CHAPTER XI.

THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA.

The history of Islam in Africa, covering as it does a period of

well-nigh thirteen centuries and embracing two-thirds of this vast

continent, with its numerous and diverse tribes and races, presents

especial difficulties in the way of systematic treatment, as it is

impossible to give a simultaneous account in chronological order of the

spread of this faith in all the different parts of the continent. Its

relations to the Christian Churches of Egypt and the rest of North

Africa, of Nubia and Abyssinia have already been dealt with in a former

chapter; in the present chapter it is proposed to trace its progress

first among the heathen population of North Africa, then throughout the

Sudan and along the West coast, and lastly along the East coast and in

Cape Colony. [1023]

The information we possess of the spread of Islam among the heathen

population of North Africa is hardly less meagre than the few facts

recorded above regarding the disappearance of the Christian Church. The

Berbers offered a vigorous resistance to the progress of the Arab arms,

and force seems to have had more influence than persuasion in their

conversion. Whenever opportunity presented itself, they rebelled

against the religion as well as the rule of their conquerors, and Arab

historians declare that they apostasised as many as twelve times.

[1024] In the annals of the long struggle a few scanty references to

conversions are to be found. These would appear sometimes to have been

prompted by the recognition of the fact that further resistance to the

Arab arms was useless. When in 703 the Berbers made their last stand

against the invaders, their intrepid leader and prophetess, al-Kāhinah,

[1025] foreseeing that the fortune of battle was to turn against them,

sent her sons into the camp of the Muslim general with instructions

that they were to embrace Islam and make common cause with the enemy;

she herself elected to fall fighting with her countrymen in the great

battle that crushed the political power of the Berbers and gave

Northern Africa into the hands of the Arabs. Peace was made on

condition that the Berbers would furnish 12,000 combatants to the ranks

of the Arab troops, and of these men two army-corps were formed, each

of which was placed under the command of one of the sons of al-Kāhinah.

[1026] By this device of enlisting the Berbers in their armies, the

Arab generals hoped to win them to their own religion by the hope of

booty.

The army of seven thousand Berbers that sailed from Africa in 711 under

the command of Ṭāriq (himself a Berber) to the conquest of Spain, was

composed of recent converts to Islam, and their conversion is expressly

said to have been sincere: learned Arabs and theologians were

appointed, “to read and explain to them the sacred words of the Qurʼān,

and instruct them in all and every one of the duties enjoined by their

new religion.” [1027] Mūsạ̄, the great conqueror of Africa, showed his

zeal for the progress of Islam by devoting the large sums of money

granted him by the caliph ʻAbd al-Malik to the purchase of such

captives as gave promise of showing themselves worthy children of the

faith: “for whenever after a victory there was a number of slaves put

up for sale, he used to buy all those whom he thought would willingly

embrace Islam, who were of noble origin, and who looked, besides, as if

they were active young men. To these he first proposed the embracing of

Islam, and if, after cleansing their understanding and making them fit

to receive its sublime truths, they were converted to the best of

religions, and their conversion was a sincere one, he then would, by

way of putting their abilities to trial, employ them. If they evinced

good disposition and talents he would instantly grant them liberty,

appoint them to high commands in his army, and promote them according

to their merits; if, on the contrary, they showed no aptitude for their

appointments, he would send them back to the common depôt of captives

belonging to the army, to be again disposed of according to the general

custom of drawing out the spoil by arrows.” [1028]

How superficial the conversion of the Berbers was may be judged from

the fact that when the pious ʻUmar b. ʻAbd al-ʻAzīz in A.H. 100 (A.D.

718) appointed Ismāʻīl b. ʻAbd Allāh governor of North Africa, ten

learned theologians were sent with him to instruct the Muslim Berbers

in the ordinances of their faith, since up to that time they do not

seem to have recognised that their new religion forbade to them

indulgence in wine. The new governor is said to have shown great zeal

in inviting the Berbers to accept Islam, but the statement that his

efforts were crowned with such success that not a single Berber

remained unconverted is certainly not correct. [1029] For the

conversion of the Berbers was undoubtedly the work of several

centuries; even to the present day they retain many of their primitive

institutions which are in opposition to Muslim law. [1030] Islam took

no firm root among them until it assumed the form of a national

movement and became connected with the establishment of native

dynasties, under which many Berbers came within the pale of Islam who

before had looked upon the acceptance of this faith as a sign of loss

of political independence. Of these various changes of political

condition it is not the place to speak here, but in a history of Muslim

propaganda the rise of the Almoravids deserves special mention as a

great national movement that attracted a great many of the Berber

tribes to join the Muslim community. In the early part of the eleventh

century, Yaḥyạ̄ b. Ibrāhīm, a chief of the Ṣanhāja, one of the Berber

tribes of the Sahara, on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, sought

in the religious centres of Northern Africa for a learned and pious

teacher, who should accompany him as a missionary of Islam to his

benighted and ignorant tribesmen: at first he found it difficult to

find a man willing to leave his scholarly retreat and brave the dangers

of the Sahara, but at length he met in ʻAbd Allāh b. Yāsīn the fit

person, bold enough to undertake so difficult a mission, pious and

austere in his life, and learned in theology, law and other sciences.

So far back as the ninth century the preachers of Islam had made their

way among the Berbers of the Sahara and established among them the

religion of the Prophet, but this faith had found very little

acceptance there, and ʻAbd Allāh b. Yāsīn found even the professed

Muslims to be very lax in their religious observances and given up to

all kinds of vicious practices. He ardently threw himself into the task

of converting them to the right path and instructing them in the duties

of religion; but the sternness with which he rebuked their vices and

sought to reform their conduct, alienated their sympathies from him,

and the ill-success of his mission almost drove him to abandon this

stiff-necked people and devote his efforts to the conversion of the

Sudan. Being persuaded, however, not to desert the work he had once

undertaken, he retired with such disciples as his preaching had

gathered around him, to an island in the river Senegal, where they

founded a monastery and gave themselves up unceasingly to devotional

exercises. The more devout-minded among the Berbers, stung to

repentance by the thought of the wickedness that had driven their holy

teacher from their midst, came humbly to his island to implore his

forgiveness and receive his instructions in the saving truths of

religion. Thus day by day there gathered around him an increasing band

of disciples, especially from among the Lamṭūna, a branch of the

Ṣanhāja clan, whose numbers swelled at length to about a thousand. ʻAbd

Allāh b. Yāsīn then recognised that the time had come for launching out

upon a wider sphere of action, and he called upon his followers to show

their gratitude to God for the revelation he had vouchsafed them, by

communicating the knowledge of it to others: “Go to your

fellow-tribesmen, teach them the law of God and threaten them with His

chastisement. If they repent, amend their ways and accept the truth,

leave them in peace; if they refuse and persist in their errors and

evil lives, invoke the aid of God against them, and let us make war

upon them until God decide between us.” Hereupon each man went to his

own tribe and began to exhort them to repent and believe, but without

success: equally unsuccessful were the efforts of ʻAbd Allāh b. Yāsīn

himself, who left his monastery in the hope of finding the Berber

chiefs more willing now to listen to his preaching. At length in 1042

he put himself at the head of his followers, to whom he had given the

name of al-Murābiṭīn (the so-called Almoravids)—a name derived from the

same root as the ribāṭ [1031] or monastery on his island in the

Senegal,—and attacked the neighbouring tribes and forced the acceptance

of Islam upon them. The success that attended his warlike expeditions

appeared to the tribes of the Sahara a more persuasive argument than

all his preaching, and they very soon came forward voluntarily to

embrace a faith that secured such brilliant successes to the arms of

its adherents. ʻAbd Allāh b. Yāsīn died in 1059, but the movement he

had initiated lived after him and many heathen tribes of Berbers came

to swell the numbers of their Muslim fellow-countrymen, embracing their

religion at the same time as the cause they championed, and poured out

of the Sahara over North Africa and later on made themselves masters of

Spain also. [1032]

It is not improbable that the other great national movement that

originated among the Berber tribes, viz. the rise of the Almohads at

the beginning of the twelfth century, may have attracted into the

Muslim community some of the tribes that had up to that time still

stood aloof. Their founder, Ibn Tūmart, popularised the sternly

Unitarian tenets of this sect by means of works in the Berber language

which expounded from his own point of view the fundamental doctrines of

Islam, and he made a still further concession to the nationalist spirit

of the Berbers by ordering the call to prayer to be made in their own

language. [1033]

Some of the Berber tribes, however, remained heathen up to the close of

the fifteenth century, [1034] but the general tendency was naturally

towards an absorption of these smaller communities into the larger.

The sixteenth century witnessed the birth of a movement of active

proselytising in the Maghrib, which has been traced to the reaction

excited by the successes of the Christian powers in Spain and North

Africa. This gave an immense impulse to the institution of the

“marabouts,” [1035] and large numbers of them set out from the monastic

settlements in the south of Morocco to carry a peaceful missionary

campaign throughout the Maghrib, renewing the faith of the lukewarm

adherents of Islam and converting their heathen neighbours. [1036] To

this proselytising movement the Muslim refugees from Spain contributed

their part, as has been shown above (p. 127), coming to the aid of the

Shurafāʼ or descendants of Idrīs b. ʻAbd Allāh, who had fled to Morocco

to escape the wrath of Hārūn al-Rashīd. [1037]

From the Sahara the knowledge of Islam first spread among the Negroes

of the Sudan. The early history of this movement is wrapped in

obscurity, but there seems little doubt that it was the Berbers who

first introduced Islam into the lands watered by the Senegal and the

Niger; here they came in contact with pagan kingdoms, some of them

(e.g. Ghāna and Songhay) of great antiquity. [1038] The two Berber

tribes, the Lamṭūna and the Jadāla, belonging to the Ṣanhāja clan,

especially distinguished themselves by their religious zeal in the work

of conversion, [1039] and through their agency the Almoravid movement

reacted on the pagan tribes of the Sudan. The reign of Yūsuf b.

