Some of the Berber tribes, however, remained heathen up [[317]]to the close of the fifteenth century,[12] but the general tendency was naturally towards an absorption of these smaller communities into the larger.
The sixteenth century witnessed the birth of a movement of active proselytising in the Mag͟hrib, which has been traced to the reaction excited by the successes of the Christian powers in Spain and North Africa. This gave an immense impulse to the institution of the “marabouts,”[13] and large numbers of them set out from the monastic settlements in the south of Morocco to carry a peaceful missionary campaign throughout the Mag͟hrib, renewing the faith of the lukewarm adherents of Islam and converting their heathen neighbours.[14] To this proselytising movement the Muslim refugees from Spain contributed their part, as has been shown above (p. 127), coming to the aid of the Shurafāʼ or descendants of Idrīs b. ʻAbd Allāh, who had fled to Morocco to escape the wrath of Hārūn al-Rashīd.[15]
From the Sahara the knowledge of Islam first spread among the Negroes of the Sudan. The early history of this movement is wrapped in obscurity, but there seems little doubt that it was the Berbers who first introduced Islam into the lands watered by the Senegal and the Niger; here they came in contact with pagan kingdoms, some of them (e.g. Ghāna and Songhay) of great antiquity.[16] The two Berber tribes, the Lamṭūna and the Jadāla, belonging to the Ṣanhāja clan, especially distinguished themselves by their religious zeal in the work of conversion,[17] and through their agency the Almoravid movement reacted on the pagan tribes of the Sudan. The reign of Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn, the founder of Morocco (A.D. 1062) and the second amīr of the Almoravid dynasty, was very fruitful in conversions, and many Negroes under his rule came to know of the doctrines of Muḥammad.[18] In 1076 the Berbers who [[318]]had been spreading Islam in the kingdom of Ghāna for some time, drove out the reigning dynasty, which was probably Fulbe, and this ancient kingdom became throughout Muhammadan; at the beginning of the thirteenth century it lost its independence and was conquered by the Mandingos.[19]
Of the introduction of Islam into the ancient kingdom of Songhay, which is said to have been in existence as early as A.D. 700, we have only the record that the first Muhammadan king was named Zā-kassi, the fifteenth monarch of the Zā dynasty; his conversion took place in the year A.H. 400 (A.D. 1009–1010), and in the Songhay language he was styled Muslim-dam, which implied that he had adopted Islam of his own free will and not by compulsion, but there is no mention of the influences to which he owed his conversion.[20]
In the same century there were founded on the Upper Niger two cities, destined in succeeding centuries to exercise an immense influence on the development of Islam in the Western Sudan,—Jenne,[21] founded in A.H. 435 (A.D. 1043–1044),[22] and destined to become an important trading centre, and Timbuktu, the great emporium for the caravan trade with the north, founded about the year A.D. 1100. The king of Jenne, Kunburu, became a Muslim towards the end of the sixth century of the Hijrah (i.e. about A.D. 1200) and his example was followed by the inhabitants of the city; when he had made up his mind to embrace Islam, he is said to have collected together all the ʻulamāʼ in his kingdom, to the number of 4200—(however exaggerated this number may be, the story would seem to imply that Islam had already made considerable progress in his dominions)—and publicly in their presence declared himself a Muslim and exhorted them to pray for the prosperity of his city; he then had his palace pulled down and built a great mosque[23] in its place.[24] Timbuktu, on the other hand, was a Muhammadan [[319]]city from the beginning; “never did the worship of idols defile it, never did any man prostrate himself on its soil except in prayer to God the Merciful.”[25] In later years it became influential as a seat of Muhammadan learning and piety, and students and divines flocked there in large numbers, attracted by the encouragement and patronage they received. Ibn Baṭūṭah, who travelled through this country in the middle of the fourteenth century, praises the Negroes for their zeal in the performance of their devotions and in the study of the Qurʼān: unless one went very early to the mosque on Friday, he tells us, it was impossible to find a place, so crowded was the attendance.[26] In his time, the most powerful state of the Western Sudan was that of Melle or Māllī, which had risen to importance about a century before, after the conquest of Ghāna by the Mandingos, one of the finest races of Africa: Leo Africanus[27] calls them the most civilised, the most intellectual and most respected of all the Negroes, and modern travellers praise them for their industry, cleverness and trustworthiness.[28] These Mandingos have been among the most active missionaries of Islam, which has been spread by them among the neighbouring peoples.[29]
According to the Kano Chronicle it was the Mandingos who brought the knowledge of Islam to the Hausa people; the date is uncertain,[30] as are most dates connected with the history of the Hausa states, because the Fulbe, who conquered them at the beginning of the nineteenth century, destroyed most of their historical records. But the importance of the adoption of Islam by the Hausas cannot be exaggerated; they are an energetic and intelligent people, and their remarkable aptitude for trade has won for them [[320]]an immense influence among the various peoples with whom they have come in contact; their language has become the language of commerce for the Western Sudan, and wherever the Hausa traders go—and they are found from the coast of Guinea to Cairo—they carry the faith of Islam with them. References to their missionary activity will be found in the following pages. But of their own adoption of the faith, as well as of the rise of the seven Hausa states and their dependencies,[31] historical evidence is almost entirely wanting;[32] one of the missionaries of Islam to Kano and Katsena would certainly seem to have been a learned and pious teacher from Tlemsen, Muḥammad b. ʻAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Majīlī, who flourished about the year 1500;[33] possibly they were affected by the great wave of Muhammadan influence which moved southward from Egypt in the twelfth century.