of meat, left such activity to Muslims. By so doing, they could ensure that Muslim religious requirements were not infringed upon in such an intense and intricate interreligious set-up. But this monopoly has lately been questioned by evangelical preachers, notably by Pastor Umar Mulinde, a Muslim convert to Christianity. He slaughtered a pig while wearing Muslim dress, which was perceived as an act of extreme provocation. In the east of the country, the dissension over the meat issue went as far as provoking riots when angry Muslim groups decided to destroy Christian butchers’ shops.13 This particular situation was reported to Parliament where the threat of an explosive situation was underscored in reference to the state of affairs in Nigeria, inciting the Ministry of Agriculture to give an official status to traditional Muslims’ prerogative in the meat market.14 In Malawi, the fear of a too-rapid Islamization was expressed during the first multi-party elections in 1994. These elections brought the United Democratic Front (UDF) ruled by a Muslim, President

11 However, the electric numbing of the animal before slaughtering is not performed in the kosher and ˙alàl channels. 12 Aïda Kanafani-Zahar, “Le religieux sublimé dans le sacrifice du mouton: un exemple de coexistence communautaire au Liban”, L’Homme 141 (1997): 83. 13 Chris Obore, “Muslims Riot, Burn Christian Butchers”, The Monitor (Kampala), 15 December 2002; and “Christians, Muslims Clash over Slaughterhouses”, Asian Political News, 28 January 2003. 14 Parliamentary session in Uganda, 10 December 2002, http://kob.parliament.go. ug:8080/hansard/.

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Bakili Muluzi, to power. Besides the diplomatic reorientation toward alliances with Middle Eastern countries, the suspicions of Christians focused on the meat issue which was portrayed as a “time bomb”. As in Uganda, the meat market was built up by granting a monopoly to Muslim butchers. With the regime change, Christians became more sensitive about this issue and saw it as an insidious way for Islam to spread. They reacted by boycotting ˙alàl butchers’ shops and by provisioning themselves with live animals.15 The preceding shows us cases of the centrality of meat in defining relations between Muslims and Christians, and this can be corroborated by similar cases in places, such as India and China, where Islam is in contact with other religions. Each case shows that meat is a food that helps to demarcate a religious boundary. The first reason is its use during holidays. To limit the forms of sociability and conviviality linked to its holiday consumption based on criteria of religious affiliation amounts to drawing a boundary in social space and reactivating a regular pattern. The second reason, from which the first derives, is due to the nature of the food because the meat involved in the building of this boundary comes from mammals or winged creatures. Without going back to the issue of sacrifice that has been widely discussed in anthropology, we notice that for man it is an obvious necessity to take a life in order to stay alive, to feed on meat, to rebuild one’s flesh. However, these acts raise serious questions and one of the answers is to develop rituals for killing and consuming animals. Compared to the situations of coexistence examined above, this problematic is most apparent in the Ethiopian case where the formalization of restrictions on commensality between Christians and Muslims and their implications are very pronounced. An Interdict Structuring Interreligious Space Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia never eat meat together. Whatever the degree of kinship or friendship and whatever the reason for the gathering, the interdiction of eating meat from animals that were not killed in the name of the faith (the Trinity or Allah) is respected and draws a clear line of demarcation in interreligious space. In cities, 15 Steven Nhlane, “Malawi. Facing Growing Religious Tension”, ANB-BIA Supplement 31, 1 March 1998, http://ospiti.peacelink.it/anb-bia/nr341/e04.html.

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restaurants and butchers’ shops are distinguishable by graphic signs showing the cross or the crescent moon and star, and by names evoking references that correspond to each religion. One of the scenes from daily life where the alimentary separation appears most clearly is at lunch time on bus journeys. Seated close together, the passengers talk to one another but when it is time to get off, they break into two groups and go towards the shop sign that corresponds to their religion. The rigorously imposed impossibility of eating meat is revealed here. When it comes to ordinary daily food such as pancakes, bread, vegetables and dairy products, Muslims and Christians have no trouble sharing a table and eating from the same plate. In order to welcome both groups of customers, some hotels avoid this problem by only offering “fasting” food (som megeb): vegetarian food prepared according to Christian requirements on fasting days when Christians do not eat meat.16 The reference to the Christian fast helps to neutralize the religious restrictions that forbid commensality between Christians and Muslims, but it is worth mentioning that this is only a reference and not a strict application because dairy products or eggs can also be ordered in these restaurants. The issue regarding the kinds of animal that should not be consumed according to the two religions is only slightly challenged here. Camel meat is the only meat that brings about divergences between the two religious groups in accordance with the religious precepts of their holy books, but also in accordance with geography since the Christians are concentrated in the mountains (that are too cold and humid for camels) and the Muslims have settled mainly on the arid plains inhabited by camels and their shepherds. It should be noted that Muslims who live in the highlands avoid eating camel meat even if they recognize the important value given to this meat in their religion. As for pork, it is forbidden for Muslims as well as Ethiopian Christians (the latter abide by the precepts of the Old Testament) to eat it. Therefore, the restrictions on commensality concern meats that are recognized as being permitted by the two religions (chicken,

16

Every Wednesday and Friday (except between Easter and Pentecost) and during several periods preceding big celebrations: not only Lent but also before Christmas, the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, the flight into Egypt, and the Assumption. In total every year, up to 254 days of fasting can be observed by the most pious! This Christian fasting involves abstaining from eating any animal product (fat, dairy products, meat, eggs) except fish.

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beef, lamb and goat). Techniques regarding how to kill an animal are not an issue since the killing is done by Christian and Muslim butchers according to the same process that takes the blood, which is considered to be impure, out of the meat. Neither the meat nor its technical preparation prevents it from being shared, but its consecration does. Meat and the Incorporation of Faith The idea of eating meat from an animal that was not sacrificed in the name of their faith17 is as repugnant to Ethiopian Christians as it is to Muslims. The meat of the other is viewed as impure, soiled: erkus in Amharic, najàsa in Arabic. How is it soiled? In butchers’ jargon, the meat is strictly prepared in the same way—slitting the animal’s throat by cutting the jugular vein, the carotid and the esophagus without beheading it.18 The blood must be removed from the animal as it is considered the principle source of life and is unfit for human consumption. This goes back to Noah’s commandment: “Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. . . . But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it” (Genesis 9:4). This Biblical requirement was renewed in the Qur"ànic precepts previously mentioned and kept by Ethiopian Christians. Impurities linked to blood are therefore not in question here. In Ethiopia, only two acts distinguish Christian and Muslim ways of killing animals. On the one hand, the head of the animal should be turned towards Mecca (qibla) for some, towards the east for others. On the other hand, at the moment when the blood spurts out when the throat is cut, the Muslim who sacrifices the animal says the basmala: bismillàh al-ra˙màn al-ra˙ìm (In the name of Allah, the Passionate and the Merciful), and using the Ge’ez formula, the Christians invoke the Trinity: bä-semä ab wä-wäld wä-mänfäs qeddus, ahadu amlak (In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit; One God).

17

This interdict does not exist in the Coptic community. On the technical and religious modalities of how to kill animals according to Islam, see Constant Hamès, “Le sacrifice animal au regard des textes islamiques canoniques”, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 101 (1998): 14–19. 18

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Through the consecration of meat, the fundamental dogmas related to religious identity seem to be incorporated by ingesting bloodless meat in which the blood would have somehow been replaced by the divine name invoked when the animal was killed. In other words, the meat, expurgated of blood which represents the principle source of life, constitutes an inert support allowing the absorption of dogmas defining divine nature. Therefore in the multi-religious Ethiopian context, the consumption of meat seems to be a profession of faith. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that consuming meat that was not consecrated to one’s faith is seen as a highly sacrilegious act equivalent to apostasy. Even if it is involuntary, the absorption of meat consecrated to the other’s religion leads to an impurity that might have very serious consequences. Meat as a Method of Forced Conversion The idea of meat as a medium through which one can defend one’s faith is shared by Ethiopian Christians and Muslims alike and has had its most radical expressions in its use as a coercive method of conversion. This use can be seen in the history of religious conflicts that broke out in Ethiopia in the second half of the nineteenth century during the conquest of the Wollo region, a Muslim territory in central Ethiopia. The territory, formerly known as Amhara, was at the core of the Christian medieval monarchy before experiencing a jihad in 1531 led by imam A˙mad (which lasted from 1529 to 1543), and then incursions by the Wollo clan of the Oromo people starting in the 1580s. On the vestiges of the ancient Amhara region, a new regional organization, named Wollo, was founded by the Oromo traditional rulers. They progressively converted to Islam to avoid being absorbed by the Christian kingdom that was being rebuilt in the north.19 In the middle of the nineteenth century, after a period of crisis when the Christian kingdom broke up into rival provinces, a rebel from the western border imposed himself as the restorer of a unified

19 For a study of the extended history of that territory, see Éloi Ficquet, “Du barbare au mystique. Anthropologie historique des recompositions identitaires et religieuses dans le Wällo (Éthiopie Centrale)”, Ph.D. thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2002.

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monarchy and was crowned Tewodros II. In the unifying and modernist projects of this ruler, Wollo experienced the expected backlash against the Muslim and Oromo invasions of the sixteenth century. To accomplish a true rebuilding of the Ethiopian empire, the former center, which had become peripheral, had to be reconquered and Wollo became Tewodros’s prime target after he was crowned. After six months of fighting, on Ethiopian New Year’s Day in September 1855, he won a decisive battle over the Wollo armies. Before that victory, he predicted that if on that day “he did not have the Amara [i.e. the Christians] and the Galla [i.e. the Oromo who are pagan or Muslims from Wollo] eating at the same table, he would not be worthy any longer of being considered a Christian”.20 This call for commensality did not suggest the desire to reconcile but the negation of the religious differences existing in the Wollo region and the aim of converting the inhabitants of this territory to Christianity. A few years later, Menilek, King of Shäwa and future King of Kings, undertook the conquest of the Wollo region. In his youth Menilek had been Tewodoros’s prisoner in the natural fortress of Mäqdäla in the north of Wollo. He therefore knew the area very well and had allies there, notably the woman chief Wärqitu who had helped him to escape from imprisonment. In the conflicts over succession following the death of Tewodros in 1868, Menilek wanted to control the Wollo region as a bulwark that would protect him from his rivals. It took him six years to achieve this goal. At first, victory was obtained by exploiting the fighting between two young chiefs competing for the imamate in Wollo, then by building an alliance with one of them, Muhammed Ali.21 Menilek celebrated his success by offering his new ally a banquet and vassal. Through this feast, which brought Christians and Muslims to the same table, Menilek followed Tewodros’s prediction but in a different way. During the meal, Menilek himself also predicted the forthcoming conversion of the inhabitants of Wollo, through not coercion but conciliation. These peoples from Wollo, despite the fact that they are presently Muslims, in two or three years, they will become our brothers through baptism and communion. Here, they can rule with us this world given 20 Martino Mario Moreno, “La Cronaca di re Teodoro Attribuita al Dabtarà ‘Zaneb’”, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 2, 2 (1942): 162. 21 This name is transcribed from Amharic.

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to us by God and by his Grace; they will be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven with us. Do not hate them. Give them sènga [castrated bulls] and frida [fat cows] to kill, let them kill the animals and eat them themselves. I want to attract the people of Wollo to me through humility and charity, and I want to teach them. My wish is to make them capable of ruling themselves in this world, and since by the goodness of Christ’s grace I did not come here to loot and waste their country. And now my children and friends do not be irritated if Muslims come into your homes.22

Through the words used in this discourse, it can be assumed that the officers did not accept the new instructions dictated by their sovereign without resistance. To give the process its full convivial dimension, Menilek ended the process of forced conversion by making sure not to impose Christian meat on Muslims. In other words, he decreed this act of “sublimation” of religious difference in order to create a dynamic of coexistence. Through this subtle use of the rules of commensality, Menilek showed his talent as a conciliator, which characterized his reign. Menilek made the banquet his favorite political tool: “at the beginning of his reign, we heard him formulate his governmental agenda in a gracious aphorism: my predecessors dominated through massacres, I will triumph through banquets”.23 But Menilek’s conciliatory approach would be thwarted by his rival, the King of Kings Yohannes IV. He was crowned in 1872 after making himself the most powerful of the provincial chiefs after Tewodros’s death. Menilek also aspired to the supreme title by claiming he was King Solomon’s descendant and by refusing to surrender to an impostor with no such dynastic legitimacy. The direct confrontation between the two kings took place in 1878. Yohannes, who conquered the provinces of central Ethiopia and acquired the opportunist support of imam Muhammed Ali, the former ally of Menilek, led his troops against the Shäwa. Ethiopia was once again on the brink of civil war. But the stakes were so high that it never happened. Since power relations were not in Menilek’s favor, he submitted to Yohannes. In return, he was recognized as negus [King] of Shäwa and retained his supremacy over Wollo. This region was

22 Guèbrè Sellassié, Chronique du règne de Ménélik, Roi des Rois d’Ethiopie, translated from Ahmaric by Tèsfa Sellassié, published and annotated by Maurice de Coppet, (Paris: Librairie Orientale et Américaine Maisonneuve Frères, 1930), vol. 1, p. 122. 23 Martial de Salviac, Un peuple antique au pays de Ménélik, les Gallas (dits d’origine gauloise), Grande nation africaine (Paris: H. Oudin, 1902), p. 71.

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officially reintegrated into the Kingdom of Ethiopia and established as a buffer zone between the two antagonistic powers. The takeover of Shäwa and the absorption of Wollo into the Christian political game had consequences as far as religion is concerned. To assert the unity of the Christian faith against the schismatic movements that had been growing for two centuries, especially in the Shäwa, Yohannes called together an ecclesiastical council in 1878 at Boru Méda, a small town in Wollo. By the end of the meeting, Yohannes and Menilek had become allies in order to launch a massive Christian conversion campaign in Wollo. The first stage of the campaign was to baptize two rival imams. Imam Muhammed Ali, supported by Yohannes, took the Christian name of Mikaél accompanied by the title of ras (which in the army would be equivalent to the rank of general), and imam Amädé Libän, supported by Menilek, became Haylä Maryam and was awarded the title of däjazmac (equivalent to the rank of colonel). But to convert the people, the Christian kings had to use coercive means. In the local collective memory, this historical episode is called “The Era of the Apostates” ( yä-käfaru zämän). The processes of forced conversion that are most often cited as typical of that era all deal with meat. Many people were baptized. Many refused. They were chained up, a cow was killed [according to the Christian ritual] and they were forced to eat the meat. Thus, all the Muslims were compelled to eat but some of them took home some Muslim meat hidden in their clothes. They hid the meat they were given to eat and afterwards they threw it away and ate their own meat. Muslims call that time the era of the apostates.24

In a book entitled Histoire de l’Éthiopie, Berhanou Abebe devoted a paragraph to the massive conversion campaign which he claims “was not done without a display of reluctance” by the Muslims of the Wollo region under the reign of Yohannes.25 Berhanou reports that “the oral tradition continues to tell the story of a Muslim who was asked to eat some Christian meat (from an animal killed by a Christian) and to drink some t’äj (mead) but refused to do so on the

24 Historical notebook of liqä kahenat Tayyä Sägga, gathered at Tänta, Wärrä Himäno, December 1999. 25 Berhanou Abebe, Histoire de l’Éthiopie, d’Axoum à la Révolution (Paris/Addis Ababa: Maisonneuve et Larose/Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes, 1998), pp. 112–13.

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pretext of becoming a victim of the evil eye which would make him allergic to meat and t’äj ”. Then he quotes a stanza obtained by the Ethiopian lexicographer Desta Täklä-Wäld that represents “a good example of syncretism between popular beliefs and formal religions: Allah protects us/This is because of His will/Meat and t’äj are taboos/For those struck by the evil eye”.26 These verses are indeed well known in Wollo oral traditions, which linked them to shaykh Husayn Jibril, a Muslim saint famous for his visionary gifts. He would have told them to ras Mikaél, the former imam of Muhammed Ali, the converted sovereign of Wollo, of whom he was a secret adviser. The ras wanted to convince the shaykh to apostatize. Since he was short of arguments, he invited the shaykh to drink some honey-flavored water (berz), which does not contain alcohol, and to eat a dish of meat but the shaykh guessed the trick. In response, he came up with the verse quoted above.27 Another verse that the historical traditions of Wollo attribute to him is “Even if I must be hungry for a few days, I will not eat a decaying carcass/Since I can eat fish by going from river to river”.28 The strategy of using meat to convert people was not only used by Christians against Muslims. Its use was recorded prior to the Christianization project of Wollo by Tewodros and then Yohannes. A French traveler, Arnauld d’Abbadie, who spent time in Ethiopia between 1838 and 1848, mentioned it in his historical notes on the imam’s system of ruling Wärrä Himäno. After the battle of Guna [around 1800], Ahmädié [Kolasé, imam of Wollo] saw his son Libän again, whose [Christian] mother was dead. He was Christian and refused to selemer [to convert to Islam], but he became Muslim after his father tricked him into eating some Muslim lamb’s meat.29

26 Ibid. No details about the informant. In the Amharic dictionary by Dästa Täklä Wäld, we find a distich that is slightly different: “He shall return what he brought/ the one who struck by the evil eye does not like meat and mead a qalle‘a forcibly baptized by Emperor Yohannes”. Dästa Täklä Wäld. Addis yamareñña mäzgäbä qalat; bä-kahenatenna bä-hagärä säb qanqwa [new Ahmaric dictionary, learned and popular] (Addis Abäba: Artistic Press, 1970), p. 124. 27 Distich quoted by Bogalä Täfäri, Tänbitä ”éh Husén Jibril [Predictions of shaykh Husayn Jibril]. (Addis Abäba: Commercial Printing Press, 1993), p. 33. It was also quoted by Ato Melaku Beläw, Däsé, interview of 17 May 1999. 28 Informant: shaykh Umär Amädé, Kolo, November 2000. 29 Arnauld d’Abbadie, “Recueil de renseignements juridiques, historiques et littéraires éthiopiens”, ms. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Carte d’Abbadie, 18, pp. 23–4.

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In 1835, the Saint Simonian explorers Combes and Tamisier learned, to their expense, the importance of meat in the defining of religious identity. To avoid suspicion from the Muslim chiefs of Wollo, they had to make them believe they were Muslims not only through their mastery of Arabic but also through their knowledge of Islamic formulas. In order to rob us unscrupulously, we were accused of being idolaters. To back this up, it was asserted without any evidence that there would be no problem if we were asked to eat the meat of animals killed by any kind of people. If they could have convinced us of this fact, of so little importance in appearance but which for them sums up religion, it would have been the end of us.30

Going Beyond the Interdiction as an Act of Secularism The clever manner in which Menilek fulfilled the prophecy of Tewodros shows how avoiding the restriction on commensality involving meat can serve as a powerful unifying symbol that goes beyond religious differences to promote a transversal national identity. There are other historical cases of the act of transgression through meat that Ethiopian political actors used to neutralize, even if only partially, religious divides that were an obstacle to their personal trajectories and to their unifying projects. In the 1840s, ras Ali II was one of the most powerful figures in the Christian territory, which was divided between several rival provincial factions. This chief was of a Christianized Muslim lineage that took over the royal city of Gondar at a time when it was in decline. Arnauld d’Abbadie recounts an anecdote about ras Ali in which he describes how he wished to reconcile Christianity and Islam. Before imprisoning the Aboune [Orthodox Christian metropolitan] in a mont-fort [a natural fortress], he forced him to give him and his main officers a meal made of Christian and Muslim meat, in order, he said, to end the religious dissensions and to symbolize the fusion he wanted for a single belief encompassing Christianity and Islam.31

30

Edmond Combes and Maurice Tamisier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans le pays des Galla, de Choa et d’Ifat, Précédé d’une excursion dans l’Arabie-Heureuse, 1835–1837 (Paris: L. Desessart, 1838), vol. 2, p. 245. 31 Arnauld d’Abbadie, Douze ans de séjour dans la Haute Ethiopie, edited and annotated by Jeanne-Marie Allier (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apolostica Vaticana, 1980 [1868]), vol. 2, p. 62.

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In 1910, the lejj (infant) Iyasu—Menilek’s grandson and only male heir—ascended to the throne of Ethiopia. He was also from a Muslim lineage since he was the son of Mikaél from the Wollo region, former imam of Muhammed Ali. During his short reign (1913–1916), he attempted to upset the customs of the Christian aristocracy by deliberately hastening the integration of the Muslim peripheries to reinforce the borders against the imperialist appetite of the neighboring colonial powers who were excited by Menilek’s death in 1913. Following Menilek’s model, Iyasu tried to exploit the symbolism of meat. He had a camel killed for the Muslims and a cow for the Christians, and he had a banquet for all in the same reception room. The Muslims praised him for his gesture and the Christians blamed him.32

Such overtones towards Islam were exaggerated, distorted and exploited by his denigrators who reversed the religious argument in September 1916 by accusing him of apostasy and having him excommunicated by the patriarch. The fact that he ate meat was one of their numerous grievances. How hypocritical! While eating some meat from cows killed by Muslims in Djidjiga, he said he did so to win people over for the benefit of the Kingdom. . . . The truth is by eating some Muslim meat, Iyassou only satisfied his Muslim beliefs [mahométisme] since he did not increase the former borders by an inch.33

And in the context of World War I, his alliance with the Ottomans and his support of the Somali rebel Mu˙ammad 'Abdallàh Óasan (nicknamed the “Mad Mullah” by the British) roused the hostility of the European powers and contributed to his deposal. Final Evidence: The Case of the Oromo We conclude this chapter with more recent expressions of the transgression of this restriction that show that its significance has not weakened and still defines contemporary Ethiopian political space. 32

Gebre-Igziabiher Elyas, Prowess, Piety and Politics: The Chronicle of Abeto Iyasu and Empress Zewditu of Ethiopia (1909–1930), translated by R.K. Molvaer (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 1994), p. 352. 33 “Manifeste des Princes et du Peuple d’Abyssinie”, document reprinted by Berhanou Abbebe, “Le coup d’état du 26 septembre 1916 ou le dénouement d’une décennie de crise”, Annales d’Éthiopie 17 (2001): 353.

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The Oromo people, who represent approximately a third of the Ethiopian population of 60 million, are divided between Islam and Christianity. According to statistics based on the last population census, which was conducted in 1994, 45 per cent of the inhabitants of the federal region of Oromiya34 said they were Muslims, 42 per cent were Orthodox Christians and about 9 per cent said they were Protestants. The balance between Islam and Christianity in Oromo is reflected through a division between the northern region, which is mainly Christian, and the southern region, which is Muslim. These two groups are linked by mixed zones that are characterized by close cohabitation and sustained interactions between the two religious groups. The interreligious boundary that crosses Oromo society has its origins in a history of conquests and counter-conquests. Because of the flexibility of their social structures, the Oromo have, since the sixteenth century, occupied an intermediary position between the Christian, Muslim and pagan states. The increased rigidity of the political cadres linked to the reconstitution of Christian hegemony at the end of the nineteenth century put Oromo society in a subaltern and subordinated position within the contemporary national space. At first, sporadic rebellions erupted against the excesses of imperial power. In the ideological and military turmoil that followed the 1974 revolution, the Oromo, like other peripheral Ethiopian societies, radicalized their resistance by building a military front and claiming the independence of their nation. These nationalist movements were confronted with the necessity of overcoming religious divisions to assert the cohesiveness of the national space for which they fought. The fostering of a common Oromo identity was achieved through the sharing of meat between Muslims and Christians and was perceived as a powerful unifying act. Thomas Zitelman remarked upon this conciliatory use of meat during the internecine struggles between the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Islamic Liberation Front of Oromiya (ILFO), which were at their height in the Dire Dawa region in September 1991. A delegation of distinguished Oromo manguddoo (elders) paid a visit to the IFLO’s chairman Jaaraa Abbaa Gadaa to mediate between the

34

Since, 1991, the Ethiopian state has been organized in federations made up of 10 regions divided according to criteria of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity. In 1994, the census of the Oromiya region stated that the population was around 19 million, of which 85 per cent identified themselves as Oromo.

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warring factions. The event was recorded on video cassette and subsequently distributed to the Oromo Diaspora communities. The video included a lengthy scene in which people were shown simply sitting, eating and drinking together. Here the message about Oromo identity and meat sharing became linked to global information.35

The political meaning of this act of transgression is confirmed by the testimony of Hordhoofa Qabsisa Loltu, an Oromo exile in the United States, who wrote a series of pamphlets about the Oromo situation in Ethiopia entitled The Kindling Point. In these pamphlets, published by the author himself and distributed in the Oromo diaspora community between 1984 and 1993,36 Hordhoofa Qabsisa Loltu reflects on his conflicting Ethiopian and Oromo identity, and his reading of political history and developments. In the twentieth issue,37 Hordhoofa, who was born a Christian, describes the depth of the discomfort he felt when he ate Muslim meat for the first time and the metaphysical, political and identity revelation this act evoked. By refusing to abide by religious codes regarding the eating habits that organized the Ethiopian social space at the end of the 1960s, he took a decisive step outside his own socialized body. This step led him to political struggle, exile and, subsequently, writing. The initial rupture was provoked by a childhood friend, Sayid, who invited him to have lunch in a Muslim restaurant. To overcome his reticence, his friend argued: “The meat was raised by Oromos; why shouldn’t it be eaten by Oromos without restrictions? I refuse to allow some Abyssinian religious rule to keep me from eating it.”38 This declaration left the narrator affected by destructive feelings of doubt and revealed the possibility of a behavior defined on the basis of private and reasoned choice. For days I could think about little else. He had a good point. I was not a child at that time, I was a young man perfectly capable of thinking for myself and accountable for my own actions. It is amazing to me when I think about what a coward I was about this business of 35

Thomas Zitelmann, “Re-examining the Galla/Oromo Relationship: The Stranger as a Structural Topic”, in P.T.W. Baxter, J. Hultin and A. Triulzi, Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996), pp. 109–10. 36 Issues 1 to 6 of The Kindling Point have been republished on gumii.org. On the same website, this author started on 1 January 2000 a new collection of “plaidoyer introspectif ” entitled The Turning Point. 37 Hordhoofa Qabsisa Loltu, “Religion and Liberation”, The Kindling Point 20 (Rockville, MD: July 1987). 38 Ibid., p. 1.

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éloi ficquet eating “Muslim” meat. I had to decide what I really believed and why I was doing what I was doing. After days of searching through the Bible, I could not find anything to support this strange rule. And I had a good reason for breaking it—to demonstrate my closeness to other Oromos. I made a conscious decision to eat meat in the way our grandfathers had eaten, without seeing it as either “Christian” or “Muslim”.39

*

*

*

The tensions in the Ethiopian context at the boundary between Islam and Christianity appear most clearly in issues surrounding the sacrifice and consumption of meat. Since eating meat involves taking the life of an animal, the killing of an animal demands an invocation of the divine in accordance with codified rituals. These codifications have been emphasized much more in Ethiopia40 in comparison with some other interreligious contexts, perhaps because of the great extension of the contact zones and their continuity over long periods of time. Today, the constraints involved in this conception of the incorporation of a religious identity by way of meat have been loosened by the more or less brutal introduction of modernity in political practices and social relations. These modernizing processes, which are more prevalent in the cities than in the countryside, have helped to blur the social divide through forms of “relative secularism”,41 which is to say that these processes are limited to certain public spaces. International restaurants are thus considered as neutral for the dietary frontier discussed here, whereas this frontier still draws a strong demarcation in local and private spheres. In this way, meat as an obvious sign of religious identity contributes to maintaining the social dynamics and the power relations generated by the continuous and widely extended encounters between Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia. 39

Ibid., p. 2. This chapter does not deal with the issue of the interdiction of meat sharing between Christians and Ethiopian Jews which, although similar to the situation between the Muslims and the Christians, shows small but significant divergences in the ritualistic method of killing animals. Ethiopian Jews particularly insist on eliminating any trace of blood in the meat. See Lisa Anteby, Les juifs éthiopiens en Israël. Les paradoxes du paradis (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2004), pp. 173–85. Other situations could enlighten the historical conditions of the establishment of the interdict concerning meat sharing between religious groups in Ethiopia but they would also entail work on temporalities and spaces wider than those studied here. 41 I am using a concept borrowed from Aïda Kanafani Zahar, “Le religieux sublimé dans le sacrifice du mouton: Un exemple de coexistence communautaire au Liban”, L’Homme 141 (1997): 95. 40

CHAPTER THREE

MISSIONARY LEGACIES: MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN ENCOUNTERS IN EGYPT AND SUDAN DURING THE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL PERIODS Heather J. Sharkey Overview In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when Christian evangelical groups were expanding around the globe, British and American Protestants rushed to establish missions along the length of the Nile Valley from Alexandria to the far reaches of southern Sudan. This chapter considers the basic contours of this evangelical encounter in Egypt and Sudan,1 and assesses its impact on Muslim-Christian relations, both in the short term for missionaries and those they evangelized and in the long term for local Muslims and Christians. It focuses primarily on the work of two missions, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a British Anglican organization, and the American Presbyterian mission, both of which evangelized widely among Muslims, Christians and those they called pagans. The chapter does not include a study of Roman Catholic missions even though Catholic orders were active in the Nile Valley during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While various features distinguished Protestant missions from their Roman Catholic counterparts in this period, the most significant difference pertained

1 This article omits the definite article to describe the country Sudan as well as its northern and southern regions in both the colonial and postcolonial periods (i.e., it refers to “Sudan” rather than “the Sudan”). Note, however, that this practice is a postcolonial development. According to Deng D. Akol Ruay, it dates specifically from 1975 when the Numayri government dropped the definite article in English usage “in order to differentiate between Sudan the Country and the Sudan the geographical region”, i.e. the sudanic belt of Africa. Historians frequently refer to the country in English, even now, as “the Sudan”, a usage that has long precedent and that reflects the definite article in the Arabic version of the name (al-Sùdàn). Deng D. Akol Ruay, The Politics of Two Sudans: The South and the North, 1821–1969 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1994), p. 175.

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to the aims of proselytism. Protestant missionaries in the pre-1950 period stressed the imperative of universal evangelization and tried to convert all peoples, Muslims included. Roman Catholics, by contrast, concentrated on indigenous and expatriate Christian communities and on practitioners of local religions, and did not pursue formal missions aimed at Muslims. In this regard, Roman Catholic policies may have reflected an awareness of Muslim resistance to out-conversion that dated as far back as the Crusades and a pragmatic setting of mission priorities.2 In the long run, the Protestant missionaries’ pursuit of Muslim evangelization provoked so much illwill among Egyptian and Sudanese Muslim populations that it stimulated a nationalist and Islamist backlash. Given that its political and social reverberations went far beyond the ranks of converts and Christian communities, the Protestant missionary impact on Egypt and Sudan warrants the separate study presented here. Egypt and Sudan in the Contexts of Global Evangelism and Imperialism In 1902 while addressing an international audience of aspiring young missionaries, the American evangelist John R. Mott extolled the “wonderful destiny before the great British Empire and the Republic of America” to promote “among the depressed and neglected races, those influences which can alone ameliorate the condition of mankind, build up a truly lasting civilization, and make possible the evangelization of the world.”3 Mott’s bold confidence in missions and empire was typical of the period from 1880 to 1920 when British and American global power was expanding and when Protestant missionaries were venturing abroad in growing numbers to convert Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, practitioners of local religions and even Eastern Christians. Missions in the Nile Valley were part of this larger evangelical enterprise. Having emerged in Egypt in the early nineteenth century, Protestant missions entered a more aggressive phase once Britain firmly installed itself as a colonial power in the Nile Valley, 2 Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 9–10. 3 Clifton J. Phillips, “Changing Attitudes in the Student Volunteer Movement of Great Britain and North America, 1886–1928”, in Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchison (eds) Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880–1920 (Århus: Aros, 1982), p. 136.

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first in Egypt after 1882 and later in Sudan after 1898. They remained active in both countries until decolonization in the 1950s when nationalist leaders, responding to broad anti-missionary sentiments among the Muslim populace, withdrew missionary privileges and in some cases seized control of mission operations, “nationalizing” schools, orphanages, and hospitals much as Egypt “nationalized” the Suez Canal in 1956. By the 1950s, two issues related to these British and American Protestant missionaries had aroused popular Muslim ire. The first was their tendency to evangelize among Muslims—a practice that ran against Islamic injunctions forbidding conversion out of the faith and that led many to perceive a denigration of Islam and Muslims. The second was the role they played as partners in imperialism, appearing to function as close allies of Britain in imposing colonial control. Because of these perceptions, anti-missionary sentiments became closely tied to anti-colonial, nationalist and Islamist activism, while attempts to curtail or dismantle missionary operations later became associated with broader efforts to decolonize. The popular Muslim backlash against colonial-era missionaries strained local Muslim-Christian relations within Egyptian and Sudanese society. Under the ostensibly secular regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who rose to power following the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952, Egyptian Christians became progressively more marginalized within the Egyptian government and remained so during the Sadat and Mubarak eras. Some have attributed this marginalization to the intimacy that Egyptian Christians shared with British, other European and American elements during life under the ancien régime —suggesting, in other words, that indigenous Christians had discredited themselves as co-nationals by consorting so closely with foreigners.4 In any case, over the past half century, relations between Egyptian Muslims and Christians have been subject to low-grade chronic tension, with violent clashes periodically flaring up in villages and urban centers. 4 See, for example, Jack Sislian, “Missionary Work in Egypt during the Nineteenth Century”, in Brian Holmes (ed.), Educational Policy and the Mission Schools: Case Studies from the British Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 184; and Sohirin Mohammad Solihin, Copts and Muslims: A Study on Harmony and Hostility (Leicester, UK: The Islamic Foundation, 1991), pp. 18, 63. Solihin vacillates in his generalizations, sometimes showing sympathy to the Copts and noting their solidarity with Egyptian Muslims, at other times questioning their overall loyalty as Egyptian nationalists while noting their self-interested cooperation with Britons.

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Meanwhile in Sudan, the Arabic-speaking northern Muslims who rose to power at decolonization blamed missionaries for propagating Christianity among animist southern and Nuba peoples, thereby widening the social rifts that ran through the country. These northerners set out at once to erase or at least reduce social differences by applying policies to spread Arabic and Islamic culture in the South and the Nuba Mountains. Their heavy-handed policies contributed to the animosity that ignited the Sudanese civil war—a war that was waged from 1955 to 1971 and that raged again after 1983 before a series of peace talks in 2002–4 brought a lull to the conflict’s southern front. While the Sudanese civil war has had strong economic and political dimensions—rooted in a struggle to control water and later oil resources and to secure access to national power—cultural ideology, voiced in terms of a Muslim-North/Christian-South division, has remained important as well. The four sections that follow scrutinize these trends. The first offers a historical overview of Presbyterian and CMS work in the region from the nineteenth century to circa 1920. The second surveys the rise of nationalist and Islamist resistance to missionary activity from the 1920s until decolonization in the 1950s. The third considers the fate of missionaries and their converts in postcolonial Egypt and Sudan, as well as the status of Christian minorities who account for six to ten per cent of Egypt’s population and perhaps five to ten per cent of Sudan’s.5 The fourth section is a brief conclusion that reflects on the missionaries’ legacies, including that of Muslim distrust. Today among many Muslims, resentment against missionaries still runs deep, and “why” is the obvious question to ask here. 5 Information on religious demographics is notoriously lacking for both Egypt and Sudan in the absence of reliable census data, and estimates can vary widely. The real unknown in the Sudanese case is the proportion of people still practising traditional religions or “ethnoreligions”—a figure that may be as high as 25 per cent according to the CIA World Factbook, or as low as 13.6 per cent according to the World Christian Encyclopedia. The CIA World Factbook presents low figures for Egypt’s Christian populations, with its 2005 report suggesting 6 per cent for Egypt and 5 per cent for Sudan. The World Christian Encyclopedia suggests much higher estimates for Christian populations—15.5 per cent for Egypt (estimating 5.5 per cent “professing” Christians and 10 per cent “crypto-Christians”), and 16.3 per cent for Sudan using figures from the mid-1990s (estimating 14.2 per cent “professing” Christians and 2.1 per cent “crypto-Christians). U.S. Government, Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook (2005), http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/eg.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/su.html (accessed 10 July 2005); and David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian

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Historical Background to c. 1920 The Church Missionary Society first began work on a small scale in Egypt in 1826 and the American Presbyterians followed later in 1854. Initially both organizations concentrated their efforts on Egyptian Coptic Christians, whom the missionaries regarded as adherents of an outmoded and heavily ritualistic Christianity that was in need of modernization. According to the missionaries, proof of the Coptic Church’s inadequacy rested in its failure to stem the tide of Islamization in Egypt beginning in the seventh century.6 The American Presbyterians were particularly successful in establishing an indigenous, autonomous church among their mostly Coptic converts, many of whom came from Upper Egypt. Their efforts led to the establishment of the Egyptian Evangelical Church along with an associated theological seminary that was founded in 1863 and

Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 250–55 and 698–703. Other academic sources for Sudan cite figures that are the same as the CIA 2005 estimates, e.g., Ann Mosely Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 20. The high Christian population estimates offered by the World Christian Encyclopedia are sometimes echoed in other studies as well; for example, in a still-cited 1963 study that has recently been reissued, one American journalist estimated that Christians accounted for one in six Egyptians. Edward Wakin, A Lonely Minority: The Modern Story of Egypt’s Copts (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1963), p. 4. The CIA World Factbook’s low figures for Sudan seem to be out of date, given that many observers in the past twenty years have noted the substantial growth of Christianity among southern Sudanese war refugees. See Marc R. Nikkel, “Aspects of Contemporary Religious Change among the Dinka”, in Papers of the Second International Sudan Studies Conference, held at the University of Durham, 8–11 April 1991, Vol. 1 (Durham: University of Durham, 1991), pp. 90–100. Todd M. Johnson, a statistician involved in an ongoing project to count global Christian populations, asserts that Sudan’s MoruMangbetu, Azande, and Dinka peoples count among the ten fastest growing Christian ethno-linguistic groups in the world in 2005 (with the annual growth rate of Christianity among them estimated at approximately 15 per cent). Todd M. Johnson, “The Changing Ethnic and Linguistic Face of Global Christianity, 1900–2025 [sic],” paper presented at the Yale-Edinburgh Conference on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity, New Haven, Connecticut, 9 July 2005. Three church historians attribute part of the appeal of Christianity among southerners and the Nuba after the 1970s to the robustness of churches as civil institutions in a context where governments have been weak. Roland Werner, William Anderson and Andrew Wheeler, Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment: The History of the Sudanese Church across 2000 Years (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2000), p. 497. 6 For a typical assessment along these lines written by British Anglican churchmen in the Middle East, see Bishop Rennie MacInnes and Canon Herbert Danby, “The Ancient Oriental Churches and Islam”, in John R. Mott (ed.), The Moslem World of To-Day (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), pp. 261–76.

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whose graduates assumed incrementally greater responsibility over local church affairs. Still flourishing today, and having spawned emigrant congregations as far away as Los Angeles, the Egyptian Evangelical Church represents one of the most direct continuing institutional legacies of the Nile Valley missionaries. Although missionaries in Egypt had voiced an interest in Muslim evangelization since the early nineteenth century, they only began to pursue Muslim work directly during the late nineteenth century, following Britain’s two Nile Valley invasions—the one in 1882 that led to Egypt’s “occupation”, and the other in 1898 that resulted in the construction of Sudan as an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (a nominal ruling partnership with Egypt that amounted to de facto British control). These military conquests inspired a kind of strongarm evangelism and ideas about spiritual conquest, and prompted missionaries to adopt an aggressive approach to Islam and Muslims. Echoing the rhetoric of British military strategists and colonialists who were engaged in the territorial partition of Africa, Protestant missionaries in the 1880s and 1890s resorted to increasingly war-like language to describe their work in the Nile Valley as well as in Northern Nigeria, Iran, India and other parts of the Muslim world. They wrote about campaigns or battles for souls, portrayed Islam as an enemy, and extolled the idea of a modern Crusade—a Christian twist on the standard imperial rhetoric that rationalized conquest as a prelude to civilizing.7 In Britain especially, the Islamic jihadist revolution of the Sudanese Mahdi fired the imagination of missionaries and added popular support to the growing evangelical movement. W.H.T. Gairdner, one of the most dynamic CMS missionaries of his day, acknowledged the impact of this historical episode on his personal development. Gairdner was an eleven-year-old boy when General Charles Gordon died in Khartoum in 1885 at the hands of Mahdist fighters. He later recalled that Gordon’s epic made such an impact that it inspired him to follow a missionary career in 1897 when the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan was building momentum. Gairdner declared then that his goal was to “serve in Gordon’s country” and thereby to help bring the message of Jesus to “the whole Mohammedan world

7 See, for example, Thomas Prasch, “Which God for Africa: The Islamic-Christian Missionary Debate in Late-Victorian England”, Victorian Studies 33, 1 (1989): 51–73.

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of the Near East”.8 Gairdner was fated to spend most of his career not in Khartoum but in Cairo, where he led the CMS mission and developed an expertise in the pedagogy of colloquial Arabic.9 The program he established for teaching Arabic to Christian missionaries, which was incorporated into the American University in Cairo as the School of Oriental Studies (SOS) in 1920, was in fact the forerunner to the university’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) program which trains the leading cadre of American Arabists today. The Protestant missionary adventure in Sudan began in 1899 when a few CMS and American Presbyterian missionaries set out together for Khartoum, following fast on the heels of the conquerors. The British military authorities found themselves in an awkward position: anxious not to arouse Muslim opposition by allowing Christian missionaries to evangelize, they were equally anxious not to offend popular sentiment at home where evangelical missions commanded widespread respect. They therefore responded by banning missionaries from evangelizing among Muslims but invited them instead to move into the animist south. The Americans, along with the Verona Fathers (Italian Catholics), accepted the offer with alacrity and set out for southern Sudan in 1901. Determined to avenge Gordon by bringing Christianity to northern Muslims, CMS missionaries moved southward much more reluctantly late in 1905. Notwithstanding the government ban on proselytizing to Muslims, neither the CMS nor the American Presbyterians genuinely renounced Muslim evangelism in northern Sudan, though they were obliged to act discreetly. They remained in northern Sudanese cities by educating Christian expatriates (for example, Greeks, Copts and Lebanese), and by providing educational and medical assistance to poor people who lacked access to government services. Thus the American Presbyterians set up schools, clinics and orphanages in Greater Khartoum, catering particularly to Muslim ex-slave groups and offering education to poor boys, while the CMS founded comparable institutions

8 “Cairo is worth occupying”, he wrote at the time, “not only for its own sake” but as a base for expanding east, west and southward toward Khartoum. Quoted in Constance E. Padwick, Temple Gairdner of Cairo (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1929), pp. 65–8. 9 W.H.T. Gairdner, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic: A Conversation Grammar and Reader (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1917). Other revised editions were published by Oxford University Press in 1926 and posthumously in 1944 and 1953.

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for Muslims in northern towns (Atbara, Wad Medani, Port Sudan and also Greater Khartoum), focusing especially on girls’ education and on pre- and post-natal women’s health and baby care. In this way, the CMS missionaries, in particular, served as pioneers in female education and health care, although they have seldom received credit for their role in these fields. Indeed, CMS girls’ schools in Greater Khartoum, first founded in 1902 and teaching rudimentary reading, writing and arithmetic as well as needlework, inspired the Sudanese Muslim educator and nationalist Babikr Badri—a man still hailed as his country’s “father of girls’ education” for establishing the first independent school for northern Sudanese Muslim girls in the Blue Nile town of Rufà'a in 1907.10 Missionaries made so few converts among northern Sudanese Muslims that this chapter of their history has been largely forgotten. The CMS, for example, gained only one Muslim convert during its sixty years in northern Sudan.11 Missionaries gained much greater visibility, by contrast, through their work in southern Sudan and later, too, in the Nuba Mountains (a remote region in central western Sudan that had a large animist population). By the time of their eviction from Sudan in 1964, the Presbyterians alone claimed some 5,000 southern Sudanese conversions—a minute fraction of the region’s population, to be sure, but enough to contribute substantially to the development of the modern southern intelligentsia and to set the foundations for accelerated southern Christianization in the postcolonial civil-war era.12

10 Sudanese historians often describe Babikr Badri’s program as sui generis and as the first of its kind, and do not mention the missionary girls’ schools that had been functioning in Greater Khartoum for five years before the Rufà'a experiment began. The idea of teaching needlework and domestic skills—in other words, of developing a gender-specific, domestic skill-oriented girls’ education—came straight from the missionaries and was later followed at Rufà'a as well. The traditional mode of Sudanese education had been Islamic and Qur"àn-focused and was not genderspecific per se, although advanced Islamic study had, with few exceptions, been restricted to males. For more discussion, see Heather J. Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims: the Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan”, Journal of African History 43 (2002): 51–75. 11 Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims”. 12 Michael Parker, “J. Kelly Giffen: Launching the American Mission to Sudan, 1898–1903”, in Francesco Pierli, Maria Teresa Ratti and Andrew C. Wheeler (eds.), Gateway to the Heart of Africa: Missionary Pioneers in Sudan (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1998), p. 101.

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Many historians—Sudanese and non-Sudanese, Muslim and nonMuslim—have cast a critical eye on the missionaries, pointing out that they served as Britain’s colonial helpers in southern Sudan.13 Catholic and Protestant missionaries entered the south at the behest of the British authorities, who allocated each mission a distinct territorial sphere of influence and gave missionaries free rein to evangelize while building schools, clinics and churches, for the most part at their own expense. From the point of view of the British authorities, the “sphere system”, as it is sometimes called, ensured maximum missionary dispersion and facilitated minimal central government control. In other words, it enabled colonial rule on the cheap by enlisting missionaries as government proxies. The sphere system also minimized conflicts among missions—no small feat considering the fierce competition, strong sense of territoriality and, judging by CMS and American Presbyterian archives, occasional bickering that marked cross-denominational relations in Egypt and northern Sudan.14 Because of the role they played in southern Sudan, missionaries became closely associated with the British government’s efforts to divide Sudan into northern and southern halves while applying separate policies to each (for example, by using Arabic in the north and English in the south as the official administrative languages). Although these policies theoretically had protectionist goals vis-à-vis southern peoples (guarding them, for example, from northern Muslims who had raided for slaves in the nineteenth century), critics have pointed out that their long-term effects were highly debilitating. They led to the marginalization and underdevelopment of the south relative to the north and added to the regional imbalance of power and social atomization that inhibited stable postcolonial government.15 13 For example, Robert O. Collins, Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Lilian Passmore Sanderson and Neville Sanderson, Education, Religion & Politics in Southern Sudan, 1899 –1964 (London: Ithaca Press, 1981); M.W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); A˙mad 'Abd al-Ra˙ìm Naßr, al-Idàra al-bari†àniyya wa-l-tabshìr al-islàmì wa-l-masì˙ì fì l-Sùdàn (Khartoum: Wizàrat al-Tarbiya wa-l-Tawjìh, 1979); and Ibràhìm 'Akàsha, al-Tabshìr al-naßrànì fì janùb Sùdàn wàdì al-Nìl (Riyadh: Dàr al-'Ulùm, 1982). 14 One historian describes such wrangling between missions as a “recurring Protestant problem” in Africa and attributes it partly to denominational individualism. See Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 263. 15 The literature on this subject is vast. See, for example, Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities; Peter Woodward, Sudan, 1898–1989: The Unstable State

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As for Egypt, work there continued to expand even as new mission stations opened in Sudan. Responding to competition from the Egyptian government school system, which was slowly but steadily growing, and prompted as well by the demands of parents who saw education as a route to mobility, the missionaries established a network of schools running from Aswan to Alexandria for boys and girls, rich and poor, the children of struggling peasants and the offspring of modern professionals. They offered lower, intermediate and higher education—teaching rudimentary literacy in village schools, offering stronger academic programs in provincial or city centers, and providing more advanced study in institutions such as Assiut College, the pride of the American Presbyterian mission, and the American University in Cairo. The latter institution had roots in Presbyterian initiatives but dismayed some missionaries by taking a non-denominational and non-evangelical line. Reading papers in the Presbyterian archives of Philadelphia, one senses a flurry of activity in Egypt during the early twentieth century. Missionaries were engaged in a rush to build, extend or renovate schools, churches and hospitals; they were moving on foot and by train, car and riverboat to reach communities. No village was too remote. At the same time they were endeavoring to write, translate, publish and distribute books. The Egyptian Evangelical Church was growing, too, particularly in Upper Egypt among Copts, while some of its members were even becoming evangelists—the men as preachers offering sermons free to the public, the women as “Bible Women” evangelizing by making house visits door to door. The Coptic Orthodox Church hierarchy condemned the Protestant missionaries for poaching from their flock and tried to stem the tide of Coptic conversions, as indeed Coptic Orthodox Church leaders had been trying to do since the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the Coptic Orthodox Church drew inspiration from missionary models of worship and social service and implemented

(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990); M.W. Daly and Ahmad Alawad Sikainga (eds.), Civil War in the Sudan (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993); Mohamed Omer Beshir, The Southern Sudan: Background to Conflict (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1968); and Ruay, The Politics of Two Sudans. For a discussion of the postcolonial crisis in terms of its colonial antecedents, see Heather J. Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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reforms accordingly, such as the introduction of Sunday school programs for children.16 If one were to look at American and British missions in the Nile Valley in 1920, a year that marks the end of what some have described as the heyday or golden age of Protestant global missions,17 one could identify three trends in the social lives of missions which were to prove significant for later developments. First, missionaries still remained fiercely competitive along national and denominational lines18 but were nonetheless increasingly committed to an ecumenical “inter-mission” movement. This movement drew momentum from a series of showcase international Protestant conferences—such as in Edinburgh in 1910 and in Lucknow in 1911—during which British and American groups in particular made plans to pool evangelical resources. (For example, out of these conferences emerged committees to develop common printed materials for use in Muslim evangelism.)19 These alliances led in 1919 to the formation of the Cairo-based Inter-Mission Council which was to prove increasingly important to missionaries in Egypt in the 1930s as they began to face sustained popular Muslim opposition to their work. The Inter-Mission Council functioned in practice as both a support group and a lobbying group, and enabled mission leaders

16 Wakin, A Lonely Minority: The Modern Story of Egypt’s Copts, see especially p. 140. A superb multi-faceted analysis of the Coptic Orthodox Church (including discussion of its at times contentious relationship with foreign missionaries and local Protestants) appears in S.S. Hasan, Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17 A brief but pithy assessment of this period appears in Andrew F. Walls, “British Missions”, in Christensen and Hutchison, Missionary Ideologies, pp. 159–65. 18 Consider American efforts before and after World War I to block their Protestant German “brethren” from moving into Nubia between Aswan and Dongola (spanning the Egyptian-Sudanese border), or squabbles between CMS and American Presbyterians over turf rights to particular towns in the Egyptian Delta. Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, United Presbyterian Church of North America [UPCNA] (henceforth PHS), RG 209–1–02: J.W. Acheson Papers, Copies of correspondence with Th. Ziemendorff of Sudan Pioneer Mission in Wiesbaden, 1914 and related paperwork from 1924; RG 209–1–23: J.R. Alexander Papers, paperwork from 1902–1921 on the German Sudan Pioneer Mission; and RG 209–1–05: J.W. Acheson Papers, Lasbrey of CMS to Acheson, Cairo, 23 December 1926. 19 Some of the relevant papers, classified as “Literature and Records of the Central Literature Committee for Muslims”, are held at Orchard Learning Resources Centre, Selly Oak Campus, University of Birmingham, UK. I am grateful to John Chesworth for bringing these papers to my attention. See also American Committee on Survey [sic] of Christian Literature for Moslems, The Power of the Printed Page in the World of Islam (Cairo, 1922).

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to enlist the help of British and American diplomats and policy-setters when problems with nationalists arose. (Strikingly, there were no Catholic missionary representatives on this Council in spite of the fact that Catholic workers were also coming under fire from Muslim nationalists and activists in the 1930s.) Second, despite the emphasis on Muslim evangelism in missionary agendas during the first decades of the twentieth century, missionaries by 1920 were still gaining most of their converts from Christian and animist ranks—that is, from Egyptian Copts, who appear to have regarded the turn to Protestantism as a reform, not a rejection, of their religious culture, and from traditionally non-literate southern Sudanese or Nuba Mountain peoples, who found access to a global religion and literacy-based education through the missions. Among these two groups, whole families or villages sometimes converted. By contrast, Muslim conversions amounted to a series of isolated cases.20 Conversion was in fact extremely difficult for Muslim individuals. Muslim communities were generally receptive to the educational and medical services that Christian missionaries offered but resented Christian evangelism and regarded conversion from Islam as a crime of apostasy. Moreover, potential Muslim converts faced harsh familial or communal deterrents which typically included abduction, assault and the prospect of losing inheritance, property and child-custody rights.21 It was all the more daunting, as missionaries ruefully noted, that Muslim converts received such a cool reception from their Coptic-turned-Protestant counterparts, who appear to have looked on them with suspicion. In this atmosphere, missionaries felt that they were shouldering a double burden: the responsibility of evangelizing among Muslims (given that Coptic-turned-Protestant Christians preferred to evangelize among fellow Christians), and of making Muslims,

20 Heather J. Sharkey, “Empire and Muslim Conversion: Historical Reflections on Christian Missions in Egypt”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 16, 1 (2005): 43–60. 21 Discussion of the obstacles to Muslim conversion and details of particular cases appear frequently in mission archives and in books by missionaries from the period. For a consideration of the broader issues from a missionary perspective, see Samuel M. Zwemer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam: Answering the Question Why There Are So Few Moslem Converts, and Giving Examples of their Moral Courage and Martyrdom (London: Marshall Brothers, 1924).

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once converted, feel welcome within the Christian community.22 This problem of integrating Muslim converts later prompted the creation of a Muslim Converts’ Welfare Bureau in 1931.23 The third trend, around 1920, was that ideological rifts were beginning to emerge among the missionaries themselves. A heated debate was arising about the relationship between evangelism and humanitarian aid. Was evangelism the sine qua non of missions or could social service, without direct intent to convert, be a sufficient expression of Christian witness? Implicit in the latter view was the potential recognition that non-Christian people might have reason not to convert or that they might find a legitimate spiritual life through another religion entirely.24 Missionary views on this issue ran across the spectrum. In the face of minimal Muslim conversion, however, and given the mounting tide of Muslim opposition to Christian evangelism, some saw humanitarian service without evangelism as the most practical mode of outreach to Muslims.25 In regions where Muslims formed overwhelming majorities and increasingly wielded political influence, the sustainability of Christian missions was poised to become a central concern.

22 Missionaries attributed Egyptian Christians’ avoidance of Muslim evangelism to fear, cowardice or age-old complacency—thereby invoking long-standing missionary rhetoric about the weakness of Eastern Christians. For their part, many Coptic-turned-Protestant Christians recognized the incendiary nature of Muslim evangelism and saw it as impractical and a threat to peaceful Muslim-Christian cohabitation. On the disinterest of Egyptian Protestant clergy in Muslim evangelism, see, for example, PHS RG 209–1–19: C.C. Adams Papers, Adams to Anderson, 1 November 1932; and RG 209–1–22: C.C. Adams Papers, Adams to Reed, 3 August 1939; RG 209–1–23: J.R. Alexander Papers, typescript article by Alexander, “Is the Mission Church in Egypt a ‘Mature Church’?” (1935). 23 PHS RG 209–1–09: J.W. Acheson Papers, Summary of the Minutes of the Meeting of the Synod of the Nile, 4 March 1931; and [home board] to Acheson, 16 April 1931. The efficacy and scope of this Welfare Bureau was drastically curbed by the budget crisis that was afflicting the mission at the height of the Depression. 24 One historian of American religion calls this the Christian liberal-conservative divide and suggests that the early twentieth-century foreign missionary movement helped to paper over it for a time before the ideological chasm grew too wide to ignore. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 866–7. 25 William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 156–7.

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heather j. sharkey The Growth of Muslim Anti-Missionary Resistance, 1920s–1950s

The period from the mid-1920s to decolonization in the 1950s witnessed two parallel developments. Muslim resistance towards missionaries mounted, and the global evangelical movement lost some of its steam among the mainline Protestant groups that had been developing missions since the nineteenth century. As a result, missionaries faced new political and economic constraints on their activities, while nationalist and Islamist groups mobilized to restrict Muslim evangelism and to open institutions such as schools and orphanages that might supplant what the missionaries were offering. During this period, whether missionaries realized it or not, they became a force against which nationalists and Islamists set about defining and asserting themselves. Various events occurred at the start of this period to set the stage for the growth of anti-missionary agitation. In 1919, Egyptians from across the social spectrum converged to ignite a nationalist anticolonial uprising, and in 1924, a similar uprising occurred in Sudan. In 1922, Britain unilaterally declared independence for Egypt; the country thereafter became a constitutional monarchy, equipped with a faction-ridden parliament whose members turned to the press to make bids for influence and power. Northern Sudanese nationalists, by contrast, had no formal political outlets before the establishment of the Graduates’ General Congress (an elected consultative assembly) in 1938, and therefore turned to social-service work in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The first collective, anti-missionary protest in Muslim northern Sudan was a grass-roots affair that occurred in 1926 when news broke about the proposed Christian conversion of a Muslim girl at the hands of American missionaries.26 Led by Óusayn Sharìf, a newspaper editor and early nationalist who was a grandson of the Mahdi, Khartoum’s Muslim Arabic-speaking male elite raised funds for an independent Ahliyya (people’s) boys’ school—not girls’ school—that would supplement government schools while providing, in theory, an 26 Apparently the American Presbyterians had raised the girl since infancy when her Muslim father had abandoned her mother and when her mother had turned her over to the mission orphanage. Sudan Archive, University of Durham (henceforth SAD) 57/1/56, 59: Storrar papers, album entry for 8–14 October 1926; and Su'àd 'Abd al-'Azìz A˙mad, Qa∂àyà al-ta'lìm al-ahlì fì l-Sùdàn, Vol. 1: 1898–1956 (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1991), p. 92.

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alternative to the mission programs. This episode gave rise, in turn, to a broader Ahliyya movement, later hailed as an early nationalist triumph, that in the next thirty years produced a network of primary, intermediate and secondary schools for boys and eventually for girls too.27 In Khartoum, missionaries’ responses to this protest varied. While the CMS tried to keep a low profile and publicly acknowledged the right of Muslim pupils to decline religious instruction under the terms of a long-standing (but little implemented) “Conscience Clause”, the Americans insisted that their agenda was firmly Christian and that the burden of conformity ultimately rested on Muslims. Thus the American mission declared that Muslim parents who wished to enroll their children in mission programs would have to sign a consent form acknowledging that some degree of Christian instruction was an integral part of the syllabus. Enrollment in mission schools dropped after this incident in 1926, but they soon picked up again. The fact was that because educational opportunities continued to be so limited, especially for girls and boys from poor families, Sudanese Muslim parents were ultimately willing to enroll their children in mission schools, only objecting when they thought that Christian evangelism was making too much of a mark.28 This episode in Sudan in 1926 was relatively minor compared to events that were brewing in Egypt. In 1927, Cairene Muslims founded the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA), modeled on the city’s Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the latter forming part of an international non-sectarian and generally non-evangelical organization dedicated to the promotion of Christian values. The YMMA offered a YMCA-like program of cultural, social and athletic activities, but in a Muslim communal environment. More significantly, in 1928,

27 Mohammed K. Osman, “The Rise and Decline of the People’s (Ahlia) Education in the Northern Sudan (1927–1957)”, Paedagogica Historica 18, 2 (1979): 355–71. 28 Church Missionary Society archives, University of Birmingham (henceforth CMS), G3/E/P4/1927/19: Report on Church Missionary Society girls’ schools in the northern Sudan, by Mabel C. Warburton, Wad Medani, February 1927. Teaching Christian doctrine to Muslims violated the British government ban on Muslim proselytism, but missionaries evangelized in this manner anyway, as their own records attest. As early as 1903 and intermittently thereafter, occasions arose when Muslim parents withdrew their daughters from school in protest over covert evangelism. See CMS G3/E/O/1903/26; G3 E/O/1912/17: and G3/E/P3/1916/78, as well as Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims”. Before 1926, however, these protests were individual, not collective, affairs.

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the Egyptian Muslim schoolteacher Óasan al-Bannà" founded al-Ikhwàn al-Muslimùn, the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was at once Islamist (calling for the institution of Islamic law and government, rooted in sharia ideals), nationalist (supporting Egypt’s liberation from its British colonial occupiers) and pan-Islamic (emphasizing a common cause with Sunni Muslim peoples worldwide).29 Like the YMMA, the Muslim Brotherhood had strong anti-missionary dimensions from the start and replicated many Christian missionary techniques and services by preaching in coffee houses, for example, and by offering adult education programs. From its humble roots in the Suez Canal-zone city of Ismailiyya, the Muslim Brotherhood went on to become a major Islamist force in Egypt and to develop politically active, nationally specific branches abroad—among them the Sudanese National Islamic Front (NIF), which rose to power in Sudan following a 1989 military coup. American Presbyterian missionaries appear to have been unaware of the Muslim Brotherhood’s emergence in 1928. They did, however, register concern over the Young Men’s Muslim Association, which they believed was the force behind a series of anti-missionary demonstrations in the Delta town of Mansura in 1932, following the baptism of a young Muslim man named Yùsuf 'Abd al-Íamad. On this occasion, Muslim activists handed out Arabic pamphlets that described the missionaries as “vile criminals” and reportedly urged Muslims to “make war against them”. A missionary observed that “crowds on the streets were shouting down the missionaries and the police were taking no notice . . . [while] stones were thrown at the Mission by one group of demonstrators”.30 Missionaries were particularly conscious of opposition emanating from al-Azhar, the university mosque located close to the CMS and Presbyterian mission headquarters in central Cairo. They also noted the anti-missionary activities of the Society for the Defense of Islam led by the former rector of al-Azhar and former Grand Qadi of Sudan, Mu߆afà al-Maràghì.31 Of course, missionaries themselves sometimes adopted confrontational tactics vis-à-vis Azharite students

29 Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 30 PHS RG 209–1–10: J.W. Acheson Papers, Acheson to Anderson, 15 March 1932. 31 PHS RG 209–1–19: C.C. Adams Papers, Adams to Anderson, 26 June 1933.

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and scholars. For example, in a 1928 episode that caused such an uproar among Muslims that it continues to earn mention in works by Arab and Muslim authors, Samuel M. Zwemer (an American evangelist in the Dutch Reformed Church and an affiliate of the American Presbyterian mission in Cairo) entered al-Azhar and distributed Christian tracts before an angry crowd expelled him from the premises.32 Far from promoting a better understanding of Christian ideas among Muslims, this incident antagonized many Muslims and stoked anti-missionary sentiments.33 After 1928, events continued to roil the missionaries. In 1930, for example, a major anti-missionary campaign developed in the Arabic press following an incident involving Kàmil Manßùr, a former Muslim and convert to Presbyterian Christianity who worked as a lay evangelist in Cairo. One evening after Kàmil Manßùr had delivered a public lecture on the life of Jesus in a church meeting hall, two Muslim men in the audience approached the district police claiming that he had vilified Islam during his talk. When the police rebuffed them, the two men approached a local Arabic newspaper that eagerly took up the story. A series of events followed in close succession: Kàmil Manßùr was arrested but denied the charges; other Arabic newspapers seized on the story as an example of the missionary threat to Islamic integrity;34 American missionaries arranged legal aid and contacted British political and American consular authorities in Cairo, London and Washington DC; and a trial was held that culminated in Kàmil Manßùr’s acquittal. For months afterwards missionaries privately voiced concerns about the consequences of the newspaper campaign against them and about the missions’ growing vulnerability in Egypt. Missionaries believed that Kàmil Manßùr had not committed any

32 Two sources that recounted this incident are Saad Eddin Ibrahim et al., The Copts of Egypt (London: Minority Rights Group, 1996), p. 13; and Solihin, Copts and Muslims, pp. 48–9. 33 It may be worth pointing out that several of the American Presbyterian missionaries were critical of Zwemer and his methods and regretted his affiliation to their mission, as shown by passing references in the papers of missionaries such as J.W. Acheson and J.R. Alexander. 34 The Arabic newspaper al-Siyàsa, for example, placed its articles on this Kàmil Manßùr affair under the rubric of “defamation of the Islamic religion” (†a'n al-dìn al-islàmì ) or “assault on the Islamic religion” (al-i'tidà" 'alà l-dìn al-islàmì ). Al-Siyàsa (Cairo), 14 April 1930 and 18 April 1930.

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indiscretion and thought that agitators had staged the incident for Muslim or nationalist political ends.35 The Kàmil Manßùr affair in 1930 followed closely on the heels of another scandal known as the Fakhry incident that had occurred at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Early in 1930, Fakhry Farag, an Egyptian Christian (Coptic Catholic) doctor who had frequently given public lectures on venereal diseases at the AUC, gave a talk on the status of women in Islamic Egyptian society. The doctor made various remarks that were critical of Islam and gravely offended Muslims in the audience, who staged a protest afterwards. The Arabic press picked up the story, Fakhry was indicted and later acquitted, and amidst all the bad publicity, the university had to scuttle to limit the damage and to restore its image among its Muslim constituency.36 The Fakhry case had missionary connections insofar as the AUC was a charter member of the Inter-Mission Council and brought up the issue at the council’s meetings. The incident had wider reverberations for the AUC in that it prompted the university in years ahead to minimize its missionary connections for the sake of both its public standing and its long-term independent survival. By 1932, Nile Valley missions had reached what may have been, in retrospect, a breaking point. As the full force of the Great Depression began to be felt and American and British church donations plummeted, it became clear that foreign missions were suffering financially. Steep budget shortfalls brought an end to the period of missionary expansion as missions faced the prospect of having to close down village schools and sell properties and land. The same year witnessed the publication in New York of a volume entitled Re-Thinking Missions, undertaken by a Laymen’s Inquiry funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.37 One of the book’s controversial (and for many missionaries, upsetting)

35 Many papers on the case are in PHS RG 209–1–08: J.W. Acheson Papers, 1930. Two Arabic Egyptian newspapers that covered the story closely were al-Siyàsa and al-Balàgh. See for example the story entitled “Armed Evangelism in the House of the Americans”, al-Siyàsa (Cairo), 14 April 1930. 36 While AUC was not a missionary enterprise per se, its founder, Charles R. Watson, had close ties with the American Presbyterian mission and several of its faculty members were former missionaries. For discussions on the Fakhry case, see PHS RG 209–1–08: J.W. Acheson Papers (1930), and Lawrence R. Murphy, The American University in Cairo: 1919–1987 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1987), pp. 57–88. 37 William Ernest Hocking (ed.), Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932).

