This essay is an ethnographic response to Habermas’s estimation of the place of religion in the political public sphere. It examines a network of initiated hunter-healers, called dozos, in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. Since the 1990s, they have drawn on their ritual practices to integrate themselves into Ivoirian public life, often to controversial effect. Their success in this regard, mitigated as it has been, has seen them transform into semi-official security agents and, subsequently, rebel soldiers. These developments follow a history of participation in a precolonial, West African public sphere that oriented dozos toward difference, an openness that continues to infuse their rituals. Because dozos drew on ritual practice to define their security-related and military roles, they introduced religion into the Ivoirian public sphere in unexpected and innovative ways. But because their ritual practices have long mediated their devotion to both Islam and their professed encounters with spirits and other invisible forces in the forest, dozos’ so-called “religion” contains within it dialogical elements that have contributed to broadening the political public sphere in Côte d’Ivoire. Their activities ultimately inspire an alternative definition of religion that concedes the possibility of the public sphere’s encompassment within religion as much as religion’s potential integration into the public sphere.
Muslim Religiosity in Times of Covid-19 in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire: A Dialogue between Health Norms and Religious Practices. — The Covid-19 pandemic led to the adoption of exceptional measures that significantly transformed religious practices at the end of the first quarter of 2020. These transformations included the closing of places of worship, and later the adoption of strict sanitary measures (physical distancing and the limitation of people allowed in public spaces, ban on physical contact) led to the adoption of creative religious practices by Muslim religious leaders in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. However, these practices were diversely appreciated by Muslims: while organizations catering to Muslim civil servants and political and administrative elites strictly adhered to the rules, Muslim traders and youth from popular classes strongly contested the measures.
This volume examines religiosity on university campuses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on both individuals and organized groups, the contributions open a window onto how religion becomes a factor, affects social interactions, is experienced and mobilized by various actors. It brings together case studies from various disciplinary backgrounds (anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies) and theoretical orientations to illustrate the significance of religiosity in recent developments on university campuses. It pays a particular attention to religion-informed activism and contributes a fresh analysis of processes that are shaping both the experience of being student and the university campus as a moral space. Finally, it sheds light onto the ways in which the campus becomes a site of a reformulation of both religiosity and sociality.
À première vue, les récentes actions terroristes en Côte d'Ivoire et au Burkina Faso ont laissé croire à une radicalisation de l'islam dans ces deux pays. Cependant, la grande attention médiatique portée sur ces craintes et les nombreuses analyses qui ont été publiées sur les risques d'une montée de l'extrémisme, bien qu'elles soient importantes, éclipsent d'autres dynamiques récentes et plus anciennes caractérisant l'islam ivoirien et burkinabè. Il s'agit de présenter un portrait plus nuancé et dans la longue durée des réalités caractérisant ces communautés musulmanes, qui sont moins couvertes, mais plus prégnantes telles que la participation des musulmans issus de catégories sociales d'ordinaire marginalisées, principalement les jeunes et les femmes, dans les mutations de l'islam à travers leur engagement militant.
À travers une étude comparative des cas ivoirien et burkinabè, cette thèse entend donc emprunter une avenue encore peu exploitée en proposant une recherche sur des cadets sociaux, appartenant à des modèles culturels différentiés (francophone/arabophone, islam fondamentaliste/réformiste, etc.). Nous verrons de quelles manières ces acteurs, depuis les années 1970, sont parvenus à renégocier les rapports de pouvoir et les modalités hiérarchiques, voire à les bousculer, pour revendiquer une place plus importante dans le champ religieux et la sphère publique au point de reconfigurer progressivement des associations islamiques nationales. Trois grandes hypothèses sont défendues.
D'abord, la première hypothèse pose que jusqu'à la fin des années 1980, les cadets restèrent grandement en retrait des principales associations islamiques, qui étaient dominées par des ainés sociaux tant en Côte d'Ivoire qu'au Burkina Faso, sans que cela soit à l'origine de véritables tensions ouvertes ou de conflits intergénérationnels. Au cours de cette période, la prépondérance des rivalités sur la base de la « politique du ventre » entre dirigeants d'organisations islamiques des deux pays consolida la position des ainés, qui maitrisaient les procédures administratives de l'État tout en pouvant mettre de l'avant des stratégies d'extraversion. Dans ce contexte, l'émergence d'une nouvelle cohorte de jeunes arabisants ivoirien et burkinabè ne permit pas un renouvèlement des leaders associatifs malgré l'important capital religieux dont ils disposaient.
