In 2001, the government of Burkinabè launched a major urban renewal project, known as ZACA (Zone d'aménagement commerciale et administrative), in the capital city of Ouagadougou. This decision, which would entail the destruction of several populated neighbourhoods in the downtown core, was vigorously opposed by residents, the vast majority of whom were Musulmans, who were organized into a residents association led by the district imams. Although this religious-oriented protest movement proved to be short-lived and did not lead to a redefinition of the relations between the Islamic community and the state, the events surrounding Project ZACA reveal important changes within the Musulman community, relating to intergenerational tension and the erosion of a certain form of religious authority.
This article evaluates the importance of inter-religious dialogue within young people's religious associations in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso is frequently extolled for its harmonious relations in terms of religion. However, inter-confessional dialogue, demanded by the country's elites, is appropriated in a different way by the core religious actors, notably the young. If some of them adhere to the objectives of dialogue and argue in favour of this, a large portion of the young are more ambivalent, whilst the dynamics of the ruptures and withdrawals are reinforced by social, family and school dynamics.
The returning graduates from the Arabic modernised education system, trained in the universities of the Arab-Islamic world struggle to find a place in Burkina Faso. Interviews of students returning to Ouagadougou after several years spent studying in Islamic universities (in Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia or Libya) will allow us to look at how the academic profiles of these students, shaped by the historical and political context as well as by their existential motivations have affected their professional careers. Parental injunctions and grants have mostly determined the place of study and the subjects, taking part in shaping the professional trajectory. For most, studies turned out to be lengthy and chaotic, and professional opportunities after their return seldom matched the training they had received. Reintegrating these students into the Burkinabè society is problematic. They do not always master French, the official language, and are often excluded from the labour market. They have failed to put pressure on their government for recognition of their diplomas. And they suffer from a denial of recognition that does not lead to open protest.
Le wahhabisme, un courant islamique réformiste, a pénétré le Burkina Faso pendant la colonisation. Ses adeptes, les wahhabiyya, minoritaires au début de l'indépendance, ont participé à l'animation de la Communauté musulmane du Burkina Faso depuis sa création en 1962. Mais, à la suite d'un conflit en 1973 au sein de la Communauté musulmane, le cadre organisationnel unique islamique burkinabé au départ, les wahhabiyya ont créé leur association dénommée Mouvement sunnite. Animée par un engouement remarquable pour la diffusion de l'islam réformiste, cette association des wahhabiyya a été confrontée, de l'intérieur à de multiples difficultés liées en grande partie à un problème de leadership et à une crise de croissance du Mouvement. L'évolution de ces difficultés internes qui a abouti à une fusillade dans une mosquée de Ouagadougou a été marquée par plusieurs facteurs; il s'agit d'une opposition entre élite arabisante et celle des francophones, des considérations de tribalisme, le contexte des années 90 marqué par l'apparition de nouvelles générations d'élites aussi bien arabophone que francophone et le processus démocratique en cours au Burkina Faso. À l'intérieur du Mouvement sunnite, une nouvelle génération des arabisants constitués par ceux qui ont fait leurs études dans les universités arabo-islamiques a réussi pour l'instant à s'affirmer à la direction de l'Association.
A partir du milieu des années 1980, nous avons assisté à une émergence de multiples associations islamiques au Burkina Faso. Parmi celles-ci figure l'« Association islamique ahmadiyya du Burkina Faso ». La référence à la Ahmadiyya renvoie à la doctrine religieuse de Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, apparue à la fin du XIXe siècle en Inde. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad et ses héritiers sont considérés comme des hérétiques en général par les musulmans à l'échelle mondiale, mais nous constatons que, depuis sa création, l'association islamique ahmadiyya prend de plus en plus de l'ampleur au Burkina Faso. Nous avons alors jugé utile de faire une étude pour mettre en relief la genèse, l'évolution et la situation actuelle de la Ahmadiyya dans ce pays.
Aborder une telle question n'est pas chose aisée, car la documentation écrite fait largement défaut. Nous nous sommes appuyés, pour mener une telle étude, sur notre expérience des archives privées des musulmans. Nous avons consulté la presse écrite ainsi que les travaux des chercheurs sur l'islam au Burkina Faso. Plusieurs mémoires de maîtrise de l'université de Ouagadougou nous ont ainsi aidés à cette fin. Les enquêtes orales ont été déterminantes, surtout à propos du milieu des affaires. Cependant, ces enquêtes orales ne nous ont pas permis de collecter des données chiffrées très précises compte tenu du caractère sensible de ce genre d 'informations. Nous manquons donc de statistiques. En dépit de ces contraintes, il est possible de décrire, avec une certaine précision, le rôle et la place des acteurs musulmans dans l'économie burkinabé. Nous allons considérer successivement la position particulière de certains groupes ethniques dans l'histoire du pays, puis la place de l'islam et des musulmans dans l'économie burkinabé contemporaine, pour, enfin, prendre l'exemple d'une grande figure de l'entreprise et des associations islamiques au Burkina, El Hadj Oumarou Kanazoé.