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conclusions was that Christianity was special but that other religious systems also had merit and value and deserved respect accordingly. Looking back, historians of American religion suggest that Re-Thinking Missions reflected a growing loss of faith in evangelism within the liberal American Protestant camp.38 Meanwhile, missionaries remained a target of attack within the Arabic periodical press. In a press campaign that reached its peak in the summer of 1933, Arabic newspapers, and above all the daily al-Balàgh, reported that missionaries were preying upon children and youths by hypnotizing them, luring them with sweets and evangelizing nefariously. Some articles even suggested that missionaries might be the source of the country’s missingchildren problem, i.e. that they were abducting children in order to convert them. Al-Balàgh described its own coverage of evangelizing “incidents” not as an attack on missionaries, but rather as a response to missionary attacks on Islam and Muslims.39 Reeling from the newspaper campaign, missionaries denied these charges of abduction and brainwashing and drafted a statement of intent through the Inter-Mission Council.40 Published later, this statement clarified their methods and promised respect for others, but insisted on the right of freedom of religious choice, including the right of Christians to convert to Islam as well as the right of Muslims to convert to Christianity. Their statement did not quell anti-missionary sentiment, however, since educated thinkers from across the political spectrum (including, for example, the literary scholar and autobiographer ˇàhà Óusayn)41 continued to call on the government to restrict missionary enterprises and urged Muslims to boycott missionary services. In one case, a journal even published the names of all the Muslim parents who were sending their daughters to a German

38

Hutchison, Errand to the World, pp. 146–75. Translated summaries from the Arabic periodical press on this theme appear in PHS RG 209–1–10: J.W. Acheson Papers (1932). Particularly intense coverage appeared in al-Balàgh (Cairo), June-July 1933, which described missionary evangelization as a series of “hostile acts of aggression against the sanctity of the [Muslim] faith.” al-Balàgh (Cairo), 13 June 1933, p. 9. 40 PHS RG 209–1–11: J.W. Acheson Papers, Statement, “The Policy of the Foreign Missionary Societies of the Egypt Inter-Mission Council, and Certain Other Missionary Bodies with Regard to their Work in Egypt, as Formulated by Them on October 18, 1932”. 41 PHS RG 209–1–19: C.C. Adams Papers, Adams to Anderson, 26 June 1933. 39

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mission school in Aswan, apparently in an attempt to shame them into joining the boycott.42 In the 1930s, popular anti-missionary pressure began to have an impact on the law and government processes as Egyptian officials and parliamentarians subjected missionaries to greater restrictions in their work. The situation intensified following the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 when Egyptians secured greater political and administrative autonomy vis-à-vis Britain. New Egyptian government laws, officially aiming to ensure conformity in educational and medical institutions, began to require that mission schools teach the Qur"àn to Muslim children and that missionary doctors pass Egyptian government medical examinations. At the same time, passport restrictions on new missionaries intensified considerably, forcing them to spend large amounts of time on filing and tracing the paperwork for missionary visas. Pressure grew on missions, too, to hire qualified Egyptians instead of foreigners wherever possible—for example, as clerical workers or as teachers on mission payrolls. Through the Montreux Convention of 1937 (which elaborated on aspects of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that pertained to foreigners’ rights), the Egyptian government also froze the number of missionaries in Egypt; thereafter missionaries could fill existing vacancies but could not in theory expand their numbers. These restrictions might have mounted further but for the outbreak of World War II which forced many missionaries to go home with their families until the war ended. By the late 1940s, when mission activity was resuming, major changes loomed on the Middle Eastern political horizon. The process of decolonization began in the region as Syria and Lebanon gained formal independence from France in 1946 and Israel emerged from Britain’s Palestine mandate in 1948. The political situation was changing rapidly in Sudan as well. In the 1940s, among practitioners of local religions in southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, Christian conversions were occurring apace, and some converts were making their way to Khartoum where they were contributing to a fledgling community of southern Christian and Nuba urban migrants. Others were converting after their arrival

42 PHS RG 209–1–10: J.W. Acheson Papers (1932), undated English-language newspaper summarizing an article in the Egyptian Arabic periodical al-Siyàsa, “Boycott Foreign Schools—Duty of Egyptian Parents”.

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in Greater Khartoum. In 1948, reflecting a turn away from Muslim evangelism, one CMS missionary envisioned a future where mission and church work in northern Sudan would be conducted by and for these migrants.43 Meanwhile, Muslim conversion in Sudan remained rare (even by comparison with Egypt), while real or rumored cases of conversions were continuing to provoke the public. For example, according to a Sudanese Muslim woman who published an Arabic history of the Sudanese women’s movement in 1990, one episode in the 1940s proved particularly significant. “The year 1946,” she declared, “witnessed the birth of the Sudanese Women’s Union in the aftermath of an incident of the Christian conversion of a Muslim Sudanese girl called Mandamat.” One day, she recounted, a woman ran into the Graduates’ Club, a center for nationalist activism among educated northern Sudanese male elites in the Khartoum area, and cried, “My daughter, they’re going to Christianize her!” A crowd gathered and staged an impromptu demonstration; the local British inspector hid the girl and called on cavalry troops to disperse the protesters. Only later did a sharia court judge order the return of the girl to her mother on the grounds that she was a minor. In the aftermath of this episode, this writer averred, Sudanese women founded the Sudanese Women’s Union (SWU) as “the nucleus of the women’s movement against the foreign Christian missions”. In other words, this author claimed that anti-missionary activism stimulated the rise of the early Sudanese feminist (and by extension, women’s nationalist) movement.44 Strikingly, another Sudanese Muslim historian recounted the same story but attributed the whistle-blowing to the girl’s father, not her mother. He added that “the man who took up the issue and restored the girl to her family” was one Sayyid 'Alì ˇàlib Allàh, who became so upset about British colonial repression and the missionary threat to Islam that he helped to establish the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, eventually becoming the Sudanese organization’s amìr (leader) in the late 1940s.45 Two authors therefore trace the

43 J. Spencer Trimingham, The Christian Approach to Islam in the Sudan (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 56–8. 44 Susan Sàlim Ismà'ìl, al-Judhùr al-tàrìkhiyya li-l-˙araka al-nisà"iyya al-sùdàniyya (Cairo: Maktabat Madbùlì, 1990), pp. 23, 24. 45 Hassan Makki Mohamed Ahmed, Sudan: The Christian Design (Leicester, UK: The Islamic Foundation, 1989), pp. 101–2.

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growth of the Sudanese women’s movement and Muslim Brotherhood to the same anti-missionary protest. After 1938, educated Arabic-speaking Muslim men from northern Sudan gained a political outlet in the Graduates’ Congress and increasingly pressed the British to grant them greater administrative authority. Their persuasion was one important factor behind Britain’s decision in 1945 to end the Southern Policy that had officially separated the North from the South. These northerners were equally influential in shaping the outcome of the Juba Conference of 1947, which confirmed that Sudan would proceed to decolonization with the North and South together. This move effectively guaranteed that Muslim northerners, who were much better educated and more centrally placed in colonial administrative jobs than their southern educated counterparts, would dominate postcolonial government. In retrospect, historians have identified the Juba Conference as a watershed, the moment when southerners realized the extent and potential implications of their political weakness in a unified Sudan. Sensing their exclusion from the decision-making process and objecting to the hasty schedule for decolonization, educated southerners began to have concerns about the roles they would play—or that they would be allowed to play—in a decolonized Sudan. In 1949, when northern Sudanese politicians asserted their control over educational policy and initiated a program to Arabicize southern school curricula (with the implicit goal of displacing English as the South’s educational lingua franca), southerners began to worry, too, about the cultural— that is Arabic-Islamic—agendas of the northern nationalists. They feared that the government language policy of Arabicization would lead to Arabization, i.e. the ethnic transformation of southerners. A succession of dramatic events marked the 1950s in Egypt and Sudan. In 1952, the Free Officers’ coup brought revolution to Egypt. In 1953, Britain and Egypt—still nominal partners in the AngloEgyptian Sudan—agreed on final plans for a period of Sudanese selfgovernment in anticipation of independence. In 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged from the Free Officers as Egypt’s president, promising dramatic nationalist and socialist reforms. In 1955, an army mutiny broke out at Torit in southern Sudan, marking what historians later identified as the start of civil war. And in 1956, Sudan achieved formal independence months before another war shook the region. This was the Suez Crisis, later recognized as an integral part of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and of the Cold War in the Middle East theater.

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Christian-Muslim Dynamics in the Postcolonial Period In the late 1950s, missionaries in Egypt and Sudan became targets of the nationalization measures being undertaken by the newly decolonized Egyptian and Sudanese governments to expunge foreign peoples and enterprises. Nationalization in practice entailed the seizure of properties and institutions as well as the deportation of foreign nationals. In Egypt in particular, nationalization became part of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “Arab socialism” program of land, tax and other reforms that aimed to promote a more egalitarian social order on behalf of the lower classes. While the most famous instance of nationalization occurred around the Suez Canal in 1956 when the Egyptian government seized the operations of the French- and Britishowned Suez Canal Company, there were also countless seizures of small private businesses, ranging from department stores and commercial dairies to textile factories, many of which were owned by locally-born Jews and Christians who held European passports.46 In Egypt and Sudan, the CMS and the American Presbyterian missions experienced nationalization when the government claimed control over various schools, hospitals and orphanages while deporting missionaries or denying them new visas.47 In some sense, of course, the nationalization of mission schools in Egypt was not sudden but had been occurring gradually from as early as 1932, when the Egyptian government had started to require mission schools to meet building codes, for example, regarding safety, cleanliness and the provision of separate facilities for boys and girls. Restrictions and requirements mounted over the years, as in 1947,

46

Robert L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 47 Note that while historians of Sudan commonly refer to this process of mission property seizures as nationalization, particularly vis-à-vis the Sudan government’s 1957 takeover of mission schools, historians of Egypt have not tended to describe government policy towards missions in this way—though I argue that the term is appropriate for the Egyptian context as well. For the use of this term in histories of Sudan, see, for example, Ruay, The Politics of Two Sudans; and John O. Voll, “Imperialism, Nationalism, and Missionaries: Lessons from Sudan for the TwentyFirst Century,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 8 (1997): 39–52. Robert Vitalis pointed out this difference between Egyptian and Sudanese historiography vis-à-vis missions and nationalization in a conversation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 26 January 2005.

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when a new law forbade mission schools to allow non-Christian children into classes containing Christian instruction. Law 160 of 1958 marked the confirmation and culmination of these trends but showed that, regarding missionary policy at least, continuity and not rupture characterized the pre- and post-1952 periods. Law 160 required all schools to teach Islamic studies to Muslim students, to teach in the Arabic medium, to appoint Egyptian teachers to cover “national” subjects such as history and geography, and to have Egyptian directors. These measures and others made the continuation of the missions increasingly untenable, leading some mission leaders to question whether education devoid of Christian teaching—that is, social service without evangelism—could justify the high costs of the missions.48 In Egypt, the Suez Crisis of 1956 triggered the rapid demise of the two British missions—the CMS and the interdenominational Egypt General Mission (EGM).49 In its aftermath, as Britons in Egypt became persona non grata, the Egyptian government expelled the remaining British missionaries, froze their bank accounts and seized (or, to use the official term, “requisitioned”) various British missionary institutions, appointing Egyptian caretakers for them. These moves forced or prompted Christian organizations, not only missions but also, for example, the Anglican Church in Egypt, to indigenize church hierarchies more rapidly by promoting local clergy and to cede institutions to the control of local churches.50 With the United States having remained relatively neutral in the Suez conflict, American Presbyterians faced no immediate reprisals though their leaders realized that the days of the American mission might be drawing to a close—not least because the Egyptian government was more frequently refusing to grant, renew or extend American missionaries’ visas.51 Most distressing 48

PHS RG 209–2–09: E.M. Bailey Papers, Black to Bailey, 31 May 1955; and RG 209–2–10: E.M. Bailey Papers, Bailey to Black, 29 May 1956. 49 The EGM ran schools but did not seek to establish a separate denomination or church; on the contrary, it worked closely with the American Presbyterians and sent aspiring converts to the Presbyterian-affiliated Evangelical Church. 50 The CMS had already been devolving control of its schools onto the local Anglican Church when the Suez Crisis broke out. When the EGM declared that it was unable to continue staffing two of its schools, the Egyptian government seized them and ran them as government schools. The experience of the EGM, in particular, caused dismay among American Presbyterians, as archival records show. (See PHS RG 209–2–10: E.M. Bailey Papers.) 51 These developments, pertaining to Americans as well as their British counterparts, are covered in the papers of E.M. Bailey, PHS RG 209–2–06, RG 209–2–09, and RG 209–2–10 (1950–56).

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for the American Presbyterians in 1956 was the government’s application of a new law, Law 583, which forced mission schools to provide Islamic instruction to Muslim students on school grounds, under threat of imminent seizure. This stimulated a crisis of conscience and purpose among missionaries.52 Technically the American Presbyterians only dissolved their Missionary Association in 1966–1967, by which time they had already transferred institutional operations to the Egyptian Evangelical Church,53 but in fact missionary numbers were already dwindling in the late 1950s as important changes took place within the Presbyterian Church in the United States.54 A foreign institution that had never officially espoused an evangelical or missionary program, the American University in Cairo managed to avoid nationalization through careful maneuvering.55 It helped that its presidents had a long record of criticizing American foreign policy in Egypt and the wider Middle East (for example, vis-à-vis Israel) and of proclaiming loyalty to the Egyptian government. It also helped, in the words of the university’s historian, that the “children of members of the original 1952 Revolutionary Command Council were exempted from the cut-off score requirement” for competitive entry into the university. Indeed, one of Nasser’s own daughters went

52 PHS RG 209–2–10: E.M. Bailey Papers, Confidential, “The Report on Field Deputation by Dr. Reed and Dr. Black Concerning Teaching of Islam in Schools in Egypt, June 23–July 8, 1956”, mimeograph typescript. 53 Interview with the Rev. John G. Lorimer, Pasadena, California, 27 August 2004. John G. Lorimer served as an American Presbyterian missionary in Egypt from 1952 to 1990. He remained in the field after 1967 by invitation of the Evangelical Church and taught in the theological seminary. 54 In 1958, the United Presbyterian Church of North America (UPCNA), the sponsor of the American Presbyterian mission in Egypt, merged with another Presbyterian denomination (the Presbyterian Church in the USA) to form a new denomination, the United Presbyterian Church in the United States (UPCUSA). This merger led to the dissolution of the UPCNA’s Board of Foreign Missions and to the creation of a new body called the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR). In 1983, the UPCUSA merged with the major southern Presbyterian Church in the US to become what is now the Presbyterian Church (USA) or PC(USA). 55 Indeed as early as the 1930s, the AUC’s founder, Charles R. Watson, had argued that the university should not be regarded as a Christian institution but as an educational bridge or helping hand between the United States and the Middle East. Murphy, American University in Cairo, p. 86. The AUC’s lack of evangelical emphasis frustrated missionaries and caused tensions between the AUC and the American Presbyterian mission in Cairo. See, for example, PHS RG 209–1–03: J.W. Acheson Papers, Report to the Board of Foreign Missions, “Correlation of the University with the Work of Our Mission in Egypt”, 5 October 1925.

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on to attend the AUC in the mid-1960s. Official opposition to the university also diminished as Muslim students became a majority and as university staff incorporated Egyptian professors and administrators in greater numbers. It may have been significant, too, that missionary connections to the university had been shrinking in the years leading up to the Free Officers’ coup. Even the School of Oriental Studies, once an Arabic training program for missionaries, was by the 1930s and 1940s increasingly catering to American diplomatic personnel and later to American military officers.56 Decolonization had an impact not only upon foreign missionaries but also, and in the long run more importantly, on local Christians. In Egypt, although Nasser’s government officially espoused doctrines of religious equality, the position of Coptic Orthodox and Protestant minorities deteriorated in various respects. Whereas Christians had been active in Egyptian parliamentary politics before 1952 (particularly within the Wafd Party), their representation in the postcolonial Egyptian government had declined significantly. By 1996, one observer noted that although Christians accounted for perhaps ten per cent of the population, there were no Christians serving in high-profile public-sector jobs as ambassadors, faculty deans or mayors.57 Some even detected a slight in the job title that the Sadat and Mubarak governments assigned to Butros Butros Ghali (UN Secretary-General from 1992 to 1996) when they designated him not Foreign Minister but rather “Minister of State for Foreign Affairs”—a post he held from 1977 to 1991.58 In the postcolonial period, Christians in Egypt also faced discrimination in the form of government laws that had been drafted in 1934 as a reaction against missionary activities. These laws, which became more bureaucratically cumbersome with time, required Christians to secure special permits before building or even repairing a church and restricted church-building based on proximity to mosques, the number of Christians in the area and other factors. A human rights report on Egyptian Christians, written in 1996, noted

56

Murphy, American University in Cairo, pp. 84–5, 114, 167. Ibrahim et al., Copts of Egypt, pp. 15–6. 58 Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East, 2nd ed. ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2002), p. 146. Nisan emphasizes the bleak postcolonial experiences of Egyptian Christians in the chapter entitled “Copts: From Majority People to Minority Religion”, pp. 133–55. 57

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that church-building permits were seldom being granted and that Christians had to struggle to get permission to carry out even minor church repairs. By contrast, mosques proliferated.59 In northern Sudan, Copts and Evangelical Protestants (the descendants of Egyptian immigrants) faced similar forms of discrimination vis-à-vis successive postcolonial Sudanese governments, leading many to emigrate to North America, Europe and elsewhere.60 In Egypt during the 1970s Muslim-Christian tensions grew more pronounced—a development connected to the socially divisive policies of President Anwar Sadat (1970–1981), who presented himself as a “Believer President” and who emphasized Islam as the religion of state.61 To stamp out the Marxist and Nasserite left, Sadat cultivated campus Islamist groups, radical members of which later targeted Egyptian Christians and eventually assassinated Sadat himself. Among these radical elements was the Jihad Group linked to Shaykh 'Umar 'Abd al-Ra˙màn (the blind cleric later associated with the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center), who encouraged his supporters to attack Copts as a form of legitimate jihad and who approved the looting of Coptic goldsmiths as a way of funding the group’s operations. Later, near the end of Sadat’s presidency in 1981 and in the context of economic distress, MuslimChristian tensions reached breaking point in Cairo as evinced by communal riots that erupted in the poor district of Zawiya al-Hamra.62 During the Mubarak era after 1981, chronic low-grade religious strife persisted throughout the country although the government cracked down on militants. In 1996 the Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim broke an unspoken taboo on discussing discrimination against Christians by publishing a human-rights report on the Copts, but he suffered the consequences when the Egyptian government sentenced

59

Ibrahim et al., Copts of Egypt, pp. 11, 27. Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Wanderings: Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 81–92. 61 Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East, pp. 147–51. Note that the 1923 Constitution, which the Free Officers’ coup made moot, had also affirmed Islam as the state religion. 62 On Islamic extremism against Christians and on the Zawiya al-Hamra riots, see Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt (London: Al-Saqi Books, 1985), pp. 156–71, 208–10, and passim. For a fascinating recent study of Zawiya al-Hamra, see Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 60

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him to seven years’ hard labor in 2001 for “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad”, among other charges.63 More positively, beginning in 2003, the Egyptian government recognized Coptic Orthodox Christmas (7th January) as a national holiday for all Egyptians—a move that international observers, along with the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, hailed as a small but welcome gesture of social inclusion.64 In Sudan, meanwhile, Muslim-Christian dynamics became intimately connected with the politics of civil war and with issues of national unity and North-South cohesion. Even before the start of war in 1955 and before independence in 1956, northern Sudanese Muslim Arabic-speaking nationalists were convinced that missionaries had monopolized the educational infrastructure of the South through their alliance with the system of British colonialism, and that they had jeopardized national cohesion by spreading Christianity among southern animists.65 These sentiments prompted northern politicians to nationalize southern missionary schools in 1957. In 1964 (six years after the military coup), General Ibrahim Abboud took the more drastic step of deporting foreign Catholic and Protestant missionaries on the grounds that they were standing as a “bulwark in the path to national integration” and that they were guilty of various infractions including sheltering, supplying or otherwise abetting “mutineers” and “outlaws”, meaning southern war rebels.66 As in Egypt, these measures compelled the rapid indigenization of church leadership. At the same time, these measures prompted Protestant and Catholic leaders and intellectuals to rally together and strengthen

63 Mona El-Ghobashy, “Antinomies of the Saad Eddin Ibrahim Case”, Middle East Report Online (MERIP) 15 August 2002, available at http://www.merip.org/ mero/mero081502.html (accessed 9 July 2003); and Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East, p. 153. Ibrahim was exonerated and released by an Egyptian court in 2002. 64 Samar Aboul-Fotouh, “Egypt: A New Reason to Celebrate”, The New York Times, 8 January 2003, p. A6; “Egypt: Coptic Pope Thanks President for Christmas Holiday”, BBC Monitoring Middle East, 9 January 2003; Michel Sailhan, “Egypt Marks Christmas in a Gesture to Minority Copts”, Agence France-Presse, 7 January 2003. 65 See, for example, Ahmed’s Sudan: The Christian Design, which criticizes missionaries in the context of the civil war and argues for the importance of Islam as a tool for Sudanese national unity. 66 Republic of the Sudan, Ministry of the Interior, Memorandum on Reasons that Led to the Expulsion of Foreign Missionaries and Priests from the Southern Provinces of the Sudan, March 1964, p. 3 and Appendix B (“List of Contraventions Committed by Some Missionaries”). For an assessment of these events from the missionary point of view, written by two Catholic Comboni mission priests, see Gino Barsella and Miguel A. Ayuso Guixot, Struggling to Be Heard: The Christian Voice in Independent Sudan, 1956–1996 (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1998).

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inter-church relations, leading to a kind of ecumenical ProtestantCatholic solidarity that is now starting to influence the historiography of southern Sudanese Christianity.67 Muslim and Christian religious ideologies played an important role in the second Sudanese civil war after 1983. Following President Ja’far Numayri’s embrace of Islamic law in 1983 and continuing under successive regimes, the Khartoum government emphasized the centrality of a coherent Arab-Islamic identity for the Sudan and rejected calls by the major southern-based opposition group—the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/SPLA)— for secular cultural pluralism.68 To drum up popular support for the fighting among northerners, the Khartoum government portrayed the civil war as an Islamic jihad and proclaimed that northern wardead were martyrs. Meanwhile, international Christian groups—the transnational and postcolonial successors, in some respects, of the missionaries—became more actively involved in the civil war by providing food and medical aid to southern war-affected peoples and communities, and by advertising atrocities committed by government forces and their affiliates (though rarely citing SPLA atrocities in the process). In the late 1990s, for example, Christian Solidarity International drew world attention to the seizure and abuse of southern women and children by mura˙˙ilìn (government-backed militias of Muslim Arabic-speakers from Kordofan)—a practice they described as the recrudescence of slavery. Meanwhile, amidst war and displacement, Christian groups pointed to the rapid expansion of Christianity among refugees and even among soldiers, citing, for

67 The best example of this trend is Roland Werner, William Anderson and Andrew Wheeler, Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment: The History of the Sudanese Church across 2000 Years (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2000). This book is part of an ecumenical ( joint Catholic-Protestant) series called “Faith in Sudan” that is published by a Catholic order. One of the authors, William Anderson, is a former American Presbyterian missionary to southern Sudan. To some extent this book reflects a larger trend of ecumenical mission historiography that is becoming prominent in sub-Saharan Africa. A rich work of this kind is Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed, A History of the Church in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 68 To see how religious and ethnic identity issues have posed stumbling blocks in peace talks, see the fascinating account in Steven Wöndu and Ann Lesch, Battle for Peace in Sudan: An Analysis of the Abuja Conferences, 1992–1993 (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000).

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example, a sharp rise in the number of SPLA Christian chaplains as of the year 2000.69 Muslim-Christian discord has been a feature of the Sudanese civil war, and yet its ideological importance in the conflict should not be over-emphasized. It should be noted that even the post-1989 Islamist regime of General Umar al-Bashir has regularly included southern Christians in ministerial and vice-presidential positions.70 One may view these appointments pessimistically, as part of the central government’s strategy to co-opt southern leaders and to cripple southern resistance in the war, or optimistically, as a limited government acknowledgement that Sudanese national rule should or must be a collective broad-based affair—an idea that needs further practice for the sake of future peace. Missionary Legacies Along with other mission groups, CMS and American Presbyterian missionaries influenced Egyptian and Sudanese societies in three major respects. First, they developed a modern educational and healthcare infrastructure upon which postcolonial Egyptian and Sudanese governments later built; second, they converted Coptic Christians, practitioners of local religions and to a lesser extent Muslims, the descendants of whom constitute Protestant minorities in Egypt and Sudan today; and third, they left a legacy of mistrust within Muslim communities who regarded them as allies or agents of British imperialism in the Nile Valley. Since this third legacy operates in the realm of ideas and sentiments, its extent is difficult to gauge, though historians readily attest to the continued bearing of historical grievances on communal relations in the region today.71

69 Shafer Parker, “Oil for Bombs—and Beds”, Report/Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition) 27, 16 (18 December 2000): 52 in an article on the Calgary-based firm Talisman, which was a key player in the Sudanese oil industry. On the spread of Christianity in the context of war, see Nikkel, “Aspects of Contemporary Religious Change among the Dinka”. 70 In 2000, for example, southerners held posts as Second Vice President (George Kongor Arap) and led the Ministries of Transport (Lam Akol), Architectural Development ( Joseph Malwal), and Labour (Alison Manani Magaya). Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural Series 37, 7 ( July 2000): 14036. 71 See, for example, Gabriel R. Warburg, Historical Discord in the Nile Valley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992).

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More direct evidence for the legacy of Muslim mistrust emerges from a contemporary genre of anti-missionary treatises written by Islamist authors in Arabic, English and other languages. Works of this genre characterize the missionary enterprise as a debilitating colonial legacy and as a living threat to Islam and Muslims; some of them even quote long-deceased missionaries, such as the Briton W.H.T. Gairdner (1873–1928) and the American Samuel Zwemer (1867–1952), as proof of Christian antagonism towards Muslims today. (These Arabic authors generally marshal their information on the missionaries from secondary Arabic sources, testimony to the large body of anti-missionary texts that are in circulation.) Reflecting a global Sunni Islamist vision that stretches from Africa to South-East Asia, these works argue that the worlds of Islam and Christianity are engaged in a clash of civilizations. By presenting the history of missionaries in Egypt, Sudan and elsewhere as part of a long pattern of Western repression and exploitation and as part of an ongoing Christian crusade against Islam, these works contribute to the tensions that afflict present-day Muslim-Christian relations.72 Finally, there is one more missionary legacy in the Nile Valley that is worth noting: namely, the contributions that missionaries made to still-raging debates about the meaning and exercise of religious liberty. Observing the heavy social sanctions that impeded Muslim conversion to Christianity, CMS and American Presbyterian missionaries in the early twentieth century issued frequent calls for religious liberty, by which they meant not only the right to practice the faith into which one was born (which was how the Egyptian authorities generally interpreted this freedom), but also the right to convert both into and out of Islam or any other faith.73 Evangelical Christian groups are still issuing this call but they are nowadays

72 Heather J. Sharkey, “Arabic Antimissionary Treatises: Muslim Responses to Christian Evangelism in the Modern Middle East”, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 28: 3 (2004): 112–18; and Heather J. Sharkey, “A New Crusade or an Old One?”, ISIM Newsletter (Leiden) 12 (2003): 48–9. For insights into some Englishlanguage polemical works, see Kate Zebiri, Muslims and Christians Face to Face (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997). 73 Missionaries issued this call for religious liberty in many venues and publications, and discussed the issue in private writings. For one manifesto along these lines, see PHS RG 209–1–11: J.W. Acheson Papers, Statement, “The Policy of the Foreign Missionary Societies of the Egypt Inter-Mission Council, and Certain Other Missionary Bodies with regard to their Work in Egypt, as Formulated by Them on October 18, 1932”.

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joined by many others, including human rights organizations, international bodies (including, theoretically, the United Nations, which in 1948 declared the right to change religion as a fundamental human right), intellectuals and social activists (such as the Egyptian Muslim sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim), and even the government of the United States, which passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998.74 Given that, even today, conversion from Islam to Christianity remains a crime punishable by death in Sudan, and that US sanctions against Sudan after 1998 gained some of their steam from religious liberty issues, this controversy over religious freedom looks set to continue and to retain political ramifications for Muslim-Christian relations in the Nile Valley.75

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For the text of this US law and for the State Department’s 2002 reports on religious freedom worldwide, see http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/laws/majorlaw/ intlrel.htm and http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/ (accessed 13 October 2004). 75 In its report on Sudanese affairs in 1998, Human Rights Watch drew attention to the case of a Nuba Muslim man who converted to Christianity and was awaiting trial for apostasy. (He was later convicted and sentenced to death.) By contrast, in June 1998, a month before he was charged with this crime, “about 1,600 men and women from southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains converted to Islam at a mass ceremony in Khartoum, where a government official exhorted them to be the ‘vanguard for Islam in the south’, a reflection of the government’s Islamization policy”. Human Rights Watch, “Sudan: Human Rights Developments”, World Report, 1999. The connection between US sanctions against Sudan and religious liberty issues was drawn in The Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Sudan, 1999, No. 1, p. 18.

CHAPTER FOUR

A FIFTY-YEAR MUSLIM CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY: RELIGIOUS AMBIGUITIES AND COLONIAL BOUNDARIES IN NORTHERN NIGERIA, C. 1906–19631 Shobana Shankar Claiming Islam and Christianity In February 1914, Yarima Inusa, a Muslim, was baptized and given the name Samuila (Samuel in Hausa) by Charles Dudley, a missionary of the Sudan Interior Mission. Dudley had grown to know Inusa well since 1910, when Inusa met the missionary at Paiko in British Northern Nigeria after trekking hundreds of miles from his home near Dosso in the French-controlled territory of Niger. Dudley taught Inusa, who had basic literacy in Arabic, to read and write Hausa in Roman characters while Inusa worked as an interpreter, translator, cook and washer for Dudley. After four years of working as a committed lay evangelist, which took him to his village across the Anglo-French border to preach among Muslims and put him at risk from the colonial authorities, Inusa recalled in his autobiography that “Mr. Dudley . . . questioned me very thoroughly on the matter” of baptism. Whether the missionary knew that Inusa maintained, in a sense, both Islamic and Christian beliefs, we are not sure. In his private diary, the convert carefully recorded his interactions with Muslims. After one visit in June 1927, Inusa described his gifts to his junior brothers who were returning to Dosso: “I gave a Qur"àn to Zarafi and to Jibo a New Testament”. Was the line between Islam and Christianity clear? Inusa’s story, in many ways, blurs the boundaries that appear so stark in the history

1 For their support for this research, the author is grateful to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fulbright/Institute of International Education and UCLA.

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of Christian missions to Muslims. Yes, conflict occurred, not between Christians and Muslims but rather between a lay evangelist and the colonial authorities. Inusa and Dudley were both Christians but not equal, the missionary having the power to judge the African’s belief and religious character. Nor were the two Christians necessarily unified in their approach to Islam. Christian conversion did not draw Inusa and Dudley together across social and racial boundaries, while it also did not distance Inusa from his Muslim affiliation in the way Christian missionaries might have hoped. For their part, the British colonial authorities imagined a serious threat in the interaction of Muslims and Christians, proselytizing Christians in particular. With the conquest of each Muslim emirate, Lugard, the first High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, “took care to declare that his administration had no intention of interfering with religious worship”,2 a promise that British officers in Muslim areas tried diligently to uphold as an ostensible appeasement to the Muslim authorities who would be “indirect rulers”. The authorities allowed mission societies to establish stations with schools and clinics in nonMuslim or “pagan” territories. Paiko and Karu, towns of the Gbarispeaking people among whom Inusa traveled and settled, qualified as pagan areas. Birnin Kebbi and Sokoto, where he trekked and sold Christian tracts, were part of kasar Musulmi (Hausa: Muslim country). Inusa’s trek, in proving the colonial map wrong and showing little of the conflict at the core of the British construction of religion, made colonial protection a fiction. The aim of this chapter is to consider how colonial-era boundaries constructed and prioritized religious differences. British occupation, border creation and patrol, and control of migration and settlement were intimately linked to the heightening of differences between Muslim and Christian African subjects. While this process has easily been identified as divide and rule, what is less clear is how belief became a more important signifier of difference, more important than other identity markers. Indeed, in an environment where the colonial authorities attempted to control the movements of foreign Christian missionaries and African Christians, a distinct and small community, into Muslim areas, the question of how space

2 C.N. Ubah, “Problems of Christian Missionaries in Muslim Emirates of Nigeria, 1900–1928”, Journal of African Studies 3, 3 (1976): 356.

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and religious identity intersect remains an important yet unexplored subject in the history of the Muslim-Christian encounter in colonial Northern Nigeria. Colonial Boundaries and Histories of Christian Missions to Muslims The subject of Christian missions to Muslims in Northern Nigeria has received much attention from scholars, who have mainly tried to understand the British rationale for the closure of the Muslim emirates to Christian societies. Based largely on governmental correspondence and mission records, academic histories of missions in Muslim Northern Nigeria reproduce the map drawn in the debates between administrators and missionaries. Historians have concentrated on trying to account for administrative resistance to missions, to support Islam for the functioning of indirect rule or to thwart those who upset racial hierarchies with their beliefs about equality before God, namely “African converts from the Southern Provinces and the missionaries who converted them”.3 Scholars have concluded that the restrictions of the British colonial administration, despite the resistance of missionaries in Nigeria and in England, largely worked to prevent Christian evangelism and conversion in Muslim areas. Studies of the missions and indigenous Christian communities in the Northern Nigerian provinces have concentrated mostly on what came to be called the Middle Belt, where missions were allowed to move with more freedom.4 Although missions began to undertake medical

3 Andrew E. Barnes, “‘Evangelization Where It Is Not Wanted’: Colonial Administrators and Missionaries in Northern Nigeria during the First Third of the Twentieth Century”, Journal of Religion in Africa 25, 4 (1995): 413. Barnes summarizes the arguments contained in the following articles, in which the authors emphasize the British support for Muslim rulers over Christian missions, an echo of the argument made by the missionaries themselves. E.A. Ayandele, “The Missionary Factor in Northern Nigeria, 1870–1918”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2, 3 (December 1966): 503–22; E.P.T. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria (Zaria: Gaskiya Corporation, 1976); and Ubah, “Problems of Christian Missionaries”. 4 For example, see Niels Kasfelt, Religion and Politics in Nigeria: A Study in Middle Belt Christianity (London: British Academic Press, 1994); Andrew E. Barnes, “Catholic Evangelizing in One Colonial Mission: The Institutional Evolution of Jos Prefecture, Nigeria, 1907–1954”, The Catholic Historical Review 84, 2 (April 1998): 240–62; and Elizabeth Isichei (ed.), Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria (London: Macmillan, 1982).

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work in the Muslim emirates in the 1930s, historians have yet to consider medical missions as having had any religious impact; mission institutions are seen as providers of social services.5 The conclusion that missions to Muslims were restricted has virtually closed any exploration of Muslim-Christian interactions and of Muslim Nigerians’ responses to Christian missions as religious or social institutions. The episode when the Emir of Kano refused entry to the party of Bishop Herbert Tugwell of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1900 is often cited to characterize Muslim rulers’ feelings about colonial-era Christian missions. Dr Walter Miller, a member of the Tugwell party, remembered that the missionaries’ “reception in Kano was anything but pleasant”. The Emir of Kano dismissed the party abruptly, which to Miller “did not promise well for any other emirate”. In fact, the Emir of Zaria, who had shown the missionaries friendship on their way to Kano, refused them a site after the incident in Kano.6 Although Miller enjoyed a cordial relationship with Sarkin Zaria over the next thirty years, the prevailing image in academic histories is of Muslim rulers’ hostility to Christian missions. In response to Ayandele’s suggestion that emirs “were not inherently intolerant of Christianity” but were anti-imperialists, C.N. Ubah rejected the possibility of Muslim tolerance outright on the grounds that all emirs were defenders of the faith and, being enjoined by Islam to regard apostasy as a punishable act, could not have any sympathies for Christian proselytizers.7 The model of inherent Muslim resistance to Christian missions has dominated not only Northern Nigerian historiography but also studies of Christian missions to Muslims in other colonies, most

5

Ralph Schram, A History of the Nigerian Health Services (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1971), 143–56; and C.N. Ubah, “Christian Missionary Penetration of the Nigerian Emirates, with Special Reference to the Medical Missions Approach”, The Muslim World 77 (1987): 16–27. On Muslim rulers and Christian medical missions, see Shobana Shankar, “The Social Dimensions of Christian Leprosy Work among Muslims: American Missionaries and Young Patients in Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1900–1945”, in David Hardiman (ed.), Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Africa and Asia, Clio Medica/The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, forthcoming); and Shobana Shankar, “Medical Missions and Modernizing Emirs: Government-Mission Cooperation in Leprosy Control in Colonial Hausaland in the 1930s,” unpublished manuscript. 6 Walter Miller, Reflections of a Pioneer (London: CMS, 1936), p. 38. 7 Ayandele, “Missionary Factor”, pp. 506–7; and Ubah, “Missions in the Muslim Emirates”, pp. 352–54.

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notably Sudan,8 from where the British took policies on religious separation for inclusion in the Northern Nigerian administration.9 Heather Sharkey observes that the rejection of Christ’s divinity and the treatment of conversion out as apostasy in Islamic doctrine “presented special barriers to conversion”.10 She notes that insult and persecution, not prosecution, were used to discourage conversion which occurred, albeit among the marginalized, in Sudan. Indeed, she concludes that Christian conversion, “a saga of the few” leading to a dysfunctional literacy in an inferior “missionary Arabic”, was largely forgotten by the time of independence, though nationalists revived missions in their condemnation of colonialism and as a cause of the conflict between northern Sudanese and their southern neighbors, among whom Christianity found converts.11 What interests me is the historical process of this spatialization and exteriorization of religious categories in colonial and postcolonial narratives. I explore how colonization constructed religion through the control of the spatial and social order, leaving behind a cultural geography of Northern Nigeria that scholars have tended to follow without questioning. I also suggest that conversion, however marginal or rare, provides an opportunity to study religious interaction and community formation more broadly. Conversion blurs those boundaries that even the model of encounter, as a meeting of different entities, implies. As we shall see in Inusa’s life, conversion was a process in which ambiguous boundaries became clearer, through a constellation of factors including European colonial intervention, Christian community formation, and Inusa’s changing sense of his place as a Christian leader. The data in this chapter concern the life and conversion of Inusa depicted in two original documents—a diary begun around 1910 and an autobiography written in Hausa and translated into English by a missionary in 1963.12 Inusa, a Zarma man, was born around 8 Heather Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims: The Church Missionary Society in the Northern Sudan”, Journal of African History 43 (2002): 51–75. 9 Percy Girouard to Frederick Lugard, 25 January 1908, Rhodes House Library (hereafter RHL), MSS Brit. Emp.s.63 (Lugard papers), 34. 10 Sharkey, “Christians among Muslims”, p. 53. 11 Ibid., p. 75. Sharkey quotes an Anglican Church authority speaking about Muslim conversion to Christianity as “a saga of the few”. 12 The first of the two documents is written in Inusa’s own hand and was presented to me by his daughter Hannatu Samande, an elderly woman who worked in mission circles and has lived in Jos for much of her life. The diary begins almost as

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1890 in a village near Dosso, in southwestern Niger. At the age of nineteen, he left his uncle’s home to search for dry-season employment. Just three years earlier, his father, uncle and grandfather had been killed during the French suppression of Mahdist resistance to the colonialists and their indigenous agents. Inusa migrated southwards along the railway line that had been built by the British as far as Ilorin. He first met SIM missionaries at Pategi and worked for the mission from 1910 until his death in 1972, although he had wanted to return to Dosso to settle.13 Inusa returned to his place of origin several times and, on his journey to visit his family in 1916, British and French colonial officials stopped him on both sides of the border between Northern Nigeria and French West Africa. In the tense climate after the Mahdist rebellions, officials were wary of religious itinerants, particularly those disseminating tracts. The description of this difficult passage is the central concern in the two texts discussed here, though the 1963 memoir provides much greater detail about his treks and other notable events. a long entry concerning his first years at the mission and gives details of his trip to Dosso in 1916. He later added shorter, individually dated and signed segments that cover events as late as 1943. This style of writing appears similar to that found in mission-station records, which Inusa himself kept when he was in charge of stations in the absence of foreign missionaries. The second document, found in the archives of the former Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) (still an active mission bearing the same acronym) is the English translation of Inusa’s life history. A note on the title page reveals that Albert Diamond, an SIM missionary, requested that Inusa write his account and that Diamond then translated Inusa’s Hausa version into English. This text was produced in 1963 and covers 39 pages. It is typed, with a cover page. Diamond entitled the life history “To God Be the Glory”. I have not yet been able to locate the Hausa original but the second version elaborates on many of the events noted in Inusa’s diary. Diamond’s influence on the later text can be discerned. Most notably passages from the Bible appear frequently, and Inusa’s own diary has nothing of the sort. Missionaries used the testimonies of “outstanding” African Christian exemplars in their publications, and Inusa’s story appeared in The Evangelical Christian and Missionary Witness and The Sudan Witness in the 1950s. I do not think Diamond translated Inusa’s text solely for publication for broader audiences because he retained in his translation Inusa’s criticisms of the missionaries. The stilted quality of the translation suggests that Diamond’s errors were probably more related to literalism and that we may be missing some important idiomatic references. See Chapter 3 of Shobana Shankar, “Children of the Mission in Kano Emirate: Conflicts of Conversion in Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1899–1953,” Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2003, for a reading of Inusa’s story in relation to other converts of his generation. 13 Eugenie St. Germain to Mr Percy, 7 August 1954, Sudan Interior Mission Archives (hereafter SIMA), ECWA (box) Biographical Sketches L-S, 1.

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The sources are incredibly rich and will be discussed in greater detail in the following sections. I refer to “the diary” and “the autobiography” to distinguish the two documents as I read them together alongside other sources to note similarities as well as outstanding additions in the later text. The texts are remarkable, not only for being among the earliest Romanized Hausa writings produced by a commoner. Reading them together, the diary seemingly written privately and the autobiography written for a mission audience, gives a unique picture of religious identity in very different contexts. Inusa’s conversion story also presents us the opportunity to explore the issue of belief, which has often been seen as the natural difference between Muslims and Christians. As his narratives reveal, common beliefs, in Jesus’ power and in the end of the world, existed in many religious traditions, but faith alone did not determine individual and communal identification. Religious affiliations were dynamic, their importance lessened by racial hierarchies, ethnic relations, and colonial policies in some circumstances and heightened at others in the early twentieth century in Northern Nigeria. Blurred Lines between Millennial Islam and Christianity Inusa was born in Gudel, near the Songhay town of Karma but some time before 1905 his family moved to a village closer to the Anglo-French border. Southward migration to escape French taxes had become increasingly common. New settlers founded communities like Kobkitanda, where they hoped to escape from French taxes and harassment by indigenous agents working with the colonialists. Inusa lived just ten miles from Kobkitanda, the village where violence against the French first broke out. In December 1905, two French guards from Dosso were murdered in Kobkitanda. French attempts to capture the killers and their leader, a blind Zarma cleric named Shaibu, led to violent clashes and fuelled a succession of revolts.14 According to Lovejoy and Hogendorn, the Mahdists lost about 50 fighters and Shaibu fled to Satiru near Sokoto.15 14 I have chosen to follow the orthography used in Inusa’s text. Other spellings of the cleric’s name are Shu'ayb and Saybu. 15 Paul Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism and Resistance to Colonial Rule in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1905–6”, Journal of African History 31 (1991): 220, 222.

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In 1906, the combined forces of the British and the Caliphate crushed the Mahdists at Satiru, killing scores of rebels and non-combatants. The battles made clear the real challenge the Mahdists posed to the British-Caliphate coalition and symbolized “the excruciating dilemma which faced both conquerors and conquered in those early years of revolutionary change in the process of finding a modus vivendi across a political-cultural communication barrier”.16 The danger of this moment drew the Europeans and indigenous rulers closer. Many of them were British appointees and had to worry about their legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Inusa’s family suffered during this turbulent period. He was about fifteen years old, and his father was killed when the French and loyalist armies went from town to town burning houses. He wrote: . . . they set fire to our houses, even though we had no part in the uprising. No matter, they killed and plundered, for they were athirst for revenge. It was at this time my father was killed, together with my uncle and maternal grandfather.

Inusa avowed that his family had had no connection with the murders but the French exacted retribution on whomever they saw as potential fomenters of rebellion. As Lovejoy and Hogendorn wrote: “Once the French realized the seriousness of the situation, they proceeded to round up as many clerics as possible, whether they were involved or not”.17 Inusa’s connection with the Mahdists, however, seems more intimate than his family being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His testimony about Shaibu conveys a fairly close knowledge of the cleric’s teachings and power. Inusa identified Shaibu visually, as “a tall, dark thin man” who had magic medicine that he would give to all people to make them invincible against white men. The miraculous abilities of mahdis, as leaders coming at the end of the world, are the stuff of folk knowledge spread by word of mouth.18 Yet Inusa knew even about the cleric’s family, more specifically remembering that the French killed Shaibu’s wife Jimada and that her body was

16 R.A. Adeleye, “Mahdist Triumph and British Revenge in Northern Nigeria: Satiru, 1906”, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 6, 2 (1972): 193. 17 Lovejoy and Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism”, p. 238. 18 In anti-imperial movements among non-Muslims as well, the importance of protection against European power, including arms, is noted. Reports on the Maji Maji Movement in German Tanganyika, for example, note such claims.

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burned. Whether or not Inusa was himself a follower of Shaibu, the young man’s family had connections to the scholarly community in and around Dosso. After the deaths of his father and other family members, he went to Tidirka where he lived with his uncle, a scholar. Tidirka was home to at least two important Mahdists whom the French sought to capture.19 There is another connection that may provide indirect evidence of Inusa’s affiliation with Shaibu. Inusa commented on his own skill in farming, claiming that “at hoeing there was never a time when anyone my own age ever placed his foot ahead of mine”. He contrasted this success with his poor performance in Qur"ànic studies. Inusa may have known that the cleric Shaibu also held a reputation for farming. At his trial after the Satiru Rebellion, Shaibu claimed that “he was only a Mahdi of farming, not a Mahdi of war”.20 It was said that Shaibu, his grandfather, aunt and uncle left their village close to Dosso and started Kobkitanda as an expression of their contempt for the French and the Zarmakoy, the indigenous ruler of Dosso working with the colonialists. Inusa remembered Kobkitanda as “a new town that had sprung up in the bush because many people had settled there to farm”, suggesting that Shaibu’s appeal to followers was based on peasant politics. Being blind, Shaibu possessed nonliterary charismatic powers including ventriloquism and prophecy. The millennialist message at the heart of Shaibu’s anti-imperial Mahdism must have shaped Inusa’s wish to preach about the prophet 'Ìsà, whose return Muslims, like Christians, anticipated. The second coming of Christ was a subject that Reverend Samuel Crowther of the Church Missionary Society found eagerly discussed in scholarly circles in Muslim Nupe country in the nineteenth century.21 There 19 Lovejoy and Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism,” pp. 236, 238. The main Mahdist, Aman Beri, was at one time thought more important than Shaibu. He was imprisoned for three years. Interestingly, Inusa mentions in his autobiography that he visited the chief scholar in Tidirka. He entered into religious discussions with this scholar, named Jirbani Hangaberi. I cannot yet offer any insight as to whether this man had any connections with Mahdists in Tidirka but, according to Inusa’s account, he attempted to instruct the malam about Jesus. Further research is needed to identify individual actors in the Dosso Mahdist uprising. 20 Lovejoy and Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism”, pp. 235, 234. The authors continue to say that the distinction is not clear but probably had to do with Shaibu’s denial of his status as the true Mahdi. 21 See, for example, Samuel Crowther and Reverend J.C. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger: Journals and Notices of the Native Missionaries Accompanying the Niger Expedition of 1857–1859 (London: Dawsons, 1859), p. 161.

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were many kinds of Mahdist belief in Northern Nigeria. Asma"u Saeed identifies three different groups: Ansar, who were followers of the Mahdi in Sudan; spontaneous Mahdis, like Shaibu; and those who believed that the Mahdi would appear to guide the faithful but had not yet done so.22 Most Muslims were in this latter group, Saeed suggests, and many among the British mistook any type of millennialism as anti-colonial. We may instead view expectancy as a part of mainstream Muslim belief that at different times, especially during European occupation, became more important.23 Lamin Sanneh observes that “millennialism has its own history” in Africa which Muslim, traditional, and Christian prophetic movements have transformed into less urgent beliefs and practices. Islamic and Christian metaphors of flight, prophecy and renewal shaped philosophies of violent uprooting and, out of these, Sanneh continues, sustainable religious practices, including pilgrimage, new emphases in regular worship, and new sects.24 Heterodoxies in the twentieth century may be evidence of this historical millennialism. Jesus-center sects are scattered throughout Hausaland as well, the most commonly cited example being the Isawa. In interviews with Christian converts descended from the Isawa in Zaria, Ian Linden found that the sect traced its history to Malam Ibràhìm, a scholar whose reading of the Qur"àn led him to reject Mu˙ammad as God’s chosen prophet and to raise Jesus ('Ìsà) to that status instead.25 In this way, Ibràhìm’s teachings differed from those of other Muslim scholars who anticipated the second coming of the Prophet Mu˙ammad and expected 'Ìsà to return to fight the forces of evil first. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of many such Mahdist-type currents, some of which were turned

22 Asma"u Saeed, “British Fears over Mahdism in Northern Nigeria: A Look at Bormi 1903, Satiru 1906 and Dumbulwa 1923”, manuscript in School for Oriental and African Studies Library Special Collections, Jean Boyd Collection, PP MS 36/SP/15–24, Box 15, item 22 a–d. 23 Adeleye, “Mahdist Triumph”, pp. 194–5. 24 Lamin Sanneh, “Comparative Millennialism in Africa: Continuities and Variations on the Canon”, in Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (eds.), Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 234–61. 25 Ian Linden, “The Isawa Mallams c. 1850–1919: Some Problems in the Religious History of Northern Nigeria”, seminar paper presented at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, 1971. See also his essay “Between Two Religions of the Book: The Children of the Israelites (c. 1846–c. 1920)”, in Isichei, Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria.

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against the hegemony of the Sokoto Caliphate. Ibràhìm’s questioning of Mu˙ammad’s prophetic authority evoked a very strong reaction from Abdullahi, the Emir of Kano, who ordered his execution. His followers fled, and the Isawa descendants in the twentieth century sought out Dr Walter Miller of the Church Missionary Society in Zaria. Linden believed that the pre-Christian history of this sect remained difficult to ascertain because of conversion and missionary bias in reports on Isawa thought. Inusa’s narratives as well as other SIM reports on Isawa suggest that currents of 'Ìsà-center thought were not only in evidence in Zaria. In parts of Kano, Katsina and Bauchi emirates, too, Isawa communities as well as other heterodox sects have existed and continue to maintain their distinct beliefs. They have garnered the interest of Christian missionaries who see in these sects a natural predisposition to Christian conversion.26 In Kano and Bauchi, most Isawa have not converted to Christianity or to other Islamic sects because they consider themselves reformists and practitioners of a purer Islam. Inusa, coming from the scene of the Mahdist uprising just three years earlier, found the Christian missionaries’ teaching about Jesus attractive. In 1909–1910, Inusa traveled together with Audu, a Zarma acquaintance, from Jebba to Pategi in Northern Nigeria. There, Inusa took a job as a “boy” to the native assistant to the telegraph clerk, while Audu became a stable boy for an SIM missionary. Inusa was contemplating studying with a Nupe malam (Muslim scholar, plural: malamai ) when his friend Audu mentioned the missionaries’ preaching. To shi Audu yana kawo mani labarin da ya shike ji daga Mission watau labarin Isa yana ta gaya mani Isa mai cheto . . . na che haka? Ashe Turawa sun bi Allah har da wazi ya che mani i haka wata rana ka zo ka ji wazi don kan ka. Ni kwa na tafi har na ji da kaina bayan wannan kwa na yi nufi in tafi mission in zamna don in kara ji labarin kuma in koiya karatu.

26 SIM station reports from Matazu and Roni include descriptions of treks to Isawa villages by white missionaries in the late 1930s and 1940s. Nigerian Christian evangelists also attempted to evangelize the Isawa. Reverend Panya Baba, the onetime General Secretary of the Evangelical Missionary Society, the African proselytism wing, wrote “Nigeria’s Isawas: Muslims Who Follow Jesus”, for a Christian newsletter entitled Africa Pulse in June 1980. He described Isawa beliefs and practices including the absence of Mu˙ammad’s name in Isawa prayers, the wearing of white and the very strict separation of the sexes. This particular Isawa community had had contact with missionaries but was unimpressed by both Christian and mainstream Muslim teachings.

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shobana shankar Audu brought me the news that he had heard at the Mission, the news of 'Ìsà. He told me that 'Ìsà is our salvation. I said, “What? You mean white people follow God and even preach?” He told me, “Yes, one day, you come and listen to the preaching for yourself.” I went to hear it for myself, and after that, I decided that I would go to the mission and stay in order to hear more and learn to read.

European religiosity came as a shock to Inusa—whites as anything other than soldiers was, at this time of violence, unthinkable. While his diary simply registers surprise, further explanation of attitudes towards Europeans is given in Inusa’s autobiography. Speaking of Shaibu’s power to incite revolt against the French, Inusa declared: “At that time, if our people heard of an opportunity of driving out the white man, they would give themselves completely to that cause, they hated to be ruled by the French”. Distinctions between the missionaries and political officials, or between French and British sides, were not significant, if perceived at all, to the newly colonized subjects. It is therefore difficult to separate sentiments against whites as colonizers and as Christians, but Inusa’s writings suggest that Europeans were regarded primarily as irreligious and militarily powerful, not as followers of a false religion. Of course Europeans themselves found the distinctions between missionaries and colonizers to be of much greater importance. Tensions ran high between colonial officials and missionaries who felt that the British recognized the rights of Muslim African subjects before those of Christian missionaries. Officials themselves were divided on the issue, with some arguing that “the absence of [Christian] ministers is . . . freely commented on by the better class of Moslems, especially those who have visited Tripoli and Egypt and have become accustomed to assume that the European nations are not without a religion which they respect”. On the other hand, some officers in the Muslim emirates argued that governmental support for the missionaries would show Christianity to be the religion of the British and contradict the imperial image of tolerance.27

27

Resident Zaria Gowers to C.L. Temple, Acting Governor of Northern Provinces, 10 June 1912, Arewa House 15227, file “CMS Question of Allowing Them to Establish in Kano or General Question of Missionary Propaganda in NP”. The SIM found a completely different situation in the French territory, where colonial officials introduced indigenous rulers to missionaries, making it explicit that the Christian workers were distinct from the government and “had come to do good”. A. Stirrett to Mr Trout, 28 February 1931, SIMA CB-1/A.

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The relationship between the missions and the government mattered less than the actual teachings of Christianity for those Northern Nigerians who were interested in religious ideas. Like Muslims, the early missionaries to colonial Northern Nigeria had expectations of the imminent resurrection of 'Ìsà, expectations that had moved them to spread the Christian gospel to the multitudes before that time. As a young man, Walter Miller, the CMS’s chief missionary in the Muslim North, had served one year as secretary of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), which had as its early slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation”.28 Christian millennialism had also influenced the SIM founders, including Rowland Bingham, who had heeded the urgent mission call of A.B. Simpson, an influential pastor and teacher in Toronto and later in the United States.29 The very creation of interdenominational church organizations, like the SIM and the Sudan United Mission that were both focused on the “unreached” in the African interior, were founded on pre-millennialist ideas.30 The Biblical inspiration of SIM missiology and preaching appealed to converted and unconverted Muslim Northern Nigerians alike, who saw the Injila, or New Testament, as God’s word “filled with light”.31 The SIM’s teachings about Christ found a sympathetic listener in Inusa, who gave up the idea of studying with the Nupe malam.32 As he worked for Dudley at Karu, Inusa recalled: I also had the opportunity of hearing from him about Jesus, until I understood about salvation. At this time I sought with all my heart how to believe and follow Jesus. Ever since Audu told me to come . . . and I heard then the words of Jesus, I agreed that this was the right religion but lack of understanding prevented me from accepting him. 28 David K. Strong, “The Smokey Horizon: Moving Beyond the American Experience in Filipino Mission”, Journal of Asian Mission 2, 2 (2000): 183; and Andrew Porter, “Evangelical Enthusiasm, Missionary Motivation and West Africa in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Career of G.W. Brooke”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 6, 1 (1977): 38. 29 Yusufu Turaki, Theory and Practice of Christian Missions in Africa: A Century of SIM/ ECWA History and Legacy in Nigeria, 1893–1993 (Nairobi: International Bible Society Africa, 1999), pp. 80–1. 30 Strong, “Smokey Horizon”, p. 184. The author makes this point about the formation of new boards in the US and lists several other examples besides the SIM. The Sudan United Mission too had millennial roots in the beliefs of Karl Kumm, its founder, and his wife, Lucy Guinness Kumm. 31 Report by missionary Howard Borlase, citing words of Emir of Gwandu, n.d., SIMA, Jega Station Records SR-15/A, Miscellaneous 1947–1981. 32 It is worth noting that not long before, in 1902, Nupeland had seen its own Mahdist movement led by Malam Maizanna. Adeleye, “Mahdist Triumph”, p. 195.

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The belief in Jesus as a prophet was there but accepting the doctrine of Christ’s divinity was a step that took time for Inusa. Interestingly, there is no reference to the Trinity or to the Holy Spirit in either of Inusa’s writings. It took four years, in which time Inusa learned to read Romanized Hausa, for him to receive baptism, a length of time that was not inordinately long compared to other converts of Inusa’s time with a Muslim background.33 The missionaries’ skepticism about Inusa’s readiness for baptism may have been a response to his first trip home in 1913, a trip from which missionaries thought he would not return. He recalled that at the Paiko station “everybody was amazed to see me, for they had thought I had gone away for good”. After his return, he was baptized and in 1915 he married Rifkatu, his first wife, to whom he had been engaged since October 1911. Clearly baptism had to precede Christian marriage in the SIM. Inusa’s religious status may have continued to be ambiguous. His statement about his wedding is somewhat confusing: “it was only in the year 1915, January 22, that we married at Minna when I was in the mission”. (Emphasis added. The Hausa appears as Ama sai da shekara ta 1915 ga January 22 muka yi aure a Minna lokachin ina chikin mission.) The distinction Inusa made, I suspect, was between being a worker at the station, of whom there were many, and a member of the mission recognized by the white authorities. The significance of baptism lay not in one’s faith but in the changed relationship between convert and missionary. Policing the Boundaries between Muslims and Christians Inusa’s journeys to Dosso confirm that his identification with Christianity did not cut him off from Muslims, but his descriptions also suggest that the maintenance of his familial and communal ties became more difficult. Both the French and the British remained tense after the violence at Dosso and Satiru. The inability to block borders and prevent subversive ideas from moving across them was especially troubling and a cause of accusations of ineptitude on both sides.

33 I have compared data on times to the baptism of Muslim converts in different parts of Northern Nigeria and, taking ten to twenty confirmable conversions, Inusa’s four years to baptism is much less than others, who took typically ten to twelve years to receive the rite.

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Each time Inusa traveled from mission stations in Northern Nigeria to Dosso, he took with him parts of the scriptures translated into Arabic. There were very few portions of the Bible translated into Hausa34 and the Roman script was unfamiliar to most. Inusa wanted to sell these texts as he crossed through the areas around Sokoto and into Dosso. Around Sokoto, especially, he hoped to reach scholars for whom books were a highly-valued but rare item. These texts, however, merely generated laughter among the ordinary people at Dosso. Inusa listened to their jeers about his having been away for years and bringing nothing to show other than a few books. Contrary to his statement about wanting to sell the books, Inusa wrote that he distributed them among the malamai in his town in 1913. While the texts seemed to make little impact, Inusa believed that his preaching and new-found knowledge impressed people in his hometown. He talked about learning the new kind of writing and also preached about salvation through Jesus. The womenfolk in the town tried, Inusa recounted, to arrange a marriage for him and keep him in Dosso but he told them of his fiancée and the Christian practice of monogamy. Regardless of the reliability of these reminiscences about this first trip to Dosso, which appear only in the second document, produced for a mission audience, the issue of bookselling is confirmed by diary entries written at the time of, or shortly after, his trek in 1916. In both texts, Inusa noted his selling of books on his second journey to Dosso. He carried with him two kinds of books, littatafai (the generic Hausa word for books) and Babali da ran shari’a, an Arabic pamphlet containing scripture translations under the title “The Day of Judgment”. I have yet to confirm what the Hausa word for book might have signified in the early twentieth century but there were probably many kinds of books in circulation. As one Muslim Hausa scholar remembered, booksellers, being few in number in a given market, typically had large quantities of texts. Sellers often took whatever opportunity they could to purchase books in bulk and made some returns on their investments by loaning out texts for copying.35 34

Some of the Gospels were translated into Hausa and printed in separate sections as of 1910. The missions, as a body, tried to standardize translation efforts. It was only in the 1930s that the Hausa Bible was completed, thanks to the efforts of a number of missionaries from different societies. 35 Alhaji Mahmadu Koki, Kano Malam, edited and translated by Neil Skinner (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1977), pp. 35–6.

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Inusa had ready buyers for the texts on his second trip. In his diary, he carefully noted the number of texts he sold. Before reaching Dosso, he had sold ten books in the town of Kontagora alone, in addition to three in Yelwa and two in Birnin Kebbi. The money was good since each book cost three shillings, his weekly pay as Dudley’s helper. More important than the money however, his status as a bookseller gave Inusa an opening into scholarly communities. His unfinished Qur"ànic education would have limited his ability to converse in depth and debate with malamai. Booksellers typically hailed from scholarly backgrounds but, according to one malam, “probably their education was not very deep and they weren’t good enough to be teachers themselves”.36 With machine-printed texts not yet widely available, Christian colportage actually helped Inusa fit into a Muslim hierarchy. Inusa’s ability to move among Muslims went undetected for nearly a month, after which he was summoned by the French commandant in Dosso. The officer had received word from the commandant of Gaya, on the border, where the latter had inspected Inusa’s bag. The French officer at Dosso refused to allow Inusa to preach and stated that he could remain in town on the condition that he convert back to Islam. Inusa refused and a native soldier was called to escort him to the Nigerian side of the Anglo-French border. When the soldier and Inusa went to the Zarmakoy, the chief of Dosso, no help was offered. Looking back on this when he wrote his autobiography, Inusa recalled: “He [the Zarmakoy] never did anything to help me stay in my own country but just acquiesced to the dictates of the Commandant”. After paying his respects to his grandfather, whom he never saw again, Inusa departed, accompanied by the gendarme. Inusa, with his loads being carried by his younger brother Zarafi and another man named Kori, was escorted to the border and the three made their way through several villages before reaching the town of Birnin Kebbi. In what appears to have been a standard procedure for controlling the movement of strangers, Sarkin Birnin Kebbi, without any interrogation or interview, ordered the travelers to be taken to the local British District Officer (DO). The British defended the policy of monitoring the migration of strangers into

36

Koki, p. 35.

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Muslim towns as a public-health measure.37 Inusa’s experience makes clear, however, that surveillance served other political interests. The District Officer asked Inusa questions about his origin and destination, and Inusa showed him a letter from Dr Andrew Stirrett, head of the SIM at Wushishi. This letter, Inusa remembered, incensed the DO, who began to abuse Inusa and the mission. “Who gave you permission to enter here to preach and even sell tracts in Gwandu, that is Muslim land?” Inusa remembered hearing. Forced to display the contents of his bag, Inusa showed the books to the DO. The DO turned to two clerks standing with him and asked them to read. They were unable to, and the DO asked Inusa to read aloud. What he read we are not sure but he wrote that after they listened to him reading aloud, each of the two clerks purchased a book before he was sent back to Sarkin Birnin Kebbi. In his memories of this ordeal, Inusa felt that the European officials were the cause of his poor treatment. He expressed unhappiness with the way in which the Zarmakoy yielded to European orders, but the futility of resistance to the colonialists’ power, on his part or that of the indigenous rulers, only became clearer. After he returned to the palace of Sarkin Birnin Kebbi, two guards were dispatched immediately to rush Inusa to the Resident of Sokoto, who collected Inusa’s belongings and refused to allow him to spend the night anywhere in town other than in the jail. Inusa stayed outside the town and the next day waited until three in the afternoon for an interview. After questioning Inusa about his reasons for coming to Muslim territory to preach about Almasihu (Hausa: Messiah), the Resident asked that the Sultan of Sokoto send a policeman to escort Inusa to the border of kasar Sarkin Musulmi, the Sultan’s territory. Inusa and his companions were forced out of town by mounted police, marching until they reached Ambursa where they spent the night. Stopping only to sleep and not even to eat, they continued the next day “as prisoners, being treated worse than criminals”, Inusa complained. Finally, he sent his brother and friend back to Dosso. At Daraga, between the Sultan’s domain and that of Sarkin Kontagora, the guard left Inusa, with his books back in his possession.

37 See, for example, sections related to public health in E.J. Arnett, Gazetteers of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria (London: Frank Cass, 1972).

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Inusa’s activities were threatening to the European officials for several reasons. Memories of the uprisings of 1905–1906 were still fresh and would remain a source of fear into the late 1920s. The circulation of religious tracts was especially worrisome, particularly since escaped Mahdists reportedly remained active through literary activities.38 Inusa’s trip through Kontagora, Yelwa and Sokoto took him right through areas that had seen millennialist uprisings less than ten years earlier.39 British officials, in particular, felt that the “great majority” of Nigerian Muslims were “religious-minded” and might take interest in any revivalist preaching, including Mahdist sermons or “the presentation of the Christianity of the missionaries [that] presumably takes on the character of preaching the religion of Isa”.40 Religious intercourse was just too dangerous due to what was seen by the British as the inability of Muslims to separate their intellectual or cultural interests from religious ones.41 The lack of will on the part of the indigenous authorities to enforce the separation between Muslims and Christians confirmed European beliefs about the religious naivety of African Muslims, but also revealed colonizers’ fears that indirect rulers might not participate in maintaining the divisions that seemed so natural to the social landscape of the emirates. Around the time of Inusa’s trek, the Sultan had been enforcing the political boundaries of his territory. In 1915, the Sokoto Native Authority forced a number of refugees who were reportedly trying to escape French military conscription back across the border. The following year, several Tuareg leaders of uprisings in French territory came to Sokoto seeking the Sultan’s protection, but he arrested them and sent them back.42 But just as important as the political boundaries were the religious ones. The demarcation of the boundary between Sokoto, the seat of the Sultan, and Kontagora, 38

Lovejoy and Hogendorn, “Revolutionary Mahdism”, p. 239. Adeleye, “Mahdist Triumph”, p. 195. 40 Memo from Secretary of the Northern Provinces to all Residents Northern Provinces, 29 September 1927, Public Records Office, CO 583/152/6, 3, 6. 41 In a recent article, Paul Landau offers an engaging consideration of the missionary influence in academic scholars’ use of the category of religion. This is a useful starting point but his discussion mentions little on Islamic Africa. Given that Islam has its own scriptural claim to truth and catalogue of difference, exploring its intersections with Christianity in various African contexts would enrich our understanding of the historicity of religion, as Landau does using examples mostly from Southern Africa. Paul Landau, “Religion and Christian Conversion in African History: A New Model”, Journal of Religious History 23, 1 (February 1999): 8–30. 42 “Sokoto Province”, Arnett, Gazetteers of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, p. 54. 39

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which had a religiously mixed population under a Fulani since 1864, is significant because it conformed to a pre-colonial Caliphal pattern. Removing Inusa from Sokoto to the border was meant to maintain the sanctity of Sokoto as a Muslim space according to “tradition”, while confirming the Sultan as the protector of Islam and the British as the protectors of the Sultan. The decision about Inusa was also a preventive measure that the British saw as their responsibility. The words of Resident Lonsdale of Bauchi Province show how many officers saw their role. Whatever may be urged as to our own religious toleration it should not be forgotten that the same cannot be said of the Moslem faith and principles; moreover, I have always doubted the measure of tolerance exhibited by missionaries.43

Protecting tolerance meant vigilance on the part of the British to prevent the friction that would inevitably arise in any encounter between Muslims and Christians. Policing the activities of ordinary people like Inusa was a drama played out to reaffirm British impartiality and enlightenment as well as the allegiance between the Resident and the Sultan. Yet for Inusa, the European officials were anything but fair; they, not the Muslim officials, were his tormentors. From the murder of his family members to his banishment from his own home, Inusa saw that Europeans used their power in brutal ways. His views differed from those of white Christian missionaries who declared that the government had used “peace and security” as mere excuses to deny Christians freedom.44 The important distinction is that Inusa was equally critical of the injustices that he perceived the missionaries, as the white authorities, had perpetrated. Upon his return to Northern Nigeria, Inusa found himself with no money to pay carriers for his loads and no help from the SIM missionaries. Although one, Mr. Hein, who was at Wushishi, listened to Inusa’s story and gave him 5 shillings, he found a completely different situation at Minna. . . . chikin turawan da ke minna ba wanda ya nuna mani alheri ko na anini haka Paiko haka Idda kuma ba wanda ya nuna mani alheri sai bachin zuchiya.

43 Resident Bauchi to Lieutenant Governor, Northern Provinces, 9 September 1918, Arewa House File 15227. 44 Minutes of Missionary Conference in Lokoja, 1910, International Conference of Missions/Conference of British Mission Societies collection, UCLA Young Research Library, fiche 100, p. 2.

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shobana shankar Of the Europeans at Minna, not one showed me any kindness worth even a tenth of a penny, and the same was true at Paiko and Idda, not one person showed me kindness, only irritation.

