4.8. AFRICAN ISLAM, A NON-WESTERN TOPIC?

EMPHASIS ON THE ISLAM OF 19TH-CENTURY AFRICAN THEOCRACIES MAY SEEM AN EXCEPTION TO THE EMPHASIS ON THE WEST

But historians can choose animism or Islam:

This photo and that below from Rois d'Afrique by Daniel Lainé, Paris (ed. Arthaud), 1991.

There not only are there many more studies of African Islam than of animism, but the emphasis is on philosophies meant to "purify" it, that is, to make it as un-African as possible. 

In fact, leaders innovated when useful: Take Amadu Tall's 800 wives and proclamation of Segu as a pilgrimage site equal to Mecca. 

Why the fascination with proclamations of orthodoxy? Is it that Islam seems an alternative to the beliefs of the industrialized world, a replacement that is powerful, exotic and socially conservative? 

Does that attention also give a kind of respectability to Africans, by associating them with elites that are urban, commercial, literate —  and white? 

  

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Next,
4.9.

Africans take center stage