Summoned from the Margin tells the story of Lamin Sanneh's fascinating journey from his upbringing in an impoverished village in West Africa to education in the United States and Europe to a distinguished career teaching at the Universities of Yale, Harvard, Aberdeen, and Ghana. He grew up in a polygamous household in The Gambia and attended a government-run Muslim boarding school. A chance encounter with Helen Keller's autobiography taught him that education and faith are the key to overcoming physical and personal hardship and inspired his journey. Burning theological questions about God's nature and human suffering eventually led Sanneh to convert from Islam to Christianity and to pursue a career in academia. Here he recounts the unusually varied life experiences that have made him who he is today. Watch the trailer:
In Piety and Power an African scholar provides a unique perspective on historical patterns of religious interaction in West Africa and their meaning for world Christianity and Islam today. Sanneh's topics range from Muhammad's significance for Christians, to an examination of a nineteenth-century "ecumenical" opening between the two faiths in Freetown, to an overview of the relation between religion and politics that directly challenges many Western assumptions about Africa and Islam. Other treatments of Christian-Muslim encounter in Africa are often framed in terms of European colonial and missionary history. In contrast Piety and Power places the inter-faith issues firmly in an African social setting. Sanneh explores the impact of Islam, Christianity, and European mission and colonialism in terms of African adaptations and expressions. An autobiographical essay on Sanneh's own education in an African Qu'ran school gives readers a rare and revealing look at the power and influence of Islamic institutions in their African adaptations.
Tracing the rise of Christianity to its key role in Europe's maritime and colonial expansion, this text sheds light on the ways in which societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been drawn into the Christian orbit.
In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Thus began an unprecedented movement with critical long-term effects on the evolution of social, religious, and political institutions in modern Africa. Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates the story of freed slaves who led efforts to abolish the slave trade by attacking its base operation: the capture and sale of people by African chiefs. Sanneh's protagonists set out to establish in West Africa colonies founded on equal rights and opportunity for personal enterprise, communities that would be havens for ex-slaves and an example to the rest of Africa. Among the most striking of these leaders is the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a recaptured slave who joined a colony in Sierra Leone and subsequently established satellite communities in Nigeria. The ex-slave repatriates brought with them an evangelical Christianity that encouraged individual spirituality--a revolutionary vision in a land where European missionaries had long assumed they could Christianize the whole society by converting chiefs and rulers. Tracking this potent African American anti-slavery and democratizing movement through the nineteenth century, Lamin Sanneh draws a clear picture of the religious grounding of its conflict with the traditional chieftain authorities. His study recounts a crucial development in the history of West Africa.
The unprecedented resurgence, renewal, and rebirth of twenty-first century Christianity in postcolonial societies, such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America, calls for new insights, methodologies, and paradigms since the West can no longer be regarded as the sole citadel and cradle of the Christian faith. The Christian message has been reshaped and reappropriated in different contexts and cultures and, through this cross-cultural transmission and transformation, it has become a world religion. Contextualizing the Christian faith also entails decolonizing its theology, precepts, and dogma. These efforts continue to engender new initiatives and efforts in the intercultural, interconfessional, intercontinental, and interreligious dimensions of world Christianity. A New Day is a collection of essays in honor of Lamin Sanneh, one of the most adamant advocates and apostles of the radical change in the face of Christianity in the twenty-first century. The essays in this book by recognized scholars deal with issues, themes, and perspectives that are important for understanding Christianity as a world religious movement.
Over the course of the last 1400 years, Islam has grown from a small band of followers on the Arabian peninsula into a global religion of over a billion believers. How did this happen? The usual answer is that Islam spread by the sword-believers waged jihad against rival tribes and kingdoms and forced them to convert. Lamin Sanneh argues that this is far from the whole story. Beyond Jihad examines the origin and evolution of the African pacifist tradition in Islam, beginning with an inquiry into the faith's origins and expansion in North Africa and its transmission across trans-Saharan trade routes to West Africa. The book focuses on the ways in which, without jihad, the religion spread and took hold, and what that tells us about the nature of religious and social change. At the heart of this process were clerics who used religious and legal scholarship to promote Islam. Once this clerical class emerged, it offered continuity and stability in the midst of political changes and cultural shifts, helping to inhibit the spread of radicalism, and subduing the urge to wage jihad. With its policy of religious and inter-ethnic accommodation, this pacifist tradition took Islam beyond traditional trade routes and kingdoms into remote districts of the Mali Empire, instilling a patient, Sufi-inspired, and jihad-negating impulse into religious life and practice. Islam was successful in Africa, Sanneh argues, not because of military might but because it was made African by Africans who adapted it to a variety of contexts.
