vii).
The spread of Islam into Senegal and other regions of Africa may have begun as early as the eighth century. Approximately 100 years earlier, in 610 C.E., an Arab merchant—Muhammad— began to preach a series of revelations that he believed came to him from God through the angel Gabriel. Angered by his denunciation of local religious beliefs, the people of Mecca rose up against Muhammad, who fled with his followers to Medina in 622. His flight, called the hegira, marked the beginning of a new religious calendar and a new faith, Islam. Islam’s effects in the area that eventually became Senegal were not significantly felt until the eleventh century when a ruler of the Tekrur kingdom converted to Islam and persuaded his family and many of his subjects to adopt the new faith. Most mass conversions occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as many West Africans turned to the certainties of a strict religious faith to help them cope with the social and political upheaval resulting from colonization by France and Great Britain.
The particular practice of Islam among the Senegalese includes devotion to the prescriptions of universal Islam, such as complete submission to the will of God (“Allah”), and the observation of Islamic customs specific to the geographic region and to the ethnic group occupying that region.
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