Tāshfīn, the founder of Morocco (A.D. 1062) and the second amīr of the

Almoravid dynasty, was very fruitful in conversions, and many Negroes

under his rule came to know of the doctrines of Muḥammad. [1040] In

1076 the Berbers who had been spreading Islam in the kingdom of Ghāna

for some time, drove out the reigning dynasty, which was probably

Fulbe, and this ancient kingdom became throughout Muhammadan; at the

beginning of the thirteenth century it lost its independence and was

conquered by the Mandingos. [1041]

Of the introduction of Islam into the ancient kingdom of Songhay, which

is said to have been in existence as early as A.D. 700, we have only

the record that the first Muhammadan king was named Zā-kassi, the

fifteenth monarch of the Zā dynasty; his conversion took place in the

year A.H. 400 (A.D. 1009–1010), and in the Songhay language he was

styled Muslim-dam, which implied that he had adopted Islam of his own

free will and not by compulsion, but there is no mention of the

influences to which he owed his conversion. [1042]

In the same century there were founded on the Upper Niger two cities,

destined in succeeding centuries to exercise an immense influence on

the development of Islam in the Western Sudan,—Jenne, [1043] founded in

A.H. 435 (A.D. 1043–1044), [1044] and destined to become an important

trading centre, and Timbuktu, the great emporium for the caravan trade

with the north, founded about the year A.D. 1100. The king of Jenne,

Kunburu, became a Muslim towards the end of the sixth century of the

Hijrah (i.e. about A.D. 1200) and his example was followed by the

inhabitants of the city; when he had made up his mind to embrace Islam,

he is said to have collected together all the ʻulamāʼ in his kingdom,

to the number of 4200—(however exaggerated this number may be, the

story would seem to imply that Islam had already made considerable

progress in his dominions)—and publicly in their presence declared

himself a Muslim and exhorted them to pray for the prosperity of his

city; he then had his palace pulled down and built a great mosque

[1045] in its place. [1046] Timbuktu, on the other hand, was a

Muhammadan city from the beginning; “never did the worship of idols

defile it, never did any man prostrate himself on its soil except in

prayer to God the Merciful.” [1047] In later years it became

influential as a seat of Muhammadan learning and piety, and students

and divines flocked there in large numbers, attracted by the

encouragement and patronage they received. Ibn Baṭūṭah, who travelled

through this country in the middle of the fourteenth century, praises

the Negroes for their zeal in the performance of their devotions and in

the study of the Qurʼān: unless one went very early to the mosque on

Friday, he tells us, it was impossible to find a place, so crowded was

the attendance. [1048] In his time, the most powerful state of the

Western Sudan was that of Melle or Māllī, which had risen to importance

about a century before, after the conquest of Ghāna by the Mandingos,

one of the finest races of Africa: Leo Africanus [1049] calls them the

most civilised, the most intellectual and most respected of all the

Negroes, and modern travellers praise them for their industry,

cleverness and trustworthiness. [1050] These Mandingos have been among

the most active missionaries of Islam, which has been spread by them

among the neighbouring peoples. [1051]

According to the Kano Chronicle it was the Mandingos who brought the

knowledge of Islam to the Hausa people; the date is uncertain, [1052]

as are most dates connected with the history of the Hausa states,

because the Fulbe, who conquered them at the beginning of the

nineteenth century, destroyed most of their historical records. But the

importance of the adoption of Islam by the Hausas cannot be

exaggerated; they are an energetic and intelligent people, and their

remarkable aptitude for trade has won for them an immense influence

among the various peoples with whom they have come in contact; their

language has become the language of commerce for the Western Sudan, and

wherever the Hausa traders go—and they are found from the coast of

Guinea to Cairo—they carry the faith of Islam with them. References to

their missionary activity will be found in the following pages. But of

their own adoption of the faith, as well as of the rise of the seven

Hausa states and their dependencies, [1053] historical evidence is

almost entirely wanting; [1054] one of the missionaries of Islam to

Kano and Katsena would certainly seem to have been a learned and pious

teacher from Tlemsen, Muḥammad b. ʻAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Majīlī,

who flourished about the year 1500; [1055] possibly they were affected

by the great wave of Muhammadan influence which moved southward from

Egypt in the twelfth century. [1056] The merchants of Kordofan and in

the Eastern Sudan generally, boast that they are descended from Arabs

who made their way thither after the fall of the Fāṭimid caliphate of

Egypt in 1171. But there were probably still earlier instances of

Muslim influence coming into Central Africa from the north-east. It was

from Egypt that Islam spread into Kanem, a kingdom on the N. and N.E.

of Lake Chad, which shortly after the adoption of Islam rose to be a

state of considerable importance and extended its sway over the tribes

of the Eastern Sudan to the borders of Egypt and Nubia; the first

Muhammadan king of Kanem is said to have reigned either towards the

close of the eleventh or in the first half of the twelfth century.

[1057] But the details we possess of the spread of Islam from the

north-east are even more scanty than those already given for the

history of the states of the Western Sudan. The mere dates of the

conversion of kings and the establishment of Muhammadan dynasties tell

us very little; but one fact stands out clearly from this meagre

record, namely the extreme slowness of the process. The survival of

considerable groups of fetish-worshippers in the midst of territories

which for centuries were under Muhammadan rule, would seem to indicate

that the influence of Islam was long confined to the towns and only by

degrees made its way among the pagan population, if indeed it did not

meet with such stubborn resistance as has kept the Bambara pagan,

though (dwelling between the Upper Senegal and the Upper Niger) they

have been hemmed in by a Muhammadan population for centuries.

An unsuccessful attempt to convert the Bambara was made by a marabout,

named ʻUmaru Kaba, early in the twentieth century. This man had founded

a new religious confraternity, connected with the Qādiriyyah, and

having failed to attract his co-religionists to it, he turned his

attention to the pagan Bambara, and endeavoured to convert them to

Islam and enrol them in his order. He seemed to be on the road to

success and had already converted a pagan village in the province of

Sansanding, when the chief of the province drove the missionary across

the frontier and ordered the newly-converted Bambara to return to their

old religious observances. [1058]

Where intermarriages with such races as Arabs and Berbers have been

frequent, a steady process of infiltration has gone on, and this, added

to the propagandist activities of those races—Fulbe, Hausa and

Mandingo—who have distinguished themselves for their zeal on behalf of

their religion, would have contributed to the more rapid growth of a

Muhammadan population, had it not been for the internecine wars that

caused one Muhammadan state to work the destruction of another. Melle

rose on the ruins of Ghāna in the thirteenth century, to be crushed at

the beginning of the sixteenth by Songhay, which in its turn was

desolated by the Moors a century later. As these Muhammadan empires

declined, with the wholesale massacres characteristic of warfare in the

Sudan, fetishism regained much of the ground it had lost; and as in the

Christian, so in the Muhammadan world, there have been periods when

missionary zeal has sunk to a low ebb, and Muhammadans in some parts of

the Sudan have been content to leave the paganism that surrounded them

untouched by any proselytising efforts.

In the fourteenth century the Tunjar Arabs, emigrating south from

Tunis, made their way through Bornu and Wadai to Darfur; others came in

later from the east; [1059] one of their number named Aḥmad met with a

kind reception from the heathen king of Darfur, who took a fancy to

him, made him director of his household and consulted him on all

occasions. His experience of more civilised methods of government

enabled him to introduce a number of reforms both into the economy of

the king’s household and the government of the state. By judicious

management, he is said to have brought the unruly chieftains into

subjection, and by portioning out the land among the poorer inhabitants

to have put an end to the constant internal raids, thereby introducing

a feeling of security and contentment before unknown. The king having

no male heir gave Aḥmad his daughter in marriage and appointed him his

successor,—a choice that was ratified by the acclamation of the people,

and the Muhammadan dynasty thus instituted has continued down to the

present century. The civilising influences exercised by this chief and

his descendants were doubtless accompanied by some work of proselytism,

but these Arab immigrants seem to have done very little for the spread

of their religion among their heathen neighbours. Darfur only

definitely became Muhammadan through the efforts of one of its kings

named Sulaymān who began to reign in 1596, [1060] and it was not until

the sixteenth century that Islam gained a footing in the other kingdoms

lying between Kordofan and Lake Chad, such as Wadai and Baghirmi. The

first Muhammadan king of Baghirmi was Sultan ʻAbd Allāh, who reigned

from 1568 to 1608, but the chief centre of Muhammadan influence at this

time was the kingdom of Wadai, which was founded by ʻAbd al-Karīm about

A.D. 1612, and it was not until the latter part of the eighteenth

century that the mass of the people of Baghirmi were converted to

Islam. [1061]

But the history of the Muhammadan propaganda in Africa during the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very slight and wholly

insignificant when compared with the remarkable revival of missionary

activity during the present century. Some powerful influence was needed

to arouse the dormant energies of the African Muslims, whose condition

during the eighteenth century seems to have been almost one of

religious indifference. Their spiritual awakening owed itself to the

influence of the Wahhābī reformation at the close of the eighteenth

century; whence it comes that in modern times we meet with some

accounts of proselytising movements among the Negroes that are not

quite so forbiddingly meagre as those just recounted, but present us

with ample details of the rise and progress of several important

missionary enterprises.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a remarkable man, Shaykh

ʻUthmān Danfodio, [1062] arose from among the Fulbe [1063] as a

religious reformer and warrior-missionary. From the Sudan he made the

pilgrimage to Mecca, whence he returned full of zeal and enthusiasm for

the reformation and propagation of Islam. Influenced by the doctrines

of the Wahhābīs, who were growing powerful at the time of his visit to

Mecca, he denounced the practice of prayers for the dead and the honour

paid to departed saints, and deprecated the excessive veneration of

Muḥammad himself; at the same time he attacked the two prevailing sins

of the Sudan, drunkenness and immorality.

Up to that time the Fulbe had consisted of a number of small scattered

clans living a pastoral life; they had early embraced Islam, and

hitherto had contented themselves with forming colonies of shepherds

and planters in different parts of the Sudan. The accounts we have of

them in the early part of the eighteenth century, represent them to be

a peaceful and industrious people; one [1064] who visited their

settlements on the Gambia in 1731 speaks of them thus: “In every

kingdom and country on each side of the river are people of a tawny

colour, called Pholeys (i.e. Fulbe), who resemble the Arabs, whose

language most of them speak; for it is taught in their schools, and the

Koran, which is also their law, is in that language. They are more

generally learned in the Arabic, than the people of Europe are in

Latin; for they can most of them speak it; though they have a vulgar

tongue called Pholey. They live in hordes or clans, build towns, and

are not subject to any of the kings of the country, tho’ they live in

their territories; for if they are used ill in one nation they break up

their towns and remove to another. They have chiefs of their own, who

rule with such moderation, that every act of government seems rather an

act of the people than of one man. This form of government is easily

administered, because the people are of a good and quiet disposition,

and so well instructed in what is just and right, that a man who does

ill is the abomination of all.... They are very industrious and frugal,

and raise much more corn and cotton than they consume, which they sell

at reasonable rates, and are so remarkable for their hospitality that

the natives esteem it a blessing to have a Pholey town in their

neighbourhood; besides, their behaviour has gained them such reputation

that it is esteemed infamous for any one to treat them in an

inhospitable manner. Though their humanity extends to all, they are

doubly kind to people of their own race; and if they know of any of

their body being made a slave, all the Pholeys will unite to redeem

him. As they have plenty of food they never suffer any of their own

people to want; but support the old, the blind, and the lame, equally

with the others. They are seldom angry, and I never heard them abuse

one another; yet this mildness does not proceed from want of courage,

for they are as brave as any people of Africa, and are very expert in

the use of their arms, which are the assagay, short cutlasses, bows and

arrows and even guns upon occasion.... They are strict Mahometans; and

scarcely any of them will drink brandy, or anything stronger than

water.”

