Models of Liberation in West Africa | Professor Ware and Mustafa Briggs

[Music] Hello, salams and welcome you're listening to the Sacred Footsteps podcast. Sacred Footsteps is an online publication and podcast devoted to alternative and spiritual travel, history and culture from a Muslim perspective. Join us while we talk to writers, historians, artists, as well as a whole host of other people about travel as a spiritual practice. [Music] Hello, alaikum, what I hope to lie to ala wa barakatuh is your brother Mustafa Rikhia with the Sacred Footsteps podcast. And in this episode, Hamdulillah, we have a very, very special episode. So I'm joined by someone I like to call my elder brother, a mentor, a friend, a role model, Hamdulillah. Professor Rudolf Wehrd III who is a historian of West Africa at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So he formerly taught at the University of Michigan and before that with Northwestern University and he received his PhD in history in 2004 from the University of Pennsylvania. And he's mostly known for his amazing, amazing book, which I used as a reference for my bachelor's degree dissertation, The Walking on Anne, Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge and History in West Africa. He also has another publication called "Jihad of the Penn" Sufi Thought in West Africa, which is Torrance and with Zachary and Amir Saeed. And he has a new book coming out which he will tell us about in Shahrullah in this interview. Well, this is going to be an interview/conversation. We're going to go back and forth because we're talking about a subject that Mashallah, I have a lot of passion for. If you know me and you know who I am then you know that this is Mashallah, my favorite subject. And Hamdulillah, I'm one of my favorite people discussing it. So Mashallah, it will be an amazing time for everyone involved. So I'll pass it over to Professor Wehr, Shahrullah, Salam alaikum. Wa-laikum, Salam, wa rahmatullah wa tala'aikum. So good to see you again, Mustafa. Hope you're doing well. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Isshahrullah. Shahrullah, who is always good to see you, Hamdulillah. Hamdulillah. The subject of today's podcast, I think, is very pertinent to what is happening in the world at the moment and an undiscovered or unappreciated side of Islamic legacy, models of liberation in West African Islam. And the reason why I've chosen the subject is because I want us to discuss the history of Islam in West Africa, the unique manifestation of Islam in West Africa and how that can be relevant for our experience today, not just as Muslims of African descent, but as Muslims living in the West and just Muslims in general. Because Allah tells us, "O Jamna, Kompou'ubanosh, Shobanwa, Qawla'il, tarrafu." He made us different tribes and nations in order for us to know each other. And with the tarraf, that's an intimate knowledge and an intimate knowledge that breeds, you know, a matter of fact, that breeds experiential knowledge. So my first question, I would say, would be talk to us a bit about the spread of Islam in West Africa, because I feel like from what I've studied Islam in West Africa spread in a very, very unique way. Talk about the spread of Islam in Africa we can't forget to mention the Jahanqe system, the scholarly lineages, and how Islam was spread. Because when we think of the Middle East and many other places, Islam usually was spread through conquest. First, we had to talk about it in the time of the Khulafah-e-Rashidin and the Al-Mahed and the Al-Baghid, you know, it was a thing of conquering. What today, there would probably call colonization of such or arabization, whereas Islam is very unique in West Africa, because, you know, I'm sure you're going to bring the facts and figures that are still in the walking, put, and others. But Africa is a majority Muslim continent, it's the only majority Muslim continent. And especially in Sapsaharan Africa and Black Africa, we see that it was never ruled or colonized by Arabs. It was not a part of the wider, you know, Middle Eastern Islamic empire, although they did have their own Islamic empires that came about afterwards. But yet Islam is such a strong part of the, and it's something where the culture of the West Africans or Sapsaharan Africans never became arabized. They didn't assimilate into being arab, they didn't pick up the arabic language as their main language. They kept their languages, they kept their cultures, they kept their traditions, but yet they're still very, very Muslim and have reached a level of Islamic scholarship. So I wanted to ask you, when did Islam enter the region? How did it enter and how did it spread in the region? It's a beautiful, beautiful set of questions. And so I'll say this and then I want to go back for one thing before I fully answer the question. Like the imprint of the way in which Islam spread in Sapsaharan Africa is still present today, right? Like first impressions matter, you know, the way that a thing arrives in a place, you know, does a lot to structure what it will eventually become. And because Islam comes peacefully to Sapsaharan Africa without any external conquest and it's not imposed by state forces or military forces, it is very much a bottom up grassroots, grassroots movement rather than something that is imposed from the top. And for that reason, like still to this day, when you study Islamic movements in West Africa, they have that organic close to the ground feel that they then blossom into something else. And they have roots that are deep in the ground and reach upwards rather than being imposed from the top down and therefore penetrating the soil shallowy. So that's one kind of symbolic way of representing one of the principle lessons that we can learn is that we've been given an opportunity to spread this religion peacefully through teaching, through spiritual work, through proselytizing and rooting it in the ground of our societies so that it grows. Because as the great West African scholar, our Imam and friend, Shaykh Tajani, he says he puts it when commenting on Surab-Arab, verse 256, Laqraha Fidin, there is no compulsion in religion. He says, look, when you compel somebody to believe something, you don't gain a believer, you gain a hypocrite. So, and anything that is forced and imposed is a belief that, you know, may at some point enter the heart, but it certainly isn't one that germinates there. It certainly isn't one that starts there. And so, you know, we have an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of those West African ancestors in creating an Islam that is focused on teaching, that is focused on, you know, proselytizing at the grassroots. So that's one, and I'll come back to the history of that in just a moment. But I want to return to the very first thing, you know, that you said, because you were, you know, citing Quran. And like, it's important, like, why we study these examples in the first place. Like, we don't just study these examples, because there are ancestors, because we happen to be black people. And it's also not just that it is that we study, you know, one another's history, so that we know each other. But the Quran actually gives us an explanation of why you study the past in the first place. Okay. And it comes in Surah-Tuhuud, when God explains to the Prophet, he says, "Indeed, all that we relate to you in the tales of the previous prophets with it, we fortify your heart." So the purpose of studying the greats of the past is that you get inspired by their example, and the way that they carry forth this word into the world. And it fortifies your heart with the knowledge that it can be done. And also, you take inspiration in the courage that they show, the patient perseverance that they show, you infer lessons from it. So like, that to me is like the key of study in this history. It's the key of study in all history. And so with respect to your initial question, yeah, there is no, there's no conquest external, external conquest of Sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, what happens is that first merchants who are working in trade routes that predate at Islam, right? Because West Africa is trading with North Africa in the Roman period, extensively. But when Islam comes, Muslim merchants start coming across Trans-Saharan trade routes for gold and for salt and for other goods that were common in that time, and they started to bring Islam with them. And once they open those trade routes, scholars started to fall in behind them. And so those two groups merchants and scholars really start to kind of leave an imprint on West African society early. But what happens is that within West African society, social groups that match those two social groups develop very early. There are already West African merchants that are moving goods all over West Africa, colon nuts, forest products to the savannah, savannah products to the forest, putting goods on canoes in spots that are like Timbuktu and moving them down the river to spots like Gena. There's dense trade already going on. So merchants are amongst the first people to adopt Islam because they're exposed to it through their trade networks and it's also good for business. Later, indigenous families start to specialize not just in having Islam as an identity, but in teaching the religion as the basis of their activities. And that's the formation of those clerical families which comes very, very early in the history of Islam in West Africa. And they really become the principal agents for spreading Islam amongst West African populations. The earliest ones that we can document go back to the Jihankhye tradition, but actually also in the area of Lake Chad and Kanan Bornu, probably in the eighth and ninth century, their clerical families develop in there. If you look here into the early