Post-1960s: (Islam and Political Stability — The Antiquity of Islam Across Africa Continuing into the Postcolonial Era, Nigeria’s Sharia Debates, Sub-Saharan…

Post-1960s: (Islam and Political Stability — The Antiquity of Islam Across Africa Continuing into the Postcolonial Era, Nigeria’s Sharia Debates, Sub-Saharan Islam Remaining Highly Localized with Traditional Sufism Predominating, Muslim Minorities Organizing as Political Lobbyists in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Contrast with North Africa Where the Push for Sharia and Orthodox Islam Brought Islamists into Conflict with Secular Governments): The antiquity of Islam across Africa continued into the postcolonial era, with debates and sometimes violent confrontation over its application and role in government. Strident Islamism has generally been less common in sub-Saharan Africa than in the north — in the sub-Saharan postcolonial era, Islamist concerns focused on the rights of Muslims in countries split between Muslim and Christian populations, as in Nigeria where sharia law is applied in the north but the broader political arena has been dominated by debates about Muslim and Christian access to power. Islam in sub-Saharan Africa has remained highly localized, adapted to local circumstances, with traditional sufism predominating — eclectic, unorthodox orders identified as the enemy by those seeking pure orthodoxy. In territories where Muslims are a minority, such as Kenya and Tanzania, they organized as effective political lobbyists around the grievance of economic marginalization. North Africa’s experience differed — the push for sharia and rejection of the separation of politics and religion brought Islamist groups into conflict with secular or moderate governments. In Egypt, radical Islamists long viewed the secularizing policies of Nasser’s successors as an affront — Sadat’s peace accord with Israel prompted his 1981 assassination by Islamists, and Mubarak faced a rising threat from the Muslim Brotherhood. In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front challenged the moderate FLN regime, leading to bloody civil war in the early 1990s. In Sudan, the north-south divide was exacerbated by aggressive Arabizing Islam attempting to impose itself on the south, with civil war raging from 1955 to 1972 and again from 1983, intensifying after the National Islamic Front’s 1989 seizure of power and leaving an estimated 1.5 million dead by 2002.