The first few lines of Stéphane Pradines’s Historic Mosques in Sub-Saharan Africa make the reader aware of the primary impetus behind the volume: “There is no general survey of the mosques of Sub-Saharan Africa” (1). While numerous works have been produced on the mosque as a building type, on mosques of particular locales, and on the architectural and decorative components of mosques, none have brought together mosques as a collective within the vast cultural, sociopolitical, and economic space of so-called sub-Saharan Africa. I say “so-called” because the term sub-Saharan is a problematic qualifier, having roots in European imperial philosophies of the colonial period that aimed to divide what they deemed a more culturally developed “Arab” Africa (North Africa) from a less developed “Black” Africa. As Tatenda Chinondidyachii Mashanda, a politics and international affairs scholar at Wake Forest University, wrote of the term in 2022 for The African Exponent: “[It]...

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