Une deuxième hypothèse défend l'idée que des jeunes et des femmes jouèrent un rôle plus significatif au sein de l'islam associatif ivoirien et burkinabè à partir des années 1990 et 2000, à la faveur de négociations, de compromis et de coopération entre ainés et cadets dans le cadre d'un processus sinueux marqué par des avancées – beaucoup plus importantes en Côte d'Ivoire – et des reculs selon les structures associatives. Dans les deux pays, les cadets des organisations de musulmans francophones bénéficièrent d'un cadre particulièrement favorable pour exprimer leur agencéité. À partir des années 2000, les changements survenus dans les mouvements salafistes des deux pays et la grande place faite aux jeunes et aux femmes dans des radios islamiques, surtout en Côte d'Ivoire, illustrèrent bien le fait que les ainés furent aussi amenés à revoir les responsabilités dévolues aux cadets dans la da‘wa. Cependant, les relations entre les ainés et les cadets au sein des structures reconnues comme étant les principales interlocutrices des musulmans auprès de l'État furent particulièrement évocatrices du caractère encore grandement gérontocratique de l'islam au Burkina Faso contrairement à la Côte d'Ivoire.
Enfin, la dernière hypothèse postule que la maitrise du langage de l'État et le savoir religieux ne sont plus suffisants pour s'affirmer dans le champ de plus en plus concurrentiel des associations musulmanes et revendiquer la légitimité de pouvoir s'exprimer au nom de la « communauté ». Si le savoir religieux demeure important, la légitimité et l'autorité des responsables d'organisations islamiques découlent de plus en plus de la capacité à véhiculer un « islam civil » et à s'engager sur le plan du développement socioéconomique. Ce phénomène, qui eut pour conséquence de favoriser entre autres la montée de jeunes scolarisés dans le système éducatif francophone, se manifesta beaucoup plus rapidement en Côte d'Ivoire qu'au Burkina Faso.
L'arrivée au pouvoir en 2011 d'un président issu d'un lignage malinké musulman a ouvert un nouveau chapitre dans les relations antérieurement mouvementées entre islam et État. Les grands imams d'Abidjan, à la tête des organisations islamiques nationales, sont dans une proximité intime du pouvoir et régulièrement sollicités. Ils cumulent en retour diverses largesses. De nombreux cadres issus des associations islamiques se sont élevés dans la hiérarchie du régime. La verve des imams, jadis ardente pour dénoncer les travers des autorités, s'en est trouvée émoussée ; dans le même temps, la redistribution communautaire est grippée. Alors que les difficultés sociales de la majorité musulmane restent entières, la contestation gronde, quoique hors du registre de la « radicalisation ».
The hunting songs of the majority-Muslim, Odienné region of Northwestern Côte d'Ivoire accomplish more than meets the ear. They conjoin and distinguish Muslim goals and ostensibly non-Muslim hunting practices. The musical repertoire of my host, Dramane Coulibaly, is illustrative. This study examines the role that Dramane's songs played in motivating initiated dozo hunters to kill game during dozo funerals, a primary concern for dozos at these events. Next, it analyzes the structure and content of Dramane's songs in relation to the embodied, emplaced, and material dimensions of dozo funerals, where Dramane's performances served to calm the spirits of the dead so that they would leave the living in peace. Finally, it examines the musical aspects of Dramane's songs in relation to Islam, with the aim of broadening the study of Islam in West Africa and beyond to encompass the texts and performance practices of dozo funerals.
Les difficultés des États sahéliens et des acteurs internationaux à enrayer les activités des groupes armés djihadistes expliquent que des nuages sombres s’amoncellent autour de certains pays côtiers ouest-africains. Comment y faire face ?
In 1973 the Muslim Dyula of northern Cote d'Ivoire, in their quarter of Korhogo town or in the villages, listened to the radio and might occasionally see an Italian 'western' at the cinema. Television was an exotic rarity; cassettes were a novelty. By 1984 television was ubiquitous; households that had not been interested in radio were now enthusiastic about watching television in the evening. Cassettes had become even more common than radios, and tapes were pirated and copied. The shift from radio and film to television and cassettes brought religion more fully into the forefront of the electronic media. For Muslims, religious cassettes consisted of sermons or 'recitations' in Dyula. Sermons, given in the open air and accompanied by refreshments, are festive occasions, a spectacle where the audience expects to be entertained. The form of the sermon bears a striking resemblance to Mande epic recitation, and are readily taped by individuals in the audience, to be listened to as entertainment; they are not a commercial commodity. Sermons on television, however, have very different requirements:t he Thursday evening Muslim 'show' has younger, Saudi-oriented clerics who are not allowed to ramble; the 'show' is tightly scripted, with precise times allotted; clerics read from a text rather than quote from memory,e xtempore.D espite the generationald ivide in tastes and styles, the two genres still coexist side by side-though for how long?
