The Origins of the Mud-Brick Building Tradition

The present Mosque was built as late as 1907 but it was reconstructed on the ruins of the first Mosque which was built in the 14th century, at about the same time as most of the cathedrals of Europe were built. 

This was at the height of the Malian Empire when Mali was one of the richest countries in the world and the fabulous wealth from the Malian gold mines was traded across to the Middle East and to Europe along the caravan trade routes through the Sahara, bringing with it an early exposure to Islam.

The Djenne chief Koy Konboro was the first to have embraced Islam in this city and he is said to have built the first Mosque, at around the same time as the great Mosques of Timbuktu the Djingarey Ber and the Sankore. 

The brother of Koy Konboro took over after his death, but he was not a Muslim and practised the old religion of animism. He separated the Mosque into two parts – one for Islam and one for the old fetishist practices. 

Islam was by no means the universally accepted religion in Djenné and many continued to worship the old gods. The influence of the earlier African religion can be felt even today in the importance of magic in Djenné ’s social fabric.

Today it is practised by the many marabouts, who are learned men who have studied the Koran and often use the written Arabic of the Koran as potent incantations to manipulate the present and the future. There is a famous Fulani proverb which says  ‘those who write are magicians’, a poignant saying in Mali where the literacy rate is only 33%.

The Fulani are pastoral people who are spread throughout the West African Sahel countries. During the nineteenth century they carried out sweeping Jihads of West Africa in order to purify Islam. They established several ‘empires’ the first being the Sokoto Caliphate in northern Nigeria in 1804. Later the religious fervour spread to Mali and in 1819 the Fulani chief Sekou Amadou conquered Djenne. During the reign of his Massina Empire the Mosque was abandoned and left to fall into ruin. 

Just as the iconoclasts of the Reformation in Europe destroyed the decorations of churches because ornamentation was considered a distraction from God, the religious leaders of the Massina Empire found the beauty of the Djenne Mosque to be too ostentatious. The puritanical Islam represented by Sekou Amadou abandoned the Mosque and built a simpler one close by.

The Fulani wars of the nineteenth century can be said to have inspired some of the Jihadist Groups of the recent Malian conflict, since one Jihadist group in central Mali have adopted the name ‘The Liberation of the Massina Front' hankering back to those glory days of religious fervour and a ‘purer’ Islam.