African and Black Orientalism

George Lang is likely one of the first scholars to draw attention to Orientalist features in European-language African writing. Lang explores the effects of the reductions of Islam's complexity upon Africanist writing. The denial of the complexity of Islam impedes the understanding not just of Islam but of Africa. In the area of literary criticism, very frequently one or other dimension of Islam is either missed by Western critics or cast out of context. This also leads to significant mis-interpretations of African novels of Islamic inspiration. Similar arguments are developed in Ahmed Bangura's book Islam and the West African Novel: The Politics of Representation (2000).

Edris Makward acknowledges a new shift in the African novel from a linguistic (English-French) to a religious polarity based on writers' attitudes to Islam. The thought was impressed upon him by an address given in 1979 by Wole Soyinka in which Soyinka praises Sembène Ousmane, a Senegalese writer, for being critical of Islam in his work while denying Cheikh Hamidou Kane, another Senegalese writer, the merit of authenticity for depicting Islam as part of Senegal's heritage rather than as an alien religion that was imposed through violence and other coercive means.

Similarly, in the early 1990s Ali Mazrui and Wole Soyinka were locked in a debate pertaining partly to the question of African authenticity and the Islamic factor. Ali Mazrui wrote the article "Wole Soyinka as a Television Critic: A Parable of Deception" in response to Soyinka's negative critique in Index to Censorship of Ali Mazrui's television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage. In his article, Soyinka accuses Mazrui of denigrating indigenous African culture in the series. Perhaps more significantly, he alludes to the fact that Mazrui is not only culturally Arabized, he is also by both blood and vocal identification part Arab. In both the address alluded to by Edris Makward and the debate between Soyinka and Mazrui, Soyinka repeats some of the negative opinions about Islam that one finds in colonial writings: Islam is a seductive superstition that was imposed on the Africans through the sword. Perhaps more significantly, Soyinka is ready to discredit an African scholar's interpretation of African history on the bases that the scholar is a Muslim and has allegedly Arab-Islamic sympathies.

Wole Soyinka's critique of Islam is part of an intellectual current that some commentators would consider to be Orientalist. It is related to the issue of Islam and African or black identity. Some African and black scholars assert that black Americans and black Africans who profess or advocate Islam are committing a form of cultural apostasy. They are critical of all "alien" ideologies such as Islam, which have allegedly brought havoc to Africa and the Black Diaspora.