Christianity and Islam

P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 4 Christianity and Islam while bantu-speaking peoples were colonising southern africa, the north was entering one of its greatest historical periods. Per- haps only in pharaonic times had it been more central to human progress than in the third and fourth centuries ad,whenitwas the intellectual spearhead of Christianity, and again 800 years later, when it was the pivot of Islam and acommercial network encompassing most of the Old World. This leadership, already threatened, was destroyed during the fourteenth century by the demo- graphic catastrophe of the Black Death, from which the region took 500 years to recover. Butintheir time of greatness, North Africans adapted Christianity and Islam to their own cultures and transmitted both religions to Black Africa, where centuries of internal development had prepared social environments for their reception and further adaptation. christianity in north africa Legend said that St Mark himself brought Christianity to Alexandria in ad 61. In reality the church in Jerusalem probably sent missionaries to Alexandria’s large Jewish community. The first firm evidence of Christianity there comes from an early second-century controversy between Jews who had and those who had not accepted the new faith. Shortly afterwards Christianity expanded beyond this Jewish nucleus. By ad 200 there was a Greek-speaking church under a Bishop of Alexandria, with many Christians in Upper as well as Lower Egypt. They saw Christ as a great teacher in the Greek manner; their first major theologian, Origen (c. 185–253/4), believed that man should elevate himself towards God through wisdom and asceticism. Once the first bishops outside Alexandria took office early in the third century, Christianity spread among Egyptians as well as Greeks. By 325 Egypthad fifty-one known bishoprics and the Bible was widely available in the vernacular Coptic language (ancient Egyptian written in Greek script). The chief leaders of popular Christianity were monks: first individual hermits like St. Antony, who lived in the desert from about 285 to 305, then disciplined communities pioneered in c. 321 by Pachomius. Monasticism may have had models in ancient Egyptian priestly asceticism, just as the Coptic Church’s elaborate charity inherited an ancient 37 P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 38 africans: the history of a continent tradition of famine relief. Both exemplified the indigenisation of Christianity at a time when Egypt’s old religion and culture were disintegrating. In 312 Constantine made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion. Later in that century, the authorities persecuted traditional priests and either closed their temples or converted them into churches or monasteries. By ad 400 perhaps 90 percent of Egyptians were Christians. Further west, Christianity may have reached the Maghrib through Greek or Roman rather than Jewish networks. The first firm evidence of its existence is the execution of twelve Christians at Carthage in ad 180 for refusing to sacrifice in honour of the emperor. Such early Christians appear to have come from every rank, age, and sex in urban society. Christianity offered fellowship across social divisions in increasingly stratified towns, just as it offered literal bodily resurrection in a purposeless world and spiritual protection in a dangerous world. In place of the multitudinous spiritual forces (daemones) and human sorcerers whom pagans feared, Christianity pictured a dualistic conflict between God, who protected the faithful, and the Devil, whose forces included all aspects of paganism. Christianity did not threaten social rank and its teach- ing generally passed from older to younger people, but it fed upon conflicts of generation and gender in complex, patriarchal households, as it would later in tropical Africa. Among the first North Africans to be martyred, in the arena at Carthage in 203, was a well-born, twenty-year-old wife and mother named Perpetua: We walked up to the prisoner’s dock. All the others when questioned admitted their guilt. Then, when it came my turn, my father appeared with my son, dragged me from the step, and said: ‘Perform the sacrifice – have pity on your baby!’ Hilarianus the governor . . . said to me: ‘Have pity on your father’s grey head; have pity on your infant son. Offer the sacrifice for the welfare of the emperors.’ ‘I will not,’ I retorted. ‘Are youaChristian?’ said Hilarianus. AndIsaid: ‘Yes, I am.’ . Then Hilarianus passed sentence on all of us: we were condemned to the beasts, and we returned to prison in high spirits. 