The Ibadi-Wangara Link: A Myth or a Reality?

The destruction of the Ibadi imamate in North Africa in 909 AD marked a turn in the Ibadi political thought. Since then, the doctrine of jihad (in the sense of holy war) for the spread of Islam was abandoned. In Subsaharan Africa, where Islam spread in the Ibadi form with the action of North Africa traders, but started receding since the conquest of the Almoravids in the eleventh century. With the development of takfiri ideologies linked to reforms and jihads, a minority of Muslim traders, linked the the Suwarian tradition, though Sunni-Malikis, rejected this political use of Islam and maintained a line of conduct parallel to the one adopted by the Ibadis in North Africa. My paper is a tentative historical analysis on the longue durée of the abandonment of jihad as an ideology. It will highlight the homologies between these two trends of Islam in Africa, bringing to light the historical connections between the two through trading networks between the North and the South of the Sahara. These were mediated by the Ibadi-Wangara traders at least until the rise of the takfiri (jihadi) ideology with the actions of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maghīlī in the end of the fifteenth century in Songhay.