The Ahmadiyya is regarded as being a highly controversial religious movement in many parts of the Islamic world and is, in fact, not even regarded as being ‘Islamic’ by states such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (which ban adherents from taking the pilgrimage to Mecca). Despite that, not much research has been done about the Ahmadiyya. This gap in research is aggravated by the fact that the Ahmadiyya has been and is a highly active and successful missionary movement in many parts of the world, even in many Western countries. The Ahmadiyya has become known, for example, for its numerous translations of the Qur'an into vernacular languages; those translations have often triggered ‘counter-translations’, as for instance, in Tanzania, by both Sufi- and Salafi-oriented Muslim scholars. In effect, the Ahmadiyya has been at the center of Muslim attention for at least one hundred years. The present work by John Hanson is, thus, a welcome contribution that (at least) partially fills this remarkable gap in research.

Focussing on the development of the Ahmadiyya in Ghana (or colonial Gold Coast), Hanson anchors his account with a very concise and helpful Introduction to the history of the Ahmadiyya outside Ghana. He traces its genesis as a religious movement in colonial India and its subsequent spread into other British colonies as well as metropolitan Britain (Chapters Three and Four). He then complements this historical account by presenting the local West African context, that is, precolonial and colonial ‘Ghana’ before the arrival of the Ahmadiyya (Chapters One and Two). One of the most remarkable aspects of this account is the fact that Hanson was able (through meticulous use of local archives and oral sources) to reconstruct the almost forgotten role of the ‘Afro-Brazilians’, slaves who had been sent to Brazil and who, over the course of the nineteenth century, returned to West Africa, where they became the founders of wealthy trading companies. Some of those Afro-Brazilians converted to Islam and invited Muslim ‘missionaries’ (among them Ahmadis) to come to ‘Ghana’ to teach local converts. The influence of these Atlantic ‘outsiders’ has so far been neglected by researchers, due to the fact that the spread and expansion of Islam in tropical West Africa has been associated almost exclusively with the influence of ‘inland’ Muslims, or those scholars and clerics who represent ‘savannah’ Islam.

The third and major part of the book (Chapters Five through Eight) is devoted to the establishment and expansion of the Ahmadiyya in coastal, present-day Ghana and its subsequent spread inland in the first half of the twentieth century inland, in particular to the Asante and Wa peoples. What is most fascinating about this account is that the establishment and expansion of the Ahmadiyya followed epistemological dialectics that can also be observed in other ‘Muslim’ movements of reform (and analyzed in detail in Loimeier 2016).Footnote ¹ Such movements typically seek to establish, first, doctrinal distinctions by drawing on texts and, in particular, new ways of interpreting the Qur'an (often in a comparative exegesis with the Bible) and by rejecting ‘savannah’ esoteric and magical (Sufi) practices. Second, these movements entail symbolic distanciation — by praying, for instance, with arms crossed, qabd, and not sadl, arms relaxed at one's side, like almost all other Muslims in West Africa (with the exception of the Niassène Tijaniyya from the 1930s). Third, these movements promote practices of social segregation — by not praying with other Muslims, but apart from them in Ahmadi mosques, as well as by rejecting matrilineal inheritance rules, or by rejecting the scarification of children (175f, 192f, and 231f). The fourth common characteristic of independent movements of reform, that is, the practice of spatial separation by way of a hijra, or migration (and often, as a consequence, jihad), has not been adopted by the Ahmadiyya. The movement in fact stresses its peaceful message and its educational character as expressed in the translation of Ahmadi texts into English and the establishment of English language schools. Still, the spread of the Ahmadiyya led to numerous splits in local communities, which is again a feature of many movements of reform that tend to question established truths.

Despite being a pioneering work on a thoroughly under-researched religious movement, the book unfortunately falls short in two respects. First, Hanson's account stops more or less at the time of Ghana's independence. The postcolonial development of the Ahmadiyya is largely neglected (except for some few sentences in the Conclusion). Second, a discussion and analysis of the social background of the Ahmadiyya converts is missing. We learn that the movement recruited from a wide array of social groups, including cocoa farmers, traders, migrant workers, and functionaries of the colonial state. Apart from these bits of information, however, the book remains silent about this aspect of the development of the Ahmadiyya.

Nonetheless, this book is a great one, and a must-read for all those who are interested in the dynamics of movements of reform, of ‘sectarian’ religious development and, of course, West African and Ghanaian history.