Abstract
Senegalese “conversion” to Shi‘i Islam resulted from cosmopolitan interactions with West Africa’s resident Lebanese population and Iranian revolutionary ideologies. Shi‘i advocates spread their religious convictions through teaching, conferences, holiday celebrations, and media publicity. Key to their success are libraries full of Arabic and French texts from Iran and Lebanon. Inherent in Islamic education is the authority bestowed on those who are knowledgeable, and with the spread of religious knowledge through books, media, and the Internet comes a broadening of the scope of religious authority and resulting conflict with or accommodation of old political communities. Senegalese converts to Shi‘i Islam use their literacy in Arabic and individually acquired libraries of Islamic legal books to bypass the authority of Sufi marabouts. Some keep their feet in both Sunni and Shi‘i worlds, and their ability to compare religious texts of both traditions wins them disciples. Shi‘i minorities claim autochthony and authenticity in Senegal through narrating revisionist historical accounts of the spread of (Shi‘i) Islam to Africa. Conferences commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn during the Shi‘i mourning period in the month of Muharram target Sufi Muslims who also love the family of the Prophet. Shi‘i leaders skillfully detach this foreign religious ideology from Middle Eastern politics and make this branch of Islam relevant to Senegalese through establishing religious centers as NGOs, which work to bring health care and economic development to neighborhoods in the name of Shi‘i Islam.
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Notes
In contrast see the earlier literature on the spread of Islam to Africa examined in terms of forced conversion through conquest or the political economy of conversion for trade alliances (Levtzion 1979).
References to other publications refer the reader elsewhere for greater elaboration, while some topics are to be further explored in future research.
I acknowledge that many Muslims may not consider the change in affiliation from one branch of Islam to another a conversion.
Another Senegalese Sufi order is the Layen, which syncretically incorporates pre-Islamic beliefs associated with the sea. Its founder Limamou Laye proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi expected at the end of time, and his son Insa Laye as a reincarnation of Jesus.
The French first used the term marabout in West Africa to refer to members of Muslim lineages who were also clerics, ranging from the obscure to the well-known and including urban and rural imams or prayer leaders, teachers, scholars, preachers, saints and Sufis, amulet confectioners and diviners. See Soares (2005).
Religious ties between the two countries were strengthened due to increased relations between Iranian president Ahmadinejad and Senegalese president Wade.
A hawza is a seminary of Shi‘i Islamic training.
“Senegal–Iran: From Friendship to Diplomatic War,” Afrik-News, 25 February 2011, http://www.afrik-news.com/article19020.html
Brenner (2001) points out that the rise in Arabic literacy resulting from madrasa education spurred the growth of Sunnite sentiment in urban Mali throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Niezen (1990) also finds that the most important criterion for leadership in the rural reform movement among the Songhay of Gao is literacy in Arabic. However, some reformist movements, in Africa and other parts of the world, do not require Arabic literacy. See Samson (2009) and Janson (2009).
Pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of informants who are not public figures in Senegal.
Ayatollah al-Khu’i was still alive at the time the book was written. He died in 1992.
He died a few years ago.
Iranian funding also came with conditions that some Senegalese Shi‘i leaders refused to accept.
Sayyid Mujtaba Musavi Lari established the Office for the Diffusion of Islamic Culture Abroad in Qom in 1980. This organization dispatches free copies of his translated works throughout the world and has printed Qur’ans for free distribution among Muslim individuals, institutions, and religious schools in Africa. For more information see http://www.irib.ir/worldservice/Etrat/English/Nabi/Besat/seal1.htm. Accessed 31 July 2008.
This “work ethic” has most often been attributed to the Murids in the literature even though it is also prominent in the Tijani and Qadiri orders.
Fatima Zahra is the Prophet’s daughter who is held in esteem by Shi‘a.
Austen (2010) does state, however, that prior to the rise of the Almoravids in the mid-eleventh century, Islam had been represented in the desert by small communities of Ibadi Kharijite merchants. The Fatimids put an end to the Ibadi Tahert state in 909 and adopted a doctrine of kitman (concealment of beliefs) in response. He suggests that “there is no direct evidence about whether this practice was followed in the southern Sahara and Sudan, but it would have made good sense in a region where Muslim merchants constituted a very small minority among populations with whom they wished to maintain peaceful trading relations” (p. 85-86).
