c. 2008 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks put American Islam in an often uncomfortable and unwelcome spotlight, a visit by an overseas Islamic cleric isn’t exactly cause for excitement.

Those who are granted entry into the U.S. _ and not all of them are _ are closely scrutinized for any incitements to violence, anti-American sermons or ties to militant groups abroad.

Then there’s Sheikh Mamadou Taibou Ba.

Ba, a well-known cleric in his native Guinea, was warmly greeted on a recent Sunday afternoon by a crowd of about 300 Muslims in colorful African dress in this city’s hard-scrabble Dorchester neighborhood. When he rose to speak, Ba, 34, praised America’s freedom of religion and opportunity, and urged his audience of mostly immigrants from Senegal and Guinea to integrate into American life and culture.

“Boston is a great city. There are great places to live, to work, to be educated,” said Ba, speaking in French and Fulani, during a stop on a two-month tour that will take him to New York, Philadelphia and other U.S. cities.

While many West African Muslims remain critical of U.S. foreign policy, they also tend to view America, and Islam, through a more moderate lens then their co-religionists in many Arab and South Asian countries.

To be sure, West African Muslims account for a small percentage of U.S. Muslims. But, thanks in part to a burgeoning interest among African-American Muslims in their roots, the West African brand of Islam is gaining newfound visibility and influence.

With an approach to Islam partly shaped by the mystical Sufi tradition and religiously diverse societies at home, West African Muslims are seen by some observers as important counterweights to more rigid and radical interpretations of Islam coming out of the Middle East.

“In most cases,” said Misbahudeen Ahmed-Rufai, a native of Ghana who teaches history at Chicago’s Harold Washington College, “Islam in Africa is more moderate _ moderate meaning people being more interested in their own spiritual development, rather than trying to force others to go their way.”

While most Americans usually associate Islam with Arabs and South Asians, there are an estimated 150 million Muslims in West Africa _ around 15 percent of the world’s total Muslim population.

Introduced by North African traders in the 10th century, West African Islam is marked one the one hand by the ancient library of Timbuktu and on the other by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. According to some estimates, more than a third of Africans sold into slavery were Muslim.

“As an African-American Muslim, after making the Hajj, your next obligation should be to visit Goree Island,” said Ayesha Mustafaa, editor of the Muslim Journal newspaper in Chicago, referring to the final exit point for slaves off the coast of Senegal.

In the last 30 years, African-American Muslim interest in that history has surged, including a growing number of U.S.-based travel agencies specializing in tours of important historic and religious sites in West Africa. Many families who want their children to memorize the Quran and receive a classical Islamic education send them to West Africa.

Ihsan Muhammad is one of them. His father sent him at age 12 to study in Senegal with Sheikh Hassan Ali Cisse, one of the best known leaders of the Tijani Sufi order, the largest Islamic order in Africa.

“He wanted us to go abroad to be totally immersed in the atmosphere of Islam, and he wanted us to go somewhere where we would have a sense about our heritage of Islam,” said Muhammad, now 34. “He didn’t know if we would make that connection if we went to Saudi (Arabia) to study.“

When Muhammad arrived, there were already a dozen or so African-American students studying at Cisse’s madrassa. Like Muhammad, who went on to found the Nasrul Ilm Islamic school in Atlanta, dozens of Cisse’s graduates are now schooling new generations of students at Islamic schools in America and abroad.

“They are now part of the Islamic intelligentsia,” said Ashaki Taha-Cisse, who heads the African American Islamic Institute in Brooklyn, an Islamic school founded by Sheikh Cisse in 1976. (She is not related to the sheikh.) “The influence of African Muslims in America has been a positive thing, mainly for allowing Islam to be seen and experienced free from a lot of Arab culturalisms.”

Within American Islam, especially (but not exclusively) among black Muslims, Tijani graduates and other West African Muslims have become an important counterweight to the Salafi and Wahhabi streams of Islam exported from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, which frequently espouse a literalist interpretation of Islam and are sometimes seen as condoning violence.

“I encountered some of those types of people when I was growing up,” Muhammad said, “and when I finally got to Senegal, I said, `Oh, so this is Islam.”’

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While many Muslim countries are struggling with sectarian violence and religious persecution, observers say West African Muslims have generally fared better. That’s due in large part to religiously diverse societies where interfaith marriage is common and any given family could contain Christians, Animists and Muslims.

Observers caution that Muslims in West Africa are not a monolith, but encompass a wide variety of interpretations and levels of practice. In Nigeria, for example, several Muslim-majority states have enacted a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, which has led to violent clashes among Muslims and between Muslims and Christians.

On a recent visit to Ghana, Ahmed-Rufai said he even saw someone wearing an Osama Bin Laden T-shirt. He recommended more U.S.-sponsored cultural exchanges and development projects in West African countries, with African-Americans playing visible roles.

“If the U.S. does that,” Ahmed-Rufai said, “it will go a long way towards making sure more extremist views don’t spread.”

KRE/RB END SACRIBEY

A photo of Ba is available via https://religionnews.com.