La grave crise qu'a connue la Côte d'Ivoire peut, à la faveur de cette fin de confit, être considérée comme l’occasion pour l’Ivoirien de faire un examen de conscience. Ainsi, au-delà des analyses socio-politique, psychologique, philosophique, etc., il importe d’insister sur l’analyse spirituelle, c’est-à-dire de réexaminer les rapports de l’homme avec Dieu son Créateur. Une telle réflexion amène les Ivoiriens à voir ce qu’ils ont en commun et de différent et à voir comment ils ont “utilisé "ces différences et ces caractères communs. En somme, comment ils se sont “regardés ’’ : nordistes et sudistes, chrétiens et musulmans, etc., alors que tous sont issus d’Adam.
Mais loin de nous enferrer dans les erreurs passées. Il faut voir à présent ce que doit être notre attitude les uns vis-à-vis des autres pour une Côte d'Ivoire plus unie et pour des perspectives nouvelles de cohabitation pacifique. Pour ce faire, nous verrons comment l’homme vit sa foi à travers l’autre, ce que le Saint Coran véhicule comme message universel et enfin ce que la communauté musulmane apporte dans la construction d'une paix véritable en Côte d'Ivoire.
Islamic education appears to have entered a new era at the beginning of the millennium. Recognising twenty-two madrasas in 2011 was the first step of the ministry of Education toward an integration process that started in the 1990s to reform informal religious education. In 2013, the number of establishments meeting the requirements for inclusion in formal education reached one hundred. However, the process has raised questions about the curricula for training teachers and opened the way for negotiations between actors in education. This article analyses public education supply and the dynamics it brought about in these schools as well as among those who promoted integration, through a diachronic study of the trajectory of Islamic schools.
This article analyzes the initiatives of a Muslim convert in northern Côte d'Ivoire, an area where Islam continues to encounter difficulties, despite predating the colonial period. These initiatives are viewed in the context of the military and political crisis that contributed to the country's divi- sion between warring parties (government forces and rebel groups), as well as the local population's growing use of magical-religious practices, verging on paganism. This essay takes an anthropological and historical approach, examining Ousmane Doumbia's background and the context of Islam in Senufo, his region of origin. It thus shows how this religious figure tried to take advantage of the social context created by the crisis to secure a place in the national Muslim community.
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.
Media reports of the rebellion tearing apart C?te d'Ivoire portray the conflict as a rift between a Muslim North and a Christian South. They repeatedly refer to the armed conflict in religious terms by describing the country as split between a government-held area in the Christian and animist South and a rebel-held area in the Muslim North." This cultural/geographical description of the conflict inhibits our understanding of the situation. These newspaper reports echo the divisive statements of politicians and thus serve to widen rifts. In sum, the religious and geographical simplifications by the media do not contribute to our understanding of the conflict. Rather, they insidiously exacerbate it by reinforcing stereotypes and deepening social and political divisions.
Créer des cinémas est un acte exceptionnel pour le fondateur d'une communauté soufie. C'est pourtant ce que fit Yacouba Sylla dans les années 1950-1960. Alors que les cinémas ont disparu du paysage urbain, ses sept anciennes salles sont encore visibles dans les villes où elles furent implantées. Comment fonctionnaient-elles ? De quelle symbolique étaient-elles porteuses ?
This article describes the process of re-Islamization in progress in the region of Odienné, in northern Côte-d'Ivoire. This process began in 1996 when Sheikh Matie Boiké Samassi established a Maouloud (Mawlid an-Nabi) celebration in his village, Kelindjan, by proposing a series of ritual and organizational innovations combining holiness, religious fervor and festivities. Since the attractiveness of Maouloud is becoming more and more evident, the village has become an important religious center that is being invested by other Muslim actors and political entrepreneurs in a context of return to normality following a decade of military-political crisis. With these combined actions, this annual ceremony has become institutionalized in a "Mega Maouloud" modeled on the Malian and Senegalese celebrations, albeit to a lesser extent. Based on a diachronic approach, this study analyzes how these pious encounters have evolved over time into a space of free exchange about the secular and temporal problems of the region.
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).