1 Persecution was sporadic until 249–51,when the Emperor Decius, a soldier who thought Christianity was corrupting the state, launched more thorough repression. Martyrs were especially numerous in prosperous North Africa because the Church was growing most quickly there, with at least 150 bishoprics concentrated especially in the ancient colonial zone around Carthage but also scattered generously further south in Byzacena and west in Numidia. During P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 39 5.Christianity and Islam. P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 40 africans: the history of a continent the next half-century, Christianity spread rapidly in the countryside, espe- cially in Numidia, the inland plains of modern Algeria, which were then being planted with olives. In this settler country of estates and Berber villages, Chris- tianity was a religion of protest, infused with Berber traditions of statelessness and honour, which forbade man or woman to betray loyalties from fear of pain or death. When Diocletian launched his Great Persecution in 303 in a desperate attempt to restore the old Roman order, church leaders were required to surrender the scriptures for destruction. Those who complied, the traditores (surrenderers), were subsequently denied recognition by zealots who created aschismatic church under the leadership of Donatus, their candidate for the bishopric of Carthage. Whereas the Catholics found followers especially among urban notables and in the Romanised farming region near the coast, Donatist leaders, although themselves mostly Latin-speaking urban intellectuals, won support chiefly among the non-Roman lower classes of the towns and, espe- cially, the Berber cultivators and labourers of Numidia. Many Donatist churches there had a local martyr’s body beneath the altar. The coincidence of religious and agrarian conflict bred violent zealots, the Circumcellions (those ‘around the shrines’), often perhaps seasonal labourers, who defended Donatist insti- tutions and terrorised exploitative landlords and Catholic clergy. Donatism predominated in the Maghrib throughout the fourth century. Its repression was eventually organised by St. Augustine of Hippo (in eastern Algeria), who condemned it as narrow, provincial, schismatic, and socially subversive. In ad 411 Donatism became a criminal offence and the Catholic Church, now increasingly integrated with the Roman state, intensified repression. The Van- dal invasion of North Africa in 429 interrupted this, but persecution resumed when Byzantine rule was established in 533.Donatism was gradually confined to its Numidian strongholds, but there it survived until the seventh-century Arab invasion. To this day the Coptic Church of Egypt dates events not from the birth of Christ but from ‘the era of the martyrs’. Yet it forgave its traditores and suffered only brief schism. Its crisis came later, following the Council of Chalcedon of 451,which tried to shore up the disintegrating Roman Empire by declaring the primacy of the bishops of Rome and Constantinople (the new imperial capital) at the expense of Alexandria and by adopting a characterisation of Christ – that He had two distinct but inseparably united natures, divine and human – acceptable to Rome but anathema to Alexandria. Overt schism came in 536,when the Emperor Justinian tried to impose a pro-Chalcedonian hierar- chyupon Egyptians who now proclaimed the Monophysite (one-nature) faith. Byzantine persecution of Monophysites prevented united Christian resistance to the Muslim invasion of 639,which destroyed the pro-Chalcedonian hier- archy but left Coptic Christians as protected tributaries concerned ever more exclusively with survival. P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 41 christianity in ethiopia and sudan The Coptic Church had wide regional influence. Its first engagement was in Ethiopia. Following the collapse of Daamat between the fifth and third centuries bc,several small successor states occupied the northern Ethiopian plateau. The growth of Red Sea trade in Ptolemaic times enriched the region and linked it to Mediterranean developments through its chief port at Adulis, famed for its ivory. During the first century ad,atatime of unusually generous rainfall, a kingdom emerged at Aksum. This went on to reunite the region, inheriting much South Arabian culture and embellishing its capital with palatial stone buildings, tall stone stelae marking royal graves, and a surrounding belt of ruralvillas. Two centuries later the kingdom struck coins on Roman models. Its seamen voyaged as far as Sri Lanka. The introduction of Christianity to Aksum is traditionally attributed to Frumentius, a young Christian trader kidnapped en route from Tyre to India. He became tutor to the future King Ezana, who officially adopted Christianity in about 333, after Frumentius had been consecrated in Alexandria as Aksum’s first bishop. This tradition oversimplifies a complex process, for Christianity was only one of several religions (including Judaism) at Ezana’s court; more than a century after his supposed conversion, a successor recorded the sacrifice of fifty captives to Mahrem, local god of war.Ezana had probably sought to patroniseall religions, including Christianity, whose prominence on his coins suggests that he displayed it especially, but not exclusively,toforeigners. Because Christianity reached Aksum from Alexandria, the Ethiopian Church became Monophysite and was headed by Coptic monks from Alexandria until the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, because Christianity first influenced the court, it became a state religion, gradually extended among the people by priests and monks with royal backing. Between the fifth and seventh centuries, the scriptures were translated into Ge’ez (the Semitic lingua franca of Aksum, written in a script derived from the South Arabian