Danfodio united into one powerful organisation these separate

communities, scattered throughout the various Hausa states. The first

outbreak occurred in the year 1802, in the still pagan kingdom of

Gober, which had gained ascendancy over the northernmost of the Hausa

states; the attempt of the king of Gober to check the growing power of

the Fulbe in his dominions caused Danfodio to raise the standard of

revolt; he soon found himself at the head of a powerful army, which

attacked not only the pagan tribes, forcing upon them the faith of the

Prophet, but also the Muhammadan Hausa states. These fell one after

another and the whole of Hausaland came under the rule of Danfodio

before his death in 1816. His grave in Sokoto is still an object of

reverence to large numbers of pilgrims. He divided his kingdom among

his two sons, who still further extended the boundary of Fulbe rule;

Adamaua, founded in 1837 on the ruins of several pagan kingdoms, marks

the limit of their conquests to the south-east; and the city of Ilorin,

in the Yoruba country, founded in the lifetime of Danfodio, was the

bulwark of the Pul empire to the south-west. With varying fortunes the

dominant power remained throughout the nineteenth century in the hands

of the Fulbe, who showed themselves cruel and fanatical propagandists

of Islam, until British administration was established in Nigeria in

1900.

The introduction of law and order into Southern Nigeria has favoured

the propaganda of Islam as in other parts of Africa that have come

under European rule. The Hausa Muslims, some of whom belong to the

Tijāniyyah order, have been able to move freely about the country and

to penetrate among pagan tribes which had hitherto kept all Muhammadan

influences rigidly at bay. In the Yoruba country particularly Islam is

said to be rapidly gaining ground. There is a legend of an unsuccessful

attempt made by a Muslim missionary as early as the eleventh or twelfth

century; he was a Hausa who came to Ife, the religious capital of the

pagan Yoruba country, and used to call the people together and read

them passages from the Qurʼān; he could only speak the Yoruba language

imperfectly, and with a foreign accent he would repeat to his

listeners, “Let us worship Allāh: He created the mountain, He created

the lowland, He created everything, He created us.” He did this from

time to time without succeeding in winning a single convert, and died a

few months after his arrival in Ife. After his death his Qurʼān was

found hanging on a peg in the wall of his room, and it came to be

worshipped as a fetish. [1065] Where this early apostle of the faith

failed, his modern co-religionists have achieved a remarkable success.

During the period of anarchy before the British occupation, the Muslims

were for the most part congregated in large, walled towns, but under

the new conditions of security they are able to reside permanently in

villages, and near the scenes of their agricultural labours, and

Muhammadan influences have thus become more widely extended over the

country. As in German East Africa, the presence of Muhammadans among

the native troops has been found to be favourable to the extension of

their faith, and the pagan recruits often adopt Islam in order to

escape ridicule and gain in self-respect. [1066] In the Ijebu country

also, in Southern Nigeria, a quite recent propagandist movement has

been observed; Islam was only introduced into this part of the country

in 1893, and in 1908 there was one town with twenty, and another with

twelve mosques. [1067] This rapid spread of the Muslim faith is

particularly noticeable along the banks of the river Niger in Southern

Nigeria; a Christian missionary reports: “When I came out in 1898 there

were few Mohammedans to be seen below Iddah. [1068] Now they are

everywhere, excepting below Abo, and at the present rate of progress

there will scarcely be a heathen village on the river-banks by 1910.”

[1069]

There has thus been much missionary work done for Islam in this part of

Africa by men who have never taken up the sword to further their

end,—the conversion of the heathen. Such have been the members of some

of the great Muhammadan religious orders, which form such a prominent

feature of the religious life of Northern Africa. Their efforts have

achieved great results during the nineteenth century, and though

doubtless much of their work has never been recorded, still we have

accounts of some of the movements initiated by them.

Of these one of the earliest owed its inception to Sī Aḥmad b. Idrīs,

[1070] who enjoyed a wide reputation as a religious teacher in Mecca

from 1797 to 1833, and was the spiritual chief of the Khaḍriyyah;

before his death in 1835 he sent one of his disciples, by name Muḥammad

ʻUthmān al-Amīr Ghanī, on a proselytising expedition into Africa.

Crossing the Red Sea to Kossayr, he made his way inland to the Nile;

here, among a Muslim population, his efforts were mainly confined to

enrolling members of the order to which he belonged, but in his journey

up the river he did not meet with much success until he reached Aṣwān;

from this point up to Dongola, his journey became quite a triumphant

progress; the Nubians hastened to join his order, and the royal pomp

with which he was surrounded produced an impressive effect on this

people, and at the same time the fame of his miracles attracted to him

large numbers of followers. At Dongola Muḥammad ʻUthmān left the valley

of the Nile to go to Kordofan, where he made a long stay, and it was

here that his missionary work among unbelievers began. Many tribes in

this country and about Sennaar were still pagan, and among these the

preaching of Muḥammad ʻUthmān achieved a very remarkable success, and

he sought to make his influence permanent by contracting several

marriages, the issue of which, after his death in 1853, carried on the

work of the order he founded—called after his name the Amīrghaniyyah.

[1071]

A few years before this missionary tour of Muḥammad ʻUthmān, the troops

of Muḥammad ʻAlī, the founder of the present dynasty of Egypt, had

begun to extend their conquests into the Eastern Sudan, and the

emissaries of the various religious orders in Egypt were encouraged by

the Egyptian government, in the hope that their labours would assist in

the pacification of the country, to carry on a propaganda in this

newly-acquired territory, where they laboured with so much success,

that the recent insurrection in the Sudan under the Mahdī has been

attributed to the religious fervour their preaching excited. [1072]

In the West of Africa two orders have been especially instrumental in

the spread of Islam, the Qādiriyyah and the Tijāniyyah. The former, the

most widespread of the religious orders of Islam, was founded in the

twelfth century by ʻAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī, said to be the most popular

and most universally revered of all the saints of Islam, [1073]—and was

introduced into Western Africa in the fifteenth century, by emigrants

from Tuat, one of the oases in the western half of the Sahara; they

made Walata the first centre of their organisation, but later on their

descendants were driven away from this town, and took refuge in

Timbuktu, further to the east. In the beginning of the nineteenth

century the great spiritual revival that was so profoundly influencing

the Muhammadan world, stirred up the Qādiriyyah of the Sahara and the

Western Sudan to renewed life and energy, and before long, learned

theologians or small colonies of persons affiliated to the order were

to be found scattered throughout the Western Sudan from the Senegal to

the mouth of the Niger. The chief centres of their missionary

organisation are in Kanka, Timbo (Futah-Jallon) and Musardu (in the

Mandingo country). [1074] These initiates formed centres of Islamic

influence in the midst of a pagan population, among whom they received

a welcome as public scribes, legists, writers of amulets, and

schoolmasters: gradually they would acquire influence over their new

surroundings, and isolated cases of conversion would soon grow into a

little band of converts, the most promising of whom would often be sent

to complete their studies at the chief centres of the order, or even to

the schools of Kairwan or Tripoli, or to the universities of Fez and

al-Azhar in Cairo. [1075] Here they might remain for several years,

until they had perfected their theological studies, and would then

return to their native place, fully equipped for the work of spreading

the faith among their fellow-countrymen. In this way a leaven has been

introduced into the midst of fetish-worshippers and idolaters, which

has gradually spread the faith of Islam surely and steadily, though by

almost imperceptible degrees. Up to the middle of the nineteenth

century most of the schools in the Sudan were founded and conducted by

teachers trained under the auspices of the Qādiriyyah and their

organisation provided for a regular and continuous system of propaganda

among the heathen tribes. The missionary work of this order has been

entirely of a peaceful character, and has relied wholly on personal

example and precept, on the influence of the teacher over his pupils,

and on the spread of education. [1076] In this way the Qādiriyyah

missionaries of the Sudan have shown themselves true to the principles

of their founder and the universal tradition of their order. For the

guiding principles that governed the life of ʻAbd al-Qādir were love of

his neighbour and toleration: though kings and men of wealth showered

their gifts upon him, his boundless charity kept him always poor, and

in none of his books or precepts are to be found any expressions of

ill-will or enmity towards the Christians; whenever he spoke of the

people of the Book, it was only to express his sorrow for their

religious errors, and to pray that God might enlighten them. This

tolerant attitude he bequeathed as a legacy to his disciples, and it

has been a striking characteristic of his followers in all ages. [1077]

The Tijāniyyah, belonging to an order founded in Algiers towards the

end of the eighteenth century, have, since their establishment in the

Sudan about the middle of the nineteenth century, pursued the same

missionary methods as the Qādiriyyah, and their numerous schools have

contributed largely to the propagation of the faith; but, unlike the

former, they have not refrained from appealing to the sword to assist

in the furtherance of their scheme of conversion, and, unfortunately

for a true estimate of the missionary work of Islam in Western Africa,

the fame of their Jihāds or religious wars has thrown into the shade

the successes of the peaceful propagandist, though the labours of the

latter have been more effectual towards the spread of Islam than the

creation of petty, short-lived dynasties. The records of campaigns,

especially when they have interfered with the commercial projects or

schemes of conquest of the white men, have naturally attracted the

attention of Europeans more than the unobtrusive labours of the

Muhammadan preacher and schoolmaster. But the history of such movements

possesses this importance, that—as has often happened in the case of

Christian missions also—conquest has opened out new fields for

missionary activity, and forcibly impressed on the minds of the

faithful the existence of large tracts of country whose inhabitants

still remained unconverted.

