Islam and West African Religions

Abstract

The chapter discusses the extraordinarily long history of West Africa’s religious traditions. It argues that Islam in West African has been profoundly transformed by ancient Egypto-African belief systems that are far older than any of the Abrahamic traditions, and that the faith in Africa has been ‘Ajamized (or Africanized). It contents that it is largely for this reason that Wahhābī and other Islamic militants have targeted West African Muslims as needful of their “benevolent” intervention and that their activities in the Sahel are better construed as a particularly pernicious form of the old taboo-Arab racism and neo-imperialism. The chapter also observes that the current instability in the Sahel region is largely due to U.S., French, and NATO-led attacks on Libya, which destabilized the region.