Islam came into Ghana through the ancient caravan trade routes across the Sahara that connected Asante with Muslim North Africa and the Near East long before Europeans landed on the Atlantic coast.  This international trading network dated from Roman times, but the spread of Islam facilitated the commercial integration of large parts of the Western Sahel. Throughout present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and the Northern regions of Nigeria, Togo and Benin, ethnic and family diasporas maintained commercial operations through branches that extended credit, arranged apprenticeships and coordinated orders.  Caravan routes also carried spiritual freight, linking West African Muslims to spiritual leaders and teachers based in North Africa through travel for education and pilgrimage.  Trading towns like Salaga in Northern Ghana became religious centers before Islam spread widely in the rural areas.  Rural migrants to these towns found it advantageous to convert to Islam, to win respect, trust and valuable connections in these multiethnic communities.  

Asante imperial power during the 18th and 19th century grew through participating in these international networks, but also by strictly limiting access of Muslims and other Northerners to the central provinces and the capital, Kumasi.  No foreign traders could enter Asante beyond the border markets designated by the Asantehene.  The only Muslims allowed in Kumasi were a few experts in Islamic protective charms invited to supply these for the Asantehene. Royal family members were completely prohibited from practicing Islam.  On the other hand, repeated Asante wars of expansion brought substantial numbers of captured Northerners in as slaves, whether Muslims or not.  Their owners kept many within Asante villages to work as farm laborers and house servants, but they also sold many to finance further wars. Europeans of various nationalities then shipped them across the Atlantic from ports on the coast.

One dramatic result of the final defeat of Asante by the British in 1902 was the immediate influx of Northerners into Kumasi.  Most of the soldiers who occupied Kumasi were from the Hausa Constabulary, recruited directly from Northern Nigeria after its recent conquest.  Their numbers were supplemented by recruits from the Northern Territories of the colony, now the Northern and Upper Regions, including many of the "Ghana Hausa" whose families had settled there generations earlier.  Under British protection, their barracks became Kumasi’s first Muslim neighborhood as relatives joined them.

Nigerian Hausa who dominated trade in Salaga and points north eagerly extended their trading activities into this once forbidden city.  One of the earliest civilian Muslim settlements was Tafo, located on the northern outskirts of Kumasi along the Great Northern Road built to link Asante to the Northern Territory.  Wealthy Hausa captured leadership roles in the Kumasi Zongo, first as British allies, but soon succeeded in negotiating land grants directly from the Asantehene for further expansion of their settlements. A new and larger Central Mosque was soon required to accommodate increasing numbers of worshippers.  Today the Zongo chief still lives in the palace built in the original Zongo, selected from the elite ranks of Hausa "strangers" who came directly from leading Northern Nigerian families.  In later years, candidates whose Zongo roots run deeper have contested this Hausa monopoly. Descendents of the Wangara ritual experts invited to protect the Asantehene before British conquest made the first claim, but today some "Zongo boys" born and brought up there argue that they have the best claim to lead it.