history, for example, of proselytizing in what's now Northern Nigeria, it's actually coming from both sides. It's coming. There's a black central African tradition from the Lake Chad region and a Jihankhye tradition coming from the kind of bend of the Niger River that are meeting in places like Northern Nigeria. And there's an early developing Fulani tradition within a century or two wall-off speakers are developing their own clerical inages. So Ninkai are probably the first to do so, then Mandingo. So you have these little cradles of Islamic teaching that get rooted in West African societies themselves. And they're not being sponsored by states. They're not coming armed with guns. They're coming armed with books. They're coming armed with tablets. They're coming armed with literacy. They're coming armed with an idea that the best way to draw people to Islam is not to try to compel them, but to rather embody a beautiful example so that these people will wonder, "Wait, what is this moral code that you say you live by all about?" - Shana. And in speaking about them coming with books and then not being states-sponsored and then not having any political affiliations, I wanted to ask, what is the relationship between, so, okay, this is one question, but it's three questions. - Okay. - What are the books being studied and what's the level of scholarship being developed and spread by these clerical families? Is it equivalent to what we see happening in Yemen and in Syria and in northern Africa? Is it the same level or is it, you know, if not, no, how is it like? - Okay, so we'll start, let's start with that one. That's a great question. And you can bracket the other two and we'll knock those down as we come in. The way that I'll answer that question is with a specific historical example, okay. And that is the state of affairs in Mali, the empire of Mali in the 14th and 15th centuries, okay? So people might have heard of Mons of Musa who is probably the wealthiest man to ever live, at least a lot of economic journals called me up for interviews asking me about him so that they can name him the wealthiest person that ever lived. But one of the things that people don't know about him is that he controlled the gold trade, had tremendous wealth, but he invested that in scholarship in Imperial West Africa. The building of schools, the building of mosques, investment in libraries and manuscripts. So that what happened in the 1330s, 1340s, 1350s is that West Africa became a global center for Islamic scholarship. There were, you know, Shura Fah from Mecca and Medina, from Baghdad, from South Asia, from what's now the Indian subcontinent that traveled all the way to Timbuktu to study with jet black West African scholars because they were understood, first of all, to be the best teachers of Mali ki Fik on the planet one. And in addition to being extremely learned in all of the disciplines, and I'll just give you one example so that this doesn't sound made up. A person called Modibo Muhammad al-Kabadi, okay, who is mentioned in the Tariqa Sudan and also in other contemporary historical texts about the Imperial language in West Africa. He's mentioned as a saint that was capable of miracles, but he's also the books that he taught are enumerated. And it said that he would have 60 to 70 students at a time learning all of the advanced treaties in Mali ki Fik in addition to the other texts. So in his instance, we have documented instances of Shura Fah leaving North Africa and coming to study with him. And then composing praise poetry to say, "Will there ever be another one like him? O Arabs, will we ever produce the like of him?" - Yeah. - Those words were written by Sidi Yahya Tadalisi, who himself was understood to be a Shereef. Documented instances of people leaving the holy cities in order to come to West Africa to study with people like Modibo Muhammad al-Kabadi. And this is also just another, since we're dropping, like sneak previews of works to drop. I've actually been able to find a manuscript of a surviving book written by Modibo Muhammad al-Kabadi, probably from the 14 teens, and we're working on an annotated translation of that text now. So this was not some second or third rate scholarly tradition. It was the pinnacle of the scholarly tradition because it had the state patronage at that point in time, not state control, but state patronage of one of the most powerful and wealthy men of all time who gave autonomy to clerical lineages to do what they wanted. They ruled within their own domains. The state didn't interfere, but the state did see a benefit in providing resources, access to books, access to schools. And that led to a now all but forgotten efflorescence of Black African scholarship in Islam. - And what I find amazing, what I find interesting is that, and we'll go into this, 'cause this ties into the next question, is that you mentioned that the scholarly clerical families were exploits in my like we fit the masters of the Quran, masters of the Islamic sciences, people who had reached the pinnacle in scholarship. And this was by the 13th century, meaning for about two centuries, previous or more, they were already firmly grounded in knowledge and established in what they were doing. I mean, I had, for example, the Jahanq tradition from three major books, the Tafsirah of Jalaluddin Suyuti, and Shifah of Qadi Yad and the Mawata of Imam Malik, was a primary text. - Can I say something about that? 'Cause that is a claim that is often made. However, the Tafsirah of Suyuti is actually too late to be a foundational text for the Jahanq. The Jahanq are specializing in Quranic exegesis, at least 400 years before Suyuti's born. So the Tafsirah Jalaluddin becomes the foundational Tafsirah texts that they use as the basis of the oral teaching. But just to be clear, if you go 500 years back before that, the Mawata of Imam Malik is being used. And the Shifah of Qadi Yad is also about maybe three centuries earlier than Suyuti. So it's a tradition that is focused on core texts and changes the texts that are the best ones to teach, along the way. Sorry to interrupt, but yeah. - My best was important to highlight. And I wanted to then now ask you the relationship between these scholarly families and the rulers and the empires. So what was the social setup of West Africa pre-colonization and what was the political setup and how did they interact? Because now within the Islamic tradition, there's always been, I would say, after the time of the Khulafar, there's always been a complicated relationship between the Olemah and the Umarah, the scholars and the rulers. Usually they try and control the religion, the ways being taught and the ways being spread. Usually scholars, we all know that Imam Malik, Imam Ahmad bin Hambo, etc. All of the great scholars, most of them had problems with their religion. - They were persecuted, yeah. - And so on the Shifahar obviously, which is why we have so many of their problems in Africa, because they were running away from the (indistinct) in the Middle East, you know. So with that, what was the relationship? Because I remember I had a conversation with you what that he said, something that was extremely important in the spread of Islam in West Africa and the way that is relevant to how we can modernify Islam in the West is that it was independent of the political sphere. Even though it influenced the political sphere, it was there before the empires and the kingdoms and it's still there now after. And we went into the final where I wanna take the conversation. We'll talk about before colonization, as he said in the early times, what was the relationship between these scholarly clerical families and the rulers? 'Cause we see for example, that the Ghana Empire was ruling at a time, And when there were non Muslim kings that had Olamah working with them living within their boundaries, the role of Moses as a, uh, uh, Al Umari says when he talks about his visit to the Ghana Empire in the 12th century, he says, you know, the king is a Muslim, but there's the capital city with 12 masjids, one of the exactly. Exactly. Good job. And then the Mali Empire, the kings are Muslim, what's their relationship with the scholars and some guy, etc, etc. Man, it's a, it's a beautiful question and, you know, beautifully detailed question. And two things, you know, jump to mine immediately, right? Like, so for the modern Muslim, you know, a lot of people repeat this saying, like, Islam didn't wa da'ala, right? Islam is, is religion and, you know, politics or, you know, however you want to translate the term. And people act like that, that's a, that's in the Quran someplace. Um, where they act like it's in Hadith someplace, but it's not. It's actually like a nationalist aphorism that's developed, you know, in the Middle East, you know, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Um, it's not, you know, the original, you know, model. The, the model, as it existed in West Africa was, for lack of a better term, it was the separation of church and state to protect the church from the state. See, in, in Western societies, we've evolved separation of church and state in order to protect the state from the church. In West Africa, it evolved in the opposite direction. It evolved as a way of protecting, um, clerical autonomy so that they could stand in a position of autonomous ethical critique of political authorities. There meant to be the ones that are standing outside of power, um, and telling rulers that this exceeds the bounds. Mm-hmm. This, there's a better way of doing this. And you can't do that when you are a part of the thing that you are meant to criticize. Because people tend to reason with their material interests at stake when they are part of political institutions in an explicit way. They craft rulings and decisions and fatawa that justify or rubber