Diamond translated Inusa’s recollections of the missionaries’ reactions: “. . . they did not seem to believe me. They did not take much notice of me, let alone listen to my story or even believe it”. Another insult came when Dr Stirrett, upon hearing of Inusa’s trials, merely said, “Quite so, quite so”. The doctor refused to lend him 5 shillings and advised Inusa to ask his “brother” Yakubu, whom the missionary noted had lots of money. Yakubu, a labourer, lent him the money. Stirrett’s words, which rankled Inusa so much that he wrote about them in both accounts and related them to other missionaries,45 demonstrate that a common religious affiliation did not outweigh the mission’s racial hierarchy. SIM rules dictated that missionaries were expected to “encourage the natives in industry and self support”46 but clearly some missionaries, like Hein, felt that lending an African Christian money did not constitute a lapse. While Stirrett may have been an exception, the more revealing evidence of racial boundaries was Inusa’s own sense that the missionaries had slighted him. He perceived injustices committed by both the European colonial authorities and the missionaries, without regard to religious affiliation. The boundary between Islam and Christianity was therefore not “natural”, as European observers might have assumed, but this is not to say that boundaries did not exist. Inusa discussed the derisive reaction to the Bible tracts in Dosso. A more important difference in Inusa’s narratives was that between the Zarma community and the Fulani. In the later document, Inusa recounted an interaction with an imam in the mosque of a Fulani village. Inusa and the man greeted one another respectfully, and Inusa laid out his books. The man, addressing him as sidi, asked if the texts were from the east. Inusa explained that he was a Christian and, in response to the man’s question about Inusa’s origin, the latter answered Dosso. The Fulani immediately became hostile and demanded that Inusa leave the mosque, exclaiming, “Are not all Dosso people infidels? Did they

45 Eugenie St. Germain to Mr Percy, 7 August 1954. It seems that these two missionaries were discussing Inusa’s ordeal in advance of an article that was to be published about him in the Sudan Witness in 1955. 46 Practices and Principles of the African Industrial Mission, 1903, SIMA, Pamphlets, SIM History. This was one of the early names of the Sudan Interior Mission.

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not go to war against the Shehu dan Fodio? Did they not refuse his flag?” Inusa understood perfectly that the Zarma had been a thorn in the flesh of the Fulani because of resistance to the jihad. Because of this history, Inusa wrote: There is a natural dislike between the Filani and the Zabarmawa [Hausa for Zarma people]. They would not even give us a drink of water or a place to lay our head. They always remembered the trouble our people caused them. That is why we were called infidels and driven away, because our people had refused to follow Shehu.

The Fulani incursion into Zarma country and the ensuing resistance to the Caliphate occurred in the context of jihad,47 but for Inusa, the mutual hatred was not about religious differences, either among Muslims or between Muslims and Christians. “It was not because I was a follower of Jesus,” he explained, “but because we as a people were hated by the Filani [sic]”. While the lines between religious communities were mutable, those between whites and blacks, Fulani and Zarma, invaders and subjects, were not. It is debatable whether these differences were any more natural than others, given that history and violence shaped these animosities in concrete ways. Yet the significant point is that religious difference was not paramount for Inusa as well as those with whom he had contact at this time in Northern Nigerian history. In the next section, I take up the question of how religious affiliation overshadowed racial identity. Religious Communion over Race: The Transformation of a Mission Station into a Christian Community Inusa’s crossing of boundaries—religious and political—continued throughout his life. He maintained, for example, links with Dosso, both by trying to return again in 1934 and by regularly visiting his brothers Zarafi and Jibo as well as others from home. As we saw earlier, he provided material support for his kin, not only in the form of books but also in money, cloth and seed tobacco. Inusa

47 P.K. Tibenderana, Sokoto Province under British Rule (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1988), p. 2; R.A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies (London: Longman, 1971), pp. 52–3, 68; and H.A.S. Johnstone, The Fulani Empire of Sokoto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 151.

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seems to have had the idea of settling at home but found it impossible for reasons he did not explain. His connection with non-kin Muslims also continued. At Karu, when Inusa was working without missionary oversight, he made brief entries in his diary detailing the livestock trade with local Fulani. In his autobiography, Inusa mentioned that he visited Fulani camps to distribute medicines as well. Surely Inusa found these cattle Fulani different from the Sokoto Fulani and others who looked down on the Zarma; as a relatively well-paid employee of the Europeans, his reputation and social standing would no doubt have been higher on and around mission stations than when he was travelling far out of the area. Instead of long-distance trekking, which he gave up or did not record after his trip home, familial networks around the mission community became more important. After his first wife Rifkatu died, Inusa got married again, to Biamuradi, the matron of the girls’ school at Wushishi. The two each had their own children and they also fostered numerous others, including the children of Muslims. The couple also fostered Zarafi’s son, Garba, who came to live at the mission station in 1934. Inusa brought the boy back with him because Zarafi had died.48 The exchange of first-born children between adult siblings is a common practice, which some Northern Nigerians explain as a measure to prevent the eldest children from being spoiled; parents and their first-born children have an avoidance relationship. Fostering also maintains linkages between family members who live in different areas and may have disparate wealth. Thus it is a kind of leveler of differences. In Inusa’s case we do not know if the brothers had planned for Garba to live with his uncle before the younger man’s death, but it is clear that the brothers’ relationship was maintained and the elder brother acted as a patron to his younger siblings. Garba, who was raised a Muslim, became a Christian under Inusa’s tutelage. After serving with the British army in World War II, Garba married Inusa’s second daughter Saratu, in conformity with another common familial practice in and around Hausaland, first-cousin marriage. The couple entered into service for the SIM close to Inusa. Similarly, his eldest daughter, Hannatu, married a Christian convert from Chad, who worked in Jos at the SIM’s press. 48 Wushishi Resume 3rd quarter 1940, SIMA, Wushishi Resumes 1934–45, SR-32/A.

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It was, in part, simply a matter of growing older and having children that settled Inusa into Christian service in the immediate surroundings. Yet the insularity of the mission world was a product of the boundaries created and enforced by the colonial ban on missions to Muslims. Although these were nominally lifted and medical missions were allowed into the emirates by the 1930s, Muslim and British authorities scrupulously shepherded mission societies in the placement of new mission institutions in or near rural Maguzawa or non-Muslim Hausa communities or in mixed urban areas that Muslims began to avoid.49 The missionaries, wanting to take advantage of new openings, largely conformed to the parameters set by the authorities. The early ban on missions to Muslims worked to change the methods of evangelism, and even native evangelists increasingly worked within institutional guidelines. More and more evangelists worked as church leaders, not as grass-roots activists. Herein lay the factor that seems to have changed Inusa’s relationship with the white missionaries and his identity in the Christian community, the search for autonomy and religious legitimacy. The parts of Inusa’s autobiography not relating to his youth as a Muslim and his treks are devoted to discussing his struggles and reconciliation with the SIM missionaries. What seems to have been the most profound crisis was the missionaries’ reassignment of Inusa from Karu to the Wushishi station in 1930. About his leaving Wushishi, he devoted one page of his diary to the following succinct entry. Na bar Karu January 15, 1930 Na tashi daga Karu na koma Wushishi da zama na kwa isa Wushishi February 1930. Samuila Inusa [I left Karu and returned to Wushishi for good. I arrived in Wushishi in February 1930].

Inusa’s description of the circumstances in the life history is more telling. He remembered: In my heart there was a fight going on for I did not want to leave Karu. It had been my plan that if I ever left Karu, it would only be to return to my own country. It became a real tug of war between the Mission authorities and myself. 49

See Shankar, “Children of the Mission in Kano Emirate”, Chapters 5–7.

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Inusa explained the missionaries’ decision on his assignment in Wushishi as part of their placement of Yepwi, an indigene of Karu, to oversee the station. Yet this replacement surely frustrated Inusa, for he noted that when he was in charge of Karu, it was Yepwi’s half-hearted conversion and backsliding that made “it very hard to win souls for Christ”. This young man apparently fell for the temptation of marriage to a second wife arranged by the Chief of Karu, a gift of a horse, and the promise of a titled position.50 Perhaps as a way of explaining his anger, Inusa revealed in his autobiographical testimony the lure of marriage in Dosso and affiliation with notable malamai that he had resisted as a young man trekking for evangelism. There is a focus on sin in Inusa’s second text that is entirely absent in his diary. This may have resulted from Inusa’s own reflections or his attempt to appeal to the themes stressed in missionaries’ sermons and writings. These purposes were not necessarily unconnected, for Inusa’s discussion of temptation to sin may have been a means of demonstrating to a missionary audience the trials and sacrifices of a native evangelist. Having Christian missionaries understand these hardships was of special concern to evangelists after the 1940s when Nigerians made a greater push for the ordination of African pastors. Workers like Inusa had performed the critical work of the mission, including the adoption and rearing of children, including Muslim children, who came into SIM care, interpreting and translating, and manual labor,51 in addition to preaching, but they were not vested with religious authority by the mission. By the late 1920s, the SIM had begun to establish formal schools for the education of young Christian Nigerians as well as Bible training schools for adults,52 but the first African Christian leaders were not organized formally until 1945 when a group of native evangelists formed the African Missionary Society (AMS). The name was later changed to the Evangelical Missionary Society.53 This group was still, however, in its early years under white missionary authority.

50

“Yepwi”, Sudan Witness 31, 3 (May–June 1955): 4. Wushishi Resume 1st Quarter Resume 1953, SIMA, Wushishi Resumes 1946–68, SR-32/A. 52 Turaki, Theory and Practice, pp. 295–6. 53 Ibid., pp. 491–505. 51

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Dr Stirrett represented the views of many SIM missionaries when he cautiously agreed to license African Christians to administer the sacraments as long as the mission continued to have oversight over the personnel granting licenses.54 African pastors were not actually ordained until 1954. This landmark coincided with negotiations for the recognition of the Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA) as a church body separate from the SIM. Inusa was not made a pastor until 1956. Inusa did not mention the formation of ECWA; instead he referred to his selection for ordination by the Gbari District Church Council, an indirect reference to ECWA—and not SIM— as the party responsible for this honor. While racial differences may not have entirely disappeared, the institutionalization of ECWA shaped a different relationship between white missionaries and black converts. Pastors now answered to African authorities, a significant factor in changing the mission hierarchy. Ordination helped foster a more equal relationship between black and white Christians. While we read about Inusa becoming a pastor, we do not find any mention of independence and Inusa’s autobiography ends with his ordination as well as a warm mention of several missionaries, in stark contrast to the bitterness with which he remembered the circumstances after his trek (in both documents). “It is now thirty-three years since I left Karu to take up work at Wushishi. During these years it has been my joy to work side by side in the Gospel with Miss E.A. Clark, Miss E.L. St. Germain and Miss L.A. Kibby.” He may have enjoyed a better relationship with these women missionaries at the girls’ school than with some of the male missionaries in earlier times, but the strongest sentiment is the mutuality of the work at Wushishi. This point in the narrative is the most illustrative of Christian communion. Religious Identity and Histories of Encounter Written fifty years apart but about many of the same historical events, the two texts of Inusa’s conversion give us a sense of how ambiguities and anecdotes come alive as a narrative of Muslim-Christian encounter in the retelling of stories to different audiences. Religious

54

Handwritten note, n.d., SIMA, Correspondence AP Stirrett 1925–1948.

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identity, I want to suggest, emerged over the course of a lifetime impacted by colonial occupation, racial hierarchies, ethnic conflict and the process of aging. If I have overemphasized the malleability of lines between Islam and Christianity in the “millennial moment” at the time of European invasion and afterwards, my goal has been to consider religion as historical and theology as shaped by the priorities of the times in which people find themselves. While difference is critical, an equally important subject of study should be how the formation of religious communities minimized certain disparities. The fact that Inusa became rooted in a Christian community contributed in some measure to the lessening in importance of his pluralistic approach to living between Islam and Christianity. By focusing on the demarcation of religious communities, I have attempted, in a sense, to explain how Inusa’s texts became “Christian narratives”, one located in a mission archive in the United States and the other with surviving family members who are outstanding figures in the Christian community in Jos. The religious definition of these spaces is itself a result of the dynamics of colonial-era Christian evangelism in Northern Nigeria. Reading history across boundaries, physical and cultural, and not as local or communal, provides some insight into how divisions between Muslims and Christians have been produced and reproduced.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE TIME OF CONVERSION: CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS AMONG THE SEREER-SAFÈN OF SENEGAL, 1914–1950S1 James F. Searing Introduction There are moments when conversion is “in the air”, to borrow a phrase from Robin Horton.2 This chapter explores such a moment for the Sereer-Safèn, an ethnic minority in the Thiès region of Senegal, whose pre-colonial ethnic identity was defined in opposition to Wolof culture.3 The Safèn rejected monarchy, Islam and slavery, all features of Wolof culture. They lived in village communities governed by the elders of maternal clans and ritual specialists who controlled spirit shrines. Conversion followed Wolof conquest, military recruitment during World War I, outbreaks of bubonic plague and cash-crop production for the world market, but is not easily linked to these events. An important Catholic mission station was established at Popenguine in 1885, the main colonial port of trade for the Safèn 1 I would like to thank the Fulbright Program for a grant that permitted the fieldwork, carried out in 2002, that is cited in this chapter. I also give particular thanks to Babacar Faye, who served as my assistant, to my wife, Patricia Hickling, who was present for most of the interviews and contributed suggestions and ideas throughout, and to the imam of Bandia, the late Babacar N’Dione (d. August 2003), who is cited here and was supportive of my research for many years. I also thank all the Safèn informants who shared their time and knowledge. 2 Robin Horton, “On the Rationality of Conversion, Part I”, Africa 45, 3 (1975): 220 for one reference to this phrase, which figured importantly in the debate between Horton and Humphrey J. Fisher. The first publication was Robin Horton, “African Conversion”, Africa 41, 2 (1971), which provoked a response. See Humphrey J. Fisher, “Conversion Reconsidered: Some Historical Aspects of Religious Conversion in Black Africa”, Africa 43, 1 (1973). Horton’s two-part article was a rejoinder, Part I, cited above and Robin Horton, “On the Rationality of Conversion, Part II”, Africa 45, 4 (1975): 373–99. Fisher restated his own position in Humphrey J. Fisher, “The Juggernaut’s Apologia: Conversion to Islam in Black Africa”, Africa 55, 2 (1985): 153–73. 3 I refer to Wolof culture rather than Wolof society or Wolof monarchy, to underline the encompassing nature of the opposition. Safèn informants stressed their

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district. Popenguine remains a Catholic religious center and the site of an important pilgrimage at Pentecost, but surrounding Safèn villages are today affiliated with the Tijàniyya Sufi order in Tivaouane. Socially, conversion was a rebellion led by young men from 1914 onwards against their elders. The young men triumphed, overturning the system of matrilineal inheritance in one generation. But why did the Safèn convert to Islam rather than Catholicism? This outcome was not inevitable. This chapter explores the theme of conversion through interviews with the first generation of converts, including Muslim scholars and the leader of the Catholic community at Popenguine. The most respected Muslim leader in the district, Babacar N’Dione, attended a Catholic school before he switched his allegiance to Islam. Narratives of conversion focus on intimate issues linked to ethnicity, such as the inability of Safèn men to marry outside their ethnic group, the public and open nature of Muslim spiritual knowledge, the beauty of Muslim clothes and hairstyles, and the cost of traditional funerals. They also suggest that conversion to Islam gave the Safèn more agency in redefining ethnic identity and in coming to terms with their history. Conversion to Islam has not received the same attention from researchers as conversion to Christianity, apart from the heated debate between Robin Horton and Humphrey Fisher in the 1970s and 1980s.4 That debate was not so much about the moment of conversion but about the longer-term process of conversion to Islam in West Africa. Fisher and Horton defined two radically different poles or perspectives on conversion. Fisher argued for “a genuine religious transference” that made Islam a “new force” in the society that advanced under its own momentum like a juggernaut, culminating in reform and jihad to eradicate unbelief.5 Horton, on the other

hostility to Wolof social hierarchies (kings, slaves, caste) to underline what they rejected but also to the social behavior associated with these divisions (praise singing by griots and its links to the cult of the warrior). Negative stereotypes about the Wolof abound: they are lazy, deceitful, etc. Before conversion, this rejection also encompassed Islam. Since conversion, the rejection of things seen as Wolof has diminished but not disappeared. For example, Safèn informants often praised Muslim baptism (ngente), a Wolof borrowing, but still emphasized their rejection of Wolof marriage customs (associated with inflated bridewealth). 4 I have discussed the literature on conversion in more detail in James F. Searing, “Conversion to Islam: Military Recruitment and Generational Conflict in a SereerSafèn village (Bandia), 1920–1938”, Journal of African History 44 (2003): 73–94. 5 For the phrases in quotations, see Fisher, “The Juggernaut’s Apologia”, p. 153.

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hand, began with a basic African cosmology with a two-tiered structure, the lesser spirits and the supreme being, corresponding to the social microcosm and the macrocosm. Horton argued that African receptivity to the message of Islam only began when the social microcosm (and the lesser spirits that underpinned it) began to break down under the impact of trade, conquest or some other change that focused attention on the macrocosm (and the supreme being). When this occurred, conversion was in the air but even then the nature of conversion was determined in large part by the basic cosmology. “Just what is accepted and what is rejected will largely be determined by the structure of the ‘basic’ cosmology.”6 Fisher’s model relied on stages of quarantine, mixing and reform to describe conversion, typically referring to an evolution in a particular society over several centuries.7 While this aspect of his model is difficult to apply to the moment of conversion, Fisher’s model suggests that agency lies with the educated adherents of Islam, who bring a model that takes on a momentum of its own. Horton’s model describes the moment of conversion in structural terms that fit the Safèn case very well, as they show interest in both Islam and Christianity after experiencing colonial conquest and a series of crises (military recruitment and bubonic plague)8 that shattered the social microcosm at the same time that they were pulled into a larger world by cash crops. Conversion was in the air from 1914 onwards. Horton’s model seems to give agency to the basic cosmology, especially since he named his model the “Intellectualist Theory”.9 Horton’s disembodied “basic cosmology” can be adapted to the moment of conversion in two steps. I am concerned here with a Safèn cosmology, not a West African one. The carriers of this cosmology were the Safèn themselves. By looking at how the first generation of converts

6

Horton, “Rationality of Conversion”, I, p. 220. Fisher’s model, as he notes, is not his unique interpretation but is based on a more general view of Islamization in West Africa and elsewhere. For a general presentation of the Islamization model, see Nehemia Levtzion, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization”, in N. Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), pp. 1–23, and N. Levtzion, “Patterns of Islamization in West Africa”, in ibid., pp. 207–16. 8 I discuss the impact of military recruitment in Searing, “Conversion to Islam”. For a good overall history of bubonic plague, see Myron Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914–1945 (Portsmouth, NH: James Currey, 2002). 9 Ibid. 7

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understood conversion, we locate the process of “selection” that Horton attributed to the structure of the cosmology in concrete human agents. My evidence comes from first-generation converts who were directly involved in the transition between cosaan (tradition) and Islam. The Safèn Region in Colonial Senegal, 1888–1914 The Safèn population can be defined as speakers of Saafi-Saafi who live in the district southwest of Thiès in a triangle between Sebikotane, Thiès and Popenguine on the Atlantic coast. The word Safèn refers to the district and the people who live in it. The main group of Saafi-Saafi speakers outside this district live in villages in the Joobas District to the west of the Safèn, which forms a transitional border district. The Joobas region is divided into speakers of Saafi-Saafi and Sereer Siin-Siin. Saafi-Saafi is the largest of the four or five distinct speech groups within the Northwest Sereer or Cangin language group10 with an estimated 104,000 native speakers in 1998.11 Research was carried out in six Safèn villages, Guinabour, Bandia, Dobour, Tchiki, Kirène, and Diass, and in the town of Popenguine which has a mixed population of Safèn, Sereer Siin-Siin, Lebu and Wolof. In the pre-colonial period, a combination of geography, ecology and cultural differences allowed the Safèn to maintain their independence from the monarchy of Bawol, which claimed the region.12 The Safèn were surrounded by small-scale societies that shared their resistance to monarchy, social hierarchy and Islam. From the perspective of the Safèn, the Wolof social order delineated an ethnic boundary defined (negatively) by monarchy, “caste” and slavery. In addition the Wolof followed patrilineal and Islamic patterns of inheritance while the Safèn were matrilineal. The Safèn social order was defined by ten maternal clans. In the absence of a state, the leaders of these ten clans, which were divided into two halves or Some studies add a fifth language, Lehar or Noon-Lala, but Safèn informants consistently spoke of five Sereer groups: Siin-Siin, Safèn, Palor, Ndut and Noon (also called Jangin). 11 For this estimate, see http://www.ethnologue.com. 12 For a more detailed examination of the Safèn and their neighbors in this period, see James F. Searing, “‘No Kings, No Lords, No Slaves’: Ethnicity and Religion among the Sereer-Safèn of Western Bawol (Senegal), 1700–1914”, Journal of African History 43 (2002): 407–29. This article was based on an earlier period of fieldwork in 1989 and 1995. 10

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moieties, governed Safèn society. Two Safèn neighbors, the Noon or Jangin to the north between Pout and Thiès, and the Joobas to the west, fought the Wolof far more than the Safèn did, according to my informants.13 To the northeast, the Safèn bordered the Lebu, regarded as close relations who had adopted the life of fishing and the sea, and mixed with other groups. To the south, the Safèn were bordered on the Atlantic by the Sereer-Njegem, Siin-Siin speakers with a history of resistance to monarchy. The first major colonial incursion in this region was the arrival of Catholic missionaries at Popenguine in the 1880s. By 22 May 1888 Monseigneur Picarda had baptized 38 adults, whose names are today inscribed on a plaque in the church in Popenguine. By contrast, the Safèn were only conquered after 1895 when Wolof chiefs, led by Sanor Ndiaye, defeated the Joobas and were able to descend the escarpment into the Safèn district. Apart from a landing for boats at Popenguine beneath the cliffs of the Cape de Nase, the sea coast was inhospitable. Locally, Popenguine was known as Tongor, with a Muslim district named Ndayeen. Popenguine, to use the name given to it by merchants from Gorée and Rufisque and by the French, was the historic port of the region. Informants know of it as a port where cattle were exchanged for iron and alcohol, in contexts that are clearly pre-colonial.14 During the era of the peanut trade, Popenguine exported peanuts to Rufisque, and was the home of merchants such as Paul Gomis. Since independence, the infrastructure of the peanut trade has disappeared, highways have been built, and Popenguine no longer functions as a port. After the conquest, Wolof chiefs constructed a fortified base on the eastern outskirts of Bandia, where a new village quarter was established, Bandia-Bambara, inhabited by strangers to the district. Most of the key changes came after 1907 when the district was reorganized and the colonial presence, in the form of Wolof chiefs and their administration, was strengthened. The key Wolof canton chief was Samba Loabe Diop, a son of Lat Joor by a taara (a concubine of slave origin). He ruled the district of Mbayar-Nianing, including 13 Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, born c. 1920–21, 31 May 2002; interview, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse, Kirène, born 1924, 30 July 2002; and interview, El-Hadji Abdou Faye (1), born c. 1916–9, Tchiki, 12 July 2002. 14 Interview, El-Hadji Abdou Faye (1), 12 July and (2), Tchiki, 15 July 2002. This is clear especially in the commentary on the funeral song of Njeer Nduur, who was located in the middle of Tchiki’s approximately five-hundred-year history.

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the Safèn, from 1907 until the early 1920s. He was succeeded by his half-brother, Mbakhane Diop. Both names came up frequently in interviews. Many of these narratives emphasize resistance to taxation, to the recruitment of forced labor for road construction and to farm the chief ’s fields, and to military recruitment during World War I. The French presence in the district was limited. There was a small military camp at Ngekokh, still often referred to as the campement, with French administrators in Mbour and Thiès. Along with the mission at Popenguine and the merchants there, this formed the colonial presence in the period under study. In the 1920s a road from Thiès to Popenguine was completed that passed near the Wolof chiefs in Bandia-Bambara. The Geography of Spirit Shrines: Religion and Power Bandia was undoubtedly chosen by the Wolof chiefs because it harbored the most important religious shrine in the district, with specific characteristics that gave it a public, political character. The shrine, or Koffki, functioned as a judging shrine where disputes over inheritances (land and cattle, referred to in interviews as suuf and allal) were settled by an ordeal with fateful consequences. This shrine, which was described by Pinet-Laprade15 in 1860, was unlike any other Safèn shrine. Pinet-Laprade’s description comes in the context of Sereer religion and ordeals. It provides a useful starting point for a discussion of religion and power among the Safèn. “Finally, under the sacred tree at Bandialuf (the original name of Bandia)16 . . . there is a stone that has the power to kill within a month any individual who is guilty and who has the stone placed on his/her head.”17

15

Jean Pinet-Laprade was a contemporary of Faidherbe, the governor of French Senegal in the 1860s. He was Faidherbe’s lieutenant, commanding French posts at Gorée, Dakar and the Petite Côte until his death in 1869. Sometimes referred to as the Governor of Dakar and dependencies, at others as the Commandant at Gorée, he was responsible for French interests in Cap Vert and the Petite Côte, while Faidherbe was responsible for Saint-Louis and French interests in the Senegal River Valley. 16 Several informants in Bandia explained that the original name of the village was Bandialuf but the name was shortened by the Wolof chiefs. For example, interview, Saliou Seck, Bandia, 16 July 2002; and interview, Ibrahima Cisse, born 1921 (1), Bandia-Bambara, 10 July 2002. 17 Archives Nationale du Senegal, 1 G 33, Notice sur les Sérères, p. 16.

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Although not fully comprehensible by itself, the judgment alluded to by Pinet-Laprade was described to me by several informants. The decision to go to the Koffki to settle a dispute was seen as a measure of last resort. Safèn came to Bandia from all over the region to settle serious disputes over the inheritance of land or cattle, after all other efforts at reconciliation had failed. The parties in dispute were warned of the dangers. These were conflicts over inheritance rights within a maternal clan, of which there were ten. The stakes were high, as leadership within the clan was at stake. The winner would receive gifts from all clan members as contributions to the clan property he managed. In an interview, Babacar N’Dione, who was the imam of Bandia and the most respected Muslim scholar in the Safèn district, described what happened at the shrine. You know at the xerem/Koffki there are stones . . . [He picks up his prayer beads to use in the demonstration.] So these people are arguing and disagreeing and they are called. But even when they are challenged, they continue to disagree and no one admits they are wrong. They refuse. Then they say to them, “Come”. Then they go to the xerem and the stones. The one who is swearing says this thing is mine, this treasure is mine [alaal, “treasure”, here the cattle in dispute], and as he says this he has to lift up the stones and touch them to his head, and he does this three times. Then he says the treasure is mine, the treasure is mine. And people say, see, he is telling the truth. But the other one, when he tries to lift the stones, he can’t, they hit him on the head, he fails, and people know he is the one who is lying. That they had here in Bandia, only in Bandia.18

Other informants described the judgment that followed. The Koffki had two separate avatars, one or both of whom might manifest itself. The bird of the Koffki would land on the house of the guilty party and call out. Or bees would come and fill part of the residence of the guilty one. If nothing was done, disaster would strike. His favorite cattle would die, his nephew would die. In the end the house would be destroyed.19 The only way out was for every member of the maternal clan segment associated with the false testimony to pay a fine and admit their mistake.20 This punishment was not meted out by the master of the shrine but by the spirit that dwelt within the shrine.21 18 19 20 21

Interview, Interview, Interview, Interview,

Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002. Ngër Loem, Bandia, born c. 1919, 9 July 2002. Ibrahima Cisse (1), Bandia-Bambara, 10 July 2002. Latir Dong Faye (2), born 1903, Bandia, 2 August 2002.

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Because of its shrine and the role Bandia played in certain religious ceremonies, it was seen as the central village or capital of the Safèn district. By building their headquarters on the outskirts of Bandia, Wolof chiefs probably hoped to tap into the political authority it represented and to keep the shrine and its keepers under surveillance. There is no evidence that the Wolof controlled the shrine. Interviews stress Wolof fears of the shrine and its continued importance as a judicial court well into the colonial era. Informants describe Sereer getting permission to take cases to the Koffki from French tribunals in Thiès and Mbour. The Koffki in Bandia was one of many shrines in the Safèn district. Although the characteristics of each shrine are different, there is a general discourse about the “protecting” power of the shrines and the spirits that inhabit them that echoes the main themes of the ethnic boundary described earlier. Each Safèn village had at least one shrine, and the shrines—each of which had a name and specific characteristics—defined a public sphere of religious ritual that was common to the village.22 Bandia had the Koffki, Guinabour had Graam and a sacred well, Tchiki had Carit and Enge (an ancestral shrine), Kirène had Jayña, Diass had Sahee, and Dobour had a spring with healing waters. Each shrine was controlled or administered by a particular matrilineal clan, and one clan, the Leemu, controlled most of the shrines. All of the shrines served as focal points for the divination ceremonies that were held before the start of the rainy season. Most were sites of periodic sacrifice to the resident spirits, but the shrines had their own unique characteristics. In addition to possessing the one judging shrine that could kill, Bandia played a key role in the prayers to the supreme God (kiim koox), associated with the heavens and rain, that occurred only in times of serious drought that threatened the entire district.23 One such ceremony occurred in the period in question, probably during the drought of 1913–1914. Narratives from Bandia stress the exceptional powers of the Koffki to protect the village and district from the Wolof. When Thieyacine, the king of Bawol, tried to conquer the Safèn around 1890, he

22 The shrine names appear to be proper names, naming the spirit or its avatar. No etymologies were given for these names (unlike village names). My informants’ responses suggested the question was misguided because the shrines obviously revealed their own names. 23 Searing, “Conversion to Islam”.

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arrived in Bandia in the rainy season. He was greeted with an invitation to leave and not come back until the rainy season was over, because “a king will ruin the rainy season”. When he insisted on returning the next Monday, he was met by the assembled elders who took up positions on the road after divining at the shrine. When Thieyacine approached, his horse reared up and he fell to the ground, hitting his head. He died several days later in Thiès.24 This story may refer to Sanor N’Diaye, originally one of Thieyacine’s agents, who died of sleeping sickness in 1894 during his campaigns against the Joobas and the Safèn.25 Many informants stressed the protecting powers of the shrine. Protecting spirits and their dislike of monarchy and government appeared in interviews with informants from several villages. An informant in Diass simply said that Sahee, the shrine, “did not like monarchy [Wolof, nguur, monarchy or government]”.26 From a slightly different perspective, the shrines at Guinabour (Graam) and Diass (Sahee) could be described as “wind spirits”. They protected the villages by raising a wind that made them invisible to their enemies, particularly the Wolof.27 In Guinabour the “magic” well that figures in stories of the founding of the village and its links to water spirits enforced a taboo against persons belonging to caste groups (particularly gewel or griots), who could not approach the well or be buried in the village. The taboo against caste, like that against monarchy, was tied to ideas that caste and monarchy would hold back the rains and destroy fertility.28 In more general terms, informants described past migrations into the region and the founding of village shrines as essential features of Safèn identity and the system of defense that protected the independence of the region.29

24

Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002. I heard a shorter version of the same story, but about Sanor, from Farba Cisse in 1989. Interview, Bandia, 28 March 1989. 26 Interview, Dong Cisse, born 1918, Diass, 31 July 2002. 27 Interview, Assan Seck N’Gueye, born 1920, El-Hadji Youssou Mage Seck, born 1921, El-Hadj Thiour Seck, born 1924, Assan Seck, village chief, born 1940, Mamadou Lamine Seck, born 1942, Guinabour, 22 July 2002. For similar protecting powers from a different region, see Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 28 Interview, Guinabour, 22 July 2002. 29 Interview, Ibrahima Cisse (2), Bandia-Bambara, 18 August 2002; and interview, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse, Kirène, 30 July 2002. 25

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Hostility to monarchy and caste also figured in descriptions of the difference between the Safèn and the Sereer Siin-Siin. Although the Siin-Siin were considered to be close relations whose original maternal clans shared the same beliefs and customs as the Safèn, they had become more like the Wolof with the arrival of monarchy in Siin and Saalum. One informant said that the Siin-Siin had been “colonized” by the Soose (Wolof and Sereer for Mande), referring to the Gelwaar aristocracy of Mandinka origins. With the aristocracy came griots, the cult of war and the warrior, and other features that were considered non-Sereer by the Safèn. In this perspective, the main features of monarchy were war, slave raiding, and the cult of honor and praise songs cultivated by Siin-Siin and Wolof bards.30 The conquest of the Safèn by Wolof chiefs and the arrival of colonial government did not change the fundamental hostility of the Safèn to the Wolof social order. The ethnic boundary between the Safèn and the Wolof was also a formidable barrier to the adoption of Islam, as Islam was initially identified with the Wolof. This fact gave an initial advantage to Catholicism in the period of rapid change that began with the conquest. The Catholic Church in Popenguine and the Safèn My research initially focused entirely on conversion to Islam, based on the overwhelming predominance of the Tijàniyya, specifically alÓàjj Màlik Sy’s branch of the Sufi order in Tivaouane, in the region today. My interviews revealed an earlier period of conversion to Catholicism, tied to the church in Popenguine. The most striking example is the life history of the imam of Bandia, now widely considered the most influential Muslim in the district. Babacar N’Dione was the first Safèn to both memorize the Qur"àn and receive a formal initiation into the Tijàniyya as the disciple of Ababacar Sy. Babacar N’Dione left Bandia in 1939–1940 to study first in Yoff and then in Tivaouane. Eventually he had disciples throughout the Safèn district. Most of the earlier imams were either educated outsiders, Lebu and Wolof, brought in to teach and convert, or local Muslims

30 For general statements about monarchy, war, griots and Siin-Siin: interview, El-Hadji Abdou Faye (1), Tchiki, 12 July 2002; and interview, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse, Kirène, 30 July 2002. For the statement about the Soose, interview, Biran Seck, born 1927, Assan Seck, village chief, born 1940, Guinabour, 25 July 2002.

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with a fairly rudimentary education. On Muslim holy days Babacar N’Dione was at the center of local pilgrimages and celebrations. But Babacar N’Dione was a Catholic for nine years and studied at the mission in Popenguine until he decided to leave the Church in 1937 at the age of seventeen or eighteen. His Catholic education no doubt played a role in his later pursuit of Muslim education. When he joined the Catholic Church around 1928 there were probably as many Catholics as Muslims in the district. His home village, Bandia, possessed the most important traditional shrine and was the last village of the six I studied to enter the “time of conversion”. Babacar N’Dione described the initial advantage of the Catholic Church by referring to Safèn attitudes toward the Wolof. He was responding to a question about the mission in Popenguine. I was a Catholic for nine years. That was until 1937 when I left the Church and in 1938 I converted to Islam. We were in agreement with the Catholics back in those days, but we did not like the Wolof. . . . There were missionaries in Popenguine and Popenguine was the capital of the Catholics, but in the region around here [sweeping his arms] there were a few Catholics. There were Catholics back then, but only one here, one there. There are still some Catholics in Joobas, but in those days there were a few Catholics in all the villages. Now almost all of them have become Muslims.31

This quote raises a number of issues but underlines the fact that the Catholic Church was gaining converts through the 1920s, when the balance began to shift in favor of Islam. Popenguine’s contemporary importance for Senegalese Catholicism contrasts with the Church’s failure to penetrate the immediate hinterland of the mission. Popenguine is best known today as the site of an important pilgrimage at Pentecost (or Whit) Monday that is in many ways the national festival of the Catholic Church. In addition, Popenguine is the birthplace of Cardinal Hyancinthe Thiandoum, the Senegalese Catholic who played the most important role in the Church hierarchy. He was born into a Catholic family in Popenguine on 2 February 1921, making him a contemporary of Babacar N’Dione and many of my Safèn informants. He became a priest in 1949 and was named Archbishop of Dakar in 1962.32 In addition to these 31

Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002. http://www.dailycatholic.org/issue/archives/1999Dec/245dec24,vol.10,no.245txt/ dec24col.htm. 32

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claims to importance, Popenguine is a site of veneration of the Virgin, has been recognized as such by the Church and was visited by the Pope on the 100th anniversary of the pilgrimage (1992).33 Locally, Mariamu Popenguine (Mary of Popenguine) has been seen more than a hundred times. Popenguine was located on the linguistic border between the Safèn and Sereer Siin-Siin speakers. It is considered by the Safèn to be a mixed settlement, made up of Safèn, Siin-Siin, Lebu and Wolof. The same is true of the neighboring village of Géréo, which oral traditions link to Popenguine. In Popenguine I interviewed a Safèn Catholic, Guillaume Ndoye, who was born in 1914 and who is currently considered the eldest member and a leading lay community representative in the Catholic quarter located just to the north of the church. When asked about the history of Catholicism in Popenguine (cosaanu diine katolik), he replied with a three-part narrative that encapsulated the history of the Catholic quarter. His story began with the drowning of Monseigneur Sylaber [Sylvestre?], a missionary who arrived by boat from Siin (probably from Joal). The boat capsized and the local inhabitants of Tongor tried in vain to rescue him and later to recover his body.34 Our fathers saw what had happened and they tried to save him, but they couldn’t and he drowned. They saw where he was in the water. 33

Although informants spoke of this anniversary, it would have been an approximate centenary as the date of the first pilgrimage was 1890. Referring to the Pope’s visit as “on the centenary” of the pilgrimage is a local argument for the importance of Popenguine, as the Pope’s itinerary and the timing of his visit was undoubtedly organized for other reasons. The Catholic Church recognized Popenguine as a Marian site without mention of local visions of the Virgin. However, the church in Popenguine does refer to these visions (in very general terms) on a website devoted to the Church. Mary is said to have appeared to the people as a bright vision. 34 Although most parts of Guillaume N’Doye’s testimony track well with the official history of the Church (as presented on the website), this story does not have any parallels. This story may conflate local stories with an echo of the famous incident in which Monsignor Hyacinthe Jalabert and 16 missionaries drowned off the coast of France on January 12, 1920 when the packet boat “L’Afrique” was capsized and sunk. Cardinal Hyacinthe Thiandoum was named after this martyr of the faith, whose life work took place in Senegal. http://www.sanctuaire-poponguine.sn/hi1889.php. For a local mission drowning, there is the incident of the capsizing of the ship “Saint-Joseph”, lost at sea off the Petite Cote on March 20, 1908, as depicted in a mission postcard: “Le Sénégal: La bénédiction du bateau de la Mission le Saint-Joseph perdu en mer corps et bleue, le 20 Mars 1908.” I thank Patricia Hickling for this postcard reference. On the other hand, Guillaume’s emphasis on Géréo and his descriptions of the relationship between Popenguine and its hinterland closely parallel Church accounts.

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They dived down to him and tried to pull him up, but they couldn’t and they saw he was dead. Those who came out of the water, there was blood coming out of their ears. When they came up out of the water, their ears burst and blood came out.35

This tragic death tied the inhabitants of Tongor to the mission. This story, not mentioned in the Church histories that focus on missionaries, may have more to do with drowning at sea and sacrifice to spirits. Maam Cupaam, a sea spirit, is still honored on the coast. Her shrine is now part of an ecological tourist complex created by the women of Popenguine.36 All those who drown at sea are taken by the spirits. When the French established the Church, the people of Tongor were the first to study there. Guillaume Ndoye underlined the links formed with Rufisque in this period. “Those were the people of this quarter who did that. After that here people studied and were educated. They studied and later they went back and forth to Teengeej [Rufisque] and the pilgrimage came.” The pilgrimage began in 1890, two years after the first conversions in the town and the date when the cornerstone of the Church was laid. For most of its history, it was a local event. The third part of the narrative was cast in more personal terms. I was a boy then. I was born in 1914. When I was a boy I saw something. I saw four vultures descend [he makes as if he is flapping wings in descent] through the trees like this. I saw them with my eyes. They were the purest white and beautiful. And then I ran away.37

As he explained in another part of the interview, this was his personal vision of Mariam. The vultures belonged to her. Mariam also manifested as a sister wearing a nun’s habit, but those who saw her were struck by her beauty and the extraordinary whiteness of her garments. Running away from the vision was a frequent response. For local Catholics then, the importance of Popenguine as a Catholic center is clearly tied to these visions of the Virgin Mary. They underline the emergence of a new sacred site, since she is seen in the vicinity of the church, and her manifestations are directly tied to Popenguine’s importance as a site of pilgrimage. She is typically seen at the end of the morning or in the early evening. She

35 36 37

Interview, Guillaume N’Doye, born 1914, Popenguine, 24 July 2002. Les Dames-Nature de Popenguine. Interview, Guillaume N’Doye, Popenguine, 24 July 2002.

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can manifest herself to anyone, not just to Catholics or to those who want to see her because of their faith. I was told that I could see her if I stayed in Popenguine. Guillaume Ndoye also told a detailed story of a Muslim friend of his named Oumar Kane who saw her and fled town abruptly in response. He had himself committed to the hospital in Thiès. There someone told him he had seen Mariam. After leaving hospital, he consulted a Muslim scholar who told him he had been tricked and that the vision was the work of demons. Guillaume Ndoye rejected this view. “But it was not the work of demons [saytaane]. It was Mariam. He saw Mariam. The way he described her with her dress and with her rosary [chapelet]. It was her. You know that over one hundred people have seen her, seen her with their eyes. Over one hundred.”38 There are clear parallels between Mariam and the spirits associated with Safèn and Lebu shrines. In the Safèn district the clearest parallel is with Jayña, the shrine in Kirène. In Kirène there have been visions of a woman who seems to act like a crazy person wandering in the bush, who appears and disappears, particularly in the period before the rainy season. She is usually seen in the evening. When she is seen, people go to the shrine and sacrifice. Jayña also has an avatar, in this case a bat.39 This is the only example I have found in which conversion (to Islam or Catholicism) led to the emergence of a new spiritual power that appears to merge Sereer religion and world religions in a syncretistic form. Muslims spoke of the spirit shrines in their villages, but this was always in the context of discussing history. When shrines persisted into the present, Muslims emphasized change. Their functions had changed (as in Bandia) or only a few people still placed faith in the power of the shrines. Muslims sometimes referred to the spirits as demons (saytaane) in a way that simultaneously affirmed their reality and demoted their status within a Muslim cosmology. For Muslims, “tradition” and Islam have a parallel existence but never seem to combine. Spirits become demons, demoted in status, but with a more glorious past. Muslim devotion does not combine with tradition. In comparison, Mary and her pure white vultures, appearing not far from the shrine to Maam Cupaam, do seem to combine Catholic and Sereer visions. 38 39

Ibid. Interview, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse, Kirène, 30 July 2002.

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Guillaume Ndoye’s descriptions of the visions of Mariam can be read as an assertion of the spiritual powers of the Church in Popenguine. But there are also many aspects of his testimony that underline the isolation of the Catholic community in Popenguine and the failure of Catholicism to win many converts in the region during the time of conversion. Guillaume Ndoye worked for the Church as a gardener and then a messenger and wagon driver from the age of seven when his father brought him to the mission and left him there. He never attended the mission school but worked for the Church for most of his life. His recollections underscore the cultural isolation of a ward of the Church in the Safèn region. “And you know in those days people didn’t speak clearly. They just used songs. They didn’t speak directly.” Here he is referring to the songs that males learned during circumcision, which were secrets within the age-class. He was a Catholic who never underwent this rite of passage; these secrets were beyond his understanding. He also emphasized the dangers. After alluding to the trade in alcohol carried out between Popenguine and Safèn villages, he said: You know people would go from Popenguine to Géréo to sell alcohol [sangara], to sell alcohol, but it was very dangerous. People bought alcohol here and then they went to Géréo to sell it. You could be robbed or killed. . . . In Géréo they drank until they were drunk, they drank until they were drunk and people were falling over. They drank and danced. That was why it was dangerous.40

In context, this clearly describes the sale of alcohol for a traditional funeral. Alcohol flowed freely for three days and was accompanied by shooting matches and displays of military courage by the waxambaane (circumcised bachelors). The most vivid descriptions of Guillaume Ndoye’s work for the Church involve his labors as a wagon driver who carried goods and messages as far as the mission in Mont Rolland. He described the dangers of being attacked by waxambaane on the roads. You know what a waxambaane is? Well there was one time when they followed us, with their swords. They wanted to steal. We were trying to take care of the wagon and they were following us. We beat the

40

Interview, Guillaume N’Doye, Popenguine, 24 July 2002.

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horse to go faster, but they still caught up with us, until their swords were coming up into the wagon. I then hit at the sword with a stick to break through. Then they attacked again. I struck one of them on the arm. Then we drove them off and rode away. That was the way it was then. There were bandits. . . . Yes, in those days it was dangerous in the bush. That was a difficult job. You had to be brave. We Catholics had to be brave. It was bad here in the old days. It was dangerous. If you had any money, it was dangerous. They would come for the money. They would even kill you. That was in the 1920s and 1930s.41

Throughout the interview, Guillame Ndoye made it clear that he considered Safèn traditionalists to be savages. Catholics, by contrast, were described as following or imitating Europeans. Catholics have the character of Europeans [ jikko tubab]. They wear European clothes. They learned French. They went to school first. They followed the Europeans. That is why they are like them.

When asked about Catholics in neighboring villages and whether it was difficult to convert he replied: Yes it was difficult for them. You know they had their xerem [shrine]. Do you know what that is? . . . . Their xerem, you know, their demons [dafa saytaane]. They had their charms, their [ritual] baths that they did, things they believed could do things, even kill. But Catholics did not accept any of those things. We don’t wear charms [takk garab fi, pointing to wrists] on our arms or anything. They were ceddo [traditionalists, pagans]. We were Catholic.

I asked if Catholics feared the xerem. No, listen to what I say, the Catholics did not like the xerem. They did not like them. We did not like people making medicines, making magic [déebaa-déeb] to affect people’s thoughts. We didn’t let any of that enter our heads. No, we didn’t accept any of that. We didn’t believe in people eating people [referring to witchcraft/sorcery, dëmm]. Did anyone ever see that? You can’t see it. I never let any of those things enter my head. . . . You know the Catholics have their secrets with the Europeans. The Europeans never believed in any of that. Did people eat people? The Europeans didn’t believe it and the Catholics didn’t believe it either.

41

Ibid.

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Despite these professions of Catholic knowledge and superiority, there was a palpable sense of disdain and fear whenever he spoke of Sereer religious beliefs. The Catholic community at Popenguine internalized French missionary attitudes towards African religion, which made it difficult for them to participate in or understand the social life in the villages in the immediate hinterland. Catholic religious and ritual life was focused on the mission. When a Catholic died in the hinterland, it was Guillaume Ndoye’s job to collect the body for burial in the church cemetery. This was a difficult task, as relatives were often reluctant to hand over the corpse to the church. Babacar N’Dione, who was a student at Popenguine from 1928 to 1937 (at about the same period described by Ndoye), broke with the Catholic Church in 1937. By this date his older siblings were converting to Islam. When asked why he left the Church and became a Muslim, he recalled in detail his conversation with the missionaries who tried to convince him to stay and offered him a scholarship to study in Dakar. His speech is a criticism of the Church’s monopoly on ritual and what he perceived as the inadequate progress of his education after nine years of study. I was in Popenguine. When I visited [ home] I saw that the Muslims here [in Bandia] knew what to do and say when someone died. They knew what to say and do when someone got married. They knew what to say and do when a baby was born. I saw that after nine years I knew nothing. I said to the priest, “You [using emphatic form], you name the children; you do the marriage; you know what to do for the corpse of the dead. You pray for the dead. I have studied nine years. I don’t know what to say to celebrate a marriage. I don’t know how to name a child. I don’t know how to prepare the body of the dead. I don’t know how to bury the dead. I don’t know how to pray for the dead. . . . That’s why I am leaving the Church. I want to know. I want to belong.42

Babacar N’Dione’s focus on ritual knowledge, and particularly on the rites of birth, marriage, and death, underscores themes that appear over and over again in Muslim accounts of conversion.

42

Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002.

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I have borrowed Robin Horton’s notion of a “time of conversion” because Horton’s focus on the shifting boundary between social microcosm and macrocosm offers a good starting-point for discussing conversion among the Safèn. Colonial conquest, incorporation in the world market through cash crops, military recruitment during World War I and outbreaks of bubonic plague in 1919 and again in 1923–24 led to a collapse of the ethnic boundary that had defined Safèn independence. In the era of European rule, the spirit shrines had failed to protect the country and this point was driven home by military recruitment during World War I. Quite apart from these blows to the older cultural model, the Safèn were forging important economic links with the rest of Senegal that were accompanied by the arrival of many strangers in the region. The end of isolation was just as important as the loss of independence. In the crisis that followed, the Catholic Church and Islam both offered ways to forge a larger identity that was more compatible with the new realities in the district. Narratives about conversion focus on changes in birthing ceremonies, marriages and funerals because these evoke the larger transformation that occurred. Young unmarried males are at the heart of the story. They contested the matrilineal order at the heart of tradition, which concentrated power and wealth in the hands of the elders of the ten maternal clans, by converting to Islam. Conversion created new families, nuclear units centered on a couple and their children. Before pursuing these rebellious young men, the background to conversion in Muslim narratives needs to be addressed. The Catholic Church saw the Safèn as superstitious pagans. How did Muslims perceive this issue? Educated Muslim informants—like Babacar N’Dione in Bandia and El-Hadji Abdou Faye in Tchiki—defined Safèn traditions in Muslim terms, as a prelude to their discussion of cosaan (tradition). El-Hadji Faye said that the Safèn did not reject or refuse Islam; therefore they were not yeefer or infidels in the true sense. They were living in jàhil, ignorance of Islam. They were what the Qur"àn referred to as the jàhiliyya.43 He elaborated on this point

43 The term is used here in its Qur"ànic sense to refer to the age of ignorance before Islam, not in its Islamist sense, as a “modern barbarism” symbolized by corrupt regimes like that of Nasser in Egypt. Sayyid Qu†b denounced this modern

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by drawing on the memories of his pilgrimage and drawing parallels between jàhiliyya Arabs and the Safèn. Babacar N’Dione presented the Safèn past in a slightly different way. He presented the core values of tradition as “speaking the truth, doing what is right, and hard work”, in an economy based on herding and farming. The Safèn had never known true Islam, having experienced only the false version propagated by Wolof kings and chiefs. When they came to know true Islam, in the form of the Tijànì teachings of al-Óàjj Màlik Sy, they saw that it was in harmony with the values that their ancestors had taught and they wanted to convert.44 He also emphasized Safèn belief in a supreme God, as exemplified in rain-making ceremonies led by Bandia. He said, “God helped the Safèn”, and when he described the success of praying for rain (before conversion) he concluded with the phrase, “God rained” (Yalla taw na).45 This selective rehabilitation of tradition contrasts starkly with Catholic condemnations of Safèn “savagery” but should not be read as signaling a general Muslim accommodation with tradition. Muslim scholars have condemned traditional funerals, alcohol, pipe smoking, witchcraft beliefs and other aspects of Safèn tradition. The lines of conflict and the changes that accompanied them appear in narratives of conversion and discussions of the time of conversion. Narratives about conversion to Islam that focus on individual life histories evoke some of these themes. Two of them focus on marriage as one of the symbols of the changing boundaries of the social order. The first case of conversion to Islam in the district occurred in Kirène in 1914. The conversion of Dali Cisse was recounted by his son, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse. His father had become a cattle trader and traveled widely in Senegal as a result of his work. His travels took him to Fuuta Tooro where he spent time and decided to become a Muslim. When he returned to Kirène in 1914, he announced to the elders of the village that he had become a Muslim. They reacted by telling him that if that was the case, he would never find a bride in the village. He replied that if that was so he would marry a jàhiliyya and argued that nominally Muslim rulers should be declared apostates (takfìr) to Islam. El-Hadji Abdou Faye uses the concept to excuse the “paganism” of the Safèn as mere ignorance, rather than rejection of Islam. For the Islamist meaning, see Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, translated by Anthony F. Roberts, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 30–2. 44 Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002. 45 Ibid.

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Tukulor woman and bring her back to the village. At that the elders said, “We see that you are hard-headed and stubborn.” After deliberation, they decided that the lesser evil would be to allow him to convert and marry a local woman. He stayed in the village, eventually becoming the imam as others converted.46 The second story of this kind focuses on Doic Faye, the first person to convert in the village of Tchiki and the second convert in the district. No date was given but this must have occurred no later than the early 1920s, as Doic Faye was the contemporary of Dali Cisse and they became lifelong friends. His story was related by ElHadji Abdou Faye, an informant with a remarkable command of oral traditions, including a hundred Safèn songs. His account was partly based on the funeral song of Doic Faye. In Doic Faye’s time, everyone in Tchiki was a ceddo (traditionalist). One day Doic Faye went to visit relatives in the village of Daxal on the road to Pout. These relatives were Muslims. When he arrived there he met a woman and fell in love with her. The funeral song focuses on an exchange between Doic Faye and his Muslim relatives. They looked at him and saw that he was wearing his hair in tresses, wrapped in a cloth, according to Safèn tradition. His relatives asked, “What is this?” He explained, but they said, “This is not beautiful”. They then told him about al-Óàjj Màlik Sy in Tivaouane. They told him that if he went to him he would convert him, and he would have his head shaved and receive new clothes. He decided to convert. He heard that al-Óàjj Malik Sy would be visiting Rufisque. He said, “I will go there on the day when he is there and convert”. He converted and later he married the woman.47 Both of these stories focus on marriage in a way that draws attention to the changing ethnic boundary between the Safèn and their neighbors for a younger generation of men after 1914. By themselves, they might suggest an instrumental view of conversion. Conversion allowed the Safèn to forge new ties outside of the region and the price of admission to this larger world was conversion. These are Safèn historical narratives, so their main themes are implicit. Those who converted first were young men, waxambaane, unmarried bachelors who boldly broke with tradition. Since Muslim

46 47

Interview, Mbaye “Dali” Cisse, Kirène, 30 July 2002. Interview, El-Hadji Abdou Faye (2), Tchiki, 15 July 2002.

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marriages would create a new kind of family, one in which children inherited from their fathers, they also announce the foundation of new families. The defiance of elders and the embracing of new clothes and fashions from outside the region go hand in hand. Most of my data about conversion come from converts reflecting on their own experiences and the changes they have witnessed in their lifetimes, rather than from narratives of this kind. In these discussions, the meaning of conversion was often expressed by exploring funerals and baptisms or naming ceremonies because these rituals focused on the most dramatic changes that occurred. By converting to Islam, the Safèn generation that came of age after World War I overturned the system of matrilineal inheritance and descent that had defined the social order.48 This was particularly true of the cattle herds that represented the accumulated wealth of matrilineal clans. Cattle herds were divided up, with negotiated compromises over maternal and paternal claims. The bachelor age-class (waxambaane) would now work for fathers rather than maternal uncles. Land, which was never scarce, was not a serious issue. Before conversion, wealth and power were in the hands of the leaders of the ten matrilineal clans. When the Safèn compared themselves with the Wolof, the absence of kings and government was the main theme. In the absence of a state, power was in the hands of the leaders of the ten clans. When meetings were held, these groups assembled in two groups of five, each with a spokesman. These clan leaders are the same figures who are called “uncles” when traditional inheritance is contrasted with Muslim inheritance. My informants would explain that, in the old days, the nephew would inherit from the uncle. This referred to a system of labor and inheritance in which younger members of matrilineal clans contributed to the wealth of their clan head by donations of labor and livestock. From this wealth, the clan head paid for the costs of ceremonies, fines and rites of passage. When the head of a clan died, a nephew inherited. The uncles (maternal uncle, nijaay) were the elders whose power was 48 The issue of land and its inheritance was more complex, but caused few difficulties in practice. The village chief of Bandia explained that there were many (potential) conflicts over land but that land had never become an issue because usufruct rights were widely respected and there was no shortage of land. He implied that potential claims of land ownership based on matrilineal descent were not put forward by claimants. This contrasted with claims to cattle which did lead to conflicts during the time of conversion.

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undermined by conversion. In contrasting the present with the past, the Safèn often sum this up by saying, “There are no kilifa (heads of maternal clans) today. Today everyone is a kilifa.” This is shorthand for saying that conversion had led to the formation of nuclear families and more individualism, and had destroyed the old accumulations of wealth and power. Funerals and Cosaan ( Tradition) The traditional funeral was the symbol of the old order. As a result, it was the key defining institution for cosaan (tradition) and the key institution that came under attack when young Muslim converts refused to work for and inherit from their maternal uncles in a wave of revolt that spread from village to village after World War I. This particular configuration of the conversion drama calls for some discussion of traditional funerals and why they figure so prominently in definitions of tradition. When an elder man or woman with a senior rank in his/her maternal clan died, there was an elaborate and expensive funeral.49 For the male head of a clan, thirty cattle could be sacrificed. Most of these were contributions from the maternal family from all the villages in the region. Additional cattle would come from a friend, in-laws and the father’s family. The inheriting nephew supplied alcohol and other goods. Everyone was invited. The funeral began with the construction of a tomb and the burial, but continued for three days (for a man), with drinking, the singing of funeral songs that commemorated the deceased, dancing, martial competitions and feasting. Fewer cattle were sacrificed for a woman but a large number of hand-woven cloths were placed in the tomb. In addition to the cattle that were sacrificed after the burial, one live bull was placed in the tomb of a man in a chamber nicknamed the pillow. A live cow was placed in a woman’s tomb. There were other differences as well. A man was buried lying on a bed. A woman was buried in a seated position with a calabash on her head, a drinking gourd for

49 My discussion is a brief synopsis of dozens of interviews that discuss funerals. I have followed the outlines suggested by one of the most detailed interviews: ElHadji Abdou Faye (1), Tchiki, 12 July 2002.

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alcohol and a pipe in her hands, which were crossed over her chest. The cloths were piled on her legs. A funeral celebrated the individual who had passed away but was at the same time the most important social gathering in the region. Funerals were expensive. Funerals were elaborate ceremonies that celebrated the dead and passed the succession in the matrilineage to the nephew. The first stage involved the immediate friends and family (members of the same maternal clan) of the dead, including in-laws, and the people in the village. This group prepared the tomb, with the nephew bringing the live bull. Then the first cattle were killed and the horns or the whole head of the bull were placed on the tomb. They put the first layer of dirt over the tomb and performed songs about the person’s life. Anyone who knew the deceased “and had an intelligent word” could come forward in the order organized by the master of ceremonies. At this point in the funeral the alcohol (pure trade spirits bought by the barrel) flowed freely. Everyone, male or female, could drink as much as they wanted. Many informants described this as singing, dancing and drinking that continued until people literally fell to the ground. However, in many cases the major celebrations were postponed until after the tomb was constructed. This led to a funeral in two phases, the first involving the village and the second involving the region. For practical reasons the first and second stages of the funeral were often separate events. When a kilifa died, a special drum was beaten to announce the death. This allowed delegates from other villages to attend the burial, after which a day was set for the second stage of the funeral. Depending on the time of year, this could be in a week’s time or it could be after a delay of several months to allow maternal kin in the surrounding region to select cattle for the sacrifice. The second stage of the funeral began when delegations from other villages, following the guidance of the master of ceremonies, starting singing their own songs for the dead in a series of choreographed processions. These groups were led by the maternal relatives, accompanied by friends and allies from their village. Each delegation brought horns for the tomb and a bull or cow for sacrifice. Each sang songs recounting the life story of the deceased and put a new layer of dirt over the tomb. When each village had performed in turn, the remaining cattle were sacrificed in stages. In the eyes of its Muslim critics, the funeral was a shocking waste of wealth and a scene of drunkenness.

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For Muslims, the traditional funeral was clearly one of the centerpieces in arguments in favor of conversion. In my first interview with Babacar N’Dione in 1995, he used the funeral to begin his discussion of why Islam was better than tradition.50 He emphasized the social inequalities that were underlined. A clan leader had a grand funeral but a poorer younger person had a modest funeral. Children were buried with little ceremony at all. The decoration of tombs and the funeral songs emphasized the individual character of the person. By contrast, Muslim funerals were egalitarian. Muslims also condemned the vast expenditure of wealth and the drunkenness and dancing. After describing the traditional funeral, Babacar N’Dione said, “That was not beautiful”. The beauty of the Muslim funeral was in the washing of the body and the pure white funeral shroud but, above all, in the recitation of the Qur"àn. It was clear from interviews that funerals had been the object of many discussions and that Muslim leaders had perceived this as a crucial issue. Converts to Islam were buried in Muslim funerals, while the elders that died as ceddo (traditionalists) continued to have traditional funerals until quite recently. This situation made the funeral a central site of struggle between Islam and tradition. Muslims tried to limit the number of cattle sacrificed in traditional funerals, a compromise based on the fact that matrilineal inheritance ended before the last unconverted Safèn elders died. Since their nephews and sons were already Muslims, the last traditional funerals had to reflect this reality. With Muslim funerals, there has been a clear effort to limit the length and extent of the celebrations. Today in Bandia, relatives who come to visit from distant villages are hosted overnight and a feast is held, but funerals are not allowed to continue over several days. During my fieldwork I attended a Muslim funeral that revealed another area of compromise and negotiation that is still taking place. Maternal clans are still, for the Safèn, a primary sense of identity. In funeral celebrations, the ten clans are still allowed to assemble in two groups of five for the purpose of gathering their cash donations to pay for the funeral costs and to aid the grieving family. This allows maternal clans to express their sense of affiliation and debt to the dead. But after the donations have been collected in this way

50

Interview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 14 July 1995.

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(from maternal clan heads), the money is put together and given to the imam, who divides it up to cover the costs and help the bereaved nuclear family. In a discussion of this practice, Babacar N’Dione explained that different Muslim leaders had adopted different approaches to the problem. His explanation outlined the missionary activities of the Tijàniyya in the region. For example, his namesake, Babacar N’Dione, the first important Tijànì missionary in the region, had taken a harder line against funerals in the 1920s and 1930s when he was the imam at Diass. Babacar N’Dione was a Lebu and Tijànì who had been invited to Diass to convert people and open a school. His style contrasted with that of Amadou Gning, the first Tijànì missionary in Bandia, who had advocated a more gradualist approach. When the first Muslims in Bandia had sought a missionary and teacher in 1937, they visited Dali Cisse in Kirène, the first Muslim convert from a neighboring village. He in turn took them to visit Babacar N’Dione in Diass. Babacar N’Dione went to Thiès and used his contacts in the Tijàniyya to recruit Amadou Gning. He was a Wolof from northern Senegal. He agreed to come to Bandia and opened a school in 1938. Most Muslims in Bandia were converted by Amadou Gning or his immediate successor, Ibrahima Seck.51 These Tijànì missionaries to the Safèn reveal an essentially untold story about Muslim conversion in Senegal. My knowledge of them is limited to what my informants told me, but this is clearly an area that needs more research. The Muslim missionaries did not settle permanently in the region and they have now been replaced by local scholars. This pattern allowed Safèn scholars to take over the task of interpreting Islam within a period of about twenty years and gave scholars like Babacar N’Dione of Bandia a central role in defining Islam among the Safèn and in guiding the transition from the old order to the new. The Muslim attack on funerals and matrilineal inheritance led to a rapid break-up of the old properties in cattle and labor exchanges within maternal clans. This was undoubtedly a welcome change for the generation of rebellious young men who led the movement of conversion. In an era of cash cropping, it leveled the playing field and led to the formation of new family units based on Islamic inheritance.

51

Inteview, Babacar N’Dione, Bandia, 31 May 2002.

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While the passing of the traditional funeral is a key (negative) symbol of the new order, Muslim naming ceremonies, in the form of the ngente and borrowed from the Wolof, also figure largely in discussions of conversion. The ngente is a celebration centered on the birth of a child and the mother. Babacar N’Dione uses the ngente to symbolize the new Muslim order. Ngentes are large celebrations that bring together friends and relations from distant villages, as traditional funerals did in the past. For women, the ngente is clearly the Muslim ceremony that symbolizes the new order of Islam and its focus on the nuclear family.52 For Babacar N’Dione, the ngente figures as a Muslim celebration that symbolizes the new order in the same way that the traditional funeral symbolizes the past. Conclusion The time of conversion in the Safèn district, between roughly 1914 and 1950, was a time when traditionalists, Catholics and Muslims lived side by side in Safèn villages. Elders in this period rejected the new religions altogether or were persuaded to convert only after their own sons and daughters and nieces and nephews had adopted Islam. At the beginning of the time of conversion the Catholic Church had some advantages, based on Safèn hostility to their Muslim Wolof conquerors. But this advantage quickly faded when the Church failed to place lay teachers, chapels or schools in the villages in the region. The Church’s monopoly on religious knowledge and rituals alienated young Catholics like Babacar N’Dione, who left the church in 1937 because he felt he was not being taught its essential rituals. The Catholic community in Popenguine became isolated from its hinterland, as is expressed in the hostility and fear of Sereer religion taught by the Church. Islam penetrated the region gradually, but by the 1920s and 1930s Safèn villages were calling on the Tijàniyya to supply them with Muslim missionaries and schools. The Tijànì missionaries converted the Safèn but were quickly succeeded by local

52 Here I am summarizing data from women informants; interview, Yakha Faye, Bandia, 26 June 2002; interview, Toutane Cisse, Bandia, 27 June 2002; interview, Lemou Sène, Amy Faye, Salimata Diouf, Bandia, 28 June 2002; and interview, Awa Sène, Mariata Diouf, Rokhaya Faye, Tchiki, 18 July 2002. It is impossible to even begin to analyze all the data from these interviews here.

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Muslims. This gave Safèn religious scholars like Babacar N’Dione a leading role in defining the transition from tradition to Islam. This transition is still taking place. Conversion led to dramatic changes in the distribution of power and wealth, symbolized by the demise of matrilineal inheritance and traditional funerals. For converts, changes in birthing ceremonies, marriage, funerals and inheritance symbolize the transformations brought by conversion to Islam. Focusing on first-generation converts allows a discussion of conversion to move beyond the polarities in the Horton-Fisher debate, where the juggernaut of Islam was opposed to the basic African cosmology. This polarity occults the agency of converts and diverts attention from the moment of conversion. Neither Horton’s nor Fisher’s model predicts significant change at this moment, although Horton’s model is useful in conceptualizing the moment when “conversion is in the air”. Fisher, in particular, sees conversion as a long process but his stages of quarantine, mixing and reform are ill-suited to dealing with the immediate changes described by converts. Horton’s model occults human agency by predicting that the basic cosmology will determine the outcome. For the Safèn, the interests of a youthful generation of converts were far more important than the basic cosmology in determining which aspects of Islam required immediate changes in social practice and which could be negotiated over time. Neither model predicts the fissures between generations observed among the Safèn or the linkages between conversion and the rapid transformation of patterns of inheritance and family structure. Elder Safèn rejected conversion but a young generation of converts, in defiance of their elders, broke with the past. The choice between Islam and Christianity that shaped the Safèn experience highlights the agency of converts. Islam offered the Safèn a much more active role in shaping Islam than the Catholic Church in Popenguine in appropriating Christianity.

CHAPTER SIX

CHRISTIANITY AS SEEN BY AN AFRICAN MUSLIM INTELLECTUAL: AMADOU HAMPÂTÉ BÂ Ralph Austen Jésus vu par un musulman is probably the best-known African statement on Christian-Muslim relationships.1 The fame of this work may owe more to the general and very well-deserved reputation of the author than to its intrinsic merits as an historical or theological document. Nonetheless, it can provide us with a window into certain aspects of Muslim-Christian dialogue in West Africa and its role in shaping the general development of one of the most prominent (especially for European-language audiences) Muslim intellectuals to emerge from this region in the twentieth century. The discussion of Jesus is not the only public statement on Christianity by Hampâté Bâ. In 1970 or 1971 he held an extensive “dialogue with Nigerien students” that was later published as “Reflections on the Islamic Religion” and contains long passages addressing Muslim-Christian issues.2 Sometime in the 1960s he also gave a lecture in Paris on “The Parallel between the Christian Lord’s Prayer and the Muslim Fatiha”, the opening sùra of the Qur"àn. All of these texts can be found in the second edition of Jésus vu par un musulman that was edited by Hélène Heckmann, Hampâté Bâ’s widow and literary executor. The historical context of Hampâté Bâ’s statements on Christianity is both global and West African. They derive ultimately from the international “dialogue movement” launched by the Roman Catholic

1 Since its original publication, this little book has seen two editions and many printings: Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jésus vu par un musulman (Abidjan-Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1976); and Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jésus vu par un musulman (Paris: Stock, 1996). 2 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Aspects de la civilisation africaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972), pp. 47–109. The dating of the event comes from Hélène Heckmann’s introduction to the 1996 edition of Jésus vu par un musulman.

