Download or read book Doubt Scholarship and Society in 17th Century Central Sudanic Africa written by Dorrit van Dalen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century was a period of major social change in central sudanic Africa. Islam spread from royal courts to rural communities, leading to new identities, new boundaries and new tasks for experts of the religion. Addressing these issues, the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī acquired an exceptional reputation. Dorrit van Dalen’s study places him within his intellectual environment, and portrays him as responding to the concerns of ordinary Muslims. It shows that scholars on the geographical margins of the Muslim world participated in the debates in the centres of Muslim learning of the time, but on their own terms. Al-Wālī’s work also sheds light on a century in the Islamic history of West Africa that has until now received little attention.
Download or read book Jihadist and Salafi Discourses in Sudanic Africa written by Amidu Sanni and published by King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS). This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Almoravid’s invasion of Ghana in 1062 until the Moroccan conquest of the Songhay Empire in 1591 that, allegedly, was not “sufficiently Muslim,” Africa south of the Sahara has been exposed to a “purification of Islam” project. This project took two forms, one was the quietist, intellectually driven reformism (for instance, the 15th century Moroccan al- Maghili and 16th century Malian Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti d. 1627). The second was militant Islamism, for which the 19th century, better known as the “Jihadist period,” was particularly significant in Sudanic Africa. Maba Diakhou Ba (1809-1867) was active in the Senegambia, ‘Umar Tall (1795-1864) in Central Mali, and ‘Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817) in mainland Central Sudan (Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroun). Since the second half of the 20th century when the shari'a[Islamic Law] was the rule in ‘Usman dan Fodio’s Sokoto Caliphate (1804-1903), the development became a reference point for Jihadist ideologues in Nigeria. The 1979 Iranian Revolution further served as an impetus for political activism and reformist tendencies in Muslim West Africa, ranging from the moderate to the extremist, even before the September 11, 2001 cataclysm in the U.S. The Yan Izala, a pan-Wahhabi literalist, reformist movement to which Abū Bakr Gumi (1924-1992) served as the patron saint, the spirit auctores, provided a platform for both the quietist intellectual Salafī protagonists of Nigeria on the one hand, and the Jihadi Salafi interlocutors on the other. The most illustrious exponent of the latter category is Boko Haram. This paper gives an overview of the history of Salafi and Jihadist narratives in Sudanic Africa with particular attention to Boko Haram of Nigeria, as it now assumes a wider regional profile in Muslim West Africa.
Download or read book Islamic Scholarship in Africa written by Ousmane Oumar Kane and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting-edge research in the study of Islamic scholarship and its impact on the religious, political, economic and cultural history of Africa; bridges the europhone/non-europhone knowledge divides to significantly advance decolonial thinking, and extend the frontiers of social science research in Africa.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Islam in Africa written by Fallou Ngom and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-26 with total page 782 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook generates new insights that enrich our understanding of the history of Islam in Africa and the diverse experiences and expressions of the faith on the continent. The chapters in the volume cover key themes that reflect the preoccupations and realities of many African Muslims. They provide readers access to a comprehensive treatment of the past and current traditions of Muslims in Africa, offering insights on different forms of Islamization that have taken place in several regions, local responses to Islamization, Islam in colonial and post-colonial Africa, and the varied forms of Jihād movements that have occurred on the continent. The handbook provides updated knowledge on various social, cultural, linguistic, political, artistic, educational, and intellectual aspects of the encounter between Islam and African societies reflected in the lived experiences of African Muslims and the corpus of African Islamic texts.
Download or read book African Futures written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-28 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection are written to make readers (re)consider what is possible in Africa. The essays shake the tree of received wisdom and received categories, and hone in on the complexities of life under ecological and economic constraints. Yet, throughout this volume, people do not emerge as victims, but rather as inventors, engineers, scientists, planners, writers, artists, and activists, or as children, mothers, fathers, friends, or lovers – all as future-makers. It is precisely through agents such as these that Africa is futuring: rethinking, living, confronting, imagining, and relating in the light of its many emerging tomorrows.
