Islam in Europhone African Literature

Abstract

The chapter begins with a survey of the history of Islam in Senegal to illustrate the complexity of the relationship between Islam and African Muslims. It then proposes a reading of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë and Mariama Bâ‘s Une si longue lettre, within an Islamic framework, to illustrate how African authors have looked at Islam from a marginal position in their attempt to search for ways to illustrate shifts in identity and identification among African Muslims. It shows, among other things, how the faces of Islam that African authors portray in their texts are influenced by local beliefs and interpretations of Islamic texts.