The present state of affairs in Muslim Africa is largely the result of Muslims’ reactions to the burning issues of postwar and postcolonial Africa culture among African people; the planting of Europeanized Christianity and the impact of colonialism on African societies; the emergence of Pan-Africanism and Negritude and the successes of the anti-colonial movement.

By 1900, virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, was under the colonial yoke, and Islam and traditional African religions were on the defensive. Islam was putting up a fight against the political and military might of the colonial powers, but its adherents were increasingly shaped by the new rules of the political game called imperialism. Related to, but not necessarily identical to, the colonial process were the missiological challenges posed by European missionaries. These religious rivals of Islam had suffered defeat at the hands of the African mosquito in the centuries preceding the discovery of quinine. But by 1900, their enthusiasm and activism combined to make them more eager to compete with Muslims in the conversion of the African people. By the end of the Second World War, Africa became a theater of religious coexistence under several imperial roofs. Each imperial power had its own formula for religious interaction and social change in the colonies. Muslims seized the opportunity of indirect rule in British Tropical Africa to refurbish the decaying structures of their glorious institutions and to redefine their identity under the colonial dispensation. Those African Muslims who lived under French colonial rule, especially the inhabitants of the Four Communes of Dakar, St. Louis, Rufisque and Goree Island in Senegal, soon found themselves bracketed legally from their Muslim counterparts in the interior of Africa simply because they were supposed to be more assimilated into the French colonial culture. Many Muslim intellectuals who went to study in France during the war were products of this concerted French policy of assimilation. It was in response to the challenges of the colonial regimes and their cultural policies that the African nationalist movement gained momentum. It led to the reexamination of the African historical experience and the redefinition of the African identity question. We will return to this issue when we examine the relationship between African Muslims and the Pan-African movement.