Today, the African continent is represented by 54 sovereign states, half of which are member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, i.e. they officially identify themselves as Muslim countries. The Central African Republic (CAR) sympathizes with them and acts as an observer state in the Organization. The situation in the Muslim countries of Africa is also influenced by two other regional organizations: the Arab League (uniting 22 countries) and the Arab Maghreb Union, which includes Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia.
The Muslim population of modern Africa is predominantly Sunni Islam. Sunni Islam is represented by all four schools of law. A significant role among Muslims is played by Sufi brotherhoods (tariqats), of which there are several dozen in Africa. Sufism offered not only a way to spiritual salvation, which African ethnic religions could not provide, but also a new type of social relations based on the ethics of brotherhood and mutual social support within Muslim community.
The Arab conquests of the VII-VIII centuries led to the spread of Islam in North Africa. From the IX century, the religion began to spread from the north (Egypt and Maghreb) and the east (Arabia) to Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and from there it spread to the south and east of the continent. By the XII century, Islam had spread to the island of Zanzibar and Mozambique. Incidentally, the latter state was named after Sheikh Mussa Bin Bique, a Muslim preacher.
In West Africa, Islam emerged around the XI century – Arab geographical sources of this time mention the adoption of Islam by the population of Ghana. In South Africa the religion became known from about the XV-XVI centuries due to the Swahili culture. From the XVII century, the Dutch East India Company began to import Malays, natives of Indonesia, into the Cape region. With their arrival Islam in a specific Malaysian interpretation took root on the southern tip of the continent along with the already known there Swahili version of Islam, which, in turn, was strongly influenced by Yemen and Oman. In the XVIII-XX centuries, Islam continued to spread in the interior of Africa – northern Nigeria, CAR.
The fall of the USSR, which marked the collapse of world socialism, strengthened the ideology of the global supremacy of Western civilization that emerged in the XIX century. But already at the end of the XX century, supporters of that ideology encountered obstacles that challenged the possibility of the global unconditional domination by Western values based on secular ideals and the principles of liberal democracy. The process was limited by the revival of world confessions, primarily Christianity and Islam – by the beginning of the XXI century, these religions had increased the number of their adherents in the world, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa.
The religious self-determination of Africans, especially the population of so-called Tropical Africa, also known as Black Africa (the part of the continent south of the Sahara Desert inhabited predominantly by Negroid peoples) became more organized and socially oriented. The cohesion of local peoples on the basis of shared religious values and rules of behavior took place in the face of severe and prolonged upheavals at the end of the XX century: the rise of uncontrolled violence, poverty, and the decline of traditional morals and ethics.
The trends in the development of Islamic religious self-consciousness were strengthened by the penetration into Tropical Africa of the ideas of Islamic fundamentalism, which began in the 1940-1950s and whose proponents demanded a return to the original principles of Islam and a purification of it from later cultural layers, especially African ones. The influence of Islamic fundamentalism was further strengthened by the aggravation of socio-economic and political crisis in African countries and the development of global information and social networks.
The religious revival in Tropical Africa is closely connected with renewal movements on other continents. The growing influence of Islam cannot be imagined outside the organized rise of Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam in the Arab countries. The events of the Arab Spring in 2011-2012 plunged the entire Arab-Islamic world – the world of canonical Islam – into a state of transition, implying a crisis of development. The revolutionary political events generated changes in public and personal consciousness, requiring a rethinking of the basic aspects of Islamic values, Islamic identity and self-consciousness.
The acute political crisis led to the rapid collapse of political regimes in the North African states: Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Unrest also engulfed Algeria. In Morocco and Mauritania the protests were not massive, but pushed the ruling circles towards reforms. In 2011 the “peaceful” (after almost 40 years of civil war) secession of Afro-Christian South Sudan from Arab-Muslim Sudan took place, and the painstaking process of reunification of Somalia, which collapsed in the early 1990s, began.
The fact is that sooner or later Islamic countries have to solve the issue of restoration of state governance, for which modern Islamic theory has no ready-made models. The epicenter of the contradictions of the global Islamic community, caused by the crisis of development, was initially concentrated in the area of the struggle against colonialism. In the XXI century, the confrontation shifted inside Muslim society itself, demanding change from the power structures. In those Muslim countries where the official authorities effectively resist anti-state extremism, the restricting of society proceeds quietly without armed confrontation.
The picture is different in most Muslim states of Tropical Africa. There, ineffective power structures, coupled with a poorly organized spiritual elite and population that continues to profess pre-Islamic beliefs, are powerless against the onslaught of determined fundamentalists. Armed conflicts arise that lead to an expanding network of terrorist organizations operating under Islamic slogans, and the tribal structure of African society forms a base for the recruitment of extremists.
Islam in Africa is not static and is constantly changing for social, economic and political reasons. Recognition of the fact of increasing religious contradictions in the Tropical part of the continent is an important step towards an adequate response to this phenomenon of the modern world and its manifold consequences. Unfortunately, recognition of the problem often turns into an excuse for neo-colonial pressure from outside. It is important to note that this situation is not an exclusively African phenomenon, but one of the manifestations of the global increase in the importance of the religious factor.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
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