A Muslim Presence in a Non-Muslim State
The Asante kingdom was never an Islamic state. Its rulers were installed through rites bound to the ancestors and to the Golden Stool, and the authority of the Asantehene rested on a religious order that Islam neither replaced nor seriously threatened. Yet from at least the eighteenth century Muslims were a familiar and valued presence in Kumasi. They arrived as traders, scholars, scribes and makers of protective charms, and the accommodation reached between them and the Asante court is among the more revealing features of the kingdom's political life.
Most came from the north. The savanna states of Gonja and Dagomba, drawn into the Asante tributary system during the eighteenth century, had long-established Muslim communities. Beyond them lay Hausaland and the Dyula and Wangara trading networks that reached to the Niger bend and across the Sahara. As Asante extended its authority northwards and the kola trade grew, Muslim merchants followed the great roads south to the capital.
Scholars and Scribes at Court
What distinguished the Muslim community from other foreign residents was literacy. Arabic gave the court something it did not otherwise possess: a written medium for correspondence, record-keeping and agreement. Muslim scribes drafted letters to the northern provinces and to rulers beyond them, and kept accounts of tribute and trade. Their usefulness was practical rather than devotional, and the Asantehene employed them much as he employed any other specialist skill.
When Europeans reached Kumasi in the early nineteenth century they found this literate establishment already in place. Thomas Edward Bowdich, who led the British mission of 1817, described a Muslim quarter in the capital and obtained Arabic manuscripts there. Joseph Dupuis, who followed in 1820 and read Arabic himself, dealt directly with Muslims at the court and drew on them for much of what he was able to report about the interior. Both men were struck by how much the court knew of places no European had seen.
Charms, Amulets and Protection
Muslim clerics were also sought out for their amulets: short written texts, folded and sewn into leather cases, worn on the body or stitched to a garment. War shirts hung with dozens of such packets were prized items of Asante military dress, and were worn by men who had no intention of becoming Muslims. To the Asante, the power of a written charm was one form of spiritual protection among several, to be used alongside rather than instead of established practice. Muslim scholars, for their part, seem generally to have accepted the demand for their services without insisting that their clients convert.
The Limits of Accommodation
The arrangement had boundaries on both sides. Asante rulers did not adopt Islam, and the state ceremonial that legitimated their office — above all the Odwira festival and the cult of the blackened stools — was untouched by it. Muslims resident in Kumasi were expected to keep to their quarter and to conduct themselves as guests of the Asantehene.
The standing of the community also fluctuated with the ruler and with the political weather. The reign of Osei Bonsu in the first quarter of the nineteenth century is usually taken as the high point of Muslim influence at court, when scholars enjoyed considerable access and were consulted on matters reaching well beyond trade. Under later rulers that access narrowed, and periods of suspicion followed periods of favour. The evidence for these swings comes largely from European visitors writing at particular moments, so the picture is uneven and historians differ over how sharp the changes really were.
How Historians Have Read It
Two bodies of scholarship shape most modern accounts. Ivor Wilks, in his work on the nineteenth-century Asante state, treated the Muslim presence as part of the kingdom's administrative apparatus — a literate service class within a growing bureaucracy. Nehemia Levtzion's studies of Islam in the Middle Volta basin placed the same communities within a wider West African pattern in which Muslim minorities served non-Muslim rulers without seeking to convert them. Neither reading suggests that Asante was on a path to becoming Muslim; both suggest that the court was pragmatic about what Islam could offer it.
Afterwards
The relationship outlasted the kingdom's independence. Kumasi's zongo, the quarter historically settled by northern and Muslim migrants, remains a large and distinct community within the city, and its trading links to the north are continuous with those that first brought Muslim merchants to the capital. For anyone studying Asante, the Muslim presence is a useful corrective to the idea of a closed forest kingdom: Kumasi sat at the meeting point of Atlantic and Saharan commerce, and the men who wrote its Arabic letters were one of the connections between them.