culture), Christianity and Aksumite authority spread further southwards on the Ethiopian plateau, and pagan temples in Aksum and Adulis became churches. But from the late sixth century, Aksum’s prosperity declined, first perhaps because warfare between Byzantium and Persia dislocated trade, then owing to Muslim expansion that destroyed Adulis, and finally because increasing reliance on agriculture coincided with declining rainfall. Aksum struck its last coins in the early seventh century. The king who died in 630 was buried not in the capital but further to the southwest, where the merging of Aksumite and indigenous Cushitic cultures was to create the historic church and kingdom of Ethiopia. Christian origins in Nubia differed from those in Aksum, partly because Nubia immediately adjoined Christian Egypt. After the collapse of Meroe dur- ing the fourth century ad,Nubian-speaking rulers created three kingdoms in P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 42 africans: the history of a continent the Nile Valley: Nobatia in the north with its capital at Faras, Makuria in the centre with its headquarters at Old Dongola, and Alwa in the south based on Soba (close to modern Khartoum). Symbols on pottery and other objects sug- gest Christian influence from Egypt by at least the fifth century, but the initiative for systematic conversion came from the Byzantine court, where rival parties sent both Catholic and Monophysite missionaries to Nubia. The Monophysite reached Nobatia first, in 543,‘and immediately with joy they yielded themselves up,’ as the chronicler John of Ephesus recorded, ‘and utterly abjured the error of their forefathers, and confessed the God of the Christians.’ 2 Evidence of vil- lage church-building and adoption of Christian burial confirms this account, although pagan temples survived in Nobatia for another two centuries. Alwa’s rulers were also keen to link themselves to the larger world. When the mission- ary Longinus arrived there from Constantinople in 580,‘he spake unto the king and to all his nobles the word of God, and they opened their understandings, and listened with joy to what he said; and after a few days’ instruction, both the king himself was baptized and all his nobles; and subsequently, in process of time, his people also.’ 3 The Nubian kingdoms remained Christian for nearly a thousand years. Nobatia and Alwa were Monophysite from the first and Makuria soon became so. Nubian bishops drew their authority from Alexandria and the Church dated events by the Coptic era of the martyrs. Yet Byzantium also exercised a pow- erful influence on elite culture. The beautiful murals in the cathedral at Faras, excavated from the sand during the 1960s, began in Coptic style but gradually changed to Byzantine, although they also displayed distinctive local features. The liturgical language was Greek; only slowly were parts of the liturgy and Bible translated into Nubian, written in the Coptic form of the Greek alphabet. Church architecture suggests that the liturgical role of the laity diminished with time. Kings were in priestly orders and bishops held state offices in the Byzan- tine manner. Some historians attribute the ultimate disappearance of Nubian Christianity to a failure to adapt as fully to the local culture as did Ethiopian Christianity, which was more isolated from external influence. Nubian paint- ings, for example, always depicted Christ and the saints with white faces in contrast to Nubians, a distinction not drawn in Ethiopian art. Yet the different fates of the two Churches owed more to different relationships with Islam. islam in north africa The expansion of Arab power and the Islamic religion following the Prophet Muhammad’s death in ad 632 was the central process in world history for the next 400 years. During that time Islam became the predominant faith throughout North Africa and established footholds in both West and East Africa. In doing so it not only tied the north permanently to the wider history P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 43 of the Old World, but it began to reintegrate sub-Saharan Africa into that history for the first time since the desiccation of the Sahara. Some four thousand Muslims commanded by Amr ibn al-As invaded Egypt in December 639.Withinlessthanthreeyears, they had conquered the Byzantine Empire’s richest province. They were helped by deep antagonism between Byzantine rulers and Monophysite subjects, who confined their resistance to defending their villages. But the Muslims’ chief strength was the disciplined conviction that characterises the zealots of a new faith. ‘We have seen a people who prefer death to life and humility to pride’, a later historian imagined the Byzantines saying. ‘They sit in the dust, and they take their meals on horseback. Their commander is one of themselves: there is no distinction of rank among them. They have fixed hours of prayer at which all pray, first washing their hands and feet, and they pray with reverence.’ 