stamp any imposition that kings would like to impose. So there is a long tradition in West Africa of preserving clerical autonomy and of yes, providing occasional services to political authorities, but always being wary of getting pulled into political, um, you know, um, conflicts. The Jihankai are an excellent example of this. You know, anytime, you know, political strife, you know, erupted, people were always trying to draw them in to provide, you know, religious opinions on this matter or the other. And that's when Jihankai said, oh, time to go. Like, and they would just prefer migration in every instance. Every time there was Fidna, they'd just get up and go. Um, rather than have their religion compromised, um, by being asked to make decisions on opposite sides of affairs involving Muslims. So the, the short version is that, um, pious distance from power was the basic model in West Africa, um, in the pre-colonial period. And when kings were thought of as being just and as people that took counsel, then scholars were more willing to work with them and in league with them. So that's why people like Monsomusa were successful and well remembered, right? And when, when kings were tyrants and abusive, the only people that could usually be counted on to speak up against them were scholars, were clerics. That was their job. And that, that ended up really, um, having significant effects later once the Atlantic slave trade arises, right, in West Africa because over the course of time, um, because clerical communities are thought of as being autonomous spaces where kings, um, are not allowed to exert their authority over the course of time. Like, um, and once, uh, kings start to get caught up in worldly matters that they shouldn't be involved in, um, clerical, you know, communities become even more important. They really become sites of organizing radical resistance to the injustice of the world. We should be thinking about this, right? In terms of our model, like we need to be thinking about how we, we stay distant from, um, overtly political aspirations. It's not that Muslims shouldn't be involved in politics. Muslims should be involved in politics and Muslims should be involved in politics as Muslims. But religious authorities should not be pursuing political authority. Because what happens over and over again, and this happens across West African history, we can talk about this in more detail, is that when the religious authorities become the political authorities, then who's going to provide the autonomous ethical critique of the political authorities? You started out with good, religion and bad politics, but oftentimes when the scholars become the kings, you end up with bad religion and bad politics. That's so important. And you touched on something that was going to be my next question, which is the transatlantic slave trade. But before we go there, I want to talk about an accusation that's always being brought up when speaking about the history of Islam in West Africa. And the way your face is looking, you know where I'm going with this, is the Arab slave trade. So there's two questions I have here. I want to know, because I was reading up about the Jahanke tradition, and there was a figure within that tradition called Salim Suhare, I believe his name. That's right. His model was the model that they say is how Islam spread in West Africa. It was the model for West African scholarship, which differed with the North African model. So we see, for example, in North Africa, Jihad was the main focus of people in spreading the religion. And the rulings, according to the scholars of Maliki Fikh, I mean, even if we study the Salah, we see this whole chapter on the rulings for Jihad, how to go about giving a Jihad. And what most scholars say oriental scholars specifically focus on is the fact that Islam was spread through Jihad, as in the Muslims will then say, okay, we're going to wage Jihad on this non-Muslim state. We invite them to Islam for three days. If they don't accept, we ask them to pay the Jizya, if they're a Hiliqatab, if they're not Islam, or we kill you, kind of, right, basically. That's how they always present it. And so they say through that then, colonize it. It was a form of colonization, and then also slave. The door for slavery was open because the people that resisted them were then enslaved and sold, et cetera. And that's how it's spread. Whereas when we see the Salim Suhare model, it's a model that doesn't engage with Jihad at all. And doesn't oppose non-Muslims and even pagan people who considered pagan, people who considered politics as being the political authorities and Muslims living under them, which is something that their North African counterparts did not accept. So in the North where we see they say, no, non-Muslims should be living under. No, Muslims should be living under the rule of non-Muslims. And it's an obligation to wage Jihad and replace them with Muslim leaders. In West Africa, we see this kind of collaboration between the scholarly families who are living within communities, setting up their communities under non-Muslim kings and working with them. So we see, for example, Al-Bakri says, oh Al-Omaryeh, I forgot his name, says when he visits the Ghana Empire that the king isn't Muslim, but most of the ministers in his government are Muslim. And his capital city has 12 masjids in a Muslim section. And in the non-Muslim section where the king lives, he has within his palace are masjid. So I wanted to ask, how would that model and how did they justify it, scholarly way? In a scholarly way, how did they justify not waging Jihad? And what was their scholarly basis for that? And then we'll move into as well the myth of the Arab slave trade. And yeah, what you have to say about that as well. There's so much to say and what you've said is so rich. I mean, the first thing to remember is that when I talk about scholars like Motiboh Muhammad LaKabadi and his teaching of Mali Ki Fik, that's the teaching that people are leaving North African and Middle Eastern societies to come to West Africa again. They're getting orientation in Mali Ki Fik that uses the exact same sources, but instead of arriving at warlike conclusions that justify the enslavement of everybody that doesn't believe like them, they are getting arguments that are rooted in foundational texts that make this basic argument, that the only system of governance that Muslims can't live under is no system of governance at all. That chaos is the thing that prevents the practice of religion because it's just power versus power and people shed one another's blood, but that any political authority that provides the circumstances for the practice of the religion, the free practice of the religion is a good thing, right? Because the goal is to keep people out of the fire and to raise people's ranks and paradise. [BLANK_AUDIO] The jihad of the sword was a contingent device used by the prophet himself because he had authorization to do so. Some prophets pick up the sword, some prophets never pick up the sword, but they all have the same mission, which is to raise high the word of God. So the the jahake position and the overall predominant position in West Africa can be summarized in the in these following points. The first is is that unbelief is a result of jahal ignorance, not evil. People can't believe when they don't know anything about a religion. Second, it's God's will that some people remain in jahalia longer than others. This is obvious. Third, la akraha fidin, there is no compulsion in religion. Therefore conversion occurs in God's time on his schedule. And because because jihad produces people that testify with the tongue, but don't believe it with their heart, it's not an acceptable means for conversion. It's legitimate only in self defense to protect the survival of the Muslim community. Muslims may support non-Muslim rule as long as they are allowed to practice their faith freely. And when they're prevented from practicing their faith freely, they should get up and go. They should prove, but they should try to stay when they can when they're allowed to practice their faith because by presenting an example of righteousness, knowledge and piety, they create an example to be emulated within the society. And that becomes the vehicle for the spread of Islam. And lastly, you center scholarship at the heart of your communities so that even if you're surrounded by people that believe other than you, you are going to be well founded in your de. Those seven principles is how you changed sub Saharan Africa from a place with 0% Muslims to the only majority Muslim continent in the world. So places now that when you go through Niger, northern Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, all the way through to Somalia, 92, 94, 96, 98% Muslim without shedding any blood. If we want to spread, look, if we want to spread Islam in the West, we better recognize that that has to be the model that we're going to apply. You know, these people that think that they're going to establish some corrupt caliphate and take down, you know, these imperial powers are out of their minds. Up look, what comes to mind, to be honest, is an outcast lyric, okay, a song lyric from the group outcast. And the line is, Niggas ran and raven about cats, they made them cats. They got some stuff that'll blow out your backs. Like, if you want to make this a matter of guns, they got bigger guns than you. But this can be done without shedding so much as a single drop of blood. And if you want proof, check on my ancestors. And that's where we're going to finish the conversation. But before we get to that part of the conversation, we've spoken about the entrance of Islam into West Africa through the scholars and the merchants. We've spoken about the spread of Islam in West Africa, independent of