Download or read book Realizing Islam written by Zachary Valentine Wright and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tijaniyya is the largest Sufi order in West and North Africa. In this unprecedented analysis of the Tijaniyya's origins and development in the late eighteenth century, Zachary Valentine Wright situates the order within the broader intellectual history of Islam in the early modern period. Introducing the group's founder, Ahmad al-Tijani (1737–1815), Wright focuses on the wider network in which al-Tijani traveled, revealing it to be a veritable global Islamic revival whose scholars commanded large followings, shared key ideas, and produced literature read widely throughout the Muslim world. They were linked through chains of knowledge transmission from which emerged vibrant discourses of renewal in the face of perceived social and political corruption. Wright argues that this constellation of remarkable Muslim intellectuals, despite the uncertainly of the age, promoted personal verification in religious learning. With distinctive concern for the notions of human actualization and a universal human condition, the Tijaniyya emphasized the importance of the realization of Muslim identity. Since its beginnings in North Africa in the eighteenth century, the Tijaniyya has quietly expanded its influence beyond Africa, with significant populations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America. We are proud to offer this book in our usual print and ebook formats, plus as an open-access edition available through the Sustainable History Monograph Project.
Download or read book Sultan Caliph and the Renewer of the Faith written by Mauro Nobili and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant re-examination of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, revealing it to be a crucial nineteenth-century source for history in West Africa.
Download or read book Don t Think for Yourself written by Peter Adamson and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we judge whether we should be willing to follow the views of experts or whether we ought to try to come to our own, independent views? This book seeks the answer in medieval philosophical thought. In this engaging study into the history of philosophy and epistemology, Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom. Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlīd, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtihād, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlīd,” according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought.
Download or read book Biographies of Radicalization written by Mirjam de Bruijn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term ‘radicalization’ immediately evokes images of extremism, Muslim fundamentalism, and violence. The phenomenon is considered one of the evil forces triggering acts of terrorism and confl icts around the world. These notions also colour the way we view Sub-Saharan Africa since the Boko Haram uprising in Nigeria in 2009 and the spillover consequences of the Libyan civil war in 2012. This book aims to broaden our understanding of radicalization. It searches for the deeper wellsprings of radicalization as a force not only negative in outcome, but also pregnant with opportunities and vital to social and political change. The book argues that radical ideas and persons appear primarily with a call for change. Certainly, these cries can turn extremely violent and lead to open confl ict, but could this violence have been avoided if the radicalization and people involved had initially been interpreted differently? Following an opening refl ection by a slam artist on the phenomenon of radicalization, the book presents four case studies from the past and six from the present day. The studies are drawn mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa, with one from the Netherlands. By focusing on ‘biographies of radicalization’ the book investigates the history of the phenomenon, the forms it takes, and the pathways that lead a person to become radicalized. Rather than focus on chronological accounts of events, the emphasis is on exploring personal trajectories and inside stories. What can we learn from these individual itineraries and forms of radicalization? Were violent outcomes inevitable, and how might the calls for change have been turned in a different direction? The last three chapters examine pathways out of radicalization, ending with a report on youth in Dakar who directly engage with problematic issues in society and creatively harness the energy for change without becoming violent radicals.
Download or read book Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies 700 1750 written by Mohamad El-Merheb and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present edited volume offers a collection of new concepts and approaches to the study of mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies. It includes nine remarkable case studies from different parts of the Islamic world that examine the professional mobility within the literati and, especially, the social-cum-cultural group of Muslim scholars (ʿulamāʾ) between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Based on individual case studies and quantitative mining of biographical dictionaries and other primary sources from Islamic Iberia, North and West Africa, Umayyad Damascus and the Hejaz, Abbasid Baghdad, Ayyubid and Mamluk Syria and Egypt, various parts of the Seljuq Empire, and Hotakid Iran, this edited volume presents professional mobility as a defining characteristic of pre-modern Islamic societies. Contributors Mehmetcan Akpinar, Amal Belkamel, Mehdi Berriah, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Adday Hernández López, Konrad Hirschler, Mohamad El-Merheb, Marta G. Novo, M. A. H. Parsa, M. Syifa A. Widigdo.
