Pre-1800–19th Century: (North African Islam — Nomadic-Sedentary Interaction, the Shift from Caliphal to Sufi-Allied Leadership, Islam as a Political Weapon f…

Pre-1800–19th Century: (North African Islam — Nomadic-Sedentary Interaction, the Shift from Caliphal to Sufi-Allied Leadership, Islam as a Political Weapon for Berber Communities, the Sanusi in Libya, Abd al-Qadir’s Qadiriyya Resistance in Algeria, and Muhammad Ahmad the Mahdi in the Sudan): In the centuries prior to 1800, northern Africa was characterized by the interaction between nomadic and sedentary groups, and a major change in the nature of Islamic states — a shift from the early phase in which leaders attempted to copy the first caliphs to a new phase of restricted power where sufi increasingly took over religious leadership in alliance with political rulers. Islam provided Berber communities with a sense of brotherhood, facilitating contacts among pastoral communities and traders. A large number of revivalist and fundamentalist movements appeared in the deserts and savannahs of Arabia and Africa. In Libya, Sidi Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi sought peaceful means to convince Muslims of the need to renew their faith through expanding desert-based brotherhoods. In Algeria, the Qadiriyya under Abd al-Qadir rallied anticolonial resistance under the banner of pure Islamic values, organizing desert tribesmen into military units. In the Sudan, subjection to aggressive Egyptian modernization provoked a violent reaction — Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, a sufi, declared himself the Mahdi and mobilized followers to expel the Egyptians in 1881. The key theme of nineteenth-century Islam was its regionalism — while there was constant exchange of ideas across the Islamic world, Islam expressed itself differently according to local circumstances.