The Jakhanke Muslim Clerics
Title | The Jakhanke Muslim Clerics PDF eBook |
Author | Lamin O. Sanneh |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 1989 |
Genre | Islam |
ISBN | 9780819174819 |
This book attempts the first major study of the Jakhanke people. The Jakhanke have since the thirteenth century been a specialist group of Muslim clerics and teachers, living among the Serakhulle, from whom they sprang, and the Manding, whose language they speak. Despite the nineteenth-century ambience of militancy, they maintained their tradition of consistent pacifism and political neutrality which is unique in Muslim Black Africa. Their manuscripts and clan histories survive today in precious family collections and libraries. The author has drawn on these histories, present-day interviews, travellers' observations and colonial reports to weave a fascinating, comprehensive study of the Jakhanke for the first time in any language. The author traces the details of their wanderings and analyzes important themes such as their system of education, their function as dream-interpreters and amulet-makers and finally, the dark side of the coin, the dependence of their way of life on the institution of slavery. Includes photos and maps.
The Jakhanke
Title | The Jakhanke PDF eBook |
Author | Lamin O. Sanneh |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2018-09-03 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0429943911 |
When originally published in 1979, this was the first comprehensive study of the Jakhanke in any language. Despite the 19th ambience of jihad, the Jakhanke maintined their tradition of consistent pacifism and political neutrality which is unique in Muslim Black Africa. Drawing on histories, interviews, and colonial reports the book traces the details of the Jakhanke pilgrimages and analyses important themes such as their system of education, their function as dream-interpreters and amulet-makers and finally the dependence of their way of life on the institution of slavery.
The Walking Qurʼan
Title | The Walking Qurʼan PDF eBook |
Author | Rudolph T. Ware |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2014 |
Genre | Education |
ISBN | 1469614316 |
Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa
Ransoming Prisoners in Precolonial Muslim Western Africa
Title | Ransoming Prisoners in Precolonial Muslim Western Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Jennifer Lofkrantz |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
Pages | 229 |
Release | 2023 |
Genre | Africa, West |
ISBN | 1648250645 |
Examines African debates on captivity, legal and illegal enslavement, and religious and ethnic identity in the era of West African jihads. In this pioneering study--the first to cover ransoming, or the release of a prisoner prior to enslavement for cash or kind, in African regions south of the Sahara--Jennifer Lofkrantz focuses on a broad temporal and geographical area raning from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and including present-day Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Morocco. The work concentrates particularly on the nineteenth-century jihad era and on the Sokoto Caliphate and the Umarian States. The overall period was a time of intense intellectual debate over the questions of who was and who was not a Muslim, how Islamic law could and should be implemented, what rights and protections recognized freeborn Muslims should have, and what role governments should play in ensuring those rights especially during a time when slavery was legal. Ransoming discourses and procedures expose Muslim West African answers to these questions as well as providing a lens on broader issues and ideas on slavery, freedom, and religious and ethnic identity. Based on research conducted mostly in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and France and on Arabic-, French-, and English-language archival sources, treatises, personal correspondence, oral sources and testimony, biographical data, travel reports, and early colonial documents, this study approaches the question of ransoming of captives through an examination, first, of intellectual debates among pre-nineteenth-century West African scholars on issues of ransoming; second, of nineteenth-century policies based on understandings of those intellectual debates in the context of the jihads; and, finally, of West African practices of ransoming in the nineteenth century.
Beyond Jihad
Title | Beyond Jihad PDF eBook |
Author | Lamin O. Sanneh |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 377 |
Release | 2016 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199351619 |
Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and took hold, and what that tells us about the nature of religious and social change. At the heart of this process were clerics who used religious and legal scholarship to promote Islam. Once this clerical class emerged, it offered continuity and stability in the midst of political changes and cultural shifts, helping to inhibit the spread of radicalism, and subduing the urge to wage jihad. With its policy of religious and inter-ethnic accommodation, this pacifist tradition took Islam beyond traditional trade routes and kingdoms into remote districts of the Mali Empire, instilling a patient, Sufi-inspired, and jihad-negating impulse into religious life and practice. Islam was successful in Africa, Sanneh argues, not because of military might but because it was made African by Africans who adapted it to a variety of contexts.
Paths of Accommodation
Title | Paths of Accommodation PDF eBook |
Author | David Robinson |
Publisher | James Currey |
Pages | 361 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9780852554579 |
Charts the responses of the Sufi orders to the French colonial regime and their negotiations over power and autonomy.
Beyond Jihad
Title | Beyond Jihad PDF eBook |
Author | Lamin Sanneh |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 377 |
Release | 2016-08-19 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0199351635 |
Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and took hold, and what that tells us about the nature of religious and social change. At the heart of this process were clerics who used religious and legal scholarship to promote Islam. Once this clerical class emerged, it offered continuity and stability in the midst of political changes and cultural shifts, helping to inhibit the spread of radicalism, and subduing the urge to wage jihad. With its policy of religious and inter-ethnic accommodation, this pacifist tradition took Islam beyond traditional trade routes and kingdoms into remote districts of the Mali Empire, instilling a patient, Sufi-inspired, and jihad-negating impulse into religious life and practice. Islam was successful in Africa, Sanneh argues, not because of military might but because it was made African by Africans who adapted it to a variety of contexts.