Among the 18 districts of Odienné, a secondary town of northern Côte d'Ivoire, the district of "Texas" is known to host the highest concentration of bars called "maquis". When darkness falls this residential neighbourhood turns into a space for entertainment, pleasure and business. This chapter explores this effervescence of the forbidden (haram) in the context of a town in which public life is dominantly framed by Islam. It shows how the evolution of Texas by night reveals the centrality of urban margins for their implicit function of making possible the cohabitation of various lifestyles.
This essay examines the dangers and possibilities, in times of transformation, for the practice of Islamic blessing powers called albaraka by women and men ritual specialists and other leaders among the Tuareg of Niger and Mali, West Africa. Sociopolitical dynamics challenge some arrangements that have underwritten traditional albaraka power. In this scenario, prominent men and women who protect and mediate the Tuareg world from threatening outsiders draw on this force in diverse ways.
In this article, I propose to look at how class belonging, and shared notions of good religiosity are intertwined in the context of current ways to assert oneself as a “good Muslim.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019 in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, this article presents a series of portraits of women and their families. These portraits emphasize how the growing popularity of tourist travels towards so-called “Muslim societies” in the Arab world, and more recently in Morocco, plays a role in the construction of “good religiosity” as it is enmeshed in social class relations. The ethnographic data discussed in this article shows that travel consumption asserts class belonging as well as shared notions of “good religiosity.” To draw out this argument, I propose to revisit in a critical way Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of conspicuous consumption as processes of social distinction.
After an ill-fated religious revival, the Sufi teacher Yacouba Sylla and his followers became wealthy and politically influential in post-Second World War Côte d'Ivoire. They argued for an understanding of democratization and development that defined both ideas in terms of their community's own mystical experiences and world-historical significance, rather than in terms of modernity. As a way of making sense of their own past and defending their place in an increasingly tense political environment, these efforts achieved their most explicit articulation in a powerful story about Yacouba Sylla's refusal of a gift from Ivoirian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
The Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey (UAM), marked at the beginning of its creation in the 1970s by Marxist-Leninist ideologies, has experienced since the end of the 1980s a rise in student religious practices organised by Christian and Muslim student religious associations. Based on a qualitative approach combining semi-structured interviews and direct and indirect observations, this article focuses, on the one hand, on the establishment of religious associations of Salafi, evangelical and Pentecostal students in this university. On the other hand, it analyses the affirmation of religious identity by these students. Through the dissemination of religious education initiated by these associations through Koranic schools and Bible studies, religiosity has acquired great importance among the students who take part.
Le rapport documente les conditions de vie des civil·e·s vivant dans les villes assiégées du Burkina Faso ou fuyant celles-ci mais aussi les crimes de droit international et les atteintes aux droits humains commis par les groupes armés. Le rapport met également en lumière la réaction des autorités, notamment les violations du droit international humanitaire qu’elles commettent et les restrictions qu’elles imposent à l’assistance humanitaire.
In the village of Todiam, persons accused of a fault come by far to take an oath in the mosque. This ordalic procedure utilizes actors, codes and principles which invite to analyze this oath by regarding it as a /test/ in the sense of pragmatic sociology. From this point of view, and by confronting the speeches to the practice, one questions the conditions of legitimacy and effectiveness of this juratory test, its possible misappropriations and its performatif effects on the social life.
À la suite de l’avènement de la démocratie et de la liberté d’association au Niger au début des années 1990, les étudiants de l’Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey mirent en place des associations confessionnelles afin d’organiser leurs activités religieuses. L’impact significatif du prosélytisme qui s’en est suivi fut la conversion et l’affirmation de l’identité religieuse des étudiants, tant musulmans que chrétiens, dans un espace marqué jadis par les idéologies marxistes-léninistes. Ce chapitre traite de la construction de l’identité religieuse des étudiants salafis et pentecôtistes en se focalisant sur le concept local de la tuba. En partant de l’exemple de deux étudiants, l’un salafi et l’autre pentecôtiste, le texte analyse les trajectoires des étudiants salafis et pentecôtistes et leurs discours respectifs. Ces deux cas constituent des figures de conversion les plus observées parmi les étudiants. Les résultats font ressortir deux figures de convertis : le radical, un converti interne, et le sabon tuba, un converti externe.
