Introduction

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite Europe’s superior mar itime and military power, Islamic commercial networks established along the fringes of the Islamic world, notably in Africa and South East Asia, remained in place, linking the interior with coastal ports. These fringes were not exactly 'frontiers’; in most cases, a substantial Islamic presence had existed for centuries. However, the majority of the population was not Muslim. These areas were to become the arena of substantial conversion to Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in large measure because of and not simply despite the imposition of European hegemony.

The nature and extent of Islamic expansion along these fringes depended on the interplay of various factors: the social organisation of specific local societies; the prior history of Islamisation and of the integration of Muslims into these societies; and the ways in which difierent regions of the world were ultimately integrated into European dominated global economic networks. In South East Asia as well as East Africa, the spread of Islam was inextricably linked to maritime trading networks, with Islam initially confined to ports along the coast. However, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most of the interior ofJava was at least nominally Islamic, although Islam was still expand ing to parts of the Sumatran interior.1 At the outset of the modern era, Muslims in East Africa remained exclusively along the coast, and it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that Islam began to expand into the interior.2 By

1  M. C. Ricklefs, 'Six centuries of Islamization in Java’, in Nehemiah Levtzion (ed.), Conversion to Islam (New York and London, 1979), pp. 100 28; Christine Dobbin, Islamic revivalism in a changing peasant economy: Central Sumatra, 1784 1847 (London and Malmo,

1983).

2  Randall Pouwels, Horn and crescent: Cultural change and traditional Islam on the EastAfrican Coast (800 1900) (Cambridge, 1987).

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Contrast, Islam had come to West Africa by means of the trans Saharan trade, and was far more entrenched in the interior than along the coast. The rapid growth of the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth to eighteeenth centuries irrevocably shifted patterns of trade in favour of coastal ports.

This chapter will focus on Islamic expansion in West Africa over the course of the last two centuries. Given the historical, cultura and ecologicd diversity of the area, this was hardly a uniform process. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Islamic trade networks had spread from the Sahel throughout much of the West African savanna, and in some cases into the forest regions bordering the Guinea Coast. In the powerful state ofAsante, Muslim traders and clerics enjoyed positions of influence in the kingdom, and were permitted to recruit local converts (though without much success). States and chiefdoms in the savanna/ sahel region were characterised by hereditary social categories: a warrior aristoc racy; Muslim clerics and merchants; 'casted’ occupational groups notably blacksmiths, leather workers, sculptors and praise singers and the peasant majority. Slaves constituted a sizeable proportion of the population in larger states. So called stateless peoples lived on their peripheries, at times incorporated as tribute paying commoners, or more often systematically raided for slaves.

The religion of Islam was by and large the hallmark of hereditary groups occupying specific niches in the overall political economy of the region, mem bers of dispersed clerical and mercantile networks who maintained a distinct identity in the places they settled. These groups were not necessarily committed to the active conversion of other sectors of society. The influential teachings of the early sixteenth century scholar al ITajj Salim Suware enjoined peaceful relations with rulers who allowed Muslims to live in compliance with the strictures of the Sunna.3 Such collaboration was not only profitable for mer chants, for whom the ruling groups represented clients for luxury goods as well as suppliers of captured slaves, but also for clerics, who provided ruling groups with charms, remedies and other forms of supernatural assistance. Ruling groups might also convert to Islam, as in the empires of Mali, and Songhai, though not in their successor states. Rulers of many of the Hausa city states considered themselves Muslim. In some of the most heavily Islamised areas, notably the Senegal River valley and parts ofHausaland, a significant proportion of the peasantry may also have professed Islam. In such cases, there seems to have been a religious double standard; ruling groups and peasants were not generally expected to conform as strictly to clerical norms of practice.

3 Ivor Wilks, 'The Juula and the expansion of Islam into the forest’, in Nehemiah Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds.), The history ofIslam in Africa (Athens, OH, 2000), pp. 93 115.