The first of these militant propagandist movements on the part of the

members of the Tijāniyyah order owes its inception to al-Ḥājj ʻUmar,

who had been initiated into this order by a leader of the sect whose

acquaintance he made in Mecca. He was born in 1797, near Podor on the

Lower Senegal, and appears to have been a man of considerable

endowments and personal influence, and of a commanding presence. He was

the son of a marabout and received a careful religious education; he

was already famed for his learning and piety when he set out on the

pilgrimage to Mecca in 1827. He did not return to his own country until

1833, when he commenced an active propaganda of the teaching of the

Tijāniyyah order, fiercely attacking his co-religionists for their

ignorance and their lukewarmness, especially the adepts of the

Qādiriyyah order, whose toleration particularly excited his wrath. He

traversed the Central Sudan, winning many adherents and receiving

honour as a new prophet, until about 1841 he reached Futah-Jallon,

where he armed his followers and commenced a series of proselytising

expeditions against those tribes that still remained pagan about the

Upper Niger and the Senegal. It was in one of these expeditions that he

met his death in 1865. His son, Aḥmadu Shaykhu, succeeded in holding

together the various provinces of his father’s kingdom for a few years

only; internal conflicts and the advance of the French broke up the

Tijāniyyah empire, and their territories passed under the rule of

France. [1078]

Some mention has already been made of the introduction of Islam into

this part of Africa. The seed planted here by ʻAbd Allāh b. Yāsīn and

his companions, was fructified by continual contact with Muhammadan

merchants and teachers, and with the Arabs of the oasis of al-Ḥawḍ and

others. A traveller of the fifteenth century tells how the Arabs strove

to teach the Negro chiefs the law of Muḥammad, pointing out how

shameful a thing it was for them, being chiefs, to live without any of

God’s laws, and to do as the base folk did who lived without any law at

all. From which it would appear that these early missionaries took

advantage of the imposing character of the Muslim religion and

constitution to impress the minds of these uncivilised savages. [1079]

We have ampler details of a more recent movement of the same kind,

which had been set on foot in the south of Senegambia by a Mandingo,

named Ṣamudu, commonly known by the name Samory, a pagan soldier of

fortune born about 1846, who became a Muhammadan early in the course of

his career and founded an empire, south of Senegambia, in the country

watered by the upper basin of the Niger and its tributaries. An Arabic

account of the career of Samory, written by a native chronicler, gives

us some interesting details of his achievements. It begins as follows:

“This is an account of the Jihād of the Imām Aḥmadu Ṣamudu, a

Mandingo.... God conferred upon him His help continually after he began

the work of visiting the idolatrous pagans, who dwell between the sea

and the country of Wasulu, with a view of inviting them to follow the

religion of God, which is Islam. Know all ye who read this—that the

first effort of the Imām Ṣamudu was a town named Fulindiyah. Following

the Book and the Law and the Traditions, he sent messengers to the king

at that town, Sindidu by name, inviting him to submit to his

government, abandon the worship of idols and worship one God, the

Exalted, the True, whose service is profitable to His people in this

world and in the next; but they refused to submit. Then he imposed a

tribute upon them, as the Qurʼān commands on this subject; but they

persisted in their blindness and deafness. The Imām then collected a

small force of about five hundred men, brave and valiant, for the

Jihād, and he fought against the town, and the Lord helped him against

them and gave him the victory over them, and he pursued them with his

horses until they submitted. Nor will they return to their idolatry,

for now all their children are in schools being taught the Qurʼān, and

a knowledge of religion and civilisation. Praise be to God for this.”

[1080] It is not possible here to trace the course of his conquests,

which were marked by wholesale massacres and devastation. [1081] He

reached the height of his power about 1881, shortly after which he came

in conflict with the French, who took him prisoner in 1898 after a

series of harassing campaigns. He died in 1900. Though the effect of

his conquests was the destruction of large numbers of pagans who were

massacred by his ruthless armies, while others were terrified into a

nominal acceptance of Islam, he does not appear to have put before him

the same distinctly religious aim as al-Ḥājj ʻUmar did. [1082] He left

to the Qādiriyyah marabouts the task of propaganda, and they with their

accustomed traditions of toleration are said to have done much to

mitigate the savagery of his proceedings. [1083] They opened schools in

the conquered towns, established there the organisation of their order,

and both instructed the new converts and sought to win fresh ones.

With regard to these militant movements of Muhammadan propagandism, it

is important to notice that it is not the military successes and

territorial conquests that have most contributed to the progress of

Islam in these parts; for it has been pointed out that, outside the

limits of those fragments of the empire of al-Ḥājj ʻUmar that have

definitively remained in the hands of his successors, the forced

conversions that he made have quickly been forgotten, and in spite of

the momentary grandeur of his successes and the enthusiasm of his

armies, very few traces remain of this armed propaganda. [1084] The

real importance of these movements in the missionary history of Islam

in Western Africa is the religious enthusiasm they stirred up, which

exhibited itself in a widespread missionary activity of a purely

peaceful character among the heathen populations. These Jihāds, rightly

looked upon, are but incidents in the modern Islamic revival and are by

no means characteristic of the forces and activities that have been

really operative in the promulgation of Islam in Africa: indeed, unless

followed up by distinctly missionary efforts they would have proved

almost wholly ineffectual in the creation of a true Muslim community.

In fact, the devastating wars and cruel violence of conquerors such as

al-Ḥājj ʻUmar and Samory and especially the emissaries of the

Tijāniyyah have caused the faith of Islam to be bitterly hated by the

pagan tribes of the Sudan in the countries watered by the Senegal and

the Niger. Hostility to the Muslim faith has almost assumed with them

the form of a national movement, but still this Muhammadan propaganda

has spread the faith of the Prophet in many parts of Guinea and

Senegambia, to which the Fulbe [1085] and merchants from the Hausa

country in their frequent trading expeditions have brought the

knowledge of their religion, and have succeeded during the last and the

present century in winning large numbers of converts. Especially

noteworthy is the activity of those Qādiriyyah preachers and Muslim

traders who have won fresh converts to their faith since the French

occupation has brought peace to the country; this peaceful penetration

has been facilitated in the French Sudan, as in other parts of Africa

that have recently come under the sway of European powers, by the

consideration shown by French officials to the educated classes, who

are of course all Muhammadans, and by the open contempt with which the

degraded habits and superstitions of the pagan fetish-worshippers are

regarded. [1086]

But the proselytising work of the order that is now to be described has

never in any way been connected with violence or war and has employed

in the service of religion only the arts of peace and persuasion. In

1837 a religious society was founded by an Algerian jurisconsult, named

Sīdī Muḥammad b. ʻAlī al-Sanūsī, with the object of reforming Islam and

spreading the faith; before his death in 1859, he had succeeded in

establishing, by the sheer force of his genius and without the shedding

of blood, a theocratic state, to which his followers render devoted

allegiance and the limits of which are every day being extended by his

successors. [1087] The members of this sect are bound by rigid rules to

carry out to the full the precepts of the Qurʼān in accordance with the

most strictly monotheistic principles, whereby worship is to be given

to God alone, and prayers to saints and pilgrimages to their tombs are

absolutely interdicted. They must abstain from coffee and tobacco,

avoid all intercourse with Jews or Christians, contribute a certain

portion of their income to the funds of the society, if they do not

give themselves up entirely to its service, and devote all their

energies to the advancement of Islam, resisting at the same time any

concessions to European influences. This sect is spread over the whole

of North Africa, having religious houses scattered about the country

from Egypt to Morocco, and far into the interior, in the oases of the

Sahara and the Sudan. The centre of its organisation was in the oasis

of Jaghabūb [1088] in the Libyan desert between Egypt and Tripoli,

where every year hundreds of missionaries were trained and sent out as

preachers of Islam to all parts of northern Africa. It is to the

religious house in this village that all the branch establishments

(said to be 121 in number) looked for counsel and instruction in all

matters concerning the management and extension of this vast theocracy,

which embraced in a marvellous organisation thousands of persons of

numerous races and nations, otherwise separated from one another by

vast differences of geographical situation and worldly interests. For

the success that has been achieved by the zealous and energetic

emissaries of this association is enormous; convents of the order are

to be found not only all over the north of Africa from Egypt to

Morocco, throughout the Sudan, in Senegambia and Somaliland, but

members of the order are to be found also in Arabia, Mesopotamia and

the islands of the Malay Archipelago. [1089] Though primarily a

movement of reform in the midst of Islam itself, the Sanūsiyyah sect is

also actively proselytising, and several African tribes that were

previously pagan or merely nominally Muslim, have since the advent of

the emissaries of this sect in their midst, become zealous adherents of

the faith of the Prophet. Thus, for example, the Sanūsī missionaries

laboured to convert that portion of the Baele (a tribe inhabiting the

hill country of Ennedi, E. of Borku) which was still heathen, and

communicated their own religious zeal to such other sections of the

tribe as had only a very superficial knowledge of Islam, and were

Muhammadan only in name; [1090] the Tedas of Tu or Tibesti, in the

Sahara, S. of Fezzan, who were likewise Muhammadans only in name when

the Sanūsiyyah came among them, also bear witness to the success of

their efforts. [1091] The missionaries of this sect also carry on an

active propaganda in the Galla country and fresh workers are sent

thither every year from Harar, where the Sanūsiyyah are very strong and

include among their numbers all the chiefs in the court of the Amīr

almost without exception. [1092] In the furtherance of their

proselytising efforts these missionaries open schools, form settlements

in the oases of the desert, and—noticeably in the case of the

Wadai—they have gained large accessions to their numbers by the

purchase of slaves, who have been educated at Jaghabūb and when deemed

sufficiently well instructed in the tenets of the sect, enfranchised

and then sent back to their native country to convert their brethren.

[1093] It would appear, however, that the influence of this order is

now on the decline. [1094]

Slight as these records are of the missionary labours of the Muslims

among the pagan tribes of the Sudan, they are of importance in view of

the general dearth of information regarding the spread of Islam in this

part of Africa. But while documentary evidence is wanting, the

Muhammadan communities dwelling in the midst of fetish-worshippers and

idolaters, as representatives of a higher faith and civilisation, are a

living testimony to the proselytising labours of the Muhammadan

missionaries, and (especially on the south-western borderland of

Islamic influence) present a striking contrast to the pagan tribes

demoralised by the European gin traffic. This contrast has been well

indicated by a modern traveller, [1095] in speaking of the degraded

condition of the tribes of the Lower Niger: “In steaming up the river

(i.e. the Niger), I saw little in the first 200 miles to alter my

views, for there luxuriated in congenial union fetishism, cannibalism

and the gin trade. But as I left behind me the low-lying coast region,

and found myself near the southern boundary of what is called the

Central Sudan, I observed an ever-increasing improvement in the

appearance of the character of the native; cannibalism disappeared,

fetishism followed in its wake, the gin trade largely disappeared,

while on the other hand, clothes became more voluminous and decent,

cleanliness the rule, while their outward more dignified bearing still

further betokened a moral regeneration. Everything indicated a

leavening of some higher element, an element that was clearly taking a

deep hold on the negro nature and making him a new man. That element

you will perhaps be surprised to learn is Mahommedanism. On passing

Lokoja at the confluence of the Benué with the Niger, I left behind me

the missionary outposts of Islam, and entering the Central Sudan, I

found myself in a comparatively well-governed empire, teeming with a

busy populace of keen traders, expert manufacturers of cloth, brass

work and leather; a people, in fact, who have made enormous advances

towards civilisation.”