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Church after the Vatican II Council of 1962–1965.3 More immediately, they come out of an exceptionally successful version of these Christian-Muslim encounters initiated by Catholic authorities in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where Hampâté Bâ lived during the 1970s and 1980s.4 Hampâté Bâ was not himself a central force in the Abidjan dialogues but they did produce still more statements by him on relations between Christianity and Islam.5 Abidjan and the larger movement represented by the inter-faith efforts there were also responsible for Hampâté Bâ’s invitation to the Niamey conference of 1975, at which he presented his discussion of Jesus. From the perspective of Mali, his home country, Hampâté Bâ was thus seen as one of the few prominent West African Muslims to have entered with any enthusiasm into the Christian-inspired ecumenical efforts.6 Interesting as they are in their own terms, the Muslim-Christian dialogues of the Vatican II era do not appear to have had any lasting impact upon West African inter-faith relations. In Abidjan they faded out soon after the departure, in 1984, of the Franciscan Brother Gwenolé Jeusset, who had been their major proponent. The success of such ecumenical efforts, along with Hampâté Bâ’s decision to make his home in Côte d’Ivoire, also owed a good deal to the personal influence of President Houphouët-Boigny. Unhappily, developments in this country since Houphouët-Boigny’s death in 1993 suggest that it is no longer a model of Christian-Muslim understanding. Instead of focusing on Jésus vu par un musulman and the circumstances of its production, my own inquiry deals with Hampâté Bâ’s 3 Pro Mundi Vita editors, “Opportunities and Limits of Organized Dialogue”, in Richard W. Rousseau (ed.), Christianity and Islam: The Struggling Dialogue, vol. 4 (Scranton, PA: Ridge Row Press, 1985); and Christian W. Troll, “Changing Catholic Views of Islam”, in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Islam and Christianity: Mutual Perceptions since the Mid-20th Century (Leuven: Peeters, 1998). There was a parallel effort by the Protestant World Council of Churches that does not appear to have touched at least French-speaking West Africa; see Jutta Sperber, Christians and Muslims: The Dialogue Activities of the World Council of Churches and their Theological Foundation (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000). 4 This effort is described in rich detail by Marie Miran, L’islam en mégapole. Une histoire des communautés musulmanes d’Abidjan, 1950–2000 (Paris: Karthala, forthcoming). I am very grateful to Dr Miran for sharing this manuscript and other insights with me. See also Gwenolé Jeusset and Raymond Deniel, Ami de Dieu et notre Ami, El Hadj Boubacar G. Sakho (Abidjan: Inades, 1986). 5 See particularly an interview at the Franciscan Noviciate of Anyama on 27 May 1980 (transcript provided by Marie Miran). 6 Michel Lagarde, “Quelques aspects concrets du dialogue islamo-chrétien au Mali”, Islamochristiana 5 (1979): 166–8.

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confrontations with Christianity over a much longer period of time. The Islam in question is the specific version of Tijànì Sufism imparted by Hampâté Bâ’s teacher, Cerno Bokar Salif Tall. The medium of transmission, Hampâté Bâ himself, has been very aptly characterized by Louis Brenner as a “Tijànì Francophone”, a man who inhabited and attempted to define the space between his own African Muslim culture and the Christian European world of colonialism and its aftermath.7 Jesus as Seen by Hampâté Bâ Before looking at Hampâté Bâ’s texts in biographical and historical terms, it is necessary to give a brief summary of their contents. What is the theological understanding of Jesus and Christianity more generally? How does Hampâté Bâ define “ecumenism”? What are the methods and forms of representation through which he makes his arguments? The formal theology that Hampâté Bâ brings to his discussion of Jesus is (as advertised) entirely Muslim and, from this perspective, quite conventional.8 Jesus is given a privileged position in the line of Biblical prophets who precede Mu˙ammad. His miraculous birth to a virgin mother is announced in advance by an angel. He is the anointed Messiah who will return to earth “before the end of time”9 but is neither God nor the Son of God. Christianity and the entire Biblical tradition are a major basis of the Qur"àn and constitute the “woof ” (trame) of Muslim religious life.10 The message of all these interpretations is clearly ecumenical, stressing the convergence of Christianity and Islam and glossing over the differences (for example, the divinity of Jesus is neither affirmed nor explicitly denied).11 Hampâté Bâ notes that Islam is, in principle,

7 Louis Brenner, “Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Tijânî francophone”, in Jean-Louis Triaud and David Robinson (eds), La Tijaniyya: Une confrérie musulmane à la conquête de l’Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 2000), pp. 289–326. 8 For a fuller account of the match between orthodox Muslim doctrine on Jesus and this book see Gérard Chalaye, “Jésus vu par le musulman Amadou Hampâté Bâ”, Interculturel francophonies 3 ( June–July 2003): 297–317. 9 Hampâté Bâ, Jesus, p. 40. 10 Hampâté Bâ, Aspects de la civilisation africaine, p. 74. 11 In his 1980 Anyama interview, Hampâté Bâ goes somewhat farther towards reconciliation by equating the Christian “Son of God” with the Muslim “Breath of

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more inclined to such self-understanding since it recognizes Christian scriptures while Christians totally reject the Qur"àn. But he admits that in practice Muslims are no more tolerant than Christians.12 The major shared point is, of course, monotheism, but Hampâté Bâ occasionally makes gestures towards his more consistent preoccupation— the affirmation of African “tradition”, which is presented here as participant in a similar spirituality. In its strongest form, this ecumenism verges on relativism. Hampâté Bâ thus cites Cerno Bokar on the existence in every dialogue of “three truths: that of each of the two partners (‘my’ truth and ‘your’ truth) and THE truth. This last is placed at an equal distance from the first two.”13 However, in keeping with the doctrine of the Catholic dialogue movement, Hampâté Bâ pronounces himself firmly against “syncretism”. The various religions are to understand one another from their distinct positions rather than attempting to merge into some new common doctrine. This stance is particularly understandable in an African context, where both Christian and Islamic practices are always subject to critiques of succumbing to “primitive” local beliefs and practices. Hampâté Bâ, who also revered African culture, is characteristically able to subvert this implication by a rhetorical move in which he considers Judaism, Christianity and Islam as three brothers of a polygamous family where there is only a single father but each mother brings up her child according to her own customs. Each of these wives speaks of her husband to her children according to her own conceptions.14

The sources that Hampâté Bâ cites to support his arguments are almost entirely Qur"ànic and the only commentaries he discusses are those of Cerno Bokar. It is quite possible that his understanding of Jesus was also influenced by Louis Massignon, a French scholar of Sufism who was particularly interested in such matters, with whom Hampâté Bâ came into contact as early as 1938. However, no effort is made in these texts to display sophisticated scholarship, which is perhaps appropriate for the audience in some of these dialogues but God”. He also identifies a Muslim equivalent for the Trinity in the complex of “Allah, Jibril and Muhammad”. 12 Hampâté Bâ, Aspects de la civilisation africaine, p. 75. 13 Hampâté Bâ, Aspects de la civilisation africaine, p. 82. 14 Hampâté Bâ, Jesus, p. 100. This response to a question, quoted by Hélène Heckmann, has no footnote and is not found in any of the main texts under discussion here but clearly derives from the same set of dialogues.

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also consistent with what we know about the degree of advanced study in or about Islam (to say nothing of Christianity) undertaken by Hampâté Bâ. As he himself tells us in his memoirs, his elementary Qur"ànic studies were disrupted by the death of his first teacher and then cut off completely when, at the age of twelve, he was forcibly recruited into a French school. He abandoned the latter system in 1921 after completing the equivalent of middle school and became a clerk in the colonial administration. As we shall see, he continued to educate himself in his free time but without any formal support, and sometimes against major obstacles.15 In his comparison of the Lord’s Prayer and the Fati˙à, the opening sùra of the Qur"àn, Hampâté Bâ attempts some linguistic analysis of Arabic terms (and apologizes for his inability to do the same for the Greek or Aramaic/Hebrew original of the Christian prayer). This may be an effort to respond to intra-Muslim confrontations of the 1950s, when Hampâté Bâ supported Islamic education in French and local vernaculars as opposed to the insistence on Arabic of the then new Wahhàbì reform movement.16 In any case, there is relatively little such effort; the main text of the Fati˙à is only in French and the cited Arabic is all transcribed into Roman letters. The ecumenical texts presented by Hampâté Bâ thus appear to be aimed at a non-Muslim and even Western (or at least westernized African) audience. However, they diverge strikingly from this style when the author begins to introduce “arithmology” into his argument. Here he follows a major element in his Tijànì education but one which usually repulsed Europeans, including the reviewer of Jesus for a major “dialogue” journal.17 15 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Amkoullel, l’Enfant Peul. Mémoires (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992), pp. 214–5, 307–18, 501–6. In an undated interview Hampâté Bâ indicates that up to the period of the Popular Front government in the late 1930s, African fonctionnaires were strongly discouraged from reading books or subscribing to metropolitan French journals (Fonds, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, IMEC [L’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine] 6GE8–4/361 bis [the citations from this archive are based on a provisional catalogue]). His efforts during this time at sporadic and informal study of Arabic and Islam are described in Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Oui mon commandant! Mémoires (II) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994), passim. 16 Louis Brenner, “Becoming Muslim in Soudan Français”, in David Robinson and Jean-Louis Triaud (eds), Le temps des marabouts: Itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique Occidentale Française v. 1880–1960 (Paris: Karthala, 1997), pp. 467–92. In his 1980 interview, however, Hampâté Bâ denounces “the great error or scorn” of “the confusion which is made between Arabism and Islam”. 17 Maurice Borrmans, book review, Islamochristiana 5 (1979): 286; for the basis of

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In general, Hampâté Bâ’s more famous renditions of Cerno Bokar’s teachings provide the model for his discussions of Christianity.18 The dialogues and parables that made these texts popular among westernized readers19 are very much present in Hampâté Bâ’s own writings on Christianity, as is the numerology, which he considered the key to the esoteric (Arabic: bà†in) and thus deeper element of Sufi knowledge. More generally, as indicated in the quotation above concerning truth, Cerno Bokar presented Islam in a form that can be understood as ecumenical and thus open to dialogue with another faith. However, Cerno Bokar did not himself address Christianity in any detail and we thus have to examine the further career of Hampâté Bâ to understand both how he came to such dialogue and where it ultimately led, at least in his own thoughts and writings. Earlier Encounters with Christianity Hampâté Bâ grew up during the first two decades of the twentieth century in the Malian towns of Bandiagara, Bougouni, Bamako, Jenne and Kati. This exposed him to three sets of cultural-religious traditions which became the main concern of his later intellectual and public life: the Islam of his family, primarily the Tijànì Sufi tradition (with a secondary investment in the Qadiri Sufi tradition of Macina); the militantly secular republicanism of French government schools; and the indigenous Fulbe and Mande worlds surrounding (and even penetrating) these privileged spheres. Christianity was not a major presence in this landscape despite (and partly because of ) French colonial rule that did not, in this post-Dreyfus Affair era, lend much support to missionaries, especially in heavily Muslim regions.

this numerology in Cerno Bokar’s thought see Louis Brenner, West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Quest of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal (London: Hurst, 1984), pp. 91–97; Hampâté Bâ’s first known publication is a numerological analysis of the texts describing the birth of Mu˙ammad (a reference there to Jesus is abbreviated because “it would divert us very far from our subject”); “Mystère de la Naissance”, Islam-AOF 1, 1–2 (1938): 10–12. 18 Amadou Hampâté Bâ and Marcel Cardaire, Tierno Bokar, le sage de Bandiagara (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1957); and Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Vie et enseignement de Tierno Bokar: le sage de Bandiagara (Paris: Seuil, 1980). 19 These writings, along with Hampâté Bâ’s memoirs, have recently become the subject of a theater piece, Tierno Bokar by Peter Brooks and Marie-Hélène Estienne.

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Hampâté Bâ’s confrontation with Christianity occurred during three discontinuous phases of his life that intersected with important moments in the cultural history of West African contact with Europe. The first, an essentially antagonistic one, came during the classical colonial era of the 1920s and 1930s, when Hampâté Bâ served as a clerk in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso); the second grew out of a personal relationship with the French scholar Théodore Monod in the more politicized atmosphere around the time of World War II; and the last was the postcolonial Vatican II era which produced his main texts on Islamic-Christian relations. The Mossi-dominated lands of Burkina, where the young Hampâté Bâ arrived in 1922, were seen by both Muslims and Christians as a largely pagan territory, open to competitive proselytization, with the colonial administration as a potential ally for either side.20 An African administrator like Hampâté Bâ—with his strong Muslim connections—thus appeared as a major threat to the Catholic Church. When, during his initial service in Ouagadougou, Hampâté Bâ helped organize a produce-purchasing cooperative among his mainly Christian fellow fonctionnaires, he was vehemently denounced by the territorial Archbishop, who forced most of the members to quit the organization. In one of his later rural postings, the local Catholic mission blamed him for the reconversion of the local commandant’s interpreter to Islam. During the time when he was given temporary control over his own district sub-division, Hampâté Bâ himself opposed various missionary policies and anti-Muslim utterances with the result that he was eventually transferred elsewhere.21 These clashes with Church authorities were reported by Hampâté Bâ to have prejudiced him against even reading the Bible seriously up until his meeting with Monod.22 He indicates, in this same correspondence, that as the result of his intensive studies with Cerno Bokar, mainly undertaken at the end of his Burkina service in 1933,

20 Assimi Kouanda, “Marabouts et missionaires catholiques au Burkina à l’époque coloniale (1900–1947)”, in Robinson and Triaud, Temps des marabouts, pp. 33–52. 21 Hampâté Bâ, Oui mon commandant, pp. 338–46, 394–7, 407–11. The manuscript version of this work contains a fuller account of the cooperative episode: Fonds AHB, IMEC 6GE7–8/354. 22 Letter to Monod, 11.ii.41 cited in Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, p. 314. Louis Brenner has kindly given me photocopies of this entire correspondence, hereafter cited as Fonds Monod.

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“je n’ai plus le même esprit”. And indeed, the initial basis for communication in 1938 between these two men—the one still a colonial clerk although in a more influential position in Bamako, the other newly appointed in Dakar as the first director of IFAN (L’Institut Français [now Fondamental] d’Afrique Noire)—was Hampâté Bâ’s desire to publish his French rendition of Cerno Bokar’s teachings. This work eventually came out in print almost two decades later with a different French collaborator and no privileged reference to Christianity. Moreover, the circumstances which led Hampâté Bâ to approach Monod and motivated his eventual appointment to IFAN involve his Fulbe and Muslim concerns rather than an interest in Christianity. These need to be surveyed briefly, since they provide a context for the very strong ecumenical collaboration with Monod but also, perhaps, for its termination prior to the Vatican II dialogues. The Move to IFAN and Théodore Monod During the mid-1930s Hampâté Bâ began to develop contacts that would allow him to shift from an administrative to a research career. He also found himself in a political situation which made such a move even more desirable, if not absolutely necessary. The contacts initially involved two French colonial administrators, Colonel R. Figaret and Gilbert Vieillard, both deeply engaged in Fulbe cultural studies but not particularly concerned with either Islam or Christianity.23 However, Vieillard was already employed at IFAN at this time and when he returned to France in 1940 for military service (and his subsequent battlefield death), he left his large research archive in Dakar. The need to catalogue these important papers was one of the major reasons that Monod finally appointed Hampâté Bâ to IFAN.24 23 Hampâté Bâ did have a brief but intensive and mutually sympathetic dialogue at this time with another French officer, Lieutenant Jean Louis Montezer, after the latter had published a small book which followed the standard colonial line on Islam noir, including a mistrust of the Óamawiyya (see below). But Montezer turned out, in 1940, to be a Gaullist and had to flee West Africa, implicating Hampâté Bâ in further suspicions of disloyalty to the reigning Vichy regime: Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 179; Muriel Devey, Hampâté Bâ, l’homme de la tradition (Senegal: Livre Sud), pp. 78–9; and Bintou Sanankoua, “Hampâté Bâ (v. 1900–1991)”, in Robinson and Triaud, Temps des marabouts, p. 400. 24 Claude Malon, “Gilbert Vieillard: Adminstrateur et ethnologue en Afrique

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Islam provided the political motivation for Hampâté Bâ to leave Bamako. In the years preceding World War II he had become, through his teacher Cerno Bokar, affiliated with the Óamawì branch of the Tijàniyya. The conflicts between the Óamawiyya and various groups in AOF (Afrique occidentale française), including the more established 'Umarian Tijànìs, led the French to persecute Cerno Bokar and contributed to his illness and death in 1940.25 Hampâté Bâ also came under suspicion and only managed to hang on to his administrative position with great difficulty. He thus turned to Monod for immediate rescue and, as Brenner argues, for new spiritual support. Monod represented a new and far more liberal version of Christianity than Hampâté Bâ had previously encountered. He was a devout although hardly orthodox Calvinist Protestant, married to a Jewish Czech woman,26 and also a fully qualified academic (although highly adventurous) researcher. Monod’s scholarly credentials were in the natural rather than the human sciences so his response to the first contact with Hampâté Bâ on the receipt of his original Cerno Bokar transcription was to pass the text on to Louis Massignon,27 the leading French student of Islamic mysticism. Massignon was, in addition, both a serious Catholic and a champion of inter-faith dialogue. Hampâté Bâ would meet Massignon himself in 1951 and be further encouraged in his ecumenical interests.

Occidentale”, Cahiers de sociologie économique et culturelle, Ethnopsychologie 33 ( July 2000): 119–22. 25 Brenner, West African Sufi. The rift within the Tijàniyya had as much to do with rivalries among Muslim authorities as with French paranoia, as demonstrated both in the unpublished third volume of Hampâté Bâ’s memoirs (Fonds AHB IMEC 6GDD25–3/5 sections 1, 2) and by Robert Launay and Benjamin F. Soares, “The Formation of an ‘Islamic Sphere’ in French Colonial West Africa”, Economy and Society 28, 4 (1999): 497–519. 26 This became a major preoccupation during the time of his closest relationship with Hampâté Bâ, due to the anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime in France and AOF, and the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. 27 Devey (Hampâté Bâ, p. 77) claims that Figaret sent this document to Massignon but Monod claimed that it was his interest in Hampâté Bâ and Cerno Bokar which first brought him into contact with Massignon. See Jean Moncelon (ed.), “Théodore Monod and Louis Massignon”, Cerisy-La-Salle, 15 August 1990, Témoignage de Cerisy La Salle, http://jm.saliege.com/Monod.html. The details of these communications would be interesting in tracing the development of Monod’s religious relationship with Hampâté Bâ. In my preliminary survey of the IMEC Hampâté Bâ archive I did not find the letters from Monod complementing those sent to Monod and preserved in the Fonds Monod. There are also some materials on Hampâté Bâ among the papers of Louis Massignon, but I have not yet seen them.

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The beginning of Hampâté Bâ’s relationship with Monod himself, however, had nothing to do with Christianity. Indeed, Massignon initially expressed skepticism to Monod about treating the Cerno Bokar text as “an indigenous Sudanese document” given the traces he found in it of “rather banal . . . French theosophic theory”.28 Hampâté Bâ defended himself against this charge by explaining that he had only undertaken the study of theosophy (quite independently) in fulfillment of Cerno Bokar’s advice that he “begin by carefully seeking out the most appropriate French terms to fit mystical [Islamic] matters, with the goal of being understood by Europeans.”29 In this same letter, Hampâté Bâ notes that he might have expected help from Catholic or Protestant clergy with his translation project “but, alas, for many reasons relationships between Muslims and Christian priests are a very rare thing in French West Africa; I find this very regrettable.” In any case, both Monod and Massignon eventually agreed that the Cerno Bokar texts represented a significant expression of Sufi Islamic thought and deserved publication.30 Monod finally met Hampâté Bâ face to face after his own return from military service in France in 1941. In this same year Hampâté Bâ requested and received a French Bible from Monod and proceeded to study and cite it with great enthusiasm.31 In 1945 the two men visited the home and grave of the recently deceased Cerno Bokar. Within the mosque of Bandiagara, Monod recited (and had translated into Fulfulde by 28

“L’auteur n’a certainement pas rédigé tout seul [sic] cet étonnant document et le mélange très attachant qu’il y a de traditions tidjaniennes authentiques et d’additions ‘théosophiques’ dûes [sic] à l’influence personnelle d’un français (sur place vous pouvez peut-être me dire de qui il s’agit, j’ai pensé à Dupuis Yakouba, mais il doit être trop vieux) me gêne un peu car, tout de même on ne peut présenter ni publier comme un document soudanais autochtone un texte qui, pour toute une partie, transforme l’arithmologie mystique traditionnelle des tidjaniens suivant une théorie théosophique française (d’ailleurs assez banale). Ce qui me frappe et qui semble bien de l’auteur, c’est une certaine force de pensée, une démarche dynamique et une expérience certaine de la direction de conscience des noirs auxquels ces Peulhs s’imposent par un ascendant intellectuel incontestable. Ceci n’est qu’une première impression et je vous récrirai d’ailleurs plus longuement.” Massignon to Monod, 14 March 1939, in Moncelon, “Monod & Massignon”. The original of this letter is also in the Fonds Monod. 29 Hampâté Bâ to Monod, 8 January 1941, Fonds Monod (also cited in Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, p. 293). 30 Massignon to Monod, 6 June 1939, in Moncelon, “Monod & Massignon” and Fonds Monod. 31 Devey, Hampâté Bâ, p. 80; Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, p. 314. The use of Christian terms in Hampâté Bâ’s correspondence with Monod during the 1940s would, if read out of context, give the impression of an actual conversion.

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Hampâté Bâ) the “Hymn to Charity” of St. Paul, whom he presented as “a Sufi from among the Banu Israel”.32 Monod also published several articles between 1947 and 1950 that included parables and poetry by Cerno Bokar and one of his disciples (all collected and translated by Hampâté Bâ).33 For Monod, the main message of all these encounters was clearly ecumenical in both religious and racial/cultural terms, as befitted a survivor of the World War II era. By putting such texts before an audience materially and no doubt also mentally very distant from Fulbe Sudanic Islam, I have, once again, only one desire: to confront Christians with a religious phenomenon different from those with which they are familiar but in fact identical; to give them a further motivation for belief in Unity, of God and among men, and to welcome as a message of consolation and hope the beautiful word—still heard so seldom—of: convergences.34

In 1942 Monod finally succeeded in rescuing Hampâté Bâ from his difficulties in Bamako by having him transferred from the territorial administrative services to IFAN. This shift formally launched Hampâté Bâ’s career as a researcher and writer. In its first phase, up until the mid-1950s, it also involved the two men in a continuing effort at common religious understanding. Much of this dialogue is quite literally expressed in their correspondence, which is available in the Fonds Monod and cited at considerable length by Louis Brenner. At this point we simply have to assume that the ideas discussed (along with possible contributions from Louis Massignon) are close to those expressed in Hampâté Bâ’s speeches and writings of the 1960s and 1970s. The extant correspondence of the 1940s also alludes to at least one institutional project, the creation of an ecumenical zàwiya. However,

32 Théodore Monod, “Un poème mystique soudanais”, Le monde non chrétien n.s. 2 (1947): 217–28; Théodore Monod, “Un Homme de Dieu: Tierno Bokar”, Présence Africaine 8–9 (1950): 149–57; Théodore Monod, “Préface”, Hampâté Bâ, Amkoullel, pp. 7–8; and Devey, Hampâté Bâ, p. 78. Sanankoua, “Hampâté Bâ”, p. 405, reports that the text was a Psalm of David, who was identified, in very orthodox Muslim terms, as a “Prophet of Israel”. 33 Théodore Monod, “Dans l’islam noir: un mystique soudanais”, Almanach des Missions (Montpellier: 1943) (neither I nor Louis Brenner have found the printed version of this article, whose manuscript original is preserved in the Fonds Monod); Théodore Monod, “Un poème mystique”; and Théodore Monod, “Un homme de Dieu”. 34 Monod, “Un poème mystique”, p. 228.

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the available documentation does not provide much detail about how such a devotional center would operate. We do know that the zàwiya was initially to be set up somewhere in eastern Mali. In 1946, when Hampâté Bâ first came into contact with Houphouët-Boigny and the Óamawì Yacouba Sylla, Côte d’Ivoire was also proposed and the idea was briefly revived during Hampâté Bâ’s permanent residence in Abidjan in the 1980s. A property had even been purchased at Sofara in Mali in 1953 explicitly for this purpose. However, from the 1950s onwards, Hampâté Bâ’s concept of a zàwiya seems to have taken a less ecumenical form or at least based itself more on the Islam he had learned from Cerno Bokar and the study of indigenous African culture rather than an explicit dialogue with Christianity. Hélène Heckmann describes the Sofara (or Sevaré) project as “an ecumenical center for religious and cultural encounters doubling as a Qur"ànic school with a diverse curriculum (Islamic sciences, but also mathematics, literacy, languages, etc.)”.35 Monod’s own view of the ecumenical interests he shared with Hampâté Bâ certainly gave a central position to the teaching of Cerno Bokar, whom he was the first to describe in print as “Le Sage de Bandiagara”.36 Unlike most European readers, the IFAN director showed himself sympathetic to the numerological aspects of the discourses recorded by Hampâté Bâ and shared with him similar esoteric material based on Christian and Jewish symbolism.37 At the same time, Monod encouraged Hampâté Bâ to edit the texts of his master’s utterances into a dialogical form which would make them appeal to a wider audience (and coincidently draw on Hampâté Bâ’s own narrative skills). The explicit goal was publication but this result was finally achieved in a more intra-Islamic than ecumenical context, which also seems to have driven the two men apart. From Monod to French Africanists As shown by Brenner, Hampâté Bâ was never entirely happy with his employment at IFAN, not out of any pique with Monod but

35 Hampâté Bâ, Oui mon commandant, p. 505; Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, pp. 316–7; and Sanankoua, “Hampâté Bâ”, p. 405. 36 Monod, “Homme de Dieu”, p. 157. 37 Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, pp. 314–6, 320–21.

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mainly because the work he was assigned often involved more administration than scholarship or teaching, and it did not pay enough. His career did get a major boost in 1951 when, on Monod’s recommendation, he received a UNESCO fellowship to study in Paris. This sojourn would have an impact upon the subsequent direction of his work and its religious orientation. Most immediately, it put him in touch with a whole new range of French academic Africanists who had great interest in indigenous culture and Islam but (with the exception of Massignon) little or no concern for Christianity or personal religion in general. At the same time this visit established Hampâté Bâ as a man who could perform effectively upon an international stage and it thus provided the basis for new ventures in ecumenism. The Paris trip also occurred in the early stages of a new relationship between Hampâté Bâ and the colonial establishment, this time with the same organism that had persecuted Cerno Bokar as a Óamawì: the Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes. In this post-war period, however, the Bureau’s agenda had shifted quite radically. The new threat to French political and cultural goals was Reformist or socalled Wahhàbì Islam and a Tijànì like Hampâté Bâ became a valuable ally in mounting a counter-reform policy of teaching Islam in French and local vernaculars rather than in Arabic.38 Even if Hampâté Bâ had still been interested in Christian-Muslim dialogue during this period, any overt reference to such concerns would have been impolitic in a situation where Sufi Islam was under attack as being “syncretistic”. While working with the counter-reform project, Hampâté Bâ did not resign from IFAN but was at last granted his wish to be sent from its urban offices to a hydrobiological laboratory at Diafarabe in Macina. Fortunately, the director of this laboratory, Jacques Daget, was also interested in Fulbe ethnography and supported Hampâté Bâ in the research and writing of his first published book, a history of the nineteenth-century Macina jihadist state.39 As part of his counter-reform program, Marcel Cardaire, the head of the Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes, also authorized Hampâté Bâ to open a school

38

Brenner, “Becoming Muslim”, pp. 296–9. Amadou Hampâté Bâ and J. Daget, L’empire peul du Macina. I (1818–1853) (Bamako: IFAN, 1955). 39

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at Diafarabe (for which he needed permission from Monod).40 It was likewise Cardaire who finally brought about the publication of the manuscript on Cerno Bokar.41 The Pursuit of Ecumenism and its Significance Hampâté Bâ had published several previous articles with IFAN and Présence Africaine, and even won a prize in 1944 for the translation of a Fulbe narrative, Kaïdara;42 but the two books from the 1950s, among the most important of all his works, established him as a major figure in African letters. It was from this position that he could take a series of initiatives that would bring him back into ChristianMuslim dialogue, now with Catholic partners who would later launch Vatican II. In 1959 during a writers’ conference in Rome, Hampâté Bâ sought and obtained an audience with Pope John XXIII. Two years later, he took advantage of an invitation to Israel (again, an external initiative quite typical of this era) to conduct a ChristianJewish-Muslim religious service on Mount Zion.43 This last gesture underlines the absence of any evident institutional legacy to Hampâté Bâ’s various efforts at inter-faith reconciliation. His other, quite extensive, work as a teacher and leader of Muslims in West Africa likewise bore little fruit.44 With the material presently available, perhaps the most we can make of Hampâté Bâ’s encounters with Christianity is to evaluate them in terms of his own intellectual and spiritual development.

40 Hampâté Bâ to Monod, 26 September 1953, cited in Brenner, “Tijânî francophone”, p. 300. 41 Bâ and Daget, Tierno Bokar. Despite the formal co-authorship, both this and the Macina book are essentially the work of Hampâté Bâ, with the two Europeans functioning mainly as assistants and editors. This is indicated by both their content, quite beyond the competence of either Cardaire or Daget, and their republication under Hampâté Bâ’s own name in the 1980s. 42 Devey (Hampâté Bâ, pp. 91–2) states that Kaïdara was also published locally by the Rotary Club of Dakar in 1943 but I have not been able to find any references to affirm the existence of such a printed work, as opposed to a booklet on the topic based on a talk by Monod. 43 Sanankoua, “Hampâté Bâ”, pp. 404–5. There is also a lengthy description of the Jerusalem venture in the 1980 Anyama interview transcript. 44 This included, among other things, a program to encourage Fulbe, whose only education had been in Qur"ànic schools, to use the Arabic alphabet to write in their own language; Fonds AHB, IMEC 6GE14–7/530.

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One possibility is to consider all these ecumenical undertakings as a secondary aspect of Hampâté Bâ’s longer and more consistent development as a Tijànì Sufi. By the time he began reading the Bible with any sympathy he was already over forty years old and thus well-established on his religious path. The teachings of Cerno Bokar made it possible for him to enter into conversation with the kind of Christianity represented by Théodore Monod and we can read the various dialogues and addresses of the Vatican II era as, at best, elaborations of the Cerno Bokar texts. This is not to belittle them but rather to suggest that they are more a testimony to the openness of this version of Sufi teaching than major statements of their own on Christianity and Islam. However, we can also entertain the possibility that the form in which Cerno Bokar is ultimately presented to readers was deeply influenced by Hampâté Bâ’s confrontations with Christianity. He makes no such statement in his published comments on the teaching of his master, and various references to Jesus and tolerance for other faiths in the teachings of Cerno Bokar, like the statement in Hampâté Bâ’s own publications, are well within the Islamic canon.45 This is a question which can only be answered by comparing the earliest manuscripts of Cerno Bokar’s words with the texts produced after the encounters with Monod and Massignon, something not possible with the documents that are presently available to us.46 We can perhaps be more confident in asserting that by entering into religious dialogue with Monod and extending this into the Vatican II era, Hampâté Bâ developed a range of expression and thought in French that would not have been possible otherwise.47 Monod is in no way responsible for Hampâté Bâ’s interest in research and he was not the first or the last or—in academic terms—even

45 See Amadou Hampâté Bâ, “Jésus et Hasdu: Conte initiatique de la mystique peule, enseigné à la zaouïa de Bandiagara par TIERNO BOKAR SALIF TALL”, Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire 31, B, 3 (1969): 754–86. This text is much like the other Fulbe “initiatory tales”, with no reference to Christianity, published by Hampâté Bâ. 46 Neither the Hampâté Bâ archive at IMEC nor the Monod and Massignon papers appear to contain the version of Cerno Bokar’s teachings originally transcribed in the 1930s. 47 In an undated interview, Hampâté Bâ attributed his ability to master French beyond the very limited level of his formal schooling to the influence of various colonial mentors, including Monod (Fonds AHB IMEC 6GE8–4/361).

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the most significant French scholar with whom Hampâté Bâ came into close contact. However, the language and thoughts of his other interlocutors—even those such as Montezer and Cardaire who were interested in Islam—offer an academic and political discourse and not the literary language which makes Hampâté Bâ such a compelling and nuanced writer. This skill perhaps owes something to his relationship with Monod and is displayed in Hampâté Bâ’s renditions of Cerno Bokar’s teachings as well as in his most widely read— if less religious—literary works, Wangrin and the two published volumes of his memoirs. Hampâté Bâ himself and scholars who knew him personally, including Louis Brenner, credit this narrative ability to the orality that lay at the base of his earliest formation and was the medium in which, even as a mature adult, he first learned and then communicated much that he later wrote. If this is true, then it is the traditional rather than the Islamic, to say nothing of the Christian, aspect of Hampâté Bâ’s culture which accounts for his wide appeal. However, at the very least, this skill was addressed very seriously to Islamic issues. Whether or not the published version of Cerno Bokar’s teachings owes something to Hampâté Bâ’s close contact with committed Christians and Christian thought, it is a work much appreciated by Malian Muslims, perhaps because it so effectively links Islam with local practices of oral transmission.48 Is Hampâté Bâ then a sui generis figure rather than a representative of more general trends in West African Islamic thought or its confrontations with Christianity? We cannot, at this moment, even be entirely sure of the degree to which his views were influenced by Cerno Bokar, since we presently have so few documents of this Tijànì teacher’s words prior to Hampâté Bâ’s encounter with Monod. Similar ecumenical lessons are attributed to his own Sufi master by another Muslim sage of the same era, Almamy Malik Yattara. But the memories of this education were only recorded in the 1980s and 1990s, after Almamy had been in close contact with Hampâté Bâ.49 In any case, Hampâté Bâ himself is a very real figure of Islam in West Africa and his various encounters with Christianity represent 48

I owe evidence for the current reception of Cerno Bokar to Benjamin Soares. Almamy Malik Yattara and Bernard Salvaing, Almamy: une jeunesse sur les rives du fleuve Niger (Brinon-sur-Sauldre: Grandvaux, 2000), pp. 373–8; and Bernard Salvaing, personal communication. 49

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an historical possibility within such a world. Like all cultural monuments, his life and work can at least provide a starting point for further inquiry into the more general conditions of his time and place.

CHAPTER SEVEN

FUNDAMENTALISM AND OUTREACH STRATEGIES IN EAST AFRICA: CHRISTIAN EVANGELISM AND MUSLIM DA'WA John A. Chesworth Introduction This chapter looks at the role of fundamentalism in outreach, both for Christian Evangelism and Muslim da'wa, “the propagation of Islam” in Arabic. Fundamentalism is a misunderstood term, which can be emotive. It is an idea with Christian origins, applied to groups who wish for a return to the “fundamentals” of the faith. In recent times it has been misapplied to Muslims, when it would be better to call groups that simply wish to return to the “basics” of their faith either Reformist or Revivalist. However, in both Christianity and Islam there are groups that could be termed Fanatics or Extremists and it is these groups that in common usage are termed “fundamentalists”. The word fundamentalist is used in this chapter for those of either religion whose fanaticism or extremism has sometimes led to an increase in interfaith tensions or violent political action. Within the African context, fundamentalism is becoming increasingly significant as both Muslim and Christian groups seek to influence the political structure of the continent. Jeff Haynes in Religion and Politics in Africa examines the claims that “religious fundamentalism in sub-Saharan Africa may be little more than a manifestation of the impact of foreign religious-ideological manipulation”, and “that fundamentalism is no more than a highly negative reaction to modernization on the part of disoriented, manipulated individuals”.1 Both external influence and the internalizing or indigenizing of fundamentalist ideas are seen in East Africa in the methods of outreach used by Muslims and Christians. Haynes sees that Christian 1 Jeffrey Haynes, Religion and Politics in Africa (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1996), pp. 197–231, quotation pp. 197–8.

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fundamentalism has been readily adopted and has become a part of popular religion and been indigenized. African fundamentalist Christians (sometimes referred to as “born again”, “reborn” or “charismatic”) normally believe in experiential faith, the centrality of the Holy Spirit. . . . The fundamentalist worldview is informed by belief in the authority of the Bible in all matters of faith and practice.2

Such Christians and churches have tended to develop a conservative, pro-government stance. In Kenya at the end of the “Moi years”—the era of the second president of the Republic of Kenya, Daniel T. Arap Moi, who had become increasingly autocratic and ruled from 1978 to 2002—it was such churches that were strongly in favor of the government and spoke out against the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic church leaders who condemned the government’s actions and corruption. Haynes is of the opinion that Islamic fundamentalism has not found a niche in Africa because “when religious dogmatists do seek to impose what many of their co-religionists perceive as anathema, their goals are not realized”.3 Whilst it is true that in East Africa the traditional Shàfi'ì ulama have reacted negatively to such dogma, such outright rejection has not been observed and younger Muslims have been attracted by such dogmatic teaching, as will be shown in this chapter. The outcome is that when fundamentalists undertake outreach, it has a distinct effect on the ways in which they address peoples of other faith groups. To illustrate this, the chapter looks initially at outreach strategies through public meetings, examining how Christian groups have used open-air meetings from the earliest times of Christian missionaries arriving on the East African coast during the middle of the nineteenth century. The study then specifically looks at the use of mihadhara (public debates, from the Arabic, mu˙à∂ara) by Muslim groups, such as Jumuiya ya Wahubiri wa Kiislamu Tanzania (Society of Muslim Preachers of Tanzania, JUWAKITA). The chapter concludes by examining one Muslim group in detail, Warsha ya Waandishi wa Kiislam (Muslim Writers’ Workshop), popularly known as Warsha, and the influence of an expatriate on its formation and ethos.

2 3

Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 198.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 161 Outreach Strategies Christian Evangelism: Early Open-Air Outreach in East Africa Christian Evangelism through public rallies was part of the strategy of some of the early missionaries in East Africa. Reports of the approaches that they used then are reflected in some of the methods described below. The Church Missionary Society (CMS), which arrived in East Africa in 1844, was the first of the modern missionary societies to work in the area. The missionaries were primarily working amongst “pagans” but, being based on the coast around Mombasa, they were in close contact with the Muslim community. The Annual Reports of the Society, Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, give stirring examples of the work and the approaches used. In 1894, Rev. W.E. Taylor describes the open-air meetings that were held four times a week in the market place. The market-place, the private property of H.E. the Arab Governor, is a piece of land adjoining the bazaars, occupied in almost its whole extent by several large and high palm-leaf roofed sheds, and surrounded by the shady recesses of the gahawas, or coffee-shops, where buyers and dealers solace themselves in the intervals of business. Here amongst the fish, flesh, and fowls, and the piles of country produce and cries of Native auctioneers, in a motley crowd of Swahilis and Swahili-speaking people from the up-country tribes, the coast, and shores of Asia, we have found a regular preaching site in a shed devoted to barbers and razor-grinders, and seek to preach by word and song the Gospel, which we know is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Greeks foolishness, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Mohammedans both these; but to them that are called—Jews, Greeks, and Mohammedans—Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. . . . Wherever one goes one hears the words, “Tela sizue!” (Taylor, don’t make innovations!) being the refrain of one of the most popular songs, a sort of parody of one of our choruses; or else it is “Stop and tell us something about Isa ( Jesus)!”4

Other CMS missionaries worked with Taylor and the pattern of meetings at the Mombasa market and at nearby Zizi la K"onzi carried on after his departure in 1897. This approach was also used 4

Church Missionary Society Archives, University of Birmingham (henceforth CMS), Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the Year 1895 (1896), p. 586.

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elsewhere: in his Annual Letter to the CMS for 1894 he describes a holiday in Lamu where he introduced open-air meetings to the German missionaries of Neukirchen Mission. We had great pleasure in inaugurating market services similar to those at Mombasa, and these have been kept up ever since by the German Neukirchen missionaries. We found the fame of Mombasa had preceded us, and the town was ringing with our choruses and parodies on them—or, rather, answers directed against our Gospel. . . . The Germans . . . expressed themselves as considerably cheered by our visit, and especially at the new way of “reaching the masses” which we . . . introduc[ed] to them. They said that in Germany open-air meetings were so rare that they had no experience in this so public a method of scattering the good seed.5

The numbers attending the meetings are reported by F. Burt in his Annual Letter of 1896 as being around 100 at the market place and 150–200 at Zizi la K’onzi.6 As the missionaries moved inland, the use of open-air meetings continued. R. Pittway writes positively of its use in Nairobi and Nakuru in the 1920s and 1930s but as not being so successful in the late 1940s. Nairobi 1924: On Sunday afternoons we have open-air meetings in villages which are composed largely of Mohammadens. . . . Quite a number of Mohammadens stand and listen. Nakuru 1930: The open-air meetings are well attended and many Mohammadens quietly listen to the Gospel on these occasions; and from remarks heard it is clear that they think about, and discuss the messages given. Nairobi 1935: The Open Air Meetings have been well attended and a greater number of our African brethren have desired to share in this profitable task. There have been attendances of 200–400 at these openair meetings and many have been reached for the Gospel who would not be reached through ordinary services and classes. Weithaga 1948: Open-air work continues but is becoming increasingly difficult; workers not only being “heckled” by the opposition, but sometimes physically attacked.7

5

Ibid., p. 586. CMS, Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the Year 1896 (1897), p. 11. 7 CMS, 1924, 1930, Pittway Annual Letter: Annual Letters File (G3 AL 1917–1934); 1935, 1948 Pittway Annual Letter: Annual Letters File (G3 AL 1935–1949). 6

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 163 Contemporary Christian Outreach The previous examples serve to show that the current use of public meetings has a long history in East Africa. In the post-war period in the run-up to independence, Christian outreach continued to be important. The East African Revival Movement was very active in outreach. Also there was a series of public meetings with international, mainly American, speakers, including Billy Graham, who in 1960 conducted “sensational rallies in Nairobi and Kisumu”.8 Joseph Galgalo reports that other similar meetings were conducted by T.L. Osborn in Mombasa in 1957 and later on during the 1960s, which gave an “impetus for open-air preaching, which has since become the most popular method of evangelism in Kenya”.9 The visit by Oral Roberts, when he held healing rallies in Nairobi in 1968, is also cited as a major influence in the use of public rallies and the introduction of Pentecostal churches.10 From the mid-1980s Christians regularly began to organize outreach in the form of public rallies. Ludwig reports on the growth of one organization. Since 1986, at least one “crusade” a year has taken place in Dar es Salaam. In order to organise a “crusade”, representatives of Assemblies of God, Lutherans, Anglicans and other churches work together in the “Big November Crusade Ministries”. This organisation was officially registered in 1989/90. In 1990, it began to work outside Dar es Salaam and in 1991 there were “crusades” in not less than twelve regions.11

J.R. Mlahagwa12 refers to the Big Harvest Crusades that have been organized annually in Dar es Salaam by Nyumba kwa Nyumba (House to House Ministries) since the late 1980s. These “crusades” usually take the form of rallies held on open ground in an easily accessible part of the city. Meetings are held daily—in the late afternoon—for up to two weeks. They usually have

8

A. Shorter and J.N. Njiru, New Religious Movements in Africa (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2001), p. 18. 9 J.D. Galgalo, “Impact of Pentecostalism on the Mainline Churches in Kenya”, Encounter 3 (2003): 28–42, quotation p. 30. 10 Shorter and Njiru, New Religious Movements, p. 18. 11 F. Ludwig, “After Ujamaa: Is Religious Revivalism a Threat to Tanzania’s Stability?”, in D. Westerlund (ed.), Questioning the Secular State (London: Hurst & Co., 1996), p. 223. 12 J.R. Mlahagwa, “Contending for the Faith: Spiritual Revival and the Fellowship Church in Tanzania”, in T. Spear and I.N. Kimambo (eds), East African Expressions of Christianity (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), p. 301.

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several choirs and a well-known speaker, either from within the country or from abroad. Groups involved in similar outreach include Christ for All Nations (CfaN). Its leader, Reinhard Bonnke, a German who is a regular visitor to Tanzania and Kenya, regards “Africa as a field ripe for harvest”. Ludwig comments on this approach, “[it] does not leave much room for dialogue with other religions. In Tanzania [Bonnke] has to refrain from direct attacks, but nevertheless he uses a ‘powerful’ militant language”.13 Bonnke has spoken out against Islam, and crusades have been cancelled in Nigeria and Mali because of fears of violence arising from his views. Paul Gifford discusses Bonnke’s attitude to Islam and Muslims in Africa as follows. Bonnke is quite open that he is conducting a campaign against Islam, moving against the Muslim lands of North Africa. Of his Jos crusade, Revival Report says: “Muslims vie militantly for control of the city. That fact . . . made the Jos crusade crucial for CfaN in its evangelistic commitment to drive upward into Africa”. And elsewhere: “Jos was one of CfaN’s most strategically important crusades for advancing north into Nigeria’s Moslem strongholds”. This he considers his divine mandate: “We are even knocking on the gates of the Islamic fortresses, because Jesus has said ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you’”. Everyone understands exactly whom he is referring to when he writes: “We are gripped by a holy determination to carry out the Great Commission of our Lord, which is a command to attack the strongholds of Satan”. The widely-heralded, seemingly unstoppable advance of Christianity, exemplified by Bonnke and his seemingly limitless resources, personnel and technology, appears as the ultimate threat to Muslims. To Muslims, Bonnke’s aim is the elimination of every mosque from Africa in the shortest possible time. This elimination is to be achieved through evangelisation and not through arson . . . but in Muslim eyes the ultimate effect is the same, their cultural annihilation.14

In addition to Bonnke’s views on Islam, Gifford also examines the methods of conducting outreach by large public rallies, including the sheer logistics and statistics involved.15 He also analyzes the content

13

F. Ludwig, “After Ujamaa”, p. 223. P. Gifford, “Reinhard Bonnke’s Mission to Africa, and his 1991 Nairobi Crusade”, in P. Gifford (ed.), New Dimensions in African Christianity (Nairobi: All Africa Conference of Churches, 1992), p. 171. 15 P. Gifford, “‘Africa Shall Be Saved’: An Appraisal of Reinhard Bonnke’s PanAfrican Crusade”, Journal of Religion in Africa 27, 1 (1986): 63–92, see pp. 63–5; and “Reinhard Bonnke’s Mission”, pp. 157–60. 14

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 165 of sermons delivered in a series of thirteen meetings conducted in Zimbabwe.16 Of particular interest is the account of the Nairobi Crusade conducted in Mathare Valley in February 1991. Gifford makes specific reference to how Bonnke deals with Islam. [By] definition Muslims can only be part of Satan’s Empire. At Mathari [sic] Valley Bonnke welcomed all: “Whether Christian or not, Hindu, Muslim, it doesn’t matter. Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you. He’s willing to save and heal you, whatever your background, and I’m very happy you are here”. The happiness arises from the possibility of their turning to Jesus. If they fail to grasp this opportunity, however, they remain in Satan’s power and will be damned eternally.17

Colin Whittaker, in his biography of Reinhard Bonnke, reports on the Mathare Valley campaign, having previously described the rallies in Nairobi and Nakuru and how President Moi had requested an audience with Bonnke. In addition, he describes how the president had taken eight cabinet ministers with him to attend a rally and three had openly professed Christ.18 At the close of the Nairobi event, some of the Kenya press challenged Reinhard Bonnke: “Why do you come to a beautiful park and preach the gospel? Why don’t you go to a slum area, like Mathare Valley?” It was Reinhard’s kind of challenge, and his response was immediate, “When I come back to Nairobi, Mathare Valley is the place where I shall go”. In February 1991, he was able to keep his word. At first, people from outside the area were afraid to attend the campaign in this notorious location because of the many drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes and thieves known to live there. But as Reinhard lifted up “the Christ who was the friend of publicans and sinners” they were captivated. He proved in the dens and brothels of Mathare Valley that Christ did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, and the great Physician worked outstanding miracles of body and soul. The presence of God somehow permeated the area and crime dramatically decreased.19

Whittaker’s entire report of the Mathare Valley campaign is given but no mention is made of the content of his preaching or the

16

Gifford, “Africa Shall Be Saved”, pp. 65–78. Gifford, “Reinhard Bonnke’s Mission”, p. 163. 18 C. Whittaker, Reinhard Bonnke: A Passion for the Gospel (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1998), pp. 179–80. 19 Ibid., p. 182. 17

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references to Islam that Gifford has. Bonnke and his approach to Evangelism are questioned by Christians and complained of by Muslims. Whittaker refers to Bonnke as the “Combine Harvester”, reflecting on his mass approach to Evangelism.20 Discussing Bonnke’s rallies and other international Evangelists with Kenyans, support from local churches in preparation for campaigns is given and follow-up is arranged. However, with weekly rallies in Uhuru Park and regular reports of thousands of commitments to Christ, it is easy to wonder how many of those making such commitments have done so several times before. One informant stated that he had been told that if those making commitments at such rallies were counted, there would be over 60 million such “born agains” in Kenya, a country with a population of around 30 million. Many people clearly make a public commitment time and time again.21 Other groups running large-scale outreach include African Evangelistic Enterprise (AEE), Tanzanian Fellowship of Evangelical Students, and Campus Crusade for Christ.22 A feature of the speakers at some of these meetings is the “trend of being aggressive toward other religions”.23 Muslims have found this approach offensive and threatening. The patterns of public rallies for Christian outreach in Dar es Salaam and major towns in Tanzania are similar to those found in Nairobi and in other urban settings in Kenya. Shorter and Njiru have commented on the increase in the number of street preachers following independence in Kenya. [A] tradition of street-preaching developed in Nairobi and other towns. . . . From the 1960s onwards, urban street preaching gathered momentum, until it became commonplace. The growth of street preaching was also linked to the growth of urban populations, and particu-

20

Ibid., p. 125. “Born agains” is the name given to those who make a commitment to Christ and are seen as having been born again. Stephen Ndoria, a student at St Paul’s United Theological College, in class discussions in March 2004. 22 Mlahagwa, “Contending for the Faith”, p. 303. 23 T. Drønen, “The Cross and the Crescent in East Africa: An Examination of the Reasons behind the Change in Christian-Muslim Relations in Tanzania 1984– 1994”, University of Oslo, MA thesis in religion Dissertation, (1995), p. 66. 21

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 167 larly to the numbers of industrial and office workers who provided the main audiences in their lunch hour.24

Walking through Nairobi at lunchtime on a weekday one sees street preachers actively presenting their message to anyone who will listen. The preachers are mainly Christians but not exclusively so. Another factor in current Evangelism is the use of radio and television. In Kenya the state broadcasting channel, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC), and Family TV both often broadcast evangelists’ messages. Family TV has a regular lunchtime spot featuring Bennie Hinn, who also visits and holds rallies. Two regular “televangelists” are Bishop Margaret Wanjiru of Jesus is Alive Ministries and Evangelist Pius Muiru of Maximum Miracle Centre. Margaret Wanjiru runs a very popular church in the center of Nairobi and espouses a “prosperity gospel”. According to Galgalo, her sermon was delivered on the KBC television programme “The Glory is Here”, based on the crucifixion of Jesus. The central core of her application was that Christ’s nailed feet and hands were for the blessing of our hands and feet. And that the holes punctured into Christ’s hands is the assurance that “there can be no holes in our pockets or bank accounts [sic] because Christ has borne it on our behalf ”.25

Her approach is very popular but weak theologically and questioned by the mainstream churches. Muiru has a regular television spot, Kuna Nuru Gizani (There is Light in the Darkness), with a populist approach. How far can the methods used in this type of outreach be called “fundamentalist”? If the addresses were analyzed, the contents would often be found to be dogmatic and to be using aggressive language, which can foment unrest between Muslims and Christians. In Tanzania, preachers have been told not to preach against other religions in their sermons. This is true for both Christian and Muslim outreach, as Ludwig comments on Bonnke, and the reason why Muslim preachers Ngariba and Kawemba from Tanzania were expelled from Kenya after public meetings held in Mombasa. They were banned on security

24

Shorter and Njiru, New Religious Movements, p. 18. Galgalo, “Impact of Pentecostalism”, pp. 28–42. The sermon was broadcast on 20 September 2002; see endnote 15, p. 42. 25

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grounds in 198726 after their preaching was seen as being potentially inflammatory against Christians. Muslim Outreach and Muslim Preachers Muslim outreach (da'wa) has become increasingly visible in recent years due to the use of a variety of methods, some of which have been copied from those used by Christians. Nnyombi writes of the significance of Mombasa in da'wa for both Kenya and East Africa as a whole, because of the training given to “religious activists” and as the birthplace of the unregistered Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK).27 Mombasa is also significant as a center for the publishing of Muslim tracts and pamphlets. One reason for the greater level of activity is the arrival of Kenyan graduates from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, who K.N. Maina says have brought back an intellectual orientation that is generally at variance with the traditional, and often Hadrami, Shafi view of certain religious practices. Wahhabism, in its puritanical, uncompromising and aggressive form has been imported into East Africa by many of these recent graduates.28

Nnyombi comments that friction has developed not only between the graduates and traditionalists but also between them and the followers of other religions, especially Christianity. This, in turn, has led to polemical public debates (mihadhara) in big towns like Nairobi, Mombasa and Nakuru that are often conducted by foreign preachers from Tanzania.29 What is the meaning of the mihadhara (here in the plural), the word used for these meetings? In Swahili, the dictionary defines mhadhara (singular) as a lecture, a public talk, discourse. The Arabic word, ˙à∂ara, means to be present or to present a lecture. Bosha gives the

26 “Kenya: Provoking Muslim Agitation”, Impact International 17, 23 (27 November 1987): 5; and M. Rajab, “Nyerere against Islam in Zanzibar and Tanganyika”, (nd), http://victorian.fortunecity.com (30 March 1999). 27 R. Nnyombi, “Christian-Muslim Relations in Kenya”, Islamochristiana 23 (1997): 147–63, p. 149 footnote 8. 28 K.N. Maina, “Christian-Muslim Relations in Kenya”, in M. Bakari and S.S. Yahya (eds), Islam in Kenya (Nairobi: ISP, 1995), p. 172. 29 Nnyombi, “Christian-Muslim Relations”, p. 153 footnote 25, p. 159 footnote 54.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 169 Arabic usage as lecture or discourse.30 Two Swahili words illustrate its meaning: the verb kuhudhuria—to attend, and the noun mahudhurio—attendance. If something is to be discussed publicly, it is done hadharani (literally, before an audience). Mhadhara has gained a wider, popular usage for public meetings; this includes meetings for community, political and religious purposes. Any meeting which involves the general public can be called mhadhara. It is helpful to examine the development of mihadhara in Tanzania in order to understand their wider use in East Africa, as the preachers involved are often from Tanzania. Abu Aziz in a deposition to the Attorney General in May 1998 stated that Since the adoption in 1984 by Muslim preachers of the method of propagating Islam using comparative religious study, and the corresponding rise of conversions to Islam from Christianity, the Catholic clergy has been instigating the government to ban Muslim preaching popularly known as Mihadhara (public debates), alleging that they were defamatory and insulting to Christianity.31

In January 1998 at a meeting in Tabora, President Mkapa spoke out against “people who go about distributing cassettes, booklets and convening meetings where they insulted and ridiculed other religions”.32 Aziz understood this as an open attack only on Muslims, whereas both faith groups have used these methods. The Muslim weekly An-Nuur reports such apparent discrimination, for example when an Assemblies of God Church was given permission to hold a meeting while the imam of Chaurembo Mosque was taken into custody at the same time by the police for planning a meeting.

30 The Swahili-English dictionaries consulted were I. Bosha, The Influence of Arabic Language on Kiswahili with a Trilingual Dictionary (Swahili-Arabic-English) (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1993), p. 150; Kamusi ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza (Dar es Salaam: Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili, 2001), p. 201; F. Johnson, A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (Nairobi: OUP, 1939), p. 122; M. Benjamin (ed.) Living Swahili Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University, 1995), p. 71; and J.M. Cowan (ed.), Arabic-English Dictionary (Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, 1976). 31 A. Aziz, “Submission to the Attorney General of Tanzania on the Mishandling of the Issue of Muslim Preaching by the C.C.M. Government”, 15 May 1998, http://www.islamtz.org (10 October 1998), p. 2. The deposition followed a police raid and the ensuing riot at Mwembechai Mosque, Dar es Salaam in February 1998. For more information on this, see H.M. Njozi, Mwembechai Killings and the Political Future of Tanzania (Ottowa: Globalink, 1999). The full text of Abu Aziz’s deposition appears as an appendix. 32 Aziz, “Submission to the Attorney General of Tanzania”, p. 2.

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Muslims were upset by this action, which they saw as a clear case of discrimination against them.33 Aziz refers to Muslim preachers using mihadhara from 1984 onwards as a method of presenting comparative religious study, without making his meaning clear. Both Smith and Chande34 report examples of the ways in which comparative religious study is carried out by Muslim Bible scholars. Chande describes a visit to Tanga by members of Jumuiya ya Wahubiri wa Kiislamu Tanzania (Society of Muslim Preachers of Tanzania, JUWAKITA), Sheikh Muhammad Ali Kawemba and Sheikh Musa Fundi Ngariba35 from Kigoma, Western Tanzania. They spoke at a series of meetings organized by Umoja wa Vijana wa Kiislamu Tanzania (Tanzanian Muslim Youth League, UVIKITA) in March 1985. These public discussions were not intended for Muslims only but were also meant for Christians with whom the missionaries wanted to enter a dialogue on what the Bible teaches or says as opposed to what Christians believe on such subjects as the divinity of Christ, monotheism versus trinity, monkery [sic], the Prophet as Paraclete, fasting, dietary regulations and ritual purification. A few times during the question period there were lively exchanges between the missionaries and a few Christians, including a priest. On these occasions the missionaries displayed their skills in polemics. It is obvious that they had taken the trouble to study Christianity and were very familiar with the Bible. . . . Their aggressive style enchanted the ordinary Tangan but annoyed some Christian representatives who reacted negatively to being challenged in public.36

33 The Muslim weekly paper An-Nuur, published in Swahili in Dar es Salaam, reported that mihadhara planned by Muslims continue to be banned: “Rais Mkapa atekeleze hadi yake kwa hadhari”, An-Nuur (no. 187), (30 March 1999); and “Imamu ahojiwa na polisi kwa kuandaa mhadhara”, An-Nuur (no. 197) (5 March 1999), http://www.islamtz.org. 34 P. Smith, “An Experience of Christian-Muslim Relations in Tanzania”, AFER 20 (1988): 106–11; and A.N. Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development in Tanzania (Bethesda: Austin & Winfield, 1998). 35 Kawemba and Ngariba (d. 1993) come from Ujiji: their grandfathers came from Zaire. J. Lacunza Balda, “Swahili Islam: Continuity and Revival”, Encounter 193–4 (1993): 28. JUWAKITA was proscribed by the Tanzanian government in 1993. J. Lacunza Balda, “Translations of the Quran into Swahili and Contemporary Islamic Revival in East Africa”, in D. Westerlund and E.E. Rosander (eds), African Islam and Islam in Africa (London: Hurst & Co., 1997), p. 99. This group is also linked to Umoja wa Wahubiri wa Kiislam wa Mlingano wa Dini (Union of Muslim Preachers of Comparative Religions UWAMDI) Rajab, “Nyerere against Islam”, p. 12. 36 Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 153 footnote 36 refers to

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 171 Smith describes the meetings, with Kawemba and Ngariba again as speakers, held in Tabora in 1986 that were organized by Baraza Kuu la Waislamu Tanzania (Tanzania Muslim Council, BAKWATA). Local Christian leaders had been specially invited, as had party and government officials and Islamic community representatives. The theme of the lectures “The Word of God” was introduced with the words: there is one God, one people and one religion. It is unacceptable then that the people in the audience should be of different religions. By the end of the lectures, claimed the speaker, you will see which religion is the religion ordained by God.37

Smith reports that Ngariba began the lectures by challenging the Christian understanding of the Bible, especially the gospels. First, Ustadh Ngariba asks: Where in the Gospels does Jesus claim to be the Son of God? Here the argument is that Jesus cannot be called divine in any other way than say, the other prophets and holy men in the Bible. Certainly he cannot be likened to God himself; that would be idolatry. Christians have been misled in their belief of Jesus’ divinity, especially by St. Paul. Secondly, Where does Jesus tell the people “Be my followers?” The argument here is that Jesus did not command people to be his followers but, on the contrary, he forbade them. Again St. Paul is portrayed as the arch-villain who induced people to call themselves Christians, at Antioch. Thirdly, Ustadh Ngariba explained that Jesus came only for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. The argument is based on Matthew 10:5 and 19:27 that Jesus came only for those lost sheep and his immediate disciples were sent only to them. Jesus did not come for Africans or Europeans. Fourthly, Several biblical texts, it was claimed, foretold the coming of the Prophet Muhammad, for example John 16:12ff. Jesus was a true prophet who pointed to the coming of Muhammad but the Christians have misrepresented these texts. The intended One

this aggressive style of conducting missionary activities as generally associated with the Ahmadis and Christian missionary groups. Among the Sunnis, the person best known for this style of preaching is Ahmad Deedat. Kigoma has been the region of Tanzania that has produced preachers of this kind, including Ngariba and Kawemba. 37 The emphasis is his. Smith, “Christian-Muslim Relations”, p. 107.

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john a. chesworth who is to come is not the Holy Spirit of Christian tradition but Muhammad. After . . . Ustadh Kawemba developed several further points on prayer, fasting, ritual cleansing, and so on. This was intended to show that just as the prophets had performed these rites and practices in a certain way, so did the Islamic community. The Christian community, on the contrary, does not perform these rites in the prescribed way. He asked, “on what authority have the Christians changed these?” “Is it not obvious,” he continued “that only the Muslim community has remained faithful?”38

The lectures were followed by a question time when many Christians attempted to respond but in fact only succeeded in demonstrating the Christians’ lack of understanding, as the speakers quoted texts to substantiate their position, merely to be contradicted by other speakers.39 Thus both Chande and Smith give an impression of the way in which the Muslim mihadhara concerning comparative religious studies are being conducted, engendering inter-faith tension. The Bible seems to be used as the means of showing Christians that they have reason to question their faith. Muslim preachers appear to wish to show the Bible as a pointer to the “correct” way to God, that is, in their view, Islam. The Influence of Ahmed Deedat East African preachers and writers have been influenced by and followed the approach used by Ahmed Deedat (1918–2005). Deedat’s pamphlets began to appear in East Africa in the 1960s. One example that is printed in South Africa in English and is widely available is Muhammad (PBUH) in the Old and New Testaments. There is a Swahili translation of this text, Mtume Muhammad katika Biblia (The 38

Smith, “Christian-Muslim Relations”, pp. 107–8. Ngariba and Kawemba published a short booklet (pp. 33 + iv) in 1987 in English entitled Islam in the Bible, also in Swahili as Uislamu katika Biblia. Lacunza Balda regards this pamphlet as being in the style of Deedat. Lacunza Balda, “Swahili Islam: Continuity”, p. 28. The opening statement of the text in the Swahili version of the booklet, but not in the English version, is headed “Mungu Mmoja Dini Moja” (“One God One Religion”). Both state, “Muslims are wondering why there is more than one religion”. M.F. Ngariba and M.A. Kawemba, Islam in the Bible (Zanzibar: Al-Khayria Press, 1987), p. 1; and M.F. Ngariba and M.A. Kawemba, Uislam katika Biblia (Zanzibar: AlKhayria Press, 1987). 39 Smith, “Christian-Muslim Relations”, p. 108.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 173 Apostle Mu˙ammad in the Bible), dated 1965. Others include, Biblia Asema nini juu ya Muhammad (S.A.W.) (What the Bible Says about Mu˙ammad [P.B.U.H.]), dated 1988; Uislamu katika Biblia (Islam in the Bible); Je! Yesu Alisulubiwa? (Was Jesus Crucified?). Arye Oded states that Islamic propaganda also reached Kenya from the Islamic Propagation Centre in Durban, South Africa, which disseminated pamphlets about Islam, such as What the Bible Says about Muhammad, which was reprinted in Nairobi and distributed by the Jamia Mosque of Nairobi.40

In addition to printed material, audio-cassettes and, more recently, videos of Deedat’s debates and talks are popular and have been widely distributed in East Africa. Ngariba and Kawemba published Islam and the Bible in 1987 in English and Swahili at a time when they were involved in a series of mihadhara (public meetings) concerning the Word of God. Justo Lacunza Balda regards Ngariba as “following in the footsteps of Deedat”.41 Hamza Njozi, in his book Mwembechai Killings and the Political Future of Tanzania, describes how in June 1981, as Secretary General of the Muslim Students’ Association of the University of Dar es Salaam (MSAUD), he invited Ahmed Deedat to speak at a conference in Dar es Salaam, where he gave a lecture on Mu˙ammad in the Bible.42 This was significant as it meant that a considerable number of young educated Muslims were able to see at first hand the methods and effectiveness of Deedat’s approach. It is not surprising that his methods soon came to be used in mihadhara. The comparative religious studies approach used in mihadhara is aimed at challenging the preconceived views of Christians concerning their own faith. Certainly it is difficult for a listener not to want to respond to the statements made by the speakers. Cuthbert Omari comments on the participation of Christian fundamentalists in mihadhara with Muslims: 40 A. Oded, Islam and Politics in Kenya (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc., 2000), p. 113. 41 Lacunza Balda, “Translations of the Quran”, p. 101. 42 Njozi, Mwembechai Killings, pp. 11–12, reported that after the first lecture six Catholic seminarians embraced Islam and that pressure was put on MSAUD to cancel the second lecture, following a letter to the leadership of Bakwata by both the TEC (Tanzanian Episcopal Conference) and the CCT. Njozi reports that he went to the vice-president to ask him to allow the meeting to go ahead. As a result of the meeting four Christians embraced Islam.

