Why are some African Muslim countries peaceful and friendly?

I asked Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad:

What about certain African countries that are mostly Muslim, aren’t there are some that are peaceful? Westerners go live there, they don’t have a hard time, they get along with the locals. So when they hear people like us talk abut Islam and jihad, it doesn’t correspond with their experience, and they dismiss it.

Dr. Bostom replied:

They are Animists with Islam sitting very lightly. The more Islamic (Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan), the more jihadist. Indeed the history of Islam in Africa is punctuated by jihad campaigns waged by orthodox Muslims against their Animist-Muslim syncretist co-religionists who are not Islamic enough. The great Fulani jihad campaigns of the early 19th century under Othman Dan Fodio are the best known example of this phenomenon. But there were others before and after, like the Mahdist jihad featured in the movie Khartoum, with Charlton Heston, and described, in its latter stages, by Winston Churchill in The River War.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2006 11:25 PM | Send