Visions of History and Internal Islamic Discourse

As to what might be called internal Islamic discourse about cultural identity, I would argue that there has been a subordination of the history of so-called "peripheral" Islamic communities (of Sub-Saharan Africa in this paper) to the presumed "heartlands" of Islam in the Middle East. This subordination, it seems, was self-imposed by those communities themselves as well as externally created and encouraged in the dominant discourse of the Middle East. I am not suggest-ing that an Islamic identity was always the only one claimed by Muslim communities of either center or periphery, or that an Islamic discourse was the only one they practiced. Rather, my point is that, to the extent that some elites from those regions identified themselves and their communities as Islamic, and prac-ticed an Islamic discourse to legitimize and internalize those perceptions, the relationship tended to be one of hegemony by the center over subordinated, unequal peripheries. I would also suggest that the general population of peripheral communities accepted subordination "voluntarily" whenever presented with it as a religious imperative, though they may not necessarily have perceived or articulated their own identities as exclusively Islamic at any given point in time. Visions of their own local and regional history were suppressed in favor of those from the more "significant" Islamic history of the Middle East.

From that perspective, "significant history" of time and place was represented by Islamic elites to have been that of the Middle East, especially of the seventh to the tenth centuries, as transmitted through Arabic oral traditions or recorded Arabic texts. With the Koran itself and records of the traditions of the Prophet and those of earliest Muslim communities rendered in classical Arabic, and the requirement that recitation of the Koran in prayer must be in the original Arabic, the cultural context of early Islamic time and place has come to acquire a sanctified religious authority. The authenticity and integrity of the religious experience of all Muslims came to be judged against the standards set by that "center" of significant time and place: the more closely a person or community is identified with the center, the "better Muslim" that person or community is deemed to be.

Thus, for example, most Muslim communities of the present-day Northern Sudan, despite their obvious African Nubian origins and complexion, claim direct decent from the tribes of Arabia, preferably that of the Prophet himself, and generally identify culturally and politically with North Africa and the Middle East, rather than with their own geographical region and historical origins in East and "West Africa.[1] In my view, these features of Northern Su-danese consciousness are at the root of the chronic state of political instability and civil war, with the consequent economic weakness and underdevelopment that have afflicted Sudan since independence in 1956.

This phenomenon is also clearly illustrated by what are known as the Jihad movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in West Africa and Sudan, where the concept of the state and society, and their underlying ideology, sought to reproduce, a thousand years later and in great detail, the model of the early Medina city-state of the Prophet in Eastern Arabia of the seventh century, and to imitate the rhetoric and discourse of classical Islamic theology of the Middle East of the eighth and ninth centuries.[2] Although those earlier forms of historical models were subjected to severe and sustained challenged by an alternative, "modern" European colonial and postcolonial hegemonic uni-versalism, they have persisted in one form or another to the present time. These perceptions of identity and visions of history now appear to be poised to reclaim their earlier dominance in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, with drastic consequences for countries like Sudan and Nigeria today, and potentially serious implications for the whole of East, West, and Central Africa. The harsh and exclusive theology and politics of Wahhabism in West Africa are not only sustained by annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Saudi Arabian financial support; they are inspired by Islamic militancy in Algeria and also draw on a history of Jihad radicalism in the region.[3]

By far, however, the most significant, pervasive, and enduring manifestation of Middle Eastern visions of history is the impact of that time and place on the conception and formulation of traditional Islamic San'a law.[4] Because many of the Sari'a concepts and principles were clearly derived from Middle Eastern customary institutions and practices of the seventh to the ninth centuries, the underlying customary social, economic, and political norms and structures of that time and place are now believed to have permanently acquired the sanctity of Islam itself. In particular, Sari'a concepts of property, commerce, family, and status of women are clearly strongly influenced by customary norms and institutions of the Middle East of that time. Efforts to drastically reformand change those aspects of Sari'a, or to replace them permanently by secular law, are seen as tantamount to apostasy (heresy) deserving the death penalty. If the law of Islam is believed to be as sacred as the normative dictates of the religion itself, why should the customary institutions and practices of the earliest communities acquire equal sanctity?

1. See, for example, Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, D.C., 1995), chap. 2.

2. On the jihad movements of West Africa see Ibrahim Ado-Khrawa, The Jihad in Kano (Kino 1989); Robert Sydney Smith, Warfare and Diplomacy in Pre-colonial West Africa (London 1989), chap. 3; J. B.Webster, The Revolutionary Years: West Africa Since 1800 (London 1980), chaps.1 to 3; Elizabeth Isichei, History of West Africa Since 1800 (New York 1977), chap. 2. On Islam in West Africa in general, see, H. Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (New York 1984);Peter B. Clarke, West Africa and Islam (London 1982).

3. The strong connection between the Wahhabi revival in late eighteenth-century Arabia and the Jihad movements of West Africa was suggested,- for example, by Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (NewYork 1967), 56. See also Lansine Kaba, The Wahhabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa (Evanston, II., 1974), chap. 1.

4. See generally, Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford 1950).Cf. Muhammad Mustafa Azami, On Schachet's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (NeVYork 1985).