In order to form a just estimate of the missionary activity of Islam in

Nigritia, it must be borne in mind that, while on the coast and along

the southern boundary of the sphere of Islamic influence, the

Muhammadan missionary is the pioneer of his religion, there is still

left behind him a vast field for Muslim propaganda in the inland

countries that stretch away to the north and the east, though it is

long since Islam took firm root in this soil. Some sections of the

Fūnj, the predominant Negro race of Sennaar, are partly Muhammadan and

partly heathen, and Muhammadan merchants from Nubia are attempting the

conversion of the latter. [1096]

The pagan tribe of the Jukun, [1097] whose once powerful kingdom

disappeared before the victorious development of the Fulbe, has

withstood the advancing influence of Muhammadanism, though the foreign

minister of their king has always been a Muslim and colonies of Hausas

and other Muhammadans have settled among them; but these Muslim

settlers do not succeed in making any converts from among the Jukun,

whose traditions of their past greatness make them cling to the

national faith whose spiritual headship is vested in their king. [1098]

It would be easy also to enumerate many sections of the population of

the Sudan and Senegambia, that still retain their heathen habits and

beliefs, or cover these only with a slight veneer of Muhammadan

observance even though they have been (in most cases) surrounded for

centuries by the followers of the Prophet. The Konnohs, an offshoot of

the great tribe of the Mandingos, are still largely pagan, and it is

only in recent years that Islam has been making progress among them.

[1099] Consequently, the remarkable zeal for missionary work that has

displayed itself among the Muhammadans of these parts during the

present century, has not far to go in order to find abundant scope for

its activity. Hence the importance, in the missionary history of Islam

in this continent, of the movements of reform in the Muslim religion

itself and the revivals of religious life, to which attention has been

drawn above.

The West Coast is another field for Muhammadan missionary enterprise

where Islam finds itself confronted with a vast population still

unconverted, in spite of the progress it has made on the Guinea Coast,

in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in which last there are more Muhammadans

than heathen. One of the earliest notices of Muslim missionary activity

in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone is to be found in a petition for

the dissolution of the Sierra Leone Company, ordered to be printed by

the House of Commons, on the 25th May, 1802. “Not more than seventy

years ago, a small number of Mahomedans established themselves in a

country about forty miles to the northward of Sierra Leone, called from

them the Mandingo Country. As is the practice of the professors of that

religion they formed schools, in which the Arabic language and the

doctrines of Mahomet were taught, and the customs of Mahomedans,

particularly that of not selling any of their own religion as slaves,

were adopted. Laws founded on the Koran were introduced. Those

practices which chiefly contribute to depopulate the coast were

eradicated, and in spite of many intestine convulsions, a great

comparative degree of civilisation, union and security were introduced.

Population, in consequence, rapidly increased and the whole power of

that part of the country in which they are settled has gradually fallen

into their hands. Those who have been taught in their schools are

succeeding to wealth and power in the neighbouring countries, and carry

with them a considerable portion of their religion and laws. Other

chiefs are adopting the name assumed by these Mahomedans, on account of

the respect which attends it; and the religion of Islam seems likely to

diffuse itself peaceably over the whole district in which the colony is

situated, carrying with it those advantages which seem ever to have

attended its victory over Negro superstition.” [1100] In the Mendi

country, about one hundred miles south of Sierra Leone, Islam appears

to have found an entrance only in the present century, but to be now

making steady progress. “The propagandism is not conducted by any

special order of priests set apart for the purpose, but every Musalman

is an active missionary. Some half a dozen of them, more or less,

meeting in a town, where they intend to reside for any length of time,

soon run up a mosque and begin work. They first approach the chief of

the town and obtain his consent to their intended act, and perhaps his

promise to become an adherent. They teach him their prayers in Arabic,

or as much as he can, or cares to, commit to memory. They put him

through the forms and ceremonies used in praying, forbid him the use of

alcoholic beverages—a restriction as often observed as not—and lo! the

man is a convert.” [1101] On the Guinea Coast, Muslim influences are

spread chiefly by Hausa traders who are to be found in all the

commercial towns on this coast; whenever they form a settlement, they

at once build a mosque and by their devout behaviour, and their

superior culture, they impress the heathen inhabitants; whole tribes of

fetish-worshippers pass over to Islam as the result of their imitation

of what they recognise to be a higher civilisation than their own,

without any particular efforts being necessary for persuading them.

[1102]

In Ashanti there was a nucleus of a Muhammadan population to be found

as early as 1750 and the missionaries of Islam have laboured there ever

since with slow but sure success, [1103] as they find a ready welcome

in the country and have gained for themselves considerable influence at

the court; by means of their schools they get a hold on the minds of

the younger generation, and there are said to be significant signs that

Islam will become the predominant religion in Ashanti, as already many

of the chiefs have adopted it. [1104] In Dahomey and the Gold Coast,

Islam is daily making fresh progress, and even when the heathen

chieftains do not themselves embrace it, they very frequently allow

themselves to come under the influence of its missionaries, who know

how to take advantage of this ascendancy in their labours among the

common people. [1105] Dahomey and Ashanti are the most important

kingdoms in this part of the continent that are still subject to pagan

rulers, and their conversion is said to be a question of a short time

only. [1106] In Lagos there are well-nigh 10,000 Muslims, and all the

trading stations of the West Coast include in their populations numbers

of Musalmans belonging to the superior Negro tribes, such as the Fulbe,

the Mandingos and the Hausa. When these men come down to the cities of

the coast, as they do in considerable numbers, either as traders or to

serve as troops in the armies of the European powers, they cannot fail

to impress by their bold and independent bearing the Negro of the

coast-land; he sees that the believers in the Qurʼān are everywhere

respected by European governors, officials and merchants; they are not

so far removed from him in race, appearance, dress or manners as to

make admission into their brotherhood impossible to him, and to him too

is offered a share in their privileges on condition of conversion to

their faith. [1107] As soon as the pagan Negro, however obscure or

degraded, shows himself willing to accept the teachings of the Prophet,

he is at once admitted as an equal into their society, and admission

into the brotherhood of Islam is not a privilege grudgingly granted,

but one freely offered by zealous and eager proselytisers. For, from

the mouth of the Senegal to Lagos, over two thousand miles, there is

said to be hardly any town of importance on the seaboard in which there

is not at least one mosque, with active propagandists of Islam, often

working side by side with the teachers of Christianity. [1108]

We must now turn to the history of the spread of Islam on the other

side of the continent of Africa, the inhabitants of which were in

closer proximity to the land where this faith had its birth. The facts

recorded respecting the early settlements of the Arabs on the East

Coast are very meagre; according to an Arabic chronicle which the

Portuguese found in Kiloa [1109] when that town was sacked by Don

Francisco d’Almeïda in 1505, the first settlers were a body of Arabs

who were driven into exile because they followed the heretical

teachings of a certain Zayd, [1110] a descendant of the Prophet, after

whom they were called Emozaydij (probably أمّة زيديّة‎ or people of

Zayd). The Zayd here referred to is probably Zayd b. ʻAlī, a grandson

of Ḥusayn and so great-grandson of ʻAlī, the nephew of Muḥammad: in the

reign of the caliph Hishām he claimed to be the Imām Mahdī and stirred

up a revolt among the Shīʻah faction, but was defeated and put to death

in A.H. 122 (A.D. 740). [1111]

They seem to have lived in considerable dread of the original pagan

inhabitants of the country, but succeeded gradually in extending their

settlements along the coast, until the arrival of another band of

fugitives who came from the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, not far

from the island of Baḥrayn. These came in three ships under the

leadership of seven brothers, in order to escape from the persecution

of the king of Lasah, [1112] a city hard by the dwelling-place of their

tribe. The first town they built was Magadaxo, [1113] which afterwards

rose to such power as to assume lordship over all the Arabs of the

coast. But the original settlers, the Emozaydij, belonging as they did

to a different Muhammadan sect, being Shīʻahs, while the new-comers

were Sunnīs, were unwilling to submit to the authority of the rulers of

Magadaxo, and retired into the interior, where they became merged into

the native population, intermarrying with them and adopting their

manners and customs. [1114]

Magadaxo was founded about the middle of the tenth century and remained

the most powerful city on this coast for more than seventy years, when

the arrival of another expedition from the Persian Gulf led to the

establishment of a rival settlement further south. The leader of this

expedition was named ʻAlī, one of the seven sons of a certain Sultan

Ḥasan of Shiraz: because his mother was an Abyssinian, he was looked

down upon with contempt by his brothers, whose cruel treatment of him

after the death of their father, determined him to leave his native

land and seek a home elsewhere. Accordingly, with his wife and children

and a small body of followers, he set sail from the island of Ormuz,

and avoiding Magadaxo, whose inhabitants belonged to a different sect,

and having heard that gold was to be found on the Zanzibar coast, he

pushed on to the south and founded the city of Kiloa, where he could

maintain a position of independence and be free from the interference

of his predecessors further north. [1115]

In this way a number of Arab towns sprang up along the east coast from

the Gulf of Aden to the Tropic of Capricorn, on the fringe of what was

called by the mediæval Arab geographers the country of the Zanj.

Whatever efforts may have been made by the Muhammadan settlers to

convert the Zanj, no record of them seems to have survived. There is a

curious story preserved in an old collection of travels written

probably in the early part of the tenth century, which represents Islam

as having been introduced among one of these tribes by the king of it

himself. An Arab trading vessel was driven out of its course by a

tempest in the year A.D. 922 and carried to the country of the

man-eating Zanj, where the crew expected certain death. On the

contrary, the king of the place received them kindly and entertained

them hospitably for several months, while they disposed of their

merchandise on advantageous terms; but the merchants repaid his

kindness with foul treachery, by seizing him and his attendants when

they came on board to bid them farewell, and then carrying them off as

slaves to Omam. Some years later the same merchants were driven by a

storm to the same port, where they were recognised by the natives who

surrounded them in their canoes; giving themselves up for lost this

time, they repeated for one another the prayers for the dead. They were

taken before the king, whom they discovered to their surprise and

confusion to be the same they had so shamefully treated some years

before. Instead, however, of taking vengeance upon them for their

treacherous conduct, he spared their lives and allowed them to sell

their goods, but rejected with scorn the rich presents they offered.