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john a. chesworth Some of those Christians even accepted the idea of a public debate with Muslims on certain biblical and doctrinal passages. However they were a failure for Christians because the Muslims who took part in the debates were well prepared and made the Christians with their fundamentalist attitudes look ignorant and foolish before the audience.43

Omari’s view is borne out by others. The preparation and knowledge of the Bible shown by the speakers often exceeds that of the Christians who try to respond. Smith echoes this in his report on the Tabora meetings and the way in which a Bible text was interpreted differently by the Christians who were trying to respond.44 These fundamentalist Christians believe that they will be led by the Holy Spirit to give the right and convincing response. They eschew formal theological education and academic study. The “failure” is there because the Muslim preachers have prepared themselves and know the texts they use. The Muslim preachers also know suitable ripostes with which they can put down Christian questioners, which emphasizes the Christians’ lack of knowledge. Aziz reports on the success of mihadhara in converting Christians, some of them priests. He regards this success as being one of the reasons for the government seeking to ban Muslim preaching at the instigation of the Roman Catholic Church because “it was blasphemous and insulting to Christianity . . . and a threat to the peace of Tanzania”.45 We have examined how mihadhara have been used in Tanzania and described the present sensitive situation there, with permission being refused for mihadhara, and if they are held, the meetings are often shut down by the authorities. However mihadhara are still taking place: a group called Al-Mallid is now increasingly active. Similar methods are still being used in the mihadhara held in various parts of Kenya. In 2002 as part of a vacation program on Islam, held at St. Paul’s United Theological College, Limuru, Muslim speakers were invited to address the course on Muslim-Christian relations. This was arranged through the Jamia Mosque in central Nairobi. One was a preacher from the Muslim Preachers’ Association who 43 C.K. Omari, “Christian-Muslim Relations in Tanzania”, in J.P. Rajashekar (ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations in Eastern Africa (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1988), p. 66. It is worth noting that in this instance Omari uses “fundamentalist” in its original sense, that is, a group of Christians who desire to live by the fundamentals of their faith. 44 Smith, “Christian-Muslim Relations”, p. 108. 45 A. Aziz, “Submission to the Attorney General of Tanzania on the Mishandling of the Issue of Muslim Preaching by the C.C.M. Government”, p. 12.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 175 came from Mwanza, in Tanzania, but was working in Nakuru, Kenya. When invited to speak, he chose to demonstrate the comparative religious studies approach, and for about half an hour he used the Bible to demonstrate the truths of Islam. This short demonstration clearly showed that the methods used by Ahmed Deedat and propagated by Ngariba and Kawemba are still being followed, even in the way that verses are interpreted. It also demonstrated that mihadhara are seen as an effective method of dissemination. It is not clear, however, whether the ways that Taylor and other Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century carried out open-air preaching, and their use of the Bible as described above, have had any significant effect on the content and interpretation of the Bible used by present-day Muslim preachers. Muslim Writers’ Workshop (Warsha) The Muslim preachers who are involved in da'wa and mihadhara have influenced many young Muslims who are now writing and developing outreach strategies based on the methods they have observed. One group of young Muslims was awakened to the vitality of Islam by the teachings of an expatriate Pakistani during the 1960s and 1970s. It is this group that we now examine. Warsha ya Waandishi wa Kiislam (Muslim Writers’ Workshop), popularly known as Warsha, comprises a small group of Muslim intellectuals including Mohamed Said. He was born in 1952 and has a BA in political science from the University of Dar es Salaam. He can be seen as the most prominent member of the original Warsha, having had several articles published and a book in 1998, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924 –1968): The Untold Story of the Muslim Struggle against British Colonialism in Tanganyika. This is an example of a style of writing that can be best described as “revisionist histories”. Presently they are based at Quba Mosque in Dar es Salaam from where they run a secondary school, arrange courses, publish literature and issue statements on matters of public concern (mainly education and economics). Warsha is concerned with effecting reform in the teaching at Qur"ànic schools, which still mainly consists of learning by rote and memorizing parts of the Qur"àn.46 46

Mohamed Said has had several articles—described as research articles—

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Although Warsha is based in Dar es Salaam, its influence is more widespread. According to Sigvard von Sicard, it claims to have a considerable following amongst Muslims in the 20–40 age group and A.N. Chande reports that “it makes its presence felt in the major urban centres in the country through its writings which have appealed to a segment of the youth”.47 External Influences: Muhammad Hussein Malik and Warsha How did Warsha begin as an organization? Its origins can be traced back to an expatriate teacher on a government contract. In 1964 Muhammad Hussein Malik, a Pakistani, went to Tanzania to teach mathematics at a secondary school in Dar es Salaam. In addition to his official teaching duties, Malik volunteered to teach Islamic studies at all the secondary schools in Dar es Salaam and the surrounding areas. All secondary schools have a weekly religious education (dini) class, usually taught by a member of the local clergy or an accredited lay worker to their own faith group. His teaching of

published in Africa Events and New African in 1988 and 1989, such as The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924–1968) (London: Minerva Press, 1998), and two longer articles by him appear on the Islam in Tanzania web pages. These are copies of articles published in 1989 and 1993. The preface of the book says of him: “He has conducted research on political history of Tanganyika hitherto considered as conclusive, uncovering that significant part omitted in the official history. The author came into prominence in the late 1980s through his revelations and thought provoking articles on the central role of Islam in the struggle against colonialism in Tanganyika and the marginalization of Muslims by successive post-independence governments, a subject which until then was considered a taboo”. M. Said, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924–1968) (1998), pp. vii–viii. P. Smith in “Christianity and Islam in Tanzania: Development and Relationships”, Islamochristiana 16 (1990): p. 176, citing an article by Said, “In Praise of Our Ancestors,” Africa Events ([March/April 1988]) refers to revisionist histories being attempted today that are trying to show these early movements in support of TANU as Islamic movements. Said’s response to the accusation of being revisionist is to quote the party archives showing that the TANU Elders’ Council under Sheikh Suleiman Takadir had 173 members, all of whom were Muslims. M. Said, The Life and Times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924 –1968), p. 338. See also A.Y. Lodhi and D. Westerlund, “African Islam in Tanzania”, in D. Westerlund and I. Svanberg (eds), Islam Outside the Arab World (London: Curzon Press, 1999), p. 106. For further examples of “revisionist histories”, see J. Chesworth, “Muslims and Christians in East Africa since Independence: Shifting Fortunes and Perceptions”, Journal of African Christian Thought 7, 2 (2004): 39–47. 47 S. von Sicard, “Islam in Tanzania”, CSIC Papers No. 5 (September 1991): 1–13; and A.N. Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 255.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 177 Islam was seen as revolutionary in Tanzania and it enabled a group of young Muslims “to understand itself and be aware of the antiMuslim force against Islam”.48 Said explains the method that Malik used in teaching Islamic studies as follows: Dr. Malik began first by helping his students overcome the inferiority complex which was a result of colonial propaganda and histories taught in schools. Muslim students were taught of scientific achievement and accomplishment of Muslim scholars of the past and present. . . . He taught a contrasting history of Islam as a religion which did not begin with Muhammad (PBUH), but with Adam. Dr. Malik taught his way down to the time of Jesus and the Jews, emphasising the fact that Jesus like Muhammad was a Muslim. His most interesting and captivating topic was the history of the Jews how they turned religion into nationality and vice-versa. He concluded his course by showing the imprecision in Christianity.49

It seems that Malik’s approach to the teaching of Islam came as a breath of fresh air to the young Muslims used to the rote learning of the Qur"ànic schools. In an interview with Chande, Malik said that he had had connections with Abù l-'Alà" al-Mawdùdì’s Jamà'at-i Islàmì (Party of Islam) “which had shaped his understanding of Islam as a religion and code of conduct in life”.50 Malik exposed the students to the teachings of Mawdùdì, who was Indian by birth, founded the Jamà'at-i Islàmì in 1940, and wrote many books that have been influential throughout the Muslim community, including Tafhìm al-Qur"àn, his translation of the Qur"àn into Urdu with a commentary; and of Sayyid Qu†b, an Egyptian who was active with the Muslim Brotherhood and executed by the government in 1966 for seditious activities. He wrote several books, notably Signposts, giving the students a greater awareness of Islam and its place in the world. The Islamic Foundation has published several works by both Mawdùdì and Qu†b, and their office in Nairobi has published some in Swahili as well. For Mawdùdì: Towards Understanding Islam, Katika Kuu [sic] Fahamu Islamu; Islamic Way of Life, Mpango wa Maisha Katika Uislamu; in English Fundamentals of Islam; The Meaning of the Qur"an; What Islam stands for; Qadiani Problem; in Swahili Muongozo wa Ibada

48

Rajab, “Nyerere against Islam”, p. 9; Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 5. Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 6. 50 A.N. Chande, “Islam, Islamic Leadership and Community Development in Tanga, Tanzania”, PhD thesis, McGill University, (1991), p. 231. 49

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Katika Uislamu (Guide to Worship in Islam), Ndia [sic] ya Amani na Uokofu (Way of Peace and Salvation). For Qu†b: in Swahili, his Utume wa Mohamed (The Servanthood of Mu˙ammad). The Islamic Foundation bookshop in Nairobi also stocks several titles published by the Islamic Foundation in the United Kingdom, especially the Qur"ànic commentaries, Tafhìm al-Qur"àn by Mawdùdì and Fì ¸ilàl al-Qur"àn by Qu†b, as well as titles such as Qu†b’s Signposts. It is perhaps too soon to assess how influential the availability of their books in Swahili has been. However, it seems clear that Malik was one of the first to use their ideas in teaching in East Africa. Chande relates in his interview with Malik the approach that he used. [He] concentrated his efforts on the Muslim youth since this group was a fertile ground with which he could work to create a new Muslim awareness. His technique was to teach his students not so much about fiqh (legal matters), but about the basic principles or philosophy of Islam. He inspired in his students an understanding of Islam that went beyond mere religious dogma, that is, Islam as a complete way of life. This type of teaching moulded the thinking of the Muslim youth in Warsha in an activistic direction.51

Said in his writing clearly shows the debt that he and others owe to Malik. In a period of ten years Dr. Malik was able to mould a strong following of disciplined and committed young men who began to see the injustices committed to Muslims in the Tanzanian society. Dr. Malik’s teachings went beyond schools, he made rounds of mosques to lecture on different topics with his students interpreting for him. Once free of complex[es] and armed with the teachings of [the] correct version of Islam as a superior culture to any other, Dr. Malik laid a heavy burden on his students that they have an obligation to change the society and restore back the honour denied Islam and Muslims not only in Tanzania but throughout the world.52

The influence of Mawdùdì is apparent in the approach used by Malik. It also seems clear in the writings of Warsha. Uchumi katika Uislamu (Economy within Islam),53 The True Way of Life and Mafundisho 51

Chande, “Islam, Islamic Leadership and Community Development in Tanga”, pp. 231–2. 52 Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, pp. 6–7. 53 Chande states that the Warsha booklet Uchumi was inspired by ideas from the writings of Mawdùdì. Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 148. Uchumi condemns Tanzanian socialism and proposes an Islamic model; The True

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 179 ya Qur"an (Teachings of the Qur"àn) all show Mawdùdì’s ideas, with an emphasis on the Qur"àn, the application of sharia and seeing other religions as subordinate to Islam. Malik’s students took his teachings and began applying them in Tanzania. By the mid-1970s they had began to enter tertiary education and became active in student politics. In particular they joined the Muslim Students Association of the University of Dar es Salaam (MSAUD), which became very active under the influence of Warsha members. They also spread the message of Islamic activism to others. They . . . started to work on ways to change the leadership of BAKWATA to transform it from a puppet organisation under the influence of the Christian lobby to an effective Muslim institution to represent Muslim interests.54

Rajab felt Malik “played a formative role in the ideological development of Muslim youths in Tanganyika and formed [Warsha] in 1975”.55 Initially, a group of around eight members would meet on Sundays to write together. Lodhi and Westerlund say that it had many young, well-educated members, some of whom were Shi'a. Said says that they deliberately operated without registration and without making their leadership apparent, in order to avoid problems.56

Way of Life, concerns living in accordance with a fundamentalist interpretation of the sharia. According to Smith, “Christianity and Islam”, p. 181, it is Warsha’s aim to make this the way of life in Tanzania. 54 Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, pp. 8–9. Both Said and Rajab regard the governing political party Chama cha Mapinduzi (Revolutionary Party) (CCM) as being in the thrall of Christians. Rajab is a Zanzibari Muslim activist whose polemical anti-Christian writings can be accessed via the Islam in Tanzania website. Rajab calls CCM the Christian Church Movement, in “Nyerere against Islam” p. 12, and in the context of the arrival of the Portuguese in 1498, the Catholic Crusade Movement. See M. Rajab, “Islam and the Catholic Crusade Movement in Zanzibar”, (nd), URL http://victorian.fortunecity.com, (30 March 1999), p. 3. 55 Rajab, “Nyerere against Islam”, p. 9. 56 Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 144. Said says this of Warsha: “From the quality of the papers it published and distributed to Muslims there can be no doubt whatsoever that [the] authors were highly educated”, Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues in Tanzania”, p. 9. Lodhi and Westerlund, “African Islam in Tanzania”, p. 106. The logic seems to be that if you are not registered you cannot have your registration cancelled.

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BAKWATA (Baraza Kuu la Waislamu Tanzania), the Tanzania Muslim Council, was viewed with suspicion by many Muslims. However, a change occurred in the late 1970s when a Muslim lawyer, Sheikh Muhammad Ali, who was originally from Tanga but was working in Dar es Salaam, became secretary. Warsha members began to occupy various positions in BAKWATA. In the light of his influence with Muslim youth, it is not surprising that when Malik finished his teaching contract with the government the door was open for him to start working for BAKWATA. Having gained influence within BAKWATA, Warsha conducted research as to why Muslim students were lagging behind in education and published a report in December 1981, Umuhimu wa kuwa na Seminari za Kiislamu (The Importance of Establishing Islamic Seminaries). BAKWATA was running four schools, including Kinondoni in Dar es Salaam and Jumuiya in Tanga, which had originally been started by EAMWS (East African Muslim Welfare Society). Warsha regarded the way they were run, offering secular education and being in effect profit-making projects, as wrong. BAKWATA obtained permission from the Ministry of Education for three of the schools to become Muslim seminaries. Recruitment for new staff was carried out and members of Warsha were offered most of the posts.57 The environment of the seminaries was Islamic so that pupils should acquire both a modern education and Islamic religious teaching. The Islamic environment aimed at in the seminaries was one where times of prayer, and an Islamic dress code and behavior were followed. Religious teaching was seen as a means of fostering the moral values of the youth. For this purpose, a number of religious textbooks were produced by the Kinondoni Muslim Seminary to be used in the teaching of the new subjects. These new subjects included Qur"ànic studies, Arabic, Islamic history and fiqh. The books were published in 1982: Mafunzo ya Elimu ya Dini ya Kiislamu wa Shule za Sekondari I–IV (Teaching of Religious Education for Secondary Schools I–IV). Malik became closely associated with Kinondoni and his son

57

Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 10.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 181 was installed as headmaster there to help shape the character of the new school.58 BAKWATA began publishing the monthly newsletter Muislamu (Muslim), the first issue of which came out in May 1981. Warsha was involved with this project, with its members forming the editorial board. Articles included teachings of the Qur"àn, the purpose of ˙ajj and dietary rules. BAKWATA was also responsible for producing programs for Radio Tanzania, which were broadcast every Friday. Warsha took over their production and they reduced the playing of recordings of kasida (religious poems; Arabic, qaßìda) and dhikiri (Sufi litanies; Arabic, dhikr) and aimed to broadcast programs carrying a special message to Muslims. Malik had a slot on a morning program that created interest amongst educated Muslims.59 It was around this time that Warsha wrote a series of books, Mafundisho ya Qur"an (Teachings of the Qur"àn), concerning each of the Pillars of Faith of Islam. These were published by the Islamic Foundation in Nairobi between 1982 and 1985. The series covers four of the pillars: Shahada (Confession of Faith), Kusimamisha Sala (Standing for Prayer), Funga [sic] ya Ramadhani na Falsafa ya Qur"ani (The Fast of Ramadan and the Philosophy of the Qur"àn), Hajj (Pilgrimage). None is listed for sadaka/zakat (almsgiving/tithes). During 1982, events occurred which led to the ejection of Warsha and all its members from BAKWATA. Said regards the events leading to Warsha’s expulsion as being a government-inspired plot to isolate them from Muslims in order to prevent them from making any further revelations about the mistreatment of Muslims.60 Sheikh Muhammad Ali, as secretary of BAKWATA, was taken to task for allowing the organization to be hijacked by hot-headed youths. Warsha was accused of being anti-government and perpetrating animosity between Muslims and Christians through its writings. The booklet Uchumi katika Uislamu (Economy in Islam) was cited as being particularly anti-government. It criticizes the Tanzanian socialist system of Ujamaa, which it considers communist. Chande quotes, “Any ideology which is not based on Islam is of Jahilliyah

58

Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, pp. 146, 235. Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 11; and Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 146. Malik had a fifteen-minute slot; the response was probably only for educated Muslims as he would have spoken in English and not Swahili. 60 Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 14. 59

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[sic] (Ignorance)”. This would be unacceptable to the Tanzanian government, an avowedly secular state. The government’s response would be seen as an attack on Islam by Muslim activists. Chande also explains that it was accused of mixing religion with politics as it “had not concerned itself with merely disseminating information on the ritual aspects of Islam but had taught about Islam as a complete way of life”. Said reports that President Nyerere ordered Aboud Jumbe, the then vice-president, to close all Muslim seminaries.61 Warsha Expelled from Bakwata In June 1982 Sheikh Muhammad Ali, having been summoned by Jumbe to explain his support for Warsha, resigned from his post in BAKWATA. The Muslim seminaries reverted to being ordinary secondary schools, all members of Warsha were sacked from jobs within BAKWATA, including those teaching at the schools, and Warsha was expelled from BAKWATA and denied access to its facilities and involvement in its newsletter and radio programs. Malik had his work permit revoked by the government and was given 24 hours to leave the country.62 He spoke to his “students” before his deportation. Said reports what he told them: BAKWATA were late in asking the government to deport him, he had already accomplished his work. The Muslims were aware of the machinations against them and the struggle against Christian hegemony in Tanzania had passed to a different flock of Muslims.63

Following his deportation, Malik went to Kenya and was employed by the Islamic Foundation in Nairobi. The fact that the Islamic Foundation published four books by Warsha, the Mafundisho ya Qur"an (Teachings of the Qur"àn) series, between 1982 and 1985 can be seen as Malik’s recommendation.64 In 1993 the Islamic Foundation

61 Lodhi and Westerlund, “African Islam in Tanzania”, p. 106; Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, pp. 148, 242; and Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 14. 62 Chande reports that Malik’s work permit was not renewed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs because BAKWATA regarded him as a negative influence on the youth. He applied for an extension that was not granted and then had no choice but to leave the country. See Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 242. 63 Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 16. 64 The Islamic Foundation seems an appropriate place for Malik to have worked,

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 183 published a book by Malik, The Mission of Jesus: Divine Principles of World Order. In the preface he is described as Professor M. Hussain Malik, Advisor and Counsellor (Chaplain) to Muslim Students, University of Nairobi. The foreword, written by Dr. Mohammed Sayied, the Hon. Secretary of the Islamic Foundation, refers to Malik as a “dear colleague in the Islamic Foundation and one of its founders, . . . his long sojourn in Kenya, Tanzania and Mauritius”.65 In correspondence, Malik stated that he is now teaching Islamic religious education (IRE) to “the university students of Nairobi in State House Secondary School,” and can be contacted through the Young Muslims’ Association (YMA).66 In The Mission of Jesus, Malik acknowledges the influence of Mawdùdì: When I came into contact with the works of Maulana Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, in particular his Tafheemul Quran (The Meaning of the Qur"àn), I realised that the revealed religion by God to mankind though all His Prophets was the one and the same to establish God’s Sovereignty or His Kingdom on Earth. It is quite logical to hold this belief, because it would not sound reasonable that God should have given different religions to different Prophets. They must therefore be the creation of human mind [sic]. The Mission of Jesus confirms this mental impression of mine for which I am grateful to the great Maulana.67

as it published four titles by Mawdùdì in Swahili and five in English, also one work by Sayyid Qu†b in Swahili. The following books and papers have been published or disseminated by Warsha: “Hoja ya kuchunguza dhulma dhidi ya Waislamu wa Tanzania katika, Elimu” (1979); “Umuhimu wa kuwa na Seminari za Kiislamu” Report 24, December 1981; Mafundisho ya Qur"an: Shahada (Nairobi: Islamic Foundation, 1982); Mafundisho ya Qur"an: Kusimamisha Sala (Nairobi: Islamic Foundation, 1984); Mafundisho ya Qur"an: Funga ya Ramadhani na Falsafa ya Qur"ani (Nairobi: Islamic Foundation, 1985); Mafundisho ya Qur"an: Hajj (Nairobi: Islamic Foundation, 1985); “Chapter and Clause”, Africa Events (August 1988): 37–9 (Translation of statement); Uislamu ni Njia Sahihi ya Maisha (Mombasa: Ansaar Muslim Youth Organisation, nd); and Uchumi katika Uislamu (nd), unpublished paper; Mafundisho ya Qur"an: Uislamu Njia Sahihi ya Maisha (nd). 65 M.H. Malik, The Mission of Jesus: Divine Principles of World Order (Nairobi: Islamic Foundation, 1993), p. ix. 66 Information given in a letter written on 25 August 1999. The late Professor Hannah Kinoti, who was chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi, confirmed that Malik was a member of the department, appointed as Chaplain to Muslim students. Kinoti also commented that he did not come onto the campus, preferring to speak off campus (discussion, August 2000). 67 Malik, Mission of Jesus, p. vii. It is worth noting here that Malik was not the only one who knew of Mawdùdì. The influential scholar, translator of the Qur"àn and Chief Kadhi of both Zanzibar and Kenya Abdallah Saleh Farsy was also aware of his writings and ideas.

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Following the split between BAKWATA and Warsha and the departure of Malik,68 Warsha still strived for its aims. It succeeded in setting up Masjid Quba and Islamic Centre in Dar es Salaam, and after some opposition, its secondary school was eventually registered by the Ministry of Education in 1988 while Professor Malima was Minister. Chande reports on the wider long-term influence of Warsha, commenting that In imitation of Warsha (which has devoted a great amount of energy to organizing Muslim youths) a number of Muslim youth study groups have sprung up in various parts of the country such as Mwanza, Shinyanga and Tanga, with names such as Uvikita. These groups have been established for the purpose of mobilizing Muslim youths to educate themselves about Islam and to raise their awareness about what needs to be done to uplift the conditions of Muslims.69

Warsha and the writings of Mohamed Said have been strongly influenced by Malik and the way in which he awakened that generation to Islam and attacked the way history had been taught from a colonial viewpoint. This has led to new approaches in the teaching of Islam to youth, avoiding the rote learning of the madrasa (Qur"anic school), and a revisionist understanding of the struggle for independence. Malik can be seen as being one of the earliest proponents and propagators of the teachings of Mawdùdì and Qu†b in Eastern Africa. He maintains the views of Mawdùdì and Qu†b that to work for Islam is to serve all humanity,70 seeking to rouse Muslims

68 The relationship between BAKWATA and Warsha has been very poor. The 1982 national Maulid celebrations held in Tabora were disrupted by members of Warsha who distributed statements which “explained the Muslim position on the issue of Muslim seminaries”, see Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 17; and Sicard, “Islam in Tanzania”, p. 8. Said comments “that Warsha had over time managed to establish centres in certain areas of the country, Tabora being one of them.” Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues in Tanzania”, p. 16. BAKWATA used the radio to attack Warsha, which responded by distributing typewritten papers to Muslims after Friday prayers “calling upon Muslims to rise up against the puppet leadership of BAKWATA”, Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 21. Said also reports, “At the same time Adam Nasibu, in the presence of Vice-President Kawawa, spoke on the radio and warned the government of enemies who had invaded the country, meaning Dr. Malik, Sheikh Mohamed Ali and Warsha.” Said, “Intricacies and Intrigues”, p. 16. 69 Chande, Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development, p. 228. 70 Ibid., p. 231.

fundamentalism and outreach strategies in east africa 185 from their apathy and inactivity, to transform them from being passive Muslims to being active believers working for the cause of Islam. Conclusion This chapter has examined aspects of the outworking of fundamentalism in East Africa. It has looked at the open-air meetings of the early Christian missionaries and their successors, with the large public rallies and street preachers working in the open air and fervently presenting their messages from a strongly fundamentalist perspective. In looking at mihadhara and the work of Warsha, the chapter attempts to demonstrate a significant factor in fundamentalism, namely the desire for a return to the fundamentals of the faith. This wish for a return to basics has led to a felt need to demonstrate its superiority over other faiths. This has been done in the preaching at mihadhara, often polemical, contentious and deliberately provocative and in the writings of young Muslims from Warsha and groups influenced by them, who in their desire to inform have attacked Christianity, which is seen as a tool of the West and the colonial past. In this they have been influenced by those educated at Islamic universities outside East Africa. There is an irony in the response of many Muslims involved in outreach in that in their protest at the ways in which Christianity has been used as a tool they use the same means that the Christian missionaries did in their initial evangelism. Such methods include education, health and relief services. The impetus to reach out to others is evident for both Christians and Muslims actively involved in outreach. The way in which this is carried out in East Africa has been shaped by local circumstances. The large public rallies conducted by both groups are popular and can be seen to be effective in bringing in new members. The way the message is propagated largely seems to depend on external influences. For the Christian Evangelists, the American televangelist seems to be the model, demonstrating God’s power through signs and wonders, healing and miracles, and preaching a message of prosperity. Muslim preachers use the Bible to prove the truth of Islam, borrowing from the style of presentation and writings of Deedat. At times, the styles of both preachers resemble each other in the passion they use to stir up listeners. Both groups use a crowd’s emotions and fervor to promote their messages.

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Fundamentalism, both Christian and Muslim, in its outworking in East Africa can only be a divisive force in what is an increasingly pluralist society. The need to live alongside those of other faiths in peace and harmony and with clear channels for dialogue is vital. There is the obvious danger that one faith, by demanding a return to its fundamentals, thereby denies equality to other faiths.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING: MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS AT CROSS-PURPOSES IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIA Patrick J. Ryan S.J. “In my end is my beginning” (En ma fin est mon commencement), the motto of Mary Queen of Scots, may serve as the epigraph of this chapter as well. The poet T.S. Eliot played with this motto and its obverse (“In my beginning is my end”) in the opening and concluding movements of the second of his masterful Four Quartets, “East Coker” (1940). Eliot was trying to come to terms with his own spiritual journey from St Louis, Missouri, to Somerset in England, to which he had traced the roots of the Elyot family. I wish to use the two phrases to examine not a poet’s journey but the journeys of two very large religious communities, the Muslim and Christian communities of Nigeria. To understand not exactly the end of the cultural and historical developments of these two communities but the end result right now, their present stage of evolution, I wish to return to their beginnings. In those beginnings we may find some clue that will enable us to understand the present end—we hope not a dead end—of each community. In contemporary Nigeria growing tension prevails between the large Muslim and Christian populations in the country. The simplifying mind attributes this tension to the diverse orientations of Islamic and Christian traditions in general. To give some hint of the end to which I am heading, let me suggest rather that the real problem between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria has much more to do with their beginnings in Nigeria than with their beginnings in the Middle East, or with their beginnings in the revelation that came from God. This is not the only way to understand the development of Islam or the development of Christianity in Nigeria, but it may serve as one prismatic perception of certain continuities and discontinuities in the sometimes separate and sometimes intertwined histories of these religious communities.

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What I want to do here is to examine what the French would call the point de départ—the starting point—for each of two particular Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria, the Hausa Muslim and the Igbo Christian communities, the first in Kano and the second in Onitsha. Then I would like to turn my attention to the present situation—the point d’arrivée, so to speak—in the respective religious journeys of at least some Muslims and some Christians in Nigeria over the last twenty-five years, not just Hausa and Igbo, and the relationship between those present situations and the respective points de départ. I have to sketch with a broad brush but I hope that the length of my experience in West Africa, encompassing four decades, and my academic formation as a historian of religion concentrating on this area, will keep me from generalizing too easily. The Point de Départ in Traditional Forms of Faith1 Every religious man or woman has a context in which he or she exists religiously; there is no such human being as the ideal, decontextualized Jew, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist. Some enthusiastic but somewhat naive Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists may object to the generalizations I have just made, saying that at least Moses, Jesus, Mu˙ammad and Siddartha Gautama were respectively the quintessence of their respective forms of faith. But then, when you examine the portrait of Moses, Jesus, Mu˙ammad or the Buddha that your interlocutor is relying on, you may find a specific context underlying the Moses or the Jesus or the Mu˙ammad or the Buddha of the ideal portrait. Context does not imply imperfection; it merely asserts humanity, historicity, concreteness in a particular social and 1 I use the terms “faith” and “tradition”, rather than traditional religion or indigenous religion, in more or less the same sense in which the late Wilfred Cantwell Smith used the terms “faith” and “cumulative tradition” to replace the overly reified term “religion”: “By ‘faith’ I mean personal faith . . . [,] an inner religious experience or involvement of a particular person; the impingement on him of the transcendent, putative or real. By ‘cumulative tradition’ I mean the entire mass of overtly objective data that constitute the historical deposit, as it were, of the past religious life of the community in question: temples, scriptures, theological systems, dance patterns, legal and other social institutions, conventions, moral codes, myths, and so on; anything that can be transmitted from one person, one generation, to another, and that an historian can observe.” Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 141.

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cultural setting. The Muslims and Christians of Nigeria, like every other Muslim and Christian in the world, practice their Islam or their Christianity in a particular setting. This is especially evident in what we can still say historically about the first Muslims and Christians in the area that is now the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Neither Nigerian Muslims nor Nigerian Christians today are utterly determined in their practice and understanding of Islam and Christianity by their origins in particular historical settings or particular social structures. But an examination of those historical origins and particular social structures may serve as a hermeneutic, not entirely exhaustive, for understanding where Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians find themselves today. Where we begin, historically and socially, is at least partially determinative of where we end. Muslim Beginnings The first presence of Muslims in the area of what is now Nigeria can be dated to about one millennium ago in Kanem-Borno. Foreign Muslims—at first Arabo-Berber populations crossing the Sahara into what geographers have called the Sahel or the central and western Sudan—encountered people in what is now Nigeria following Traditional2 forms of faith. These Arabo-Berbers were either accompanied by or supplanted by indigenous Muslim populations of the Mande cultural area or the Fulbe cultural area who penetrated even further into Nigeria and left lasting cultural traces of their presence among the peoples living in the Niger-Benue geographical zone. The contours of the Traditional forms of faith once practiced by these pre-Islamic Niger-Benue peoples we may grasp with greater or lesser accuracy, depending on the area involved and the Arabic manuscripts that may be cited as witnesses. Needless to say, the Muslim authors of such manuscripts were seldom disinterested witnesses of what they described; they generally painted a very negative picture of non- or pre-Islamic forms of faith. It may well be that the forms

2 When I capitalize the words Traditional or Tradition in this chapter I am referring more specifically to the forms of Traditional faith in Africa, what is sometimes rather too globally referred to as “African Traditional Religion”, a term that gives the false impression that indigenous non-Islamic and non-Christian religious phenomena in Africa are now, or once were, homogeneous.

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of Traditional faith still practiced in Nigeria can give us some insight into what Traditional forms of faith in what is now Nigeria were half a millennium ago or even earlier. But, as a historian of religion, I wish to sound a note of caution here. Traditional forms of faith are not without a history, even if we may not always know that history. The encounter of Traditional forms of faith with longdistance trade, invasion, drought, migration, Islam, Christianity and other factors promoting change cannot always be documented accurately, but we should realize that Traditional forms of faith in Nigeria were not changeless. Like every other element in culture in Africa, Traditions changed in the past and continue to change today.3 For an illuminating example of what seems to be a first or at least a very early encounter of a Traditional form of faith with Islam, let me cite what the Kano Chronicle (henceforth, KC) records of the first encounter of some of the indigenous people of Kano with immigrant Muslims coming from the Mali diaspora of the fourteenth century or possibly later.4 It should be understood that the KC is probably a late nineteenth-century composition meant to trumpet the antiquity and importance of Kano over its rival, the relatively new city of Sokoto.5 But the KC no doubt preserves oral tradition that was still current in late nineteenth-century Kano, although it has the tendency to describe pre-Islamic events as if they were taking place in an Islamic setting. Thus, for instance, Barbushe, the first ruler of Kano (even before the arrival of the sarki Bagauda or BaGabda), is said to have performed wonders and “all the people flocked to Barbushe on the two nights of Idi”.6 There were no celebrations of 'ìd al-fi†r and 'ìd al-kabìr, presumably, in pre-Islamic Kano, but the later mythical account tries to explain something in categories that it knows.

3 See the description of Maguzawa Tradition of the non-Muslim Hausa in Joseph Greenberg, The Influence of Islam on a Sudanese Religion [Monographs of the American Ethnological Society, no. 10] (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1946, rpt. 1966). 4 See Muhammad al-Hajj, “A Seventeenth Century Chronicle on the Origins and Missionary Activities of the Wangarawa”, Kano Studies 1, 4 (1968): 7–42. 5 John O. Hunwick, “Not Yet The Kano Chronicle: King-Lists With and Without Narrative Elaboration from Nineteenth-Century Kano”, Sudanic Africa 4 (1993): 95. 6 H.R. Palmer (tr.), “The Kano Chronicle”, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 38 (1908): 63.

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It is often said that the KC leaves the realm of myth and enters into somewhat mythically remembered history when it narrates this first formal arrival of Muslims from the Mali diaspora. The eleventh [sarki] was Yaji, whose [formal] name was 'Alì, and whose mother’s name was Maghanarku. He was called Yaji [“pepper” in Hausa] because of his great anger in his youth; and his behavior followed his name. . . . In the reign of Yaji, Wangarawa came from Mabba, and they came with Islam. The elite of them consisted of 'Abd al-Ra˙màn Zayte, Ya'qùb Mandawari, Famure, Bulqasim, Qanaje, Dukure, Sheshe, Kuweye, Murtuku, the Imam Jijiriyara Labu, and the father of Sultan Fawa, Ghurdumus, Awta, Lawal, the Imam Madatay and others to the total of forty. When they came they ordered the sultan to perform the worship [ßalàt]. He worshiped and they made Ghurdumus his imam, and Lawal his muezzin. Awta was the slaughterer of all meat that was eaten. Mandawari was the Imam of all the Wangarawa together with the elite [kibàr] of Kano. Zayte was the qà∂ì for them. The sultan ordered every area of Kano to perform ßalàt, and they did so. He built a mosque under the tree aforementioned four times. They performed the five ßalàwàt in it. Sultan Ghazarzawa disapproved of ßalàt, so when they had performed it there and went back to their homes, Sultan Ghazarzawa and his people went to the mosque and excreted in it, discoloring it with filth. On account of this [Yaji] made Dannabu Je go around the mosque with various kinds of weapons all the way from evening worship to break of dawn, shouting as he went around. Despite that, they [Ghazarzawa and his people] deceived him with his group and pursued them. So he [Dannabu Je] returned [to Yaji] and refused [to depart] with another group of his, and they [Ghazarzawa and his companions] continued their befouling of the mosque, until Sheshe and Famure said: “We have no cure for these pagans except to appeal to God”. They agreed and gathered on a Tuesday in the mosque from the time of the evening worship until sunrise, cursing the pagans, and going back to their homes in mid-morning. God responded to their appeal and blinded their [i.e., the pagans’] leader on that day, and later blinded everyone who did such a thing together with their womenfolk. After that Yaji feared every pagan in his kingdom and disarmed each one, saying to him: “You are sultan of the blind [in Hausa: makafi].”7

What is going on in this narrative? In the stories of previous generations recounted in the KC, much is made of the religious significance

7 This translation, with slight emendations, was made from the Arabic manuscript of the Kano Chronicle (MS O/AR10/2) originally owned by Sir Richmond Palmer, now in the National Archives, Kaduna. Professor John Hunwick made this translation available to me.

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for the indigenous people of Kano of a tree at the center of the city sacred to a god called Tchunburburai. This is the “tree aforementioned four times” in the text from the KC. A brief summary of those four previous mentions of the tree in the KC throws light on the present passage. (1) At the beginning of the KC the narrator states that the place sacred to Kano’s god was Kakua and the god worshipped there was called Tchunburburai. The sacred tree itself was called Shamuz and its custodian was the Mai-Tchunburburai. Even Barbushe, the first named ruler of Kano (previous to the arrival of Bagauda), only entered the sacred precincts on special occasions. The people feared trees and sacrificed to propitiate them. (2) Naguji, the fifth sarki descended from Bagauda, seems, like his predecessors back to the time of Bagauda, not to have been familiar with the rites surrounding the sacred tree and he tried to elicit information from the local people about these rites, but was rebuffed. (3) The next sarki, Gugua, still curious about these rites, dreamt of a man with a red snake and was offered in his dream the choice of life or of knowing the mysteries surrounding the sacred tree. Prudently, he chose life but died blind in odd circumstances. (4) The fourth mention of the sacred tree comes from the reign of the second predecessor of Yaji, Tsamia. Determined to destroy the sacred tree, one of Tsamia’s lieutenants launched an attack on the sacred precincts, apparently at the behest of the sarki. There he encountered a man with his back against the tree holding a red snake whom the lieutenant attacked. The bearer of the red snake snorted fire and fled, disappearing by plunging into water. In many cultures round the world, the Earth as a numinous force is venerated at the base of certain trees.8 Likewise, the snake—a particularly earth-bound creature—is often involved in the symbolism of Earth veneration.9 Robin Horton has noted that the “Earth-spirit, considered as a principal spiritual guardian of the community . . . is an age-old feature of religious life in West Africa, and one invoked to account for and support age-old socio-political structures”. Horton goes on to note the precise political significance of this Earth symbolism.

8 See G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, tr. J.E. Turner (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1963, rpt. 1938), pp. 56–7. 9 See W. Brede Kristensen, The Meaning of Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion, tr. John Carman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), p. 100.

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It seems to have been inspired by the recurrent observation that particular communities had, during the course of their histories, become enlarged through the gradual and peaceful influx of groups unrelated in lineage and clan terms to their original founders, and by the further observation that such communities, despite their resulting heterogeneity, had preserved high degrees of cohesion. This recurring situation was neatly accounted for in terms of the idea that, whilst the continued adhesion of individual lineage groups was due to their several sets of ancestral forces, the continued cohesion of the community as a whole was due to an earth-spirit under whose aegis these forces worked.10

Jack Goody, an anthropologist whose work is cited by Horton in this context, notes that horses and Earth shrines usually prove antithetical in the savannah of northern Ghana, the former associated with Muslim invaders and the latter with autochthones.11 Even before Muslims came to Kano in any substantial numbers or influence, the KC suggests that tensions were rising between the sarkinate of the descendants of Bagauda and the devotees of the shrine where Tchunburburai was venerated. This tension between the sarkinate and the Earth shrine may even predate the rise or arrival of the lineage symbolized by Bagauda, as the KC story of Barbushe’s limited access to the sacred precincts of Tchunburburai may suggest. In Hausa oral tradition, the legendary Bayajida, sometimes said to be the grandfather of Bagauda and the progenitor of all the principal Hausa states (Hausa bakwai), supposedly began his career in Daura by marrying the queen after conquering the snake named Sarki that had inhabited and restricted access to Daura’s only well.12 This “just-so” story, possibly meant to explain among other things the origin of the title sarki, may actually represent the beginning of a challenge to the Earth shrine and its mediation between various clans by a new political phenomenon, the territorial ruler or chief, the supreme mediator of inter-clan relations in a particular area. Just as the Earth shrine seems to have developed, as Horton

10 Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 356. 11 See Chapter 4, “Polity and Ritual: The Opposition of Horse and Earth”, in Jack Goody, Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 12 See “The Legend of Daura”, in H.A.S. Johnston (ed. and tr.), A Selection of Hausa Stories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 111–13.

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notes, in response to the challenge of multiple clan lineages settling in a common territory, either new immigration or the imperatives deriving from population increase in a particular territory may have led to a change in government from Earth-shrine mediation of local clans to rule by a hereditary chief different from the custodian of the Earth shrine, possibly a military figure or agricultural migrant coming from elsewhere. In Kano, the changeover from the governance, if such it may be called, of the Earth shrine and its guardians, possibly in tension with Barbushe, to the rule of Bagauda and his descendants was one stage in the evolution of government in Kano. This pattern of dual governance is well known in areas of the West African savannah west of Hausaland.13 In the light of the above, I would suggest that the KC account of the building of the first mosque in Kano under the tree sacred to Tchunburburai represents a further stage in the developing relationship between the Kano chieftaincy (sarkinate) descended from Bagauda and the primeval Earth shrine and its guardians. The Islamization of Yaji—or his more intense Islamization, if he and some of his predecessors were at least nominal Muslims—was concretized by his surrounding himself with immigrant Muslims, the Wangarawa, named in some detail in the KC.14 The devotees of the sacred tree and the red snake took offence at the building of a mosque in their sacred realm, a symbolic replacement of one religious tradition by another, and responded by profaning the mosque in a way most offensive to Muslims. The Wangarawa, allied with Yaji, struck back using means that the devotees of Tchunburburai could readily comprehend: striking their enemies blind. Recall that according to the KC the seventh sarki, Gugua, had died blind after a life of unsatisfied curiosity about the mysteries of Tchunburburai. Even if some foreign Muslims had been present in Kano before the

13 See, for example, Meyer Fortes, The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi (Oosterhout, NB: Anthropological Publications, 1969), pp. 27–30. 14 Mervyn Hiskett has suggested that the KC narrative may telescope several waves of both Mande-originated and Sarakole-originated migration into the Kano area from the territory of the Songhay Empire from the fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries C.E. See Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (London and New York: Longman, 1984), pp. 45–6. On the influence of the Sarakole clerical caste called Jakhanke, see Lamin Sanneh, The Jakhanke Muslim Clerics: A Religious and Historical Study of Islam in Senegambia (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989).

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arrival of the Wangarawa, the conversion of Yaji strengthened the somewhat tenuous domination of Kano by the sarkinate and also advanced the cause of Islam by its connection with the sarki. We may, then, take the KC’s account of Yaji and the advent of the Wangarawa as a symbol of the definitive implantation of Islam in Kano, strengthening the sarkinate in a battle with the Earth shrine for sacred political dominance of the territory. Nevertheless, Kanajeji, the second successor of Yaji, withdrew from the Islamic allegiance of his father and grandfather, especially when he was religiously challenged in a military struggle to conquer Zaria (Zazzau). His son and successor, Umaru, was so intensely Muslim that he withdrew from the sarkinate to live a life of pious seclusion—probably a euphemism for abdication under pressure from forces in Kano hostile to Islam. The KC finally narrates how the sarkinate that had overcome the Earth shrine was itself overcome by the advent of a reformist Muslim emirate as a result of the Sokoto jihad in the early nineteenth century. The alliance of Islam with the sarkinate against the Earth shrine eventually led to a corruption of Islam by the sarkinate, as can be demonstrated by the KC’s story of how the Qur"àn had been transformed into Dirki, an object of sacrificial veneration, by the sarkinate of Mu˙ammad Zàkì (probably in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century C.E.). The last Hausa sarki to rule in Kano (in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century C.E.), Mu˙ammad al-Wàlì, depleted his resources sacrificing to Dirki in a time of drought. By the standards of the Sokoto jihad, such sacrificial veneration of a wrapped and buried Qur"àn was the grossest possible example of takhlì†, the mixing of Islam with elements of traditional faith.15 A new stage was about to develop in the history of sacralized governance in Kano, the installation of a Fulani emir authorized to bear the reformist Islamic standard of 'Uthmàn dan Fodio. The Earth priest and the sarki gave way to a new form of sacred rule. 15 Among the twelve examples 'Uthmàn dan Fodio gives of kufr in Nùr al-albàb are several types of malpractice involving the Qur"àn: chanting the Qur"àn to drum accompaniment; the writing of God’s names or verses from the Qur"àn with blood or on bones; the combination with bits of snakeskin of water washed over slates on which God’s names are written or verses from the Qur"àn. The drumming, the animal blood and bones and the snakeskin make all of these practices examples of takhlì†, the forbidden combination of Islamic and traditional religious practices. See “Nour-El-Eulbab (Lumière des Coeurs) de Cheikh Otmane ben Mohammed ben Otmane dit Ibn-Foudiou”, Ismaël Hamet (ed. and tr.), Revue africaine: Bulletin des travaux de la société historique algérienne 41 (1897) and 42 (1898).

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Islam began to take hold in Kano as a cultus allied with the development of centralized personal rule, the sarkinate. That very alliance with the sarkinate led to serious compromises of Islamic monotheism by the end of the eighteenth century, if the KC, a document emanating in its final literary form from the inheritors of the Fulani emirate, is to be trusted. The new era of Islamic personal rule that began in Kano with the establishment of the Fulani emirate there can be interpreted as less dramatic a break from previous developments than might otherwise be presupposed. Christian Beginnings The first presence of Christians in the area of what is now Nigeria can be dated to slightly more than a half millennium ago in the Niger Delta. Although there were some Christian clergy among the Portuguese who came to Warri and Benin at the time, their impact was limited, not only because disease devastated the missionaries but also because of the connection of their Portuguese royal patrons with the slave trade.16 Pietist Protestants, imbued with the abolitionist spirit of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, began the first major implantation of Christianity among the peoples of West Africa in the aftermath of the British ban on the exportation of slaves on the high seas from Africa. The ill-fated Niger expedition of 1841 began the dual penetration of what is now Nigeria by agents of British colonialism and missionaries of the more evangelical variety, all intent on replacing the institution of slavery and its agents with something more “civilized” by British and Christian standards of the time.17 The combination of abolitionism and evangelism played an important role in most nineteenth-century Christian missionary efforts in West Africa, whether spearheaded by European or by liberated African agents. One of those liberated African agents, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a participant in the Niger expedition of 1841, played a dominant role in Church Missionary Society (henceforth, CMS) evangelism in south-

16 Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 77. 17 J.F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, 1965), pp. 11–13.

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ern Nigeria, not only in Yorubaland (from 1845) but also among the Igbo, among whom Crowther arrived at Onitsha in 1857, and among other denizens of the banks of the Niger and the creeks of the Delta. Crowther achieved a great deal in his long life (1806–91), but internal problems of CMS agents in Nigeria and especially a scandalous split between the European and African agents of evangelization darkened the last years of his missionary career. These same internal problems of the CMS accidentally offered an opportunity to the first Catholic missionaries to work among the Igbo population of Onitsha and its environs, although they did not originally come to Onitsha with the idea of exploiting the opportunity provided by the CMS’s internal strife. Crowther, characteristically free of the narrow prejudices of some of his British evangelical colleagues, had willingly surrendered to the first French Catholic missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit who came to Onitsha in 1885 a piece of land along the Niger that had originally been allocated for CMS use: “I acquired the land for the cause of God. Take it.”18 Not unlike the earliest Protestant missionaries in West Africa, the earliest Catholic missionaries in and around Onitsha expended much of their energy combating the continuing evils of the internal African slave trade. Father Joseph Lutz, an Alsatian member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, began Catholic missionary work in Onitsha in 1885. He and his first companions founded Christian villages19 not unlike the Jesuit Reductions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paraguay20 where liberated slaves, purchased from slave markets by the missionaries with charitable funds donated in Europe, could live Christian lives separate from the local people. Many of these liberated slaves, in any case, were not local people but the hapless victims of slave-raiding further north along the Niger and the Benue Rivers. Along with these liberated slaves, various

18 As quoted in Emefie Ikenga-Metuh and Christopher I. Ejizu, [A] Hundred Years of Catholicism in Eastern Nigeria: 1985 (Nimo, Anambra State: Asele Institute, 1985), p. 13. 19 See P.B. Clarke, “The Methods and Ideology of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Eastern Nigeria, 1885–1905”, in O.U. Kalu (ed.), The History of Christianity in West Africa (London: Longman, 1980), pp. 36–62. 20 E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London: Longman, 1966), p. 291.

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internal refugees from Igbo society, especially twins and their mothers,21 victims of leprosy, smallpox, and crippling diseases and those belabored with having committed various ritual offenses also found a haven in these Christian villages.22 Lutz also recognized the importance of education, especially within these Christian villages, and even of medical work as a missionary enterprise. But the real beginning of extensive Catholic educational work among the Igbo only began after Lutz’s time. The third successor of Lutz as superior of the Catholic mission in Onitsha, Father Leon Alexandre Lejeune, a veteran of missionary work in Gabon, started in 1900 to direct Catholic missionary efforts away from the redemption of slaves and the building of Christian villages. To Lejeune first, and then to an Irish missionary, Father (later Bishop) Joseph Shanahan, who first arrived in Onitsha in 1902, must be attributed the great emphasis Catholic missionaries among the Igbo were to give to education during the twentieth century. The education imparted in these Catholicsponsored schools was not only religious and vocational (as in the earliest CMS schools) but included English and mathematics as well.23 Shanahan succeeded Lejeune in 1905 as Prefect Apostolic (the papally appointed head) of all Catholic missionary work east of the Niger and continued to direct the affairs of the Catholic Church in that area until 1931. The transformation of Catholic missionary work in and around Onitsha from the redemption of slaves and the creation of separate Christian villages to the permeation of Onitsha and the more inland settlements of Igbo territory through the establishment of hundreds of schools was not achieved without opposition, notably from Rome. The Cardinal Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1912, Cardinal Gotti, questioned the diversion of funds collected overseas for the liberation and settlement of slaves into the field of education. Shanahan took up the challenge posed by Gotti’s query. Already we can see the results existing schools have brought. Because of them the children are no longer forced to sacrifice to idols, or to take part in immodest dances, or to indulge in diabolical rites. Pagan parents allow them full liberty to practise the Christian religion. The

21 Traditionally most Igbos abominated plural births. See Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 58. 22 Ikenga-Metuh and Ejizu, Hundred Years of Catholicism, pp. 16–18. 23 See Clarke in Kalu, Christianity in West Africa, p. 53.

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very slave dealers are afraid of them, because they can speak a little English. This of itself will prevent them from being taken as slaves and will save their families also. So far we cannot but congratulate ourselves on the fidelity of the children, and on the goodwill of the pagans. The school keeps the missionary in contact with the people, because the children give him free entry into every house. He is no longer a stranger but a member of the family. This fact alone makes what he can effect, and what he can prevent, really incalculable. He is known everywhere and he alone can go throughout the country without danger. Other Europeans dare not move about the country unescorted. But at the moment of writing, our presence is being demanded in some fifty towns. Yet traffic in human flesh still goes on. Our method of opposing it is to make known the truth through the medium of the school.24

Much of the literature about the beginnings of Christianity in Africa stresses the influence of the missionaries but neglects the more basic participation of the local people in the reception of Christianity. Shanahan’s continuance of Lejeune’s turn towards education as an instrument of evangelization seems to have appealed to something in Igbo culture that the earlier approach—the redemption of slaves and providing refuge for internal exiles in Christian villages—had not. Lejeune’s predecessors had hoped that the conversion to Catholicism of the traditional rulers in Aguleri (1891) and Onitsha (1893) might, like the conversion of Constantine, lead to a more general influx of the Igbo in and around Onitsha to Catholic Christianity. But that hope possibly exaggerated the importance of the centralized territorial chieftaincy to Igbo society.25 What in Igbo culture facilitated the acceptance of Christianity and especially Catholic Christian evangelization through schools? Many West African populations give prominence in their understanding of themselves to notions of individual destiny: okra among the Akans of Ghana,26 ayanmo among the Yoruba,27 nuor-yin among the Tallensi of

24 Shanahan to Cardinal Gotti, as quoted in Desmond Forristal, The Second Burial of Bishop Shanahan (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1990), pp. 103–4. 25 See Richard N. Henderson, The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 509–15. 26 Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 85–8. 27 William R. Bascom, as quoted in Meyer Fortes, Oedipus and Job in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, rpt. 1983), p. 7.

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Ghana,28 etc. But in a society as diverse and comparatively non-centralized and non-chieftaincy-dominated as the cultural continuum we call Igboland, the destiny of the individual plays a particularly defining role in the culture. One anthropologist lists it first among the major values of the Onitsha Igbo people. Onitsha proverbs make it quite clear that maintaining life is a justifiable end in itself only to the extent that it is productive or nurturant of more life. This overwhelming concern with the production and continuity of life is basic to the fundamental concept of Onitsha philosophical and religious thought: the idea of chí. Chi is “life” (ndu), or life conceived as an animate self that guides the course of existence. The most directly important manifestation of this for any person is the “chi in me”, which is thought of as a spiritual essence of the living self that guides and determines the course of that person’s life from birth to death. It is believed that when an individual chooses to “enter the world” (ínye-uwa), he makes a pact with a particular essential being (chi ), selecting his length of life and his future activities; the choices so made are marked by the chi of his hand as his akala-aka (“marks of the hand”), or “destiny”.29

This notion of chi undergirds not only the distinctive individuality of Igbo men and women but also their sense of the transcendent order to which they as individuals are related. Since chi refers then to a single life acted out by each person, there are as many chi as there are living individuals. However, not only does chi have a more general and inclusive meaning as the essence of life, it is also projected as a life essence attributed to the entire universe, a universal self called chi-ukwu or chukwu, literally “great chi”. The term chi-ukwu designates an ultimate self ordering the universe as a whole, which in turn is conceived as a multiplicity of “worlds” (uwa). . . . Chiukwu is said to have created all physical phenomena and endowed them with force and direction. . . . When a person dies, his chi ceases to exist as an independent entity, returning to the great ground of being in the sun or in the sky. Chi-ukwu exists as long as the universe which it personifies.30

When Shanahan first lived in the village of Ogboli, now a part of metropolitan Onitsha, he started as a learner of language rather than as a teacher of anything, finding the children of the village the most

28 29 30

Fortes, Oedipus, p. 16. Henderson, King in Every Man, pp. 106–7. Henderson, King in Every Man, pp. 107–8.

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accessible of teachers for what he had to imbibe. Eventually, however, he began to teach them, starting there his first tiny school.31 Schooling always distinguishes individuals from the general mass of society, making possible the advancement of one person over others, not on the basis of inherited status but on the basis of personal achievement. Shanahan saw in schools “a providential instrument of incalculable good in our hands”. Itinerant preaching in villages, he concluded, “brings no result. But no one is opposed to a school.”32 Even if Christianity has a pronounced social significance and social ethics, it has encouraged the development of individual Christians as men and women who think of themselves as having unique personal vocations from God, an idea very close to the Igbo concept of chi. This aspect of Christianity has become particularly pronounced since the end of the medieval period. The invention of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century and the vernacular translations of the Bible in the sixteenth century revolutionized Christianity in Europe, Protestant at first but then Catholic as well. The publication of books made possible individual learning in a way unknown in earlier centuries, when learning was essentially a group exercise— the oral imparting of knowledge by a master to his students. Such individual learning created a new type of human being, at first in Europe but then everywhere printed books reached. With the advent of Christianity in Igboland, the individualism of Renaissance and Reformation Europe met an indigenous individualism that responded with alacrity to the new learning. Shanahan grew in his knowledge of and love for Igbo culture as the years went on, taking a much more positive attitude than might have been characteristic of many earlier and later missionaries, Catholic or Protestant, and especially of the more counter-cultural evangelicals who tended to take a dim view of any culture other than that of Victorian England, tea parties and all.33 In contrast, Shanahan would preside over wrestling matches and even crowned with his pith helmet a boy named Chukwukani Obiajulu, who was subsequently given the baptismal name of Louis because he was “the King of the Wrestlers” (Eze Nwokolobia) just as Saint Louis had been 31

Forristal, Second Burial, pp. 49–50. Shanahan as quoted in John P. Jordan, Bishop Shanahan of Southern Nigeria (Dublin: Veritas, 1971), p. 82. 33 See Ajayi, Christian Missions, pp. 14–15. 32

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the King of France.34 Unlike the idol-smashing missionaries of other times, Shanahan promoted a certain degree of respect for the religious traditions of the Igbo. We toppled idols no more. Instead, acting with respect for all existing native customs, we told them quietly where these things went wrong, and that there was a way of conducting religious observances laid down by God himself. Idols topple by themselves when they cease to be propped up by anxious human hands.35

The foregoing account of the beginning of Catholic Christianity among the Onitsha Igbo suggests that the new religious tradition allied itself not so much with any major element in the social structure but rather with the striving of the individual Igbo to achieve or to deal with his or her destiny. Christianity among the Igbo took root in their personality structure. Schooling—including schooling in quite secular subjects—enabled Igbo people to live out the quotation seen on so many trucks in the Igbo areas of Nigeria in times past: “Man pass man”, a phrase in colloquial Nigerian English meaning that one person surpasses another in excellence. In the context of Christianity and education, this could be cynically construed to imply that the Igbo advanced themselves as individuals through conversion and education and the prosperity they brought. But the old lorry inscription sometimes went beyond “Man pass man” to another and more important assertion, “God pass all”. Even the most ambitious Christian achievers in Igboland were challenged by these inscriptions to recognize the limitations of their own human or educational excellence in the context of the supreme excellence of God. Present Situations, Muslim and Christian It is always difficult, and even risky, to attempt delineating eras, especially when one is too close to them; we are insufficiently distant from the periods we wish to characterize to get a proper perspective.

34 This anecdote, narrated many years later by Louis Chukwukani Obiajulu to Sister Edith Dynan, MSHR, is found in her unpublished memoir of Shanahan, Bishop Shanahan as Remembered by Men and Women in Nigeria, 1985–1987, as quoted in Forristal, pp. 100–2. Forristal, however, misspells Chukwukani as Chukwanna; I am grateful to Sister Edith for the correction. 35 Shanahan as quoted in Forristal, Second Burial, p. 94.

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Nevertheless, I would like to attempt an analysis of the present situation of both Islam and Christianity in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but starting with events dating back to approximately 1978, the concluding year of the first period of military rule that Nigeria experienced in the wake of the collapse of the First Republic in 1966. Note that I say Islam and Christianity in Nigeria, not just Islam among the Hausa Muslims of Kano and Christianity among the Igbo Catholics of Onitsha. The accounts of Muslim and Christian beginnings examined above are cited as examples, although I think typical ones, of the major religious communities in Nigeria. It should be noted, however, that Nigeria is a very complicated mosaic of ethnicities, religious allegiances, and regional and sub-regional attachments. Not everything said, for instance, about a Sunni Hausa Muslim from Kano and a Sunni Yoruba Muslim from Lagos and their experiences over the past quarter of a century or so would be absolutely the same. Likewise, not everything said about an Igbo Catholic from Onitsha and an Edo Catholic from Benin City and their experiences over the past quarter of a century would be absolutely the same. But, as in a mosaic, there are gradations of color and shade that make the ethnic, religious and regional experiences of these populations at least a subject for discussion and refinement along a continuum. The Hausa Muslims of Kano and the Igbo Catholics of Onitsha began their journeys as Muslims and Christians starting from significantly different points de départ that can be summarized as follows: • For the Hausa Muslims of Kano, Islam attached itself to the sarkinate, strengthening it in a struggle for political power with the Earth shrine and its custodians. Eventually the sarkinate, strengthened by Islam, became the sarkinate corrupting Islam and was replaced by a Fulani emirate of purified Islamic observance, critical of the mixing (mukhalli†) chieftaincy of the sons of Bagauda. • For the Igbo Catholics of Onitsha, Christianity attached itself to a central element in the personality structure, chi, the expression of one’s individuality, one’s personal call from God (chi-ukwu). At the same time, the comparative underdevelopment of chieftaincy in many Igbo societies (although Onitsha is something of an exception) encouraged individual Igbo children to break with the religious and cultural paths taken by their parents or their village and chart individual paths with the help of mission-sponsored schooling.

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As was noted at the outset, this is not the only way to understand the development of Islam among the Hausa people of Kano and its neighboring states or the development of Christianity among the Igbo people of Onitsha and related populations in southeastern Nigeria. But this summary may serve as a hermeneutic, not entirely exhaustive, for understanding where Nigerian Muslims and Nigerian Christians find themselves today. It should be noted, as well, that this hermeneutic is not meant to privilege either religious tradition, or to denigrate either. The more political and social roots of Islam in Nigeria have not prevented Islam from penetrating deep into the personalities of many Nigerian Muslims over the centuries, especially through the mysticism of the Qàdiriyya and the Tijàniyya Sufi orders. The more personal and psychological roots of Christianity in Nigeria have not prevented Christianity from influencing the political and social order over the past two centuries, from the era of abolitionism to the age of “born-again” politicians. Beginning in the middle of the 1970s the Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria—not just in Kano and Onitsha—began to see themselves in a new context. The sudden worldwide rise of petroleum prices in 1973 as a result of OPEC flexing its muscles had effected changes in Nigeria from 1973 to 1982. These were the years not only of the excessive lengthening of military administration but also of the oil boom, a great deal of conspicuous consumption, private and public, and a consequent widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, followed finally by the too-long delayed return to civilian rule in 1979. By 1983 this civilian rule was growing in unpopularity in the wake of the oil bust of 1982 and more general social malaise culminating in the federal election of 1983 and the military coup on New Year’s Eve of that year. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, various factors, many of them derived from the Shiite political thought of the Ayatollah Khomeini, destabilized Iran, toppling the monarchy of the Pahlavi Shahs and substituting a form of Islamic governance unique to Iran.36 Similar radical sentiments, not so structurally organized, nearly destabilized the monarchy of Saudi Arabia on the first day of Mu˙arram in the year 1400 hijra (1979). The Islamic world, once considered an unim36 See Hamid Enayat, “Iran: Khumayni’s Concept of the ‘Guardianship of the Jurisconsult’”, in James Piscatori (ed.), Islam in the Political Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 160–80.

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portant backwater by the denizens of the two shores of the North Atlantic, suddenly loomed on their horizon as another alternative— different from the socialist model—to Western secular democracy. It was to take another ten years before formerly communist Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union started to change and eventually to break up, leaving the newly self-conscious Islamic world as the only possible ideological rival to the secularizing (and sometimes secularist) West. What has happened to Islam and Christianity in Nigeria over the quarter of a century since 1978? What has happened to the communities of Muslims and Christians whose beginnings we examined above? Where have they ended up at the present stage of their journeys? I will commence with a brief exposition of some of the inner tensions of the Muslim community over the years since 1978. Then I will deal with the inner tensions of the Christian community over the same period before finally treating the tensions that have developed between Muslims and Christians in that period. Inner Tensions of the Muslim Community since 1978 The election in 1979 of the Muslim politician Shehu Shagari as Nigeria’s first executive president, an event not unattended by controversy, and his re-election in 1983 did not particularly advance the cause of Islam as a political theme in Nigeria. In fact the very opposite was true. To the embarrassment of a government headed by a devout Fulani Muslim from Sokoto, a revolutionary movement of possibly millenarian ideology caused violent civil unrest in Kano late in 1980. The instigator of this revolutionary movement, a Cameroonian named Mu˙ammad Marwa, had been settled in the northern part of Nigeria for several decades and had even once been deported from the country around 1963. Nicknamed Mai Tatsine (Hausa: “the one who curses”), he had built up a considerable following in the 1970s, the years of uneven petroleum-based prosperity in Nigeria, among a quintessential lumpenproletariat, the impoverished almajirai 37 in urban center like Kano. Marwa’s central theme was the corruption

37 The Hausa word almajiri (plural: almajirai ), ordinarily denoting Qur"ànic school pupils but often used more widely for street urchins, is said to derive from the Arabic al-muhàjir (emigrant). See R.C. Abraham, Dictionary of the Hausa Language

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of Islam, especially among the so-called Hausa-Fulani elite in the 1970s.38 Newspaper reports of Marwa’s preachments ascribed heterodox doctrines to him, some of which, if true, would have made him an ex-Muslim. But it was hard after Marwa’s death in 1980 to reconstruct exactly what he taught. Both the civilian government of Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–1983) and the military regimes that have succeeded it have placed the blame for these riots on “aliens”, a term used to designate non-Nigerian Africans, although the official lists of those arrested in the wake of the 1980 disturbance would suggest that most of Maitatsine’s followers were indigenous Nigerians. . . . The exact contents of Maitatsine’s doctrine remain unclear, although he seems to have continued the cryptoKhariji tradition within militant West African Sunnism, especially the tendency to pronounce takfir on those ostensibly defined as Muslim. . . . At every turn of a Muslim century Sunni Muslim expectation of a communal renewer (mujaddid) or even the Mahdi flowers. The hijri year 1400 commenced on 20 November 1979, the date of the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by Sunni dissidents critical of the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, an event that might have served as model for a similar uprising in Kano a year later.39

The most significant cause of the religious anger of Marwa and his almajirai was probably the impoverishment of this devout Muslim underclass at the time of the Nigerian oil boom. The total revenue of the federal government from petroleum and other export commodities in 1970 had been $1 billion; in 1980 the revenue was $23 billion. At the same time, rural migration to the big cities had increased because of drought.40 Whereas the Hausa-Fulani elite in Kano and other Muslim urban settings in the Nigerian north had benefited from this petroleum-based windfall, the almajirai and other members of the underclass had not. If anything, esteem for their religious status and the humble services they rendered had declined

(London: University of London Press, 1962), p. 27. In the classical Islamic sense, the word muhàjir designates one who has gone on hijra from the abode of infidelity to the abode of Islam, like Mu˙ammad and his companions who went from Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. 38 See Paul M. Lubeck, “Islamic Protest under Semi-Industrial Capitalism: ’Yan Tatsine Explained”, Africa 55, 4 (1985): 369–89, and Allan Christelow, “The ’Yan Tatsine Disturbances in Kano—A Search for Perspective”, The Muslim World 75 (April 1985): 69–84. 39 Patrick J. Ryan, “Islam and Politics in West Africa: Minority and Majority Models”, The Muslim World 77, 1 ( January 1987): 13–14. 40 Lubeck, “Islamic Protest”, p. 377.

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with the greater secularization of the nation, of Kano, and especially of its Muslim community. The violence with which the civil authorities put down the ’Yan Tatsine disturbances in 1980 (and related disturbances in 1982, 1984 and 1985 in other areas of northern Nigeria) left the impression with many poor Muslims in Nigeria that the Muslim elite, whether civilian or military, did not have the same priorities as their fellow Muslims of humble background. The coup of 31 December 1983 ousted the Shagari regime a few months after its re-election. Although many in Nigeria-Muslims and Christians—hoped for a dramatic reversal of their misfortunes in the military regime led by General Muhammadu Buhari, the seemingly irreversible decline of the oil-based economy made the national populace grow tired of the self-proclaimed reformism of Buhari and his Chief of Staff, Tunde Idiagbon. Within twenty months, a military putsch brought to power a series of military rulers, with a few months of interim civilian rule in 1993: General Ibrahim Babangida (1985– 1993), General Sani Abacha (1993–1998) and General Abdusalami Abubakar (1998–99). None of them solved the economic or social problems of Nigeria, and the first two, especially, contributed wittingly or unwittingly to Muslim-Christian tensions to be detailed below. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, however, the Muslim community, particularly in the northern half of the country, were preoccupied with other internal divisions. The challenge, if such it may be called, of an eccentric figure like Mai Tatsine shrank in importance compared with the inner struggles of Muslims, especially in northern Nigeria, during this period. Only a brief summary can be given of very complex controversies that have been studied in greater detail by others. The jihad of 'Uthmàn dan Fodio (1804–1809), although it had its origins at the same time as the first period of so-called “Wahhàbì” (more accurately muwa˙˙id ) intellectual and political fervor in the Arabian peninsula, was probably not directly affected by this particular type of reformist thought. What particularly distinguished the reform of 'Uthmàn from Wahhàbì ideology was 'Uthmàn’s fervent adherence to the Qàdiriyya Sufi confraternity, a type of piety strongly repudiated by Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhàb.41 The influence of Saudi Arabia

41 See Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 131–2.

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on Nigerian Muslims, especially since 1950, has entailed the introduction of Wahhàbì thought into northern Nigeria. A strong factor in popularizing this type of thought has been the growing restiveness of the educated Muslim elite with the emirate system, the continuation of Lord Lugard’s indirect rule through the successors of the emirs appointed by 'Uthmàn dan Fodio and his successors.42 These emirs generally identified themselves religiously with either 'Uthmàn’s Qàdiriyya or with the Tijàniyya confraternity introduced into northern Nigeria later in the nineteenth century by al-Óàjj 'Umar and transformed in the twentieth century under the influence of the Senegalese religious leader Ibràhìm Niasse.43 Politically the emirs conformed with the colonial administration that had maintained them in power (1903–1960) and with the elected political regimes that succeeded the colonial administration in power. Much as Wahhàbì ideology is identified to the present day with the feudal royal family ruling Saudi Arabia, in northern Nigeria it has been more frequently espoused by the critics of feudalism in the form of the emirates. Eventually the most outspoken critic of the emirates and of Sufism within the context of northern Nigeria was Abubakar Mahmud Gumi. Once the principal Arabic interpreter for the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, on his frequent forays into the Arab world, Gumi was named by Bello as the Grand Kadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria in 1962. The assassination of the Sardauna in 1966, although a great personal loss for Gumi, eventually freed him to pursue his anti-Sufi and anti-emirate ideological proclivities more vigorously. But with the creation of six states out of the Northern Region in 1967, his Northern Region judicial post became somewhat ambiguous in its jurisdiction. Finally it was the Federal Military Government during the Buhari regime that formally retired Gumi as Grand Kadi of the erstwhile Northern Region in April 1985. This was probably as a punishment for Gumi’s outspoken criticism of an opinion enunciated by Buhari, who had told Muslim leaders that

42

Muhammad Sani Umar, “Changing Islamic Identity in Nigeria from the 1960s to the 1980s: From Sufism to Anti-Sufism”, in Louis Brenner (ed.), Muslim Identity and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: Hurst & Company, 1993), p. 157. 43 See Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., “The Mystical Theology of Tijani Sufism and Its Social Significance in West Africa”, The Journal of Religion in Africa 30, 2 (2000): 208–24.

