In Togo, the opposition movement behind the anti-government protests that broke out in 2017–2018 appears to reflect a greater role for Islam in politics. Tikpi Atchadam, leader of the Parti National Panafricain, was the preeminent figure in the movement, having built a solid grassroots base among his fellow Muslims. This article examines the unique role that Muslim leaders played in these protests, as well as the Faure Gnassingbé regime's strategic response. The ruling party made spurious claims against Muslim opponents, associating them with a dangerous wave of political Islam. I argue that by portraying Atchadam as the leader of a radical ethnic and religious movement with Islamist goals, Faure Gnassingbé and his supporters sought to weaken this emerging challenger and deter members of the public from backing calls for political change. The strategy also helped garner support from Western countries while simultaneously driving a wedge between Muslim community leaders.
This article presents a synthetic, historical-cum-anthropological overview of the collective trajectory of Ivoirian converts to Islam from southern autochthonous lineages who can be referred to—albeit unsatisfyingly—as ‘native' Muslims. It focuses on what is effectively an invisible and silent minority within southern native groups and the majority Dioula Muslim society alike: a community that has barely received any attention from social scientists despite the transformative impact of its slow but steady Islamization process. The study aims first at shedding light on salient socio-religious and political aspects of this group's development, from colonial to postcolonial times. Given that this plural group is situated at the crossroads of various ethnic, national, and religious controversies, having enflamed Côte d'Ivoire in olden days as much as in recent years, the article eventually makes use of this group's distinct prism to question the contested Ivoirian interface between Islam, ethnic geography, and nationalism at large, and attempt some nuanced answers.
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.
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.
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 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.
The minority status of the Ahmadiyya is linked to the doctrine of this movement, described by some as heterodox, by others as non-Islamic, but also in connection to their minority demographics, whether in Burkina Faso, the country under scrutiny here, or within the overall Muslim population. The article examines the special case of the Ahmadiyya to answer general issues regarding the transnational expansion of Muslim minorities and their use of media in the struggle for recognition and participation in national public spheres. The description of the iconographic aesthetics of this Muslim missionary minority, in particular the use of the portraits of the charismatic leaders, is used to analyse the challenges of its self-representation towards the Muslim majority worldwide. The analysis of Ahmadiyya's iconographic discourse highlights that the charismatic aesthetics makes individuals sense the power of the caliphate in their intimacy. It also emphasises the tensions related to their mediatised selfrepresentation.
The article, in a chronological manner, presents the academic literature from the initial studies on religions in Burkina Faso in the late 1950s to the present and according to the different subjects covered. The first part dis-cusses the classical works of anthropology of religion, the second part deals with historians' publications on pro-cesses of Islamisation and Christianisation in Burkina Faso. Finally, a third part analyses the publications that focus on religious diversity and contemporary religion as well as the comparative studies of Burkina Faso with other countries in the sub-region. The last part addresses the issue of radicalisation and its reception in research in religions in Burkina Faso. The common thread that runs through the different parts is the emphasis on the interactions between the political and religious situation of the country, researchers' interests and global interest in relations between Muslims and Christians. By way of conclusion, the article proposes a set of questions and initial interpretations that constitute opportunities for further research and new paths of exploration.
