Chapter XI · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM IN AFRICA.

Where intermarriages with such races as Arabs and Berbers have been frequent, a steady process of infiltration has gone on, and this, added to the propagandist activities of those races—Fulbe, Hausa and Mandingo—who have distinguished themselves for their zeal on behalf of their religion, would have contributed to the more rapid growth of a Muhammadan population, had it not been for the internecine wars that caused one Muhammadan state to work the destruction of another. Melle rose on the ruins of Ghāna in the thirteenth century, to be crushed at the beginning of the sixteenth by Songhay, which in its turn was desolated by the Moors a century later. As these Muhammadan empires declined, with the wholesale massacres characteristic of warfare in the Sudan, fetishism regained much of the ground it had lost; and as in the Christian, so in the Muhammadan world, there have been periods when missionary zeal has sunk to a low ebb, and Muhammadans in some parts of the Sudan have been content to leave the paganism that surrounded them untouched by any proselytising efforts.

But the history of the Muhammadan propaganda in Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very slight and wholly insignificant when compared with the remarkable revival of missionary activity during the present century. Some powerful influence was needed to arouse the dormant energies of the African Muslims, whose condition during the eighteenth century seems to have been almost one of religious indifference. Their spiritual awakening owed itself to the influence of the Wahhābī reformation at the close of the eighteenth century; whence it comes that in modern times we meet with some accounts of proselytising movements among the Negroes that are not quite so forbiddingly meagre as those just recounted, but present us with ample details of the rise and progress of several important missionary enterprises.

Danfodio united into one powerful organisation these separate communities, scattered throughout the various Hausa states. The first outbreak occurred in the year 1802, in the still pagan kingdom of Gober, which had gained ascendancy over the northernmost of the Hausa states; the attempt of the king of Gober to check the growing power of the Fulbe in his dominions caused Danfodio to raise the standard of revolt; he soon found himself at the head of a powerful army, which attacked not only the pagan tribes, forcing upon them the faith of the Prophet, but also the Muhammadan Hausa states. These fell one after another and the whole of Hausaland came under the rule of Danfodio before his death in 1816. His grave in Sokoto is still an object of reverence to large numbers of pilgrims. He divided his kingdom among his two sons, who still further extended the boundary of Fulbe rule; Adamaua, founded in 1837 on the ruins of several pagan kingdoms, marks the limit of their conquests to the south-east; and the city of Ilorin, in the Yoruba country, founded in the lifetime of Danfodio, was the bulwark of the Pul empire to the south-west. With varying fortunes the dominant power remained throughout the nineteenth century in the hands of the Fulbe, who showed themselves cruel and fanatical propagandists of Islam, until British administration was established in Nigeria in 1900.

There has thus been much missionary work done for Islam in this part of Africa by men who have never taken up the sword to further their end,—the conversion of the heathen. Such have been the members of some of the great Muhammadan religious orders, which form such a prominent feature of the religious life of Northern Africa. Their efforts have achieved great results during the nineteenth century, and though doubtless much of their work has never been recorded, still we have accounts of some of the movements initiated by them.

The Tijāniyyah, belonging to an order founded in Algiers towards the end of the eighteenth century, have, since their establishment in the Sudan about the middle of the nineteenth century, pursued the same missionary methods as the Qādiriyyah, and their numerous schools have contributed largely to the propagation of the faith; but, unlike the former, they have not refrained from appealing to the sword to assist in the furtherance of their scheme of conversion, and, unfortunately for a true estimate of the missionary work of Islam in Western Africa, the fame of their Jihāds or religious wars has thrown into the shade the successes of the peaceful propagandist, though the labours of the latter have been more effectual towards the spread of Islam than the creation of petty, short-lived dynasties. The records of campaigns, especially when they have interfered with the commercial projects or schemes of conquest of the white men, have naturally attracted the attention of Europeans more than the unobtrusive labours of the Muhammadan preacher and schoolmaster. But the history of such movements possesses this importance, that—as has often happened in the case of Christian missions also—conquest has opened out new fields for missionary activity, and forcibly impressed on the minds of the faithful the existence of large tracts of country whose inhabitants still remained unconverted.