African and Black Orientalism

European governments commissioned much of Western scholarship on African Muslim societies produced in the colonial period. The most influential writers on African Islam were scholar-administrators, or at least closely linked with colonial administrations. Britain, Germany, Holland, and France commissioned the most respected specialists on Islam to study the Muslim societies that were coming under their rule. The scholarship therefore studied Islam as a focus of resistance to colonial rule. Sometimes the scholars sought to justify the colonial undertaking.

For example, the writer of the apology of British occupation of Northern Nigeria, A Tropical Dependency (1905), was Flora Shaw, the colonial correspondent for the London Times, who eventually married Lord Luggard, the first high commissioner of the British protectorate of Nigeria. Lady Luggard argued that African Islam had lost its initial grandeur and had betrayed its own ideals. Britain could, therefore, no longer ignore her historic responsibility to take over.

An anthology of works on African Islam by colonial-administrators would be encyclopedic. François Clozel, Maurice Delafosse, Jules Brévié and Paul Marty, Lady Luggard, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, and C.-H. Becker, to name a few, all adapted their writings for use by the colonial establishments that they served. Other scholars, such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, were missionaries, who by and large saw Islam either as an obstacle in their bid to Christianize Africa or else as a temporary and intermediary stage in the black African's journey from "paganism" to Christianity.

The image of African Islam that emerges from these writings is not consistent. Islam is revolutionary; it is fatalistic. It is misogynist; it elevates the status of the African woman. It is egalitarian; it allows a small clique of religious men (marabouts) to live at the expense of their gullible followers. All these perceptions and more had a lot to do with the concrete experiences of the scholars, the diversity of the societies studied, and the changing priorities and political landscapes of the colonizing countries. In consonance with the essentialism that Edward Said decries, writers tended to explain the behaviors of individuals and communities by evoking the single, universal, and unchanging reality of their being Islamic.

Not all of the images about African Muslim societies in colonial scholarship are, therefore, negative. Moreover, one has to acknowledge the great contributions made by some of the Orientalists to our knowledge of the societies they studied. For example, it was Octave Houdas, a French Orientalist, who studied and translated into French, over a hundred years ago, two of the most significant histories of West Africa, the Tarikh el-Fettach and the Tarikh es-Soudan. He was aided in this by Maurice Delafosse, a French linguist and ethnologist, who also a French colonial administrator. It is the view of some modern commentators that many of the Orientalist approaches to African Islam have been carried over into contemporary scholarship on Africa and African literature.