Islam in West Africa Religion, Society and Politics to 1800 by Nehemia Levtzion. Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 1994.

Abstract

Islam in West Africa is a collection of nineteen essays written by Nehemia
Levtzion between 1963 and 1993. The book is divided into five sections. dealing
with different facets of the history and sociology of Islam in West Africa.
The first section focuses on the patterns, characteristics, and agents of the
spread of Islam. The author offers an approach to the study of the process of that
Islamization in West Africa that compares pattems of Islamizacion in medieval
Mali and Songhay to patterns in the Volta basin from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries. He also assesses the complex roles played by African
chiefs and kings and slavery in the spread of Islam.
Section two focuses on the subject of lslam and West African politics from
the medieval period to the early nineteenth century. Levtzion identifies two
trend in African Islam: accommodation and militancy. Islam's early acceptance
in West African societies was aided by the fact that Islam was initially seen as
a supplement, and not as a substitute, to existing religious systems. Levtzion
analyzes the dynamics of Islam in African states as accommodation gave way
in time to tensions between the ruling authorities and Islamic scholars, calling
for a radical restructuring of the stare according to Islamic ideals. The tensions
between the Muslim clerics of Timbuktu and the medieval Songhay rulers. and
the ultimately adversarial relationship between Uthman dan Fodio and the Gobir
leadership in eighteenth-century Hausaland, are singled out for sustained analysis ...