In response to the significant urbanisation and the demographic expansion of Ouagadougou, the Catholic Church and Islamic associations are diversifying their operations, which were already significant in terms of health and education at the end of the 1980s. This social engagement is at the heart of humanitarian, proselytising, socio-economic and political challenges and influences the position of these actors in the public space. This article intends to contribute to consideration of the relations between these religious actors and the State in Burkina Faso with the aim of analysing the sectors of secondary teaching and health in Ouagadougou. It will be demonstrated that the operations of these actors (Muslim and Catholic) made their legitimacy evolve differently in the public space from 1987 to 2010. The Catholic actors have had a greater influence than the Muslims on the decisions of the State. Subsequent to the challenges and the political context, the capacity of agency (capacity to act) of the actors of the two denominations has modified.
A study of Ramatoullaye, the holy city of the Tidjaniyya confraternity in Burkina Faso, allows for analysis of the way its leaders have met with such challenges as : confrontation with the State, links to globalized Islam, cultural change affecting the new generation of adepts. An approach in terms of action theory and opportunism is privileged in the analysis of the confraternity's management of local/global relations.
Jusqu'à la fin du XIXe début XXe siècle, les Moose (Mossi) du Yatenga (région du cercle de Ouahigouya) restent fermement attachés à la religion traditionnelle; l'Islam ne réussit pas à pénétrer dans la cour royale; cependant sur le territoire du Yatenga vivent depuis les XVIe-XVIIe siècles de groupes ethniques musulmans minoritaires et 'étrangers' (Fulbe, Yarse, Marase). Ces groupes jouent dans la société mossi un rôle économique non négligeable (élevage, commerce). L'Islam ne déborde pas ces groupes et reste leur monopole jusqu'au début du XXe siècle. En 1896 le Yatenga est intégré dans le domaine colonial français et pendant la période coloniale la position de l'Islam s'améliore nettement. Involontairement et indirectement le colonisateur français stimule le progres de l'Islam. L'auteur explique cette progression de l'Islam et étudie les rapports entre Musulmans et pouvoir colonial au Yatenga.
Recent studies have described the active participation of women in local associations as well as in public and national debates about secularism, the Family code, and women's rights within Islam. In this article, I explore how female preachers have claimed a new role for women within Islam through a better knowledge and understanding of Islamic texts. In doing so, these women drew on modernist speeches made by men, used the media and aligned themselves with international movements with the aim of claiming a new social identity for their sisters in Islam, establishing greater equality between men and women in the religion, and finding a way of being a good mother and woman while maintaining an independent social position. In fact, these female preachers sought to spark a quiet yet real social revolution in religion by casting a critical and modernist eye on local cultural traditions and Islamic identity.
This article compares the strategies devised by two Salafi-oriented Islamic associations, the Senegal's Jamaatou Ibadou Rahmane (JIR) and the Burkina Faso's Mouvement Sunnite (MS). Drawing on extensive field research conducted between 2002 and 2013, it shows that both organizations have been engaged since the 1970s in a similar legitimacy-building process, using contrasting strategies. The JIR intends to build a more constructive relationship with the State and the brotherhoods, while still continuing to cast a critical eye on these two groups. In Burkina Faso, recurring leadership crises and violent incidents has sapped a great deal of the MS's energy. It therefore has to regain visibility and legitimacy by maintaining a certain distance from political debates. The comparison shows that political Islam has entered in both countries a transitional phase that took into account the emergence and perhaps even the consolidation of a cultural and religious form of citizenship.
From a series of ethnographical grounds led to Dakar and to Ouagadougou, the logics of spiritual ascent of women's various generation's preachers and the social uses that they make as means of communication are examined. This article demonstrates that their ascent results from the link in the community. Although the logic of individuation is highlighted, signs of emphasis of their individuality, without abandoning the community, allow reporting a subtle process of hybridization between individualization and individuation. This prospect is also analyzed through certain speeches of preachers, which reveal how the latter navigate between various registers of agency (compliant agency, pious agency and pious critical agency) according to their distance, resistance or acceptance in front of logics of social reproduction, in front of the standards of religious order and in front of the reports of authority.
Interest in the question of youth and Islam in West Africa stems from the overwhelming demographic weight of youth and their relatively recent incursion into the public domain, as well a wave of Islamic revivalism that has swept across Africa from the late 1970s on. In this paper, we propose to examine the sociopolitical role of young men in Islamic revivalist movements that occurred in urban centers in Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal in the 1980-1990s. Such movements were particularly popular among secularly educated young men who attended French-speaking schools. While the role of young men in revivalist movements suggests new configurations of authority and charisma, their religious agency remains closely embedded within relationships that extend across generations. Here, we examine instances of conflicts between generations and pay attention to sites of negotiation, such as mosques and voluntary associations.
