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The various Muslim theocratic states that emerged in West Africa over the 18th and 19th centuries (including Sokoto, Masina, and, later, the Umarian state) came to power in a series of conflicts, or jihads, against political systems in which slavery preexisted as the basic system of labor extraction and population control and in which slaves were the medium of exchange in wider Atlantic and trans-Saharan economic networks. The conflicts promised emancipation for Muslims enslaved in these systems but also involved the capture and enslavement of large numbers of people. The economic and political rationales for mass enslavement remained. However, for the first time they were framed within a written, Islamic discursive tradition, circulated by the leaders of the jihads. These texts enforced a new policy of enslavement that drew upon Islamic legal traditions but, for the most part, recycled preexisting arrangements of slave raiding in non-Muslim areas. Over time, what emerged were societies in which slavery was essential to the growth, functions, and reproduction of state power and in which slave labor of various kinds fueled the majority of economic, political, and social activity. Because of the multidimensional uses of slavery, the institution continued well into the European colonial period and continues to inform social dynamics in the early 21st century.

Although Jerusalem was the ultimate target of many of the largest crusading expeditions during the medieval period, North Africa nonetheless played a crucial role in this movement. Following the establishment of the Crusader states at the end of the 11th century, Latin Christians clashed with the Fatimids of Egypt for regional control of the Levant and Nile River delta. This conflict gave way in the 13th century to the “Egyptian strategy,” through which crusaders thought the most likely way to retake Jerusalem was by attacking the rich and fertile lands of the Nile. The crusades of King Louis IX, which were directed at Egypt and Tunis, were motivated in part by the idea that seizing these lands in North Africa would ultimately lead to the reconquest of the Holy Land. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, crusading fervor reached the shores of North Africa via the Reconquista. Beginning in the 13th century and extending through the early modern period, Christian leaders in Iberia viewed campaigns in northwest Africa as an extension of their earlier repulsion of Muslims from the peninsula. These crusades, which were theorized as dynastic enterprises that served to both spread Christianity and expand the borders of empires, persisted into the 16th century as the papacy marshaled the assistance of European Christian powers against the Ottomans. The response of Muslim dynasties in North Africa to these expeditions was never uniform, as some preferred diplomacy with the aggressing Franks and others conflict. However, there gradually developed in the Islamic world the idea that a persistent jihad against Mediterranean-wide Frankish aggression was an appropriate response. The memory of medieval crusades was a particularly potent one in France, where Louis IX’s expeditions were evoked during France’s conquest of Algeria in the 19th century.

Established using a conventional Islamic model of government, the new Muslim state in Sokoto, known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), possessed eventually very large numbers of men, women, and children, taken captive (usually when children) in jihad from mainly non-Muslim communities, to serve as slaves. These slaves worked on farms or within households, they might be concubines and bear children for their owners; or they might be sold as children for export to North Africa in payment for the luxury imports the new elite wanted. Slaves were, under Islamic law, deemed “minors” or “half-persons,” and so had rights that differed from those of the free Muslim. By the end of the 19th century there were more slaves on the local markets than could be sold; exports of captives to North Africa had already dropped. For some captives enslaved as children, however, the career as a slave led eventually to high political positions, even to owning many slaves of their own. But slaves’ property, even their children, ultimately belonged to the slave’s owner. Revolts by male slaves were very rare, but escape was commonplace. Concubines, if they ever became pregnant by their owner, could not be sold again. The abolition of slavery c.1903 was slow to become a reality for many individual slaves, whether men or women.

It is tempting to seek an auspicious beginning for the Sudanese city of Omdurman, given its eventual significance, but there is none to be found. From its humble origins as a watering place for local pastoralists on the west bank of the Nile, and a mere hamlet and waystation for travelers by the early 19th century, it grew rapidly in the 1880s into a crowded market center, an administrative capital, and even a holy city: all due to the tumultuous events of the Sudanese Mahdist movement (or Mahdiyyah) of 1881–1898. And while it was not the intention of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi to found anything—he considered Omdurman just another “spot” (buq‘a) among the many he had camped at—the policies of his successor and the devotion of his followers enlarged and ennobled the place, transforming it into the dominant urban center of the Nilotic Sudan. As a holy city, Omdurman can hardly be compared to such places as Jerusalem, Rome, or Mecca, with their centuries or even millennia of existence; and although it resembles Shaykh ‘Uthman dan Fodio’s city of Sokoto in northern Nigeria as the capital of an expansionist jihadist state, it also differs from it in some important ways. Ultimately, whether one considers its messianic or economic importance, its military or administrative functions, its planned or spontaneous origins, Omdurman is remarkable for becoming, in just over a decade’s time, one of the most important cities across Sudanic Africa. Moreover, the experience of the Sudanese people in so tribally and ethnically diverse an urban environment, under such concentrated and extreme conditions, both impelled by the policies of the state and inspired by fervent Mahdist belief, helped to accelerate ongoing social changes, which ultimately led to the formation of a more coherent national identity.

While the literature on the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) is extensive, studies on the armed conflict between the Algerian military and the armed Islamic groups, which cost the lives of more than 200,000 remain insignificant. The complex intersections between the political, social, and economic factors leading to the war in the 1990s show that the critical junctures began after independence in 1962. These junctures continued through the 1970s (Arabization movement) and 1980s (1988 Berber Spring), which together can help in contextualizing the Algerian Civil War. These different periods reveal the history of the National Liberation Front (FLN) as a one-party rule and contextualize its historical strong relationship with the Algerian National Army, revealing the power dynamics between the two and the roots of the struggle over the country’s sovereignty. Furthermore, the 1980s were marked by the youth riots in 1988 (Berber Spring) and their crucial role in what president Chadli Benjedid presented as a political reform program, including a new constitution, which ended the political monopoly of the FLN and saw the emergence of more than thirty new political parties. In January 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) overwhelmingly won the municipal elections, with a much larger number of votes than the ruling FLN in the first round. However, instead of accepting the Islamists’ victory, the military promptly stepped in and cancelled parliamentary elections, banned the FIS, and arrested its leaders. After President Mohamed Boudiaf’s assassination, the government imposed a national state of emergency and used a combination of strategies including economic reforms as well tough laws to repress the Islamic armed groups and control the situation. The idea that the armed Islamic groups started after the official ban of the FIS has been contested. Two parallel strategies were adopted by the successive governments of the 1990s: one was based on the repression of the FIS, who in turn retaliated with car bombs and assassinations of women, intellectuals, police, and military forces; and the other was based on the introduction of social and economic reforms. The country went into cycles of extreme violence for more than a decade, in which the negotiations between the Islamists and the military were not interrupted. President Liamine Zaroual’s amnesty initiative, Rahma, was unsuccessful, yet it was the basis upon which his successor, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, proposed his project of amnesty, known as the Civil Concord, in 1999, later replaced by the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in 2005. Bouteflika resigned on April 2, 2019, after months of mass protest called the Revolution of Smiles, which started on February 22, 2019, against his candidacy to the presidency for a fifth mandate.