A Summation of the Arguments and

Rebuttals to the Afrocentric Criticisms of

Islam in Africa
In this article by Professor Shareef Muhammad, he summarizes
arguments and rebuttals to Afrocentrist criticisms of Islam in
Africa.

Afrocentrist myth: Islam are that it spread by the sword,

undermined traditional African cultures, and that the Arab Slave
Trade depopulated Africa and destabilized those African societies.
They alleged that both conquest and slavery were the principal
means by which Arabs introduce Islam to Africans.

Response: These assertions are hyperbolic and not supported by

either the African sources or the external Arab sources that make
up the corpus of literature that are the core source of information
on the subject. The events in question have been inflated to gain
ground in the identity politics of the diaspora. The Arab Slave
Trade was never a defining issue on the continent of Africa but was
part of the normal state practices of that time. In fact, Walter
Rodney in his esteemed work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
said that the term Arab Slave Trade was a misnomer since its used
to describe bilateral trade agreements across a myriad of ethnic
groups in which Africans had full agency.

Metanarrative: Islam south of the Sahel was an indigenous affair

in which Africans controlled the terms on which Islam was adopted
and practiced. It’s proselytizing, practice, and politics were entirely
African. This is evinced in how unique Islam was in the sub-
Saharan from Islam in the Levant and North Africa. Even in North
Africa where Islam did spread by force the Arabs never made it
across the whole of North Africa leaving the assimilation and
practice of Islam entirely to the Berbers. Berber attitudes and
behavior towards the sub-Sahara were Berber not Arab or
determined by Arabs.

Afrocentrist myth: The Almoravid were Arab invaders who

toppled Ghana in 1076 ACE and this is how Islam was introduced
to the region.
Response: This event is controversial because there is no
unambiguous mention in the Ghanaian oral traditions or the
chronicles of the Arab writers of this time (11th century) nor is
there a scholarly consensus that this invasion happened. At most
the primary sources point only to a correlation between the spread
of Islam throughout the western sub-Saharan and the Almoravid
efforts at doing so through what we know were missionary work
not a military invasion. David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher wrote
an exhaustive treatment of the Arabic sources and African oral
accounts called The Conquest That Never Was. They concluded
that they could find “nothing in the traditions to indicate any
conquest of the eleventh-century Sahelian state known to Arab
geographers as “Ghana.”” Yet, this remains a controversy among
actual scholars. So, let us explore the position that the Almoravid
conquest did take place. All of the sources that describe the
Almoravids in sub-Saharan relate them as an African contingent
of the movement that originated in Senegambia. Cheikh Anta Diop
who takes the stance that there was an invasion and that they
seized Aoudaghast and Ghana saying on page 163 of Precolonial
Black Africa that “This was the only time white troops attempted
to impose Islam through violence.” The “white” Berber to which
Diop is referring took up a retreat in Senegal where he attracted
Senegalese who converted and aided him in this military campaign
to spread Islam through force. But their victories were confined to
only the northern part of the Ghana, Sijilmasa and the Maghreb.
They did not succeed in West Africa, to the east and west. The
conversion of these regions was the work of autochthonous
marabouts (West African Sufis) who were preaching the religion.
So, even if we take the theory of an invasion we see that even that
is described as an indigenous affair. The fact that the Ghanaian
oral sources point to draught instead of northern conquerors as
the cause of Ghana’s fall at the least minimizes this event. Diop
goes on to say that “The primary reason for the success of Islam in
Black Africa, with one exception, consequently stems from the fact
that it was propagated peacefully at first by solitary Arabo-Berber
travelers to certain Black kings and notables, who then spread it
about them to those under their jurisdiction.” pg. 163.

Afrocentrist myth: The Arab Invasion Destroyed Egypt and

Enslaved the Native Black Population.
Response: Ancient Kemet was destroyed and compromised over a
millennium prior to the 640 A.C.E when the Muslims invaded. The
Kemet that Afrocentrists romanticize had been long gone. When
the Muslims arrived they were entering a thoroughly Hellenized,
and Romanized Egypt whose native population was an amalgam of
black African, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Eastern European.
Whole population of Italians and many Vandals and Goths moved
into North Africa during the time of Augustine. The Berbers were
made lighter when Europeans moved into North Africa since as far
back the Ice Age. The Hyksos colonization of Northern Egypt didn’t
help either. The further west you went in North Africa the lighter
the population. Alfred J. Butler’s The Arab Invasion and the Last
30 Years of Roman Dominion. The Baqt Treaty exposes the lie that
the Arabs introduced the enslavement of black Africans. Its
pertinent to this controversy because it was the first time the Arabs
tried to invade sub-Sahara and they failed. The Baqt Treaty was
an agreement in which the Nubians who were the victors set the
terms of peace and offered to pay the Arabs slaves as a peace
offering. The point here is that like everywhere else in Africa up till
the 1800 sub-Sahara African states negotiated with outsiders from
a position of strength and autonomy. This contradicts the Afro-
centrist version of African history which insists on portraying
Africans as eternal victims. They had full agency during these
transactions and their encounters with Arabs who were
numerically and technologically inferior to the Africans they
encountered. To understand their decision to give slaves to
foreigners requires that we look at African states and politics as
they were and not as we want to for the purposes of our petty
arguments cultural authenticity.

