Engaging with a Legacy: Nehemia Levtzion (1935-2003)

E. Ann McDougall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138946637
• eBook ISBN: 9781317980896
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Engaging with a Legacy shows how Nehemia Levtzion shaped our understanding of Islam in Africa and influenced successive scholarly generations in their approach to Islamization, conversion and fundamentalism. The book illuminates his work, career and family life – including his own 'life vision' on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It speaks to his relationship with researchers at home and abroad as mentor, colleague and provocateur; in one section, several authors reflect on those dynamics in terms of personal and professional development. Levtzion's contemporaries also speak of interactions with him (and his life-long companion, wife Tirza) in the 1950s and 1960s; we see in these writings the birth of West African historical studies. Levtzion's arrival as Israeli graduate-student in Nkrumah's Egyptian-leaning Ghana, and the debate over what 'African Studies' should mean in an environment that included the personal intervention of W.E.B. Du Bois, are stories told for the first time. Most poignant is the account of Levtzion's commitment to building African Studies, complete with emphasis on Islam, in the heart of the Jewish state at The Hebrew University. His never-ending defence of the program reflected his determination to be both 'engaged historian' and 'engaged Israeli' – a legacy he chose for himself. Finally, an 'Epilogue' to the original publication shows how one aspect this legacy, Levtzion's growing preoccupation with the 'public sphere in Muslim societies', has become even more relevant in 'post-Arab Spring' Africa and the Middle East.

This book was published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies.

Engaging with the Legacy of Nehemia Levtzion: An Introduction

E. Ann McDougall

Résumé

Ce volume puise principalement dans les présentations faites au cours de deux réunions de l’Association des études africaines (2003, 2004) célébrant les contributions de Nehemia Levtzion au domaine de l’Islam en Afrique et évoquant nos interactions collectives et personnelles avec lui. Ce volume est d’autre part enrichi par les articles additionnels d’anciens étudiants, collègues et amis (les deux se confondent généralement), et par de jeunes érudits contemporains qui commencent tout juste à “connaître” Levtzion, grâce à la découverte de ses travaux. L’”Épilogue” donne le dernier mot, mot posthume, à Levtzion lui-même, dans un article qui examine le rôle contemporain du fondamentalisme vu par un historien dont la vie tout entière était engagée dans l’histoire de l’Islam au croisement entre le Moyen Orient et l’Afrique. Les pages qui suivent n’ont pas seulement pour but de rendre hommage à Nehemia Levtzion mais de réfléchir de manière critique, de reculer les limites et de présenter à d’autres érudits africanistes, engagés dans d’autres domaines d’études, et aux nouvelles générations d’érudits africanistes intéressés par ces questions, le rôle de Levtzion en ce qu’il a modelé notre compréhension de l’expérience de l’Islam en Afrique.

Abstract

This volume draws principally on presentations from two African Studies Association meetings (2003, 2004) that celebrated Nehemia Levtzion’s contributions to the field of Islam in Africa and reminisced about our collective personal interactions with him. It is enriched by additional papers from former students, colleagues and friends (usually one and the same), as well as from contemporary young scholars just beginning to “know” Levtzion through his legacy. The “Epilogue” gives a final, posthumous word to Levtzion himself, in an article looking at the contemporary role of fundamentalism from the perspective of an historian who spent his life engaged in the history of Islam at its Middle Eastern and African crossroads. The following pages are meant not only to pay homage to Nehemia Levtzion but also to reflect critically, to push boundaries, and to introduce Africanist scholars, engaged in other areas of study and new generations of Africanist scholars in this field, to Levtzion’s role in shaping how we have come to understand the experience of Islam in Africa.

Prologue

It seems regrettable that it so often takes the death of a colleague to generate this kind of collaboration. How much more fun it would have been to have had Nehemia Levtzion engage with us as we put forward these essays and respond in his inevitable challenging way to the resulting collection. Instead, this volume had its origins in an extremely sad set of panels. The first, referred to in the section below on “Ancient Ghana and Mali,” was organized by Levtzion himself for the 2003 African Studies Association (ASA) meeting to re-launch work on a “new version” of his seminal work of the same name. The panel carried on, under David Conrad’s chairmanship, and we are fortunate to have updated revisions of those presented in the following pages (David Conrad, Susan Keech McIntosh, and Roderick McIntosh).¹ The second was a consecutive set of two roundtables and a panel organized for the 2004 ASA in which several of our contributors participated (Ivor Wilks, Bill Miles, Martin Klein, David Robinson, John Voll, Yekutiel Gershoni, David Owusu-Ansah and Abdulai Iddrisu, and Kenneth Harrow). These were well attended by Levtzion’s colleagues, several of whom added their own reminiscences and comments to the proceedings (and Roland Oliver kindly agreed to include them in this collection). Finally, over the past year or so, more essays and reminiscences were offered (Naomi Chazan, Irit Back, Michael Frishkopf, and Dalton Collins) — extending the “engagement” represented here from those who first experienced research in Ghana with Levtzion in the heady days of that country’s early independence, through those for whom he was colleague, friend, mentor, or supervisor, to those who today carry on the next generation of research, influenced by his legacy, never having known the man. All are reflected in the following pages.

