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Sanneh Lamin . Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition of West African Islam . New York : Oxford University Press , 2016. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Timeline. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xviii + 358 pp. $34.95. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-19-935161-9 .
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Editors' note: See also Souleymane Bachir Diagne's comparative review of this book and Ousmane Oumar Kane's Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa in this issue.
Beyond Jihad is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the history of Islam in Africa. At a time when discourses about Islam in the popular media and some academic circles increasingly focus on religious intolerance and violence, Lamine Sanneh's book is a refreshing and timely intervention that explores the long history of peaceful expansion of Islam across West Africa. The book challenges established narratives that construe "jihad of the sword" as the most significant instrument of conversion and vehicle of reform in West African Islam and emphasizes the agency of teachers, quietist clerics, traders, and Sufi saints. In this view conversion is achieved through shared knowledge, high morals, ethical behavior, and peaceful accommodation rather than coercion. By shifting the emphasis from violence to education as the foundational basis for conversion, Sanneh is able to write sub-Saharan Africa and Africans into the...