Islam was introduced to the African continent almost 1400 years ago, and since then has spread, so that now there are Muslim communities from Cairo to Cape Town, and from Dakar to Zanzibar. Africa is the home of roughly one quarter of the world’s one 1.2 billion Muslim population. Approximately half of the population of Africa is Muslim, some countries being 90-100% Muslim, and every country having at least a significant Muslim minority of 5-10%. As a religion grounded in a sacred book - the Qur’an - Islam rapidly developed its own literary/scholarly tradition, for celebrating its spirituality and for analyzing and contesting the theology that developed within it. Wherever Islam spread as a religion, so did its educational system under which Islamic knowledge was transmitted, and sometimes revised and reshaped by new generations of scholars. Africa participated fully in such processes. In the early centuries of Islam (7th - 11th centuries CE) centers of learning developed in northern Africa in such cities as Cairo, Qayrawan (Tunisia), Tlemcen (Algeria), Fez and Marrakesh (Morocco), and in Saharan/sub-Saharan Africa from the 12th century the cities such as Shingit and Walata (Mauritania), Jenne and Timbuktu (Mali), Agades (Niger). Kano, Katsina, Gazargamu, Zaria and Ilorin (Nigeria), Kutranj (Sudan), Lamu and Mombasa (Kenya), Zeila, Mogadishu and Brava (Somalia), and Zanzibar (Tanzania). Sub-Saharan centers of learning were in constant touch with centers in North Africa and the wider Middle East. African scholars making the pilgrimage to Mecca frequently spent time in such milieux of learning, or in Mecca itself where they could have contact with scholars from all over the Muslim world. We know, too, of some West African scholars who settled and taught in Arabia salih al-Fullani from Guinea, who taught in Medina from 1773 until his death in 1803, and passed on his learning to a number of Indian students, and Alfa Hashim from Mali, who fled colonial intrusion and spent the years from 1907 until his death in 1931 teaching in Medina and passing on his spiritual (Sufi) teachings to believers from places as distant as Indonesia and the Balkans.Not only did an Islamic scholarly tradition take root in Africa, but a broader literacy in Arabic became common, leading to the development of state bureaucracies, and the use of Arabic for personal correspondence, legal documents, family records, and the widespread recording of local, regional, and clan chronicles. Arabic was also a language of political dispute, and of poetry praising heroes and satirizing enemies.This widespread literacy in Arabic came gradually to be supplemented by literacy in indigenous languages written in the Arabic script (notably Swahili, Hausa, Fulfulde, Songhay, Kanuri and Nupe, but also many more languages of which our knowledge is as yet only fragmentary). It is a common assumption that Africans only became literate when their languages were first reduced to writing in the Latin script by missionaries and/or colonial officials in the 19th century, but an investigation of the Islamic tradition of learning clearly negates this myth. Arabic literacy goes back almost a millennium in some areas, and literacy in African languages using the Arabic script from two hundred to five hundred years. A striking example of Arabic literacy, now beginning to be more fully studied, is the letters and documents written by certain Africans of Muslim background who were brought to the Americas in slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. We can now see echoes of the Islamic educational tradition from Africa as they manifested themselves in North Carolina, Mississipi, Panama and Bahia.