It is important to understand what drove the anger in the rhetoric of Burkina Faso’s military ruler, Ibrahim Traoré, the cultural context behind his attack, and the religious trends he may have specifically intended to criticise.
These trends revolve around what may be described as sectarian Salafism. This does not refer to Salafism in its entirety, but to an extremist wing with a deeply rooted tendency to declare other Sunni schools, different Muslim sects and others to be outside Islam.
This current developed within Madkhali circles, then expanded regionally and internationally through various intelligence services. For decades, this violent ideology has also been connected to Africa’s horrific history of religious armed groups and to efforts aimed at isolating African states that rebelled against French dominance.
This context must be considered when attempting to understand Traoré’s anger.
Distinguishing Islamic Law from the Uncritical Defence of Heritage
The recent rise of highly dangerous interpretations presented under the banner of returning to Islamic heritage requires careful scrutiny.
This does not mean dismissing Islamic jurisprudence, disregarding the history of legislation or denying the extraordinary intellectual journey of jurists and scholars throughout Muslim civilisation.
It means restoring the proper hierarchy of reference by placing the higher law and objectives of Sharia above limited or distorted rulings. This applies to systems of governance, relations among people and the jurisprudence of major transactions, all of which should guide society towards sound judgement.
Rulings preserved in the heritage that conflict with the foundations of Sharia, the definitive principles of the Qur’an or the proper application of legal rulings to reality must therefore be reviewed against those higher principles.
Understanding a scholar’s judgement also requires examining his psychological state, the disputes surrounding him and even the conditions of war in which he lived.
Imam al-Dhahabi demonstrated this insight with great skill in Siyar A‘lam al-Nubala, where the language and even the judgements attributed to the same scholar can differ from one period to another.
The duty of sincere scholars and advocates of Sharia is to confront interpretations through which extremist groups have shed the blood of innocent people.
Such groups have justified collective excommunication by claiming that ordinary citizens belong to governments that refuse to implement Sharia. They then penetrated African tribal communities in the name of religious vengeance, bringing devastation upon Africa while Western powers continued exploiting the resulting chaos.
The matter is therefore not merely a political leader’s crisis. It is a catastrophe rooted in distorted thought.
The distinction has previously been drawn between the historical body of jurisprudence and the unconditional sanctification of everything inherited from the past.
The Qur’an, the Sunnah and the higher objectives of Islam provide the scale by which that heritage must be judged. The question is how much genuine correction has been achieved in confronting the intellectual foundations of extremism, whether they emerged from Salafi or later theological traditions.
When Historical Fatwas Are Used to Justify Violence
One particularly dangerous example is the invocation of rulings attributed to Imam Ibn Taymiyyah, a major figure in the history of Muslim legal and intellectual thought, to justify a culture of exterminating minorities.
Such interpretations were influenced by the immense bloodshed in Syria under the sectarian regime in Damascus.
The danger of invoking these rulings extends beyond their original setting. They shape ideas among young Muslims, make them vulnerable to manipulation by intelligence agencies and are then recycled through modern statements, media platforms and articles.
This creates inflammatory questions such as: is this the religion being presented as an alternative, while it supposedly fails to guarantee minorities their right to life?
The same problem applies to rulings drawn from historical discussions of slavery and human bondage.
After studying a number of major works of Islamic heritage, it becomes clear that understanding a scholar’s judgement requires examining his emotional condition, his conflicts and the circumstances of war surrounding him.
Al-Dhahabi’s method again offers an important example, as the language and judgements of scholars often changed across different stages of their lives.
Ibn Taymiyyah’s own statements regarding Ash‘aris and Sufis varied in tone and assessment. This phenomenon was not unique to him.
The influence of political circumstances, historical moments and intellectual conflict can also be found in the works of Imam al-Juwayni, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and others.
Slavery in Muslim History and the Colonial Economy
Muslim bandits and slave traders acted unlawfully as contractors for Western colonial powers deeply immersed in slavery.
For those powers, enslavement was not incidental. It became a central requirement in their pursuit of superiority and material advancement, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to many philosophers of the European Renaissance.
This is the first response that should be directed to Captain Traoré.
At certain points in Muslim history, forms of slavery existed that did not comply with the lawful rules governing war. Such enslavement was invalid from the outset.
Some may not realise, for example, that a number of people enslaved in the Arabian Gulf before their liberation by modern states had originally been free Muslims.
