Today's Ghana has been home to Muslims for well over half a millennium. The first Muslims in the region were immigrants, West African long-distance merchants who settled and became residents. By the mid-nineteenth century Muslims still were a minority overall but with significant concentrations in several towns. They connected the region to Muslim networks in West Africa, the Mediterranean world, and southwest Asia.Muslim scholars established schools where students learned Arabic and produced hand-written copies of the Qur'an and other Islamic texts. These Muslim scholars also wrote religious commentaries, histories, and poetry. 

Volta Basin

Europeans, largely the British in the middle Volta Basin, imposed colonial rule in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In responding to this challenge, most Muslim scholars did not endorse military jihād and ultimately put aside reservations about the loss of political autonomy to make the best of the new circumstances. Some Muslims turned to Sufism, and others promoted Islamic reform movements. Al-ḥājj 'Umar's writings were an expression of a long tradition of West African Muslim scholarship that has not continued in the contemporary era, making his writings a significant aspect of the region's Muslim cultural heritage.