Before they left, one of the party ventured to ask the king to tell the

story of his escape. He described how he had been taken as a slave to

Baṣrah and thence to Baghdād, where he was converted to Islam and

instructed in the faith; escaping from his master, he joined a caravan

of pilgrims going to Mecca, and after performing the prescribed rites,

reached Cairo and made his way up the Nile in the direction of his own

country, which he reached at length after encountering many dangers and

having been more than once enslaved. Restored once again to his

kingdom, he taught his people the faith of Islam; “and now I rejoice in

that God hath given to me and to my people the knowledge of Islam and

the true faith; to no other in the land of the Zanj hath this grace

been vouchsafed; and it is because you have been the cause of my

conversion, that I pardon you. Tell the Muslims that they may come to

our country, and that we—Muslims like themselves—will treat them as

brothers.” [1116]

From the same source we learn that even at this early period, this

coast-land was frequented by large numbers of Arab traders, yet in

spite of centuries of intercourse with the followers of Islam, the

original inhabitants of this coast (with the exception of the Somalis)

have been remarkably little influenced by this religion. Even before

the Portuguese conquests of the sixteenth century, what few conversions

had been made, seem to have been wholly confined to the sea-border, and

even after the decline of Portuguese influence in this part of the

world, and the restoration of Arab rule under the Sayyids of Omam,

hardly any efforts were made until the twentieth century to spread the

knowledge of Islam among the tribes of the interior, with the exception

of the Galla and Somali. As a modern traveller has said: “During the

three expeditions which I conducted in East Central Africa I saw

nothing to suggest Mohammedanism as a civilising power. Whatever living

force might be in the religion remained latent. The Arabs, or their

descendants, in these parts were not propagandists. There were no

missionaries to preach Islam, and the natives of Muscat were content

that their slaves should conform, to a certain extent, to the forms of

the religion. They left the East African tribes, who indeed, in their

gross darkness, were evidently content to remain in happy ignorance.

Their inaptitude for civilisation was strikingly shown in the strange

fact that five hundred years of contact with semi-civilised people had

left them without the faintest reflection of the higher traits which

characterised their neighbours—not a single good seed during all these

years had struck root and flourished.” [1117] Given up wholly to the

pursuits of commerce or to slave-hunting, the Arabs in Eastern Africa

exhibited a lukewarmness in promoting the interests of their faith,

which is in striking contrast to the missionary zeal displayed by their

co-religionists in other parts of Africa.

A notable exception is the propagandist activity of the Arab traders

who were admitted into Uganda in the first half of the nineteenth

century; they probably recognised that the sturdy independence of the

Baganda made slave-raiding among them impossible, so they sought to

gain their confidence by winning them over to their own faith. Many of

the Baganda became Muhammadans during the reign of King Mutesa, but

Stanley’s visit to this monarch in 1875 led to the introduction of

Christian missions in the following year, and the power of the

Muhammadans in the state declined with the rapid increase in the

numbers of the Christian converts and the establishment of a British

Protectorate. [1118] But a number of Muhammadans still hold important

positions in Uganda, and it is stated that there is a possibility of

the Eastern Province becoming Muslim. In the rich tributary country of

Busoga, to the north of Uganda, a large number of those in authority

were said, in 1906, to be Muhammadans. [1119] But with this exception

Islam in East Equatorial Africa was up to the latter part of the

nineteenth century confined to the coast-lands and the immediately

adjoining country. The explanation would appear to be that it was not

to the interests of the slave-dealers to spread Islam among the heathen

tribes from among whom they obtained their unhappy victims; for, once

converted to Islam, the native tribes would enter into the brotherhood

of the faith and could not be raided and carried off as slaves. [1120]

The suppression of the slave-trade, with the extension of European rule

over East Equatorial Africa, was followed by a remarkable expansion of

Muslim missionary activity; peace and order were established in the

interior, railways and high roads were made, and the peaceful Muslim

trader could now make his way into districts hitherto closed to him.

The administration selected its officials from among the more

cultivated Muhammadan section of the population; thousands of posts

were created by the government of German East Africa and given to

Muhammadan officials, whose influence was used to bring over whole

villages to Islam. [1121] The teachers of the state schools were

likewise Muhammadans, and as early as the last decades of the

nineteenth century Swahili schoolmasters were observed to be carrying

on a lively and successful mission work among the people of Bondëi and

the Wadigo (who dwell a little inland from the coast) in German East

Africa. [1122] But it was in the beginning of the twentieth century,

especially after the suppression of the insurrection of 1905 in German

East Africa, that the activity of this new missionary movement became

strikingly noticeable in the interior. [1123] This movement of

expansion has especially followed the railroads and the great trade

routes, and has spread right across German East Africa to its western

boundary on Lake Tanganyika, northward from Usambara to the Kilimanjaro

district, and southward to Lake Nyasa. [1124] The workers in this

propaganda are merchants, especially Swahilis from the coast, soldiers

and government officials. [1125] The acceptance of Islam is looked upon

as a sign of an elevation to a higher civilisation and social status,

and the ridicule with which the pagans are regarded by the Muhammadans

is said often to be a determining factor in their conversion. [1126] An

instance of the operation of this feeling may be taken from West

Usambara, which was said in 1891 to be still closed to Islam; the

feeling of both chiefs and people was hostile to the Muhammadans, who

were hated and feared as slave-dealers; but when the days of the

slave-trade were over and an ordered administration was established,

the first native officials appointed were almost entirely Muhammadans;

they impressed upon the chiefs and other notables who came in touch

with them that it was the correct thing for those who moved in official

circles to be Muhammadans, and thereby achieved the conversion of some

of the greater chiefs, who afterwards exercised a similar influence on

chiefs of an inferior degree. [1127] There seems to be little evidence

of the activity of professional missionaries or of any of the religious

orders, but there are not wanting evidences of systematic efforts, such

as those of a Muslim teacher, who is reported to have regularly visited

a district in the Kilimanjaro country every week for five months,

preaching the faith of Islam; his ministrations were welcomed by the

people, whom he entertained with feasts of rice, etc. [1128] In this

zealous propaganda it is noticeable that the preachers of Islam do not

confine their attention to pagans only, but seek also to win converts

from among the native Christians. [1129]

Islam made its way into Nyasaland also from the East Coast, having been

introduced by the slave-raiding Arabs and their allies the Yaos, whose

ancestors came from near the East Coast where they had long since

accepted Islam. It is said that an Arab is now seldom seen in

Nyasaland, but the Yaos constitute one of the most powerful native

tribes in Nyasaland, and look upon Islam as their national faith.

Though there appears to be no organised propaganda, Islam has spread

very rapidly during the first decade of the twentieth century, and that

among some of the most intelligent tribes in the country. [1130]

Islam has achieved a similar success among the Galla and the Somali.

Mention has already been made of the Galla settlements in Abyssinia;

these immigrants, who are divided into seven principal clans, with the

generic name of Wollo-Galla, were probably all heathen at the time of

their incursion into the country, [1131] and a large part of them

remain so to the present day. After settling in Abyssinia they soon

became naturalised there, and in many instances adopted the language,

manners and customs of the original inhabitants of the country. [1132]

The story of their conversion is obscure: while some of them are said

to have been forcibly baptised into the Christian faith, the absence of

any political power in the hands of the Muhammadans precludes the

possibility of any converts to Islam having been made in a similar

fashion. In the eighteenth century, those in the south were said to be

mostly Muhammadans, those to the east and west chiefly pagans. [1133]

More recent information points to a further increase in the number of

the followers of the Prophet, and in 1867 Munzinger prophesied that in

a short time all the Galla tribes would be Muhammadan, [1134] and as

they were said to be “very fanatical,” we may presume that they were by

no means half-hearted or lukewarm in their adherence to this religion.

[1135]

The Galla freedman whom Doughty met at Khaybar certainly exhibited a

remarkable degree of zeal for his own faith. He had been carried off

from his home when a child and sold as a slave in Jiddah; when Doughty

asked him whether no anger was left in his heart against those who had

stolen him and sold his life to servitude in the ends of the earth,

“Yet one thing,” he answered, “has recompensed me,—that I remained not

in ignorance with the heathen!—Oh, the wonderful providence of Ullah!

whereby I am come to this country of the Apostle, and to the knowledge

of the religion!” [1136] “Oh! what sweetness is there in believing!

Trust me, dear comrade, it is a thing above that which any heart may

speak; and would God thou wert come to this (heavenly) knowledge; but

the Lord will surely have a care of thee, that thou shouldst not perish

without the religion. Ay, how good a thing it were to see thee a

Moslem, and become one with us; but I know that the time is in God’s

hand: the Lord’s will be done.” [1137]

Among the Galla tribes of the true Galla country, the population is

partly Muhammadan (some tribes having been converted about 1500) [1138]

and partly heathen, with the exception of those tribes immediately

bordering on Abyssinia who in the latter part of the nineteenth century

were forced by the king of that country to accept Christianity. [1139]

Among the mountains, the Muhammadans are in a minority, but on the

plains the missionaries of Islam have met with striking success, and

their teaching found a rapidly increasing acceptance during the last

century. Antonio Cecchi, who visited the petty kingdom of Limmu in

1878, gives an account of the conversion of Abba Baghibò, [1140] the

father of the then reigning chieftain, by Muhammadans who for some

years had been pushing their proselytising efforts in this country in

the guise of traders. His example was followed by the chiefs of the

neighbouring Galla kingdoms and by the officers of their courts; part

of the common people also were won over to the new faith, and it

continued to make progress among them, but the greater part cling

firmly to their ancient cult. [1141] These traders received a ready

welcome at the courts of the Galla chiefs, inasmuch as they found them

a market for the commercial products of the country and imported

objects of foreign manufacture in exchange. As they made their journeys

to the coast once a year only, or even once in two years, and lived all

the rest of the time in the Galla country, they had plenty of

opportunities, which they knew well how to avail themselves of, for the

work of propagating Islam, and wherever they set their foot they were

sure in a short space of time to gain a large number of proselytes.

[1142] Islam here came in conflict with Christian missionaries from

Europe, whose efforts, though winning for Christianity a few converts,

have been crowned with very little success, [1143]—even the converts of

Cardinal Massaja (after he was expelled from these parts) either

embraced Islam or ended by believing neither in Christ nor in Allāh,

[1144]—whereas the Muslim missionaries achieved a continuous success,

and pushed their way far to the south, and crossed the Wābi river.

