Emerging from traditional Qur'anic schools in the colonial era, the « arabising » social category asserted itself in Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso around a new education system, that of the medersas, which were inspired by the religious reform movement at plays in the Arab world. Graduates from these schools, in connection with universityes in the Arabo-Islamic countries, transformed Islam in accordance with the often Wahhabi-inspired teachings that they acquired, in particular in Saudi Arabia. More largely, they tried to transform their societies in conformity with their religious principles, and with their social aspirations that were more often than not blocked. The arabizing Muslims have eveolved differently in the two countries, due to different social contexts, and contradictory postcolonial policies. Finally, various generations of arabizing Muslims had to adapt to rapidly transforming societies between the late colonial period and the stabilization of postcolonial regimes.
Since the 1990s, most African economies and public spheres have been liberalised, and new civil society actors have emerged. As mapped out by Marie Nathalie LeBlanc and Louis Audet Gosselin, in West Africa Christian and Muslim organisations have come to dominate the field of humanitarian assistance.
Moving beyond mainstream development theory, Faith and Charity brings out the crucial role of religion in the development process and the interplay of moral and political ideologies. From faith-based NGOs to individual local activists, the authors explore how each group makes sense of, and contributes to, the wider process of social development in the neoliberal era.
Based on extensive research and deploying a sophisticated and original frame of analysis, Faith and Charity will make an important contribution to the existing literature on development anthropology and the anthropology of religion in Africa.
Based on field research conducted in 1992, 1993-1995, and 1998, the author examines how young, urban, educated Muslims of Malian origin living in Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire, privilege Islam as the cornerstone of their individual and group identities. As Muslims, this group is moving away from their ancestral ties to Mali, expressed as 'sya', the word in the Dioula-Banmanan language which comes closest to the concept of ethnicity. The shift in identity from 'sya' to Islam is embodied in the creation and growth of neighbourhood-based Islamic youth associations since the early 1990s. Islam provides youths with a distinct identity with which to face gerontocratic relations of power, the structural changes that have affected educational and Islamic institutions in Côte d'Ivoire over the past thirty years, and recent Ivorian politics of cultural difference.
In 1929, French colonial officials in Mauritania began monitoring a young man named Yacouba Sylla, the leader of a religious revival in the town of Kaédi. A Sufi teacher (shaykh), Yacouba Sylla had incurred the hostility of local administrators and the disdain of Kaédi's elite for preaching radical reforms of social and religious practice and for claiming authority out of proportion to his age and his rather minimal formal education. He claimed to derive his authority instead from a controversial shaykh named Ahmed Hamallah, then in exile from his home in Nioro, French Soudan (now Mali).
Exubérance des prophéties pentecôtistes en soutien au président Laurent Gbagbo, puissance ésotérique des chasseurs traditionnels de la rébellion pro-Guillaume Soro, malédictions proférées par des prêtresses baoulé, dissentiments entre catholiques, destruction de masques, assassinats d'imams : la Côte d'Ivoire du nouveau millénaire a été le théâtre de maintes violences politico-religieuses. Mais la communauté nationale n'a cessé, dans le même temps, de défricher des chemins vers la réconciliation, psalmodiant le caractère sacré de la paix. Ce livre explore la dimension religieuse de l'histoire politique de la Côte d'Ivoire depuis le semi-échec du putsch militaire du 19 septembre 2002 jusqu'à l'après crise post-électorale de 2010-2011. Il analyse la fabrique croisée du politique et du religieux en temps de guerre et en temps de paix ; il interroge la part des hommes et de(s) Dieu(x) dans la dramaturgie des violences et des réconciliations à l'ivoirienne. Toutes les religions sont concernées, sans exclusive. Les diversités et les divisions internes des communautés ne sont pas gommées. Dans une empathie distanciée, le livre privilégie les données recueillies par rapport aux thèses et donne voix aux différents acteurs qui montrent, dans leurs registres polyphoniques, comment les crises ivoiriennes ne furent pas seulement la traduction militaire d'enjeux politiques, économiques et idéologiques mais aussi des guerres mystiques.
Houphouët-Boigny, premier président de la Côte d'Ivoire, érigea la loi sur la laïcité contenue dans la constitution de son pays, comme principe de base de sa politique religieuse. Ainsi, pour mettre en œuvre cette politique, il s'est employé à faire de la cooptation clientéliste, du patronage politique et de l'exploitation politique de ses rapports avec les groupements religieux ivoiriens, les principaux axes, en vue de la consolidation de son pouvoir politique.