Thanks to Levtzion’s generous family (and here I thank in particular Amos Nadan), we also have Levtzion himself in the words of a biography he delivered personally on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (“The Legacy of Nehemia Levitzion 1935-2003”), and in one of the last essays he wrote but never published (“Resurgent Islamic Fundamentalism”). Sadly, we also have occasion here to say “good-bye” and “thank you” to his friend and partner of more than forty years, Tirtza (“In Memory of Tirtza”). “Good-bye” because Tirtza passed away only four years later. Thank you” because she was a part of everything Nehemia Levtzion did and integral to the relationships most of the people here developed with him over the years. The warmth of their home and their friendship is inseparable from our memories of, and respect for, Levtzion’s contributions to the field of African Studies.

The following pages are meant to do more than “remember” Nehemia Levtzion. They are meant to pay homage, to reflect critically, to push boundaries and perhaps most importantly, to introduce to Africanist scholars engaged in other areas of study, and to new generations of Africanist scholars in this field, Levtzion’s role in shaping how we have come to understand the experience of Islam in Africa.

Memoirs and Memories

In this section, Levtzion’s own bare-boned version of “life” — marked by intersecting recollections of family marriages, births, and deaths with research trips, publications, and university positions — is fleshed out by the reminiscences of others. Ivor Wilks, already fully rooted in the collection of Arabic documents in newly-independent Ghana when Levtzion arrived, reveals the tensions involved in both Levtzion’s choice of thesis research and the complications his arrival as an Israeli Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana posed in the context of Nkrumah’s pro-Egyptian politics. Wilks’ reminiscences are themselves a piece of history, replete with actors like the late Thomas Hodgkin, Peter Shinnie, W.E.B. Du Bois, and President Kwame Nkrumah; one cannot read this piece without feeling a sense of the excitement, frustration, contestation, and negotiation that characterized the “early years” of shaping how Islam in Africa was to be studied.

Martin Klein’s essay is an integration of reminiscences of Levtzion the man and the evolution of Levtzion the scholar — a very personalized appreciation of what Klein sees as Levtzion’s major intellectual contributions to African studies. He approaches Levtzion’s early work from the vantage point of a fellow traveller to newly independent Africa (he having arrived in Senegal at the same time as Levtzion came to Ghana), with full appreciation of the challenges research posed — not only physical but conceptual. As Klein says, “there were no models.” He is also especially mindful of Levtzion’s adventurous spirit in accepting that he must draw on oral information both to locate written documents relevant to Islam and to understand them, when this was not the methodology in which he had been trained. Moreover, it was not the “oral tradition” being proffered at the time as a viable research tool by another intrepid Africanist, Jan Vansina. Klein reminds us as well that seminal work is not without weakness, as he not only notes criticisms of Levtzion’s Muslim Chiefs at the time but also points to areas in which the work has not fully stood the test of time. In engaging thusly, from personal and professional perspectives, with honesty and respect, Klein helps us to understand Levtzion’s initial impact as a young Arabist in Africa — and why that impact remains profound and contentious.

Roland Oliver, who knew Levtzion when he first came to London for his PhD work, speaks of how Levtzion’s knowledge of Arabic was the key that opened doors for him to the oral and written histories of northern Ghana’s clerics. At a time when any scholars who would call themselves Arabists headed into Middle Eastern or religious textual work, Levtzion surprised people by turning his attention to sub-Saharan Africa, where he helped to sow the seeds that would reap a field called “Islam in Africa.”

William Miles, Naomi Chazan, and I remember Levtzion in more personal terms, in a sense celebrating his humanity as much as his scholarship and professionalism. For Miles, it was Levtzion’s Jewishness, as articulated in his scholarly work and personal life, that has left an indelible mark. He shares with us his moment of meeting Levtzion — he a brash, naïve young graduate student, Levtzion the “prickly,” brusque master of the field who nevertheless gave generously of his time and advice and became a life-long mentor and friend. Similarly, my memories are rooted in Levtzion’s critical responses to my early work, responses that were both flattering in their depth and detail, and challenging because Levtzion was not easily convinced to change his mind. These exchanges opened the door for a relationship that, while not “close” continued to influence my thinking — not to mention generating this project.

