07 ISSUE V
MAY 2025
MAY 2025
Islam in the African Renaissance
Marsh, who presented at The New School’s African Studies Initiative in late 2024, argues African self-determination will likely adopt more religious forms, even when framed in secular terms.
By Wendell Marsh
Two competing discourses about Africa characterized the first two decades of the 21st century: The African Renaissance and the Global War on Terror.
Despite their historical coincidence, these two discourses have seldom been a part of the same discussion. Reasonably so. The African Renaissance has been an African idea that gave shape and expression to African aspirations for self-definition and sovereignty. It constitutes a tradition of African initiative in building the future. The Global War on Terror, on the other hand, has been, in addition to a discourse, a practical, infrastructural, technological, legal, and military intervention by external actors that often undermines African aspiration. And yet, thinking the African Renaissance and the Global War on Terror together might be necessary for understanding a historical conjuncture that has now passed.
The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu, Mali, are a natural starting point for such a meditation. South Africa-based historian Susana Molins Lliteras has argued that the “iconic archives” of Arabic manuscripts at the edge of the Sahara desert bear a symbolic “potency.” They attracted deep investments to pursue former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s vision of Pan-African cooperation and development in the first decade of the new millennium. It also drew the attention of Islamist insurgents who occupied the fabled city and used the state-of-the-art facilities as barracks during their ten-month rule in 2012-2013. In the heat of the battle to recapture the desert town, and the wider struggle over the narrative about what happened, reports of the destruction of cultural heritage seemingly validated the notion of civilizational clash, with the African Renaissance falling on the side of Western hegemony and Muslim militants representing an antagonistic enemy of modernity.
However, we might also consider the rhetorical moves made by intellectual, political, and cultural entrepreneurs in neighboring Senegal, as well as the ways their responses made sense of and intervened in that moment. Senegal, with its Muslim majority population, its prominence in producing influential philosophical, artistic, and cultural movements, and its geo-strategic location at the crossroads of Sahelian Africa and the Black Atlantic, is the ideal site for meditating on the place of Islam in the African Renaissance during the time of terror.
I do just that in the final chapter of my forthcoming book, TEXTUAL LIFE: ISLAM, AFRICA, AND THE FATE OF THE HUMANITIES (Columbia University Press, September 2025). In the broader context of the book, I narrate the tragic story of the Senegalese Muslim polymath Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), a scholar denied, who wrote a monumental history of West Africa in Arabic and attempted, but failed, to publish it in a bilingual edition with the support of colonial officials. All the same, Kamara’s work has seen waves of interest, including during the nationalist period and since the spread of Islamist insurgency in the Sahel. The book is ultimately a parable about the fate of the humanities in the face of epistemic, technological, and political change. In the final chapter, “The Secular-Religious Afterlife of Shaykh Musa Kamara,” I show how the African Renaissance and the Global War on Terror have conditioned a new religious framing of a scholar that was previously received as an informant by the colonial state and as an author and a historian by nationalist thinkers of the 1970s.
Through a conjunctural and grounded analysis, I identify a significant resurgence of scholarly interest in Kamara’s life and work, both within Senegal and internationally. In the decade following the 2012 insurgency in Mali, a notable body of literature has emerged in Arabic, French, and English, produced mainly by Senegalese scholars residing in Senegal and its global diaspora. This recent proliferation of publications—both in volume and frequency—as well as the growing number of contributors, surpasses that of any previous decade since Kamara’s death in 1945. Moreover, the current output exceeds the scope of material Kamara himself was able to disseminate during his lifetime.
It is important to note that this recent publication activity has emphasized two of Kamara’s works in particular, his autobiographical TABSHĪR AL-KHĀʾIF AL-ḤAYRĀN [The Announcement of the good news to the fearful and the confused] and his treatise against the validity of armed struggle on behalf of Islam, AKTHAR AL-RĀGHIBĪN FĪ AL-JIHĀD… [Most of the would-be jihadists…]. I demonstrate that the themes of these publications, along with the commentary about them, contribute to making Kamara an icon of secular-religion, that is, a normative model for a mode of religious expression that aligns with the demands imposed by political modernity.
Against a hasty presumption that an African Renaissance might constitute a break with religion as is often (erroneously) believed about the European Renaissance, the emergence of a new “religious” reception of Kamara amid the Global War on Terror suggests that African self-determination will likely take profoundly religious forms, even if on secular terms.
Wendell Marsh, Ph.D. (Columbia, 2018), is Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark, specializing in African-Arabic textuality, Islam in Africa, the Diaspora, and religious studies. He presented at the African studies Initiative, a project of The New School, including GPIA.