The First Encounter with Islam

Islam entered West Africa without a conquering army or a missionary’s banner, on the back of a camel, in a saddlebag next to a sack of salt.

A Picture That Does Not Fit

How did Islam reach West Africa? Many people picture horsemen with banners, an army marching across the Sahara, a sultan besieging a city and putting its population before a choice, and that picture does fit parts of the Maghreb, Andalusia and parts of Central Asia, but for West Africa it does not fit. The first encounter with Islam in the region we now call West Africa began with trade, with conversation and with hospitality, and one should imagine a group of men stopping at a well and performing their salat in the shade of a tree while Soninke farmers looked on. This was a world religion sliding into an enormous continent through small people, almost unnoticed. By around 750 this process is already under way, for as early as the eighth century Muslim traders are present in Awdaghust and in other oasis towns along the edge of the Sahel, and they come not as envoys of a caliph, but as merchants.

The Road That Already Existed

To understand how Islam enters West Africa, the road must be understood first. The Sahara had been crossed for centuries before the Prophet ﷺ was born, for Amazigh caravans travelled under the Romans and long before them, and salt, gold and slaves were already moving back and forth before a single Arab knew anything of West Africa. What changed in the 8th century was not the birth of the route, but the identity of the merchants who used it. After the Islamic openings of North Africa in the second half of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th, the Maghreb was Islamized, and this happened in waves, sometimes slowly, sometimes in jolts, accompanied by revolts, compromises and new syntheses, with the result that the Amazigh tribes who controlled the Saharan trade, the Sanhaja and the Zenata above all, themselves became Muslims. It was these Imazighen who first carried the deen southward.

No Islamic army ever subjugated West Africa militarily in the period discussed here, and attempts at military expansion southward from the Maghreb were rarely lasting, for the distances are too great and the Sahara is a merciless wall: whoever tries to push an army through it loses so many men and animals to the crossing that almost nothing remains on the other side. Yet West Africa did Islamize, never all at once or completely, but substantially and durably.

These first contacts did not take place in Kumbi, which will only later become a meeting place, or in Gao, which in this period is still an independent city-state with a limited Muslim presence. The very first place where Muslim traders and black African populations met lay at the southern edge of the desert itself, in the oases and salt mines where caravan traffic made its structural halts, and Awdaghust stands at the top of that list. Located in what is now southern Mauritania, Awdaghust was already a flourishing trade centre in the late 8th century, with a mixed population of Sanhaja Imazighen who functioned both as wealthy merchants and as camel drivers, and alongside them black African communities, Soninke and related peoples, who practised horticulture and craftwork. Here a travelling Muslim and a local farmer could not avoid each other; they had to know each other.

Tadmekka also became an important point of contact in this period, though somewhat further east, while Sijilmasa itself lay on the northern rim of the Sahara and was not a West African contact point in the strict sense, but it was the starting point of the routes, and whoever prayed there knew that his prayers would travel southward on camels’ shoulders. Ghat, Ghadames and Zawila in present-day Libya played similar roles on the central and eastern routes, each with its own distinctive community of Muslim merchants, and each thus contributed to a layered, many-coloured network of early encounters.

A Forgotten Demography

Another point that is rarely mentioned is that the Islamized population of West Africa in this early period already included black African Muslims, and not only Amazigh merchants who happened to be staying in the Sahel. From the 8th century onward, children were born in Awdaghust and Tadmekka from mixed marriages, with an Amazigh father and a Soninke mother or the other way around, who were raised as Muslims from the start, and their names first surface in Arabic sources only in the 11th century, while their presence as a group begins here. This matters historically, for Islam in West Africa is not a religion that was imposed on Africans by outsiders and that they then had to internalize, but has been an African phenomenon from the very beginning. Black Muslims were there from the start and not only later, for they lived in the trading towns, spoke the languages of commerce and gave their children Islamic names.

This period is a hinge point, for what has now begun will grow in the coming centuries not gradually, but in fits and starts. The trans-Saharan trade, still relatively modest in this period, will undergo an explosive intensification in the 9th century, with new routes opening and new towns blossoming, while new mosques, still built of mud, will have minarets within a few generations, and a new class of scholars will emerge who have studied at al-Azhar and yet sit teaching on a mat in a village in the Sahel.

But the seed is planted in this early encounter. Traders from Tahert and Sijilmasa, Ibadi for the most part, carry a deen that will become an identity not for themselves, but for the descendants of the receiving peoples.

Sources

• John O. Hunwick (ed./trans.), Shariʿa in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford 1985, pp. 3, 6–9, 14.
  • p. 3: Muslim merchants of Arab, Berber and probably Persian origin trading down to Tadmakka and the Niger soon after the foundation of Ibadi Tahert in 144/761; Ibn as-Saghir ﵀ on the trade routes to bilad as-sudan.
  • pp. 6–7: merchants from Tripolitania, Ifriqiya and the central Maghreb reaching ancient Ghana via Tadmakka in the second century of Islam, guided by nomads from the south; the Islamization of the Imazighen of the Maghreb, formally complete by the end of the first Islamic century; Tadmakka and its outpost Sane near Gao as one of the earliest points of contact between Islam and sub-Saharan Africa; al-Zuhri ﵀ on the Sanhaja who became Muslims under Caliph Hisham (724–743).
  • pp. 8–9: al-Ya’qubi ﵀ (259/872–873) saying nothing about the religion of the ruler of Kawkaw, so that Gao had no Muslim ruler yet in the 9th century; the first Muslim ruler of Gao presumably making his profession at the hands of a North African or Tadmakkan faqih, possibly an Ibadi.
  • p. 14: the spread of Islam among the western Sanhaja (Goddala, Lamtuna, Masufa) a century or two before the mid-11th century; the road from Sijilmasa to Ghana down the Mauritanian Adrar and Awdaghust.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 17, 21, 24, 26, 28, 31–33, 38.
  • p. 17: commerce between the Mediterranean and the Sahel that predates Islam in the Maghreb, controlled by the Garamantes, and the camel that made regular trans-Saharan trade viable between 100 BCE and 100 CE.
  • pp. 21, 24: Gao as an independent city-state and, by the 9th century, a hub of political and commercial activity; al-Ya’qubi ﵀ making no mention of Islam in Gao.
  • pp. 26, 28: Tadmekka (Es-Souk), 390 kilometres northeast of Gao, as an entrepot for salt; Zawila, Ghadames and Tahert within an Ibadi network of cities, with urban settlements in the Fezzan since at least the 8th century.
  • p. 31: the exchange of salt for gold developing in the 9th century.
  • pp. 32–33: Awdaghust (Tegdaoust) controlling the salt of Awlil, ten days’ journey from Ghana; its mixed population of North African merchants, Sanhaja and non-Muslim residents from Ghana; al-Bakri ﵀ on the cathedral mosque and the many smaller mosques; Sijilmasa, founded in 140/757–758, with residents from Basra, Kufa and Baghdad.
  • p. 38: Muslim merchants and learned men peacefully coexisting with a non-Muslim ruling elite in Ghana, before the Almoravid turn.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. 13, 31, 274.
  • p. 13 (TS ch. 4, note): Kumbi Saleh as an excavated Muslim merchant settlement dating back to the 9th century.
  • p. 31 (TS ch. 7, note): the excavations at Tegdaoust identifying the caravan town as the Awdaghust of al-Bakri ﵀.
  • p. 274 (Leo Africanus, note): North African merchants making trading journeys to the lands bordering the southern Sahara since the late 8th century.