[34] The merchants of Kordofan and in the Eastern Sudan generally, boast that they are descended from Arabs who made their way thither after the fall of the Fāṭimid caliphate of Egypt in 1171. But there were probably still earlier instances of Muslim influence coming into Central Africa from the north-east. It was from Egypt that Islam spread into Kanem, a kingdom on the N. and N.E. of Lake Chad, which shortly after the adoption of Islam rose to be a state of considerable importance and extended its sway over the tribes of the Eastern Sudan to the borders of Egypt and Nubia; the first Muhammadan king of Kanem is said to have reigned either towards the close of the eleventh or in the first half of the twelfth century.[35] But the details we possess of the spread of Islam from the north-east are even more scanty than those already given for the history of the states of the Western Sudan. The mere dates of the [[321]]conversion of kings and the establishment of Muhammadan dynasties tell us very little; but one fact stands out clearly from this meagre record, namely the extreme slowness of the process. The survival of considerable groups of fetish-worshippers in the midst of territories which for centuries were under Muhammadan rule, would seem to indicate that the influence of Islam was long confined to the towns and only by degrees made its way among the pagan population, if indeed it did not meet with such stubborn resistance as has kept the Bambara pagan, though (dwelling between the Upper Senegal and the Upper Niger) they have been hemmed in by a Muhammadan population for centuries.
An unsuccessful attempt to convert the Bambara was made by a marabout, named ʻUmaru Kaba, early in the twentieth century. This man had founded a new religious confraternity, connected with the Qādiriyyah, and having failed to attract his co-religionists to it, he turned his attention to the pagan Bambara, and endeavoured to convert them to Islam and enrol them in his order. He seemed to be on the road to success and had already converted a pagan village in the province of Sansanding, when the chief of the province drove the missionary across the frontier and ordered the newly-converted Bambara to return to their old religious observances.[36]
Where intermarriages with such races as Arabs and Berbers have been frequent, a steady process of infiltration has gone on, and this, added to the propagandist activities of those races—Fulbe, Hausa and Mandingo—who have distinguished themselves for their zeal on behalf of their religion, would have contributed to the more rapid growth of a Muhammadan population, had it not been for the internecine wars that caused one Muhammadan state to work the destruction of another. Melle rose on the ruins of Ghāna in the thirteenth century, to be crushed at the beginning of the sixteenth by Songhay, which in its turn was desolated by the Moors a century later. As these Muhammadan empires declined, with the wholesale massacres characteristic of warfare in the Sudan, fetishism regained much of the ground it had lost; and as in the [[322]]Christian, so in the Muhammadan world, there have been periods when missionary zeal has sunk to a low ebb, and Muhammadans in some parts of the Sudan have been content to leave the paganism that surrounded them untouched by any proselytising efforts.
In the fourteenth century the Tunjar Arabs, emigrating south from Tunis, made their way through Bornu and Wadai to Darfur; others came in later from the east;[37] one of their number named Aḥmad met with a kind reception from the heathen king of Darfur, who took a fancy to him, made him director of his household and consulted him on all occasions. His experience of more civilised methods of government enabled him to introduce a number of reforms both into the economy of the king’s household and the government of the state. By judicious management, he is said to have brought the unruly chieftains into subjection, and by portioning out the land among the poorer inhabitants to have put an end to the constant internal raids, thereby introducing a feeling of security and contentment before unknown. The king having no male heir gave Aḥmad his daughter in marriage and appointed him his successor,—a choice that was ratified by the acclamation of the people, and the Muhammadan dynasty thus instituted has continued down to the present century. The civilising influences exercised by this chief and his descendants were doubtless accompanied by some work of proselytism, but these Arab immigrants seem to have done very little for the spread of their religion among their heathen neighbours. Darfur only definitely became Muhammadan through the efforts of one of its kings named Sulaymān who began to reign in 1596,[38] and it was not until the sixteenth century that Islam gained a footing in the other kingdoms lying between Kordofan and Lake Chad, such as Wadai and Baghirmi. The first Muhammadan king of Baghirmi was Sultan ʻAbd Allāh, who reigned from 1568 to 1608, but the chief centre of Muhammadan influence at this time was the kingdom of Wadai, which was founded by ʻAbd al-Karīm about A.D. 1612, and it was not until the latter part of the eighteenth [[323]]century that the mass of the people of Baghirmi were converted to Islam.[39]
But the history of the Muhammadan propaganda in Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is very slight and wholly insignificant when compared with the remarkable revival of missionary activity during the present century. Some powerful influence was needed to arouse the dormant energies of the African Muslims, whose condition during the eighteenth century seems to have been almost one of religious indifference. Their spiritual awakening owed itself to the influence of the Wahhābī reformation at the close of the eighteenth century; whence it comes that in modern times we meet with some accounts of proselytising movements among the Negroes that are not quite so forbiddingly meagre as those just recounted, but present us with ample details of the rise and progress of several important missionary enterprises.