They were brought during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Arab, African and Asian Muslim intermediaries working for international slave-trading companies, from Portuguese networks to American ones.
These men and women came from Africa and parts of Asia. They were abducted, despite being free Muslims, and those responsible for kidnapping them should have faced legal retribution.
How, then, were people who were already Muslims enslaved?
This is a documented issue that deserves serious examination.
In many cases, the history of slavery in Muslim societies was separate from the rulings and spirit of Sharia.
The same applies to wars initiated for the interests of rulers, including alliances with one Christian state against another or internal struggles within a kingdom or sultanate.
Reviewing this history is therefore a religious obligation. Its legitimacy is often deeply questionable.
How can rulings on slavery issued by certain scholars be invoked when the wars themselves did not meet the legal conditions of jihad?
Africa, throughout the history of Western power, was treated as a vast plantation for the slave market and as a theatre for the systematic theft carried out by the modern West.
Traoré should review and understand this history before publicly attacking the religion of his own people.
Can it be called patriotism to force citizens to abandon a religion that resisted colonialism and enslavement?
Slavery, Captivity and the Higher Objectives of Sharia
Today, slavery no longer exists except in rare cases among ignorant Muslim communities. Racist cultures, however, continue to exist.
The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, condemned racism as a form of pre-Islamic ignorance when addressing one of his righteous companions, leaving a lesson for the Muslim nation across generations.
The central distinction is that slavery has no independent foundation in Sharia outside the legal regulation of prisoners after war.
Prisoners represent part of the human population of an enemy society. Their right to life must be protected, their affairs regulated and their integration into Muslim society governed by justice.
They must also retain the right to enter into a contract for their freedom.
The rulings governing captives do not require a commander to impose the same outcome on every prisoner.
A commander may consider which war criminals deserve punishment, which prisoners may be released for ransom, which may be pardoned and which may remain detained, especially when an individual has a plausible claim of right or has suffered injustice at Muslim hands.
What, then, should be understood from the Qur’an, the Sunnah of the Prophet and sound jurisprudence?
All such rulings must be understood according to this framework, while accounting for the conditions of each era and stage.
When the higher purpose of Sharia, including guidance and social peace, disappears and the practice becomes a trade in human freedom, the religious justification for slavery collapses.
Such practices depart from the Prophet’s guidance, particularly his emphasis on the rights of contracted slaves and freed dependants.
The strictness of his instructions in this regard reflects the higher purpose of Islamic law.
The repeated failure of Muslims to embody the Prophet’s character is itself one of the greatest trials facing the Muslim nation.
This is the Arab Prophet whose life Traoré must understand.
He carried a sacred message declaring that no human being is superior to another except through piety.
True piety means submission to God, refusing to violate His rights and refusing to violate the rights of human beings.
Did Slavery Truly End in the West?
Did the story of slavery end in the West?
What about the contemporary far right, modern statistics on racism and the confinement of African states within systems of sanctions and isolation, as Burkina Faso itself experienced?
Who assassinated Africa’s free leaders?
Was it the Arabs, or France and the colonial powers?
Do the colonial-minded voices applauding Traoré not glorify modern Western culture?
Where did this culture come from, if not from the same worldview that produced slavery?
What was Africa’s condition during the age of Western progressive revolutions, during the rise of modern Europe and at the time constitutions and rights-based philosophies were being proclaimed?
Does Captain Traoré not know that the very humanity of African peoples was once openly debated?
Does he not know that the repeated example of Belgian rule in the Congo remained politically unresolved even during parliamentary discussions in Brussels in 2022?
Does he know how many victims were killed there by the supposedly progressive spirit of the West?
None of this means denying the value of any rights-based law that genuinely protects human freedom or establishes constitutional equality.
Every beneficial mechanism humanity develops is something Muslims should recognise and adopt.
Yet the natural disposition affirmed by Islamic guidance establishes freedom as an absolute existential right through the Qur’an’s sacred declaration of human dignity.
This is not a system of rights that collapses in practice or changes depending on whether it is applied in the Global South or the Global North.
Malcolm X and the African Islamic Dream
Mr President, Malcolm X entered a new era of freedom when he rejected the fabricated mythology of Black heritage promoted by Elijah Muhammad.
He inspired a resistant moral awakening among African Americans and connected it to the human dream represented by African Islam.
Islam is one, whether lived by Arabs or Africans.
Yet impostors among some Muslim religious figures, together with Western colonial projects, obscured that truth.
It was through them, Mr President, that you were deceived.