Afro-centrist myth: Islam is an Arab not an African religion.

Response: What is the point being made here? This is a strange

criticism setting aside for now whether its valid. Did Africans view
themselves as African first or as their tribe first? There is no single
African religion there are African religions and they do not
equivocate. So, while they share similarities they have very
pronounced differences. The religious practices of the Dogan would
have been perceived just as foreign to the Xhosa as Islam. You
cannot change tribes and therefore you cannot change tribal
religions which are tied exclusively to the tribe. Since Islam was
not being forced on them by outsiders and because African rulers
accepted the religion on African terms and not Arab terms the
indigenization of the religion was faster and more natural.
However, the fact remains that Islam as a religion debuted in the
Arabian Peninsula with its Prophet being an Arab, and the official
language being Arabic. I suppose you could make a surface
argument that based only on these facts that it’s an Arab religion.
However, if you are going to look at the 30 years of Seerah (life of
the Prophet (saws)) during his mission as a Prophet then one would
honestly have to emerge with a different picture. Why can’t we
reduce Islam to being an Arab religion?

1. The Arabs were the first and most vehement enemies of

Muhammad (saws)’s when Africa was welcoming. The first
hijra into Ethiopia led to the first free practicing Muslim
community. Islam was settled peacefully in Africa before
Arabia. If Islam was an Arab religion then why were the Arabs
so hostile?
2. Many of the early companions of the Prophet (saws) were not
Arab but African, Persian, and European. From Bilal to
Salman al Farsi (may Allah grant them Jinnah). Most of them
had been slaves within Arabia. If you were to ask them they
would have said that they do not see Islam as an Arab or slave
religion.
3. The Prophet (saws) is reported to have said in a hadith that
the person who stammers trying to read the Quran because
Arabic is not their native tongue receives more blessings for
their struggle than the native who speaks with fluency. This
is the most explicit denial of Arab supremacy.
4. The Prophet (saws) said in his final sermon that there is no
superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab over
an Arab. This is an even more explicit rejection of Arab
supremacy.
5. In another hadith the Prophet (saw) is reported to have said
that you must obey your ruler even if he be an Abyssinian
slave with the head of a raison. Everyone is so focused on the
phrase “head of a raison” that they completely missed the
meaning of the statement. He said obey your Black African
ruler. He is foretelling the rule of Africans.
6. The difference between Arab and West African is as vast as
the difference between West African and East African and the
similarly between East African and Arab is as much as the
similarity between those on the coast of West Africa and those
 in the interior of West Africa. In other words the foreignness
of Arabs depended on where in Africa you were and what part
of Arabia you were from. Yemeni has more in common with
Ethiopians and Somalis than Kuwaitis. The Arabness of
Islam is less of a barrier to the Africans in the 11th century
than it is to black people in the Diaspora who have been
Westernized. Ironically the same Afrocentrists who cite the
foreignness of the Arab are even less familiar with African
cultures than they’d like to admit which is one of the reasons
why they focus such much on ancient Egypt. It’s not a
present reality (culturally) that they have to deal with.

Afrocentrist Myth The Arab Slave Trade. The Arabs introduced

the enslavement of Africans that paved the way for European
enslavement of Africans.

Response: The trans-Saharan Trade and more significantly the

Indian Ocean Trade predate the rise of Islam by thousands of years
with the Indian Ocean Trade dating back to 2500 B.C.E. The
spread of Islam simply made Arabs the new participants in
something that was old. Africans were equal partners in their
commercial relations and more often operated from a position of
strength. In both the trans-Saharan Trade and Indian Ocean Trade
slaves were never the central item traded. Slaves was part of a
wider trade in gold, ivory, and soapstone. The Indian Ocean Trade
in particular was already thousands of years old and had been
controlled by different ethnicities in that region when the Arabs
first came into possession of it. Why not call it the East African
Slave Trade, the Greek Slave Trade, the Roman Slave Trade, the
Gujurat Slave Trade, the Garamante Slave Trade, or the Persian
Slave Trade? Why not call it the gold trade, the soapstone trade, or
the ivory trade? Why is there only an interest the Arab period? To
call the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean Trade the Arab Slave
Trade when it was practiced for thousands of years before the
Arabs took possession and slaves were not even their central focus
is a political decision not scholarly one.

