The Journal of Religion Review of Paths of Accomodation

Among contemporary historians of west Africa, few are more diligent and prolific than David Robinson. Indeed, his ethic of hard work echoes that of Sheikh Amadu Bamba (1853-1927), the Senegalese Sufi saint (Wali Allah) who is one of the principal subjects of this book and much of Dr. Robinson’s recent writing. Glancing at the astonishing list of consistently excellent works he has written or edited in the past few years, one gets the impression that in Robinson’s case, Bamba’s famous couplet might be modified, from “Work as if you’ll never die, Pray as if you’ll die tomorrow” to “Teach as if you’ll never die, Publish as if you’ll die tomorrow”!

Like the best historians, Dr. Robinson manages to energize his narrative with social theory. As a result, readers gain a sense of the dynamism of events, decisions, and personalities. Of particular interest in this regard is his adaptation and extension of the Marxist phrase “symbolic capital” as “the accumulation of prestige and power within a group” through which certain Muslim leaders “were able to gain and exercise authority. This form could be vested in credentials of learning, Sufi achievement, the performance of miracles, genealogical descent, or important works” (pp. 5-6). Robinson is referring here to what west African Muslims would call baraka—the blessed capacities that Islamic scholars sometimes call “charisma.” Robinson prefers “symbolic capital” to “charisma,” for the latter “bears too heavy a burden from its Weberian past and does not capture the complexity of repertory, reputation, and constituency” (p. 6) of local holy men. He then suggests how different forms of symbolic capital are developed to maximize their “interconvertibility” (p. 232) among ostensibly religious and manifestly political fields of action.

Clearly, Robinson intends to introduce readers to the processes and efficacies of local religion even as he addresses more down-to-earth issues such as the economic history of certain clans and great families; but as his title suggests, he will also situate such discussion in what might be termed an ethnographic history of French colonial authority. He will offer an invaluable introduction to the “mediators of knowledge” embedded in both African and European imaginaries, as well as the purposeful historiographies applied to and developed within Senegal and Mauritania by both African and European protagonists.

Many of the debates within the nineteenth-century Muslim societies of westernmost Africa concerned the relationships between piety as expressed through the mystical practices and social dependencies of Sufism, and political power wielded first by local kings and chiefs and then, once these figures were defeated and/or co-opted by the French, by colonial authorities (p. 18). What could and should be the balance between resistance and resignation? When and how might reasonable (and profitable) accommodation be seen as anything other than “selling out”? These are broadly significant questions of enduring interest, of course, and as Robinson presents the very particular case studies of the tactics of local luminaries like Saad Buh, Sidiyya Baba, Malik Sy, and Amadu Bamba, paradigms emerge that can be applied to many other circumstances at different times and elsewhere in the world.

Within the same frames of time and space, what innovations by French authorities would maximize benefits to the Metropole? Robinson’s presentation of “France as a ‘Muslim Power’” is especially fascinating. As inventive strategies are presented, so are the tensions and pretensions of the moment. Black Islam Noir and Moorish or “White” Islam Maure were based upon deep scholarship by key colonial figures and mixed with romantic and racist projections of what Muslims ought and could be made to be like. Surveillance was intensified, subversives exiled, pilgrimage curtailled, networking controlled, collaborationists rewarded, and tendencies to localize universalist Islam exploited. As interesting are contemporary parallels to be drawn as one reads this compelling history, for in the twenty-first century when north African influxes and attendant demographic shifts have made France something of a “Muslim Power” within its own boundaries, where is the brilliantly adaptive reasoning that characterized France’s west African colonial enterprise, whatever one may think of its motivations and results?

Of most lasting value may be Robinson’s development of comparative biographies of significant figures as a means to consider social process. While presenting the lives of a few great men, he demonstrates how a “texture of constituencies” (p. 232) can be discerned that includes less obviously famous people, including the women whose explicit presence is so difficult to trace in written records. Combining these insights with Robinson’s keen sense of how particular authorities contributed to the colonial moment offers readers a dramatic sense of context rare to history-of-religion scholarship.

The Journal of Religion