It is well known that Islam is the majority religion in Africa north of the Sahara; this part of Africa is, in the West, often detached from Africa and assimilated to "the Middle East" or "the Arab World."
It is much less well known that today Islam is likely the most widely professed faith south of the desert, in what westerners have often called "Black Africa", as well. Roughly 1/6th of the world's Muslim population can be found in sub-Saharan Africa. How did this come to be? How has the adoption of Islam by Africans shaped their history?
And, conversely, how have Africans shaped Islam?
One goal of this course is to begin to provide answers to these questions. We will examine African Islamic history beginning with the earliest Muslim migrants from Arabia to Ethiopia in the early 7th century CE until the dawn of the 21st century. Covering fourteen centuries of Islamic history on the African continent could never be accomplished in an exhaustive fashion in fifteen weeks, so our approach will be to draw an outline of the historical development of Islam on the African continent, and then focus more intensively on specific regions and particular themes.
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