However, it is Chazan’s piece that perhaps most brings Levtzion alive for us once again. As she says, he was “mentor, patron, colleague, counterpart, and friend for nearly forty years.” And in this multi-faceted relationship that she enjoyed with him, most of us will recognize something familiar: his scrupulous devotion to solid research, his generosity of heart and spirit that nevertheless seldom led easily to “giving way” in an intellectual disagreement, his stubbornness — that could be frustrating in many situations on the one hand, admirable when it was directed to the right cause or project, on the other. In recounting her memories of Levtzion, Chazan also tells the history of African Studies in Israel. From training many who would become its first practitioners, to wooing friends and colleagues from all over to participate in this special community of scholars, to fighting the political battles that never seemed to end, Levtzion assured that African studies would flourish in a multi/inter disciplinary environment and that it would do so, ultimately, in conjunction with the older, more established Middle Eastern studies tradition. It is all the more sad, then, to read in Chazan’s final paragraphs that so much of what he built in terms of infrastructure has not survived his death. It is notable that the “legacy” in Israel — as elsewhere — will now be measured in the inspiration that continues to drive his students and successors to work together and develop the field in an international context.

The section closes with the family “memory of Tirtza,” a memory that completes Levtzion’s story of the partnership and marriage that provided both context and support for his scholarship.

Engaging with a Legacy

In this section, which derives its focus from the larger goal of this volume, David Robinson, John Voll, and Dalton Collins respond directly to Levtzion’s corpus of work. The first two are long-time colleagues and contemporaries of Levtzion whose own works on Islam in Africa (most especially West Africa) need no introduction to most readers. The last is a young graduate student only recently “introduced” to Levtzion’s scholarship who reflects, perhaps, a new generation’s approach to engagement.

Robinson chooses to focus on the early days of Levtzion’s career, and therefore on Muslim Chiefs. While for Klein, the book’s importance was largely in its foray into unchartered territory (almost literally) geographically speaking, for Robinson the impact lay principally in its challenge to the extant historiography of “Islamization.” He points out that Levtzion’s study was the first to stray from the traditional model that treated Islam prior to the great jihads of the nineteenth century as little more than a precursor to “real conversion,” a “side-effect” of trade and commercial diaspora, and to suggest that the process of spreading Islam was also one of “acculturation”; moreover Muslim communities engaged in complex relationships with host political and state structures. This work, according to Robinson, “set in motion some very powerful vectors of research that have benefited the field and the understanding [of Islamization] of the last thirty years.” He further highlights Levtzion’s 1971 article, “A Seventeenth-Century Chronicle by Ibn al-Mukhtar: A Critical Study of Ta’rikh al-Fattash.” Robinson describes it as revolutionary, challenging contemporary understanding both of a particular historical text and of the real meaning of nineteenth-century jihad. By proving that what was understood to be a sixteenth-century document in fact included a segment forged in the nineteenth century by an Islamic theocracy competing for legitimacy in an era of many “Islamic” states, he revealed that jihad was fought on a number of levels, using a range of “tools” that were not necessarily military in nature. Most importantly, again, Levtzion was challenging the extant view of that theocracy as a “pure and pristine” orthodoxy by revealing it to be much more troubled and complex than scholars to date had understood. Robinson himself gives a fascinating interpretation of how Levtzion’s revelation of the forgery allows us to re-shape our understanding of the Middle Niger Delta region and of “Islamization” in the nineteenth century, expressing hope that these ideas will be pushed even further.

Voll worked with Levtzion in the mid-1980s on “Islamic renewal and revival in the eighteenth century,” co-organizing a colloquium on the subject and giving context to a lively debate on the nature and significance of what was called “neo-sufism.” This was a discussion not limited to Africa and as Voll makes clear, in spite of what might seem its particularisms, it remains relevant to understanding the dynamics of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Africa and elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East. His article gives an excellent overview of the historiography of this subject, situating Levtzion’s views on what was “new” about “neo” Sufism in the eighteenth century within the ongoing debate. He notes what he sees as Levtzion’s most important observation in the process of emerging neo-sufi movements — the growing use of local vernacular. And he traces, over several years, where Levtzion saw this as having impact: first in assisting the spread of Islam from the Arabic-speaking heartlands into Asia and Africa; second, in particular with the use of mystical verse, in facilitating the “move” from the urban to the rural populous; third, by allowing for the participation of more “common” people, in generating the expansion of the tariqh itself; and fourth, by extension, in assuring a growing impact of tariqa. Most significant, Voll quotes Levtzion as recently as 2002 tying use of the vernacular to activism: “A new Muslim leadership [in this context] emerged that articulated the grievances of the masses, criticized the rulers, and contributed to the radicalization of Islam.” As Voll concludes, “The rise of vernacular religious literature and its role in the radicalization of some groups within the Muslim world as articulated by Levtzion … suggests new lines for discussion of Islamic renewal movements.” In particular, his placement of these movements within the conceptual framework of “the public sphere in Muslim societies” can be helpful for understanding twenty-first century movements as well as their eighteenth-century predecessors.

