Africa

The roots of Islam in Africa

 The history of Islam in Africa is long and rich. The famous historian Ibn Khaldun says that the name Ifriqiya was given after Ifriqos bin Qais bin Saifi, one of the Kings of Yemen. To Al-Bakri, the boundaries of Ifriqiya were Barga on the East and Tangier on the West, which means that in addition to the Africa proper of the Romans, it included Tripolitania, Numidia and Mauritania. Today, by the use of the word Ifiriqiya or Africa, the Arabs as well as non-Arabs mean the entire continent of Africa.

Islam entered Africa in the 7th century AD. After the death of Muhammad (saw), in 632, Khaleefah Abu Bakr as Siddiq (ra) embarked upon spreading Islam outside the Arabian Peninsula. Although he died two years later Khaleefah Umar ibn al-Khattab continued with this mission. In 636, Islam had entered Jerusalem, Damascus, and Antioch; in 651, all of Persia was under the Khilafah. But Islam also moved west into Africa. In 646, the Khilafah expanded to Egypt and quickly spread across northern Africa.

The largest African cities and kingdoms were located in the Sahel, a desert and savannah region south of the Sahara. After 750 AD, these cities and kingdoms arose because they served as hubs for the trade routes across northern Africa. By the 1300's, these large Sahelian kingdoms became Islamic and, more importantly, centers of Islamic learning.

There are several important cultural practices that Islam gave to Africa. The first is literacy. Egypt and the Nilotic kingdoms of the Kushites and the Nubians had long traditions of writing, and the Ethiopians had acquired it through their ties to the Semitic peoples of southern Arabia. But these writing systems did not spread throughout Africa. Islam, however, as a religion of the book, spread writing and literacy everywhere it went. Many Africans dealt with two languages: their native language and Arabic, which was the language of texts. However, this gradually changed as Africans began using the Arabic alphabet to write their own languages. To this date, Arabic script is one of the most common scripts for writing African languages.

With literacy, the Islam brought formal educational systems. In North Africa and the Sahel, these systems and institutions would produce a great flowering of African thought and science. In fact, the city of Timbuktu had perhaps the greatest university in the world. Thus Islam’s influence on Northern and Eastern Africa continued only to be challenged and eventually ended at the hands of European colonialism and the collapse of the Uthmani Khilafah in 1924. However, the disease of war and poverty which grips Africa today started before the collapse of the Uthmani Khilafah, as its power was on waning long before 1924.

The first "scramble for Africa" began when Henry Stanley claimed the Congo River Valley for Belgium. France then invaded Algeria and built the Suez Canal. Britain invaded Egypt in order to have control of the canal, which was crucial to their shipping routes. Britain and Egypt then took control of Sudan. France began to colonize Tunisia and Morocco. Italy took Libya. Britain fought a war with and defeated the Boers in order to gain control of the resource rich Southern Africa. Cecil Rhodes became rich from the Kimberly diamond fields, which produced 90% of the world's diamonds at the time. By the early 1900's most of Africa was taken by European colonialists. Today, political power has been reordered, America is now the leading world power replacing the European nations influence, but while the control over the world’s resources has passed into different hands the objectives have not changed.

As long as Capitalism is the dominant ideology in the world, the relationship between nations will continue to be based on the ruthless pursuit of wealth. This has been the story of the world ever since the world power of the Islamic Khilafah state declined and disappeared from the international arena, leaving the world to be reshaped in the image of Capitalism.
While the western Capitalist nations traditional interest in Africa has been ‘cash crops’, diamonds and other minerals, it has gained significant attention in recent times due to oil discoveries and increased oil production in existing fields. This has happened as the realization has dawned of the instability of the Middle East oil supply in the future, due to the rise of political Islam. This has caused the continued supply of resources, most significantly oil lying in the balance of political Islam. A military subcommand for the Gulf of Guinea has already been recommended, including the recently authorised creation of Africa Command (AfriCom) by the US military. These important events have not gone unnoticed. The Times of London acknowledged these developments in a July 29, 2002, story headlined, "U.S. Presses Africa to turn on the tap of crude oil." Quoting Walter Kansteiner, U.S. Under Secretary of State for African Affairs, the Times reported, "African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will increase and become more important as we go forward."

35 years of petroleum exports in Nigeria have not helped raise living standards; despite its oil wealth, per capita income in Nigeria is less than $1 a day and living standards are below the average in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria is perhaps the most prominent example of where countries rich in natural resources suffer from lower living standards, slower growth rates and higher incidence of conflict than their resource-poor counterparts.

The inverse relationship between growth and oil and mineral abundance has come to be known as the “resource curse”. From 1970-1993, resource-poor countries (without petroleum) grew four times more rapidly than resource-rich countries (with petroleum) – despite the fact that they had half of the savings. The greater the dependence on oil and mineral resources the worse the growth performance appears to be.

Africa represents a highly significant portion of the world’s oil resources. Capitalist nations are preparing the grounds in Africa through explorations on land and under the sea, oil companies issuing significant bribes to African government officials, increased military expenditure for US ‘Peace Keeping’ forces in Africa and several presidential visits to secure political allegiance to oil exports. Western oil companies and African governments come from the same style of Capitalism and therefore the wealth generated from oil exports tends to circulate amongst themselves, leaving the average man to become even poorer, a fact documented by several organizations. Therefore, whatever the resource finds in Africa, poverty will continue to be the lot of the African continent.

In contrast, the Islamic Khilafah system fully integrated the peoples and lands it governed over with statesmen from the Khilafah marrying from and intermingling with the indigenous people. The spread of Islam to Africa was not driven by material gains rather the aim was the furthering of the message of Islam and its noble values.  The Islamic economic system facilitated the well being of Africa via the distribution of wealth. The strong injunctions to ensure that wealth does not remain in the hands of the wealthy led to wealth flowing throughout society. The current international competition between the US, EU and China on Africa’s immense oil and mineral resources highlights the need for the return of the rightly guided Khilafah Rashidah.