This book explores the clash of civilizations between the secular government and Muslim traditions in West Africa, appraising the challenge of separating the administration of the state from the beliefs of the Islamic peoples of the region. It is useful for students of comparative religion.
The paper in this volume are organized in three parts: scriptural, contextual and theological. The central question being addressed is: how do Christians living in contexts, where Islam is a majority or minority religion, experience, express or think of the Cross? This is, therefore, an exercise in listening. As the contexts from where these engagements arise are varied, the papers in drawing scriptural, contextual and theological reflections offer a cross-section of Christian thinking about Jesus and the Cross.
Summoned from the Margin tells the story of Lamin Sanneh's fascinating journey from his upbringing in an impoverished village in West Africa to education in the United States and Europe to a distinguished career teaching at the Universities of Yale, Harvard, Aberdeen, and Ghana. He grew up in a polygamous household in The Gambia and attended a government-run Muslim boarding school. A chance encounter with Helen Keller's autobiography taught him that education and faith are the key to overcoming physical and personal hardship and inspired his journey. Burning theological questions about God's nature and human suffering eventually led Sanneh to convert from Islam to Christianity and to pursue a career in academia. Here he recounts the unusually varied life experiences that have made him who he is today.Watch the trailer:
When originally published in 1979, this was the first comprehensive study of the Jakhanke in any language. Despite the 19th ambience of jihad, the Jakhanke maintined their tradition of consistent pacifism and political neutrality which is unique in Muslim Black Africa. Drawing on histories, interviews, and colonial reports the book traces the details of the Jakhanke pilgrimages and analyses important themes such as their system of education, their function as dream-interpreters and amulet-makers and finally the dependence of their way of life on the institution of slavery.
Roland Allen is renowned for his original solutions to dilemmas about mission. His principal works were written in the opening decades of the twentieth century, yet his radical ideas still resound in today's church. The Ministry of the Spirit brings together some of his shorter pieces which have long been unavailable, enabling today's readers to delve deeper into Allen's ideas. Among them are "Pentecost and the World," "Non-Professional Missionaries," "Mission Activities," and an abbreviation of "The Case for Voluntary Clergy." The writings collected in The Ministry of the Spirit sit with Allen's better-known work and are no less penetrating and suggestive for the mission of the church. Allen's fundamental belief in centrality of the work of the Holy Spirit to Church life shapes his conclusion. As Professor Lamin Sanneh says in his Foreword: it is 'hard to believe that Allen first broached these ideas nearly a hundred years ago, for they are so redolent with contemporary meaning.'Roland Allen's experience as a missionary in North China led him to re-assess radically the missionary principles of the Western churches. His work, recognized as prophetic even in his own lifetime, has taken on a new significance in the third Christian millennium.
The issue . . . in the multicultural millennium is not so much the 'Islamization' of a once-Christian culture as the emergence, with state collusion, of discrete territories where vastly different norms prevail, shut off and resentful, a breeding ground for ferment and a target for hostility." In the aftermath of the London suicide bombings, this unusual book seems more prophetic than ever. Begun six years before 9/11, it examined the roots of political Islam and its offshoots in Britain. In describing the indifference of policy makers and government officials to religion, it warned of extremism taking root among disaffected young Muslims -- and offered a vision of hope tempered with realism that might have helped avert tragedy had it been more widely heeded. The book's timely republication offers another -- and a way out of it. Lamin Sanneh, himself a former Muslim, explores the history of Islam's always controversial accommodations with the West. Jenny Taylor's debut engages contribution critically at the grassroots level, looking in detail at Islam in Britain, its mission and tactics, and the State's inadequate response to them. "Neglect would appear to have been government policy." Lesslie Newbigin describes the loss of a sense of direction in the West as bankrupt secular ideologies confront fundamentalism with politically correct platitudes or coercive legislation that is destroying the West's historic freedoms. All three authors call for a radical Christian critique to replace the false and evidently failed policies of neutrality of the State.
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