Cet ouvrage est le résultat d'une enquête de terrain, méthodiquement et objectivement menée par l'auteur entre le Mali et la Côte d'Ivoire. Ses entretiens avec des spécialistes, des recrues au Mali et ses contacts avec l'administration sécuritaire des Etats ouest-africains, particulièment la Côte d'Ivoire, lui ont permis de faire un état des lieux de l'évolution et du profil du terrorisme en Afrique de l'Ouest.
This article examines recent developments of Salafism in Côte d'Ivoire by exploring how the movement has evolved over the last 25 years through its main national associations and leaders. Although the situation with regard to terrorism has changed in this country since the attack in Grand-Bassam on 13 March 2016, the intent of this article is to move beyond a reductive focus on security and counterterrorism by painting a more-nuanced portrait of one local manifestation of a global movement often reduced to violence and conflict. Far from becoming radicalized and despite increasing levels of activism, the country's Salafi elites and main national associations have demonstrated civic engagement and opposition to terrorism. They also increased their participation in the socioeconomic arena as well as their willingness to act as a key intermediary between the Muslim community and the country's political leadership.
Under what conditions does religion become a salient social identity? By measuring religious attachment among the people living astride the Burkina Faso–Côte d'Ivoire border in West Africa, an arbitrary boundary that exposes otherwise similar individuals to different political contexts, this article makes a case for the importance of the political environment in affecting the weight that people attach to their religious identities. After ruling out explanations rooted in the proportion of different religious denominations, the degree of secularization and the supply of religious institutions on either side of the border, as well as differences in the degree of religious pluralism at the national level, it highlights the greater exposure of Ivorian respondents to the politicization of religion during Côte d'Ivoire's recent civil conflict. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the power – and challenges – of exploiting Africa's arbitrary borders as a source of causal leverage.
In the past 30 years, in Côte d'Ivoire, Islamic institutions have significantly changed in scope and magnitude, leading to the emergence of new practices and definitions of Islam. In the context of these transformations, young Muslims have acquired a growing public voice in the definition of Muslimhood through the growth of neighbourhood-based Islamic youth associations and Franco-Arabic schools (madersas). In the city of Bouaké, Islamic practices are divided between Wahhabiyya and non-Wahhabiyya, as well as between ‘syncretic' and ‘Arabized' notions. In a context of competing sources and notions of Islamic knowledge, young Muslim men and women's claims of legitimacy are made through modalities of schooling. These young people assert an Arabized version of Islam based on the formal acquisition of the Arabic language, allowing for the reading and understanding of the Qur'an in Arabic. This article argues that knowledge claims made by young Muslims allow them to reckon with local power relations embedded in gerontocracy, as well as the social divisions brought about by ancestral ties and ethnicity. This argument needs to be connected with the history of Qur'anic and Western-style schooling in Côte d'Ivoire, highlighting the differing locales of knowledge acquisition as well as the competing forms of knowledge, ranging from mnemonic knowledge to Western-style classroom teaching. The empirical data presented here were gathered in neighbourhood-based Islamic youth associations and madersas between 1992 and 1995, and in 1998.
Faced with jihadist breakthrough in Burkina Faso, neighbouring states in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea increasingly fear attacks in their own territories. These countries should improve intelligence sharing, strengthen border controls and regain the trust of local populations.
The word dyula means 'trader' in the Manding language. It is also the name of certain Manding-speaking ethnic minorities in parts of northern Ivory Coast, who, for centuries before the advent of colonial rule, enjoyed a virtual trading monopoly over the local region. In the first part of this book Robert Launay describes two Dyula communities prior to the twentieth-century colonial period: he discusses the regional symbiosis between Dyula traders and Senufo farmers; the organization of Dyula activity; and the division of the communities into relatively small clan wards with high rates of in-marriage. The second part examines the ways in which both communities have adapted to the recent loss of their trading monopoly, and the strategies they have employed, such as emigration, the assimilation of Western education and the adoption of new occupations, to carve out a new economic niche for themselves. As an account of the incorporation of 'traditional' community into a modern town, the book will be of interest to anthropologists and others concerned with development and modernisation in Africa and the Third World.
This text focuses on Turkey’s religious diplomacy in Côte d’Ivoire, a West African country where Islam has experienced significant growth in recent decades. Through the prism of a Soft Power, this cooperation opened Ivorian Islam – dominated by the Maliki and Salafi currents – to the religious tradition of Turkey. This process was marked by the transfers of practices as well as of religious objects, materials for the construction of mosques and support for socio-economic development initiatives. This study is mainly based on fieldwork carried out in Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan, Bouaké and Korhogo) and Turkey (Istanbul). In addition, a digital ethnography conducted from social networks, in particular Facebook, was used.