political control through scholarship, whether jihad of the sword, which is what we see usually in the North is replaced with jihad of the pen. Yeah, sub sub. In terms of in planting yourself in a community, benefiting the community, removing ignorance within the community and calling to Islam in the best way through an example of this exactly beautifully summarized, beautifully summarized. That's exactly right. And now we see that peacefully Muslims have been living in West Africa for about 700 years, 800 years. And then a new race arrives, a new people arrive, a new ideology arrives in the shores of West Africa, which is the European, which are the European colonizers. And the transatlantic slave trade starts to happen. And it vastly affects, I mean, people downplay the numbers and the statistics, but a vast number of the people taken kidnapped and sold into slavery from West Africa were actually part of these Muslim communities. Absolutely. And as you know, we've discussed in, I've discussed it in the former communist history of Islam in the Americas. We see scholars, we see highly educated West African Muslims being taken and enslaved in, in, in the Caribbean and North America and in South America. We see the first revolts happening happening from West Africa Muslims from the Senegal region, which led to the Haitian revolution, the Bahia revolts, the Malay revolts in Bahia, in Brazil, etc. All of these communities are being affected. So what is the reaction of the scholars on the continent and the Muslim communities on the continent to the transatlantic slave trade? And then also explain to us a bit about what is this so called Arab slave trade? Because whenever you talk about the transatlantic slave trade, people always like to say, yeah, well, you know, the Arab slave trade was much bigger. There were many more people taken, the Muslims were selling people in slavery, Mansa Musa was a slave trader, you hear all of these things. So Arab slave trade and transatlantic slave trade and what are the reactions? And I want to ask, if you can touch on Abduqad Khan, you can touch on Sheikh Ahmoud Al-Bamba because many people don't know Sheikh Ahmoud Al-Bamba had a young sister Fatima Tumbakeh who had the same one father as him. And she was kidnapped. That's right. I talked about it and I talked the other day and I still don't think people even registered that. Yeah, so please explain to us the Arab slave trade and the Atlantic slave trade and the react and the spoilers of West Africa to both. Okay, so the first thing is the Arab slave trade as a construct. Let's just take a second on that. We call the Atlantic slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade for one reason, which is that we don't want to call it what it is, which is the Euro American slave trade. Okay, we never put European or American next to the term slave trade because it's a way of denying the accountability for the people that operated the system. But people attach this moniker Arab slave trade to other slave trades because the goal is actually to try to get a critique of Muslim societies to stick. And that idea is that, well, whatever was done in the Atlantic slave trade, the Arabs did worse. Okay, this idea has been perpetuated in academic scholarship for a hundred years. When the first efforts to count the volume of the Atlantic slave trade in 1968 by Philip Curtin produced a count of nine million within three years. Some historian produced an account that said that the Arab slave trade was 10 million. No sources. No basis for the claim. No even ability to develop a basis for the claim. And by the way, that not number of nine million by Philip Curtin was later revised upwards to 10, 10 and a half, then 11, now 12 and three quarters. The truth is is that every time somebody does another count of the Atlantic slave trade, the numbers get higher. When I give estimates, I base it on what's documented currently, which is about 12 and three quarters million. But I know that every time the count has been done for the last 40 years, the numbers increased. So I usually say between 13 and 20 million Africans were brought out of Sub-Saharan Africa and God knows best. Now that is based on counting literally the manifests of every single slave ship that people have been able to find. That's how you get to that 12.75 million number. Do you know what passes for evidence in the estimate of the so-called size of the Arab slave trade? No documentation. Wild speculation. One piece of evidence that was used as the basis for suggesting that thousands of slaves were brought from the Sudan to, no, excuse me, from Ethiopia to Arabian Peninsula in the 19th century was literally based on a dinner conversation that a priest heard when he was visiting the king of Ethiopia. So that was literally the basis of it is that somebody made an off-hand comment that there were a hundred slaves a year sold here. So a historian literally just multiplied that by factor of X in order to produce this huge outflow of people. The fact of the matter is that the so-called Arab slave trade from Sub-Saharan Africa is a very recent phenomenon that is coterminous with the Atlantic slave trade. It rises at the same time that the Atlantic slave trade does. There is a slave trade and there is slavery in Muslim societies before that, but in places like North Africa. Africa, slaves come from all over the world and slave people come from all over the world and black people are a minority in the slave community in places like Egypt, even in places like Algeria. Morocco to a lesser extent just because there are slaves that are being purchased from across the Sahir Desert, but nobody's rating Sub-Saharan Africa for slaves at that point in time. There are a small part of a much larger set of economic activities, never in human history anywhere has the trade in human beings approached the scale that it takes on in the Atlantic slave trade. What happens in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century in Muslim societies with the emergence of a racialized capitalist slave trade that produces the same kinds of racist ideas that we experience in the West, that is actually part of the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Oftentimes, and you can document this in Morteinia, Morris tribes get involved in rating for slaves to sell them to Europeans and then they start increasingly using them in their own Sahir and Oasis. Then in the 19th century, when Europeans stop coming to the coast of Africa to buy slaves because they've now abolished the international trade, those slaves get sent to North Africa to Morocco and Algeria in huge numbers. You have racist ideas emerging in those societies in the 19th century that are actually first nurtured by the slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade, the Euro-American slave trade. Then because the Euro-American slave trade is cut off, slavery becomes much more intense in every part of Africa and in every part of the Muslim world. Because people only remember the last thing they see, the 19th century serves as the model for race relations in Muslim societies and people project that back to the dawn of Islam. As though this was part and parcel of an Islamic approach to slavery on the one hand and black people on the other. That's only part one of your question. The other part is so then what was the clerical response to this? Well, the clerics had been critics of enslavement before the Atlantic slave trade arose. Many of them. There's documented instances of North African scholars, West African scholars and especially scholars in Timbuktu, which is this kind of bridge between both places. Writing all kinds of opinions about how the basic condition of humanity is freedom exempt from the conditions of slavery and only illegally constituted jihad was capable of abrogating that original state of freedom. It had always been an opinion of a minority of Muslim legal scholars that only the prophet himself or someone that he deputized had the authority to waste that jihad anyway. There are no vehicles for adding new slaves to a society. So slavery should have ended. That had always been a position. But when West African scholars now get confronted with the largest trade in human beings that the world has ever known, they become increasingly radical in their argumentation against it. And they start to develop arguments that in fact, this is the phrasing of one. They say, how can it be that the testification of faith with prevents one from punishment and humiliation in the afterlife does not prevent one from the torment and humiliation of enslavement in this life. In other words, if anybody proclaims to be a believer, then they are exempt from enslavement. And this leads to, you know, Abdul Qadr Khan that you mentioned before when the slave trade is at its absolute height, leading an anti-slavery abolition movement that ends the institution of slavery in the Senegal River Valley that sets free any person that will recite a single verse of the Quran because it was his belief that not even a single verse of God's book should ever be held in bondage. And he said in the oral tradition, they say that the Muslim that should be protected from the indignities of enslavement is the one that says, "La ilaha illa' even if he pronounces ra ilaha illa'." The idea was that we're going to use this, our understanding of Islamic law as shielding from enslavement to use that to protect anyone who will even proclaim it. So the question that I asked for our time, right, are we using sound understandings of Islamic law to extend protections to women, to extend protections to abused and marginalized communities, or are we in our time the equivalent of those conservative scholars that are defending inherited legal positions on slavery without actually going into what the son of the prophet