Islam, Blackness, and African Cultural Distinction: The Islamic Négritude of Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse

Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded to a process of racial othering, particularly in response to the prejudice of some Arab coreligionists. Even if Black African Muslims were reacting to decidedly different circumstances than African Americans or Black West Indians studying in Europe, Muslim articulations of Black cultural identity in the twentieth century successfully pivoted to the new historical discourse, both apprising and contributing to the discourse on Africanité emerging from the diaspora. This study considers the engagement with the question of Black racial identity by the prominent Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Ibrāhīm Niasse (1900-1975).