The First Encounter with Islam

No conquering army. No missionary with a banner. Islam entered West Africa on the back of a camel, in a saddlebag next to a sack of salt.

A Picture That Does Not Fit

How did Islam reach West Africa? Many people picture horsemen with banners, an army marching across the Sahara, a sultan besieging a city and putting its population before a choice, and that picture does fit parts of the Maghreb, Andalusia and parts of Central Asia, but for West Africa it does not fit. The first encounter with Islam in the region we now call West Africa began with trade, with conversation and with hospitality, and one should imagine a group of men stopping at a well and performing their salat in the shade of a tree while Soninke farmers looked on. This was a world religion sliding into an enormous continent through small people, almost unnoticed. By around 750 this process is already under way, for as early as the eighth century Muslim traders are present in Awdaghust and in other oasis towns along the edge of the Sahel, and they come not as envoys of a caliph, but as merchants.

The Road That Already Existed

To understand how Islam enters West Africa, the road must be understood first. The Sahara had been crossed for centuries before the Prophet ﷺ was born, for Amazigh caravans travelled under the Romans and long before them, and salt, gold and slaves were already moving back and forth before a single Arab knew anything of West Africa. What changed in the 8th century was not the birth of the route, but the identity of the merchants who used it. After the Islamic openings of North Africa in the second half of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th, the Maghreb was Islamized, and this happened in waves, sometimes slowly, sometimes in jolts, accompanied by revolts, compromises and new syntheses, with the result that the Amazigh tribes who controlled the Saharan trade, the Sanhaja and the Zenata above all, themselves became Muslims. It was these Imazighen who first carried the deen southward.

No Islamic army ever subjugated West Africa militarily in the period discussed here, and attempts at military expansion southward from the Maghreb were rarely lasting, for the distances are too great and the Sahara is a merciless wall: whoever tries to push an army through it loses so many men and animals to the crossing that almost nothing remains on the other side. Yet West Africa did Islamize, not all at once, not totally, but substantially and durably.

Where exactly did these first contacts take place? Not in Kumbi, which will only later become a meeting place, and not in Gao either, which in this period is still an independent city-state with a limited Muslim presence. The very first place where Muslim traders and black African populations met lay at the southern edge of the desert itself, in the oases and salt mines where caravan traffic made its structural halts, and Awdaghust stands at the top of that list. Located in what is now southern Mauritania, Awdaghust was already a flourishing trade centre in the late 8th century, with a mixed population of Sanhaja Imazighen who functioned both as wealthy merchants and as camel drivers, and alongside them black African communities, Soninke and related peoples, who practised horticulture and craftwork. Here a travelling Muslim and a local farmer could not avoid each other; they had to know each other.

Tadmekka also became an important point of contact in this period, though somewhat further east, while Sijilmasa itself lay on the northern rim of the Sahara and was not a West African contact point in the strict sense, but it was the starting point of the routes, and whoever prayed there knew that his prayers would travel southward on camels’ shoulders. Ghat, Ghadames and Zawila in present-day Libya played similar roles on the central and eastern routes, each with its own distinctive community of Muslim merchants, and each thus contributed to a layered, many-coloured network of early encounters.

A Forgotten Demography

Another point that is rarely mentioned is that the Islamized population of West Africa in this early period already included black African Muslims, and not only Amazigh merchants who happened to be staying in the Sahel. From the 8th century onward, children were born in Awdaghust and Tadmekka from mixed marriages, with an Amazigh father and a Soninke mother or the other way around, who were raised as Muslims from the start, and their names first surface in Arabic sources only in the 11th century, while their presence as a group begins here. This matters historically, for Islam in West Africa is not a religion that was imposed on Africans by outsiders and that they then had to internalize, but has been an African phenomenon from the very beginning. Black Muslims were there from the start and not only later, for they lived in the trading towns, spoke the languages of commerce and gave their children Islamic names.

This period is a hinge point, for what has now begun will grow in the coming centuries not gradually, but in fits and starts. The trans-Saharan trade, still relatively modest in this period, will undergo an explosive intensification in the 9th century, with new routes opening and new towns blossoming, while new mosques, still built of mud, will have minarets within a few generations, and a new class of scholars will emerge who have studied at al-Azhar and yet sit teaching on a mat in a village in the Sahel.

But the seed is planted in this early encounter. Traders from Tahert and Sijilmasa, Ibadi for the most part, carry a deen that will become an identity not for themselves, but for the descendants of the receiving peoples.