Secular Polities and Sacred Rebellions: The Caliphate Debate, Divine Sovereignty and the Challenge of Post-Imperial West African Nation-States

This lecture is based on my current book manuscript, Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450-2015. The nine-chapter book, divided into three parts (early modern, colonial, and post-imperial periods), tracks the textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that reformers and dissidents have debated, enunciated, and deployed to legitimize their projects of reform from the mid-fifteenth century when Maghrebian scholars such as Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Maghīlī al-Tilimsānī (d. 1504-5) taught the Sahelian ‘core curriculum’ and authored politico-theological manuals for state-building projects across Muslim West Africa to the early twenty-first century when new religious movements seeking to establish God’s rule attempted to overthrow the post-imperial secular polities and nation-states that were violently established during the twentieth-century European conquest. In this lecture, I examine how Muslims in West Africa, particularly Hausaland and Bornu, have grappled with the loss of the caliphate since the dawn of colonialism. What are the historical roots of the discontent towards post-imperial West African secular polities? Why are colonial and contemporary sacred rebellions hinged upon the emotive rhetoric of a lost caliphate? Why does the multiplicity of religious movements, with their idiosyncratic methods and goals, legitimately seek to establish divine sovereignty as an alternative to the current European-style political order? I dissect the common goals, divergent aspirations, and intersecting methods that different religious movements have proposed toward the idea of reclaiming the political theology that governed the defunct African Islamic empire-states in their pristine form as they imagined them to have been before colonialism. I adopt the methods of intellectual history to show how and why it is important to understand the intellectual world of the religious movements that combatively reject the ‘conceptual enclosure’ that rigidly limits the notion of good governance to ‘secular democracy’ and other pathological formations that are embedded in the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of occidental political theories and paradigms.    

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Biography:

Abdulbasit Kassim is an IDEAL Provostial Fellow at the Department of African and African American Studies. He is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a geographical focus on West Africa and the African Diaspora in the early modern and modern periods. His cross-temporal research is a longue dureé study tracing questions about continuities, discontinuities, ruptures, and changes in the history of ideas that have fundamentally shaped past and present societies and peoples across time and space in their varied and situated cultural, social, political, economic, and material histories, placing Africa at the center of the narrative. Before coming to Stanford, Abdulbasit completed his PhD at Rice University. He held postdoctoral research fellowships at New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) and the Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) at the University of California, Riverside, for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives.” He also held a predoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University. He is the co-editor of the book The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers, 2018).