himself was, or why al-Mahd-e-Banaf had tab would set free the captives that were praying in the expeditions against the Persians. Not asking the question why the messenger of God freed anyone that he had ever owned before he died. Are we going back and asking those questions so that we can be agents for liberation and justice and abolition in our time? And you know, masha-ma, masha-ma, this is an amazing, this is an amazing, I'm kind of, yeah, I remember even I'm hearing Sheikh Ahmed Bamber once was brought a slave as a gift from somebody. That's right. But the person, and the person, he said, what's this, the person said, oh, this is your slave. And then he said, ah, what did he say? He said, he said, you own this man. And he said, he said, well, mama, mom, he said, yeah, I own him. And Bamber said to him, so come on, mom, you're a book of the world. He said, if you own him, then you own me because he and I have the same master and he pointed his finger to the heavens. Which leads me to my final kind of penultimate section of this. Insha'Allah. We haven't found no. So we can go as long as we want to. It's all good. So we spoke about insha'Allah, the fact that the Arab slave trade isn't really based though of the myth of the Arab slave trade isn't really based on solid evidence, especially with the number. And then we focused on the fact that the major slave trade we see amongst the Arab world's coincides with the euro, American slave trade. That's right. And that people were raiding African slaves. People were raiding African nations to invade people. But it's a seldom to Europeans. And that's something that when we have in oral tradition in Senegal, those other day I was listening to some kenelam using something that came from Walo. Walo is, as we know, in the birth of Senegal. And then she was talking about Talata in death. Because the Tuesday when the Mauritani and our group of Mauritani and people came to the raid, the raid saying, "I'm so panala." Yeah. But themselves in a hot and set themselves on fire. It happened. It actually happened on multiple occasions. When Abduqad-aqan was fighting against the principle slave trading king of his time, which was the Damal of Qajor in 1796, Abduqad-aqan had not lost the military battle in 20 years from between 1776 and 1796, he hadn't lost the battle. So in addition to the 30,000 soldiers that marched with him from Fudotoro across the Fetalo to Qajor, there were a number of women and children that came just to watch the battles because they didn't have any fear. And when he lost that first battle that he lost and was himself taking captive, and many of his principal lieutenants were sold into slavery. And by the way, the book that I'm writing now, I've been able to track some of his enslaved lieutenants to slave rebellions in Antiqua. I've been able to track some of his enslaved lieutenants to South Carolina and Georgia. People's heads are going to pop when this thing drops. I'm just going to tell you that right now. But to return to your story is that when he was taken prisoner and they lost that battle, the women walled themselves into huts and lit them on fire because they knew that enslavement as every enslaved person in the New World knows means risk of horrible sexual abuse for women, horrible sexual abuse for women. And rather than facing that, they preferred death at that time. So this was a trauma. And like the scholars of the age had to be responsible and do something. They couldn't just lean on what their books had said that you already had did because it obviously wasn't meeting the moment because if it had been meeting the moment, then we wouldn't be in the situation we're in. So yeah, so go, yeah, I mean, one of them leading onto the next question. The Euro Asian slave trade, Gordon's hand in hand with colonization. Yep. watching documentary about Islam in East Africa and Professor Abdullah King Quick was explaining that many people talk about, for example, the Amani Arab slave trade and the Swahili coast, not knowing that it was the Portuguese that initiated that. They initiated that, absolutely. Oh, abandoning what their deans said about slave trade and following the European trend and enslaving Africans, etc., etc. And on the west, we see, in the west African coast, we see the same thing. We see people engaging in non-Muslim kings, capturing and selling Muslims to Europeans. We see Europeans coming and raiding and kidnapping and selling Muslims and non-Muslims. And then this also leads to the system of colonization. That's right. The thing is that in the case of, and I want to focus on the Senegalian region specifically, is, well, we know Hamd-e-Labab, Sheikh Usman, then for you on the Sohb-e-Labab, which came to an end, not cities, which politically came to end during the British colonial rule. So, in quality, the Sultan was still there and the Amir was still there, but they were under British protectorate. But Islam had already been widespread in the night, no, the Nigeria by that time. That's right. It decreases. But what is interesting with the case of Senegalian is that the majority of Senegalian was non-Muslim before colonization. I would say there were more non-Muslims in Senegalian region according to what I know, maybe I'm wrong, than there were Muslims. But during colonization, we see Islam spread rapidly throughout Senegalian region. So it had a presence of over a thousand years. I remember seeing a letter of Sheikh Abraham yesterday that is not good in Senegal in the year 310 Hidjiri, which is a masters of, but you know, early 10th century, the 900 something thereabouts. But we see that Islam starts to spread rapidly during colonization. And we see many scholars such as Sheikh Ahmad Bamba, Sheikh Al-Ajim Malik, Sheikh Abdul Aynas, Sheikh Omar Foojyu Tal, during the time of colonization. But each one of those four that I mentioned, who I would say are the four major scholars who established towns and scholarly lineages and leaders of Islam in that region. Each one of them had a completely different attitude and way of dealing with the colonizers. So we see Abu Sheikh Omar Foojyu Tal was a mojahid. He picked up the sword and he fought against the French and he fought against the non-Muslim kings that were collaborating with the French. Then when we come to Sheikh Ahmad Bamba, we see that he believes in peaceful protest, peaceful, well, you can explain what he believes in, like what he believes in, but we see him being exiled by the French. When it comes to Al-Ajim Malik, see, who's around the exact same time, we see him working with the French. It looks like he's working with them. Yeah, it looks that way. It's not true, but it looks that way. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just setting up the question and I'm arguing with you. Well, you do it. You're doing good. I like this. Please, I'll just go and finish the question. I'm just, I'm, I'm taking it all in. Yes. Sheikh Omar Foojyu, we see him fighting the French. Ah, Sheikh Ahmad Bamba, we see him being exiled by the French. Al-Ajim Malik, see, we see him working with the French. His eldest son, C.D. Ahmad, died at World War One in service. Correct. And he was an imam in the French army as well when he was there. But the French group was taken by the French. He fought for the French in World War One and he passed away there. And then we see Al-Ajim Abilanias, not wanting to really get involved. He wasn't much ahead. He put Stannis in. Stannis saw it and he said, I'm going to leave and go to live in Anghalleh as they say. Yeah, yeah, exactly. He put this one in farming and teaching and then he returned. And then we see his son, Sheikh Al-Ajim Abilanias, at time when colonization is ending and independence is on the rise. And he's working within the colonized system in the beginning and fighting for liberation and trying to, you know, an Africanism in his relationship with farming, through my relationship. So, brother Mustafa, can I jump in at this point and just say one thing? Yeah. And then I want to, I do want to let you finish the question. But the question that you asked brings up something else for me that I never get to say that's really crucial that you really led me to. Go ahead. So we'll get into the individual cases and we'll talk about imperialism. But the diversity of responses that you just described that were all effective responses, that is the key to understanding what the classical curriculum was all about. So in our time, we are trying to produce carbon copies of traditional Islam that came before us, okay? But that's not what the classical system of schooling was designed to produce. It was designed to produce people who so thoroughly embodied and understood the tradition that they were capable of improvising the appropriately Islamic response to whatever situation they encountered. And because the situations they encounter are going to be different, the responses that they give are going to be different and they'll all be correct. And the Muslim Minds Day has been so colonized by European forms of logic that we think that if two people arrive at different conclusions in front of the same text that they are either one of them is wrong and the others right or they're both wrong, right? Like the Maliki scholars can't be right in both advocating for jihad and suggesting against it. When the tradition was actually said that as long as you're firmly rooted in the text and you follow an authentic process, then whatever answer you arrive at is correct. Because there is no way of producing a thick manual, right? That is going to encompass all of the circumstances that even one of the children of Adam would encounter in their own individual lives. Much less what we might encounter as a collective species for all of us in our individual lives that tells us how we're supposed to respond