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they had to compromise with each other just as, supposedly, Ibràhìm (the Biblical Abraham) had compromised with his idol-making father and had sold idols for him.44 Gumi’s anti-Sufism inspired some of his admirers, especially Isma’ila Idris, to found at Jos in March 1978 a rigorist movement that was not only anti-Sufi but militant in its commitment to Wahhàbì ideology more generally. Usually known in Hausa as ’Yan Izala, the movement is more formally called in Arabic the Jamà'at izàlat albid'a wa-iqàmat al-sunna (The Society for the Removal of Deviation and the Establishment of the Sunna). ’Yan Izala, although begun in the northern part of the country, has established branches in many other sections, especially among younger people of northern Nigerian background. In the process of this propagation, ’Yan Izala has split many mosque communities, creating its own worshiping communities for the Friday congregational worship, often denouncing other communities and their Sufi leadership as infidels (kuffàr). Attempts made by the Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs, and urged on by the federal government, to reconcile Sufi and Izala factions have largely proved fruitless, at least on any long-term basis.45 As has also happened in Ghana,46 the Saudi government has encouraged ’Yan Izala, and the Iranian government since 1979 has tilted towards the Sufi confraternities, not so much out of any supposed congruence between Shia Islam and Sufism but because the Saudis were supporting their critics.47 There is a certain historical logic, as it were, in the progress from Wangarawa Muslim attachment to the sarkinate of the sons of Bagauda to the corruption of Islam by its connection with the sarkinate, followed by the eventual Sokoto-inspired replacement of a “mixing” Muslim sarkinate by a reformist Muslim emirate in Kano and other northern Nigerian city-states. This historical logic has continued in another dimension in the past quarter of a century in northern Nigeria. ’Yan Tatsine and ’Yan Izala are two recent examples,

44 See Sheikh Abubakar Gumi with Ismaila A. Tsiga, Where I Stand (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1992), p. 173. 45 See Umar in Brenner, Muslim Identity, pp. 167–72. 46 See Patrick J. Ryan, “Gradualist and Militant in West Africa: A Study of Islam in Ghana”, in John J. Donohue, S.J. and Christian W. Troll, S.J. (eds), Faith, Power and Violence: Muslims and Christians in a Plural Society, Past and Present (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1998), pp. 159–61. 47 Umar in Brenner, Muslim Identity, pp. 172–3.

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one apparently quite eccentric and the other more mainstream, of Muslim ideological attachment to the idea of transforming an immoral society into a moral society by changing the forms of government. Those inclined towards this point of view think that individuals will only be able to live moral lives once there is a moral social structure. Conversely, they maintain that there can never be moral individuals unless social structures are in place that will mandate their morality. Inner Tensions of the Christian Community since 1978 Especially since the end of the oil-boom years in 1982, Christianity in Nigeria has become increasingly captivated with the religious phenomena sometimes described as neo-charismatic. This type of Christianity has a certain family linkage with an earlier charismatic tendency, aladura Christianity, in Nigerian and more general African Christianity. But the neo-charismatic Christianity of the past quarter of a century has introduced a new style into Nigerian Christianity. Both aladura charismatics and neo-charismatics borrow, perhaps unconsciously, at least some of their religious agenda from Traditional forms of faith and the response those forms of faith give to problems connected with the individual destiny of the believer. As early as the 1920s many of the churches characterized as aladura48 supplemented or even revolted against the somewhat staid and rationalistic bias of the Anglican and Protestant traditions that had been implanted in the middle of the nineteenth century in what is now southwestern Nigeria. These aladura churches took on a superficially Catholic style in haberdashery and other externals, but on a much more significant level they responded to the needs of people, and especially the needs of the less educated who felt themselves threatened by the vicissitudes of life: economic distress, infer-

48 Like so many words used for Christian religious phenomena in the Yoruba language, the word aladura has Arabic and Islamic origins. Crowther, the creator of Yoruba Christian religious language, deliberately borrowed terminology from his fellow monotheists, the Muslim Yoruba. In Arabic, al-du'à" signifies individual prayer or petition. With the Yoruba prefix al (meaning more or less “one who”) and a euphonious r replacing the 'ayn, the word comes to mean “one who prays”. Despite the Yoruba terminology used loosely to characterize all these churches, not all of the churches have been based in Yorubaland.

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tility and childlessness, persistent physical and psychological illness, and family or lineage tensions. These vicissitudes were interpreted not in sociological or economic but in spiritual terms as evidence of an attack on the individual destinies of believers by unseen but malevolent forces. Little distinction was made between healing and exorcism, and some of these churches even repudiated the use of Western medicine, so attached were they to the principles of spiritual healing.49 The neo-charismatic churches of the past twenty-five years share some common themes with the aladura charismatics of an earlier era, but they do so with a more sophisticated style that owes much to the traditions of American-style televangelism. Generally speaking, they eschew the superficially Catholic externals of the aladura; their “anointed ministers of God” are frequently pictured on posters and billboards or in television advertisements in three-piece suits or (when the anointed minister is a woman) in European-style haute couture. Their theology adheres to a literal understanding of Biblical passages that mainline Christian churches interpret more figuratively. Some of them are more fixated on the second coming of Jesus and other eschatological themes than are others. Almost by definition, the neocharismatics make much of the more accessible charismata in the Pentecostal tradition, especially glossolalia, “speaking in tongues”, for which these churches have a higher regard than Saint Paul did (1 Corinthians 14: 2–40). They make frequent claims as well to miraculous healings and similar wonders. For all the seemingly communal manifestations of aladura charismatic Christianity in Nigeria in times past and of neo-charismatic Christianity in the present, every variety of Christian faith in Nigeria is radically individualistic in its approach. From its beginnings in Nigeria, Christianity has attached itself (not only among the Igbo) more to the personality structure of the individual than to the social structure in which the individuals live. Crowther and the early CMS evangelists had more success with individuals than with chieftaincies. In any case, the first liberated African evangelists were people who had been torn out of their own social settings as a result of the slave trade. In Sierra Leone they had lived in multi-ethnic settings, although the Yoruba tended to dominate because of their vast numbers.50 49 See J.D.Y. Peel, Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 50 Hastings, Church in Africa, p. 340.

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When Crowther was made a bishop, however, the British Anglican missionaries made sure that he was made a bishop not in his ethnic homeland but in areas for the most part contiguous to the Niger River.51 Not much opportunity was offered to the first Yoruba Anglican bishop to utilize in his home area his firsthand experience of what it was to be both a Christian and a Yoruba. Such cultural uprooting contributed to a very individualistic interpretation of Christianity. There are some neo-charismatic churches that have pushed the individualistic bias of Nigerian Christianity to new extremes. Responding to the decline in the Nigerian economy since 1982, many of these churches have adopted the “gospel of prosperity” version of Christianity first popularized by television preachers in the United States. According to the ideas associated with the “gospel of prosperity”, it is only right and proper—indeed it is God’s will, that those who deserve it achieve earthly prosperity. Poverty, illness, poor health, and other misfortunes are sure signs of sin, of a lack of true Christian commitment, and God’s signal that he is aware of the individual’s shortcomings. It follows, in this line of reasoning, that the most devoted Christian is the most wealthy; the sight of a millionaire preacher addressing a sermon to a prosperous congregation is a material justification of such beliefs. . . . As Benson Idahosa [founder of the Church of God Mission in Nigeria] remarked: “My God is not a poor God. God did not say you should worship him in rags. My God is a living and kind God.”52

The poor man of Nazareth might find himself uncomfortable in congregations espousing this ideology. Nevertheless, many people, and especially educated young people whose academic training has not enriched them significantly, have flocked to the neo-charismatic churches that preach the “gospel of prosperity”, not only in Nigeria but also elsewhere in West Africa. Many of these churches make commitment to their theology somewhat difficult for those with limited incomes, since they often insist on tithing with the assertion, found on many cars’ back windows and bumpers, that “Givers Never Lack”.53

51

Ajayi, Christian Missions, pp. 206–8. Jeff Haynes, Religion and Politics in Africa (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1996), p. 225. 53 Car-window decals and bumper stickers from these prosperity churches often proclaim that the year in progress is “My Year of Conquering” or “My Year of Wonders”. They also warn the potentially malevolent in rush-hour traffic snarls that “I am too defended to be a victim”. 52

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Despite the individualism of these prosperity churches, one of the most prominent preachers of this tendency in Nigeria took sufficient interest in the social structure of the country to run for the presidency of Nigeria during the presidential election in 2003. His candidacy was not taken very seriously. Other candidates, however, and especially President Obasanjo, have sought and received the blessing of some of these gospel-of-prosperity preachers on the ticket that the candidate in question was an “anointed man of God”. The neo-charismatic Christian churches tend to take a negative view of the older Christian denominations, accusing them of irrelevance to the concrete needs of Nigerians. Some of this builds on the foundation of old-fashioned anti-Catholicism (accusations of idol worship and the like) and a more diffuse rejection of the more staid versions of Christianity. More seriously, the neo-charismatic churches, and especially those caught up in the enthusiasm for the “gospel of prosperity”, dislike the somewhat penitential tone of mainline Christianity, Protestant or Catholic. The “gospel of prosperity” continues the self-esteem therapeutics well known in the United States from the preaching of the late Norman Vincent Peale, best summarized in his book, The Power of Positive Thinking.54 Christianity, not only among the Igbo people but more generally in Nigeria, proved attractive from its inception as a way for the individual to do something for himself or herself. Schooling in Igboland differentiated the educated from the uneducated. One should be slow to interpret this self-advancement of individuals in purely instrumental terms.55 Whatever reasons the first Spaniards or Britons had for embracing Christianity, or the first Iranians or Andalusians had for embracing Islam, it did not preclude the development in those cultural areas of such profoundly Christian and Muslim people as Juan de la Cruz, Julian of Norwich, Óusayn b. Manßùr al-Óallàj and Ibn al-'Arabì.

54 See Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa (London: SPCK, 1995) which notes in passing the influence of Peale’s thoughts on African Christians: p. 409, n. 73. 55 For such a facile interpretation, see Haynes, Religion and Politics, p. 227, paraphrasing Horton, Patterns of Thought, pp. 154–6.

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In April 1978 the Muslim community in Nigeria came to a dramatic sense of itself at the Constitutional Assembly when the debate on establishing a Sharia Court of Appeal at the federal level divided the members of the Assembly along religious lines.56 Despite all the rhetoric emanating from the Biafran side at the time of the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), religion was not an important issue in that tragic conflict.57 But the greater centralization of power in the Federal Republic of Nigeria was consequent on the replacement of the original regional division of the country by multiple state arrangements in 1967 and later prompted the desire expressed by many Muslim participants in the Constitutional Assembly of 1977–1978 to seek the creation of such an appeal court at the federal level. The alkali (Hausa for the Arabic al-qà∂ì ) courts of the pre-1967 Northern Region would have referred cases on appeal in the long run to the Northern Region Sharia Court of Appeal, the highest Islamic law court in the region. Such Islamic courts were not established in the other regions before 1967, even in the Western Region where a large number of Muslims (Yoruba, migrant Hausa, etc.) resided. With the abolition of the Northern Region in 1967 Muslim jurists felt the need for such an appeal court at the federal level. The alternative entailed sending all such cases on appeal (largely concerned with inheritance, divorce and other matters of personal law) to the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic, where they were less likely to be entertained. The then-military government headed by General Obasanjo (in the process of handing over power to civilians to be elected in 1979) engineered a compromise that pleased neither party to the controversy, but especially did not please the Muslim members who had walked out of the Constitutional Assembly in protest. The Muslim Yoruba members of the Constitutional Assembly played a central role in crafting this compromise: the appointment of a panel of judges versed in Islamic law within the Federal Court of Appeal to hear such cases referred to them by state Sharia Courts of Appeal. Muslims were not happy because they had

56 57

Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria (London: Longman, 1983), p. 477. See Isichei, History of Nigeria, p. 341.

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not created a sharia court at the federal level.58 Christians were not happy because they saw the Muslims’ desire for such a court at the federal level as an attempt to establish Islam as a state religion. The unhappiness of the Christians in Nigeria and their fear of the establishment of Islam as a state religion increased in 1986 when the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida tried to promote Nigeria from observer status to full membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).59 This somewhat loose union of Muslim states,60 both rich and poor, was particularly valued by the economically distressed members of the Organization for the possibility it provided for soft loans to bail out floundering economies such as Nigeria’s in the wake of the 1982 fall in oil prices. Nigerian Christians, seldom united in any cause before, started to organize themselves in the late 1970s into the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to oppose what they saw as stealthy attempts by Muslims to declare Nigeria an Islamic state.61 Following the OIC controversy, CAN became a major player in Nigerian religio-political struggles. By way of reaction, Nigerian Muslims became quite vocal as well in their critique of Nigeria’s membership in such Christian (!) associations as the Commonwealth62 and Nigeria’s establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Eventually Babangida’s government, seeking peace at any price, announced that the question

58 For a concise account of these events see John Hunwick, “An African Case Study of Political Islam: Nigeria”, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 524 (1992): 148–9. See also David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1–11; and chapter 9 in this volume. 59 The OIC was founded in 1972 as a delayed reaction to the 1969 fire set in the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem under Israeli control. See Lamin Sanneh, The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 221. 60 The Charter of the Islamic Conference, as found in Hasan Moinuddin, The Charter of the Islamic Conference: The Legal and Economic Framework (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), states this very clearly. The founding states in 1972 (including secularist Turkey and religiously mixed Lebanon and Sierra Leone) stated that “their common belief constitutes a strong factor for rapprochement and solidarity between Islamic people . . . resolved to preserve Islamic spiritual, ethical, social and economic values” (p. 186). 61 See Roman Loimeier, “Islamic Reform and Political Change”, in David Westerlund and Eva Evers Rosander (eds), African Islam and Islam in Africa (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), p. 288. 62 See Haynes, Religion and Politics, p. 213.

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of Nigeria’s full membership in the OIC had been deferred indefinitely.63 The whole affair contributed to a general hardening of Muslim-Christian feelings in the country. In March 1987 at a government-run College of Education at Kafanchan in the largely Christian southern part of Kaduna State, Christians belonging to the Federation of Christian Students organized what they called “Mission ’87 in Jesus Campus”, a title they proclaimed with a banner at the entrance to the school. The school’s Muslim students took umbrage at this and the banner was removed. However, Muslim feelings were even more exacerbated by a talk given at Mission ’87 by a Muslim convert to Christianity, Abubakar Bako, during which he was said to have misquoted the Qur"àn for his own evangelical purposes. Local Kafanchan Christians who were not students eventually entered into the struggle that ensued on the campus of the College of Education between Christian and Muslim students and then violence spread to several other urban centers in northern Nigeria, leaving at least 19 dead and 152 churches and 5 mosques destroyed.64 Shortly thereafter Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, mentioned above, returned from Saudi Arabia where he had just received the 1987 King Faisal International Award for Services to Islam. Never one to shrink from controversy, Gumi weighed in on the topic of the riots. Later he summed up his views succinctly: “The Kafanchan crisis was the first mass action against Muslims in the country since the military coup of 1966”.65 There have, alas, been several other such incidents of Muslim-Christian tensions on the campuses of northern Nigerian academic institutions over the years since the Kafanchan crisis of 1987. The Federation of Christian Students and the Muslim Students’ Society have each contributed their share to these tensions.66 63

Hunwick, “An African Case Study”, p. 150. Isichei, History of Nigeria, p. 343. See also Christian Association of Nigeria Publicity Committee (Kaduna), Kaduna Religious Riot ’87: Catalogue of Events (n.p., n.d.). 65 Gumi with Tsiga, Where I Stand, p. 191. This was of course consistent with Gumi’s frequently repeated assertion that Nigeria, as a majority Muslim country, could never accept having a Christian head of state again as it did under General Gowon (1966–1975) and General Obasanjo (1976–1979). See the interview with him by the journalist Yakubu Mohammed in Quality, 1, 2 (October 1987): esp. p. 37. 66 The Muslim Students’ Society, founded in 1954 by Lateef Adegbite and other mainly Yoruba Muslim students based in Lagos, started off as a very mild, even irenical organization. It was radicalized and finally divided among largely Hausa students in northern Nigeria in the late 1970s and early 1980s, splitting into com64

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The tension generated by the 1978 debate over the establishing at the federal level of a Sharia Court of Appeal turned out to be a minor prelude to the uproar over sharia produced in Nigeria over the years since the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999. In 1978 and even into the late 1980s the main cases thought to be referable to a Sharia Court of Appeal at the federal level would have been concerned with matters related to personal law: marriage, divorce, and inheritance. But shortly after the return to civilian rule in 1999 the Governor of Zamfara State in the northwest of Nigeria, Alhaji Ahmad Sani, introduced for debate in the Zamfara House of Assembly “a law to establish a Shari'ah Penal Code for Zamfara State” to which, on its passage, he appended his assent on 27 January 2000.67 Since then eleven other states in Nigeria, all of them contiguous and in the top third of the country, have legislated similar Islamic penal codes. Effectively this gives each of the states that have legislated these penal codes dual systems of punishing the guilty, one for Muslims and one for non-Muslims. Both Christian and Muslim reactions to these state Islamic penal codes have been vigorous, the former quite negative and the latter quite positive. Nigeria has drawn considerable international disapproval of the punishment decreed for, but not carried out on, women convicted of adultery on the basis of circumstantial evidence in Sokoto and Katsina states.68 Less attention has been paid internationally to hand amputations carried out on petty thieves in the states that have legislated these penal codes. No one has yet subjected to sharia penalties any of the major embezzlers or swindlers who have depleted Nigeria’s national coffers. Islam first entered into much of northern Nigeria in one or another alliance with chieftaincy, even if stranger Muslims had lived among

peting pro-Iranian and pro-Saudi factions, some of which have re-splintered further. See John Hunwick, “Subsaharan Africa and the Wider World of Islam: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives”, in Westerlund and Rosander, African Islam, p. 39. 67 Zamfara State of Nigeria, Shari'ah Penal Code Law (Law No. 10, 2000): photocopy. 68 On the peculiarity of the Maliki legal tradition prevalent in Nigeria and most of West Africa and its acceptance of circumstantial evidence for adultery (e.g. a single or divorced woman’s pregnancy), see Patrick J. Ryan, “Ready to Cast the First Stone”, America 187, 17 (25 November 2002): 12–14. The case in Sokoto State against Safiya Hussaini was voided on appeal in 2002 because her crime was committed before the penal code was enacted. The case against Amina Lawal in Katsina State was successfully appealed in 2003.

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populations of traditional religious orientation for some time previously. Eventually, after strengthening chieftaincy and then being corrupted by chieftaincy, a reformist version of Islam displaced the sarkinate and instituted the emirates of the Sokoto jihad era. In the postcolonial period even these emirates have been challenged by a more rigorist vision of Islamic governance fathered in the Arabian Peninsula. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, largely entered Igbo society through the personality structure, through the individual and his or her desire to respond to a personal vocation through education. Igbo society, in particular, encouraged such individualism in a setting where chieftaincy was relatively underdeveloped. Even nonIgbo Christians responded to Christianity from their respective beginnings in terms of the opportunities it offered for personal development, and not because of its connection with major elements of the traditional social structure. The current tensions between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria derive much of their force from their very different orientations to society and personality. Muslims seek the good society from the enactment of a legal and political system that guarantees ethical standards. Christians seek the good society from the improvement or development of the individuals who make up that society. Considerable misunderstanding has resulted from these diverse basic orientations. Concluding Unscientific Postscript I take the title of this conclusion, of course, from an 1846 work by Søren Kierkegaard. In his rebellion against the Hegelianism prevalent in European intellectual circles in the first half of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard wrote under various pseudonyms a number of unusual works that bridge the gap between theology, philosophy and autobiography. He denied the Hegelian presupposition that all of existence could be systematically and completely understood, insisting that existence itself is constantly developing in our subjective participation in it and therefore eludes systematization. What would Kierkegaard have made of all the generalizations I have made above about Islam and Christianity in Nigeria? I think he would have preferred that I return—that we return—to our experience of God as

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persons in community, whether as Muslims, Christians or whatever we happen to be religiously, or whatever we try to be. Let me briefly describe two formative experiences I have had of Muslim-Christian relations in Nigeria, one early in my life in Nigeria and one quite recently. “In my beginning is my end”, as well. I first came to Nigeria in 1964 as a secondary-school teacher and Jesuit scholastic, aged 25. I came with a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature and found myself teaching the niceties of English grammar in Yorubaland. The Yoruba people intrigued me, and especially the ease with which the Christian and Muslim Yoruba lived together, sometimes under the same roof. One 'ìd al-kabìr I saw the Anglican chief in the town where I lived carried in a palanquin shaded with umbrellas to the Muslim praying-ground, dressed for all the world like the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello. I lost interest in English Language and Literature as time went on, resolving that after my theological studies and ordination I would try to find out how the Yoruba Muslims and Christians—and even Yoruba adherents to forms of Traditional faith—manage to live together in what was to my mind such an ideal coexistence. My second experience is much more recent. “In my end is my beginning.” On the afternoon of 1 August 2000, on the road between Lokoja and Kaduna, I nearly had what the Nigerian newspaper obituaries routinely call “a ghastly motor accident”. I thank God that neither I nor my fellow passenger or anyone in the other vehicle involved was seriously injured. But I also thank God for some other things that happened that day. Quite literally, dozens of cars stopped to offer us assistance. For me, the most moving of all was a car full of senior Muslim gentlemen coming from Kano who were fingering their tasbì˙ beads as they got out of their vehicle, compassionate concern written on their faces. They could see very clearly on my wrecked car the words SOCIETY OF JESUS and CATHOLIC CHURCH. That did not deter them from taking on the deeply human and deeply religious role of neighbors to a person in need. It took me some time to convince them that I was all right and was just waiting for the police to come and measure the skid marks on the road and the like. They only left me, at my urging, with great reluctance, concerned that I might be suffering from shock. I think of those Muslim men every

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time I hear my fellow Christians denounce all Muslims for their politicization of Islam. Before the Muslim gentlemen left the scene of the accident I prayed with them and they prayed with me to the one God who created all of us, in whose name, finally, we blessed each other: alsalàm 'alaykum wa-ra˙mat Allàh wa-baràkàtuhu (“Peace be with you and the mercy of God and His blessing”). I end with those words as well for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, where I have experienced such neighborly hospitality for so many years, as well as for all who have participated in the international colloquium that has ended in the production of this book.

CHAPTER NINE

AN OPPORTUNITY MISSED BY NIGERIA’S CHRISTIANS: THE 1976–78 SHARIA DEBATE REVISITED Philip Ostien The place of Islamic law in Nigeria has undergone three significant adjustments in the past half-century. The first, which I will call the “Settlement of 1960”, was brokered by the British in the run-up to Nigerian independence. The second, the “Debacle of 1979”, resulted from the constitution-making process that preceded the birth of the Second Republic. The third, the “Revival of 1999”, was led by Governor Ahmad Sani of Zamfara State and is still in progress today in the twelve northern states that are implementing sharia. Nigeria’s Christians, of course, deplore the revival of Islamic law that began in 1999, and they have spilled much ink speculating about its causes. In this chapter I suggest their own responsibility in the matter. The Settlement of 1960, under which the Muslims made large concessions but also won certain perquisites in return, was working to general satisfaction. In the constitution-making process of 1976–78, however, in the fight over the proposed Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, Christian intransigence wrecked the Settlement of 1960 and produced instead the Debacle (for Islamic law) of 1979. But this Christian victory was pyrrhic, and the battle itself was illadvised. By fighting and winning it, the Christians missed an opportunity to settle with Muslims the place of Islamic law in Nigeria on reasonable, honorable and stable terms, instead sowing the seeds— some of them—of twenty years of Muslim discontent that helped bring on the Revival of Islamic law of 1999. Indeed, I will argue that, but for the Debacle of 1979 of which the Christians were the authors, the Revival of 1999 would not have happened and we would not be witnessing the implementation of sharia in Northern Nigeria today.

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The Muslims of Northern Nigeria are famous for having resisted— for longer than almost anyone else—the far-reaching legal and judicial changes that took place in most of the rest of the Muslim world beginning in 1850. This was the year in which a new Commercial Code, borrowed largely from France, was promulgated in the Ottoman Empire, then the leading power in Islam. Over the next hundred years, not only in the Ottoman Empire but throughout the Muslim world—except in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Northern Nigeria—Islamic law, and the qà∂ì’s courts that administered it, were ousted from one legal subject-matter after another, in favor of new constitutions, new legal codes, new systems of courts, and new classes of judges and lawyers, all based on Western European models. Application of the classical sharia was everywhere confined to the law of personal status and the family. Even here the sharia was not left untouched. It was subjected to various substantive reforms; the qà∂ì’s courts that applied it were modernized; and in some places the qà∂ì’s courts were abolished completely and administration of sharia was entrusted to secular courts. In Turkey even the personal law of sharia was abolished in favor of a family code of Swiss extraction. The complex history of this legal revolution, with its many variations from country to country, is well worth studying in its own right,1 but it is not our subject here. Our point is that as late as the mid-1950s these powerful winds of change had left Northern Nigeria virtually untouched. At present [1955], . . . Islamic law is more widely, and in some respects more rigidly, applied in Northern Nigeria than anywhere else outside Arabia. This is due to the fact that the orthodoxy of the Fulani jihad has been preserved first by a century of virtual isolation and then by half a century of colonial administration; for the Muslim Emirates have naturally tended to take refuge in an almost fictitious orthodoxy and rigidity in face of any unwelcome demands or innovations, while the Protecting Power has almost invariably respected this attitude in return for the willing co-operation otherwise forthcoming.2 1 The history is recounted in, among others, N.J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964); J. Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); J.N.D. Anderson, Law Reform in the Muslim World (London: The Athlone Press, 1976); and A.E. Mayer, “Shari"ah”, in vol. 7 of the Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1986). 2 J.N.D. Anderson, Islamic Law in Africa (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1955), p. 219.

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The courts in which Islamic law was administered in the first instance in Northern Nigeria—a large subset of the so-called Native Courts— were popularly known as alkalis’ courts. Alkali is the Hausa version of al-qà∂ì, and these were traditional qà∂ì’s courts, both in the substantive law they applied and in the procedures by which they applied it. The alkalis were appointed and removed by the Emirs who, in classical Muslim fashion, also sat as courts of appeal from their judgments. No legal subject-matter known to the sharia, not even criminal law, was excluded from the alkalis’ jurisdiction. [T]he case of Northern Nigeria was, indeed, almost unique, for up till [1960] this was the only place outside the Arabian peninsula in which the Islamic law, both substantive and procedural, was applied in criminal litigation—sometimes even in regard to capital offences.3

The only limitations were on forms of punishment. From the beginning of their rule the British abolished mutilation and torture, and subjected other penalties to the requirement that they not be repugnant to “natural justice and humanity” (as determined by the British).4 As to questions of Islamic personal law—the law of marriage and divorce, family status, guardianships, waqfs and gifts, and the disposition of estates—the original jurisdiction of the alkalis’ courts was exclusive and the judgments of the Emirs sitting in their appellate capacity were final, thus giving Muslims complete autonomy from English courts and English law in this field. Other matters decided in the alkalis’ courts, whether involving other Islamic civil law (“sale, loan, bailment, security, hire, lost property, tort, agency, co-proprietorship to mention some of those that commonly come before the courts”)5 or Islamic criminal law (in Islamic terms, ˙udùd, qißàß, and ta'zìr), were in 1933 allowed to go on appeal to the English courts— the Regional High Court and in some cases to the Magistrates’ Courts—which the British had established alongside the Native Courts. This caused consternation among Nigeria’s ulama, and it is a measure of their continuing influence that as late as 1956 a new “Moslem Court of Appeal”, staffed by ad hoc panels of ulama, was interposed

3

Anderson, Law Reform, pp. 27–28. See A. Milner, “Sentencing Patterns in Nigeria”, in A. Milner (ed.), African Penal Systems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 261–92, at 263–64. 5 Report of the Native Courts (Northern Provinces) Commission of Inquiry (Lagos: Government Printer, 1952), p. 121. 4

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between the Islamic and the English courts in the Northern Region. This “was welcomed by Chiefs and Muslim jurists as a means of protecting Muslim law from encroachment as a result of appeal to ‘English’ Courts.”6 However, [t]he court was not entirely satisfactory in that lack of standing membership gave it no opportunity to build up prestige or experience. Also since it was still subject to further appeal to the High Court it did not fully allay Muslim suspicions of the latter, particularly as High Court decisions as to the extent of its appellate jurisdiction were binding on it.7

The Settlement of 1960 The Moslem Court of Appeal had a short life, not so much because of the relatively minor problems it presented in itself, but because of the momentous times into which it was born. Northern regional self-government was quickly approaching (15 March 1959), with Nigerian independence from Britain soon to follow (1 October 1960). As these profound transformations loomed, “it was felt by the leaders of opinion in the Region [including, most notably, Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, the Region’s Premier] that the whole structure of the legal and judicial systems in the North should be examined.”8 This bland statement subsumes a multitude of pressures for legal and judicial change in the Northern Region. If the fears of the considerable Christian and animist minorities in the North were to be allayed, they needed to be assured that Sharia law would not be imposed upon them in the native and customary courts. Muslims . . . demanded that they would not be subjugated to statutory law which would be in conflict with the injunctions of the Qur"an and Sunna by which they were guided in their daily lives. The Eastern and Western Regions were insistent that the substance and procedures of the law which was administered in any part of the Federation of Nigeria should respect the Fundamental Human Rights of Nigerians as set out in the constitutional instruments to be adopted throughout Nigeria in October of 1960. The British Government had made its

6

E.A. Keay and S.S. Richardson, The Native and Customary Courts of Nigeria (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1966), p. 56. 7 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 8 Statement by the Government of the Northern Region of Nigeria on the Reorganisation of the Legal and Judicial Systems of the Northern Region (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1958), p. 1.

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position clear: reform of the legal and judicial systems in the North was a necessary preliminary to the granting of self-government to the Region. The U.N. Trusteeship Council had expressed reservations about the capacity of an independent Federal Government in Nigeria to uphold Fundamental Human Rights for the minorities without a radical reform of the law in the Northern Region.9

The reforms ultimately agreed to and enacted into legislation by the Northern House of Assembly and House of Chiefs are what we are calling the Settlement of 1960. Two powerful committees mediated the changes that were made. One was the Willink or Minorities Commission, appointed in 1957 by the British Colonial Office “to enquire into the fears of minorities and the means of allaying them”. The Willink Commission’s lengthy report, published in early 1958, dealt not only with the North but with the other regions as well, and is still read today.10 Its chief recommendation regarding the matters that concern us here was that a bill of fundamental human rights, enforceable in the courts, be included in the Nigerian constitution. This was subsequently done. The other committee, less well known but much more important in terms of the legal and judicial reforms subsequently effected in the North, was the Panel of Jurists appointed in 1958 by the Government of the Northern Region, with Sayeed Mohammed Abu Rannat, the Chief Justice of the Sudan, as its chairman, and Norman Anderson, a leading British expert on Islamic law around the world, as its most prominent other member. The Panel of Jurists convened in Kaduna in late August 1958. Its mandate was to review the legal and judicial systems existing in the Northern Region and to make recommendations for their reorganization, not necessarily based on Western models, but in the light of the legal and judicial systems obtaining in other parts of the world where Muslim and non-Muslim live side by side, and with particular reference to the systems obtaining in Libya, Pakistan and the Sudan.11 9 S.S. Richardson, No Weariness: The Memoir of a Generalist in Public Service in Four Continents, 1919–2000 (Wylye, Wiltshire: Malt House Publishing, 2001), p. 209. 10 Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allaying Them (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1958). This report was serialized in 2002 by one of Nigeria’s newspapers and has recently also been republished in book form under the title Sir Henry Willink’s Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities ( Jos: Nigerian League for Human Rights, n.d.). 11 Statement by the Government of the Northern Region of Nigeria, p. 1.

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The Panel’s report and recommendations, having first been informally agreed to by leading Northerners,12 were submitted to the Governor of the Northern Region on 10 September.13 Some haste was necessary because the Nigeria Constitutional Conference was scheduled to resume in London on 29 September 1958, and progress on the matter of legal and judicial reform in the North was expected. In the event, the resumed Constitutional Conference was able to take notice of a statement by the Government of the Northern Region summarising the recommendations of the Panel of Jurists concerning the re-organisation of the legal system of the Region, and recording that the Regional Government has, subject to further consideration of particular matters, approved these recommendations.14

On his return from the conference, the Sardauna reported to the Northern House of Assembly that [W]hen our proposals were first revealed in London at the time of the resumed Constitutional Conference they met with an exceptionally favourable reception not only from the Secretary of State and the conference but also from the commercial industrial and banking interests which have dealings with this region.15

The proposals having been accepted in principle by the House of Assembly and the House of Chiefs, an immense task of legislative drafting was then necessary to effect the approved changes. This work, carried out by the British Attorney-General of the Northern Region and his largely British staff, and the subsequent consideration and enactment of the new legislation by the Houses of Assembly and of Chiefs, was finally completed in July 1960, with the new

12 J.N.D. Anderson, “Conflict of Laws in Northern Nigeria: A New Start”, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 8 (1959): 442–56, at pp. 451–53, gives a vivid account of the successful effort of persuasion which was perhaps the chief accomplishment of the Panel of Jurists. 13 Report of the Panel of Jurists Appointed by the Northern Region Government to Examine the Legal and Judicial Systems of the Region, National Archives Kaduna (NAK) File No. S.MOJ/12/S.1 vol. I, pp. 1–33, dated 10 September 1958. 14 Report by the Resumed Nigeria Constitutional Conference (Lagos: Government Printer, 1958), p. 12. 15 Report of the Debates of the House of Assembly of the Northern Region, Second Legislature, Second Session, Third Meeting, 10–13 December 1958 (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1958), column 937.

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legislation all coming into operation on 30 September 1960, on the very eve of Nigerian independence.16 It would not be inappropriate to give the name “The Great Renunciation” to the changes that were effected. Northern Nigeria’s Muslims were persuaded to give up, at last, the more or less wholesale application of the classical sharia in traditional Muslim courts, and to bring Northern legal and judicial systems more closely into line with those prevailing in most of the rest of the Muslim world at the time. • Islamic criminal law—both substantive and procedural—was abrogated, along with all other “native and customary” criminal law and procedure till then applied in the North’s Native Courts, in favor of new Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes, applied thenceforth in all courts to everyone alike. The new Penal Code—displacing as it would whole branches of Islamic law—was the first and by far the most controversial of the new measures enacted. Basically English in derivation, it also incorporated various principles of Islamic criminal law.17 Its provisions were negotiated at length with the North’s Muslim jurists to ensure that there was nothing in it repugnant to Islam.18 16 Some idea of the immensity of the legislative work that was done can be gained from the list of new laws enacted: Penal Code Law, N.R. No. 18 of 1959; Native Courts (Amendment) Law, N.R. No. 10 of 1960 (among other things establishing new Provincial Courts and the new Judicial Service Commission); Criminal Procedure Code Law, N.R. No. 11 of 1960 (among other things establishing Magistrates’ Courts and regulating procedure in the Native Courts); Evidence (Amendment) Law, N.R. No. 12 of 1960; Coroners (Amendment) Law, N.R. No. 13 of 1960; Northern Region High Court (Amendment) Law, N.R. No. 14 of 1960; District Courts Law, N.R. No. 15 of 1960; Sharia Court of Appeal Law, N.R. No. 16 of 1960; Court of Resolution Law, N.R. No. 17 of 1960; and Adaptation of Legislation Law, N.R. No. 18 of 1960. 17 Seduction and enticement—crimes in Islamic law but mere torts in England— were made crimes under the Penal Code (§ 389), as was “insulting the modesty of any woman” (§ 400). Adultery and fornication were criminalized for persons (like Muslims) “subject to any native law or custom in which extra-marital sexual intercourse is recognised as a criminal offence” (§§ 387–388). Whereas drunkenness was criminalized generally (§§ 401, 402), any consumption of alcohol was criminalized specifically for Muslims (§ 403). Muslim offenders, in addition to the punishments otherwise specified, were made “liable to the punishment of Haddi lashing as prescribed by Muslim law” for adultery and fornication, alcohol-related offences, and defamation and injurious falsehood (§ 68(2)). 18 The negotiations on the Penal Code Law are recounted at some length in the “Memorandum by the Attorney-General to the Panel of Jurists as to the Implementation of the Policy of the Northern Region Government on the Reorganisation

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• The Moslem Court of Appeal was abolished and replaced by a new Sharia Court of Appeal with a much reduced jurisdiction, limited essentially to the personal and family law of Muslim litigants. • Other Islamic civil law was not abrogated, and could still be applied, where suitable, in civil litigation, but appeals in cases decided under it were sent, not to the Sharia Court of Appeal but to the “English” High Court. In short, only Islamic personal law retained its special protected status at the appellate level. The idea was that other Islamic civil law, along with the customary law of the North’s various ethnic groups, would “be moulded and developed by the superior courts so that it fits in, both with the social needs of the country, and with the rest of the law which is of statutory or exotic origin”.19 • The judicial powers of the Emirs were curtailed. As of 1960, this meant only that all appellate jurisdiction was taken away from the Emirs’ courts; appeals from the alkalis that formerly went to them were now sent to new-style Provincial Courts whose judges were appointed and removed, not by the Emirs, but by the new Judicial Service Commission of the Northern Region. The process thus begun was completed in 1968, when the judicial powers of the Emirs were abolished completely and their former powers of appointment and removal of alkalis were also handed over to the Judicial Service Commission. • The alkalis’ courts, as early as 1960, became less traditionally Muslim and more modern. In criminal matters the alkalis no longer applied the Arabic texts of the Muslim jurists but the new Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes, which were translated into Hausa for their use. They were given training accordingly, at the Institute of Administration set up at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. They were no longer answerable on appeal to traditional Muslim rulers but to independent courts established by the regional government. Again this process continued as time went on: the Emirs removed

of the Legal and Judicial Systems of the Region based on the Recommendations of the Panel of Jurists dated 10 September, 1958”, dated 28 April 1962, NAK File No. S.MOJ/12/S.1 vol. I, pp. 45–65. 19 A.N. Allott, “The Place of African Customary Law in Modern African Legal Systems”, in L. Bown and M. Crowder (eds.), The Proceedings of the First International Congress of Africanists (held in Accra, 11–18 December 1962) (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1964), pp. 190–96, at p. 192 (referring generally to “customary law”, but applying this also to Islamic civil law other than personal law).

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from the judicial picture completely; the lower courts subjected to Inspectorates controlled by the High Court; other “secular” laws besides the Penal Code brought in to be enforced; further training of the judges in other legal systems—until it became doubtful whether the judges of the Native Courts (renamed Area Courts in 1967–68) could properly be called alkalis or qà∂ìs any more.20 My impression is that this term in fact dropped out of use until the Revival of 1999, when it too was revived and applied to the judges of the new inferior Sharia Courts into which the ex-Native, exArea, courts were at last transformed. What, amid all these sweeping changes, did the Muslims gain? There were four main things: I will call them “the essential elements of the Settlement of 1960” and they were all related to the new Sharia Court of Appeal. • Prestige. The new Sharia Court of Appeal for the Northern Region was established as a permanent court with a standing membership, and put formally on a par with the Regional High Court. Sheikh Awad Muhammad Ahmed, a Sudanese who had spent some years teaching at the Kano School of Arabic Studies, was appointed as its first Grand Kadi. Sheikh Ahmed retired in 1962 and Alhaji Abubakar Gumi, who had been his deputy, took over. Gumi was a major force in Muslim affairs in Nigeria for the next thirty years. • Finality. The judgments of the Sharia Court of Appeal on matters within its jurisdiction were made final and unappealable to any other court. The autonomy of the Muslim community as to matters falling within the sphere of Islamic personal law was thus preserved. Further appeals from the Sharia Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court were indeed possible, but as to constitutional questions only; there was no single such appeal between 1960 and 1979, when the rules were changed. The finality of the Sharia Court of Appeal’s judgments also added to its prestige.

20 Indeed, as the courts became less traditionally Muslim, it also became more difficult to attract persons well-trained in Islamic law to staff them. See for example A.H. Yadudu, “Colonialism and the Transformation of Islamic Law in the Northern States of Nigeria”, Journal of Legal Pluralism 32 (1992): 103–39, at p. 125: “The quality and depth of the training of [what Yadudu was still willing to call] Islamic judicial personnel has witnessed a very sharp deterioration.”

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• A seat on the High Court. On the recommendation of the Panel of Jurists, a “Native Courts Appellate Division of the High Court” was established to hear all appeals coming from the Native Courts to the High Court, including those decided under Islamic law that did not go to the Sharia Court of Appeal. The Native Courts Appellate Division was made up of a panel of three judges: two from the High Court and one from the Sharia Court of Appeal. All three judges had an equal voice in the decisions, that judge presiding in any particular case who was considered to have the greatest knowledge of the law to be administered. The Panel of Jurists explained the reasons for this arrangement. Firstly, it is important that there should be African representation in this Court at once to ensure that it will gain the respect and confidence of the public [at the time all the High Court judges were British]. In course of time, when Northern Nigerians take their place on the High Court bench, it may be possible to dispense with the presence of the Sharia Court Judge in criminal cases. Secondly, the Panel has recommended that there should be no changes in the law regarding civil matters, and civil cases governed by Muslim Law will continue to come before this Court. In such cases, the Sharia Judge would presumably be regarded as the judge with the greatest knowledge of the law to be administered. As long as cases of this nature are appearing before the Court, it will be necessary to have representation from the Sharia Court of Appeal.21

Some of the sting, therefore, was taken out of the fact that not all cases decided under Islamic law in the lower courts went on appeal to the Sharia Court of Appeal: Muslim legal expertise was still assured in the decision of such cases by the High Court. And again the prestige of the Sharia Court of Appeal was enhanced. • Paragraph (e). The Panel of Jurists had intended that Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction be limited to the personal and family law of Muslim litigants, but the legal draftsmen opened another door, adding: “where all the parties to the proceedings (whether or not they are Muslims) have by writing under their hand requested the court that hears the case in the first instance to determine that case in accordance with Muslim law, [the Sharia Court of Appeal shall have jurisdiction of ] any other question”. We shall have to refer

21

Report of the Panel of Jurists, p. 20.

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to this provision later on, so let us give it a name: Paragraph (e).22 Paragraph (e) potentially expanded the jurisdiction of the Sharia Court of Appeal to all matters decided under Islamic law in the lower courts, provided the requisite request in writing had been made. The provenance and early history of Paragraph (e) is an interesting subject in its own right but is not relevant here. Suffice to say that in the first two years of the Sharia Court of Appeal (1960–1962), when a constitution-drafting oversight made it impossible for Sharia Court of Appeal judges to sit with the Native Courts Appellate Division of the High Court, Paragraph (e) acted as a sort of safety valve. It allowed a number of cases involving “other Islamic civil law” to come to the Sharia Court of Appeal for decision by Muslim jurists, that would otherwise have had to go to the High Court sitting without them. Once the problem with the Native Courts Appellate Division of the High Court was fixed, Paragraph (e) was little thought of—until, once again, after 1979, when the rules were changed. How It Worked We can say without much fear of contradiction that the Settlement of 1960 worked well for as long as it lasted. Reaction to its most controversial aspects—the new Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes— was favorable. On its return visit to Northern Nigeria in 1962 the Panel of Jurists found that these codes had already won popular approval and esteem; that they had come to be regarded as “belonging” to the Northern region rather than as foreign importations or impositions; and that a very genuine attempt was being made to apply them properly.23

A later observer found that it was “generally considered that the [Penal] Code has, over time, engendered wide acceptance and proved quite workable”.24 We have already noted the completion, in 1968, 22 Paragraph (e) first appeared in the Sharia Court of Appeal Law of 1960, as § 12(e), and in the Constitution of Northern Nigeria of 1960, as § 52(5) sub-section (e) of the definition of “question relating to Muslim matters”. 23 J.N.D. Anderson, “Return Visit to Nigeria: Judicial and Legal Developments in the Northern Region”, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 12 (1963): 282–94, at p. 284. 24 V.L.K. Essein, “The Northern Nigerian Penal Code: A Reflection of Diverse

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of the work begun in 1960 of eliminating the Emirs and other traditional rulers from the judicial process. This was a working out, at the level of the Native Courts, of the principles of the separation of executive and judicial powers and the independence of the judiciary. The Sharia Court of Appeal quickly established itself as a serious, hard-working court, with its judges traveling throughout the North to hear appeals. Due to its workload, which included sittings with the High Court, the number of judges was increased from four to five in 1963. Although there was much potential for jurisdictional disputes between the Sharia Court of Appeal and the High Court, and a Court of Resolution was provided “to hear and determine any matter concerning the jurisdiction of the [two courts] when there is a conflict between them”,25 it was never once necessary to convene this court. Since the coming into force of the new legislation, it has been found that numerous instances have arisen of litigants lodging their appeals in the wrong court. In all these cases, there has been no dispute between the High Court and the Sharia Court as to which court was the appropriate one to hear the appeal, and therefore there was no need to invoke the Court of Resolution.26

The judges of the High Court and the Sharia Court of Appeal also worked harmoniously together in the Native Courts Appellate Division of the High Court, molding the various systems of law applicable to the cases that came before them—Islamic, English, customary, and increasingly just plain Nigerian—to each other and to the social needs of the country. The case of Shittu v. Biu,27 decided in 1973, is an interesting example of the kind of work they did. The underlying matter was a

Values in Penal Legislation”, New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law 5 (1983): 87–102, at p. 101. Essein was a visiting lecturer at the Nigeria Police Staff College, Jos, from 1979 to 1981. 25 Court of Resolution Law, § 5(1). 26 “Memorandum by the Attorney-General”, p. 17. The statement quoted was made in the early days—in 1962—but the fact attested to persisted. See Keay and Richardson, The Native and Customary Courts, p. 294: “the Court of Resolution has never [as of 1966] had occasion to sit since its establishment in 1960”; and A.O. Obilade, The Nigerian Legal System (Ibadan: Spectrum Law Publishing, 1990), p. 183: “No occasion has ever arisen for the convening of any of the Courts of Resolution”. A search of the law reports confirms that there is no reported decision of the Court of Resolution of the Northern Region or of any state. 27 1973 Northern States of Nigeria Law Reports, 19.

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dispute between two Muslims over the ownership of some land. Although the case had been decided under Islamic law in the trial court—an Area Court in Maiduguri whose judge was perhaps still called an alkali—the appeal went to the High Court rather than to the Sharia Court of Appeal because it involved “other Islamic civil law” rather than Islamic personal law. The three judges who heard the appeal were Chief Justice Reed and Acting Justice Hague, both of the High Court and both British, and Judge Kura Imam of the Sharia Court of Appeal. In the trial court, after the plaintiff had presented his evidence, perfecting his proof according to proper Islamic procedure,28 the defendant had been barred from presenting any evidence at all—again according to proper Islamic procedure— and judgment had been given forthwith for the plaintiff. The defendant claimed on appeal that this procedure, although correct in Islamic law, was “repugnant to natural justice, equity, and good conscience”, a test of acceptability superimposed by the British. In an opinion by Chief Justice Reed, the Appellate Division of the High Court rejected this claim. The court held that although “it is well established in English Law that it is repugnant to natural justice in judicial proceedings to decide against a person without giving him the opportunity of being heard”, the same rule could not properly be applied to Islamic law because of the different ways—carefully distinguished in the opinion—in which judges determine the acceptability and credibility of the testimony of witnesses in the two systems. Presumably Chief Justice Reed presided in this case and wrote the opinion because he was considered to have the greatest knowledge of the law to be administered—ultimately the English repugnancy doctrine. But the proper resolution of the case also required a sensitive appreciation of Islamic judicial procedure, which Judge Imam of the Sharia Court of Appeal could supply. The case is an excellent illustration of the wisdom of the Panel of Jurists: “As long as cases of this nature are appearing before the [High] Court, it will be necessary to have representation from the Sharia Court of Appeal”.

28

In this case through the testimony of one unimpeachable witness to all facts essential to his case, and then by the plaintiff himself taking the oath as to the facts.

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State Creation and the Proposal for a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal The Settlement of 1960 was working well, then; but now an event occurred that its authors had not anticipated and that raised a new issue that was eventually used to wreck it. The event was the state creation exercise of May 1967, when Nigeria’s four regions were divided into twelve states. This exercise was repeated in 1976 when seven additional states were created, four of them in the North. In the North this led to the division of one High Court and one Sharia Court of Appeal for the entire region, first into six High Courts and six Sharia Courts of Appeal, and then into ten, one for each of the states the region was divided into.29 All these new state courts were quite literally clones of the original one for the Region, inheriting identical statutes from their single parent.30 The issue this raised was, how to harmonize the work of all these new state courts, while preserving the essential elements of the Settlement of 1960. This was not a problem for the new High Courts because their statutes already allowed appeals from them to the Federal Supreme Court, which thus could resolve any conflicts that might arise between them. But for the new state Sharia Courts of Appeal there was a problem. They would all be adjudicating on the same class of cases—Islamic personal law. Inevitably, cases involving the same legal issue would come before the Sharia Courts of Appeal of different states, and they would decide them differently, thus creating a conflict. But the judgment of each of the Sharia Courts of Appeal, under their existing statutes, was final. Thus, any conflict that might arise would be irresolvable. And so the issue: how to provide for the harmonization of the work of the Sharia Courts of Appeal of the new states, while still preserving the essential elements of the Settlement of 1960. A logically prior question was probably not asked at the time: whether to provide for the harmonization of the work of the Sharia 29 Although after the second state creation exercise only nine Sharia Courts of Appeal resulted because Plateau and Benue States, newly split into two, shared one between them. 30 Under the States (Creation and Transitional Provisions) Decrees of both 1967 and 1976, the laws of the original regions or states, including the laws constituting and governing the courts, were continued in force and became the laws of the new states carved out of them.

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Courts of Appeal of the new states. In the United States, every state has its own legal system, as to which the state Supreme Court is the final authority, and differences in the law from state to state, on the very same legal issues, unresolveable by any higher authority, are well known and routinely accepted. In other federations—Germany, for example—the situation is different. Although there are state courts in Germany, there is always an appeal from them to a federal appellate court that sits (among other things) to resolve interstate conflicts in the law. Nigeria might have adopted the American position as to Islamic personal law, treating it as state law, retaining the finality of the judgments of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal, and simply accepting any inconsistencies that might develop from state to state. But if this possibility occurred to anybody at the time, I am not aware of it. Instead it was the German model that was proposed: the creation of a new “Final”, or “Upper”, or “Federal” Sharia Court of Appeal—all these names were suggested at one time or another—that would sit to hear appeals from the state Sharia Courts of Appeal and thus (among other things) to resolve any conflicts that might crop up between them. The parallel with Germany would have gone further. In Germany, the courts are split into separate non-converging hierarchies defined by legal subject-matter—civil law, administrative law, labor law, social security, tax law. The hierarchies are non-converging because the judgments of the highest court in each are final: no court sits above all hierarchies to hear appeals on all subject-matters. Had Nigeria set up a Final, or Upper, or Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, to decide cases coming from the state Sharia Courts of Appeal, and made its judgments final, as was proposed, the result would have been a separate non-converging hierarchy of state and federal courts defined by legal subject-matter— Islamic personal law—on complete analogy with the German model. These ideas did not develop right away. Indeed, it was some time before the new High Courts and Sharia Courts of Appeal of the states even began to function. The state governments did not officially take off until 1 April 1968, almost a year after the first new states were created. Even then, an Interim Common Services Agency ran several ex-regional institutions in common for the Northern states, including the High Court and the Sharia Court of Appeal. It was only two years later, on 1 April 1970, that separate state High Courts and Sharia Courts of Appeal were at last created and judges appointed

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to them;31 but the new courts still all shared the same Chief Justice (Reed) and Grand Kadi (Gumi), respectively; this was a way not only to save money but also to coordinate the work of the new courts and to see that they all started off on a sound footing under experienced guidance. Nevertheless, the new state Sharia Courts of Appeal could hear and decide cases in the absence of their shared Grand Kadi, and their judgments were still final and unappealable to any other court. This gave rise to the possibility of conflicts, and the idea of creating a new court to hear further appeals from all of them was soon being discussed. The earliest official endorsement of it that I am aware of was by the All-Nigeria Judges’ Conference at its 1972 annual meeting in Lagos, when the following resolution was adopted. The Conference agreed to adopt in principle the proposal for the establishment of a Final or Upper Sharia Court of Appeal, leaving details as to composition, jurisdiction and sittings to be worked out later.32

Three years later the idea had reached the highest levels. On 11 November 1975 the Supreme Military Council, now headed by General Murtala Mohammed, at last appointed separate Chief Judges to head the High Courts of the six northern states, and separate Grand Kadis to head their Sharia Courts of Appeal.33 This made the state Sharia Courts of Appeal fully functional and fully autonomous at last, and made the issue of a higher court to restore closure at the top more pressing. The matter was considered at the same 11 November 1975 meeting of the Supreme Military Council, and The establishment of an Upper Sharia Court of Appeal with a President or Mufti at its head was also approved.34

31

See the New Nigerian for 1, 2, and 4 April 1970, pp. 2, 6 and 1, respectively. A.N. Aniagolu, “An X-ray of the Judicial System”, in W.I. Ofonagoro, A. Ojo, and A. Jinadu (eds.), The Great Debate: Nigerian Viewpoints on the Draft Constitution, 1976/1977 (Lagos: Daily Times Publications, 1977), pp. 363–66, at p. 363. 33 See New Nigerian, 12 and 13 November 1975, p. 1 in both cases, giving the names of the appointees. Abubakar Gumi, until then the Grand Kadi for all the Northern States, was now made Consulting Grand Kadi, a position he held until General Buhari dismissed him in 1985. See A. Gumi, Where I Stand (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1992), pp. 207–10. 34 New Nigerian, 13 November 1975, p. 1. 32

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Perhaps Murtala would have proceeded forthwith to set up such a court if he had survived longer,35 but his assassination, on 13 February 1976, intervened. His successor, General Obasanjo, decided to leave the matter for further consideration by the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC). The CDC, “fifty wise men” led by Chief Rotimi Williams, was just then in the process of preparing a new draft constitution for Nigeria as part of a program for return to civilian rule announced by Murtala in late 1975 and continued by Obasanjo after he took over. Assuming the CDC endorsed the idea of a new Final or Upper Sharia Court of Appeal, which it did, its legal draftsmen could iron out the details as part of their work on the new constitution they were preparing. What emerged was the famous CDC proposal for what it called a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal.36 The terms “Final” and “Upper”, suggested earlier, had finessed the issue of where in the constitutional order such a court would fit. However, sitting as it would to hear appeals from the Sharia Courts of Appeal of all states that might decide to have one, it only made sense to establish the new court at the federal level. The CDC draft constitution limited the court’s jurisdiction to questions of Islamic personal law plus Paragraph (e)—the same exactly as the jurisdiction of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal from which appeals to it would come and whose work it would oversee and harmonize. The finality that had previously been vested in the regional and then the state Sharia Courts of Appeal was transferred to the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal: under the CDC draft its judgments would not have been appealable to any other court, except, as before, to the Supreme Court on constitutional questions only. The prestige that had formerly been attached

35 According to Gumi (1992: 206), Murtala was taking steps toward establishing the court before he died. “I was even appointed in writing to serve as Grand Mufti. After the assassination of General Murtala the issue died away. I learnt that a staunch Tariqa police officer [that is, a supporter of a Sufi order] who had easy access to the government was among the first to kick against it, because he feared it would give me some kind of advantage over the Tariqa followers.” 36 See the two-volume Report of the Constitution Drafting Committee (Lagos: Government Printer, 1976). The report of the CDC’s sub-committee on the Judicial System, recommending the establishment of a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, is at II, 101–18. The decisions of the full CDC on that report, endorsing the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, are recorded at II, 121–28. The Draft Constitution is in Volume I; the provisions pertaining to the Federal and state Sharia Courts of Appeal are §§ 180, 182, and 184–86.

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to the Sharia Court of Appeal of the Northern Region, but had been dissipated by the division of that court into so many smaller and more obscure state courts, would be gathered again in the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, with a Grand Mufti at its head. In terms of precedence, the court would be set on a par with the new Federal Court of Appeal, which was above the state High Courts and just below the federal Supreme Court. All of the essential elements of the Settlement of 1960 were thus preserved in the CDC proposal for a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, except one. There was no provision in the CDC draft constitution that would have allowed judges of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal to continue to sit with judges of the state High Courts to hear appeals from the ex-Native, now Area Courts—an important part of the Settlement of 1960 that appears to have been lost sight of throughout the constitution-making process of 1976–1978. The reason, I suspect, is the decision of the CDC to drop the idea of separate constitutions for each of the states, and to wrap all constitutional matters—state and federal—into a single national constitutional instrument.37 The special provision allowing judges of the Sharia Courts of Appeal to sit with judges of the High Courts to hear appeals from the Native/Area Courts had been written first into the 1960 Constitution of the Northern Region, and then continued in the cloned descendant constitutions of the Northern states. It seems to have been a regional detail overlooked in the 1976–1978 process of drafting the new, onesize-fits-all, national constitution.38 The Debacle of 1979 Most readers will agree, I believe, that there was nothing earth-shattering in the CDC proposal for a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal. It extended the application of Islamic law to no new persons, to no new subject-matter, and to no new part of the country. It made the place of Islamic law in Nigeria no more prominent than in any other

37

For discussion of this decision, see Report of the Constitution Drafting Committee I, iv. I have found no mention of this issue in any of the records of the discussions and debates of the time, including the materials cited in n. 41, below, or the transcripts of the debates of the Constituent Assembly. 38

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country with similar proportions of Muslims at the time. All it did was to restore, in new constitutional circumstances (many states where one region had been), essential elements of the Settlement of 1960— in which the Muslims had already given up so much, and which had been working satisfactorily for so long. As Peter Clarke observed: it was in essence little more than a technical matter in that it did not involve any modification of existing rights for Muslims or of those proclaimed by the constitution itself.39

Under the circumstances, Nigeria’s Christians might gracefully have acceded. Seeking religious peace, they might have recognized the justice in the demands of their Muslim compatriots for due recognition of Islamic legal traditions in the life of the country, while realizing, on the other hand, that nothing in what was proposed in any way upset or threatened the essentially Western legal system inherited from Britain and so dear to Christian hearts. The CDC proposal for a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal represented an opportunity for Christians to settle with Muslims the place of Islamic law in Nigeria on reasonable, honorable and stable terms—terms the Muslims would have been committed to and that would have given them, for their part, an increased sense that constitutionalism after the Western fashion could work for them too. What happened instead is well known.40 The Report of the CDC, including the draft constitution, was published in September 1976 and became the subject of a year of public discussion and analysis.41

39 P.B. Clarke, “Islamic Reform in Contemporary Nigeria: Methods and Aims”, Third World Quarterly 10 (1988): 519–38, at p. 535. 40 See, among other accounts and analyses, D.D. Laitin, “The Sharia Debate and the Origins of Nigeria’s Second Republic”, Journal of Modern African Studies 20 (1982): 411–30; P.B. Clarke, West Africa and Islam (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 249–54; Clarke, “Islamic Reform in Contemporary Nigeria”; Y.B. Usman, The Manipulation of Religion in Nigeria, 1977–1987 (Kaduna: Vanguard Printers and Publishers, 1987); A.B. Mahmud, Brief History of Shariah in the Defunct Northern Nigeria ( Jos: Jos University Press, 1988); A.H. Yadudu, “Constitution-Making and the Politicization of Sharia in Nigeria”, Journal of Islamic and Comparative Law 18 (1991): 19–37; J. Hunwick, “An African Case Study of Political Islam: Nigeria”, in C.E. Butterworth and I.W. Zartman (eds.), Political Islam, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 524 (1992): 143–55; and M.H. Kukah, Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1993), pp. 118–29. 41 A large number of articles and letters on the draft constitution published in Nigerian newspapers that year are to be found in Ofonagoro et al., The Great Debate. Conferences were held throughout the country to discuss the CDC draft. For the papers presented at two of them in the North, see S. Kumo and A. Aliyu (eds.),

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In October 1977 a mostly elected Constituent Assembly began sitting to debate the CDC draft and to make such amendments as it saw fit. In one year of discussion, Christian opinion on the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal had polarized and hardened, and in the Constituent Assembly their representatives “unleashed a storm of protest” against it.42 No compromise was found possible in protracted debate. In the end it was the Christians who had the votes, and in early April 1978 the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal was officially eliminated from the constitution. The Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly walked out the next day, maintaining their boycott of the proceedings for almost three weeks; only the intervention of the Head of State persuaded them to return. The Assembly then quickly wrapped up its work, adjourning finally on 5 June. After a cleaning-up of its text by the legal draftsmen, the Constituent Assembly draft of the constitution, without the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, was presented to the Head of State on 29 August. On 21 September, after further amendments imposed by the Supreme Military Council over the heads of the Constituent Assembly, the constitution was officially enacted, to take effect a year later, on 1 October 1979.43 It has become known therefore as the 1979 Constitution. It made a wreck of the Settlement of 1960. State Sharia Courts of Appeal were indeed provided for in the new constitution—“for any state that requires it” (§ 240(1)). Many Christians resisted even this concession to the Muslims, but without it there would certainly have been no constitution.44 But the terms Issues in the Nigerian Draft Constitution (Zaria: Institute of Administration, Ahmadu Bello University, 1977) and National Seminar on Islam and the Draft Constitution (Kano: Islamic Foundation, 1977). 42 Hunwick, “An African Case Study”, p. 149. 43 The Supreme Military Council’s amendments to the draft Constituent Assembly and the enactment of the new constitution were both effected by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Enactment) Decree, No. 25 of 1978. None of the amendments inserted by the Supreme Military Council affected the sharia issue in any way. 44 The Christians were not so much opposed to some states having their own Sharia Courts of Appeal, as to providing for this in the federal constitution. The argument was that this “would be giving recognition to one religion over and above other religions and faiths in this country and this would be tantamount to making Islam a national religion”; see Debates of the Constituent Assembly (Lagos: Government Printer, 1978) (3 volumes), vol. I, p. 951, remarks by Mr Pam, one of many who made this argument. But if there were to be state Sharia Courts of Appeal at all— as, politically, there could not fail to be—then, as a technical matter of constitutional drafting, the national constitution would have to provide for them and for

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in which the state Sharia Courts of Appeal were provided for negated every single one of the essential elements of the Settlement of 1960. • Paragraph (e) closed off. The restriction of Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction to questions of Islamic personal law was no longer palliated by Paragraph (e), which, the reader will recall, extended jurisdiction to “any other question” of Islamic civil law if “the parties to the proceedings (whether or not they are Muslims) have by writing under their hand requested the court that hears the case in the first instance to determine that case in accordance with Muslim law”. In the 1979 Constitution, this was changed to “. . . have requested the court that hears the case in the first instance to determine that case in accordance with Islamic personal law” (§242(2)(e) (emphasis added)). The courts quickly recognized this for the tautology that it was and shut off access to the Sharia Courts of Appeal on any questions other than those decided in the Area Courts under Islamic personal law only.45 • Seat on the High Court lost. We have noted the omission from the CDC draft constitution of any provision that would have allowed judges of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal to continue to sit with judges of the state High Courts to hear appeals from the ex-Native, now Area Courts. This was not corrected in the final draft of the 1979 Constitution. The result was that, although the High Court laws of the northern states still permitted the kadis (as they were now called) of the Sharia Courts of Appeal to sit with judges of the High Courts to hear such appeals, these provisions were soon struck down as being inconsistent with the 1979 Constitution.46 All specifically Muslim expertise in the decision of appeals to the High Courts involving “other Islamic civil law”—and every other matter as well, for that matter—was now lost. their place in the judicial order, the idea of state constitutions, where they had previously been provided for, having been rejected. 45 The earliest such decision seems to have been Mudi Liman v. Maiwaddan Goga (1980) (unreported), No. FCA/K/110S/80, delivered 17 December 1980, cited in Fannami v. Sarki (1985) 1 Sharia Law Reports of Nigeria 94 (FCA/K) (per Wali, U. Mohammed, and Maidama, JJ) for the proposition that “as for the purported compliance with section 242(2)(e) of the 1979 Constitution, and 11(e) of the Sharia Court of Appeal Law, [this] shall not confer any additional jurisdiction on any Sharia Court of Appeal in any matter other than that involving Islamic personal law”. 46 In the case of Ado v. Dije (1983) 2 Federation of Nigeria Law Reports 213 (FCA/K) (per Nasir, Coker, Wali, Maidama, and Karibi-Whyte, JJ).

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• Finality lost. No one seems to have thought of allowing the judgments of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal to remain final; an appeal must be allowed from them to some higher court.47 With the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal out of the picture, the only alternative was to send appeals from the Sharia Courts of Appeal— along with appeals from the High Courts—to the not-specificallyMuslim Federal Court of Appeal, and then to the Supreme Court— and this not only as to constitutional issues, as formerly, but now for all issues decided in the Sharia Courts of Appeal (§ 223). The long-standing right of Muslim courts to finally and autonomously decide all issues of Islamic personal law was thus lost. To assure some Muslim expertise in the decision of such cases in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, the President was enjoined, in exercising his powers of appointment to these courts, “to be mindful of the need to ensure that they include persons learned in Islamic personal law” (§ 252); and the Court of Appeal, when hearing appeals from the Sharia Courts of Appeal, would consist of panels of justices “learned in Islamic personal law” (§ 226(a)). But even the Muslim justices of the Court of Appeal would also be learned, of course, in “English” law, admission to practice at the Nigerian bar being one of the qualifications for their appointment, and in later years the ancestral Muslim suspicion of the English courts, even when operated by judges who were Muslims, was to be amply supported by the outcome of many cases. • Prestige lost. The single high Muslim court of days gone by, with wide territorial jurisdiction, finality in its judgments, and a voice in the decision of appeals by the High Court, was gone, replaced by many lesser offspring. No longer even clones of the former Regional Sharia Court of Appeal, they were lesser not only in their territorial reach and in their dignity, but also in their jurisdiction, powers and autonomy. These new losses for Islamic law in Nigeria were the result, not of a negotiated settlement voluntarily entered into by the Muslim leadership as in 1960, but of a humiliating defeat in the Constituent Assembly at the hands of Nigeria’s Christians.

47 This was also an important issue for many Muslims, who saw it as a matter of fairness for Muslims to have as many rights of appeal as everyone else.