Finally, Collins “engages” from a very different vantage point — he looks back upon the recently reprinted Corpus (translated, annotated excerpted texts from Medieval authors writing about West Africa) as a graduate student just beginning his research and weighing the value of older “seminal” works in light of current theoretical and methodological paradigms. In particular, he revisits the Corpus as a student of translation theory who has been strongly shaped by the late 1970s discourse that Edward Said set in motion on “orientalism.” As someone who will long continue to benefit from the Levtzion and Hopkins (1981) translations, there is a certain ambivalence reflected in his commentary about just how heavily historians should be resting on these accounts given that, even with the most studious attention having been given to literal and contextual meaning in their preparation, they still remain unsubjected to current “post modern” criticism. “Exoticising” is a practice inherent in Levtzion’s attempt to give readers the “original flavour” of the language, but it is not considered as part of the ongoing debate about the role of the translator in shaping the relationship between the reader and the text, for example. “Othering” (now a verb for which Said might take dubious credit for inadvertently popularizing) was a process inherent in each of the layers integral to the Corpus (original Arabic texts, subsequent manuscript copies, colonial translations, not to mention the intervention of Levtzion and his colleague J.F.P. Hopkins) but is not discussed per se as part of what would today be an expected exploration of methodological challenges. Collins’ ambivalence is understandable, given the rigour with which any student of history using translated documents today is interrogated, added to the rather disappointing decision made (by the publishers? by Levtzion?) not to address any of these questions in the 2000 re-issue of the Corpus in paperback. That said, he suggests that those who would engage with this work in the future should bring to it consciousness of what translators see as issues central to good translation, as well as critical applications of post-modernist concerns like “othering,” in order to derive the richest meaning possible from a text that he readily realizes, will never be duplicated.²

The Ancient Ghana and Mali Project

While Levtzion’s first book was the publication of his PhD thesis research, for his second — and many would argue equally important — monograph, he returned to the focus of his Masters thesis, the medieval “states” of Ghana and Mali. As Klein ably describes the work, it was largely influenced by pre-existing models of desert-sahel relations, including an emphasis on frontier conflict and trans-Saharan trade as transformative processes. How it made its impact was through Levtzion’s ability to plumb the Arabic authors’ texts, as well as West African chronicles written in Arabic to develop our understanding of these processes. He also drew upon the archaeological work and oral traditions available at the time to flesh out these accounts. As Klein says, he produced a work that was — once again — invaluable for teaching and research. Yet, it was sufficiently controversial to stimulate continued research in archaeology and oral history in particular, but also in other fields that bore upon its basic historical theses — numismatics, climate and environment, cultural studies (especially of desert nomads and desert-edge societies) and economic history. Levtzion’s Ancient Ghana and Mali was soon in need of up-dating. And it was at this point that the “project” of which Susan Keech McIntosh, Roderick McIntosh, and David Conrad write in this section was born — this was the same project that languished during much of the time Levtzion undertook the major administrative duties that he describes in his life history and that he had hoped to “resurrect” or at least inject new life into, with the panel arranged for the 2003 ASA.

Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick McIntosh evoke some of the discussions that took place over those many years in Texas, in Jerusalem, in Mali — and we “hear” the Levtzion of whom Chazan speaks — listening, provoking, challenging, arguing, grudgingly “negotiating” new positions, new terminology, gradually arriving at a new Ancient Ghana and Mali that remained essentially true to some of his original arguments while simultaneously moving in new directions. Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick McIntosh speak in particular to the impact archaeological findings have had in evaluating the role of trans-Saharan (as distinct from regional) trade, for example, and in challenging notions of “the state” and “ki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Engaging with the Legacy of Nehemia Levtzion: An Introduction
• Memoirs and Memories
• Engaging with a Legacy
• The Ancient Ghana and Mali Project
• Developing “Themes”: History of Islam in Africa
• The Last Word from Nehemiah
• Works Cited
• Index