to every situation. Therefore, we have to root Islam in our hearts and our limbs so that when we encounter unprecedented circumstances, whatever we produce is Islamic. And I think that that's the core argument of my first book, The Walking Quran, that usually gets missed. People think that embodiment is about transmitting something in a static way from one generation to the next. It's about producing virtuosos who because they so thoroughly understand and embody the tradition that they create responses that then a whole society can learn from, understand, follow and get free. So that was the thing that I wanted to interrupt the question for because it's like it's under the whole question. And I love the question and want to dig into the question. I want you to finish the question, but like I never get to say that part. And I really wanted to, yeah. That essentially was the question. So my question was, and how do you analyze each person's response? So we see Shia Makhuti, Mujahid. We see Shiaq Ahmad Bambo. What was his stance and how did he come to that conclusion? Al-Ajim Aliq's working seemingly with the French, which Hamd-e-Ala was beneficial because we see for example in Dhaka, Jut al-Ajim Aliq's influence we see Zawiz all over the capital city, Masjid's being built, areas being named Medina, Faz, etc. Avenue, Al-Ajim Aliq's seat, etc. Which led to the spread of Islam, the spread of Mada'ah, of Dada's teaching the Quran, the spread of Zawiz, etc. And then Al-Ajim Abdul-Ajim Aliq's leaving, coming back and then his son going on to become the giant that we see within the international political sphere. So I'm going to, you know, he's a Salam Salam, the former. He's a Mada'ah who, where he's there with President Ghamal Abdul-Nas, he's there with more patriotic Africa for the Africans, he's with the kings of Saudi, he's with all of these different political, he's in China with Chairman Mao and Zhao Englai. How does that, how does that come about? No, and the underlying question that you led with was, well, you know, under this time when colonization is happening, how come Islam is expanding instead of contracting? Right? Although I will say that the Senegal Gambian region is predominantly Muslim, at the outset of that period. The Senegal and Gambia itself are all predominantly Muslim. The further you get into the South, Kazamon's region, Forests regions of Khotivargan, those places have Muslim minorities but not Muslim majorities. But for the Savannah regions, you know, basically, like if you drew a line, kind of at Gambia and drew it straight across, you know, to Lake Chad, everything above that line is really predominantly Muslim at that time. But part of why they're so successful, and there is something that's in common in all of their responses, which is that the old regimes, because the Slaven kings had been part of establishing slavery in West African society on an unprecedented scale, there were systematic social inequalities in West Africa. And Muslim identity was something that was not openly accessible to a lot of enslaved people. Right? They get shunned and treated as less than human because the justification for their enslavement had been that they came from a land of unbelief. Okay. So now these people who mostly are growing up only Muslim and Muslim societies want to have their human dignity acknowledged in those societies. Well, how are you gonna have your human dignity acknowledged in a Muslim society? You wanna be fully accepted as a believer just like your brother that claims that he owns you. So what all of them responded to? El Azumartal, El Azumalixi, Ahmadubamba, Shahibrahim Yas, his father, El Azab alayn Yas. They all responded to a demand to democratize Muslim identity and extend it to the poorest and the meekest. They had different strategies, different tactics, but they were always about reaching out to the people that had been disenfranchised in the society. El Azumartal offers freedom to the slaves of his enemies when he goes to war with them. And why is he fighting in the first place with Karta and Segu? He is fighting with them because they are enslaving the people of the Senegal River Valley. His issue that he has with the Fulani of Masina is rooted in the fact that the Fulani of Masina are claiming that they are in a protectorate with Segu and Karta, Bamba Repolities. And El Azumartal says, "Listen, you can be friends with the non-Muslim kings, but you can't be friends with non-Muslim kings that raid our people for slaves. What's wrong with you?" And he's setting anybody that will flee from the enemy side free, just like Abdul Qavir Khan had done before him. El Azumalixi is very misunderstood in this respect. El Azumalixi had written legal opinions that said that the ordinary obligation for a defensive jihad, which is that you are required to fight. This was the ordinary, it's not an uncontestable opinion, but it was the ordinary position. It was that you are required to fight a defensive jihad, even if you were outnumbered two to one. But then if you were outnumbered by a ratio of more than two to one, then you could sue for peace, okay? He had written a legal opinion that said that the difference in the military capacity of the Europeans was such that even though they were fewer in number, they didn't outnumber you two to one. They numbered outnumbered you to a thousand to one, because they could kill a thousand of you without one of them dying, because they could shoot with weapons that you wouldn't even be able to see where they were coming from. Now they do it with drones. So you can't fight a jihad against such people for a very simple reason, he said, which is that the Muslim is forbidden from committing suicide. You can't go spending your sons on a fruitless cause like that, what's wrong with you? So because he understood that this colonization was gonna happen, whether you spilled your blood or didn't spill your blood, he instead focused on using the economic apparatus that the new colonial state was building to spread Islam. He sent teachers that were trained in his Zawiya and Tewawan to all of the towns along the French rail line. The French rail line was just built to extract resources out of the African continent and send it to the coast, but El-Ajmalik seesaw an opportunity to use it to extend sound teaching of Tijani Sufism and Quranic sciences into all of the places where the French colonial state was now going. And where the children of Adam were inevitably going to go because these were gonna become centers for commerce. And people go where they can find something to eat. So anybody that wants to accuse El-Ajmalik C of compromising with the colonial authority has no idea of the man's spiritual status nor of his strategic intelligence. El-Ajj Abdu-Lai took a blend of both positions. He initially tries, you know, Hedgera and then he realizes that, I mean, you've just escaped one colonial authority for another. I might as well be back home with my people. But in the process, he built something that actually spans two colonies, which is crucial because in that he provides a model for what Shaihi B-D-Him ultimately does, which is Shaihi B-D-Him has to be thinking at some point, well, if my father can build a community that spans two colonies, why can't I build a fighter that spans all of them? So what do you think is motivating him in 1937 to go to Kano? - What do you think? - The first trip? - He went to Hedgera in 1937 and met the Amir, then he went to his first trip. - His first trip, he goes on the humble. No one knows that he's going. His first trip, he goes on the humble. Nobody knows that he's going. The story, as it was told to me in the oral tradition is that he's traveling with just a handful of people and they hear stories. The story that I heard and you can correct it if it's wrong is that when he starts to sit with the Olama of Kano, they hear that he's from Senegal, they start asking him about the author of this book called "Cashifal Abbas" that is written by a scholar in Senegal that must have lived in the golden age centuries ago and had they ever heard of any such person. And he said, "Yeah, I've heard of the book because I'm the one that wrote it." He didn't live centuries ago. He's me. So, and that that was when it attracted the attention of the "Mirror of Kano" in the first place. And God knows best, I wasn't there. That's just the story that I've heard. - Well, it's an amazing to see how the model was spread. So we've spoken about the Aaron slave jade there, a chance at Atlantic slave jade. We've spoken about colonization and the different responses. We see Sheikh Omar resisting. We see Sheikh Ahmed Bamba and Al-Ajim Aliq see and Al-Ajim Ablanyaz working within the confines of the colonizers to spread Islam. - Each and different ways, but dealing with the fact that what was was, Bamba's approach was basically to seek spatial separation whenever possible. He sought out areas that nobody else was really interested in. If you've been to like, you know, worried, you know, farm communities like they're, they're all up in the cut, like they're out in the middle of nowhere and it's hot. Like you really have to be about God's business to be working on one of them farms, you know, in the rainy season. So sorry to interrupt, but yeah, they use different approaches, but they all worked with what was. - The way Sheikh Ahmed Bamba, his thing was, let's stay as far away from them as possible and do our own thing. Whereas Al-Ajim, he's like, no, let's be all up in their places in the middle of that thing and you are a thing. - Perfect balance, right? Perfect balance. And Elijah Abdullah did it, basically did it a mix of both. If you really think about it, you know, he transcended colonial borders and he had those agricultural communities, but also in a burgeoning urban center, which was Calaq. I