Islam was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in 610 CE in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Muhammad spread Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula, including the city of Medina by 622 CE. After his death in 632, Islam began to spread to other parts of the world. It reached North Africa during the second half of the 7th century CE, when the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, Syria, conquered the region by military force.
Berber traders helped spread Islam during the 8th century along the trade routes that crisscrossed West Africa. Initially, Islam’s presence was limited to small, segregated Muslim communities tied to the trans-Saharan trade. From the 8th to the 13th century, Muslim states began to emerge in the Sahel region. By the 11th century, a Muslim state called Takrur had formed in the middle of the Senegal Valley. The Almoravids there introduced a fundamentalist version of Islam and enforced stricter religious practices and Islamic law among West African Muslims.
West African rulers usually adopted Islam while blending it with traditional local practices. One of the most well-known empires to adopt Islam was the Mali Empire. Mansa Musa made Islam the official state religion and famously went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. Muslim polities also developed in the Hausa city-states and the Kingdom of Kanem-Bornu in present-day northern Nigeria.
Map of the Spread of Islam (worldhistory.org)
The Songhai Empire adopted Islam as well, although many people continued practicing their traditional belief systems. Rulers often combined local customs with Islamic practices. Sonni Ali, who ruled the Songhai Empire from 1465 to 1492, persecuted Muslim scholars who criticized non-Islamic customs. His successor, Askia Muhammad I (c. 1442-1538), also practiced Islam and promoted Islamic scholarship. The Songhai Empire supported Islamic institutions and sponsored the construction of mosques, public buildings, and libraries. One of the most notable examples is the Great Mosque of Djenné, a mud-brick building in Djenné, Mali, built in the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style. By the 16th century, the city of Timbuktu in Mali had become a major center of Islamic learning, attracting scholars from across the Muslim world. During the 19th century, jihad movements spread throughout West Africa, particularly in regions like Senegambia and Hausaland (now northern Nigeria). These movements overthrew established rulers and transformed both the political leadership and landowning classes.
In 1802, Usman dan Fodio, with support from a large Fulani cavalry and Hausa peasants, overthrew the region’s Hausa rulers and replaced them with Fulani emirs. His jihad led to the centralization of power within the Muslim community, educational reforms, and changes in legal systems. Fodio also sparked a literary revival, producing religious works in Arabic and in local languages written in Arabic script. His movement inspired several other jihads across the region. Samori Touré, a Mandinka military strategist and founder of the Wassoulou (Tukulor) Empire, resisted French colonization with an army of 30,000 men. After his death in 1900, his son Saranken Mori continued the resistance until he was defeated by the French in 1901. Despite European colonization, Islam continued to spread throughout West Africa into the 20th century.