Download or read book Islam and Blackness written by Jonathan A.C. Brown and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is commonly claimed that Islam is antiblack, even inherently bent on enslaving Black Africans. Western and African critics alike have contended that antiblack racism is in the faith’s very scriptural foundations and its traditions of law, spirituality, and theology. But what is the basis for this accusation? Bestselling scholar Jonathan A.C. Brown examines Islamic scripture, law, Sufism, and history to comprehensively interrogate this claim and determine how and why it emerged. Locating its origins in conservative politics, modern Afrocentrism, and the old trope of Barbary enslavement, he explains how antiblackness arose in the Islamic world and became entangled with normative tradition. From the imagery of ‘blackened faces’ in the Quran to Shariah assessments of Black women as ‘undesirable’ and the assertion that Islam and Muslims are foreign to Africa, this work provides an in-depth study of the controversial knot that is Islam and Blackness, and identifies authoritative voices in Islam’s past that are crucial for combatting antiblack racism today.
Download or read book Nigerian Gods written by Erubu Otobo and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-05-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigerian Gods is an enlightening and sobering review of the impact of the introduction of the three main Abrahamic religions on Nigeria's traditional religions, culture and way of life, viewed through the prism of its eleven largest and two of the smallest ethnic groups. Kome Otobo, gives here a factual and acute description and presentation of the main characteristics of the major ethnic groups in Nigeria - historical background and socio-political structures, demography, traditional religions, differing impacts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and major occupations and modes of existence - which should serve to propel all to a fuller assessment of the complexities of the directions which a Post-Covid-19 World is tending rapidly, ethnically and racially exploited differences jumping to the fore to question erstwhile dominant political ideologies and political arrangements based on them.
Download or read book Solitudo written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.
Download or read book Knowledge and Colonialism written by Siegfried Huigen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-07-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century and an expansion of the sphere of colonial influence in the eighteenth century made South Africa the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans could travel with relative ease deep into the interior. As a result individuals with scientific interests in Africa came to the Cape. This book examines writings and drawings of scientifically educated travellers, particularly in the field of ethnography, against the background of commercial and administrative discourses on the Cape. It is argued that the scientific travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around.
Download or read book Empires of Medieval West Africa written by David C. Conrad and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores empires of medieval west Africa.
Download or read book Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century written by Bethwell A. Ogot and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The result of years of work by scholars from all over the world, The UNESCO General History of Africa reflects how the different peoples of Africa view their civilizations and shows the historical relationships between the various parts of the continent. Historical connections with other continents demonstrate Africa's contribution to the development of human civilization. Each volume is lavishly illustrated and contains a comprehensive bibliography. This fifth volume of the acclaimed series covers the history of the continent from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the close of the eighteenth century in which two themes emerge: first, the continuing internal evolution of the states and cultures of Africa during this period second, the increasing involvement of Africa in external trade--with major but unforeseen consequences for the whole world. In North Africa, we see the Ottomans conquer Egypt. South of the Sahara, some of the larger, older states collapse, and new power bases emerge. Traditional religions continue to coexist with both Christianity (suffering setbacks) and Islam (in the ascendancy). Along the coast, particularly of West Africa, Europeans establish a trading network which, with the development of New World plantation agriculture, becomes the focus of the international slave trade. The immediate consequences of this trade for Africa are explored, and it is argued that the long-term global consequences include the foundation of the present world-economy with all its built-in inequalities.
Download or read book African History A Very Short Introduction written by John Parker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-03-22 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.