hadn't really thought of it until we started talking about it that way, but it's like, you know, it's one of those Jamal jalal Kamal type things, you know. - Definitely, definitely. So now I wanna talk about it. And I think we might end here. - Sure, and then my questions anyway, and then if you have anything else to add and that you feel is very important, can add it female scholarship within the West African community? - No, no, no, no, we can't just like do like a, just a short addendum to the, we'll open this door today, but then we'll talk about it at more length another time. - I spoke about this on the previous podcast, episode three of the sacred festive podcast, it's something that I've written and presented a lecture on. You also have done an IG live lecture on this as well. And so I wanted to talk about, we can open the door and talk about the female scholarship within the West African tradition because it's something, I wouldn't say unique to Islamic scholarship, definitely not because half of our dean comes from say the Ayesha and we had, you know, say then Afisa, the teacher of Imam Shafi, we had Fatim Afihariah, the established, the established share of one of the oldest universities in the world, et cetera. So we see these names, but tell us a bit about the key role, female scholarship and female leadership plays within the West African tradition because it's something that I've never seen replicated in any other Muslim community, especially to the extent that it is now. I mean, for me, for example, the first person to teach me, or Anne, and the first, data, the first Islamic school, that I went to where Alif Baratasa was established by the daughter of Imam Shiahti Jaini Seese. She was my Quranic teacher. She taught me the alphabet. I memorized most of the first Jews with her before I continued. And I was young, I was like 15 then. I had to take a shot, a couple of years before. And she comes from a long line of all of her grandmother's, all of her aunties, etc., they're all masters of Quran, they're all teachers with male and female students. And that's something we see Sheikh Ahmad Bamba has in his community, that's something we see Sheikh Abraham Yes has within his community. So tell us a bit about that and how important it is and how unique it is. Yeah, I mean I think that the key to the to a concise answer is actually in focusing in on the first thing that you said, which is that it this used to be part of the religion. Right. And now it's not in a lot of places. So it looks like it's unique. But just as with so many other things about Islam and West Africa, the reason why it looks unique is that other societies have abandoned what used to be Islam, whereas West Africans have stuck with it. Okay. The truth is, is that like female teachers, female Hadith transmitters, all of those things were central in early Islamic history. Otherwise, there is no Islam. And that instead, what has emerged more recently is a very masculine misogynistic form of Islam. And I talked about this in an IG live with with our sister Angelica Lindsay, because it's a really, really crucial point to understand. So I'll just repeat it in a, in a, you know, in more or less the same form here. Part of the modern Muslims understanding of gender roles in Islam is an effect of colonization. Because Europeans are profoundly misogynistic and patriarchal societies when they colonize Muslim societies at the middle of 19th century through the middle of the 20th. And so they don't take as interlocutors as people that they communicate with women. They don't take women seriously. They're not thought of as being expert authorities in anything. Okay. So when they ask, what are the contents of Sharia in a place like Egypt or Yemen or any other place so that it can be written down and become part of the way that the state governs things. Okay. They only ask privileged elite men from what they think of as the superior racial or caste group in the society. And do you see? So the picture that they paint of what the contents of Islam are is one that reflects their dominance. And instead of presenting these things as subject to contestation and debate and differences of opinion and that this female scholar wrote this opinion that you know contradicted X or Y that I'm saying. They leave all that out. And they just say, this is what Islam looks like. I have control over women. I don't ever let them outside. I have to control over children. All of these things. Okay. And that becomes part of what defines Islam in the modern era. And this, so you'll forgive me, but I'll just use the same example that I used before, which is that because this is the way I teach it to my students. So if I say to you, I'm a boxer. You might ask me in return, are you any good at boxing? And then I'm going to say to you, well, that depends. How much do you know about boxing? And then you tell me, well, I don't know anything about boxing. And then I say, well, in that case, I'm the heavyweight champion of the world. So people that don't know anything about how society functions are asking privileged elite Arabic speaking men to give the accounts of what the contents of Islam are in that society. And they reinforce and standardize gender biases that are inherent in that group. That doesn't happen in West Africa because the state is so racist that it believes that black people are too dumb and biologically predisposed to not learn Islam. And that somehow Islam is the property and proper expression of the Arab genius. And that Africans are by nature animus. And therefore, there is no whose effort to standardize state Islam. And because there's no effort to standardize state Islam, people just keep doing what they were doing before, which was having women teach, having women have spiritual authority. That's it. So what you have is not something that's so much unique as it is a survival of what used to be something that was much more widely spread. Now within that, that means that you have women as teachers. It means that you have women as spiritual authorities, scholarly authorities, intellectual authorities, that really the only obstacles to women's scholarly or women's advancement in Islam is really just about ritual roles. Is that there are certain ritual roles that traditional interpretations of Maliki Fick preclude a woman from having. And that's basically she can't lead a prayer in mixed congregation of men. That's pretty much it. And so another thing, and I think maybe we'll end up here. Sure, there was a survey that said Senegal or is it West Africa is the most sufi place on a pure research center? Yeah, they did pull that lane to us as the final question. How then did to so of managed to survive in West Africa and thrive in West Africa? And how was it manifested in West Africa in a way that it hasn't manifested anywhere else? And compared to its survival in other places. So two things, the Wahabi ideas and also the kind of state-sponsored solifism that emerges in other parts of the Middle East. Those are things that really diminish the influence of classically trained scholars. And so sufism begins to decline in those places. And because of the racist policies, ironically of colonial states, influences from those other parts of the Muslim world were kept out of West Africa. So West Africa is protected from the spread of such ideas until really like you said the 60s, when all of a sudden people, you know, after independence, then these become more influential ideas. But it's not just that. What the real success of sufism in West Africa actually comes from the people that you just mentioned, which is that they took these imaginative social reforms in the late 19th century, first half of the 20th century, that democratized access to Muslim identity to populations that had been previously excluded. Poor people, former slaves, they inverted social hierarchies so that they did it with Sufi movements. So that Sufi identity became something that was much more diffused through a broader population. It had previously been in a lot of places, a kind of because it's one of the more advanced spiritual or religious sciences, that it was something that was kind of one of the later discipline studied and it was oftentimes like the kind of crowning achievement in a lifetime of study for elite scholars, like achievements in that field. So instead, what people like Shaheeb Rahim Nyasar saying is that I can make modify, I can make experiential knowledge, an unveiling of the divine essence, something that anyone could get access to. You don't have to have memorized Quran and many, many books of, you know, Fick, although your teacher has to have done those things, right? But you don't have to do those things. If you follow this process, I can take you to where generations and generations of scholars have been striving to get. Not only can I do it, but I promise you that if you apply these, you know, principles, you'll get there. And so that becomes something that reinforces the desire to have human claims for dignity acknowledged by previously dispossessed people. Somebody that was abused and called, you know, black or in Mauritonian society or casted in Senegalese society or slave in either society, right? Now can become somebody who, with some knowledge of Quran and learning this advanced science of the so-of can become somebody that's respected and honored and can become a teacher of others and be accepted as a pillar of the community. And Ahmadubamah's mooried communities, people didn't ask what your father did for a living. If you were willing to go to the fields to work and to send your kids to the to the Quran school and go to the mosque when it was time to pray, we're good. So that's why Sufism spreads there because it becomes a mass social movement that reaches the bottom end of society starts there and