The term ‘popular Islam’ at once suggests denial or fragmentation within the Great Tradition or ‘orthodoxy’ in Islam as well as a degree of hostility on the part of those Islamicists and Muslims whose understanding of the oneness of God extends to the indivisibility of His Community. Social scientists may be expected to embrace the notion with more enthusiasm, being accustomed to observing Islam ‘from below’, but legitimate disquiet follows after plumbing the analytical shallows implicit in simple attributions of ‘popular-ness’ to matters of causation, motivation or ideology. Yet, with that said, few students of Islam in Africa cannot cite examples of belief or practice that represent ‘popular Islam’, and most would agree that this frequently bears some relation to the dramatic expansion of Islam during this century in Africa. These were some of the considerations that lay behind the selection of the theme ‘Popular Islam in Twentieth- Century Africa’ for a two-day symposium held at the University of Illinois in April 1984. Five of the papers presented at that meeting – by Louis Brenner and Murray Last, Mbye Cham, Lidwien Kapteijns, Paul Lubeck and Gabriel Warburg – are published with an essay by Abdullahi Osman El-Tom in this issue.

Since 1980, with considerable regularity during the dry season which propels the rural poor into the urban centres of northern Nigeria, religious riots have erupted in or adjacent to five cities: Kano (1980), Kaduna (1982), Bulum-Ketu near Maiduguri (1982), Jimeta near Yola (1984) and Gombe (1985). In each instance the conflict was remarkably similar. When confronted by the state authorities, an Islamic sect, the 'Yan Tatsine, unleashed an armed insurrection against the Nigerian security forces and those outside the sect, resulting in widespread destruction, in thousands of deaths and in millions of naira of property losses. Indeed, if one were to search for a historical equivalent in Nigerian history, only the communal riots of 1966 surpass the destruction wrought by the 'Yan Tatsine insurrections of the eighties. The account appearing in West Africa, describing the Gombe outbreak, provides a typical press analysis of the insurrection:

Fighting began early on Friday, April 29 when a detachment of police moved in to arrest suspected members of a maitatsine type religious sect in the Pantami ward of Gombe. The suspected leader of the religious group is a man named Yusufu Adamu. That was when all hell broke loose. Within hours, some streets had been littered with corpses many of them caught in the cross fire between fanatics and the law enforcement agents. [West Africa, 6 May 1985: 876]

For the following analysis it is noteworthy that the correspondent describes the sect as a ‘maitatsine type’, that the insurrection erupted only when the police attempted to arrest an alleged leader and that the members of the dissident sect are labelled ‘fanatics’ without any supporting evidence.

This article is based on a wider study of the history of the western Sudan, in particular the border area between the historical sultanates of Dar Fur and Wadai (Kapteijns, 1985). The period under discussion is 1882–1930, from the successful struggle against foreign domination led by the Sudanese Mahdi to the firm establishment of British colonial rule in the western Sudan. The theme which this article explores for this area and period is that of popular revolt and Islamic (specifically Mahdist) ideology. The source materials for this study consist of Arabic correspondence from the Mahdist archives, oral data and British and French colonial records.

The relationship between Islam and State has been a problematic feature of Sudanese politics both before independence and after. To a certain extent this is the result of the very nature of Islam in which the unity of ‘Church and State’ is taken for granted. However, the history of the Sudan has been affected by several other sociopolitical factors which complicated matters even further.

Islam, probably more than any other religion, connotes the image of a great tradition which has imposed itself on culturally diverse populations and gradually united them in a monolithic belief whose basic tenets stem from the Koran and the prophetic tradition. This image is bolstered by the fact that, despite the recognized cultural diversity of the Muslim world (see Geertz, 1968) which has been perpetuated through the differing interpretations of Islam embodied in its holy text, little research has been done on the meaning of the Koranic text at the local level. The lack of such research, in its own turn, perpetuates the false image of a uniform meaning of the Koranic text throughout the Muslim world.

‘A translation of the meaning of the Holy Koran into the Hausa language’ – this is the careful wording of the title of the work sponsored by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam (whose President is the Sultan of Sokoto) and signed by Abubakar Mahmoud Gummi, the chairman of its executive committee and former Grand Khadi (Gummi, 1980). It is, in short, as official a Muslim publication as there can be in Nigeria. The Arab text (set in a standard Beirut naskh typeface) is on the right of the page, the Hausa, in roman script (boko), on the left; yet colleagues say that the Hausa still reads as if it was simply part of an oral, abbreviated tafsiri transcribed for printing. Though it is nowhere labelled as tafsiri, it has some footnotes and a sentence introducing each sura; and it is a truly vernacular translation – that is, it is not as awkward to read as, say, the books translated by Haliru Binji into what one could best describe as ‘malamanci’. Lastly, the printed text originally was circulated in sections – in part, it is said, to assess people's reactions to a Hausa translation of the Holy Koran being sold in the streets of Nigerian cities. It is a measure of the public's acceptance of this work – which is in reality no more than a printed version of the various oral ‘translations’ one can hear every year in public, on the radio or on tape – that not merely has it now appeared as a single volume but that it has already gone into a second edition; indeed, Alhaji Nasiru Kabara has now almost completed the process of producing his own version.

In few other places in the creative traditions of sub-Saharan Africa is the factor of Islam more prominent and influential than in Senegal. Manifested in form and subject matter and spanning a wide cross-section of talent in both the traditional and modern media of creative expression, this prominence and influence can be attributed to a number of factors ranging from the artistic maturity, religious sensibility, intellectual astuteness and ideological orientation of individual artists, to the more general impact that Islam as a dominant religious force is perceived to have had on secular life in Senegal. These factors to a large extent determine the various ways in which individual Senegalese artists define themselves and their art vis-è-vis Islam in particular and society in general. These definitions are creatively translated into choice of form, thematic focus and, to use a cliché, ‘message’.