From Muslim Community to Islamic Society: Law, Slavery and Concubinage in Bilad al-Sudan

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 40, 1, 2015 © The Maghreb Review 2015 This publication is printed on longlife paper FROM MUSLIM COMMUNITY TO ISLAMIC SOCIETY: LAW, SLAVERY AND CONCUBINAGE IN BILAD AL-SUDAN E. ANN MCDOUGALL∗ “‘But this I am sure of’, said the English author Morgan in the early eighteenth Century [from the perspective of Algeria], ‘that there is not one natural African, on this Side the Niger, who if asked, of what Religion he is, will not, with Indignation in his Countenance, on account of so dubious and affronting a Question, immediately reply, “I am, God be praised, a Mussulman”. [Quoted: Brett 2006] INTRODUCTION In his 2005 inaugural Lecture for the Nehemia Levtzion Centre for Islamic Studies, Michael Brett thusly evoked the contentious issue of what it meant to be Muslim in societies far from Islam’s Arabian intellectual and spiritual centers, and how the process of becoming Muslim in such societies – in this case, West Africa’s Sahara-Sahel, occurred1 . He reiterated the question he had posed some twenty-five years earlier in the midst of an ongoing debate shaped by Levtzion himself about African societies’ “conversion” to Islam: “What were the mechanisms at work . . . to explain the formation of an Islamic society out of the initial community of believers?”. The paper Brett was delivering in Levtzion’s honour engaged with this question with respect to Egypt and North Africa (Ifriqiya); he was to conclude by saying that understanding this societal dynamic in West Africa had been “Nehemia’s lifelong study” and that he was “happy to leave its story to his work”. In his habitual modesty, Brett overlooked the very important article in which he had already left an indelible imprint on that story, namely “Islam and Trade in the Bilad al-Sudan: tenth-eleventh C. AD” (Brett 1983). Only ten pages in length, it suggested how the use of indigenously generated fatwas (legal opinions) might allow us to push beyond the external Arab texts which were often compilations that obscured chronology and rarely reflected first-hand observation2 , to better get at how exactly it was that trade and merchants crossing the Sahara translated into the ‘Islamization’ of West Africa. At the time, he was responding to Humphrey Fisher’s argument that it was not ∗ University of Alberta, Canada 1 The seminal work on Islam in Africa remains Levtzion and Pouwels, 2000. But see also Robinson, 2004. 2 Levtzion and Hopkins’ Corpus had recently made these available to non-Arabists, immediately having a major effect on Anglophone scholarship. FROM MUSLIM COMMUNITY TO ISLAMIC SOCIETY 29 merchants but ‘holy men’ (clerics) who were responsible for creating Muslim societies in West Africa (Fisher 1977). Brett’s retort, via the fatwa documentation, was that it was not traders or trade per se that brought about conversion but the Islamic Law that was implemented to regulate commercial affairs in the context of a non-Muslim, African community. This implementation in practice extended tentacles into political structures (e.g. the appointment of a nazir as intermediary between secular and religious powers, which in and of itself needed relations of trust and communication between Muslim and non-Muslim communities), social relations (e.g. inheritance questions when merchants died outside of dar al-Islam, ‘the land of Islam’), as well as the more explicitly commerce-related issues (e.g. unpaid debts, unaccounted for merchandise, incomplete contracts). Although Brett did not extensively develop the argument, this summation of its essence to my mind opened a research path we have yet to explore fully. Returning to his articulation of the issues: The formation of distinct communities, and their insertion into the complicated pattern of West African society, all on the basis of the Islamic Law and its provisions for the conduct of daily life, were features which survived the transition to Islam as a religion of the Sudanese [sub-Saharan animists] themselves. . . . [Therefore]. . . I want to return to the North African merchant, to show the importance of Islam in his business, and to suggest how the role of Islam in trans-Saharan trade in the period before the widespread conversion of native [Sudanic] rulers and their subjects may have influenced the subsequent history of Islam in...

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