Beyond Jihad

Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Profesor of Missions and World Christianity and Professor of History at Yale, has produced a magisterial study on the spread on Islam in West Africa. The book focuses on what the author terms the pacifist (and majority) tradition of clerical preaching in the Senegambia, Mali, and Ghana. He begins the book with an account of the spread of Islam in North-West Africa during the Umayyad dynasty, followed by the Almoravid and Almohad empires. Using both primary and secondary sources, Sanneh establishes that, particularly when it comes to West Africa, proper (not the Berber-majority north) Islam was spread by peaceful preaching through ‘channels of transmission and organized structures of state and society.’ He notes from al-Bakri’s (d. 1094) account that,