ISLAM, SOLE TOPIC TO LEAVE OUT THE WEST?

THE 19TH-CENTURY THEOCRACIES AND THEIR ISLAM MAY SEEM AN EXCEPTION TO THE EMPHASIS ON THE WEST

But historians can choose animism, which remains powerful and  as a State religion or to unite disoriented communities changed many times...

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

Or Islam, which also underwent mutations, from the "lax" beliefs and behavior of syncretism to theocrats' fervent adaptations.

Yet not only are there many studies of African Islam and relatively few of animism, but the emphasis is on the philosophy of leaders who wished to "purify" it, that is, to make it as un-African as possible. In fact, all the groups that joined the millenarist movements that spread Islam throughout the 19th-century savannah interpreted it in their own ways, and leaders innovated when useful: Take Amadu Tall's 800 wives and proclamation of Segu as a pilgrimage site equal to Mecca. 

What explains that fascination with the 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?   

*     *     * 

Next,
Africans take center stage