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Little wonder then that running through Muslim discourse in subsequent years, one feels an acute sense of victimization at the hands of Christians and of “Christian”—i.e. Western—laws and legal institutions, coupled with a determination to regain lost ground. 1979–1999 The Debacle of 1979, I said at the beginning of this chapter, sowed some of the seeds of twenty years of Muslim discontent that helped bring on the Revival of Islamic law of 1999. Let us consider this proposition briefly. Certainly Nigeria’s Muslims became more organized and more militant during the twenty years in question. But many things besides the Debacle of 1979 contributed to these developments, including, for example, such world historical events such as the Iranian Revolution and the re-Islamization of the legal systems of Sudan and Pakistan, and, inside Nigeria, the Muslim reform movement led by Sheikh Abubakar Gumi.48 So the Debacle of 1979 was not the only source of Muslim political energy during these years. It did, however, set the scene for specific Muslim unhappiness with the Nigerian legal system that manifested itself in several ways. Look to begin with at the volume of litigation on the subject of the jurisdiction of the state Sharia Courts of Appeal. Between 1960 and 1979, as we have seen, there were no such cases. Between 1979 and 1999, I count fifteen, and two more in the pipeline disposed of later.49 Before 1979 these cases would have gone to the never-used 48 As to which, see R. Loimeier, Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997). 49 Mudi Liman v. Maiwaddan Goga (1980), Ado v. Dije (1983), and Fannami v. Sarki (1985), cited above; Usman v. Umaru, decided for the first time in the Court of Appeal in 1985, No. CA/J/32/85 (unreported), and after bouncing back and forth between the High Court, the Customary Court of Appeal, and the Court of Appeal again, finally disposed of by the Supreme Court in 1992, 7 SCNJ (Pt. 11) 388; Dogon Yaro v. Bello (1986) No. KDH/24A/86, unreported, but the judgment is reprinted in full in Rashid (1986) pp. 294–98; Abuja v. Bizi (1989) 5 NWLR (Pt. 119) 120 (CA/J); Isa v. Kado (unreported) No. CA/J/136s/88 delivered 21/6/89; Alhaji Adamu Maithodu v. Sa’idu Sarki Kaji (unreported) No. CA/J/215/89 delivered on 25 October 1990; Garba v. Dogon Yaro (1991) 1 NWLR (Pt. 165) 102 CA/J/42s/90; Usman v. Kareem (1995) 2 NWLR (Pt. 379) 537 (Supreme Court); Ali Sugulma v. Mohammed Isabe (unreported) No. CA/J/113/S/94, delivered 11 July 1997; Lawan Mai Gana v. Ya Falmata Alhajiram (1997) 10 NWLR (Pt. 525) 424 (CA/J); Gambo v. Tukuji (1997) 10 NWLR (Pt. ??) 591 (CA/J); Gwabro v. Gwabro (1998) 4 NWLR

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Court of Resolution; after 1979, they were either decided in the High Courts without the benefit of input from the kadis of the Sharia Courts of Appeal or, because all issues decided in the Sharia Courts of Appeal were now appealable to the Federal Court of Appeal and thence to the Supreme Court, they went there. New pressure had been put on Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction because judges of the Sharia Courts of Appeal no longer sat with the High Courts to assist in the decision of cases governed by “other Islamic law”. This meant that Muslims litigating, for instance, contract, tort or land cases under Islamic law in the Area Courts, who wanted specifically Muslim jurists to examine the matter on appeal, had no choice but to try for the Sharia Courts of Appeal. But the trouble now was that Paragraph (e), the safety valve through which such cases might formerly have come to the Sharia Courts of Appeal, had been firmly shut; this was what a succession of cases held. All these cases, strictly limiting the jurisdiction of the Sharia Courts of Appeal under the 1979 Constitution to questions of Islamic personal law only, and turning back every effort to open the door to other matters decided in the lower courts under Islamic law, were decided by “English” courts—the High Courts, the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court. Many of the judges on these courts were Muslims, to be sure. But other Muslims, seeing every important decision go against them, must have wondered about the effects that inculcation into the English legal system was having on their co-religionists.50 The constitution being against them, the Muslims turned their attention to amending the constitution. Here they had some initial successes, all of which in the end came to nothing. The military had taken over the government again in late 1983, so it was the Federal Military Government, led first by General Buhari and then by General Babangida, that one had to deal with to get the constitution amended. The government was lobbied by

(Pt. ??) 60 (??); Korau v. Korau (1998) 4 NWLR (Pt. 545) 212 (CA/K); Magaji v. Matari (2000) 5 SCNJ 140; Abdulsalam v. Salawu (2002) 10 NSCQR 1380. Apologies for the incomplete citations in some cases, which are due to various difficulties of doing legal research in Nigeria. 50 For example, A.R.I. Doi, “Impact of the Concept of ‘Equity, Justice and Good Conscience’ on the Administration of Islamic Law in Nigeria”, Islamic & Comparative Law Quarterly 8 (1988): 105–22, discussing the decision in Ado v. Dije, cited above, remarks that it “was surprisingly supported by three Muslim judges” of the Court of Appeal.

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the Muslims, evidently, because in 1986 the Babangida regime decreed the amendment of the constitution “by deleting the word ‘personal’ wherever it occurs after the word ‘Islamic’” in the sections touching on Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction, including Paragraph (e).51 This restored the wording of Paragraph (e) to its original 1960 state— a Muslim objective since 1979—and should have re-opened the safety valve Paragraph (e) had formerly provided, allowing cases decided in the lower courts under “other Islamic law” to come on appeal to the Sharia Courts of Appeal provided the requisite request had been made. Christian reaction to this constitutional amendment was strong, seeing it (as usual) as another of many “plans, designs, or machinations of the Muslims in this country through the use of the state apparatus to ensure at any cost that Nigeria becomes ‘Islamic Republic of Nigeria’”.52 But the courts saw it differently: both the High Court of Kaduna State and the Court of Appeal soon held that the 1986 constitutional amendment “is of no jurisdictional consequence and it has in practical terms achieved nothing”, and this conclusion was later specifically approved by the Supreme Court.53 Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction stayed as it was: Islamic personal law only. Next came several new rounds of full-scale constitution-making. The first was the Constituent Assembly convened by General Babangida in 1988 as part of his subsequently aborted program to return the country to civilian rule. The task of this Assembly was to revise the 1979 Constitution, and it was inevitable that the question of the Sharia Courts of Appeal would again be agitated. It was—with such passion on both sides that the Assembly’s patron eventually “withdrew jurisdiction from the assembly over clauses dealing with the establishment, composition and jurisdiction of the High Courts [and the] Sharia and Customary Courts of Appeal of the States”, chiding the members for their “immature approach” and explaining that “as far as we are concerned there already exists a wide measure of

51 Constitution (Suspension and Modification) (Amendment) Decree, No. 26 of 1986. 52 D. Byang, Shari’a in Nigeria: A Christian Perspective ( Jos: Challenge Publications, 1988), pp. 105–6. 53 Dogon Yaro v. Bello (1986) (High Court Kaduna) (from which the direct quotation is taken), Abuja v. Bizi (1989) (Court of Appeal), and Magaji v. Matari (2000) (Supreme Court), all cited in n. 49.

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national consensus [on] these clauses”.54 In the constitution that emerged from all this the Muslims had again achieved a success with the Babangida regime: the jurisdiction of the Sharia Courts of Appeal was extended to all “civil proceedings involving questions of Islamic law where all the parties are Muslims” (1989 Constitution § 261). The restriction to questions of Islamic personal law was gone; but note the new restriction to proceedings “where all the parties are Muslims.” But this Muslim gain again came to nothing. Although a decree promulgating General Babangida’s constitution was issued,55 the document in practice remained a dead letter, no experience was ever gained from it, and the new jurisdictional provisions for the Sharia Courts of Appeal were never applied. The same is true of the Abacha constitution of 1995, which copied the Babangida constitution on the question of Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction, but which was never promulgated at all.56 When General Abdulsalami returned Nigeria to civilian rule in 1999, he disregarded the Babangida and Abacha Constitutions and convened no Constituent Assembly or Constitutional Conference himself, simply reinstating the 1979 Constitution (with some amendments). As to the issues which concern us here, the provisions of the 1999 Constitution are substantially the same as those of 1979, except for one small point. As if to add insult to injury, Paragraph (e), already rendered useless by the 1979 Constitution, was gratuitously tightened further, by changing the phrase “where all the parties to the proceedings (whether or not they are Muslims)” (1979) to “where all the parties to the proceedings, being Muslims, have requested the court that hears the case in the first instance to determine [it] in accordance with Islamic personal law” (1999 Constitution § 277(2)(e)). Apparently non-Muslims

54 Yadudu, “Constitution-Making and the Politicization of Sharia in Nigeria”, pp. 29–30. 55 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (Promulgation) Decree, No. 12 of 1989. 56 For whatever reason, there was almost no agitation of the sharia question at Abacha’s 1994–95 Constitutional Conference, except perhaps by way of a joke. During the debates on the report of the Committee on the Judiciary, one delegate stood up to propose the establishment of Ecclesiastical Courts of Appeal, to parallel the state Sharia Courts of Appeal. This was given very short shrift, and died in laughter when a Muslim delegate rose to support it saying, “Although I am not a Christian, but the number of Priests and Bishops who are committing atrocities in the Churches, they need a Court to try them” (Constitutional Conference Debates 2, 26 (15 November 1994): 1509–11).

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could no longer even consent to Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction, at least not under Paragraph (e). The Debacle of 1979 therefore resulted directly in twenty years of litigation, never previously experienced, over Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction—litigation in which the desires of Muslims to take their cases on appeal to the Sharia Court of Appeal were consistently frustrated. This led to repeated Muslim efforts to get the constitutional rules about Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction changed, efforts which in turn contributed directly to the further exacerbation of Muslim-Christian relations in Nigeria. If the Christians had accepted the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal, as proposed by the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1976, none of these things would have happened. Nor, I believe, would Muslim opinion about Nigeria’s constitutional and legal framework as a whole have turned as negative as it seems to have done in these years, as witness this story: Professor S.S. Richardson pointed out rather prematurely [in the preface to the 1967 third edition of his Notes on the Penal Code Law] that his book on the Penal Code had become a best seller. . . . Richardson himself spoke of his shock when in 1985, he went to Nigeria and was asked to give a talk on the Penal Code at the Institute of Legal Studies in Zaria. He said: “I expected about one hundred Law students for the talk, but instead, thousands of people from the bush, thousands of students from all Faculties of the University, priests, Imams, press men, loudspeakers all over the place . . . They said that the Penal Code had been a colonial imposition which had got rid of Muslim law.” . . . Muslims felt that the Sharia (a divine law) had become subjugated to what they believed was mere human law.57

It was not only the Penal Code that the Muslims in this story were angry with, it was also the wider Western-style legal system more or less left in place by the British—the constitution and the courts in particular—which were persistently refusing to yield a just place even to the restricted field of Islamic personal law plus Paragraph (e), to say nothing of bringing back Islamic criminal law. Had the CDC 57 Kukah, Religion, Politics and Power, pp. 17–18. S.S. Richardson, whose memoirs are cited in n. 9 above and whose book on The Native and Customary Courts is cited in n. 6, served in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the Northern Region’s Commissioner for Native Courts, as a key participant in the drafting of the legislation that implemented the Settlement of 1960, and as Principal of the Institute of Administration, Zaria. His Notes on the Penal Code Law (Kaduna: Government Printer, 1960) was for many years an essential text in Northern Nigerian law schools and courts.

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proposals of 1976 been gracefully accepted by the Christians, I venture to say, this form of Muslim anger would mostly have been prevented or neutralized in Nigeria. Having got that unnecessary issue out of the way, attention could have been turned to more genuine problems, like how to make the system on the ground work better in everyday practice for everybody, Christians and Muslims alike. The Revival of 1999 If it is clear that the Debacle of 1979 sowed some of the seeds of twenty years of Muslim discontent that helped bring on the Revival of Islamic law of 1999, can we also go further to say that it was a necessary condition of the Revival of 1999, in the sense that without it we would not be witnessing the implementation of sharia in Northern Nigeria today? I think we can. This part of the argument, however, depends on an accident of fate: a drafting error, made in the dying days of the Constituent Assembly of 1977–1978, that is now being exploited in ways never intended by its authors. The Constitution Drafting Committee in its 1976 draft constitution had written in Sharia Courts of Appeal for any state that wanted one, and a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal sitting above them to oversee their work and harmonize their decisions. The jurisdiction of all these courts was limited strictly to Islamic personal law plus Paragraph (e), and the judgments of the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal were final. But the subsequent Constituent Assembly—i.e., the Christian majority of it—voted the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal out of the CDC draft. This much we have covered already. The removal of the provisions for the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal from the CDC draft constitution necessitated substantial redrafting of remaining provisions relating to the state Sharia Courts of Appeal. Among other things, certain details of the rules as to jurisdiction had to be moved and to some extent redrafted; new rules had to be devised sending appeals from the state Sharia Courts of Appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal and thence to the Supreme Court; and something now had to be said about having people “learned in Islamic personal law” appointed to the latter courts. For it was made very clear to the Constituent Assembly’s legal draftsmen, who were given this work to do, that Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction was to be limited to Islamic personal law only. The Chairman of the Assembly was explicit on this point:

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I think it is absolutely necessary to put, Islamic Personal Law wherever Islamic Law is found. . . . The only thing that is granted is, Islamic Personal law. I hope that the Legal Draftsmen will take note of the fact that wherever there is Islamic Law, it should be Islamic Personal Law.58

This explains why Paragraph (e) was so limited in the 1979 Constitution. The legal draftsmen did their work well, except in one particular place. Instead of leaving the wording of the rules about Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction almost exactly as it had been in the CDC draft, which they could easily have done, they inserted some brand new language, which I have italicized in the following quotation from the relevant provision of the 1979 Constitution. 242.—(1) The Sharia Court of Appeal of a State shall, in addition to such other jurisdiction as may be conferred upon it by the law of the State, exercise such appellate and supervisory jurisdiction in civil proceedings involving questions of Islamic personal law which the court is competent to decide in accordance with the provisions of subsection (2) of this section. (2) For the purposes of subsection (1) of this section, the Sharia Court of Appeal shall be competent to decide— (a) [Islamic personal law] (b) (c) (d) (e) — [Paragraph (e), limited uselessly to Islamic personal law again]

}

In this tangle of legalese, what people concentrated on for twenty years was subsection (2), litigating about its meaning and trying to get it amended; for it was assumed that subsection (2) specified the maximum jurisdiction any Sharia Court of Appeal could have. But lying there all the time, for the most part unnoticed,59 was the italicized clause of subsection (1). Let us call this the “Delegation Clause”, because it may plausibly be read as delegating to the states the power to give their Sharia Courts of Appeal any jurisdiction they please. On

58

Debates of the Constituent Assembly, vol. III, pp. 7164–65. For the most part; but see Fannami v. Sarki, cited in n. 45 above, where the Delegation Clause and its potential for the expansion of Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction are somewhat obscurely alluded to. 59

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this reading, the matters so carefully laid down in subsection (2) specify only the minimum jurisdiction every Sharia Court of Appeal must have. Both elements of this reading of the Delegation Clause were contrary to what everyone had been assuming for 20 years—which is why they had spent so much time litigating about the meaning of subsection (2) and trying to get it amended. Nevertheless, since 1999, this is how the clause has been read by all twelve of the socalled sharia states, which have acted under it, by their own laws, to extend the jurisdiction of their Sharia Courts of Appeal from Islamic personal law only, to other Islamic civil law, and, going all the way, to Islamic criminal law as well. This, they say, is expressly permitted by the Delegation Clause. In the 1979 Constitution the Delegation Clause was part of subsection (1) of Section 242, quoted above. In the 1999 Constitution it is part of subsection (1) of Section 277, phrased in the same language exactly. If we now interrogated this bit of Nigeria’s history, we might get something like this: Q: Why was the Delegation Clause put in Section 242 of the 1979 Constitution? A: Nobody really knows.60 Q: Would the Delegation Clause have been in the Constitution but for the Debacle of 1979? A: Certainly not. If the Christians had accepted the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal as incorporated in the CDC draft, there would have been no need to redraft any of that language, and the Delegation Clause would not have crept in. 60 I talked about this with Chief Rotimi Williams and with Justice Omololu Thomas (interviews in Lagos and Ibadan, respectively, 9 February 2002, and subsequent telephone conversations with Justice Thomas). Chief Williams was Chairman of the CDC and a leading member of the Constituent Assembly, but he was not involved in the legal drafting work of the Assembly and had no recollection respecting this bit of the constitution’s language. Justice Thomas, now retired from the Court of Appeal, was head of the Assembly’s team of legal draftsmen, and so would have been directly responsible for redrafting the provisions relating to the state Sharia Courts of Appeal after the Constituent Assembly voted the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal out. Justice Thomas seemed rather shocked when the Delegation Clause was drawn to his attention and the way it is being interpreted and applied by the sharia states was explained. But he had no recollection of why the clause was put there or what it was supposed to accomplish; although we discussed this for some time, no coherent theory emerged. The one thing Justice Thomas was definite about was that the clause was not put there to allow the Houses of Assembly of the States to confer any jurisdiction they pleased on their Sharia Courts of Appeal.

an opportunity missed by nigeria’s christians Q: A: Q: A:

Q: A:

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Was the insertion of the clause a serious drafting error? Yes. Why? Because the clause appears to authorize the states to extend the jurisdiction of their Sharia Courts of Appeal ad lib. But although this idea was twice brought up and discussed in the Constituent Assembly, it was decisively rejected.61 On the contrary, the perfectly clear intention of the Assembly, which the legal draftsmen were supposed to express, was that the Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction be expressly limited to Islamic personal law only. How did this mistake escape everyone’s notice? This is a somewhat long story. After the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal was voted out of the constitution, the legal draftsmen were instructed to redraft all remaining sections touching on sharia and to bring them back to the Constituent Assembly for its further consideration. For whatever reasons, this never happened: the Assembly adjourned finally without ever looking at what the legal draftsmen had come up with.62 After the Assembly adjourned, the legal draftsmen, working with the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, were caught up in the huge task of incorporating and harmonizing all the changes the Assembly had mandated over many months of work, in a “Clean Copy” of the Constitution, to be submitted to the Supreme Military Council. This particular drafting error was simply overlooked in the endless details that had to be attended to, under pressure of an early deadline, in the production of the Clean Copy.63 It is unknown whether those who vetted the Clean Copy for the Supreme Military Council ever remarked on the Delegation Clause. The Supreme Military Council did not touch this section (as they did some others) before they handed the government over to an elected civilian regime on 1 October 1979. Just one last question. If the Delegation Clause wasn’t there, would we be witnessing the “implementation of sharia” in Northern Nigeria today? Very likely not.

Debates of the Constituent Assembly, vol. III, pp. 7113–14 and 7166–67. For details, see Debates of the Constituent Assembly, vol. III, pp. 7117ff. Per Justice Thomas.

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Q: Why not? A: There are three centerpieces of sharia implementation. One is the reinstatement of Islamic criminal law, in the form of new Sharia Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes that are applicable to Muslims only. The second is the establishment of inferior Sharia Courts—real alkalis’ courts once again—to apply the full range of Islamic law, civil and criminal, again to Muslims only. The third is the direction of all appeals from the inferior Sharia Courts, in both civil and criminal matters, to the Sharia Courts of Appeal, whose jurisdiction, under the Delegation Clause, has been expanded accordingly. Taken together, the enactment of these three interlocking measures has restored to the application of Islamic law to Muslims, in the states that have enacted them, a completeness and a degree of autonomy from the “English” legal system that it has not had for a century. Take away any of the three measures, and either completeness or autonomy would be lost. For this reason it seems unlikely that the Muslims would have thought it worthwhile to enact any one or two of them without enacting all three. But the expansion of the jurisdiction of the Sharia Courts of Appeal to all civil and criminal matters—Centerpiece No. 3—would have been unthinkable without the constitutional cover provided for it by the Delegation Clause. Hence, if the Delegation Clause were not there, we would almost certainly not be witnessing the implementation of sharia in Northern Nigeria today. Final Observations The inclusion of the Delegation Clause in the text of Section 242 of the 1979 Constitution was an ironic accident of fate—granted. But it never would have happened if Nigeria’s Christians had not elected to wage their successful war against the Federal Sharia Court of Appeal in 1977–1978. By doing so, they missed a golden opportunity to make a lasting peace with their Muslim compatriots on honorable terms and to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the matter of religion as a national political issue. Instead, religion was made central to politics and Muslim-Christian relations were poisoned for many years to come. Why did the Christians choose this course? What was it that blinded them, and to a large extent still blinds

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them today, to more reasonable alternatives? Certainly many factors contributed and still contribute to this. I want to highlight just three of them. First, Christians underestimate the importance Muslims attach to their sacred law and to making an honorable place for it in Nigeria’s constitutional order. Christianity recognizes a sacred law, given by God to the Jews and set forth in considerable detail in the Old Testament. But Christianity considers the New Testament to supersede the Old, and that we are no longer under law, but under grace. No Christian, for example, considers that the rule of Leviticus (20:10)— that adulterers should be put to death—is God’s will any longer. Muslims think differently, however. There is no New Testament in Islam, and to many Muslims—certainly to most Nigerian Muslims— the classical sharia, in part revealed and in part deduced so many years ago, remains in force today as a “divinely given blue-print to which society—ruler and subject alike—must always do their utmost to approximate”.64 The importance Nigeria’s Muslims attach to actually implementing the sharia to the maximum extent possible in the laws under which they live has been demonstrated time and again in the history recounted in this chapter. This is a matter not only of religious duty but of preservation of their very identity as Muslims, for to most of them the sharia remains “the core and kernel of Islam itself ”.65 The Christians have no sacred law at the center of their belief and practice; for them all law is a thing to be negotiated in the arena of politics. It is different with the Muslims. The Christians should take this to heart, honor it and with it their Muslim compatriots, and in their constitutional negotiations with the Muslims— who after all make up half the country’s population—concede the Islamic sharia a place of due respect. Strangely, although the Christians underestimate the importance Muslims attach to the sharia, they overestimate Muslim ambitions for the implementation of sharia in Nigeria. The Muslims were prepared to make, and did make, very considerable concessions on sharia in the constitutional negotiations leading up to Independence, giving up Islamic criminal law and limiting Sharia Court of Appeal

64 65

Anderson, Law Reform, p. 9. Schacht, Introduction to Islamic Law, p. 1.

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jurisdiction essentially to Islamic personal law. If I am correct, they would still be living reasonably contentedly with those concessions today, if the perquisites they won in return—prestige, finality, a voice for their jurists in the English courts, and, yes, Paragraph (e)—were still being honored. Since 1979 none of them have been. Twenty years of Muslim attempts to rectify the situation through the courts and the constitution revealed only very modest Muslim goals. Moreover, in those twenty years the Muslims, including the Muslim judges of the English courts, displayed a very solid commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law, at least as firm a commitment, one may think, as the Christian community can boast. This commitment continues today in the repeated declarations of the governments and laws of the sharia state, that what they are doing is “subject to the supremacy of the nation’s constitution”.66 The Muslims are not fools; they do not think they could turn Nigeria into an “Islamic Republic” even if they wanted to—which most of them probably anyway do not—and they clearly have no wish to wreck the Nigerian federation. They simply want to implement as much of their law as they possibly can within the country’s constitution and laws. That attitude is entirely politically correct. Third, the Christians also overestimate Muslim strength. They pretend they are teetering on the edge of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lies perdition. “If we let them get started, we’ll never be able to stop them! Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile! In short, if we consent to the creation of a Federal Sharia Court of Appeal today, or if we even allow state Sharia Court of Appeal jurisdiction to be opened a tiny notch further, we’ll find ourselves living in an Islamic Republic tomorrow!” Perhaps the one good thing about the Debacle of 1979 is that it gave the lie to this way of thinking. The Christians showed that they can stop or even push back Muslim political advances if they are united in wishing to do so. So even if I am wrong about the real scope of Muslim ambitions for sharia implementation in Nigeria, Christian political strength can call a halt at any time. Realizing their strength, Christians should exercise it

66 See P. Ostien, “Ten Good Things about the Implementation of Shari"a in Some States of Northern Nigeria”, Swedish Missiological Themes 90, 2 (2002): 163–74, at 166–67, “good thing” no. 2: “The implementing states have conceded the supremacy of the federal constitution and laws”, supported with various citations.

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judiciously, with the confidence and the maturity to grant Muslims their just demands, which have, after all, been extremely modest, so that religion as a political problem can be put aside and everyone’s attention can turn to other things. Nigeria’s real problems have nothing to do with religion. Religious controversy is just a diversion, which the Christians no less than the Muslims are guilty of exploiting whenever they think it will serve their own interests.

CHAPTER TEN

THE “SHARIA FACTOR” IN NIGERIA’S 2003 ELECTIONS1 Franz Kogelmann Introduction After decades of military rule that ended in 1999, Nigeria saw its first “civilian to civilian” transition in 2003. The elections began on 12 April with voting for members of the National Assembly. Elections for the presidency and governorships took place on 19 April and those for the state Houses of Assembly on 3 May. Twenty-nine political parties were allowed to compete against the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). President Olesogun Obasanjo was pronounced the winner, and his PDP will remain in power in most of the federal states for the next four years.2 Even if this transition is exceptional in the history of the independent Federal Republic of Nigeria and a sign of some degree of democracy, the elections themselves were—according to independent national and international observers—characterized by considerable fraud and ballot-rigging.3 Several hundred people were also killed in political violence during the election period and in the preceding

1 This chapter presents some preliminary results from the international and multidisciplinary research project “The Sharia Debate and the Shaping of Muslim and Christian Identities in Northern Nigeria since 1999” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany (October 2002–January 2004). 2 On the 2003 elections, see Heinrich Bergstresser, “Zweite Wahl. Nigeria zwischen Wählerwillen, Gebetsorgien und Benzinknappheit”, Der Überblick 39, 3 (2003): 45–7; on the “stage of development” of Nigeria’s democracy, see International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Democracy in Nigeria: Continuing Dialogue(s) for Nation-Building (Stockholm: IDEA, 2001); and Bolade Michael Eyinla, “Political Transition and the Future of Democracy in Nigeria”, Africa Quarterly 41, 1–2 (2001): 61–89. 3 See reports by Amnesty International such as http://web.amnesty.org/library/ print/ENGAFR440112003 or the report by Human Rights Watch on Nigeria’s 2003 elections, Nigeria’s 2003 Elections: The Unacknowledged Violence, June 2004, at http://hrw.org/reports/2004/nigeria0604/. See also the European Union Election Observation Mission’s Final Report: http://www.eueomnigeria.org/f-report.html.

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months. The highest level of violence and intimidation took place in the southern and southeastern states but there were also reports of violence and disruption to a lesser extent in the country’s western, central and northern states. European Union election observers concluded that even the minimum standards demanded for democratic elections were not met in a number of states. Human-rights violations are alleged to be part of the struggle for power at state and federal levels in Nigeria. Beside these “democratic exercises” to reconfirm and to “legitimate” the power of the political class, the use of violence as a political tool is common and corruption is pervasive at all levels of society. Inter-communal conflicts in the Niger Delta or in Plateau State over land and resources are ongoing, and flagrant violations of human rights by security forces are legion. National and international human rights organizations alike are still complaining about these hallmarks of Nigeria. However, since 1999, various aspects of Islamic law have become the main focus of international attention. There seems to be less interest in the frequent outbreaks of inter-confessional cum inter-ethnic violence directly or indirectly connected to the so-called full implementation of sharia in Northern Nigeria where thousands of Nigerians have lost their lives. The attention of international and national humanrights organizations has mainly been focused on the cases of two women, Safiya Hussaini and Amina Lawal, who were accused of adultery and condemned to death by stoning. To cut a long story short, in addition to the usual economic problems, political disputes and rivalries between different ethnic and political groups, the 2003 election process took place in a climate of tension related to sharia law. Proponents and opponents are unable to find any common ground on which to base a mutual understanding—what constitutes the fundamental right to an Islamic lifestyle demanded by God (sharia = Islam) for one side is a flagrant violation of the Nigerian constitution and accepted human-rights standards for the other. The Sharia “Shock” and the 2003 Elections What at first glance looked like the clever gambit of a single governor—Ahmad Sani, Yarima of Bakura and Governor of Zamfara State—to gain popular support and to secure his own political survival

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developed into a chain reaction throughout the predominantly Musliminhabited northern states of Nigeria. By the end of 2000, all of the twelve northern states of Nigeria had “enacted legislation or taken executive action aimed at reintroducing parts of Islamic law formerly applicable in the region, but attenuated or abandoned during the colonial period and subsequently”.4 To the astonishment of Western— i.e. non-Muslim—observers, the Muslim masses wanted the full implementation of sharia, i.e. the reinstatement of Islamic criminal law, at least in the beginning. Although the reasons for this attitude may be manifold and also very personal, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi provides one of the most concise analyses of this phenomenon. (. . .) the reform of the law was started by politicians but found popular support in an environment of despondency, frustration and discontent. The reforms received immediate intellectual support from proto-Wahhabi neo-fundamentalist movements who did not initiate them but who shared a vision of replacing the discourse on the state by the discourse on society, thus strengthening the state as agent of personal morality while understating the critical role of political ethics and ideology.5

Though designed to apply only to Muslims—non-Muslims’ suspected criminal activities are not tried by Sharia Courts—the application of the Islamic penal code has in most cases been strongly opposed by Christians, who are finding themselves directly or indirectly affected by practical effects like the prohibition of alcohol or the segregation of the sexes in public life. In addition to these restrictions on daily life, “many Christians have strongly opposed its application for reasons of politics and ‘principle’, arguing that its spread is a way of perpetuating the historical dominance of the Muslim North—a discourse which shows that regional divisions in Nigeria remain at least as strong as religious divisions”.6

4 Philip Ostien, “Ten Good Things about the Implementation of Sharia Taking Place in Some States of Northern Nigeria”, Swedish Missiological Themes 90, 2 (2002): 163–71. Also published in Nigeria in The Weekly Trust, 11–17 May 2001, p. 29 and 18–24 May 2001, p. 9, and Newswatch, 9 July 2001, pp. 61–4. 5 Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, “Fundamentalist Groups and the Nigerian Legal System: Some Reflections”, November 2002, http://www.whrnet.org/fundamentalisms/ docs/doc-wsf-sanusi-nigeria-0311.rtf. 6 Human Rights Watch, Nigeria: The “Miss World Riots”; Continued Impunity for Killings in Kaduna, vol. 15, 13 July 2003, p. 4.

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However, the implementation of Islamic law—and especially the application of the penal code—in Northern Nigeria is still being watched anxiously in the West and indeed by a lot of people, Muslims and Christians alike, within Nigeria itself. Probably the most significant and certainly the most controversial change in Nigeria’s laws in many years, the implementation of the Islamic penal code has given rise, both in and outside Nigeria, to a great deal of discussion in the popular press,7 at conferences8 and, to some extent, in recent academic literature.9 Some of the participants in this discussion have tended to present their views as a conflict between two clearly defined antagonistic camps. Muslims and Christians are using their global traditions—or the way they understand them—to justify their views concerning Islamic law and the future way of living together resulting from a full implementation of sharia. The holder of such simplified views disregards the diversity of Muslim and Christian communities in Nigeria. Other participants in this discussion, both Muslims and Christians, are constructing another dichotomy: Islam as a counterconcept to Western culture is incompatible with human rights, understood as a global and universal conception of human interaction. In the context of the 2003 elections, several important questions arise. Firstly, did Muslims and Christians use sharia and human rights as topics in the electoral campaigns? Secondly, if so, how did they instrumentalize sharia and human rights as topics in these elections? Thirdly, was there a clearly defined line of demarcation between Muslims and Christians? And finally, what were the reasoned discussions?

7 See Modupe Oduyoye, The Shariy’ah Debate in Nigeria, October 1999—October 2000 (Ibadan: Sefer Books, 2000). 8 International Conference on “Shari'a Penal and Family Laws in Nigeria and in the Muslim World: A Rights Based Approach”, organized by the International Human Rights Law Group, Abuja, with support from the German Embassy, 5–7 August 2003; International Conference on “The Sharia Debate and the Shaping of Muslim and Christian Identities”, 11–12 July 2003, University of Bayreuth; and International Conference on “Comparative Perspectives on Shari'ah in Nigeria”, 15–17 January 2004, University of Jos. 9 See Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, Muhammad Tawfiq Ladan and Abiola Afolabi-Akiyode (eds), Sharia Implementation in Nigeria: Issues & Challenges on Women’s Rights and Access to Justice (Enugu/Port Hartcourt/Abuja: Women’s Aid Collective, 2003); Musa A.B. Gaiya, “The Shari'a and Fundamental Human Rights in Nigeria”, Swedish Missiological Themes 90, 2 (2000): 175–86; Umar Danfulani, Frieder Ludwig and Philip Ostien, “The Sharia Controversy and Christian-Muslim Relations in Nigeria”, Jahrbuch für

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In looking for answers to these questions, I have drawn on a variety of sources and not just the existing secondary literature on religion and politics in Nigeria. Fundamental in this respect were the weeks I spent traveling around several regions in Nigeria immediately before the elections in April 2003, a field trip that was made all the more interesting by the fact that the war in Iraq was going on at the same time. I managed to gather information from the media and from numerous interviews and discussions with a wide range of people—from representatives of Islam and the Christian churches in Nigeria to the man in the street. However, and perhaps understandably in the immediate run-up to the elections, no campaigning politician was prepared to have a long talk with a visiting bature (Hausa: European) from Germany. My personal and partially subjective impressions have been supplemented by evaluations of the print media. I should note that my research focused exclusively on the two largest religious groups found in Nigeria. I did not investigate the influence of African traditional religions or witchcraft on the 2003 election process. Islamic Law and Human Rights The relationship between religion and human rights, as defined in the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, is both complex and complicated. Until recently most of the discourse about human rights was in largely secular terms. Many advocates of human rights—in Western and non-Western countries—assume that human rights can exist only within a secular framework. Their concept seems to be outside, and even antithetical to, the worldview of religion. However, the compatibility of religion with human rights has been the subject of a long-running discussion in

kontextuelle Theologie 10 (2002): 70–95; Ogbu U. Kalu, “Safiyya and Adamah: Punishing Adultery with Sharia Stones in Twenty-First-Century Nigeria”, African Affairs 102, 408 (2003): 389–408; Murray Last, “La Charia dans le Nord-Nigeria”, Politique Africaine 79 (2000): 141–52; Is-haq O. Oloyede, “Shari'ah in the North, Concerns of the South: Renewed Controversy over Shari'ah Law in Nigeria”, Islamic Tenets and the Shari'ah, I.A.B. Balogun (ed.), (Ibadan: Sam Bookman Publ., 2000), pp. 129–53; Markus Brunner, The Unfinished State. Demokratie und Ethnizität in Nigeria (Hamburg: Institut für Afrikakunde, 2002); and Ruud Peters, Islamic Criminal Law in Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited, 2003). See also http://europa.eu.int/comm/ europeaid/projects/eidhr/pdf/islamic-criminal-law-nigeria_en.pdf.

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many parts of the world. This lasting discussion has also affected many parts of the Muslim world and it is demonstrating that human rights are one of the most controversial aspects of the ongoing debate concerning Islam, democracy, modernity and authenticity.10 Human rights are at the heart of the intense debate about values currently being conducted among both Muslims and non-Muslims— a debate whose political and symbolic significance can hardly be overestimated. Human rights put the question of the universalization of norms, values and institutions, regardless of their cultural origins, into clearer focus than any of the other topics under discussion, and the human-rights issue, i.e. the political instrumentalization of human rights, has become the touchstone of a clash in which each side is trying to prove its cultural superiority. What all the debates about universality, authenticity and the relativism of values should not do, however, is disguise the fact that the majority of Muslim intellectuals today accept the idea of human rights as normative, and are engaged in finding ways of bringing Islam-based concepts of human rights, human responsibility and human dignity into line with international definitions/standards.11 The Islamic underpinning of human rights is, however, problematic.12 The contemporary, Western understanding of human rights

10 For a detailed discussion of this issue in an Arab Sunni context, see Gudrun Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik. Reflexionen zeitgenössischer Muslime zu Islam, Menschenrechten und Demokratie (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999); for an overview of this discussion in an African context, see Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na"im and Francis M. Deng (eds), Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990); for a female Islamic feminist voice on this topic, see Raffat Hassan, “Are Human Rights Compatible with Islam? The Issue of the Rights of Women in Muslim Communities”, http://www.religiousconsultation.org/hassan2.htm. 11 See Heiner Bielefeldt, “Muslim Voices in the Human Rights Debate”, Human Rights Quarterly 17, 4 (1995): 587–617; Abdullahi Ahmed an-Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Sami A. Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, Les Musulmans Face aux Droits de l’Homme. Religion & Droit & Politique. Etude et Documents (Bochum: Winkler, 1994), Sami A. Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, Les Mouvements Islamistes et les Droits de l’Homme (Bochum: Winkler, 1998); Sami A. Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, “Muslims and Human Rights: Challenges And Perspectives”, in Wolfgang Schmale (ed.), Human Rights and Cultural Diversity: Europe, Arabic-Islamic World, Africa, China (Goldbach: Keip Publishing, 1993), pp. 239–68; and Reza Afshari, “Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics (review)”, Human Rights Quarterly 22, 1 (2000): 314–22. 12 See in extenso Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, Les Musulmans Face aux Droits de l’Homme; Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, “Muslims and Human Rights”; and Krämer, Gottes Staat, pp. 148ff.

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calls the rights themselves “innate” and “inalienable”, yet the concept of human rights is seen as the result of a long historical development process and not as a divine transcendental norms.13 At the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke still saw human rights as a manifestation of divine law and as the “voice of God in Man”, and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 considered that human rights were derived directly from God. However, by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, a shift had taken place. The declaration of human and civil rights then reflected a secularized image of the world and humanity for the first time, an image that is anchored in “natural law” and so implies a radical human freedom. Consequently the different international humanrights instruments issued by the United Nations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), do not refer to God. The Muslim reasoning on human rights, on the other hand, rejects the idea that they have developed out of human thought processes and a human sense of justice, or even from a “natural law”. Instead, God alone as the supreme sovereign and lawmaker grants human rights. Muslims see human rights as the gift and grace of God (ni'mat Allàh), which binds Muslims to absolute obedience to the Creator. This understanding has the consequence of limiting human rights to the Muslim community or, rather, to the faithful, and leaves open the debate as to whether the human rights of someone who does not fulfill his duty to God are to be respected and protected. The category of those who do not fulfill their duty to God ranges from agnostics and communists through to the practitioners of African traditional religions. The basic question, however, remains: who decides what counts as fulfillment of duty and what as neglect of duty? Islamic declarations of human rights present themselves as religious documents of divine origin based on an unchangeable revelation. The Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights published by the Islamic Council in London states:

13

See Alexander Hollerbach, Gerhard Luf, Jochen Abr. Frowein and Wolfgang Huber, “Menschenrechte”, in Görres Gesellschaft (ed.), Staatslexikon. Recht—Wirtschaft— Gesellschaft (Freiburg: Herder, 1995), pp. 1104–18.

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Human rights in Islam are firmly rooted in the belief that God, and God alone, is the Law Giver and the Source of all human rights. Due to their Divine origin, no ruler, government, assembly or authority can curtail or violate in any way the human rights conferred by God, nor can they be surrendered. Human rights in Islam are an integral part of the overall Islamic order and it is obligatory on all Muslim governments and organs of society to implement them in letter and in spirit within the framework of that order. . . . The Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights is based on the Qur’an and the Sunnah and has been compiled by eminent Muslim scholars, jurists and representatives of Islamic movements and thought.14

Muslim commentaries and declarations on human rights, like the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the very influential and multi-national Organization of the Islamic Conference on 5 August 1990, are clearly marked by attempts to produce formal compatibility with international norms and terms.15 There are elements common to both used in the reasoning behind the right to life and the inalienability of human dignity, but the most fundamental overlap is in the area of social rights. According to Islamic reasoning, collective rights have priority over individual goals and interests. On the other hand, several areas remain problematic and unresolved, and these are particularly clear in the commentaries and declarations. A well-known example is the principle of equality between men and women, and between Muslims and non-Muslims.16 It is certainly possible to derive a principle of equality from God: “all men are equal in terms of basic human dignity and basic obligations and responsibilities, without any discrimination on the basis of race, color, language, belief, sex, religion, political affiliation, social status or other considerations. . . . all human beings are Allah’s subjects . . . and no one has superiority over another except on the basis

14 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, foreword, London, issued by Islamic Council, 19 September 1981, see http://www.alhewar.com/ISLAMDECL.html. 15 See http://www.humanrights.harvard.edu/documents/regionaldocs/cairo_dec.htm; for eleven different Islamic and Arabo-Islamic declarations and projects of declarations on human rights in French translation, see Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, Les Musulmans Face aux Droits de l’Homme, pp. 461–522. 16 See Krämer, Gottes Staat, pp. 74ff., 157ff.; for a detailed critical discussion on these topics see also Aldeeb Abu Sahlieh, Les Musulmans Face aux Droits de l’Homme, pp. 87–215.

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of piety and good deeds.”17 However, this equality before God does not automatically mean equality before the law. Both the Qur"àn and the Sunna contain articles that clearly and irrefutably contradict the principle of equality. Another problem is caused by the rights to freedom of religion and to freedom of speech that are enshrined in Western human rights.18 Islamic law forbids Muslims from changing their religion— the breakaway from Islam, ridda 'an al-islàm—and also bars female Muslims from marrying non-Muslims. When seen from the viewpoint of Western human rights and bearing in mind “that though the Qur"ànic principles and values are universal, but their application is situation specific”,19 the canonical justifications of corporal punishment and the death penalty are also problematic, to say the least. Christian Churches and Human Rights The first successful attempts to evangelize the region of what nowadays constitutes the Federal Republic of Nigeria date back to the nineteenth century. Today in Nigeria besides the Catholic Church and the mainstream Protestant churches there are a variety of different so-called charismatic churches. Such a broad range of churches makes it difficult to give a comprehensive overview of the attitudes of Nigerian churches towards human rights.20 Both the Catholic and 17 Articles 1(a) and 1(b) of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, op. cit. 18 See Krämer, Gottes Staat, pp. 151ff. 19 Asghar Ali Engineer in his commentary on a conference in Abuja on Islamic penal and family laws and human rights in 2003, see http://www.rghr.net/mainfile. php/0536/607. 20 For the Catholic bishops’ stance on human rights, see John Chidi Nwafor, Church and State: The Nigerian Experience; The Relationship between the Church and the State in Nigeria in the Areas of Human Rights, Education, Religious Freedom and Religious Tolerance (Frankfurt Main: IKO, 2002), pp. 131ff.. An introduction to the role of one of the most successful Pentecostal churches is offered by Asonzeh Franklin-Kennedy Ukah, “The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria: Local Identities and Global Processes in African Pentecostalism”, PhD thesis, University of Bayreuth, Germany, http://opus.ub.uni-bayreuth.de/volltexte/2004/73/; Toyin Falola, “Christian Radicalism and Nigerian Politics”, P.A. Beckett and C. Young (eds), Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 265–82; and Niels Kastfelt, Religion and Politics in Nigeria: A Study in Middle Belt Christianity (London: British Academic Press, 1994). On religion and its influence on Nigerian politics in general, see Jibrin Ibrahim, “Religion and Political Turbulence in Nigeria”, The Journal of Modern African Studies 29, 1 (1991): 115–36. On the correlation of

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the Protestant churches have gone through a lengthy learning process that was characterized for a long time by the rejection of human rights.21 It was only under Pope John XXIII (1953–1963) that human rights became a central element in Catholic social ethics. In his encyclical Pacem in Terris, the Pope listed, explained and commented on a number of human rights, asserting and emphasizing that certain rights and responsibilities arise from the very nature of man and are, therefore, universally valid, untouchable and inalienable. The Vatican II Council, and in particular the Declaration of Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae), was decisive in incorporating human rights into Catholic dogma by declaring the right to religious freedom to be an expression of the dignity of the individual. Contemporary Catholic understanding divides human rights into five categories: the right to life; the right to food; socio-economic rights; political and cultural rights; and the right to religious freedom. The Protestant churches also adopted a negative stance towards human rights for a long time, and it was only with the increase in cross-denominational contact, such as the foundation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) after World War II, that human rights became the frame of reference for the churches’ activities within society. As a result of the flagrant violations of human rights during World War II, the Protestant churches realized that they had to take a firm and vigorous stand against the persecution of and discrimination against individuals and groups on grounds of race, color, religion, culture or political conviction. At first, the most important element was the right to religious freedom but the right to self-determination became central during the de-colonization process. The attitudes towards human rights adopted by the numerous evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal churches—or the Born-Again military rule and religion in Nigerian politics, see Sabo Bako, “Muslims, State, and the Struggle for Democratic Transition in Nigeria: From Cooperation to Conflict”, in P.A. Beckett and C. Young (eds), Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), pp. 283–301; and on the role of religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa in general, see Stephen D.K. Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, “Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa”, Journal of Modern African Studies 36, 2 (1998): 175–220; Christian Coulon, “Religions et Politique”, in C. Coulon and D.-C. Martin (eds), Les Afriques politiques (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1991), pp. 87–105. 21 See Roman Herzog, Hermann Kunst, Klaus Schlaich and Wilhelm Schneemacher (eds), Evangelisches Staatslexikon (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1987), pp. 2116–22.

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movement, as it is often called—active in Nigeria are far from clearcut and need to be researched more closely. Unlike the issue of human rights, their attitude towards Islam is usually unambiguous. As among the most dynamic Christians in Nigeria today, some of these Born-Again groups are engaged in aggressive missionary activities, called “crusades”, even in regions of Nigeria predominantly inhabited by Muslims. Islam is the most obvious target, since it . . . provides a total vision for the moral redemption of the nation and the form of its socio-political organisation. . . . The demonisation of Islam has been taken up strongly by the Pentecostals, not simply in terms of the critique of government, but as part of the strategy of winning the nation for Christ.22

The human-rights debates conducted by Muslim intellectuals, by members of the major Christian groups or among representatives of strongly secular national and international human rights organizations have much in common, but there are also fundamental differences. As far as Christian groups are concerned, human rights are primarily a theological issue, whereas for many Muslims, human rights represent a legal problem that must somehow be made to conform to the prescriptions of the sharia. Secularism and Other “Satanic” Forces In public or private discussions with Nigerians on religion and society it is remarkable how firmly and deeply their religious beliefs are rooted. Both Christians and Muslims seem to be profoundly religious. During the opening session of the international conference on “Comparative Perspectives on Sharia in Nigeria” in Jos in January 2004, one of the keynote speakers strongly attacked what he called “the godless forces of political correctness and secularism”.23 He received much acclaim for this statement from Christians and Muslims

22 Ruth Marshall, “‘God is not a Democrat’: Pentecostalism and Democratisation in Nigeria”, in P. Gifford (ed.), The Christian Churches and the Democratisation of Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 258. 23 Danny McCain “Which Road Leads Beyond the Shari'ah Controversy? A Christian Perspective on Shari'ah in Nigeria”, in Jamila Nasir, Philip Ostien and Franz Kogelmann (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Shari'ah in Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2005), p. 15.

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alike. When talking about secular states or about the secular character of Western states, one has the distinct impression that even mentioning the word “secularism” is taboo in Nigeria. Indeed many Christians and Muslims regard secularism as the enemy of religion. Muslims see it as a Western and ipso facto Christian concept. Christians put secularism in the same category as anti-religiousness, i.e. a society missing an appropriate ethical foundation. The question as to whether Nigeria is a secular republic or not is debatable. Certain sections of the current Nigerian Constitution are in line with the constitutions of most secular states. Thus, Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution states that “The Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion” and Section 38.1 claims that “Every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom (either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private) to manifest and propagate his religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” These parts of the Nigerian Constitution are in harmony with the language of the religious freedom provision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but there is no trace of explicit secularism in it. During the late 1970s, there were intense debates about the relationship of the state and religion, i.e. the nature of the state. At the time, the Constitution Drafting Committee proposed that Nigeria be declared a secular state. “Although, apparently, this was intended to imply little more than state neutrality in religious matters, some Muslims objected to the use of the term ‘secular’, which to them implied godlessness; and in the end this word had to be deleted.”24 Strong affiliation to their own religious group among most Nigerians seems to rule out the Western model of religion and state. A vast majority of Nigerians appear unwilling to accept a strict separation of religion and state. In the Nigerian context “secularism” more accurately refers to an understanding that the government will not favour one organized

24 David Westerlund, “Secularism, Civil Religion, or Islam? Islamic Revivalism and the National Question in Nigeria”, in Austin Metumara Ahanotu (ed.), Religion, State and Society in Contemporary Africa: Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Zaire and Mozambique (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 71–101, at p. 73. See also Matthew Hassan Kukah, Religion, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 1993), p. 228.

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It is precisely this “neutrality” on religious activities by the state and its laissez-faire attitude to proselytizing activities that could prompt inter-religious clashes. Burned Churches and Sacked Mosques For many Nigerian Christians in the northern part of the country, difficulties concerning conversion between religions and the freedom to practice their religion are serious stumbling blocks. Although the Nigerian Constitution guarantees religious freedom, religious and/or ethnic minorities and Christians in particular—living in an environment dominated by Islam—often complain that their constitutionally guaranteed right to religious freedom is not respected, and they point to the Nigerian Constitution which guarantees the freedom to practice any religion. Specific incidents that have sparked conflict between Christians and Muslims in a Muslim-dominated environment in the past include the overly strict application of regulations for the building of churches; the destruction of churches; the banning of Christian religious education in state schools; and everyday discrimination—either real or imagined.26 While there were numerous outbreaks of religious and ethnic violence in northern Nigeria during the 1980s and 1990s,27 the implementation and application of sharia in the northern Nigerian states from 2000 onwards has repeatedly exposed deep-seated fears among the Christian minority there. There have been a number of clashes in central and northern Nigeria that can be partially described as 25 William Wills, “Muslim Ethnopolitics and Presidential Elections in Nigeria”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20, 2 (2000): 229–41, p. 231. On the different models of the religion-state relationship, see W. Cole Durham, Jr., “Nigeria’s ‘State Religion’ Question in Comparative Perspective”, in Nasir, Ostien and Kogelmann, Comparative Perspectives, pp. 144–67. 26 See Klaus Hock, Der Islam-Komplex. Zur christlichen Wahrnehmung des Islams und der christlich-islamischen Beziehung in Nordnigeria während der Militärherrschaft Babangidas (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1996), pp. 339–405. 27 On the events of the 1980s and 1990s, see Toyin Falola, Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998), pp. 163–225; for a Christian point of view see Patrick Lambert Udoma, The Cross and the Crescent: A Christian Response to Two Decades of Islamic Affirmation in Nigeria (London: The Saint Austin Press, 2002), pp. 143–74.

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religiously inspired riots. In February and May 2000 at least 2,000 people were killed in clashes between Muslim and Christian communities over the extension of the application of Islamic law in the northern city of Kaduna and in Kaduna State.28 In July and August 2001, violence broke out between the different confessional groups in Bauchi State. In September 2001, Jos, the capital of Plateau State in central Nigeria, whose motto is “home of peace and tourism”, became a site of mass killings and massive destruction for five days.29 Plateau State is not a so-called sharia state, and the full application of Islamic law has not been implemented there. Further violence erupted in Kano in October 2001 as a result of protests against United States military intervention in Afghanistan. Finally in November 2002, the so-called Miss World riots took place in Kaduna30 in the context of controversy over the Miss World beauty contest that was to be held in Nigeria and an allegedly “blasphemous” article in a newspaper. For the first time in its short history violence even spread to the federal capital, Abuja, where youths went on a rampage through the city. The huge number and the intensity of these clashes—there were thousands of deaths on both sides—only increased fears that religion would be a central topic or would occupy center stage in the language of politics in the 2003 elections, and that this would only serve to fuel the latent conflicts. Up until now, however, the political use of human rights by different groups to try to show their cultural superiority had not been part of the public discourse. An ideological conflict between divine law—sharia—and the man-made law of “human rights” seems to have been postponed indefinitely. Retired General vs. Retired General After analyzing party manifestos, a Nigerian journalist called them “manifestations of emptiness”,31 and this could explain why the election 28 See Umar H.D. Danfulani, The Sharia Issue and Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Nigeria (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2004). 29 See Umar Danfulani and Sati Fwatshak, “Briefing: The September 2001 Events in Jos, Nigeria”, African Affairs 101 (2002): 243–55; and Human Rights Watch, Nigeria: Jos; A City Torn Apart, vol. 13, December 2001, p. 9. 30 Human Rights Watch, Nigeria: The “Miss World Riots” Continued Impunity for Killings in Kaduna, vol. 15, 13 July 2003. 31 Vanguard, 11 April 2003.

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campaign was not marked by any ideological differences. Nonetheless, it is astonishing that the only truly viable opposition party, the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP, often nicknamed the All Notorious People’s Party), did not produce a manifesto at all in the run-up to the elections. “Although its presidential candidate, ex-General Muhammdu Buhari has a blue print which covers all sectors and aspects of the Nigerian nation, the fact remains that his political party’s manifesto has not been handy.”32 Despite the fact that the Nigerian political party landscape can be characterized by a gaping ideological void, or perhaps for this very reason, religious factors and ethnic and regional identities did play a role in the election campaign. It is a fact that religion has become extremely politicized and has been used as a tool to influence and mobilize voters. The presidential candidate of the governing People’s Democratic Party (PDP, popularly dubbed the People’s Dishonesty Party) in 2003 was the incumbent born-again Christian Yoruba ex-General Olesogun Obasanjo from the southwest of the country.33 Obasanjo had been a hero of the civil war, a military ruler (1976–1979) and under the rule of Sani Abacha—the most notorious of Nigeria’s dictators—a detainee. He was responsible for one of the few military-to-civilian transitions in the modern history of Nigeria. Shortly after coming to office in 1999, he reduced the influence of the politicized military leadership that had built up during the long years of military dictatorship, primarily by pensioning off officers from the northwest of the country. However, he has not yet tackled the decidedly Islamist policies of a number of the governors of so-called sharia states. Obasanjo’s vice president and running mate, the former chief customs officer Atiku Abubakar, who is a Muslim from the northeast, supports a moderate interpretation of Islam and has gained the reputation of being a shrewd tactician when dealing with conflicting interests. He is seen as a promising candidate for the 2007 elections, when an unwritten rule says that the presidency should go to a candidate from the north. The ANPP candidate was ex-General Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani and Muslim from the north. He had already come to power

32

Vanguard, 11 April 2003. See Ukah, “The Redeemed Christian Church”, p. 199; and Karl Maier, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 19ff. 33

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with a military coup in 1983, but his policies of strict parade-ground military discipline in public life led to his downfall after only three years when Ibrahim Babangida led a coup against him. Buhari has often been in the headlines thanks to numerous religiously intolerant remarks, but he is very popular in the north and northeast of Nigeria. His political opponents see him as wanting to increase the political dominance of the Hausa-Fulani ethnic groups in the north and northwest and to push the ANPP towards becoming a sharia party. Chuba Okadigbo, Buhari’s running mate, is a Christian Igbo from the southeast and a former member of the PDP who, as president of the Senate, escaped impeachment for corruption by resigning. Obasanjo’s close ties with controversial Christian preachers, such as the German Reverend Reinhard Bonnke and other prominent Pentecostal leaders like Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, seemed to be of no interest to the press during the elections.34 During his campaign, Obsanjo informed the country “that it is God’s intention for him to remain in office”. It seems that “Obasanjo, who lacked a clearly delineated political constituency, has just found one among Pentecostals in Nigeria”.35 In contrast, his opponent Buhari was often confronted with accusations of partisanship towards his fellow Muslims, with the press seeming to abandon journalistic objectivity to advance such claims. For example, in the March/April issue of The Flame— Light of the Nation from Enugu, the following statement was made: “On the other hand, the selection of General Mohammadu Buhari was based on an ethno-religious and vindictive agenda. How could bloody civilians in their right thinking power choose General Buhari, a dictator and religious saclist [sic] to pilot our affairs? God forbid.” It was “that famous remark about good Muslims voting for Muslim candidates at [the] 2003 elections”36 in particular that caused Buhari to issue statements to the “Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and other Christian associations in the country to explain his position on the issue”.37 In a keynote speech given on 26 March 2003

34 On Obasanjo’s ties to Bonnke, see J. Ilevbare, “Obasanjo Restates Hope in Nigeria. As German-Born Evangelist Holds Ogbomosho Spell-Bound in a Five-Day Crusade”, This Day, 14 November 2002; and H. Jimo, “Seelenernte für den ‘Mähdrescher Gottes’. Der umstrittene deutsche Evangelist Bonnke in Nigeria”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 December 2000. 35 Ukah, “The Redeemed Christian Church”, p. 199. 36 This Day, 22 March 2003. 37 Vanguard, 25 March 2003.

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to a conference on ethnic and religious tolerance organized by the Foundation for Ethnic and Religious Tolerance at the Abuja Sheraton Hotel, Buhari made it clear that he saw ethnic and religious tolerance as the only possible basis for a peaceful and unified Nigeria. Buhari did not deny that religion had assumed a prominent position in the elections but said that “those who have introduced the issue of religion into the presidential campaign are well known and the nation should call them to order by putting them in their rightful places”.38 What is remarkable is that his keynote speech did not mention the implementation of sharia. The topic seems to be effectively taboo for politicians engaged in national election campaigns in Nigeria. It is an entirely different story at the regional level where the issue was so prominent that it featured even in the national press. For example, during a campaign rally, the incumbent Governor of Sokoto State, Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa, demonstrated a slightly unconventional interpretation of sharia, saying that if a certain region in the state did not enjoy water supplies six months after his re-election, the population should feel free to stone him.39 The ploy seems to have worked as he was returned to office. If political commentators are to be believed, Attahiru Dalhatu’s counterpart in Zamfara State, Ahmad Sani, the Yarima of Bakura, also owes his re-election to sharia: the Daily Independent of 30 April 2003 stated that “his main ace in the electoral contest was the sharia factor”. Ahmad Sani came to prominence as the first governor in North Nigeria not only to implement justice according to sharia, but also to apply it rigorously in a case of cattle theft. Ahmad Sani’s spokesman, Sani Muhammad Takori, explains the sharia factor thus: The achievement of His Excellency since inception in 1999 to date is something which is known to everybody. Even the madman must have learnt about His Excellency’s introduction of Shari'a, his achievements on health, education, water supply and so on.40

During the election campaign, one of the state’s senators promised that Islamic law would be applied not only in cases of cattle theft but also in cases of “rigging or stealing votes”. In such cases, the perpetrator had to reckon with the amputation of a hand.

38 39 40

Daily Trust, 4 April 2003. The Guardian, 26 March 2003. New Nigerian, 7 April 2003.

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[ T ]he punishment will be executed on anybody irrespective of the political party. . . . the decision has become necessary because of the plan by the opposition party to [PDP] to win [the] election by all means in the state.41

The incumbent Governor of Zamfara State was also returned to office, but cases of election fraud being dealt with according to these strict regulations have so far not come to light. The sharia factor also appears to have played a decisive role in the re-election of Ahmed Mohammed Makarfi (PDP), the Governor of Kaduna State. Since 1999, there has been severe ethnic-cum-religious rioting in the state, which is not only ethnically mixed but also contains large communities belonging to the country’s two major religions. Many election analysts believe that Makarfi’s skilful handling of the sharia crisis and other turbulence was decisive in persuading the non-indigenous residents of Kaduna City and the Christian majority in the south of the state to vote for him. Whereas his closest ANPP rival promised to complete the introduction of sharia in Kaduna State, “Makarfi promoted the implementation of a judicial reform which enables the Muslims, Christians and others to be tried in law courts according to either Sharia or Customary laws”.42 Makarfi’s fellow Muslims in the north of the state have not accepted these political decisions, with the result that “Makarfi is seen as an anti-sharia governor”.43 Conclusion The 2003 elections show that violence is still part of the political culture of Nigeria. To gain access to allegedly scarce resources, politicians and their followers commit flagrant violations of human rights. The use of religion or religious feelings for political ends is still one of the most dangerous weapons in politics, not only in Nigeria. The “Miss World riots” in Kaduna illustrate that, after decades of military rule and pandemic inter-confessional conflicts, rumors and gossip about blasphemy are sufficient to stir up the masses. No wonder

41 42 43

The Guardian, 6 April 2003. The Guardian, 29 April 2003. National Interest, 6 April 2003.

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that human-rights activists were concerned about the moves initiated by the political leadership of Northern Nigeria to implement Islamic law in all its aspects. However, we do not know the exact details of this full implementation of Islamic law and how far the various states have really adopted sharia. As a result of some spectacular news stories, such as the stoning sentences of young women who have supposedly not conformed to sharia law, impartial scholarship to study these phenomena has been lost in the noisy and, in many cases, unqualified public debates about Islamic law in general. These debates, highly emotionalized by Muslims and Christians alike, made the 2003 elections dangerous in the sense that they could potentially have destabilized the country as a whole. If religion—or debates about certain aspects of religion—played a significant, perhaps even decisive, role in the 2003 national elections, it is highly remarkable that the ANPP’s Muslim presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari found himself accused of being an Islamist with a hidden agenda of the Islamization of Nigeria. There was, however, no public debate about President Obasanjo’s known leanings towards Pentecostalism and its influence on his political decision-making. Although the implementation of sharia in Northern Nigeria seems to have played no role in the national elections, with the main protagonists appearing to have been aware of the incendiary power of the issue if used for political ends, the so-called sharia factor certainly did have an effect on voting behavior at the regional level. In spite of the importance of religion, there was no public debate on either Muslim or Western interpretations of human rights in the 2003 election campaign, and there was likewise no public discussion about the compatibility of Islamic law and Western concepts of human rights—or even of the compatibility of Pentecostalism and human rights. Instead, we will have to wait for a discussion in Nigeria that goes beyond the usual restatement of mutual prejudices and polemics and, above all, a much-needed debate that deals with the social reality of daily life in contemporary Nigeria. At the moment, interaction between Nigerian Muslims and Christians on the topic of human rights appears to be low key, if it is in fact even taking place at all.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FROM RESISTANCE TO RECONSTRUCTION: CHALLENGES FACING MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA A. Rashied Omar Introduction In 2004 South Africans commemorated ten years of living in a postapartheid society. This historic milestone marked the end of the second period of non-racial democratic rule in South Africa. The celebrations were accompanied by critical reflections on both achievements as well as ongoing challenges. This chapter examines how Muslim-Christian relations have fared in the aftermath of apartheid. It seeks to address three interrelated questions. How has the antiapartheid interreligious movement come to terms with the transition from resistance to reconstruction? To what extent has the new democratic state’s religio-pluralistic policy influenced and affected the quality of religious coexistence? And what particular challenges have arisen for Muslim-Christian relations from this new historical context? The critical questions I try to illuminate will be approached by drawing on theoretical insights regarding the relationship between religion and violence gleaned from some recent studies. Theoretical Background The complex task of determining the relationship between religion and violence has intrigued and preoccupied scholars for a very long time. One hundred years before the renowned French scholar René Girard published his seminal work La violence et le sacré in 1972, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) argued that there existed an indissoluble link between religion and sacrifice, and as such “All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest

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principally on the idea of sacrifice”.1 If Bakunin’s theoretical perspective was hardly known, Girard’s theory of sacrifice and mimetic desire has profoundly shaped the academic discussions on religion and violence for the past three decades. More recently, in attempting to come to terms with the post-Cold War reality of an upsurge in religious conflicts, and particularly in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States of America, a number of new studies on the intersections between religion and violence have emerged.2 These studies come from a variety of disciplines, employ diverse methodological approaches and have raised a number of theoretical issues.3 One such influential study is the Carnegie Commission’s inquiry, launched in 1994, into the causes and prevention of deadly conflict. The Commission was constituted by an international advisory council of 42 scholars and practitioners who provided their expert advice. The report, which was released in 1997, offered a simple yet profound finding. In the Commission’s view, mass violence almost invariably results from the deliberately violent responses of determined leaders and their groups to a wide range of social, economic and political conditions that provide the environment for violent conflict, but usually do not independently spawn violence.4

Two historians of religions, Scott Appleby and Bruce Lincoln, have offered similar but independent arguments in support of this theoretical assertion. Lincoln contends that most of the post-Cold War conflicts in which religious issues have played a role occurred “in contexts where structural problems inherent to the nation-state have become manifest: specifically the potential contradiction between

1

Mikhail Bakunin, “God and the State”, in A. Lehning (ed.), Selected Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1974), pp. 111–35, quotation p. 126; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Gerard’s theories about the social role of symbolic violence have been discussed throughout the humanities and have been especially influential in the field of religious studies. 2 See Charles K. Bellinger, “Religion and Violence: A Bibliography”, The Hedgehog Review 6, 1 (2004): 111–119. 3 For a general idea of the proliferation of works on religion and violence, see Christopher Candland, The Spirit of Violence—An Interdisciplinary Bibliography of Religion and Violence (New York: Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 1992). 4 Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Preventing Deadly Conflict: Final Report with Executive Summary (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, December 1994), p. 29.

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nation and state”.5 He suggests that in such situations of perceived conflict between religious traditions and the state, “religious actors attempt to reconcile the gritty nature of their struggles with the precepts of their religious beliefs”. This is a difficult task and, according to Lincoln, it entails “highly selective readings of texts and tradition, along with the most ingeniously strained hermeneutics”.6 Appleby has made a complementary theoretical case. He argues that because of the ambivalent nature of the sacred (which can be interpreted in the service of peace as well as violence), the role of religious leaders is decisive. He furthermore contends that “corrupt, craven or merely indecisive religious leadership invites interlopers, claimants who would associate the energies and purposes of the religious community with their own.”7 Appleby has concluded his study of the role of religion in conflict by proposing that “the evidence suggests that all religions have the resources for promoting tolerance towards others, but too few religious leaders are committed to interreligious solidarity”.8 This chapter examines the veracity of these novel theoretical findings within the context of Muslim-Christian relations in the first decade of post-apartheid South Africa. The Religious Demography of Post-Apartheid South Africa To contextualize our discussion of Muslim-Christian relations it might be expedient to begin by presenting a statistical overview of the religious demography of post-apartheid South Africa. The figures are derived from the second democratically supervised population census, conducted in 2001. While the official population census is a blunt instrument for reflecting on religious diversity in South Africa, it is clear from Table 1 that Christians are in the overwhelming majority in South Africa.9

5 Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 62–4. 6 Ibid., p. 65. 7 R. Scott Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 56. 8 Ibid., p. 55. 9 For a useful discussion of the problematic nature of relying exclusively on official census results for determining religious diversity in South Africa, see David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. xi–xii.

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Table 1: Adherents of the different religions in South Africa10 Affiliation

Percentage

Christians Hindus Muslims Jews Eastern/Other Other beliefs (Christians) No religion/refused

79.8% 1.2% 1.5% 0.2% 0.9% 0.13% 16.5%

Among Christians, mainline Christian churches accounted for 32.6 per cent, African Independent churches for 31.8 per cent, and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches for 5.9 per cent. There are three critical points in relation to the question of religious pluralism and Muslims that emerge from the above. First, although the official statistics indicate that Muslims constitute just 1.5 per cent of South Africa’s total population, a number of observers have noted that such statistical indicators cannot possibly measure the cultural impact of Islam. Tayob, for example, has observed that statistics do not reflect the qualitative experience of being Muslim in South Africa.11 Second, the Muslim minority is by no means a monolith. Vahed and Jeppie have cogently demonstrated in a recent essay that South Africa’s Muslims are sociologically diverse; “they are divided along race, class, gender, ethnicity, language and beliefs”.12 This has significant implications for our purposes here. For as the aforementioned scholars argue, “Muslims in the WC [Western Cape Province] often have more in common with non-Muslims than Muslims elsewhere in the country”.13 And last but not least, cold statistics about different religions in a country refer to religious plurality and should not be confused with the concept of religious pluralism, which relates to the quality of religious coexistence between the diverse religions within a specific

10

Census 2001, see http:www.statssa.gov.za. Abdulkader Tayob, “Counting Muslims in South Africa”, Annual Review of Islam in South Africa (Cape Town: Centre for Contemporary Islam, UCT, 1996). 12 Goolam Vahed and Shamil Jeppie, “Multiple Communities: Muslims in PostApartheid South Africa”, in Johan Daniel and Roger Burrows (eds), State of the Nation 2, 2004–2005 (Pretoria: HSRC, 2004), pp. 252–86. 13 Ibid., p. 280. 11

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context. In other words, religious plurality informs us about religious demography, while religious pluralism presents the texture of human interactions. It is this latter complexity that concerns this chapter. However, such an account of Muslim-Christian relations in contemporary South Africa requires a prior understanding of the destructive legacy of apartheid on interreligious relations as well as the constructive solidarity forged in the struggle to dismantle it. Muslim-Christian Relations in the Midst of the Anti-Apartheid Struggle The story of Muslim-Christian relations under apartheid is a perplexing one that can only be correctly interpreted if it is located within the general history of South Africa; religious experiences do not occur in isolation but arise from within and out of a particular socio-historical context. Not only do these socio-historical exigencies impinge on the dynamic nature of the religious experience, they are frequently influenced by religion itself—as the South African context exemplifies. In this case, Calvinist Christianity was implicated in a system of social relations that had racial exclusivity as its basis. This, in turn, resulted in a peculiar and contested understanding of religious freedom. Central to this debate was the question of political acquiescence in and Christian legitimation of apartheid. The legitimating role that the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) played in the formation and implementation of the apartheid system has been well documented by the scholarly community.14 Many of the key architects of the oppressive apartheid system were also devout adherents of the DRC. At a conference in 1950, the DRC declared that “separate development” could only be achieved by the “gradual” movement towards total separation between whites and Bantu. The discriminatory apartheid education policy was labeled Christian National Education. As late as 1983, the new constitution

14 For a detailed study of the religious legitimation of apartheid by the Dutch Reformed Church, see Cecil Ngcokovane, Demons of Apartheid: A Moral and Ethical Analysis of the N.G.K., N.P., and Broederbond’s Justification of Apartheid ( Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989). See also, J.A. Loubser, The Apartheid Bible: A Critical Review of Racial Theology in South Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1987); Susan Rennie Ritner, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Apartheid”, Journal of Contemporary History 2, 4 (1967): 17–37; and Dunbar T. Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid and Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

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adopted by the Afrikaner National Party persisted in declaring that South Africa was a Christian country, endorsed by a particular Protestant and Calvinist understanding of Christianity.15 Essentially this meant that Muslims and other religious traditions were discriminated against and allowed to operate freely only as long as their religious activities did not challenge the apartheid system. In fact, non-Christian religious communities could acquire limited state support for their activities if they were willing to collaborate in the apartheid project. It was this peculiar situation that meant that an answer to the question of whether indeed there was religious freedom in South Africa or not was fraught with difficulties.16 Notwithstanding this challenging context, South Africa’s small Muslim community played a vociferous role in the struggle against apartheid inequalities and injustices. Its role is perhaps best symbolized in the killing in detention of a prominent Imam, Abdullah Haron, by the security police in 1969.17 Imam Haron’s funeral procession, attended by more than 30,000 mourners, was turned into a ritualized form of political protest against the apartheid regime. Both in 1976 and again in 1985, large numbers of Muslim youth joined the anti-apartheid resistance movement.18 The robust Muslim role in the anti-apartheid struggle resulted, however, in a demagogic anti-Islamic reaction within the ranks of right-wing Afrikaner Calvinists. That is, a section of the South African Christian fraternity was perturbed by the important role Muslims were assuming in the anti-apartheid struggle. The overt anti-apartheid stance adopted by Muslim youth groups was interpreted by Afrikaner right-wingers, including Afrikaner missionaries, as a “direct” and

15

David Chidester, Religions of South Africa (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 187–221. Under the segregationist policy inaugurated by the apartheid government, the Group Areas Act in particular adversely affected the Muslim community by forcing them to relocate to non-white residential areas and threatening their mosques with demolition. For an account of the Muslim experience of religious freedom under apartheid, see A. Rashied Omar, “The Islamic Experience of Religious Freedom in the South African Context”, in J. Killian (ed.), Religious Freedom in South Africa (Pretoria: UNISA, 1993), pp. 73–81. 17 A. Rashied Omar, “The Impact of the Death in Detention of Imam Abdullah Haron on Cape Muslim Political Attitudes”, BA Honours Thesis, Department of History, University of Cape Town, 1987. 18 On the role of Muslims in the anti-apartheid struggle, see Shamil Jeppie, “Amandla and Allahu Akbar: Muslims and Resistance in South Africa, c. 1970–1987”, Journal for the Study of Religion 4, 1 (1991): 3–20. 16

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“massive onslaught” on the West in general and Christianity in particular. In 1986, the General Synod of the DRC, its highest decision-making forum, passed a resolution condemning Islam as a “false religion which poses a threat to Christianity in South Africa, Africa and the world at large”.19 On the other hand, the important role that Muslims assumed in the anti-apartheid movement also led to the development of a unique interfaith dialogue and camaraderie between anti-apartheid Muslims, liberation theologians and other Christian denominations and ecumenical institutions. This common quest for a just South Africa is perhaps best symbolized in the formation of the Muslim organization the Call of Islam.20 In June 1984 a group of key Muslim activists in Cape Town decided to align themselves with a host of community, student and religious organizations under the banner of the United Democratic Front (UDF). They formalized this relationship by establishing a new movement, the Call of Islam. In the UDF itself, the Call of Islam was one of many religiously based organizations engaged in the struggle against apartheid, and in this capacity it played a significant role in persuading Muslims to accept the theological legitimacy of others working with Christians and other faith communities in the struggle against apartheid. The interreligious solidarity forged in the struggle against apartheid rapidly led to the launching of the South African chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) in 1984. Shortly after its formation, the WCRP led a non-racial peace march into a black township whereupon the apartheid police arrested nineteen religious leaders representing various traditions. Imprisoned and closely guarded, the leaders spontaneously organized an interreligious prayer service. A prominent Call of Islam leader described this interreligious experience as follows. We discovered each other: diverse in faith but comrades in the struggle. Nineteen small people waiting in a cold cell on a magistrate. Here

19 A. Rashied Omar, “Muslim-Christian Relations in South Africa: The Case of the 1986 NGK General Synod Resolution on Islam”, Honours Thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, 1989. 20 Farid Esack, Qur"an, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression (Oxford: Oneworld, 1997).