This paper describes the role marabouts played in the rites of implementation and protection of winye animistic communities and institutions. It shows the different meanings these interventions had throughout history, from an older period where Islam was conciliatory and animistic societies dominant (the example of the village of Kwena, end of the xviith century) and a more recent period where Islam was characterized by proselytism and the will to dominate (the village of Boromo, mid-xixth century). It describes the ritual practices and representations that constitute the basis of the encounter between animistic and muslim communities and gives a detailed description of some of the more important winye institutions (earth shrine and earth priest).
The coming of the Internet causes evolutions in the relation to media of religious communities. There is an external will of visibility thanks to the use of Internet as a means of communication and as a mode of presence. On the basis of the example of the Fraternal Union of Believers of Dori in Burkina Faso, our contribution analyses the appropriation of Internet by interreligious actors to come out of their isolation and to play the role of religious peacemaker in the world. The case of UFC shows that if religious people appropriate the Web, the interreligious movement can be mobilized to promote social and political objectives in African public spheres.
L'Église catholique occupe une position privilégiée dans l'espace religieux burkinabé. Ayant très tôt investi l'espace public du pays, elle constitue un acteur incontournable dans le paysage socio-politique du pays comme l'attestent son implication dans les domaines de l'éducation et de la santé et son positionnement comme médiateur lors de périodes de crise. Reposant sur une enquête de terrain menée auprès de membres de la communauté catholique (membres du clergé, religieux et laïcs), cet article étudie la façon dont les catholiques burkinabé se représentent en tant que communauté religieuse dans l'espace politique du pays. Il révèle qu'au Burkina Faso, les catholiques se représentent comme une minorité religieuse dominante sur le plan politique en raison de leur implication sans commune mesure dans l'appareil d'État. L'article montre aussi que les catholiques burkinabé voient leur position dominante être menacée, d'une part, par la concurrence des protestants et, d'autre part, par la montée de l'islamisme.
This essay examines the relationship between Western notions of modernity and Wahhabi-inclined Islamic reform in Ghana and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta until 1984) during the early decades of independence. I will highlight ways in which Western/secular education facilitated the early diffusion of this genre of reform. Over the past decade or so, historians have explored the extent to which the appeal of the Wahhabi movement in urban West Africa, toward the end of French and British colonialism, can be traced to Muslim attempts to find a middle ground between Western "modernity" and authentic spiritual purity. In what follows, I employ comparative, ethnographic, and historical analyses to draw attention to the pivotal roles Western-educated urban Muslim professionals played in the development of this reform. Despite the active participation of these professionals in transforming the Wahhabi message into urban mass movements, scholars have paid scant attention to the factors that drew them to the Wahhabi doctrine in the first instance.
This paper examines the spread of Islam in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) during French colonialism. Focusing on the Tijaniyya Shaykh, Boubacar Sawadogo, and the strategies he pursued to avoid confrontations with the French, the paper interrogates the ways French colonialism inadvertently created a new public religious space that facilitated the unprecedented spread of Islam. Pursuing peaceful strategies of conversion and religious reform, Sawadogo converted an unprecedented number of Mossi, the colony's largest ethnic group, to Islam and laid the foundation for the subsequent growth of Islam in that territory. The Mossi had resisted Islam for several centuries prior to French conquests and the French had reinforced this resistance as part of a broader policy of preventing the spread of Islam in the French federation. An examination of the strategies pursued by Sawadogo to implement his religious visions in spite of the restrictions on Islamic proselytism allows us to re-interrogate the nature of colonial hegemony.
Le dialogue interreligieux est un phénomène transnational lié aux transformations du religieux dans un contexte de globalisation. L'article met l'accent sur une forme particulière des échanges interreligieux : la collaboration pluri-religieuse impulsée par l'État dans le domaine sanitaire au Burkina Faso. Elites religieuses engagées dans un mouvement pluri religieux et pouvoir politique s'unissent pour mettre en scène l'entente religieuse pourvoyeuse de subventions et de reconnaissance. Vis-à-vis des bailleurs de fonds internationaux l'attractivité du dialogue interreligieux, ou de l'image des relations pacifiées entre religions semble offrir des légitimations et une garantie pour la réussite des actions de développement. Des exemples concrets dans le domaine de la santé montrent que lorsque le dialogue interreligieux entre dans l'arène du développement, il devient une stratégie d'autopromotion pour les différents partenaires de ce dialogue. L'article propose d'explorer pourquoi la capacité de collaboration entre différentes communautés religieuses a pu devenir une stratégie de reconnaissance sociale prometteuse.
