The Untold Islamic History of Afrobeats

On a humid Ramadan night in Lagos, long after the traffic has quieted and the street vendors have packed away their roasted corn stands, a different kind of music rises. It’s not coming from Bluetooth speakers or nightclubs, but from barefoot boys beating talking drums and chanting through the streets, their voices stretching and tilting. “Kú rò lè sun, òjó ò tí dé!” — wake up, it’s time to eat before dawn. They call it ajísari or wéré, a centuries-old tradition where young Muslim men (essentially human alarm clocks) walk from house to house before suhoor, reciting devotional songs to rouse the faithful. They move in rhythm, half prayer, half performance. Nobody could have guessed that these Islamic wake-up calls would eventually mutate into one of the most influential musical templates in Africa, and further down the line, into the backbone of Afrobeats, the global sound now blaring everywhere from Cairo to Dubai.

To understand Afrobeats— not just as a pop genre but as a cultural organism— you have to first understand how deeply Islam is woven into Nigerian life. Long before colonial borders or record deals, Islam arrived in what is now northern Nigeria via trans-Saharan trade routes around the 11th century. Merchants brought more than textiles and salt. They brought scripture, poetry, and rhythm. By the 14th century, Hausa city-states had embraced Islam as both a spiritual and political system, and by the 19th century, Fulani Islamic scholar, teacher, and preacher Usman dan Fodio’s Fulani Jihad had institutionalized Islamic governance across much of the north. Today, nearly 100 million Nigerians— almost half the population— identify as Muslim, making it the largest Muslim-majority nation in Africa. To put it into perspective, thats nearly twice the amount of the entire GCC.

But unlike in monolithic portrayals of Islam elsewhere, Nigerian Islam is wildly syncretic. In Kano, you might hear a zikr (rhythmic chant of God’s names) circle of Tijaniyya Sufis chanting the names of God in rolling unison. In Ibadan, you’ll find Yoruba weddings where Qur’anic blessings coexist with drummers pounding gangan while aunties spray naira notes as is custom in Nigerian weddings. In Lagos during Mawlid— the Prophet’s birthday— processions spill into the streets with banners and percussion. Nigerian Islam is not merely recited, it is performed.

Nowhere is that clearer than among the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group who inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The Yoruba world does not separate sound from meaning or faith from form; voice is archive, drum is language, and religion is a choir of histories. In Yoruba, a tonal language, melody must bend around meaning, which is why Yoruba singing often leans toward ornamentation, glides, and micro-turns—techniques that sit naturally beside Qur’anic melisma. The gangan (talking drum) imitates speech contours; oríkì (praise poetry) elevates lineages with rhythmic incantation; while ìjálá and other chant traditions treat voice like a drum and drum like a second tongue. When Islam takes root in this sound ecology—as it did powerfully in cities like Ilorin, Ibadan, and parts of Lagos—it doesn’t land on empty ground. It meets an existing technology of call-and-response, a social habit of collective refrain, and a worldview that treats rhythm as civic glue.

It is most evident in the birth of fuji music. Before it was a genre, it was a Ramadan necessity. Those pre-dawn ajísari singers— once purely devotional— began to improvise, dropping in praise for specific households in hopes of getting extra coins or rice. Over time, the chants became longer, more theatrical, more competitive. Fuji’s earliest forms were also, crucially, the sound of the urban poor asserting cultural presence in a class-divided Nigeria. Islamic music became both prayer and protest.

Then, in the late 1960s, one man changed everything: Alhaji Sikiru Ayinde Barrister. Also known as Barry Wonder, the young Yoruba Muslim from Lagos decided to take wéré off the streets and into the studio. He stripped away direct Qur’anic lines but kept the cadence, the melisma, the percussion. He called his creation fuji, allegedly inspired by a Japanese mountain he saw in a travel brochure. “Fuji music is an improvisation of ajísari, the music we used to sing to wake Muslims during Ramadan,” Barrister once said in an interview with a BBC Yoruba correspondent.

His rival, General Ayinla Kollington, leaned into aggression, layering even thicker drums and raspier vocals. Then, Ayinla Omowura added grit and slum poetry. What was once a dawn call to fasting became a full-blown cultural force, blaring from motor parks (ramshackle bus stations that double as music arenas), parlours, political rallies. Even when the lyrics spoke of love or gossip or rivalry, the pulse of Islam remained.

People often conflate Afrobeat and Afrobeats, but they are siblings, not twins. Afrobeat— singular— was Fela Kuti’s revolution in the 1970s: a heady cocktail of highlife, jazz, funk, and social rebellion delivered in sprawling 30-minute songs. It was secular, anti-establishment, defiantly pan-African. Afrobeats— plural— is what emerged in the 2000s and 2010s: a glossy, export-friendly evolution that fused Afrobeat with hip-hop, dancehall, R&B, and crucially, fuji. Where Fela sang against dictators, Wizkid sings about desire. Where Fela staged political crusades, Davido stages continental dominance. But if you listen closely the ghosts of Ramadan, of ajísari, of zikr, still linger in the background.

