Racing Away from Race: The Literary Aesthetics of Islam and Gender in Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s The Prophet of Zongo Street and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s The Whispering Trees
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Some literary discussions on Islam in West Africa argue that African Muslims owe allegiance more to Arab race and culture since the religion has an Arab origin while owing less to indigenous and therefore “authentic” African cultures. Most notably, in his famous quarrel with Ali Mazrui, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrenches race to serve a tendentious historicism about African Muslims as racially Arab and therefore foreign to African culture. In their fiction, two new West African writers, Mohammed Naseehu Ali and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, allegorize African Islamic identity as tied to Arab race and culture as madness, lunacy and even death. In particular, Ali’s short story “The Prophet of Zongo Street” engages with this obsessive dialectic between African Islamic identity and Arab race. Although not explicitly thematizing Islamic identity as tied to Arab race or culture, three other stories by the same authors, Ali’s story “Mallam Sile” and Ibrahim’s stories “The Whispering Trees” and “Closure,” gender the dialectic between race and Islamic identity. Ali and Ibrahim show African Muslim women’s abilities to effect change in difficult situations and relationships—marriage, romance, legal provisions on inheritance, prayer and honor. In so doing, I argue, these authors reflect a potential solution to the difficult debate in African literary criticism on Islamic identity and Arab race and culture.
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1
Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa: 1600–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 34–35.
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3
Mohammed Naseehu Ali, The Prophet of Zongo Street: Stories (New York: Amistad, 2005); Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, The Whispering Trees: Short Stories (Lagos: Parresia, 2012).
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4
Adeline Masquelier, Women and Islamic Revival in a West African Town (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), xxiii.
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9
John D. Erickson, “Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’aventure ambigue”, Yale French Studies, 53, (1976), pp. 92–101; 99.
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13
John Conteh-Morgan, “Beyond Race: Class Conflict and Tragic Vision in an African Novel”, Race and Class, 29/2, (1987), pp. 17–30; 22.
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15
Ahmed Bangura, Islam and the West African Novel: The Politics of Representation (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 23. Bangura opens his chapter on Islam and literary criticism in Africa with a discussion of the scholarly exchanges between Mazrui and Soyinka that began in the journal Transition. Bangura examines both sides of the debate by analyzing each of the points and counterpoints on Islam and Africa made by these critics. He focuses chiefly on Soyinka’s choice of criticism of Islam—Mazrui’s ethnicity, Islam’s violent origins in Africa and his interpretation that Mazrui was promoting Islam as an authentic and indigenous African religion to the detriment of traditional African faiths. As a result, these main axes of analysis as put forth by Soyinka have formed the contours of literary discussion of Islam in Africa.
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16
Emad Mirmotahari, “A Cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism: The African Novel and the Muslim Question in the National Age”, Interventions 17/1, (2015), pp. 45–63.
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17
Leonardo Villalón, “Islam and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics, ed. John L. Esposito and Emad El-Din Shahin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 382.
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19
Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
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31
Soyinka, “Religion and Human Rights”, Index on Censorship 17/5, (1988), pp. 82–85; 83.
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34
Mazrui, “Wole Soyinka as a Television critic: A Parable of Deception”, Transition 54 (1991), pp. 165–177.
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37
Wole Soyinka, Of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 42.
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93
Abdulla Yusuf Ali, Translations of the Meaning of the Holy Qu’ran (Beltsville: Amana, 2006), 195.
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99
Ali, Translations of the Meaning, 96. In the chapter, Al-Baqara (2:234–235), Ali translates the verse on the legal obligation to observe the mourning period or ʿidda as follows, “if any of you die and leave widows behind, they shall wait concerning themselves four months and ten days: when they have fulfilled their term, there is no blame on you if they dispose of themselves in a just and reasonable manner.”
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Racing Away from Race: The Literary Aesthetics of Islam and Gender in Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s The Prophet of Zongo Street and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s The Whispering Trees
In: Islamic AfricaSearch for other papers by Shirin Edwin in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Some literary discussions on Islam in West Africa argue that African Muslims owe allegiance more to Arab race and culture since the religion has an Arab origin while owing less to indigenous and therefore “authentic” African cultures. Most notably, in his famous quarrel with Ali Mazrui, the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrenches race to serve a tendentious historicism about African Muslims as racially Arab and therefore foreign to African culture. In their fiction, two new West African writers, Mohammed Naseehu Ali and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, allegorize African Islamic identity as tied to Arab race and culture as madness, lunacy and even death. In particular, Ali’s short story “The Prophet of Zongo Street” engages with this obsessive dialectic between African Islamic identity and Arab race. Although not explicitly thematizing Islamic identity as tied to Arab race or culture, three other stories by the same authors, Ali’s story “Mallam Sile” and Ibrahim’s stories “The Whispering Trees” and “Closure,” gender the dialectic between race and Islamic identity. Ali and Ibrahim show African Muslim women’s abilities to effect change in difficult situations and relationships—marriage, romance, legal provisions on inheritance, prayer and honor. In so doing, I argue, these authors reflect a potential solution to the difficult debate in African literary criticism on Islamic identity and Arab race and culture.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 492 | 54 | 6 |
| Full Text Views | 187 | 1 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 34 | 7 | 0 |