Afrocentrist myth The Indian Ocean Trade depopulated East

Africa and ravaged the continent. It proves that the Arabs were the
first enslavers of Africans and laid the foundation for the European
enslavement of Africans.
Response: The Indian Ocean Trade predated the Arab
involvement. It goes back as far as 2500 B.C.E. Before it was the
Arab slave trade it would have been the Indian slave trade, the
Persian slave trade, the Greek slave trade, and the Roman slave
trade. It was only the Arab slave trade during the Abbasid period.
During this time slave raiding occurred in fits and starts, spikes
and periods but there were also places where it didn’t happen at
all. The Zanji Uprising was larger and more impactful than the
slave trade itself. Historian M.A. Shaban argues that the majority
of participants were not slaves but free blacks and Arabs with
some runaway slaves. There would not have been enough slaves
to do the kind of devastation that happened. The irony is that it
did more damage to Iraq than it did to the East African states that
traded with them voluntarily. The aggressive slave raiding that is
so often referred to belongs to the 1800s and has much to do with
European activities in India and the Middle East at this time as
the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was practically over. The scramble
for Africa accelerated the slave raiding in Southeast Africa. After
the Abbasid period ended the Arabs were simply the face of Islamic
power which had passed to the Turks. This brings up to very
significant facts about Arabs, Islam, and slavery: the majority of
the slaves in the Arab world were white and Persian who overthrew
their Arab masters and subjugated them and eventually took
African slaves from Indian and African middle men. There was no
organized enterprise that principally targeted Africa for slaves to
build up Arab countries. African slaves were used on an as needed
basis but for the most instrumental slave labor the Arabs relied on
whites.

Note: The majority of African slaves were used as servants

(guards). This function would not have required millions of slaves
such as was the case with the military whom the Arabs relied upon
for their military campaigns that were directly responsible for their
building up of wealth. Hence, there is some doubt about the
number of African slaves being in the millions that are found in
secondary sources on the zanji trade.

Afrocentrist Argument: Arabs are just as racist towards Africans

if not more than Europeans.

Response: The inferior status of Africans only appears when we

examine Arab-African relations within Arab societies but between
Arab nations and African nations going all the way back to
Abyssinia we see that Africans were in a position of political
superiority and when the Arabs interacted with sovereign African
nations they did so with diplomacy and deference. African
sovereignty did not make Africans or Africa vulnerable to outside
opinions.

Afrocentrist Myth: The Hamitic-hypothesis is the rationale that

the Arabs relied on for their inferior view of Africans and it has
given African’s who’ve embraced Islam a negative view of other
Africans.

Response: Some Arabs involved in the enslavement of Africans

employed this theory but it was not widespread either among the
Arabs or the Africans. Africans who did use this used it to
disparage other tribes with whom they did not get along with. This
was not a consequence of the Hamitic-hypothesis but rather their
decision to use this was a consequence of tribal conflicts. Ham
does not appear in the Quran or Hadith. He is not a part of Islamic
hagiography. The story of Ham only appears in Judeo-Christian
sources and the story itself flies in the face of what Islam demands
we believe about the Prophet’s like Noah. The usedof Hamitic curse
to justify the subjugation of Africans began with a Syrian Christian
and it was adopted by Arabs and Africans with no religious
scruples. Its proliferation and impact of religious thinking in the
continent was negligible. Those who in West Africa who were using
it as part of the rationale for their tribal wars that predated the
rationale itself were brought under control by Uthman don Fodio
when he established the Sokoto Caliphate.

Afrocentrist myth: Islam did more harm to Africa than good. It

devastating the continent.

Response: This is a personal opinion. However, during the time

of this supposed devastation Africa reached its last great
renaissance. Even Chancellor Williams ruminates in The
Destruction of Black Civilization when he writes: “It may not be
without significance that the Renaissance in Africa occurred at the
same time it did in Europe, between the 15th and 16th centuries,
and that in both Europe and Africa Islamic sources were the
catalyst.” So, even Chancellor Williams had to concede this point.
Islam impacted sub-Saharan West Africa in two significant ways:
1.The spread of Islam brought the major overland trade routes that
connected Asia with Africa and Europe. This enlarged the scope of
the trans-Saharan Trade which then transformed Ghana from a
local kingdom to an empire. The conversion to Islam by West
African kings and notables brought these West African empires
into an international association of an established trade network
that made these West African empires the wealthiest of the entire
continent. Mansa Musa is the heir to this reality.

2.The West African Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai were

successively more Islamic, more literate, more erudite, politically
more sophisticated, and economically more powerful
concomitantly.

Islam was the catalyst for both of these as can clearly be

established when comparing them to their non-Muslim
counterparts. Those who wish to say that the religion of Islam was
a force of bad can only do so by denying these facts.