Consider how this coded spirituality shows up in modern stars. Asake, the most obvious heir to fuji in today’s Afrobeats, builds choirs out of himself, each line rising like a minaret line-drawing the sky. His 2022 single Peace Be Unto You (PBUY) makes the reference explicit in title and ambiance; even when the lyrics pivot to street life, the cadence of greeting—of blessing—stays at the center.

Beyond Asake, when Rema arrived in 2019 with his self-titled four-track EP—Iron Man, Why, Dumebi, and Corny—he was eighteen and already bending pop toward a devotional contour. Not devotional in doctrine, but in design with long vowels turned into ladders, melodic lines that snake and hover, a kind of youthful ululation that many listeners in Muslim-majority cities recognized instantly. Iron Man, especially, rides a modal curve with ornamentation that sits comfortably beside Islamic recitative habits. Thus, it is no mystery that his tone traveled so fast across our region. However, the point isn’t that Rema is performing religion, but that his phrasing speaks a transregional ear-memory, one tuned by centuries of call-and-response—from Qur’anic school to wedding band to stadium chorus.

This is perhaps why the genre has found a natural audience in the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt, Afrobeats listening on Spotify has surged by 2213% in the past five years. In Saudi Arabia, 568%. In the UAE, 479%. Over 2.8 million hours of Afrobeats were streamed in the UAE alone this past year. Burna Boy, Rema, Omah Lay, Wizkid— their names top charts in Riyadh and Cairo just as they do in Lagos and London. What Western analysts often miss is that Afrobeats does not just travel through danceability. It travels through cultural familiarity. The cadences feel Qur’anic. The percussion feels ancestral. A Saudi teenager hearing Asake might not know what ajísari is, but his body remembers something close to it.

And yet, if we are honest about our region, we have to admit that the love is not always matched by respect. We buy the sound, the clothes, the dance steps; we book the artists and caption the videos; we sell out the stadiums. At the same time, anti-Blackness persists—in hiring, in migration policy, in everyday micro-hierarchies of desirability and beauty, in the casual segregation of social spaces, in the unremarked distance between who gets lauded on stage and who gets profiled in the street. There’s a quiet hypocrisy in the way Afrobeats can be the soundtrack of our summer while African migrants navigate a winter of paperwork, surveillance, or condescension. If Afrobeats is a form of call—and it is—then the ethical question for our region is whether we are prepared to answer beyond the dance floor. Do we want the rhythm or the relationship? The culture or the people who make it? A region that loves the music but withholds dignity from its makers is not an audience; it’s an extractor.

Which is absurd, really, because culturally, spiritually, sonically, West Africa and the Arab world are cousins pretending to be strangers. We pray to the same God and share names. Hausa traders once moved across Sudanese routes to Mecca centuries before commercial airlines existed. Yoruba Islamic chants sound uncannily like Sufi melodies from Sudan or Morocco.

Meanwhile, in Western markets, Afrobeats is increasingly being repackaged as “global pop,” a neutralized streaming category that strips it of geography, faith, and history. The risk is not just dilution, but also dispossession. Take Reggae for instance, which went from Rasta gospel to cruise ship entertainment; or hip-hop that transformed from street prophecy to car commercial backdrop. Afrobeats could follow the same path if left undefended. And make no mistake, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Industry forecasts estimate that Afrobeats will generate nearly half a billion dollars in global streaming revenue by 2025. Burna Boy has already become the first African artist to sell out stadiums in London, Paris, and New York  (not arenas, but stadiums). The question is no longer whether Afrobeats will go global—it already has. The question is: who will profit from its future? The communities that birthed it, or the corporations that merely discovered it?

Already, major labels are lifting sonic elements without lineage, flattening fuji cadences into generic “world music” aesthetics. Yet many artists are resisting erasure. Burna Boy laces even his radio hits with Yoruba proverbs, Asake refuses to sand down his fuji edges for international palatability, and even Wizkid, often criticized for going too soft, still insists in interviews that “no matter where I go, Lagos is the blueprint.”

So perhaps the better question is not whether Afrobeats can stay rooted, but whether listeners will be educated enough to hear its roots. When a DJ in Dubai spins Last Last or a wedding in Cairo erupts to Calm Down, they are not just consuming Nigerian pop. They are inadvertently participating in a centuries-long tradition of African Islamic expression. The same chants that woke fasting families in Ibadan at 4 a.m. now wake festival crowds at midnight in Berlin. And the same drums that marched in Mawlid parades now march across Spotify playlists.

Obviously, the sound has already crossed borders. What remains to be seen is whether empathy will travel with it. Enjoying Afrobeats is easy, but recognizing the people and histories behind it requires more effort. If the genre has taught us anything, it’s that rhythm moves faster than policy, and cultural exchange is often more honest than diplomacy. But exchange becomes extraction when admiration doesn’t translate into understanding.

Main image: Kollington Ayinla-Far Out/Album Cover

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