Roots of West African Muslim Militants

What Muslim Africa is experiencing today I predicted back in the 1980’s.

Many people assume that since Africans became Muslims, they naturally adopted Arab ways. This is far from true.

To be a Muslim is to only declare there is one god and pray five times a day. To legislate within the Muslim lands you followed a particular fiqh. In the case of most of Black Africa it was Maliki.

Even up to the jihad of Uthman dan Fodio, African Islam had nothing to do with the Arab way of life. Uthman dan Fodio, after he returned from Mecca, preached against Wahhabism and he supported Freedom for women. This changed only in the 1980’s when Saudi Arabia was able to use oil money to spread the Wahhabi fiqh.

The Dark Age of Africa, then, only came after the 1890’s when European powers conquered African nations, and again in the 1990”s as greedy African Muslims sold their souls to the Saudis for a few silver pieces. The shame of Africa, is that although Europeans ruled African nations directly for less than 75 years, they continue to dominate the minds of African rulers and the African Muslim middle class who maintain a dark age in Africa up to today.

The Muslim elites in Africa abandoned their heritage to suck up to Europeans. This left African traditional Muslims leaderless. In the 1980’s the Wahhabis began to spend millions of dollars to spread their brand of Islam around the world. The failure to integrate common Muslims in the development of Nigeria led to the problems we are having in West Africa today.

The radical jihadism common to Africa will decline after the fall of Arabia as an economic power. After this traditional African Muslim tolerance will overcome Turkish/Indo-Aryan social customs which dominate the “Islamism” of African youth. This will hasten as more and more West African Mulims make the hajj and experience the deep racism Africam Muslims experience in Arabia and Egypt.

Below are some research papers I wrote on this theme back in the day.


https://www.academia.edu/8492644/The_West_African_Ulama_and_Islamic_Movements


https://www.academia.edu/8492480/Maitatsinism_in_Norther_Nigeria_we_need_to_know_more


https://www.academia.edu/8492457/Koranic_Education_and_Militant_Islam_in_Nigeria