In The Shadow of Conquest: Islam in Colonial Northeast Africa

New Jersey, The Red Sea Press, 1992. Pp. iv + 163.
Said S. Samatar (ed.)

Book Review In the Shadow of Conquest is a collection of seven essays that appear united more by the authors’ desire to correct misconceptions than by either geography or theme or even epoch. The editor was not unaware of the difficulty of finding a common thread that ran through these essays and he mentioned from the onset. The motivation for the volume appear to have come from a feeling that the historiography this area of Northeast Africa has suffered substantial distortions and subversions and it was time that this was addressed. The work also appeared to have had some inspiration from a prominent Western Africanist, B. G. Martin, for the editor kept making several reference to him, in the introduction, thus inadvertently robbing the work of creativity and ability to go beyond European scholars. The first chapter, not surprisingly, was that of B. G. Martins, who wrote on ‘Shaykh Zyala’i and the Nineteenth-Century Somali Qadiriya. Shaykh Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad al-Zayla’i lived in Somalia between 1820-82 and according to Martin, has been little known until recently. The chapter was a sketch of his life and achievements, most of it miracles, or karamat of the shaykh. The second chapter, by Abdul S. Bemath, titled ‘The Sayyid and the Salihiya Tariqa Reformist, Anticolonial Hero in Somalia’, was on the famous Muhammad Abdille Hassan of Somalia who led a revolutionary movement (1899-1920) in Somalia. Starting from his birth on 7 April 1856, the author tired to trace his life and times through his eventful career. Even for the size of the chapter, the details were rather sketchy and descriptive. The attempt made by the author to make the career of the Sayyid conform to Ali Mazruis’ scheme of responses to colonial rule did not help matters. The conclusion was particularly intriguing: “In view of the deep doctrinal antagonism between the two tariqas – and the consequent ill feeling generated among their devotees – it is a wonder that the Somalis in the closing decades of the twentieth century were not plunged into a disastrous internecine blood letting based on religious discord, and possibly civil war.” (P. 45) The third chapter was written by Said Samatar, the editor of the volume. He wrote on ‘Shaykh Uways Muhammad of Baraawe, 1847-1909: Mystic Reformer in East Africa’. This was a well written piece which threw light on the little known happenings in the area at that time in history. It brings to the fore the fact that Africa is full of rich written and oral sources of its own history. The value of the chapter was only diminished by the constant, some would say boring, references to J. S. Trimingham and B. G. Martins. Luckily in the next chapter Mohammed Hassen in discussing ‘Islam as a Resistance Ideology among the Oromo of Ethiopia: the Wallo Case, 1700-1900’, made the first attempt to go beyond J. S. Trimingham and challenged some of the insinuations of western scholars, such as the suggestion that conversions to Islam are always motivated by material considerations. More than that this chapter also revealed the oppression of the Ethiopian kings under the inspiration of their orthodox Churches, like the burning of Muslim books, forced baptism and the outright killings in 1886 of 20,000 men and women in Qallu. (P. 94) Abdusamad Ahmad’s essay, ‘Popular Islam in Twentieth-Century Africa The Muslims of Gondor, 1900-1935’ made up the fifth chapter. The author attempted to give a refreshing insight in the development and dynamics of the Muslim Christian relation in Gondor during this period. The chapter, though well referenced, was rather too short to cover the issues adequately and ended up spread too thin. Liedwien Kapteijins, a veteran of the Chado-Sudanese area, wrote in chapter six on ‘Dar Sila, The Sultanate in Precolonial Times, 1870-1916’. He gave an interesting insight about this small and little known Sultanate in the remote fringes of the sahel. He focused on the development of cash economy during the colonial period, bring out the cruelty and heartless oppressions of European colonialism. The seventh and last chapter of the volume is a short analysis of a letter between some two religious leaders in the Sudan at the beginning of British colonization. Titled ‘Two Muslims on the Eve of British Colonization in the Sudan, 1908’, the author, Jay Spaulding, captured the trauma that many Muslim notables were subjected to by British colonial authorities, hunted by vengeance over their humiliating defeat by the Mahdi. The volume, despite its diversity, is a useful collection not only in the rich information and sources it brings, but also, and perhaps more important, in the inspiration it engenders for young African scholars to begin to unlock the rich history of their peoples which has for the best part of the this century been misrepresented. This is an important component of the regeneration of the African peoples and continent which is long overdo. Usman Bugaje