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt adapted from a forthcoming report by USIP’s Senior Study Group on Coastal West Africa. The report presents the recommendations of that study group, which consisted of current and former policymakers, prominent political scientists and economists, representatives of international organizations, and business leaders.
In the 1990s a nationwide crime wave overtook Côte d'Ivoire. The Ivoirian police failed to control the situation, so a group of poor, politically marginalized, and mostly Muslim men took on the role of the people's protectors as part of a movement they called Benkadi. These men were dozos—hunters skilled in ritual sacrifice—and they applied their hunting and occult expertise, along with the ethical principles implicit in both forms of knowledge, to the tracking and capturing of thieves. Meanwhile, as Benkadi emerged, so too did the ethnic, regional, and religious divisions that would culminate in Côte d'Ivoire's 2002–07 rebellion. Hunting the Ethical State reveals how dozos worked beyond these divisions to derive their new roles as enforcers of security from their ritual hunting ethos. Much as they used sorcery to shape-shift and outwit game, they now transformed into unofficial police, and their ritual networks became police bureaucracies. Though these Muslim and northern-descended men would later resist the state, Joseph Hellweg demonstrates how they briefly succeeded at making a place for themselves within it. Ultimately, Hellweg interprets Benkadi as a flawed but ingenious and thoroughly modern attempt by non-state actors to reform an African state.
This article takes on the Islamic association's philosophy and their comprehension of association's work method in Ivory Coast. It also means, the evolution analyzing of the different aspects ideas. Mainly, our work rives on the evolution of different ideals, the function mode of Islamic foundation according to the different ideologies, the way who means the Islamic organization and the path of moving on the association life in Ivory Coast. According to its history and progress, it's doctrinal, cultural, economic and political direction.
In the 1990s, Muslims in Côte d'Ivoire redefined the boundaries of their identity, as well as the structure of their community. While young men have been at the forefront of this movement of religious revitalization as leaders and erudites, the life trajectories of young Muslim women have been deeply altered by these changes. This article explores how, through renewed acts of faith and displays of orthodoxy, Western-style educated and financially self-sufficient young women are negotiating their participation into marriage markets. Their relatively new social roles, defined by Western-style education and salaried employment, exclude them from locally sanctioned notions of "proper womanhood." Whilst their lifeworld inscribes them within a locally defined space of modernity and self-realization, they are not fully actualized as Muslim women due to their exclusion from marriage markets and, by extension, legitimate motherhood. Through their overt display of Islamic practice and their participation into newly created Islamic youth associations, they position themselves as "marriageable women" in light of marriage practices that generally favour younger and less formally educated women. The locally articulated Arabized version of Islam is at the core of their inclusion into local and transnational matrimonial markets.
The article analyzes the evolution of Islam in Côte d’Ivoire in the light of the profound changes that have taken place in the country since independence in 1960 and up to the present day. The author explores the reasons for the rapid increase in the number of Islamized residents compared to other West African countries, especially during the first 30 years of independent development. This was a period of awakening of the collective consciousness and organizational cohesion of Ivorian Muslims. The second stage, since the first multiparty elections in the early 1990s, is associated with the politicization of religion, with a new form of Islamic religious culture, especially in cities - proselytism. The tariqas, due to their lack of organization, play a secondary role in the modern history of the Muslim societies of Côte d’Ivoire. In addition, the modernization processes have further weakened their influence. Spiritual brotherhoods did not become a barrier to the spread of reformist teachings that were associated with Sunni Islam, a departure from Sufi spirituality. The reformist elite of the Ivorian Muslim community made extensive use of the Quranic concept of da'wa in their religious propaganda, with its ideology borrowed from the Arab-Islamic world. Its main goal was the re-islamization of Muslim society, the introduction of political Islam. The paper examines the problems of relations between Ivorian Muslims and Christians, which have not always been peaceful, especially during periods of military and political crises, when they were intertwined with ethnic ones. The coming to power in 2011 of A.Ouattara, the first Muslim president, contributed to the preservation of a stable balance between faiths thanks to his clerical policy.
Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals - including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor - played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history.