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a. rashied omar we experienced dialogue between religions on the highest plane. In eight hours years of suspicion and mistrust were shattered.21

As a direct consequence of the persistent role the Call of Islam activists played in the intensification of Muslim resistance to apartheid in the decade from 1984 to 1994, Muslims, as alluded to in the introduction, have, despite their small numbers, assumed a role in post-apartheid South Africa that far outweighs what would be expected from their minority status. This disproportionate Muslim influence in post-apartheid South Africa has also been facilitated by the overt religio-pluralistic stance adopted by the new democratic South African state. Religious Pluralism and the Post-Apartheid South African State As has already been alluded to, under apartheid South Africans experienced a negative understanding of religious freedom as well as a unique history of interreligious solidarity in the struggle against racism and religious bigotry. In recognition of this latter reality, the democratically elected African National Congress government, led by President Nelson Mandela, committed itself to pursuing a public policy of genuine religious pluralism. In the transition period leading up to the 1994 democratic elections, religious leaders and organizations were engaged in a number of interfaith consultations and conferences aimed at defining a progressive relationship between organized religion and the democratic state. A number of probing questions occupied their minds. How should religion relate to public policy in a modern secularized society? Should there be a significant relationship at all, or should religion be privatized? Alternatively, is religion so important that it should dominate public policy? Which, if any, of the competing religious discourses should be privileged by public policy formulators? What would be the political implications of such religious privileging? In the ensuing discussions and debates the following list of constitutional models were considered as possible options.22

21

Esack, Qur"an, p. 37. Albie Sachs, “To Believe or Not to Believe”, in J.N.J. Kritzinger (ed.), Believers in the Future: Proceedings of the National Interfaith Conference on Religion-State Relations ( Johannesburg: World Conference on Religion and Peace, 1991), pp. 91–8. See 22

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Religion/State Models 1. A theocratic model, where the state and public policy are completely determined by one particular religious denomination and the identities of both state and religion are fused. 2. A repressionist model, where the state acts to suppress religion. In such a model, the state would operate to marginalize religion or eliminate it completely from the public domain. 3. A separationist model, where the state attempts to maintain a strict wall of separation between the secular public arena and the private religious sphere. In this model, there is little or no overlap or joint activity between religion and the state, and little or no consideration is given to religious standpoints in the formulation of public policy. 4. A cooperative model, where the state actively promotes a policy of interreligious harmony and encourages religious institutions to play a role in civil society. In this model, while ensuring the protection of citizens from religious discrimination or coercion, the state seeks to engage religious groups in areas of common interest and concern. Since assuming power in April 1994, the ANC-led government has followed the fourth model, in which the state defines itself as secular but seeks to promote religious pluralism and to collaborate with religious organizations on public issues of mutual concern. This model was considered appropriate given South Africa’s religious demography and, more importantly, the powerful influence of interreligious solidarity on the anti-apartheid culture of the liberation movement. Setting the tone for this new pluralist policy, Mandela invited a representative from each religious tradition to participate in interreligious prayers that accompanied his inauguration ceremony. Moreover, three days after his inauguration as president, Mandela visited a church, a mosque and a synagogue to underline his government’s commitment to religious pluralism.23 In June 1997, President Mandela addressed an interreligious consultation for religious leaders, calling on them to lead the moral reconstruction of the emerging democratic nation. also Albie Sachs, Protecting Human Rights in a New South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990). 23 Esack, Qur"an, p. 223.

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a. rashied omar The transformation of our country requires the greatest possible cooperation between religions and political bodies, critically and wisely serving our people together. Neither political nor religious objectives can be achieved in isolation. They are held in a creative tension with common commitments. We are partners in the building of our society.24

At the end of this meeting an interreligious working group was formed to take up Mandela’s challenge, and on 13 February 1998, a National Forum of Religious Leaders (NLRF) was established with the WCRP (SA) serving as its secretariat. The NLRF has continued to liaise between the government and religious communities; in April 2003, President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, addressed its meeting. In consonance with its religio-pluralistic policy, the ANC-led government has worked steadily over the past decade to ensure that public religious broadcasting and religion in public education reflect this vision. Within a few months of taking office, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) established the Independent Forum for Religious Broadcasting Panel (RBP), its chief function being to “ensure respect for all religions and equitable representation for the expression of each faith within the total amount of religious broadcasting air time”.25 A number of private religious radio stations and to a lesser extent television stations have been flourishing in post-apartheid South Africa as a result of this new inclusive policy. The historian of religion Rosalind Hackett has recently evaluated the impact of this new broadcasting policy as part of an Africa-wide research study and concluded that it has not been as successful as had initially been anticipated.26 She has provided a useful insight into the controversy and difficulties encountered by the RBP in actualizing its vision of unbiased and proportionate representation of all religions in public broadcasting in post-apartheid South Africa. Supporting Hackett’s findings, Vahed and Jeppie have argued that in the case of Muslims the “new media” is to a large extent controlled 24

http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/misc/anc_and_religion.html. Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Mediated Religion in South Africa: Balancing Air-Time and Rights Claims”, in B. Meyer and A. Moors (eds), Media, Religion and the Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 26 In Hackett, “Mediated Religion”, there is a useful discussion of the controversy and difficulties encountered by the RBP in actualizing its vision of unbiased and proportional representation of all religions in public broadcasting. 25

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by “hegemonic groups among Muslims, usually conservative and monied, who are playing a key role in implanting a common perspective consistent with their normative outlook”.27 Public education has been another arena in which the new government has tried to introduce reforms aimed at accommodating all religious traditions. The task of implementing an interreligious education program for public schools has, however, proven to be far more difficult. After a number of draft policies and lively debate, a new religious education policy was finally unveiled by Education Minister Kader Asmal in September 2003. The new policy recognizes religious diversity while protecting students from discrimination and coercion. A number of Christian groups have been highly critical of this new interreligious education policy. Their critique is aptly expressed in the following quote from a Christian leader. It’s not the question that Kader Asmal wants to take religion out of the school curriculum, it is the fact that he says that religion can be there but it should be a sort of a multi-faith curriculum.28

Notwithstanding these small setbacks, religious pluralism has been one of the major beneficiaries of the post-apartheid dispensation as the state has labored to sustain and further develop a culture and ethos of interreligious tolerance and cooperation. In support of this, the non-racial government in September 2003 announced the appointment of an eighteen-member Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities.29 One of the key functions of this body is to promote religious pluralism and coexistence. Ironically, however, as will be demonstrated in the next section, the post-apartheid state’s overt policy of religious pluralism has not been buttressed by a sympathetic religious leadership at the civil-society level and consequently it has not sufficiently filtered down to the grassroots level. As a result, new challenges have emerged for Muslim-Christian relations.

27

Vahed and Jeppie, “Multiple Communities”, p. 269. Simon Bekker and Anne Lielde, “Faith in Cape Town: Identity, Cooperation and Conflict”, unpublished report, Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, December 2003. 29 See http://www.safrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/constitution/culturalrights.htm. 28

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Challenges Facing Muslim-Christian Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa Since the first non-racial democratic elections in April 1994, the South African interreligious movement has been in some disarray. It has struggled to make the transition from a “theology of resistance” to a “theology of reconstruction”. Over this the interreligious movement lost a good deal of its motivation, intellectual vitality and support base, and was held together by a small band of committed activists with an undefined agenda. The most obvious example is the virtual collapse of the flagship of the South African interreligious movement, the WCRP (SA). There are a number of reasons for this. Chief among them is the fact that a good number of the most talented leaders in the interreligious movement have been co-opted to serve the new government and other state agencies. For example, the chief patron of WCRP (SA), Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was appointed to head up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) while its national president, Ms Yasmine Sooka, was appointed as a TRC commissioner and its national secretary general, Ebrahim Rasool, was elected to lead the ANC in the Western Cape provincial legislature. Another insight is offered by the interreligious scholar Farid Esack. While he recognizes that the reasons for the disarray of progressive religious organizations in post-apartheid South Africa are diverse, Esack notes that “with the fuel supplied by the presence of an unmistakable Pharaoh gone, the moral imperative for active participation in the political struggle became less clear and was superseded by party politics”.30 Elsewhere I have argued that “while extrinsic motivations”, for example this interreligious solidarity against the common enemy apartheid, may be helpful in getting an interreligious dialogue started they are insufficient to sustain the movement in the longer term. In order for the interreligious movement to become self-propelling and sustainable, it needs to find intrinsic reasons from within faith commitments for promoting good relations with people of other religions.31

30

Esack, Qur"an, p. 235. See A. Rashied Omar, “Opportunities and Challenges for Muslim Peacebuilding after September 11: From Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivations for Interreligious Dialogue”, Current Dialogue (Geneva: World Council of Churches) 41 ( July 2003). 31

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However, intrinsic motivations continue to be the most elusive goal for interreligious movements all over the world. As a direct consequence of the leadership vacuum left by the interreligious movement, sections of South Africa’s conservative religious leadership have come forward to fill it. These religious leaders are more exclusivist in their religious outlooks and view religious pluralism with great suspicion. In some instances such tolerance and cooperation are regarded as a devious attempt to create a single universal religion. These religious leaders have consequently urged their followers to resist the more open democratic and pluralist policies of the post-apartheid government. A recent research study on religious identities in Cape Town found “repeated identification by Christian leaders of important differences with the Muslim faith community, sometimes articulated in a derogatory manner”.32 The danger then is the formation of religious ghettos, which resemble the discredited apartheid philosophy of separateness. The most visible example of this form of conservative activism was witnessed during the opening ceremony of the Parliament of the World’s Religions when it convened in Cape Town in December 1999. According to Hackett, “many conservative Christians stayed away or kept a low profile, mistaking the title of the conference to mean Parliament for a World Religion rather than of the World’s Religions”.33 Ironically, both fundamentalist Christian groups and like-minded Muslims protested the Parliament of Religions as a satanic event and New Age conspiracy linked to the nefarious New World Order. Notwithstanding these protests, the Parliament of Religions proved to be successful and gave birth to a new regional interreligious forum, the Cape Town Interfaith Initiative (CTII). In the last section of this chapter, I provide three poignant illustrations that involve a diverse spectrum of Muslims and Christians in support of my thesis that the overall effect of the shift to a more conservative religious leadership within post-apartheid civil society has been a setback to Muslim-Christian relations in post-apartheid South Africa.

32

Bekker and Lielde, “Faith in Cape Town”. Rosalind I.J. Hackett, “Report on the Parliament of the World’s Religions, Cape Town, December 1–8, 1999”, Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (Edinburgh International Centre for World Spirituality) 29, 2 (2000). 33

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288 The PAGAD Phenomenon

In August 1996, two years after South Africa’s first non-racial democratic elections, a vigilante movement with a strong Muslim support base called People against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) burst onto the national scene with its organized campaign of killing drug dealers and bombing their homes.34 The movement was led by individuals sympathetic to the radical Muslim movement Qibla, which had opposed South Africa’s first democratic elections as the outcome of a dubious negotiated settlement that compromised its understanding of justice. Notwithstanding the fact that Muslims largely ignored this call to boycott the elections, the rejectionist political posture it represented continued to live on in the rhetoric and radical campaign of PAGAD. Significant numbers of ordinary South Africans identified with the cause of fighting the proliferating crime and drug cartels, since the police services and criminal justice system were perceived as being inefficient and corrupt. PAGAD’s heavy-handed tactics outraged most people, including the vast majority of Muslims. Moreover, even though PAGAD declared itself a multi-religious body and boasted a smattering of non-Muslims as well as a Catholic priest among its members, its public rhetoric and grassroots support base remained narrowly Muslim as its campaign became more controversial. An unfortunate outcome of PAGAD’s four-year (1996–2000) reign of terror on the Cape Flats was the reinforcement of the global perception that Islam has a predilection for resolving problems through the use of violence. This in turn fostered an anti-Muslim backlash in the broader Christian community. At the height of the PAGAD campaign in Cape Town, for example, two individuals were forced off a metro train by their fellow passengers just because they were dressed as Muslims, whereupon PAGAD’s Catholic priest, Father Christopher Clohessy, argued that One of the fruits of PAGAD—not part of its agenda—has been to highlight the disproportionate levels of anti-Islamic prejudice in the worldview of Christians, clergy and laity alike.35 34 For a detailed study of the PAGAD phenomenon, see Raashied Galant and Fahmi Gamiledien (eds), Drugs, Gangs, People’s Power: Exploring the PAGAD Phenomenon (Cape Town: Claremont Main Road Masjid, 1996). 35 Christopher Clohessy, “Thoughts on Pagad”, in Gallant and Gamieldien, Drugs, Gangs, p. 70.

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Clohessy’s perspective was not idiosyncratic. His position was supported by an Anglican priest, Reverend Christopher Chivers, who lamented the fact that the Christian churches in South Africa have by and large remained silent bystanders in the face of the daily caricaturing of Muslims in the daily press. He warned that if the present anti-Islamic phenomenon is not held in check, it will root itself more firmly in the popular consciousness, and will undermine, if not destroy the “rainbow nation” narrative, which the Churches have fully embraced.36

The sheer cost in lives and resources as well as the negative impact on Muslim-Christian relations resulting from the PAGAD campaign still has to be calculated. What is clear, however, is that as a result of the sensationalized press coverage given to PAGAD’s activities in the form of media stereotyping of “an Islamic fundamentalist threat”, and the South African security establishment’s investigation of possible links to international Islamic groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah, right-wing Christian groups have been re-energized in their antiIslamic stance. More disconcerting, however, has been the fact that many ordinary Christians have had their media perceptions of Islam as a violent religion reinforced by the PAGAD campaign. The Bombing of the Soweto Mosque The “Islamic threat” was taken seriously by a group of right-wing Afrikaners, the Boeremag, when they embarked on a bombing campaign in the province of Gauteng in October 2002. The group’s apparent goal was to advance their struggle for the establishment of an exclusivist Afrikaner homeland somewhere in the country. Ironically, however, among the targets they chose to bomb, which included a railway line and other public facilities, the Boeremag singled out a Soweto mosque, one of the very few located in a black township.37 The irrational choice of the mosque as a target strongly suggests that sections of the Christian right in South Africa continue to believe that Islam is a threat, and that this is most vividly represented in

36 Christopher Chivers, “Churches and Anti-Islamic Stereotyping in SA: Late 19th-Century Parallels”, in Gallant and Gamieldien, Drugs, Gangs, p. 80. 37 Sonja Carstens, “Bombs Intended to Cause Mayhem”, News24.com (South Africa: 3 November 2002).

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its rapid growth in black townships like Soweto. Furthermore, rightwing Christians feel strongly that the democratic South African state’s policy of religious pluralism is unduly privileging Muslims. This was usefully depicted in the following quote from an interview conducted with an Evangelical Christian leader; “The present government seems to be pretty hostile to all faiths, except Islam; they’re very negative to Christian churches”.38 This negative Christian perspective on Islam in South Africa is not novel. It is essentially a resurfacing of the same sentiment that motivated the 1986 DRC Synod resolution that declared Islam a “threat to South Africa, Africa and the world at large”. What is new, however, is the growing opposition to the secular democratic state’s religious neutrality. Conservative Christians perceive the religio-pluralistic policy of the new government as favoring Muslims and other minority faiths at the expense of the Christian majority. In the religious identity survey conducted by Bekker and Lielde, such a sentiment was repeatedly raised by different Christian focus groups.39 Interestingly, such a perception is not unique to conservative Christians in South Africa. Lincoln, in his study, has found similar grievances among Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of the Hindu majority in India.40 Opposing the Election of a Muslim Premier Concern about the influential role of South Africa’s small Muslim community in post-apartheid South Africa is not limited to the Christian right. The important role that Muslims have assumed in the new South Africa has also raised the ire of some Christian members of the ruling ANC. In the run-up to the 2004 elections in the Western Cape, press reports indicated a power struggle raging within the Western Cape branch of the ANC “over who will be the party’s candidate for premier”.41 The press report claimed that a leaked internal ANC document identified a number of factions that had emerged within its ranks opposing the current leader of the party,

38

Simon, “Bombs”, p. 26. Bekker and Lielde, “Faith in Cape Town”, p. 26. 40 Lincoln, Holy Terrors, p. 61. 41 Ashley Smith, “Power Struggle within ANC over W Cape Vote”, Weekend Argus, 26 September 2003. 39

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Ebrahim Rasool. One of these factions was opposed to Rasool’s leadership on religious grounds. Though the press report did not explicitly mention the precise nature of the religious objection to Rasool’s leadership, it is not difficult to establish the reasons. It is widely known that Rasool is a practicing Muslim and that during the anti-apartheid struggle he served as national secretary of the Call of Islam as well as the WRCP (SA).42 Some Christians within the ANC’s Western Cape branch may have found Rasool’s leadership of the party problematic on two contradictory grounds. First, they may have proposed that a Muslim leader would not resonate well with the largely Christian “colored” electorate in the Western Cape and thus might jeopardize the ANC’s chances of winning the elections. Second, and more importantly, if the ANC managed to win the Western Cape elections and Rasool maintained his position as the leader of the ANC, it would mean that he would become the country’s first Muslim premier. The proChristian group within the ANC’s Western Cape branch group obviously felt that Rasool’s election as premier would further strengthen the already-strong position of Muslims in post-apartheid South Africa, which they detest. In fact in April 2004 the ANC did go on to win the Western Cape provincial elections under the leadership of Ebrahim Rasool and he was inaugurated as the first Muslim premier of South Africa. Voting patterns indicated that large numbers of Muslims voted for the ANC, which led Rasool to claim in one of his victory speeches that “the fact that the President of this country could elect a Muslim as Premier even though most people in South Africa are not Muslims says a lot for the respect Islam has in this country”.43 Vahed and Jeppie interpret this statement as reflective of the feelings of the majority of Muslims in post-apartheid South Africa.44

42 Within the ANC, Rasool is regarded as the resident expert on Muslim affairs. He is often consulted by both former President Mandela and President Mbeki on issues relating to Islam and Muslims. For a review of the Islamic commitment and vision of Ebrahim Rasool, see “Bridging the Two Worlds of Islam” in Charles VillaVicencio, The Spirit of Freedom: South African Leaders on Religion and Politics (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 234–45. 43 Al Qalam, April 2004. 44 Vahed and Jeppie, “Multiple Communities”, p. 279.

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a. rashied omar Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that, in contradistinction to the apartheid regime’s policy of separate development based on the homogenization of cultures and religions and the privileging of Calvinistic Christianity, the new democratic government has adopted a policy of non-alignment with any religious tradition or denomination. The post-apartheid state has attempted to establish the necessary conditions for the emergence of a culture and ethos of interreligious tolerance and cooperation. The irony however is that while religious pluralism has been driven at the level of government, a commensurate level of interreligious harmony has not been witnessed in civil society. This has been the case largely due to the inability of the once-vibrant anti-apartheid interreligious movement to make the transition from a “theology of resistance” to a “theology of reconstruction”. As a direct consequence of this leadership crisis, more conservative religious formations, such as the Muslimled vigilante group PAGAD, have emerged to fill the leadership vacuum. Many of the leaders of these new religious movements are far more exclusivist in their religious outlooks, view interreligious dialogue and solidarity with great suspicion and have urged their followers to resist the pluralist policies of the post-apartheid government. This chapter has concluded that the effect of this shift towards a more conservative religious leadership in post-apartheid civil society has been a setback to Muslim-Christian relations. In so doing, it has confirmed the findings of contemporary researchers on the relationship between religion and violence, that religious leaders who embrace interreligious solidarity are critical in the amelioration of conflict and the promotion of cordial relations between religious communities. The challenge facing interreligious Muslim and Christian leaders in post-apartheid South Africa is to reinvigorate and strengthen the grassroots interreligious movement.

CONTRIBUTORS Ralph A. Austen is Professor of African History at the University of Chicago and co-chair of the Committee on African and African American Studies. He is the editor of In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Epic as History, Literature and Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) and the coauthor (with Jonathan Derrick) of Middlemen of the Cameroon Rivers: The Duala and Their Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and has also published The Elusive Epic: The Narrative of Jeki la Njambe in the Historical Culture of the Cameroon Coast (Atlanta: African Studies Association, 1996). John Chesworth is the programme director of post-graduate courses on Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at St. Paul’s United Theological College in Limuru, Kenya. He has worked in East Africa since 1988 and is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Birmingham on the use of the Qur"àn and the Bible in Swahili in outreach literature. Éloi Ficquet, a social anthropologist, is maître de conférences and a member of the presidential board at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research interests include Amharicand Oromo-speaking groups in Ethiopia, with a particular focus on Christian-Muslim encounters. He is a co-author of Dictionnaire FrançaisAmharique/Färänsayeñña-Amareñña Mäzgäbä Qalat (Addis Ababa: Shama Books, 2004). Franz Kogelmann received his PhD in Islamic Studies from Bayreuth University in Germany in 1997. Formerly a research fellow and lecturer at Bayreuth University and a research fellow at the German Institute for Middle East Studies in Hamburg, he is now a research fellow at the Humanities Collaborative Research Centre on “Local Action in Africa in the Context of Global Influences” at Bayreuth University. He is a co-editor of The Shari'ah Debate and the Shaping of Muslim and Christian Identities in Northern Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2005).

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contributors

A. Rashied Omar is coordinator of the Kroc Institute’s Program on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (PRCP) at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. An imam from South Africa, he was awarded his PhD in religious studies at the University of Cape Town in 2005. He is the author of Tolerance, Civil Society and Renaissance: A South African Muslim Perspective (Cape Town: Claremont Main Road Mosque, 2002). Philip Ostien is a Reader in Law at the University of Jos, Nigeria. He was awarded his PhD in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and also holds J.D. and LL.M. degrees from the University of Iowa. Having taught at the University of Iowa and practiced law in Des Moines, Iowa, he joined the University of Jos Law Faculty in 1991. He is the author of A Study of the Court Systems of Northern Nigeria ( Jos: Centre for Development Studies, 1999) and a co-editor of The Shari'ah Debate and the Shaping of Muslim and Christian Identities in Northern Nigeria (Ibadan: Spectrum Books, 2005). Patrick J. Ryan, a Jesuit priest with a doctorate from Harvard University, is currently a Vice President at Fordham University in New York. He has lived in Nigeria and Ghana for much of the past four decades and has also taught at the University of Ghana, the University of Cape Coast and the Gregorian University in Rome. From 1999 to 2005 he was President of the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja, Nigeria. James Searing is the Chair of the History Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of Senegal and his publications include West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and “God Alone Is King”: Islam and Emancipation in Senegal; The Wolof Kingdoms of Kajoor and Bawol, 1859–1914 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001). He is currently working on the conversion of the Sereer to Islam during the colonial period. Shobana Shankar is Assistant Professor of History at Lafayette College where her research focuses on the history of Hausa and Hausa-speaking communities in Northern Nigeria. She received her PhD in history at UCLA in 2003 and has published on mission medicine and the native administration in Kano, women’s health in African Muslim societies, and religion and society in the Hausa emirates before the

contributors

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jihad. She is currently completing a book on childhood and conversion in colonial Hausaland. Heather J. Sharkey is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and is currently writing a book on the history of Christian evangelism and Western imperialism in the modern Middle East. She has contributed to various edited volumes and articles by her have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of African History, and Islam and ChristianMuslim Relations. Benjamin F. Soares is an anthropologist at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands, who was awarded his PhD at Northwestern University. He is the author of Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Edinburgh/Ann Arbor: Edinburgh University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2005), co-editor of Islam, Transnationalism, and the Public Sphere in Western Europe, a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2004), and co-editor of a volume on Islam in contemporary Africa. John O. Voll is Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and Professor of Islamic History at Georgetown University. He has written, co-authored and edited many books, including Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), and numerous articles and book chapters on Islamic, African and world history. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association.

INDEX Abacha, Gen. Sani, 207, 246, 270 Abbadie, Arnauld d’, 51, 52 Abboud, Gen. Ibrahim, 84 'Abd al-Qàdir, Amìr, 28, 34 'Abd al-Ra˙màn, Shaykh 'Umar, 83 'Abd al-Íamad, Yùsuf, 72 Abidjan, 143, 153 Abu Rannat, Sayeed Mohammed, 225 Abubakar, Gen. Abdulsalami, 207, 246 Abubakar, Atiku, 270 Abyssinia, Kingdom of, 39 Adeboye, Enoch Adejare, 271 Adediran, Biodun, 7 Afghanistan, 12, 222, 269 Africa: distinctive local syntheses of faith in, 20; European colonialism/imperialism in, 1, 62; independence from colonial rule, 32–38; romantic idealization of, 9; “traditional” religious belief, 8, 11, 15, 145, 260, 262 African Evangelistic Enterprise (AEE), 166 African Missionary Society (AMS), 112 African National Congress (ANC), 282, 283, 284, 290–91 African studies, 4 Africanists, French, 153–55 Afrikaners, 280, 289–90 Ahliyya movement, 70–71 A˙mad b. Ibràhìm of Harar, Imam (Ahmad Grañ), 25, 47 Ahmed, Sheikh Awad Muhammad, 229 Akan people, 199 aladura Christianity, 210–11 alcohol, consumption of, 40, 129, 133, 137, 258 Algeria, 28, 34 Ali, Muhammad (of Ethiopia), 48, 49, 50, 51, 53 Ali, Sheikh Muhammad (of Tanzania), 180, 181 Ali II, ras, 52 'Ali ˇàlib Allàh, Sayyid, 77 All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP), 270–71, 273, 274

Amädé Libän, 50, 51 American University in Cairo (AUC), 63, 66, 74, 81–82 Amharic language, 46, 51n26 Anderson, Norman, 225 Anglican Church: in Egypt and Sudan, 30, 57, 80; in Nigeria, 211, 212, 219; in South Africa, 289. See also Church Missionary Society (CMS) Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936), 76 animism, 60, 64, 68, 84, 224. See also “paganism” Ansar (Mahdist group), 98 anthropology/anthropologists, 3, 4–5, 11, 13, 193; academic specialization and, 8; Igbo people and, 200; sacrifice as issue in, 44 anti-imperialism, 37, 38 antiquity, late, 18, 20–23 Antonian Movement, 27 AOF (Afrique occidentale français), 150 apartheid, movement against, 15, 275, 279–82, 286 Appleby, Scott, 276, 277 Arabic language, 13–14, 23, 46, 154, 209; British colonialism and, 65; Christian literature in, 103; in Egypt, 73, 74, 75, 80; Islamic education in, 146; Islamist literature in, 87; in northern Sudan, 60, 78, 84; propagation of Islam and, 168; School of Oriental Studies and, 82; sharia law and, 228; spoken by missionaries, 63, 93 Arab-Israeli conflict, 78 Arabization, 78 Arabs, 24, 133, 189 Arinze, Francis Cardinal, 36 Asad, Talal, 3 Ashanti, 28 Asia, Southeast, 7, 87 Asmal, Kader, 285 Assiut College (Egypt), 66 Augustine of Canterbury, St., 18 Austen, Ralph, 14 Axum, 18, 22, 25

298

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Ayandele, E.A., 92 al-Azhar mosque (Cairo), 72, 73 Babangida, Gen. Ibrahim, 207, 215, 244–46, 271 Badri, Babikr, 64 Bafarawa, Attahiru Dalhatu, 272 Bagauda, ruler of Kano, 192, 193, 194 Bahr al-Ghazal, 31 Bako, Abubakar, 216 Bakunin, Mikhail, 275–76 BAKWATA (Tanzania Muslim Council), 171, 179, 180–84 Bandia (Senegal), shrine at, 120–24 al-Bannà", Óasan, 72 baptism, 48, 72, 89, 102 Barbushe, ruler of Kano, 190, 192, 194 al-Bashir, Umar, 35, 86 Bayajida (Hausa legendary figure), 193 Bekker, Simon, 290 Bello, Sir Ahmadu, 208, 219, 224 Benin, 196 Benkheira, Mohammed, 41–42 Bergeaud, Florence, 42 Berhanou Abebe, 50 Beri, Aman, 97n19 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) [India], 290 Bible, 46, 56, 89, 108; literal understanding of, 211; Muslim Bible scholars, 14–15, 170, 172; Muslim reading of, 148, 156; Old and New Testaments, 101, 253; vernacular translations in Europe, 201 Bin Ladin, Usama, 37 Bingham, Rowland, 101 Blyth, G. Popham, 30 Bonnke, Rev. Reinhard, 164–66, 167, 271 boundaries, (un)making of, 13, 16 Brenner, Louis, 150, 152 Britain/British Empire: in Egypt, 30, 58–59, 59, 62; Mahdist movements and, 30–31, 96; Muslims of northern Nigeria and, 90, 96; nationalist revolts against, 70; in Nigeria, 104–5, 107, 223–26; Nigerian independence and, 221; Palestine mandate, 76; slave trade and, 196; in Sudan, 59, 62, 65 Brown, Peter, 21, 22 Buddhism, 188, 290 Buganda, kingdom of, 6

Buhari, Gen. Muhammadu, 207, 208, 244, 270–72, 274 Bush, George W., 12 Butros Ghali, Butros, 82 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, 263 Caliphate, 96 Call of Islam, 281–82, 291 Calvinism, 279, 280, 292 Campus Crusade for Christ, 166 Cangin language, 118 Cape Town Interfaith Initiative, 287 Cardaire, Marcel, 154–55 Catholics. See Roman Catholic Church Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), 63 Chad, 1, 110 Chande, A. N., 170, 172, 176, 177; on Malik and Warsha, 178; on Sheikh Muhammad Ali, 181–82 Charlemagne, 22 Chesworth, John, 14 chi, Igbo concept of, 200–201, 203 Chilembwe, John, 19 China, 44 Chivers, Rev. Christopher, 289 Christ for All Nations (CfaN), 164 Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), 215, 271 Christian Solidarity International, 85 Christianity, 3, 14, 89; African movements, 27; African Muslim intellectual view of, 142–44; Africanization of, 33, 36–37; beginnings in Nigeria, 196–202; body of literature on, 5; “bornagain,” 14, 265–66, 270; charismatic, 210, 264, 265–66, 278; colonialism/imperialism and, 6, 29, 34, 91–95, 100; convergence/similarity with Islam, 23, 24, 95–102, 144; difference with Islam on divine law, 253; diversity of religious expression in, 18–19; Eastern/Orthodox, 22; in Egypt, 7, 18, 59, 60, 82–83; in Ethiopia, 6, 13, 18, 22–23, 25, 50; European, 6, 26; fundamentalism in outreach strategies, 159–68; history in Africa, 6; human rights and Christian churches, 264–66; in late antiquity, 21–23; local religious traditions and, 36, 38; Maronite, 43; meat as boundary with Muslims,

index 44–56; as monolithic community, 2; in Nigeria, 15, 210–13; Orthodox, 13, 54; outreach strategies in East Africa, 161–68; post-imperialist, 35; president of United States and, 12; racial hierarchy and, 112–13; in South Africa, 277–79, 280–81; in Sudan, 31–32, 60, 84–86; Western/Latin, 22; world history and, 18; Yoruba and, 10. See also Coptic Orthodox Christians; Jesus; missionaries, Christian; Protestants; Roman Catholic Church Church Missionary Society (CMS), 31, 57, 60, 61, 65, 77; in East Africa, 161–62; evangelization of Muslims and, 63–64; Gairdner and, 62–63; legacy of, 86, 87; Muslim backlash against missionaries and, 71; in Nigeria, 92, 97, 99, 101, 196–97, 198, 211; in postcolonial period, 79, 80 Church of Jesus Christ on Earth, 19 civil conflicts/wars: in Côte d’Ivoire, 38; in Ethiopia, 49; in Nigeria, 37, 38, 214, 270; in Sudan, 37, 60, 64, 78, 84–86 civilization, 22, 58, 62 “civilizations, clash of,” 2, 13, 16; in age of European imperial expansion, 29; civil conflicts in Africa and, 38; irrelevance of, 17–18; Islamism and, 87; West and Others, 12 Clarke, Peter, 239 Clohessy, Father Christopher, 288–89 Cold War, 11–12, 38, 78, 276 colonialism, 1, 6; Anglo-French border, 89, 94, 95, 100, 102, 104; anthropology and, 3; Christian missions to Muslims and, 91–95; divide-and-rule strategy of, 90; indigenous rulers and, 96; policing of religious boundaries and, 102–9; spread of Islam and, 7. See also Britain/British Empire; France/French Empire; imperialism Combes, Edmond, 52 Commercial Code, Ottoman, 222 communism, 38, 181, 205, 262 Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) [Nigeria], 237–41, 247–49, 267 conversions, religious, 3, 14, 24, 87; apostasy in Islamic doctrine and, 92,

299

93; capital punishment and, 88; to Christianity, 36, 38, 43, 64; colonial boundaries and, 89; to Islam, 116–17, 131–36, 138–41, 169; meat as method of forced conversion, 47–52; policing of Muslim-Christian boundaries and, 104; Protestant missionary efforts, 58 Cooper, Barbara, 10–11 Coptic Orthodox Christians, 61, 66–67, 68, 74, 83, 84, 86 cosmology, African, 117, 141 Côte d’Ivoire, 1, 11, 38, 143, 153 Cromer, Lord, 30–31 Crowther, Rev. Samuel, 97, 196–97, 211–12 Crusades, invocation of, 12, 62 Cruz, Juan de la, 213 Daget, Jacques, 154 Danfulani, Umar, 11 da'wa (propagation of Islam), 14, 159, 168–72 decolonization, 76, 82 Deedat, Ahmad, 171n36, 172–75, 185 democracy: in Eastern Europe, 12; Islam and, 261; in South Africa, 282, 283, 287, 288, 292 dialogue, interfaith, 5, 164, 170, 186; Cerno Bokar Salif Tall and, 147; Hampâté Bâ and, 142, 145, 150, 153, 154, 155; notion of encounter and, 4; in South Africa, 281, 282, 286, 292. See also ecumenicism diasporas, 35–36, 190, 191 divorce, sharia law and, 217, 223 Dudley, Charles, 89, 90, 101, 104 Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), 279, 281 East Africa, 6, 14, 20, 159; Christian outreach strategies in, 161–68; Muslim dietary laws in, 41 East African Muslim Welfare Society (EAMWS), 180 ecumenicism, 4, 85, 143, 144, 152, 155–58. See also dialogue, interfaith Egypt, 7, 11, 168; British colonial rule in, 30, 59, 62; Byzantine, 22; Christian missionaries in, 57; Free Officers’ Coup (1952), 59, 78, 82; “late antiquity” in, 18; Muslim

300

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resistance to missionaries in, 70, 71–74; Muslim–Christian tensions in, 82, 83–84; Nasser’s “Arab socialism,” 79; Protestant missionaries in, 13, 58–59, 61–62, 66 Egypt General Mission (EGM), 80 Egyptian Evangelical Church, 61–62, 66, 81 Eliot, T.S., 187 Emirs, of northern Nigeria, 92, 208, 223, 228, 232 England, 18, 201 English language, 65, 78, 87, 177, 202 English law, 227n17, 232, 233, 239, 242, 244 Esack, Farid, 286 Ethiopia, 13, 20, 38; Abyssinia, 39; Axum, 18, 22, 25; Christian identity maintained in, 25; history of Christianity in, 6, 18, 22–23, 50; meat and Muslim-Christian boundary in, 39–41, 44–56; Muslim refugees in Mu˙ammad’s time, 1, 38, 39; Muslim-Christian wars in, 25, 47–49, 54; tewahedo (Christian Church) of, 40 Europe: Christianization of, 18; Eastern and Central, 12, 205; European Union, 257; legal models derived from, 222; Renaissance and Reformation in, 201; Western, 18, 19 Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA), 113 Evangelical Missionary Society, 99n26, 112 explorers, 25, 52 Falola, Toyin, 7, 11 Farag, Fakhry, 74 Faye, Doic, 134 Faye, El-Hadji Abdou, 132–33, 134 Ficquet, Éloi, 13 Figaret, Colonel R., 149 Fisher, Humphrey, 116–17, 141 France/French Empire, 14, 41–42, 89, 97; African revolts against, 95–97, 100, 106; Catholic Church and, 127, 131; in Côte d’Ivoire, 147; decolonization and, 76; French West Africa, 94, 151; Islamic law and, 222; Islamic movements and, 28–29; in Senegal, 119, 120, 127 French language, 130, 146, 154 French Revolution, 262

Fulani/Fulbe people/state , 27, 108–9, 147, 149, 195, 196, 222; beginnings of Islam in Nigeria and, 189; ethnography of, 154; French colonial administrators and, 149; Kaïdara narrative, 155 Fulfulde language, 151 functionalism, 2 fundamentalism, 2, 15, 159, 167, 174, 185–86 funerals, Safèn tradition and, 136–40 Futa Jalon, 27 Gairdner, W.H.T., 62–63, 87 Galgado, Joseph, 163, 167 Gbari language, 90 Ge"ez language, 40n4, 46 Germany, 235, 260 Ghana, 10, 193, 199–200, 209 Ghurdumus, 191 Gifford, Paul, 164–65, 166 Girard, René, 275, 276 globalization, 25–27, 33, 35 glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”), 211 Gomis, Paul, 119 Goody, Jack, 193 Gordon, Gen. Charles, 62, 63 Graham, Billy, 163 Gugua, ruler of Kano, 192, 194 Gumi, Abubakar Mahmud, 208–9, 216, 229, 243 Hackett, Rosalind, 10, 284, 287 ˙alàl meat, 41–42, 43, 44 al-Óallàj, Óusayn b. Manßùr, 213 Hamas, 289 Hampâté Bâ, Amadou, 14, 142–44; early encounters with Christianity, 147–49; French Africanists and, 153–55; Jesus as seen by, 144–47; Monod and, 149–53; pursuit of ecumenicism and, 155–58 Haron, Abdullah, 280 Harun al-Rashid, 22 Hastings, Adrian, 6 Hausa language, 78, 90, 93, 191, 209; Bible translated into, 103; Romanized, 95, 102, 103; sharia law and, 228 Hausa people, 15, 18, 193, 203, 204, 214 Hausaland, 98, 110 Haynes, Jeff, 159 Heckmann, Hélène, 142, 153 Hegelianism, 218

index Hindus, 290 Hizbullah, 289 Hogendorn, Jan S., 95, 96 Hordhoofa Qabsisa Loltu, 55 Horton, Robin, 115, 116–18, 132, 141, 192–94 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 143, 153 human rights, 224–25, 257, 260–64 Huntington, Samuel, 2, 12, 13 Óusayn, ˇàhà, 75 Husayn Jibril, Shaykh, 51 Hussaini, Safiya, 257 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 83, 88 Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhàb, 207 Ibn al-'Arabì, 213 Idahosa, Benson, 212 identities, social and religious, 3, 13; early European contacts, 27; histories of encounter and, 113–14; maternal clans, 138–39; “national” and “tribal,” 33; national identity, 52; race and, 112–13; ritual slaughter of animals and, 46–47 Idris, Isma"ila, 209 IFAN (L’Institut Français [Fondamental] d’Afrique Noire), 149, 152, 153, 154, 155 Igbo people, 15, 188, 197, 198, 199–204, 218 Imam, Judge Kura, 233 imperialism, 13, 25, 26, 28–32, 34, 58–60, 86. See also Britain/British Empire; colonialism; France/French Empire India, 44, 62, 290 Indonesia, 7 inheritance, 139, 141, 217 Inter-Mission Council, 67–68, 74, 75 Inusa, Yarima (Samuila), 89, 90, 114; biography, 93–95, 95–96; Christian missionaries and, 99–100, 101–2; European colonial officials and, 104–8; family of, 108–11; Mahdist movement and, 96–97, 99; travels of, 102–4; Wushishi station assignment and, 111–13 Iran, 21, 62, 204, 209, 243 Iraq, 12, 260 'Ìsà ( Jesus), 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106 Isawa people, 98 Islam, 3, 10, 14, 15, 89; anthropology of, 5; apostasy condemned by, 92, 93; beginnings in Nigeria, 189–96; body of literature on, 5; “clash of

301

civilizations” hypothesis and, 17; Cold War and, 11; convergence/ similarity with Christianity, 23, 24, 95–102, 144; conversion to, 116–17, 131–36, 138–41, 169; da'wa (outreach) in East Africa, 168–72; dietary restrictions on meat, 41–44; difference with Christianity on divine law, 253; diversity of religious expression in, 19–20; ecumenical presentation of, 147; expansion of, 23; in late antiquity, 21–23; local African cultures and, 26; “national” identity and, 33, 36; Safèn funeral customs and, 136–40; in Senegal, 115, 124; Shi'a, 42–43, 179, 204, 209; as state religion, 215; Sunni, 72, 87, 203, 206; trade networks and, 24, 25; “traditional” African religions and, 24, 128, 134, 138, 189–96, 195; as transnational element, 35, 37; Wahhàbì (Reformist), 154, 168, 207–8, 208, 258. See also Mahdism; Mu˙ammad, Prophet; Muslims; sharia law, in Nigeria; Tijàniyya Islamic Foundation (Nairobi), 177–78, 181, 182–83 Islamic Party of Kenya (IPK), 168 Islamic studies, 5, 80 Islamism, 83, 86, 274; Muslim Brotherhood, 72; resistance to Christian missionaries, 58, 59, 60, 70, 87 Islamization, 24, 25, 43, 61, 194 Israel, 76, 81, 155 Iyasu, King of Ethiopia, 53 jàhiliyya (state of ignorance of Islam), 132, 181–82 Jamà'at-i Islàmì (Party of Islam), 177 Jaaraa Abbaa Gadaa, 54 Jeppie, Shamil, 278, 284, 291 Jesus, 98, 99, 103; African Muslim view of, 142, 143, 144–47, 156; divinity of, 14, 171; Mu˙ammad in relation to, 177; Muslim outreach and, 171–72; as quintessence of Christian faith, 188; second coming of Christ, 97, 211; SIM teachings about, 101–2. See also Christianity and 'Ìsà Jésus vu par un musulman (Hampâté Bâ), 142, 143, 146 Jews/Judaism, 21, 56n40, 58, 79, 145,

302

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153; Christian outreach in East Africa and, 161; ecumenical movement and, 155; sacred law of Old Testament and, 253 jihad, 25, 27, 195; in Egypt, 83; in Ethiopia, 47; in French West Africa, 154; Islamism and, 83; Mahdi movement (Sudan), 62; in Nigeria, 207, 218, 222 John Paul II, Pope, 36 John XXIII, Pope, 155, 265 Jooba people, 119, 123 Jos Plateau region (Nigeria), 38, 114 Journal of Religion in Africa, 5 Juba Conference (1947), 78 Julian of Norwich, 213 Jumbe, Aboud, 182 JUWAKITA (Society of Muslim Preachers of Tanzania), 160, 170 Kanafani-Zahar, Aïda, 42 Kanajeji, ruler of Kano, 195 Kanem-Borno, 189 Kano, Nigeria, 188, 190–96; Emir of, 92, 99; Hausa Muslims of, 203, 204; sarkinate, 209; School of Arabic Studies, 229; tensions in Muslim community, 206–7 Kano Chronicle (KC), 190–96 Kawemba, Ustadh, 172, 173, 175 Kenya, 1, 160–68, 174–75 khat, 40 Khatmiyyah (Sufi order), 35 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 204 Kierkegaard, Søren, 218 Kimbangu, Simon, 19 Kimpa Vita, Dona Beatriz, 27 Kinondoni Muslim Seminary, 180–81 Kitchener, Lord Horatio, 30 Kogelmann, Franz, 15 Kongo, Kingdom of, 27 Lacunza Balda, Justo, 173 Lawal, Amina, 257 Lebanon, 41, 42–43, 76, 215n60 LeBlanc, Marie Nathalie, 11 Lebu people, 118, 124, 126, 128, 139 Lejeune, Father Leon Alexandre, 198, 199 Levtzion, Nehemia, 6 Lewis, Bernard, 2 Libya, 168, 225 Lielde, Anne, 290

Lincoln, Bruce, 276–77, 290 Linden, Ian, 98 Lobban, Richard, 23 Locke, John, 262 Lodhi, Abdulaziz Y., 179 Lovejoy, Paul, 95, 96 Ludwig, F., 163, 164, 167 Lugard, Frederick, 90, 208 Lutz, Father Joseph, 197, 198 Mahdi, Sudanese, 28, 62, 70, 98 al-Mahdì, Mu˙ammad A˙mad, 34 Mahdism, 30, 35, 94, 95–99, 106 Mai Tatsine, 207 Maina, K.N., 168 Makarfi, Ahmed Mohammed, 273 Malawi, 43–44 Mali, 147, 153, 164 Mali diaspora, 190, 191 Malik, Muhammad Hussein, 176–81, 183–84 Malima, Kighoma, 184 Mande people/culture, 124, 147, 189 Mandela, Nelson, 282, 283–84 Manßùr, Kàmil, 73–74 al-Maràghì, Mu߆afà, 72 Mariamu Popenguine (Mary of Popenguine), 126 marriage, 132, 134–35, 217, 223, 264 Marwa, Mu˙ammad, 205–6 Marxism, 83 Massignon, Louis, 145, 150, 151, 152, 154 matrilineal clans, 118, 122, 132, 135, 138–39, 141 al-Mawdùdì, Abù l-'Alà", 177–79, 183, 184–85 Mbeki, Thabo, 284 meat, prohibition on sharing, 13, 41; forced conversion and, 47–52; incorporation of faith and, 46–47; Muslim dietary law and, 41–44; secularism and, 52–53 Mecca, 1, 22–23, 39, 42, 46, 206 media technologies, 10–11, 13, 260, 284–85, 289 Mediterranean world, 21, 23 Menilek, King of Shäwa, 48–50, 52, 53 Middle Belt (Nigeria), 91 Middle East, 19, 21, 23, 78, 187 mihadhara (public debates), 168–72, 185

index Mikaél, ras, 51, 53 millenialism: Christian, 12, 101; Islamic, 97–98, 106, 205 Miller, Walter, 92, 101 missionaries, Christian, 11, 13; African missionaries, 37; African traditions and, 19; British colonial officials and, 100–101; Byzantine, 22; Catholic, 198–99, 200–202; in early modern period, 27; in East Africa, 160, 185; European imperialism and, 27, 28, 29; French Catholic, 131, 148, 197; German, 162; history of, 61–69; humanitarian aid and, 69; imperialism and, 36; in independent African states, 34; “inter-mission” movement, 67–68; legacy of, 86–88; Muslim backlash against, 59; in Nigeria, 89–92, 94, 97, 99–103, 107–14; in postcolonial period, 79–86, 84; “sphere system” and, 65; territorial spheres of operation, 31 See also Anglican Church; Church Missionary Society (CMS); Protestants; Roman Catholic Church missionaries, Muslim, 139, 140–41 Mlahagwa, J.R., 163 modernization, 35, 61 Mohammed, Gen. Murtala, 236–37 Moi, Daniel T. Arap, 160 Mombasa, Kenya, 161, 162, 167–68 Monod, Théodore, 148, 149–55, 156 monotheism, 21, 23, 145, 196 Montreux Convention (1936), 76 Moses (Biblical), 188 mosques, 38, 42, 173, 174, 175, 289–90 Mott, John R., 58 Mourides, 35–36 Mubarak, Hosni, 59, 82, 83 Mu˙ammad, Prophet, 1, 22–23; Jesus in relation to, 144, 171–72, 177; prophetic authority, 98, 99; as quintessence of Muslim faith, 188. See also Islam; Muslims Mu˙ammad 'Abdallàh Óasan (“Mad Mullah”), 28, 34, 53 Muiru, Pius, 167 Mulinde, Umar, 43 Muluzi, Bakili, 44 Muslim Brotherhood, 35, 72, 77–78, 177 Muslim Converts’ Welfare Bureau, 69

303

Muslim Students’ Association of the University of Dar es Salaam (MSAUD), 173, 179 Muslim–Christian encounters, 1–16, 19; in anti-apartheid struggle, 279–82; “clash of civilizations” hypothesis and, 17–18; in colonial era, 147–49; definition of terms, 18–20; in early modern period, 25–27; in East Africa, 168–72, 185–86; ecumenical movement and, 155–58; in era of independence and globalization, 32–38; in European imperial age, 28–32; in late antiquity, 20–23; sharia debate in Nigeria and, 258–59; “syncretism” and, 145; wars and violent conflicts, 25, 38, 268–69 Muslims, Christian missionaries and, 11, 68–69, 70–78, 91–95; converts to Christianity, 8, 73, 88, 89, 93; diasporas and Muslim identities, 35–36; in East Africa, 6; in Egypt, 59; European Christians and, 26; inner tensions in Nigeria, 205–10; intellectuals, 14, 31, 142, 175, 261; meat as boundary with Christians, 44–56; merchants, 25; as monolithic community, 2; as the Others, 12; resistance to European imperialism, 28–29; in South Africa, 278–82, 284–85, 289–91; in Sudan, 30–32. See also Islam; sharia law, in Nigeria mysticism, Islamic, 150, 151 Nairobi, Kenya, 163 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 59, 78, 79, 81–82 nation-state, 33, 276–77 National Forum of Religious Leaders (NLRF) [South Africa], 284 National Islamic Front (NIF), 35, 72 nationalism, 34, 36, 37, 54; backlash against missionaries and, 58, 59, 60, 70; women and, 77–78 natural law, 262 N’Dione, Babacar, 116, 121; break with Catholic Church, 131, 140; as Catholic, 125; initiation into Tijàniyya order, 124; on Safèn traditions, 132, 133, 138, 139 Ndoye, Guillaume, 126, 127, 128; on traditional spirit beliefs, 130–31; work for Catholic Church, 129–30, 131

304

index

Ngariba, Mussa Fundi, 173, 175 Niasse, Ibràhìm, 208 Niger, 11, 89 Niger-Benue peoples, 189 Niger expedition (1841), 196 Nigeria, 1, 9, 164; Biafran conflict (1960s), 37, 214; British colonial rule in, 14, 90, 96, 104–5, 107, 223–26; Christian beginnings in, 196–202; Christian missions to Muslims in, 91–95; civil war in, 37, 38, 214, 270; elections in, 204, 256–60, 269–74; Fourth Republic, 217; Hausa-Fulani elite, 206, 271; independence (1960), 221, 224, 227, 253; inner tensions of Muslim community, 205–10; military rule in, 203, 206, 207, 214, 244–45, 251, 256; Miss World beauty contest, violence over, 269, 273; Muslim beginnings in, 189–96, 217–18; Muslims and Christians at cross-purposes in, 187–88, 202–5, 214–18; Protestant missionaries in, 62; religious conflict in, 10, 11, 15, 268–69; religious conversion in, 14; ritual preparation of meat in, 43; Roman Catholic Church in, 36; Second Republic, 206, 217, 221. See also sharia law, in Nigeria Nile Valley, 22, 23, 88; British imperialism in, 86; Islamization in, 24, 25; Protestant missionaries in, 57–58, 62, 67, 74, 87 Njozi, Hamza, 173 Nuba people, 60, 76 Nubia, 18, 22, 23, 24 Numayri, Ja"far, 85 numerology, 146, 153 Nupe country (Nigeria), 97, 99 Nyerere, Julius, 182 Nyumba kwa Nyumba (House to House Ministries), 163 Obasanjo, Olesogun, 213, 214, 237, 270, 271, 274 Oded, Arye, 173 Okadigbo, Chuba, 271 Omar, Rashied, 15 Omari, Cuthbert, 173–74 Onitsha, Nigeria, 197–200 Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), 215–16

Orientalism, 6 Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), 54 Oromo people, 47–48, 53–56 Osborn, T.L., 163 Ostien, Philip, 15 Ottoman Empire, 25, 53, 222 PAGAD. See People Against Gangsterism and Drugs “paganism,” 24, 48, 54, 90; Catholic missionaries and, 132; in East Africa, 161; Greco-Roman, 22; in West Africa, 191. See also animism Pakistan, 225, 243 Palestine, 76 Paraguay, 197 Peale, Norman Vincent, 213 Peel, J.D.Y., 9–10 Pentecostalism, 36, 163, 211; demonization of Islam, 265–66; Nigerian elections and, 271, 274; in South Africa, 278 People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD), 288–89, 292 People’s Democratic Party (PDP) [Nigeria], 256, 270, 271, 273 Persian Empire, 21 Philippines, 7 Pinet-Laprade, Jean, 120, 121 Pittway, R., 162 Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (Rome), 4 Popenguine, Senegal, 115–16, 118, 119, 120, 124–26, 141 Portugal/Portuguese empire, 25, 26, 196 Pouwels, Randall, 6 Presbyterians, 31, 36, 57, 61; archives of, 65, 66; evangelization of Muslims and, 63; legacy of, 86, 87; Muslim backlash against missionaries and, 73; in postcolonial period, 80, 81 Présence Africaine, 155 prophecy, 98 Protestants, 19, 54, 83; in East Africa, 160; human rights and, 264–65; missionaries in Egypt and Sudan, 57–58; ritual preparation of meat and, 43; theologians, 4; in West Africa, 197. See also Anglican Church; Pentecostalism; Presbyterians

index qà∂ì courts, 222, 223, 229 Qàdiriyya (Sufi order), 147, 204, 207, 208 al-Qaeda, 37 Qibla, movement of South Africa, 288 Qur"àn, 15, 76, 89, 177, 216; BAKWATA and, 181; Christian Biblical tradition and, 144; Christian rejection of, 145; dietary laws in, 41, 46; Fàti˙a (opening sùra), 142, 146; funeral traditions and, 138; human rights and, 263, 264; on jàhiliyya (state of ignorance of Islam), 132; Jesus and, 98; memorization of, 124; Muslim Writers’ Workshop and, 175, 179; Qur"ànic schools/studies, 146, 175, 177, 180, 184; sarkinate of Kano and, 195; sharia law and, 224 Qu†b, Sayyid, 177, 178, 184 race/racism, 95, 112–13, 265, 282 Rajab, M., 179 Rasool, Ebrahim, 286, 291 Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), 37 religion: African “traditional,” 8, 11, 15, 145, 260, 262; dietary prohibitions, 40, 41; human rights and, 260–61; politics and, 252, 253, 255, 273; religious studies, 5; ritual preparation of meat as boundary, 41–44; secular nationalism and, 35; spirit shrines, 120–24; state and, 267, 283–85; “tolerance” and, 2; violent conflict and, 1, 275–77. See also animism; Christianity; conversions, religious; Islam; “paganism”; theology/ theologians Richardson, S.S., 247 Rift Valley, 25 Roberts, Oral, 163 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 74 Rodinson, Maxime, 41 Roman Catholic Church, 4, 14, 174; dialogue movement of, 142–43, 150, 155; in East Africa, 160; in French West Africa, 148; human rights and, 264–65; Latin Mass, 19; missionary activity in Africa, 31, 36, 57–58, 68;

305

in Nigeria, 197, 198; ritual preparation of meat and, 43; in Senegal, 115–16, 119, 124–31, 141; theologians, 4. See also Vatican II Council Roman Empire, 21 Rufà'a (Sudan), girls’ school in, 64 Ryan, Patrick, 15 Saafi-Saafi language, 118 sacrifice, 44, 275–76 Sadat, Anwar, 59, 82, 83 Saeed, Asma"u, 98 Safèn people (Senegal), 115, 118–20, 121, 122; absence of kings and government, 135; Bandia shrine and, 122, 123–24; conversion to Islam by, 116–17, 132–36; funeral traditions, 136–40; linguistic border with Sereer Siin-Siin speakers, 126; traditional religious beliefs, 130 Sahara region, 24 Said, Mohamed, 175, 182, 184 Samande, Hannatu, 93–94n12 Sani, Gov. Ahmad, 217, 221, 257, 272 Sanneh, Lamin, 5, 8–9, 98 Sanusi, Sanusi Lamido, 258 Sanùsiyya (Sufi order), 28 Sassanian (Persian) Empire, 21 Satiru Rebellion (West Africa), 95–97 Saudi Arabia, 168, 204, 206, 207–8, 216, 222 School of Oriental Studies (SOS), 63, 82 Searing, James, 14 secularism, 56, 266–68 Senegal, 14, 35; Bandia spirit shrine, 120–24; colonial period in, 118–20; conversion to Islam in, 131–36; Roman Catholic Church in, 124–31 September 11, 2001, attacks, 12, 276 Sereer Siin-Siin speakers, 14, 118, 124, 126 Shagari, Shehu, 205, 207 Shaibu (Mahdist cleric), 95–98 Shanahan, Father Joseph, 198–99, 200–202 Shankar, Shobana, 14 sharia law, in Egypt and Sudan, 25, 72, 77, 243 sharia law, in Nigeria, 15, 214–15, 217, 221, 231–33; alkalis’ courts,

306

index

214, 223, 228–29, 252; British colonial rule and, 223–26; Christian opposition to, 224, 239, 240, 242–43, 245, 248, 252–55; civil law, 223, 228, 231, 233, 241, 250; criminal law, 223, 227, 247, 250, 252, 253, 258; debacle of 1979, 221, 238–43, 247, 254; “Delegation Clause” and, 249–50, 252; elections of 2003 and, 256–60, 269–74; High Court and, 230–31; human rights and, 260–64; Islamic law in North before independence, 222–24; Muslim discontent after debacle of 1979, 243–48, 248; personal/family law, 222, 229, 233, 234, 235, 237, 241, 242, 244, 248–49, 254; revival of 1999, 248–52; secularism and, 266–68; settlement of 1960 and, 221, 224–31, 234, 238; Shittu v. Biu case and, 232–33; state creation and, 234–38 Sharìf, Óusayn, 70 Sharkey, Heather, 13–14, 93 Shenouda III (Coptic Pope), 84 al-Shingeiti, Muhammad Saleh, 31 Sicard, Sigvard von, 176 Siddartha Gautama (the Buddha), 188 Siddique, Kalim, 36 Sierra Leone, 211, 215n60 SIM (Sudan Interior Mission), 89, 94, 99, 101–2, 105, 107, 110 Simpson, A.B., 101 slavery/slave trades: African, 27, 115, 118, 197, 199; Arab, 65; Atlantic/European, 25, 27, 196 Smith, P., 170, 171, 172 Smith, William Cantwell, 15 Society for the Defense of Islam, 72 Sokoto, Nigeria, 190, 195, 217, 218 Solomonic dynasty (Ethiopia), 25 Somalia, 28, 34, 53 Sooka, Yasmine, 286 South Africa, 15–16, 20, 172, 275, 290–92; anti-apartheid struggle in, 279–82; bombing of Soweto mosque, 289–90; challenges in Muslim-Christian relations, 286–87; PAGAD vigilantes in, 288–89, 292; post-apartheid state in, 282, 292; religion/state models in, 283–85; religious demography of, 277–79 Soviet Union, 11, 38, 205 spirit possession, 11

spirit shrines, 120–24, 128, 130, 132; Earth spirits/shrines, 192–94, 195 Sri Lanka, 290 Stirret, Andrew, 105, 108 Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), 101 Sudan, 1, 11, 34, 93, 168; AngloEgyptian Condominium, 30–32, 62; British colonial rule in, 59, 62, 63, 65; Christian missionaries in, 13, 57, 59, 60; civil war in, 37, 60, 64, 78, 84–86; government-backed Muslim militias of, 85; history of Christianity in, 6; independence from Britain, 78; Muslim-North/Christian-South divide, 38, 60, 93; Muslim resistance to missionaries in, 70–71, 76–78; nationalism and transnationalism in, 35; relations with United States, 88; sharia law in, 25, 243 Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/SPLA), 85–86 Sudan United Mission, 101 Sudanese Women’s Union (SWU), 77 Suez Crisis, 78, 79, 80 Sufi orders, 28–29, 36, 145, 147, 151; anti-Sufism in Nigeria, 209; Qàdiriyya, 147, 204, 207, 208. See also Tijàniyya Sufi order Sunna, 263, 264 Swahili language, 161, 168–69, 172–73, 177–78 Sy, Ababacar, 124, 125 Sy, al-Óàjj Màlik, 133 Sylaber (Sylvester), Monseigneur (of Senegal), 126 Sylla, Yacouba, 153 syncretism, 145, 154 Syria, 76 Täklä-Wäld, Desta, 51 Takori, Sani Muhammad, 272 Tall, Cerno Bokar Salif, 144, 145, 147, 148–49; Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes and, 154, 155; ecumenicism and, 156; French colonial authorities and, 150; on Islamic mysticism, 151; poetry of, 152 Tallensi people, 199–200 Tamisier, M., 52 Tanzania, 1, 164, 167, 168–72, 175–85 Tanzanian Fellowship of Evangelical Students, 166 Taylor, Rev. W.E., 161

index Tayob, Abdulkader, 9 Tchunbuburai (god of Kano), 192, 193, 194 televangelists, 167, 185, 211, 212 terrorist networks, 37, 83 tewahedo (Ethiopian Christian Church), 40 Tewodros II, 48, 49, 51, 52 theology/theologians, 1, 8, 114, 218; human rights and, 266; interfaith dialogue and, 4; in South Africa, 286, 292 Thiandoum, Cardinal Hyacinthe, 125, 126n34 Thieyacine, king of Bawol, 122–23 Tijani, Sheikh Ahmed (of Ghana), 19, 36 Tijàniyya (Sufi order), 14, 116, 124, 133, 139, 156; conversion of Safèn and, 140–41; in Côte d’Ivoire, 144, 146, 147; Óamawiyya branch, 150, 154; mysticism of, 201; in Nigeria, 208. See also Sufi orders Tristão, Nuno, 26 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 286 Tugwell, Bishop Herbert, 92 Tunisia, 168 al-Turabi, Hasan, 35 Turkey, 215n60, 222 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 286 Ubah, C.N., 92 Uganda, 43, 44 Ujamaa (Tanzanian socialism), 181 'Umar al-Fùtì, al-Óàjj, 28, 208 United Democratic Front (UDF) [Malawi], 43–44 United Democratic Front (UDF) [South Africa], 281 United Nations, 82, 88, 225, 260, 262, 267 United States, 12, 19, 55, 114, 269; American University in Cairo, 63, 66, 74, 81–92; Declaration of Independence, 262; “gospel of prosperity” in, 212, 213; International Religious Freedom Act (1998), 88; legal system of, 235; September 11, 2001, attacks on, 12, 276; Suez Crisis and, 80 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, U.N., 260, 262, 267 Universal Islamic Declaration of Human

307

Rights, The (Islamic Council, London), 262–63 Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), 148 Urdu language, 177 'Uthmàn dan Fodio, 195, 207, 208 UVIKITA (Tanzanian Muslim Youth League), 170 Vahed, Goolam, 278, 284, 291 Vatican II Council, 143, 148, 149, 155, 156, 265. See also Roman Catholic Church Verona Fathers, 63 Viellard, Gilbert, 149 Virgin Mary, visions of, 126, 127–29 Voll, John, 13 Wafd Party (Egypt), 82 Wahhabism, 154, 168, 207–8, 258 al-Wàlì, Mu˙ammad, 195 Wangarawa Muslims, 194–95, 209 Wangrin (Hampâté Bâ), 157 Wanjiru, Bishop Margaret, 167 Wärqitu, 48 Warsha ya Waandishi wa Kiislam (Muslim Writers’ Workshop), 160, 175–79, 185 “West, the,” 11, 259; assumed Christian identity of, 18; “clash of civilizations” hypothesis and, 17; human rights and, 260, 261–62, 264, 274; Muslim Others and, 12; secular culture of, 205 West Africa, 9, 20, 26, 27 Westerlund, David, 179 Whittaker, Colin, 165 Williams, Chief Rotimi, 237 Willink Commission, 225 Wollo region (Ethiopia), 47, 48–52 Wolof chiefs, 115–16n3, 118, 119, 126; Bandia shrine and, 122, 123; comparison with Safèn, 135; conquest of Safèn by, 124, 140; Islam and, 133; Muslim ceremonies and, 140 World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) [South Africa], 281, 284, 286, 291 World Council of Churches, 4, 265 World War I, 53, 115, 120, 135, 136 World War II, 76, 110, 150, 152, 265 Yaji, ruler of Kano, 191, 192, 194, 195 ’Yan Izala, 209

308

index

Yattara, Almamy Malik, 157 Yekuno Amlak, 25 Yemen, 222 Yohannes IV, 49–51 Yoruba people, 9–10, 199, 203; African evangelists and, 211; Muslims and Christians among, 129; sharia courts and, 214 Yorubaland, 197 Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA) [Egypt], 71, 72 Young Muslims’ Association (YMA), 183

Zaghwe dynasty (Ethiopia), 25 Zàkì, Mu˙ammad, 195 Zamfara State (Nigeria), 15, 217, 272, 273 Zaria, Nigeria, 92, 98, 195 Zarma people, 108–9 Zarmakoy (chief of Dosso), 97, 104, 105 zàwiya, 152, 153 Zimbabwe, 165 Zitelman, Thomas, 54 Zwemer, Samuel M., 73, 87