Islam entered Africa within decades of its inception in the seventh century CE. In North Africa its spread was related to the empire-building process which took Islam to Morocco and Spain in the far west and to India in the east whereas in the rest of Africa its diffusion followed a different path. The African dimension goes back to 615 CE when the first Islamic migration to Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia, took place, though its impact there at this early stage is not clear. A few years later, the epoch-making hijrah, or migration, by Muḥammad and his persecuted band of followers to Medina created the political center of the nascent Islamic state built in Arabia. The task of spreading Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula to other regions, including North Africa to the fringes of the Sahara, was left to Muḥammad's successors...