In Benin, the general furor surrounding the 2019 legislative elections held without opposition parties caused many to overlook the fact that Ibrahim Ousmane, a wellknown imam from Cotonou, was ultimately elected to the National Assembly. His decision to run in the elections had sparked intense debates over political participation, the criteria used to select the community’s “legitimate” representatives, and, more broadly, the nature of Islamic religious authority in a minority context. In this article, I use the controversy that erupted in 2019 as a starting point for exploring disputes within Benin’s Muslim community and the dilemmas of Muslim minority politics. These disputes center on how its members can engage with national politics to promote their collective interests and maintain their political autonomy from the state. The crisis can also be understood in terms of a “generational” struggle for religious authority, in a context where there are competing sources of legitimacy.
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.
Since 2013, when it sent troops to Mali, France has led international efforts to root out Islamist militancy from the Sahel. Yet the jihadist threat has grown. Paris and its partners should reorient their military-centred approach toward helping improve governance in the region.
In the early 1990s, the newly built women's cooperative in Zinder, Niger, was destroyed by a group of men who accused women of failing to adhere to 'Islamic principles'. During the same period, a number of bars were damaged and subsequently closed. These events were generally viewed as marking the rise of 'Islamic fundamentalism'. However, no one could identify this group that had been labelled 'fundamentalists'. The present article takes a discourse-centred approach to an understanding of how Zinderois define what it means to be a Muslim. To do this, it analyses 'forms of knowledge' that represent different ways of defining Islamic practice and Muslim identity, namely, those of Koranic scholars ('malamai'), leaders of an Islamic reform movement, and traditional healers ('bokaye'). The 'malamai', reformers and 'bokaye' define Islamic practice and Muslim identity in different ways. Historically, it was the 'malamai' who used the label 'non-Muslim' to refer to 'bokaye'. But today, the 'malamai' find themselves being labelled 'non-Muslims' by the reformers. Majority Muslims draw upon these various forms of knowledge in different ways depending on the situation and in so doing display religious creativity and innovation.
This article is an attempt to come to grips with the Hausa people's use of the mosque as a political bargaining chip in contestations over the legitimacy of and use of power in Maradi. The reader should be aware that while the subject of this cursory foray into Hausa politics is the village of Jiratawa, there are many regional and national implications to the events examined in this article. The work itself deals with three consecutive Friday mosques in the village and the political machinations surrounding them.