4 In 643 their momentum carried Amr ibn al-As and his horsemen into modern Libya. Four years later they defeated the main Byzantine army near Sufetula (Sbeitla) in modern Tunisia and gained access to the fertile heartland of successive imperialisms in North Africa, more ruralthen than in Roman times and somewhat depopulated by a great plague in 542, but still rich in grain and olives. At this point, however, the conquest faltered, owing to conflict over succession to the Caliphate. When expansion resumed in 665,the main leader, Ukba ibn Nafi, bypassed North Africa’s coastal cities and in c. 670 founded Kairwan in the Tunisian hinterland as the capital of anew Muslim province of Ifriqiya (Africa). Then he drove westwards through the inland plains until he rode his horse into the Atlantic, declaring that he had fought his way to the end of the world in God’s name. On his way back, however, his army was annihilated by a Berber coalition led by Kusayla, a chief of the Tlemcen region, who went on to capture Kairwan. This opened a new period in the conquest. For four centuries the Berber peoples of the inland plains and mountains had been regaining strength from Romans, Vandals, and Byzantines. Now they mounted the stiffest resistance the Arabs met during their conquests, restricting Arab power to the colonial heartland of Ifriqiya. When a Muslim army finally conquered western Algeria and Morocco early in the eighth century, it was a largely Berber army, as was the expedition that conquered Spain in 711–12.Islamic predominance in Berber territory meant Berber predominance in Islam. In NorthAfrica, alone in the continent, Islamisation drew its initial impulse from conquest, but the victors seldom compelled the conquered to accept their faith. Their concern was to establish an Islamic social order, in the con- fidence that individuals would gradually conform to it. In Egypt, therefore, they offered Christians either client status as Muslim converts or toleration as protected tributaries (dhimmi)inreturn for land and poll taxes, as was ini- tially preferred by most Copts, on whom the Arabs at first relied to administer Egypt’s complex society. By the eighth century, however, Arab immigrants had P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 44 africans: the history of a continent increased and Christians were gradually excluded from office, as one of several social and economic pressures to adopt Islam. By 717–20 so many Copts were becoming Muslims to escape the heavy taxes needed to finance Arab wars that converts were declared still liable to the land tax. At the same period, official business finally came to be conducted in Arabic. The Coptic language sur- vivedtemporarily in the countryside but eventually became purely a liturgical language, while the Coptic Church itself lived on its past as a religion of sur- vival, periodically harried by the authorities and unable to rival the conviction, authority, and modernity of Islam. By the fourteenth century probably fewer than one-tenth of Egyptians were Christians. The Umayyad Caliphate, which lasted until 750, was effectively an Arab king- dom led by the Meccan aristocracy. Egypt in particular was dominated by an Arab garrison. When the Abbasids gained power in 750,however,theyrelied on non-Arab nationalities and moved their capital eastwards to Baghdad, thereby encouraging North African autonomy. By the late ninth century, power in Egyptlay with Turkish military governors and their multiethnic mercenaries, who had supplanted the Arab horsemen of the heroic age. Further west, in the Maghrib, separatist tendencies were even stronger. The Berbers retained their language and, according to the great Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, apostasised a dozen times during their first seventy years of Islam. Certainly they displayed the same egalitarianism, puritanism, and particularism as had inspired the Donatist schism. At least one Christian community survived for a thousand years. A group in the Atlantic Plains of Morocco claimed to pos- sess a Koran in the Berber language and maintained its heterodoxy until the eleventh century. But the chief vehicle of Berber aspirations was Kharijism, an extreme wing of Islam born in 657 during the civil war that created the Umayyad Caliphate. It taught the absolute equality of Muslims, the right of any worthy Muslim to be elected Imam of the whole community, and consequently the duty to reject the existing, illegitimate Caliphate. Kharijites escaping persecu- tion in the east left for the Maghrib in c. 714,winning more support among Berbers than anywhere else, especially,itappears, among former Christians. In 740 they launched a revolt in Tangier, led by a former water-carrier, sparking turmoil that eventually overthrew the Umayyads. When the Abbasids proved equally repressive, Kharijites formed several zealous communities in the North African hinterland, especially at Tahert in western Algeria, which from 761–2 became the core of a Kharijite state. In 789–90 arefugee descendant of the Prophet, Idris, created a kingdom based in Fes that became the chief vehicle of Islamisation in northern Morocco. Throughout these disturbances, the cen- treofAbbasid power in the Maghrib and almost the only area of extensive Arab settlement remained Ifriqiya, but there, in 800,anArabgovernor estab- lished the hereditary Aghlabid dynasty. Thereafter the Maghrib was effectively independent. P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 45 During the following five centuries, North Africa bred several of Islam’s most creative