Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Sufi reform and religious radicalism in the context of French colonialism in Burkina Faso in order to offer a fresh understanding of the effectiveness of the strategies of peaceful reforms in West African history.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines Sufi reform and religious radicalism in the context of French colonialism in Burkina Faso. Focusing on the religious reform of a Tijaniyya sheikh, Boubacar Sawadogo, and his encounter with French colonial rule, the paper offers a fresh explanation on the strategies of reform pursued by charismatic Muslim leaders under colonial rule. Sawadogo employed his charisma and peaceful strategies of reform to expand the Muslim population of the colony despite French restrictions on religious proselytization. Between the 1920s and the end of French rule, French colonial administrators declared the Hamawiyya, a branch of the Tijaniyya to which Sawadogo belonged, radical and xenophobic. Its leaders were thus either persecuted or placed under strict surveillance. Yet the evidence regarding Hamawiyya radicalism was very limited, especially with regards to Sawadogo's community. Both French sources and oral records indicate that Sawadogo and the French independently pursued strategies of coexistence that enabled Sawadogo to convert the population to Islam without without threatening colonial order. Thus, Sawadogo's pursuit of a peaceful proselytism, which contrasted with the tradition that emerged from the Fulbe jihads of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries in the subregion, demonstrates clearly that peaceful reform remained part of West African tradition of religious reform.