grows. And nothing like that, to be honest, nothing like that had ever happened in the history of Islam. Sufism had never been become the basis of all religious socialization for a mass of society, male, female, free or slain. So it's not just that West Africa preserve something that was lost in other places, but it actually brings into being the fullest manifestation of what it really means to say that if sin is part of the religion and the religion cannot happen without it. Therefore, everyone has to have access to the science of if sin. And if you wanna understand in a nutshell like why I'm offering online courses in Sufi ideas about how you overcome the four principal enemies of the human soul and there'll be other ones after that, that's the goal is to make that happen in our communities. Because if we actually make the sweetness of this tradition, if we drop just a drop of it on the tongues of everybody, they gon' want more. But we are not giving them the sweetness of this tradition. We're giving them its rigid, arbitrary rules, separate from its ethics, separate from its spirituality. And then we act like we're surprised when people don't wanna be told what to do all the time without understanding why they're doing it and without having any kind of feeling of spiritual elevation from the practice. Play us on to people wanna hear and now dance, man. - And so, yeah, is that leaves me with my final conclusion. Hamdilat, this has been a very fruitful discussion. We've spoken about how Islam entered West Africa. We've spoken about how it spread in West Africa. We've spoken about how it manifested in West Africa. We've spoken about the liberation movements that happened within the influences excited upon the people in the region and the transformation that it brought about in the region, the fact that it spread, it's sad, it's spread, worship of Allah, it's spread establishment of the Sunnah of the Prophet, and it's a Salallah, Allah, Salam. - While allowing people to still maintain their culture, maintain their identities, maintain their traditions in a beautiful way, and the fact that it allowed us to establish all of the areas of the deen, not just the ritual aspect of Islam or the intellectual aspect of Eman, but the spiritual actualization and realization of Ehsa, my shabby, if you can see him and knowing that if you cannot see him, he can see you. So my final statement, my final question, my final, everything is, why is this relevant to us today? Is this sacred foot that's based in the UK? People are listening in from America, from Canada, from Singapore, from Pakistan, and not West Africans. They're not from this tradition. Why is this tradition then important for us to know? Why is it important for us to realize not just because Black Lives Matter, we wanna know what the Black people are doing too? But how is this relevant for us as Muslims living in the West? And when I say living in the West, I'm not just talking about those who physically live in the West, but I feel like we live in a global monoculture where the West is everywhere. I'm here in Egypt and I have my OSN box and I watch American movies, American TV shows, everything that's on HBO, I get it here in Cairo. And that's the way the world is now. The world is the West, I would say. - The world is the global West. - The global West is the monoculture that we will sign up to. So why is it relevant for us as Muslims in this 21st century global monoculture, Western global monoculture, to how is this Islam relevant to us? And how can it help us in our practice and our manifestation of the deed today? - Learning from, as we opened up this door, the stories of those who came before us in order to strengthen our hearts. - Yes. So this global monoculture was founded on the enslavement of black people and the commoditization of black bodies. The exploitation of the African continent is the thing that establishes the capital that leads to European expansion. It's the thing that brings the new world into being. It's the thing that makes Europe, Europe, pick up Walter Rodney, how Europe underdeveloped Africa and you will understand that there is no West without this original sin of the racial enslavement and exploitation of black people. White supremacy and capitalist commodification are born in the same moment. This global monoculture that we all live in is bathed in our blood. Everything that we enjoy from it, our ancestors blood and died for. So if we do not struggle to rectify the wrongs of this society, then we will be condemned by our Lord for not having done so. The basic root problems of white supremacy, which is understood as Kibbara in a Quranic sense, it's arrogance, it's iblees's sin. And capitalist commodification of people is continuing to brutalize black people today and marginalize black people today. This has become a beast. It's a beast that started with us in with our exploitation but now has tentacles in every human society. White supremacy, Palestinians think that they have a Zionism problem. Zionism is a branch of white supremacy. You've been fighting it for 60 years, we've been fighting it for 500. Muslims in America think they have an Islamophobia problem. But they don't have an Islamophobia problem because Trump says ban the Muslims and build a wall in the same breath. He's trying to keep out brown people with each line. They don't care about your dean. You just ain't white. So the fundamental flaw that is baked into this global monoculture is that it was built on the death of black people and it continues to benefit from the death of black people. It is now impossible to take each one of the tentacles of that white supremacist capitalist monster out of every human society. Instead strike at the heart of it. Strike at what it has done to black people and the whole beast will die. Everybody that is out in the streets now, Mexican Americans here, white people here, people marching in Germany, people marching in London, people marching in Paris, solidarity in Asia. Everybody seems to instinctively understand that if black people get free, everybody gets free. But we have not yet put that into a cosmic sense. We haven't put that into a sound understanding that racism is the original sin of Iblis. He claims pride over the species of Adam and now he's been dividing us through this device for 500 years. He swam in our insides and out the backside and said, this thing is hollow. It will spend all its days trying to fill the emptiness inside it if it's ever given dominion over me. That's how I'm gonna break it. So it takes our desire for consumption, for excess and causes us to value inanimate objects over people and human lives, which is what capitalism is. If we can return to a fitri understanding of this religion, to an understanding of this religion that is rooted in people's fitra, it is inherently a liberatory exercise. And by going back to the teachings of these jet black West African scholars who have been confronting this face of modernity for 500 years and improvising appropriately Islamic responses to it, then our hearts will be strengthened. Our hearts will be fortified and we will have guidance on how to take action because we can do better. I'm gonna end by reading this line from Maseleq Jannan from Ahmoudub Al-Bahmah's Pathways of Paradise because it serves as a stand in for everything that I just said except he said it much better than me because he was a poet and I ain't no poet. He said, "Do not turn away from my work because of my lack of renown "in this era nor turn down my benefits "because I am from among the blacks. "The most honored servant with God is without a doubt "the most reverent and blackness of body signals "neither weakness of mind nor lack of understanding. "O wise one, do not abandon my words thinking "that I do not practice what I preach. "Do not give away God's favourites "by preferring only the actions for this breed's ignorance. "It happens that a person of a recent age era can know secrets unknown to the ancients. A shower may proceed a deluge, but the advantage is with the deluge. You who doubt my words, don't forget the Hadith. My community is like the rain." He doesn't end the verse because he expects us all to know that the Prophet Sallallahu is said no one knows which drop is better. The first one to fall or the last. He Sallallahu is said that there will emerge in the last days a generation that will be as good as the generation of my companions or better. Whether we know or whether we think that we're living in that time, whether we think that these plagues and testaments and unrest and fire and famine and flood our signs of the last days or not, we know that the last days never been closer. The people of divine remembrance have always been preparing as though they would find themselves in those days because she never knows. If you're not drilling for it, then you're not going to be prepared when this ain't a drill. This is the real thing. This is about us getting free in our time. By drawing on the resources of people who lit the way to a sound understanding of both inner freedom and freedom out there in the world. And the lages are called the "unmuch normal". That was models of liberation in West African Islam with Dr. Rida Fuer the third aka hashtag #BuktuRillaSweaks. I want everyone to enjoy. Please, please, please, research his YouTube lectures at Buchware on Instagram. An Instagram sign up to his classes and look out for his new book coming out. Purchase the previous one and wait for the one coming in. Thank you so much for your time. For the amazing conversation, I'm sure we're picking away many, many gems. I know I have some sure the people listening have as well. And then we'll be back in Shalom with more and more and more for you here on secret footsteps. Salam alaikum. For Ahon Salam, wa rahmatullah wa rahmatullah.