An African Vortex: Islamism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Surveying the Continent

The growing influence of Islamism south of theSaharais manifest, though it is by no means developing uniformly.  Demographic, political, economic and a host of other conditions permit degrees of success that vary greatly from region to region, state to state, and even locality to locality.  Yet, similar patterns of Islamism’s advance can be observed in virtually all of the subcontinent’s Muslim communities.  The following case studies, therefore, attempt merely to provide an overview of the range of Islamist achievements in transforming sub-SaharanAfrica.

Nigeria

Home to nearly 60 million Muslims – roughly half the country’s total population –Nigeria provides an advanced example of Islamism in Africa.  Over the last five years, Islamists in the predominately Muslim north have begun to codify shari’a and other Islamist social policies.  Such activity has led to widespread violence and instability that threatens the viability of the Nigerian state.

Introduced by Arab traders in the 11^th Century, Islam came to dominate the northern part of Nigeria over the following centuries.  Despite the religion’s distinct influence over government of the region, Nigerian Islam was by no means harsh or rigid (explaining why the north was allowed considerable autonomy under colonial Britain), with a strong Sufi influence.  Rather, it permitted an environment in which Muslims of different doctrinal persuasions, Christians and animists could peacefully coexist.

As Britain began to disengage from West Africain the 1950s following roughly one hundred years of colonial rule, it was recognized that a functioning Nigerian state – one that incorporated both the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south – would have to be of a secular character.  With independence in 1960, a Penal Code was established for northern Nigeria that excluded shari’a from criminal proceedings, allowing its application only to personal law for Muslims – this jurisdiction reinforced by subsequent constitutions adopted in the country including the most recent (the 1999 Constitution).

Significantly, the several military dictatorships that ruled Nigeria in the post-independence period enforced the country’s secular character despite attempts by Islamists to impose their designs on the nation.  Although they were able to thwart Islamism in the short-term, an environment developed in which Islamist ideologies could be presented as desirable alternatives to the corruption, economic mismanagement and political oppression offered by Nigeria’s military regimes.  Such conditions helped ensure that when Nigerian democracy was allowed to emerge, the seeds of Islamism sown over the course of the preceding decades would bear fruit.

Saudi Arabia began to actively promote what has become the most popular brand of Nigerian Islamism as early as the 1960s.  Over the course of the following decades, Wahhabism became firmly entrenched in the Nigerian Muslim psyche. Riyadh’s influence becomes clearer when traced through the careers of two prominent Nigerian Muslim leaders – the Sardauna of Sokoto Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello, often called the first prime minister of northernNigeria, and his chief advisor Alhaji Abubakar Gumi.