Africa is often reductively described as the recipient of outside influences, whether Western, Chinese, or Arab. This trend is particularly acute with regard to Islam, where “African Islam” is frequently caricatured as “syncretist” – and therefore open to powerful challenges from allegedly more “orthodox” Arab Muslims.

In the tense geopolitical atmosphere of the early twenty-first century and the “War on Terror,” stereotypes of purist Arabs and syncretist Africans have been incorporated into narratives about the threat of global jihad. A lack of governance supposedly compounds this threat in Africa. Policy makers, analysts, and journalists frequently analogize the presumed experience of Afghanistan under the Taliban to other so-called ungoverned spaces or weak states, including in West Africa. Metaphors casting Africa passively – as a breeding ground of extremism, for example – often accompany such analogies. A commentator in the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2012,

West African “syncretists,” in the language of this and other authors, become passive targets for Arab “extremists” who “pollinate” or “target” African communities. Commentators sometimes point to Nigeria, due to its population size and oil resources, as the “biggest prize” for Arab “extremists” interested in Africa. Such depictions accord little agency or imagination to African Muslims.

This constellation of stereotypes focuses suspicious attention on African Muslims who travel to Arab countries for religious study. American think tanks routinely depict such Africans as conduits for the influence of Saudi Arabia, depicted as a shadowy country that bears responsibility for disseminating theological perspectives that led to the attacks of 11 September 2001. Saudi Arabia's religious outreach to Africa, for some analysts, threatens to radicalize the entire continent.