Cornell (1998) describes in more detail than other scholars how Sunni Islam met serious competition in North Africa from Shi‘a. He dates the “official” Moroccan state-sponsored turn to Malikism to the Marinids in 1286 when Moroccan ‘ulama traded their political support in exchange for institutional religion to combat outbreaks of Shi‘i messianism in al-Andalus and Morocco (p. 126).
Michael Bonner helped me clarify the history of this period and pointed me to some of these sources.
The ‘Alaouis were an offshoot of the Shi‘i Fatimids who ruled North Africa from Egypt. The term ‘Alaoui (or ‘Alevi in Syria) suggests an adherent of ‘Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, and accentuates the religion’s similarities to Shi‘i Islam. The ‘Alaoui dynasty took over rule in Morocco in the mid-seventeenth century. I am presenting these historical accounts in reverse chronological order as this is how they were presented to me, in order of importance.
Cornell concludes, in discussing the sixteenth-century Moroccan saint al-Ghazwani, that even though he uses terminology that appears to have Shi‘i origins this does not mean that he was a “crypto-Shi‘ite”—but neither was he typically Sunni (p. 223). Austen writes that the Idrisids “never established very firm or wide-ranging political or Shia religious authority, but it did bring Islam to the ‘Far West’ of the Muslim world” (2010:84). He considers the Almohads to be the last rulers to champion any form of Shi‘i Islam in North Africa. He writes that they were successful in bringing the Maghreb along with southern Spain under a single rule, but their Shi‘i theology proved to be an obstacle in maintaining the loyalty of their subjects who preferred to follow the established beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam (p. 85). I have not heard Senegalese discuss the rule of the Almohads in relation to their interpretation of the spread of Shi‘i Islam to West Africa.
The term Wahhabi refers to an Islamic movement that purports to be orthodox, named after the Saudi Arabian founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). This name is rarely used by members of the group today and was first designated by their opponents. Also known as Salafism, the movement accepts the Qur’an and Hadith as fundamental texts and advocates a puritanical and legalistic theology in matters of faith and religious practice.
According to Rawan Mbaye, university professor and Tijani Islamic leader. He informed me of a custom to pay offerings to the divinities by filling a calabash with food (typically couscous with beef) on the 9th day of Muharram. If the calabash is empty the next morning the divinity is believed to have taken his share.
Senegalese converts themselves refer to their practice and application of Shi‘i Islam as being “Senegalese.” I do not use this term to reproduce the Orientalist discourse of Islam noir or “African” Islam, or to enter into the debate about the existence of a universal Islam versus many local “Islams.”
For additional Qur’anic events and a description of other Tamkharit customs see http://www.au-senegal.com/La-Tamxarit.html?var_recherche=tamkharit. Accessed 17 September 2007.
The Wolof greeting for Tamkharit is deweneti, which means “may I be in a position to wish you a happy new year next year”.
http://www.mozdahir.com/interventions-de-cherif/discours-de-cherif-achoura-2008.html. Accessed 1 March 2009.
See Leichtman (2012) for a more complete account of these ‘Ashura conferences.
See Leichtman, M. A. (forthcoming). Shi‘i cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese migration and religious conversion in Senegal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Acknowledgments
Fieldwork in Senegal was funded by the J. William Fulbright Program, Population Council, the National Science Foundation, and Michigan State University. I would like to thank Michaelle Browers and Nelly Van Doorn-Harder for organizing the Minorities in Islam/Muslims as Minorities conference at Wake Forest University and this resulting special issue. This article benefitted from the careful critique of Mamadou Diouf and two anonymous reviewers. I am much obliged to the Senegalese Shi‘a for welcoming me into their community, sharing their religious experiences with me, and, above all, having faith in my research.
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Leichtman, M.A. Shi‘i Islamic cosmopolitanism and the transformation of religious authority in Senegal. Cont Islam 8, 261–283 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-014-0291-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-014-0291-1