This article explores the hunting aesthetics of initiated Jula hunters of Côte d'Ivoire who call themselves 'dozos'. It explains how their hunting aesthetic structures their relationship to Islam and the Ivoirian State. Although many Africans approach Islam in the context of tensions between local ritual traditions and modernizing Muslim reform, 'dozos' approach Islam the way they approach the forests where they hunt, assimilating to both in order to tame them. They organize their hunting activities around an aesthetic centred on notions of sweetness and fullness; their contraries, difficulty and emptiness; and the process of mimetic transformation (shape-shifting) that mediates between these extremes. With these categories 'dozos' assimilate themselves to and appropriate power from the forest to kill game. They also link themselves to pre-Qur'anic Muslim figures to legitimize themselves as Muslims. More recently, they tried to assimilate to the Ivoirian State to become a parallel police force. Stories of their tutelary spirit, Manimory, and the texts of their hunting songs, incantations, and epics encode diverse ways for 'dozos' to relate to Islam, leaving room for 'dozos' to eschew it as well. Their texts reveal a dynamic sense of history that defies classification in terms of tradition, modernity or postmodernity. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French.
There are many ways one might approach the study of Muslims as minorities in a given region. One theme of this paper on Muslim minorities in West Africa is Muslim involvement in artistic traditions both on an individual and a group level. This is illustrated with the case of Lamidi Fakeye, a Muslim Yoruba carver living in Nigeria. Fakeye is adamant that maintaining and enriching the artistic traditions of his people need not be incompatible with life as a pious Muslim. A second theme of this paper is stability and transformation in communities where Muslims as minorities live either in orthopraxis (upright practice) or in a 'mixed' state. This theme is illustrated with the cases of the city of Bonduku, located in the Akan State of Gyaman which today lies in eastern Côte d'Ivoire, where Muslim minority communities moved towards orthopraxis, and Bole, located northeast of Bonduku in the Gonja State, which is today in northern Ghana. Bole is an example of a Muslim community which sought to establish orthopraxis in an independent community, but failed. Attention is paid to one other pattern of relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims which is known today in the area west of the Black Volta region, where Muslims are involved in masking cults ('gbain'), which are used as mechanisms for controlling antisocial behaviour.
This article focuses on the use of digital media in the religious practices of Muslims in Côte d'Ivoire, within the context of increased visibility of Islam in public space since the onset of political pluralism in 1990. It sheds light on the coming of Muslim in the media and digital age, marked by a plurality of channels of communication including Facebook, the social network with the largest amount of users in this West African country. Following a descriptive rather than a theoretical approach, this study analyzes Muslims online activities (meetings, exchanges, da'wa, etc.) through the multiple opportunities offered by Facebook.
Depuis le début des années quatre-vingt-dix, l'élite réformiste de la communauté musulmane de Côte-d'Ivoire s'est inspirée du concept de da'wa, ou " appel à l'islam ", pour réorganiser et rénover toute la sphère islamique, engendrant en douceur une véritable révolution religieuse. Cet article s'interroge sur le processus par lequel la da'wa, notion coranique classique récemment redynamisée par la théologie dominante du monde arabo-islamique, a été réappropriée et transformée par les musulmans ivoiriens. L'environnement local, l'expérience de la modernité et le christianisme ont en effet influencé à des degrés divers la relecture ivoirienne de la da'wa. Cette synthèse culturelle et religieuse originale atteste de la participation des musulmans ivoiriens au phénomène de mondialisation du fait islamique contemporain et dissocie la globalisation d'une stricte uniformisation. La radicalité des changements introduits par la da'wa en Côte-d'Ivoire est illustrée par les efforts de rationalisation et de professionnalisation du prosélytisme ainsi que par l'accent mis sur l'action sociale et économique. Cet article montre combien cette évolution marque, à tous égards, une profonde rupture historique.
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.
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?
The nativist ideology of ivoirité of the 1990s generated brutal discriminatory policies against those labelled as ‘strangers', especially Muslims. Reversing that perspective, this article focuses on the interface between religion and national identity in twentieth-century Côte d'Ivoire from within Muslim society. The argument is divided into two parts. The first puts forward the counter-hegemonic, patriotic-cum-cosmopolitan narratives that a new Muslim leadership formulated in order to write Islam into national history. The second focuses on grass-roots, demotic, day-to-day realities. It explores Muslim takes on belonging and alienation in practice, paying careful attention to the community's internal diversity. It shows how, over time, Ivorian Muslims have showcased varying degrees of cosmopolitan patriotism but also of their own, local xenophobia. The concluding section returns to the new Muslim leadership and its multifaceted endeavours to reconcile Muslim lived experiences with their cosmopolitan patriotic aspirations. The article ends with a short epilogue surveying the violent armed conflicts of the period 2002 to 2011 and how Muslims were a part of them.
