Unworthy of a name? The blurred outlines of local “pagan religions” in the jihad literature from 19th century West Africa

Authors of Arabic texts from precolonial West Africa south of the Sahara are surprisingly silent or, at best, allusive about indigenous religions, despite the latter’s importance in the local social landscape. Even those occasional descriptive fragments about them that are provided by local Arabic sources are never integrated into a coherent picture; instead, they tend to be overwhelmed by bookish references to disparate contexts that are distant in time, space and religious background. Overall, literary convention seems to prevail on first-hand account. Moreover, neither local “pagans” nor their sets of rituals and beliefs are ever given a specific name. The present article explores this trend by focusing, firstly, on the polemic and apologetic literature dating back to the 19th jihad movements led by West African Muslim scholars, since charges of “mixing the practice of Islam with the practice of unbelief ” featured prominently in those sources and played a crucial role in legitimizing jihad against self-declared Muslim political authorities. Subsequently, the focus moves to sources from earlier times and different genres, in order to identify common trends and specific articulations in such a silent/elusive tradition. While some instances of this shared attitude can be ascribed to specific conscious motivations or to a political agenda, in most cases its pervasiveness appears rather as unintentional evidence of a certain mindset. Starting from this remark, several questions are raised and discussed: Did West African authors fail to consider local “pagans” as having religions with distinct identities? Did they lack a specific vocabulary to define and describe them? Were they simply uninterested in their beliefs and rituals? Or did they deem such a subject inappropriate to both the scholarly genres of their texts and to their medium, i.e. written Arabic?