This chapter diachronically analyzes the experiences of Muslims in West Africa, from the first contacts of West Africans with the new religion of Islam in the eighth century CE and the establishment of the first Muslim trading communities south of the Sahara desert, to the adoption of Islam by rulers and elites of different West African states from the tenth to the fifteenth century. It focuses on the first traditions of Islamic scholarship, and particularly on the ones which took place in the Middle Niger in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also in the birth of the first Sufi brotherhoods after this period. This chapter studies the different reform movements of the nineteenth century and their impact in the accomplishment of the process of islamization of West Africa, as well as their contribution to the “Africanization” of Islam, through their particular interpretation of popular devotion and piety, which continued to be the characteristic spirit of West African Islam despite the influence of global puritanism of Middle Eastern and Arabian Wahhabi movements.

Ver: https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_21-1