Suchergebnisse

The historical relationship between Islam and politics in West Africa, focusing especially on how Islam was used as a symbol and an instrument of traditional political rule. The role of Islam and Muslim scholar/warriors in the politics of precolonial West Africa. The political role of Islam in the colonial empires of France and Britain in the region. The political use of Islam in post-colonial African diplomacy and state-building. (DÜI-Ott)

The role of Islam in West African politics goes back to the beginnings of the encounter between Islamic culture and traditional African political leadership in the medieval period. When Arabo-Berber culture arrived in the West Soudan, African rulers in Ghana, Soudan, and other smaller kingdoms of the time were very much influenced by their traditional African world view. According to this world view, rulers were thought to be a link between the living and the dead, on the one hand, and between the temporal and the spiritual on the other. Indeed, it is because of this fusion of politics and primordial religion in the old Africa that the well-known American student of African religions, James W. Fernandez, wrote in the early 1960s that the "African, it can be argued, inherited a traditional disposition to shift back and forth from a political to a religious mode of address."

It is the aim of this essay to classify various aspects of Islamic political activity (different religious factions, supporters and leaders, motives, and modes of operation) in modern Middle Eastern history from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, and to analyze their causes and relations