Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Steven Barboza, American Jihad: Islam 

after Malcolm X (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1994); 

Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam, an American Mil-

lenarian Movement. Studies in Religion and Society

(Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988); Richard 

Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

African languages and literature

The variety of Islamic experiences in Africa can 

be seen in the diversity of languages and literature 

through which Islam has expressed itself. The 

most influential literary language has been Arabic. 

Culturally dominant in North Africa, Arabic has 

often been the language of religious instruction, 

devotional practices, and pious writings in sub-

Saharan Africa as well. Arab geographers such as 

al-Bakri (d. 1094) and explorers such as 

ibn

 b

at

-

tUta

 (d. 1368) wrote the oldest existing descrip-

tions of sub-Saharan Africa in Arabic. A couple of 

centuries after Ibn Battuta’s travels in West Africa, 

the earliest sub-Saharan chronicles were written 

in Arabic. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the 

Ulama

 of Timbuktu produced original scholarly 

works in Arabic and copied great Islamic texts 

from North Africa and the Fertile Crescent in the 

same language. Religious scholars would continue 

to use Arabic as the language of instruction into 

the 19th century.

In the realm of oral tradition, Muslims were 

more prone to compose and transmit works in the 

indigenous languages. Storytellers passed down 

epic tales in the vernacular for hundreds of years. 

The best known of these is the West African epic, 

Sundiata, which dates from the 13th century. In 

East Africa, the tradition of Swahili-language 

poetry developed in both oral and written forms. 

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