[1145] The majority of the Galla tribes dwelling in the west of the

Galla country were still heathen towards the end of the nineteenth

century, but among the most westerly of them, viz. the Lega, [1146] the

old nature worship appeared to be on the decline and the growing

influence of the Muslim missionaries made it probable that within a few

years the Lega would all have entered into the pale of Islam. [1147]

The North-East Africa of the present day presents indeed the spectacle

of a remarkably energetic and zealous missionary activity on the part

of the Muhammadans. Several hundreds of missionaries come from Arabia

every year, and they have been even more successful in their labours

among the Somali than among the Galla. [1148] The close proximity of

the Somali country to Arabia must have caused it very early to have

been the scene of Muhammadan missionary labours, but of these

unfortunately little record seems to have survived. The people of

Zaylaʻ were said by Ibn Ḥawqal [1149] in the second half of the ninth

century to be Christians, but in the first half of the fourteenth

century Abu’l-Fidā speaks of them as being Musalmans. [1150] The new

faith was probably brought across the sea by Arab merchants or

refugees. The Somalis of the north have a tradition of a certain Arab

of noble birth who, compelled to flee his own country, crossed the sea

to Adel, where he preached the faith of Islam among their forefathers.

[1151] In the fifteenth century a band of forty-four Arabs came as

missionaries from Ḥaḍramawt, landing at Berberah on the Red Sea, and

thence dispersed over the Somali country to preach Islam. One of them,

Shaykh Ibrāhīm Abū Zarbay, made his way to the city of Harar about A.D.

1430, and gained many converts there, and his tomb is still honoured in

that city. A hill near Berberah is still called the Mount of Saints in

memory of these missionaries, who are said to have sat there in solemn

conclave before scattering far and wide to the work of conversion.

[1152] Islam gradually became predominant throughout the whole of

North-East Africa, but the growing power of the Emperor Menelik and his

occupation of Harar in 1886 resulted in a certain number of conversions

to Christianity. [1153]

In order to complete this survey of Islam in Africa, it remains only to

draw attention to the fact that this religion has also made its

entrance into the extreme south of this continent, viz. in Cape Colony.

These Muhammadans of the Cape are descendants of Malays, who were

brought here by the Dutch [1154] either in the seventeenth or

eighteenth century; [1155] they speak a corrupt form of the Boer

dialect, with a considerable admixture of Arabic, and some English and

Malay words. A curious little book published in this dialect and

written in Arabic characters was published in Constantinople in 1877 by

the Turkish minister of education, to serve as a handbook of the

principles of the Muslim faith. [1156] The thoroughly Dutch names that

some of them bear, and the type of face observable in many of them,

point to the probability that they have at some time received into

their community some persons of Dutch birth, or at least that they have

in their veins a considerable admixture of Dutch blood. They have also

gained some converts from among the Hottentots. Very little notice has

been taken of them by European travellers, [1157] or even by their

co-religionists until recently. In 1819 Colebrooke had drawn attention

to the growth of Islam in some interesting notes he wrote on the Cape

Colony: “Mohammedanism is said to be gaining ground among the slaves

and free people of colour at the Cape; that is to say, more converts

among negroes and blacks of every description are made from Paganism to

the Musleman, than to the Christian religion, notwithstanding the

zealous exertions of pious missionaries. One cause of this perversion

is asserted to be a marked disinclination of slave owners to allow

their slaves to be baptized; arising from some erroneous notions or

over-charged apprehensions of the rights which a baptized slave

acquires. Slaves are certainly impressed with the idea that such a

disinclination subsists, and it is not an unfrequent answer of a slave,

when asked his motives for turning Musleman, that ‘some religion he

must have, and he is not allowed to turn Christian.’ Prejudices in this

respect are wearing away; and less discouragement is now given to the

conversion of slaves than heretofore. Masters, it is affirmed, begin to

find that their slaves serve not the worse for instruction received in

religious duties. Missionaries who devote themselves especially to the

religious instruction of slaves (and there is one in each of the

principal towns) have increasing congregations, and hope that their

labours are not unfruitful. But the Musleman priest, with less

exertion, has a greater flock.” [1158] During the last fifty years the

Muhammadans in Cape Colony have been visited by some zealous

co-religionists from other countries, and more attention is now paid by

them to education, and a deeper religious life has been stirred up

among them, and they are said to carry on a zealous propaganda,

especially among the coloured people at the Cape and to achieve a

certain success. [1159] This proselytising movement is especially

strong in the western part of Cape Colony. It is said that there is a

movement on foot for the founding of a college at Claremont, in the

vicinity of Cape Town, which shall become a centre for the propagation

of Islam. One of the methods at present employed is the adoption of

neglected or abandoned children, who are brought up in the Muslim

faith. [1160] Every year some of them make the pilgrimage to Mecca,

where a special Shaykh has been appointed to look after them. [1161]

The Indian coolies that come to work in the diamond fields of South

Africa are also said to be propagandists of Islam. [1162]

On account of its isolated position, 220 to 540 miles from the

mainland, the island of Madagascar calls for separate mention. The only

tribe that has adopted Islam is that of the Antaimorona, occupying a

part of the south-east coast; they undoubtedly owed their conversion to

missionaries from Arabia, but the date at which this change of faith

took place is entirely unknown; tradition would carry it back to the

very days of Muḥammad himself, but it is not until the sixteenth

century that we get, in the works of Italian and Portuguese

geographers, authentic mention of Muhammadans on the island. [1163]

From the historical sketch given above it may be seen that peaceful

methods have largely characterised the Muhammadan missionary movement

in Africa, and though Islam has often taken the sword as an instrument

to further its spiritual conquests, such an appeal to violence and

bloodshed has in most cases been preceded by the peaceful efforts of

the missionary, and the preacher has followed the conqueror to complete

the imperfect work of conversion. It is true that the success of Islam

has been very largely facilitated in many parts of Africa by the

worldly successes of Muhammadan adventurers, and the erection of

Muhammadan states on the ruins of pagan kingdoms, and fire and

bloodshed have often marked the course of a Jihād, projected for the

extermination of the infidel. The words of the young Arab from Bornu

whom Captain Burton [1164] met in the palace of the King of Abeokuta

doubtless express the aspirations of many an African Muhammadan: “Give

those guns and powder to us, and we will soon Islamise these dogs”: and

they find an echo in the message that Mungo Park [1165] gives us as

having been sent by the Muslim King of Futah Toro to his pagan

neighbour: “With this knife Abdulkader will condescend to shave the

head of Damel, if Damel will embrace the Mahommedan faith; and with

this other knife Abdulkader will cut the throat of Damel, if Damel

refuses to embrace it; take your choice.”

But much as Islam may have owed to the martial prowess of such fanatics

as these, there is the overwhelming testimony of travellers and others

to the peaceful missionary preaching, and quiet and persistent labours

of the Muslim propagandist, which have done more for the rapid spread

of Islam in modern Africa than any violent measures: by the latter its

opponents may indeed have been exterminated, but by the former chiefly,

have its converts been made, and the work of conversion may still be

observed in progress in many regions of the coast and the interior.

[1166] Wherever Islam has made its way, there is the Muhammadan

missionary to be found bearing witness to its doctrines,—the trader, be

he Arab, Pul or Mandingo, who combines proselytism with the sale of his

merchandise, and whose very profession brings him into close and

immediate contact with those he would convert, and disarms any possible

suspicion of sinister motives; such a man when he enters a pagan

village soon attracts attention by his frequent ablutions and regularly

recurring times of prayer and prostration, in which he appears to be

conversing with some invisible being, and by his very assumption of

intellectual and moral superiority, commands the respect and confidence

of the heathen people, to whom at the same time he shows himself ready

and willing to communicate his high privileges and knowledge;—the ḥājī

or pilgrim who has returned from Mecca full of enthusiasm for the

spread of the faith, to which he devotes his whole energies, wandering

about from place to place, supported by the alms of the faithful who

bear witness to the truth in the midst of their pagan neighbours;—the

student who, in consequence of his knowledge of Islamic theology and

law, receives honour as a man of learning: sometimes, too, he practises

medicine, or at least he is in great requisition as a writer of charms,

texts from the Qurʼān, which are sewn up in pieces of leather or cloth

and tied on the arms, or round the neck, and which he can turn to

account as a means of adding to the number of his converts: for

instance, when childless women or those who have lost their children in

infancy, apply for these charms, as a condition of success the

obligation is always imposed upon them of bringing up their future

children as Muhammadans. [1167] These religious teachers, or marabouts,

or alūfas as they are variously termed, are held in the highest

estimation. In some tribes of Western Africa every village contains a

lodge for their reception, and they are treated with the utmost

deference and respect: in Darfur they hold the highest rank after those

who fill the offices of government: among the Mandingos they rank still

higher, and receive honour next to the king, the subordinate chiefs

being regarded as their inferiors in point of dignity: in those states

in which the Qurʼān is made the rule of government in all civil

matters, their services are in great demand, in order to interpret its

meaning. So sacred are the persons of these teachers esteemed, that

they pass without molestation through the countries of chiefs, not only

hostile to each other, but engaged in actual warfare. Such deference is

not only paid to them in Muhammadan countries, but also in the pagan

villages in which they establish their schools, where the people

respect them as the instructors of their children, and look upon them

as the medium between themselves and Heaven, either for securing a

supply of their necessities, or for warding off or removing calamities.

[1168] Many of these teachers have studied in the mosques of Qayrwān,

Fas, Tripoli [1169] and other centres of Muslim learning; but

especially in the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo. Students flock to it

from all parts of the Muslim world, and among them is often to be found

a contingent from Negro Africa,—students from Darfur, Wadai and Bornu,

and some who even make their way on foot from the far distant West

Coast; when they have finished their courses of study in Muslim

theology and jurisprudence, there are many of them who become

missionaries among the heathen population of their native land. Schools

are established by these missionaries in the towns they visit, which

are frequented by the pagan as well as the Muslim children. They are

taught to read the Qurʼān, and instructed in the doctrines and

ceremonies of Islam. Having thus gained a footing, the Muhammadan

missionary, by his superior knowledge and attainments, is not slow to

obtain great influence over the people among whom he has come to live.

In this he is aided by the fact that his habits and manner of life are

similar in many respects to their own, nor is he looked upon with

suspicion, inasmuch as the trader has already prepared the way for him;

and by intermarriage with the natives, being thus received into their

social system, his influence becomes firmly rooted and permanent, and

so in the most natural manner he gradually causes the knowledge of

Islam to spread among them.

