A King's Heart: Islamic Political Culture as an Antecedent of Muslim Revolutions in West Africa (Senegambia, 16th and 17th Centuries)

Abstract

This article discusses the dynamics of production and diffusion of Islamic ideas in Greater Senegambia, during the 16th and 17th centuries. The principal question is: what were the social and intellectual foundations that led to the Muslims political rise? To answer it, sources from Gambian, Portuguese and Senegalese archives are analyzed, as well as published European and African narratives. It is argued that these Muslim revolutions resulted from a process of production, debate and circulation of Islamic legal ideas, which interacted with material, social and political conditions derived from the expansion of Atlantic trade. The main conceptual tool to guide the research was the concept of political culture and the applied methodology corresponded to the intersecting of oral and written documentary sources. We concluded that the Muslim revolutions resulted from the socialization of knowledge in the Quranic schools, which subsidized the formation of a new political culture, opposed to the local elites, and deeply involved with the Atlantic trade.