dynasties. The first, the Fatimids, were a Shia family claiming descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima. They came to power in Kair- wan in 910on the back of a Berber revolt, incorporated the Aghlabid kingdom, temporarily overran much of Morocco in 958–9, and went on in 969 to take Egyptpeacefully from its Turkish military rulers, completing the Berber recon- quest of North Africa and building Cairo as a capital fit for a Fatimid Caliph. Despite their heterodox origins, the Fatimids had no radical programme. They had gained power in Ifriqiya at a time of unprecedented prosperity once the Arab conquest was stabilised. The traveller al-Yakubi (d. 891)wondered at Kair- wan’s wealth, with its flourishing textile industry, growing gold imports from West Africa, surrounding market gardens, and supplies of fruit from the coast, grain from the northern plains, olives from the Sahel, and dates from Saharan oases. Townsmen owned great estates carved out by victorious ancestors and worked by the slaves for which the region was famed. Initially the slaves were Berbers captured during the conquest; thereafter, they were white and black slaves imported from Europe and tropical Africa. Cultivation of sorghum and hard wheat expanded southwards, famine was virtually unknown during the tenth century, and population almost certainly increased. Mediterranean trade was largely in Muslim hands, thanks to the Fatimid fleet, which sacked Genoa in 934–5.When this wealth enabled the Fatimid army of Slav mercenaries and Berber auxiliaries to capture Egypt, prosperity shifted to the new capital. The recordsrecovered from the Cairo Geniza – where Jews deposited unwanted papers to avoid destroying any bearing the name of God – show that immigrant Fatimids were followed by merchants from the Maghrib seeking their fortunes in what now became the centre of the Islamic world. ‘It was the heyday of the bourgeoisie’, their historian has written, 5 acommercial world dominated by family firms of many faiths, operating through partnerships and agencies spread throughout the Mediterranean, profiting from a freedom of movement and religious toleration that caused Jewish merchants to call Fatimid Egypt ‘the land of life’. This bourgeoisie dominated a stratified but mobile society with an exceptional level of craft specialisation, many female slaves in domestic service, and numerous paupers. Cairo despised and exploited the countryside, where Arab rule introduced sugar, cotton, and rice, encouraged multicropping, and – after an initial hiatus during the conquest – probably stimulated population growth, which by the fourteenth century was regaining Ptolemaic levels. In the meantime, however, exploitation of the countryside may have contributed to severe famine in 1062–73,which was the first symptom of Fatimid decline. Twenty years later their dominions were confined to Egypt. In 1171 they were overthrown by their Kurdish Vizier, the great Saladin. In Ifriqiya the shift of power and prosperity to Egypt led the Fatimids’ Berber lieutenants, the Zirids, to renounce their allegiance in 1048.Tradition alleged P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 46 africans: the history of a continent (without foundation) that the Fatimids replied by encouraging the Banu Hilal and other nomadic Arab tribes who had entered Egypt to move on westwards into Ifriqiya. The Hilal, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘gained power over the country and ruined it.’ In 1057 they sacked Kairwan. The Zirids shifted their capital and their attention to the seaboard, losing control of the interior. Transport was disrupted and gold caravans dispersed to reach the coast at several points, espe- cially further to the west in Morocco. Berber pastoralists retreated westwards. Cultivators withdrew into mountain strongholds. A huge swathe of former Berber plains was permanently Arabised, the nomads’ dialect becoming its vernacular Arabic. The effects of this ‘Hilalian invasion’ have no doubt been exaggerated. It was more an infiltration than an invasion. North Africa’s rain- fall and cultivated area had probably been contracting since the fifth century ad and would reach their nadir in the fourteenth century. 6 Loss of naval con- trol of the Mediterranean to the Byzantines during the tenth century deprived Ifriqiya of its northern slave supply, which further damaged the rural economy and contributed to repeated famines after 1004.These and the Zirids’ political weakness brought commercial decay to Kairwan even before the Banu Hilal sacked it. Their depredations were consequences as well as causes of a collapse from which Ifriqiya never recovered. By the 1090s the former granary of Rome was becoming dependent on imported Sicilian wheat. Initially the chief beneficiary was the previously fragmented western Maghrib, where nomad ambitions coincided with economic diversification and the full internalisation of Islam among its Berber converts to produce aperiod of great splendour. It began with the Almoravid movement, which originated among the nomadic Sanhaja Berbers of southern Morocco and the western Sahara, long overshadowed by their more settled Zanata rivals to the north and gradually losing their long-standing control of trade in the west- ern desert. The