Islam and the construction of social identity in the nineteenth-century Sahara

During the last quarter century anthropologists and historians have radically revised the old, static models of African pastoral societies that were produced during the colonial period. They have argued that although pastoralists generally defined themselves in terms of descent, their societies were nevertheless quite dynamic. According to their view, descent is now primarily an idiom of social discourse, a relic of a time before colonial economic changes ruptured the connection between the ideology and actual social practice. This essay draws on a nineteenth-century Arabic source from the western Sahara to argue that pastoral societies were dynamic long before the colonial period, and that many Saharans perceived their society in this way. While settled elites relied on the idiom of descent to justify and reinforce their social status, marginalized nomadic families that wished to join the settled elites sought dynamic social models to facilitate and rationalize their upward mobility. The nomads' preferred model was explicitly Islamic, based on the socially constructed relationships of the Prophet Muhammad's diverse community in Medina. This community offered the possibility of social improvement, and therein lies the enormous power of the prophetic model.