His propagandist efforts are further facilitated by the fact that the

deism which forms the background of the religious consciousness of many

fetish-worshippers may pass by an easy transition into the theism of

Islam, together with some other aspects of their theology, while their

general outlook upon life and several of their religious institutions

are capable of taking on a Muslim colouring and of being transferred to

the new system of faith without undergoing much modification. [1170]

The arrival of the Muhammadan in a pagan country is also the beginning

of the opening up of a more extensive trade, and of communication with

great Muhammadan trading centres such as Jenne, Segu or Kano, and a

share in the advantages of this material civilisation is offered,

together with the religion of the Prophet. Thus “among the uncivilised

negro tribes the missionary may be always sure of a ready audience: he

can not only give them many truths regarding God and man which make

their way to the heart and elevate the intellect, but he can at once

communicate the Shibboleth of admission to a social and political

communion, which is a passport for protection and assistance from the

Atlantic to the Wall of China. Wherever a Moslem house can be found

there the negro convert who can repeat the dozen syllables of his

creed, is sure of shelter, sustenance and advice, and in his own

country he finds himself at once a member of an influential, if not of

a dominant caste. This seems the real secret of the success of the

Moslem missionaries in West Africa. It is great and rapid as regards

numbers, for the simple reason that the Moslem missionary, from the

very first profession of the convert’s belief, acts practically on

those principles regarding the equality and brotherhood of all

believers before God, which Islam shares with Christianity; and he does

this, as a general rule, more speedily and decidedly than the Christian

missionary, who generally feels bound to require good evidence of a

converted heart before he gives the right hand of Christian fellowship,

and who has always to contend with race prejudices not likely to die

out in a single generation where the white Christian has for

generations been known as master, and the black heathen as slave.”

[1171]

It is important, too, to note that neither his colour nor his race in

any way prejudice the Negro in the eyes of his new co-religionists. The

progress of Islam in Negritia has no doubt been materially advanced by

this absence of any feeling of repulsion towards the Negro—indeed Islam

seems never to have treated the Negro as an inferior, as has been

unhappily too often the case in Christendom. [1172]

This consideration goes partly to explain the success of Muslim as

contrasted with Christian missions among the Negro peoples. It has

frequently been pointed out that the Negro convert to Christianity is

apt to feel that his European co-religionists belong to a stratum of

civilisation alien to his own habits of life, whereas he feels himself

to be more at home in a Muslim society. This has been well stated by a

modern observer, in the following passage:—“Islam, despite its

shortcomings, does not, from the Nigerian point of view, demand race

suicide of the Nigerian as an accompaniment of conversion. It does not

stipulate revolutionary changes in social life, impossible at the

present stage of Nigerian development; nor does it undermine family or

communal authority. Between the converter and converted there is no

abyss. Both are equal, not in theory, but in practice, before God. Both

are African; sons of the soil. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man

is carried out in practice. Conversion does not mean for the converted

a break with his interests, his family, his social life, his respect

for the authority of his natural rulers.... No one can fail to be

impressed with the carriage, the dignity of the Nigerian—indeed of the

West African—Mohammedan; the whole bearing of the man suggests a

consciousness of citizenship, a pride of race which seems to say: ‘We

are different, thou and I, but we are men.’ The spread of Islam in

Southern Nigeria which we are witnessing to-day is mainly social in its

action. It brings to those with whom it comes in contact a higher

status, a loftier conception of man’s place in the universe around him,

release from the thraldom of a thousand superstitious fears.” [1173]

According to Muhammadan tradition Moses was a black man, as may be seen

from the following passages in the Qurʼān. “Now draw thy hand close to

thy side: it shall come forth white, but unhurt:—another sign!” (xx.

23). “Then drew he forth his hand, and lo! it was white to the

beholders. The nobles of Pharaoh’s people said: ‘Verily this is an

expert enchanter’” (vii. 105–6). The following story also, handed down

to us from the golden period of the ʻAbbāsid dynasty, is interesting as

evidence of Muhammadan feeling with regard to the Negro. Ibrāhīm, a

brother of Hārūn al-Rashīd and the son of a negress, had proclaimed

himself Caliph at Baghdād, but was defeated and forgiven by al-Maʼmūn,

who was then reigning (A.D. 819). He thus describes his interview with

the Caliph:—“Al-Maʼmūn said to me on my going to see him after having

obtained pardon: ‘Is it thou who art the Negro khalīfah?’ to which I

replied:—‘Commander of the faithful! I am he whom thou hast deigned to

pardon; and it has been said by the slave of Banuʼl-Ḥasḥās:—“When men

extol their worth, the slave of the family of Ḥasḥās can supply, by his

verses, the defect of birth and fortune.” Though I be a slave, my soul,

through its noble nature, is free; though my body be dark, my mind is

fair.’ To this al-Maʼmūn replied: ‘Uncle! a jest of mine has put you in

a serious mood.’ He then repeated these verses: ‘Blackness of skin

cannot degrade an ingenious mind, or lessen the worth of the scholar

and the wit. Let darkness claim the colour of your body: I claim as

mine your fair and candid soul.’” [1174]

Thus, the converted Negro at once takes an equal place in the

brotherhood of believers, neither his colour nor his race nor any

associations of the past standing in the way. It is doubtless the ready

admission they receive, that makes the pagan Negroes willing to enter

into a religious society whose higher civilisation demands that they

should give up many of their old barbarous habits and customs; at the

same time the very fact that the acceptance of Islam does imply an

advance in civilisation and is a very distinct step in the

intellectual, moral and material progress of a Negro tribe, helps very

largely to explain the success of this faith. The forces arrayed on its

side are so powerful and ascendant, that the barbarism, ignorance and

superstition which it seeks to sweep away have little chance of making

a lengthened resistance. What the civilisation of Muslim Africa implies

to the Negro convert, is admirably expressed in the following words:

“The worst evils which, there is reason to believe, prevailed at one

time over the whole of Africa, and which are still to be found in many

parts of it, and those, too, not far from the Gold Coast and from our

own settlements—cannibalism and human sacrifice and the burial of

living infants—disappear at once and for ever. Natives who have

hitherto lived in a state of nakedness, or nearly so, begin to dress,

and that neatly; natives who have never washed before begin to wash,

and that frequently; for ablutions are commanded in the Sacred Law, and

it is an ordinance which does not involve too severe a strain on their

natural instincts. The tribal organisation tends to give place to

something which has a wider basis. In other words, tribes coalesce into

nations, and, with the increase of energy and intelligence, nations

into empires. Many such instances could be adduced from the history of

the Soudan and the adjoining countries during the last hundred years.

If the warlike spirit is thus stimulated, the centres from which war

springs are fewer in number and further apart. War is better organised,

and is under some form of restraint; quarrels are not picked for

nothing; there is less indiscriminate plundering and greater security

for property and life. Elementary schools, [1175] like those described

by Mungo Park a century ago, spring up, and even if they only teach

their scholars to recite the Koran, they are worth something in

themselves, and may be a step to much more. The well-built and

neatly-kept mosque, with its call to prayer repeated five times a day,

its Mecca-pointing niche, its Imām and its weekly service, becomes the

centre of the village, instead of the ghastly fetish or Juju house. The

worship of one God, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and

compassionate, is an immeasurable advance upon anything which the

native has been taught to worship before. The Arabic language, in which

the Mussulman scriptures are always written, is a language of

extraordinary copiousness and beauty; once learned it becomes a lingua

franca to the tribes of half the continent, and serves as an

introduction to literature, or rather, it is a literature in itself. It

substitutes moreover, a written code of law for the arbitrary caprice

of a chieftain—a change which is, in itself, an immense advance in

civilisation. Manufactures and commerce spring up, not the dumb trading

or the elementary bartering of raw products which we know from

Herodotus to have existed from the earliest times in Africa, nor the

cowrie shells, or gunpowder, or tobacco, or rum, which still serve as a

chief medium of exchange all along the coast, but manufactures

involving considerable skill, and a commerce which is elaborately

organised; and under their influence, and that of the more settled

government which Islam brings in its train, there have arisen those

great cities of Negroland whose very existence, when first they were

described by European travellers, could not but be half discredited. I

am far from saying that the religion is the sole cause of all this

comparative prosperity. I only say it is consistent with it, and it

encourages it. Climatic conditions and various other influences

co-operate towards the result; but what has Pagan Africa, even where

the conditions are very similar, to compare with it? As regards the

individual, it is admitted on all hands that Islam gives to its new

Negro converts an energy, a dignity, a self-reliance, and a

self-respect which is all too rarely found in their Pagan or their

Christian fellow-countrymen.” [1176]

The words above quoted were written before the partition of the greater

part of Africa among the governments of Christian Europe—England,

France and Germany—but the imposing character of Muslim civilisation

has not ceased to impress the Negro mind, or to operate as one of the

influences favourable to the conversion of the African

fetish-worshippers. Brought suddenly into contact with European

culture, these have received an impulse to advance in the path of

civilisation, but being unable to bridge over the gulf that separates

them from their foreign rulers, they find in Islam a culture

corresponding to their needs and capable of understanding their

requirements and aspirations. [1177] So far, therefore, from the

extension of European domination tending to hamper the activities of

Muhammadan propagandists, it has to a very remarkable degree

contributed towards the progress of Islam. The bringing of peace to

countries formerly harassed by wars of extermination or the raids of

slave-hunters, the establishment of ordered methods of government and

administration, and the increased facilities of communication by the

making of roads and the building of railways, have given a great

stimulus to trade and have enabled that active propagandist, the Muslim

trader, to extend his influence in districts previously untrodden, and

traverse familiar ground with greater security. Further, the

suppression of the slave-trade has removed one of the great obstacles

to the spread of Islam in pagan Africa, because it was to the interest

of the Arab and other Muhammadan slave-dealers not to narrow the field

of their operations by admitting their possible victims into the

brotherhood of Islam. [1178] Converts are now won from pagan tribes

which in the days of the slave-trade were untouched by missionary

effort. To this result the European governments have contributed by

employing Muhammadans to fill the subordinate posts in the civil

administration (since among the Muhammadans alone were educated persons

to be found) and distributing them throughout pagan districts, by

employing Muhammadan teachers in the Government schools, and by

recruiting their armies from among Muhammadan tribes; they have thus

added to the prestige of Islam in the eyes of the pagan Africans—a

circumstance that the Muslims have not been slow to make use of, to the

advantage of their own faith. [1179]

So little truth is there in the statement that Islam makes progress

only by force of arms, [1180] that on the contrary the partition of

Africa among the European powers, who have wrested the sword from the

hands of the Muslim chiefs now under their control, has initiated a

propaganda which seems likely to succeed where centuries of Muhammadan

domination have failed.