Sanhaja were largely oral Muslims until the eleventh century, when their leaders sought further instruction from rigorous teachers anxious to root out the Shiite and Kharijite legacies so powerful in the Maghrib. Abdal- lah ibn Yasin began to teach among the Sanhaja in c. 1039,gathered a following of zealots and tribesmen, and launched them against Zanata supremacy. In 1070 they created a new capital at Marrakesh. By 1083 they had conquered the whole Maghrib west of Algiers. Three years later they entered Muslim Spain to organise its resistance to Christian expansion. This military supremacy was backed by capturing much of the West African gold trade and by developing the grainlands of Morocco’s Atlantic Plains. Prosperity enabled the Almoravids to introduce into Morocco the elegant Islamic culture of southern Spain, which is still resplendent in the architecture of Marrakesh. This attracted puritan criticism, while others resented the regime’s ruthlessness in enforcing ortho- doxy and its reliance on the tribes that had initially supported Abdallah ibn Yasin. [...]... conversion varied greatly In Ghana and Gao, Islam seems long to have been confined to traders and the court, but in Takrur and Kanem it spread more quickly to the common people and aroused conflict between Islamic teachers and the practitioners of magic (closely associated with ironworking) who had previously served the throne trade and islam in east africa Whereas Islam reached West Africa across the... by higher rainfall and the lure of trade through the eastern lowlands to the coast at Zeila, exchanging slaves, gold, and ivory for salt from the lowlands and imported Islamic luxuries Muslims controlled this trade and the peoples along the route gradually adopted Islam, first the Cushiticspeaking Somali peoples of the eastern lowlands, then Semitic-speakers on the southeastern highland fringes, creating... land tax paid in 1315 Resilient agriculture and control of trade between Asia and Europe enabled Egypt to survive the Black Death better than the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, but economic decay was nevertheless grave and coincided with recurrent warfare between Mamluk groups and the decline P1: RNK 0521864381 c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam. .. rains, and perhaps even becoming possessed by P1: RNK 0521864381 c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 61 St Michael or St Gabriel Indigenous, Christian, and Islamic spirits gradually fused into a possession (zar) cult providing psychological relief for the marginal and unfortunate Missionary adaptations reinforced the distinctiveness of Ethiopian Christianity. .. himself like a woman round his neck and on his forearms, and he puts on a high cap decorated with gold and wrapped in a turban of fine cotton He sits in audience or to hear grievances against officials in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials Behind the king stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the... the control of nature and the colonisation of land, to which Christian merit attached Settlement concentrated on the relatively warm and moist plateau between about 1,800 and 2,500 metres, avoiding arid lowlands, bleak mountain slopes, and densely wooded valleys On the plateau, the settler surrounded his homestead with concentric rings of gradually less intensive cultivation and defended his fields... of childbirth, and he gave seed to eunuchs, and he healed the sick, and he destroyed the wild beasts of the desert, and the wild beasts of the belly.’20 The cultivator’s art was to minimise his vulnerability to disaster ‘We sow so much,’ they told Alvares, ‘with the hope that even if each of those said plagues [locusts and hail] should come, some would be spoiled, and some would remain, and if all is... 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 59 grave-dust It was probably already true, as in the nineteenth century, that not only women but men married young, which was rare in Africa and was probably related to ecclesiastical penalties for polygyny – although great men defied them – and a bilateral kinship system in which young men inherited land rights from both parents and moved away with their... laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak The entire inhabited world changed Therefore, there is need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of the world among all regions and races, as well as the customs and sectarian beliefs that have changed for their adherents.9 trade and islam in west... directions The new capital was abandoned and centralisation was relaxed Between 1478 and 1527, the average age of kings at their accession was 11 The beneficiary was the Sultanate of Harar, where zealous Muslims had taken refuge from Amda Siyon Reinforced by the Islamisation of the neighbouring Somali and by Turkish and Arab adventurers, Harar’s forces invaded the Christian highlands in 1529 under the leadership . and west in Numidia. During P1: RNK 0521864381c04 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 15:38 Christianity and Islam 39 5 .Christianity and Islam. . the third and fourth centuries ad,whenitwas the intellectual spearhead of Christianity, and again 800 years later, when it was the pivot of Islam and acommercial