Muslims and New Media in West Africa

Dorothea E. Schulz

Description

Gender, religion, and the new urban economy

Although Islam is not new to West Africa, new patterns of domestic economies, the promise of political liberalization, and the proliferation of new media have led to increased scrutiny of Islam in the public sphere. Dorothea E. Schulz shows how new media have created religious communities that are far more publicly engaged than they were in the past. Muslims and New Media in West Africa expands ideas about religious life in West Africa, women's roles in religion, religion and popular culture, the meaning of religious experience in a charged environment, and how those who consume both religion and new media view their public and private selves.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Overture
1. "Our Nation's Authentic Traditions": Law Reform and Controversies over the Common Good, 1999–2006
2. Times of Hardship: Gender Relations in a Changing Urban Economy
3. Family Conflicts: Domestic Life Revisited by Media Practices
4. Practicing Humanity: Social Institutions of Islamic Moral Renewal
5. Alasira, the Path to God
6. "Proper Believers": Mass-mediated Constructions of Moral Community
7. Consuming Baraka, Debating Virtue: New Forms of Mass-mediated Religiosity
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Islamic Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• África
• General officer
• Anthropology
• Religion
• General
• Islam
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005540
• Langue: English

Extrait

MUSLIMS AND NEW MEDIA IN WEST AFRICA
MUSLIMS AND NEW MEDIA IN WEST AFRICA

PATHWAYS TO GOD
DOROTHEA E. SCHULZ
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2012 by Dorothea E. Schulz

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulz, Dorothea Elisabeth.
Muslims and new media in West Africa: pathways to God / Dorothea E. Schulz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35715-1 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-22362-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00554-0 (electronic book) 1. Islam-Africa, West. 2.Women in Islam-Africa, West. 3. Islam-Mali. 4. Women in Islam- Mali. I. Title.
BP64.A38S38 2012
297.082 96623-dc2
2011025571

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my mother, Dr. Gesina Schulz, and my late father, Dr. Arnold Schulz. And to Gesina fitinin.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Overture
ONE
Our Nation s Authentic Traditions : Law Reform and Controversies over the Common Good, 1999-2006
TWO
Times of Hardship: Gender Relations in a Changing Urban Economy
THREE
Family Conflicts: Domestic Life Revisited by Media Practices
FOUR
Practicing Humanity: Social Institutions of Islamic Moral Renewal
FIVE
Alasira, the Path to God
SIX
Proper Believers : Mass-mediated Constructions of Moral Community
SEVEN
Consuming Baraka, Debating Virtue: New Forms of Mass-mediated Religiosity
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
PREFACE
No, really, now you are losing it, Nanaaa. My long-standing friend Solo, a journalist of considerable renown in his hometown, San, pronounced the second syllable of my local name with a disapproving sigh before he continued. Why should you be interested in these conservative Muslim folks who shout everywhere on the media that they alone are proper believers? Leave her alone, Fatim, Solo s older sister retorted laughingly, why should she not try to understand what these Muslims are after? True, their preachers sometimes exaggerate, and all this body covering they exact from women is just outrageous. But those women I know, who meet in these Muslim women s groups, I find them convincing in their seriousness.
It was a hot and dusty afternoon in January 1998. We were sitting in Solo s courtyard in San, chatting and slowly consuming the typically highly concentrated, dark green and sugary brews of tee chinois. I had just returned to San, a town in southwestern Mali where in 1994 and 1995 I had conducted a survey of radio reception, and was now eager to catch up on family news with Solo and his wife. Our conversation had been in a casual and light tone, until we reached the topic of my new research project. When I mentioned my plan to study the movement of Islamic moral reform that over the last years had gained a striking public presence in towns such as San, Solo, who had been leisurely leaning backward in his chair, abruptly bent forward and said, in an unyielding tone: There is nothing to understand about these Muslim folks, these so-called rightful believers. They are dangerous. They bombard us with their radio lectures seven days a week. Their leaders want to usurp political power and transform society with their conservative, patriarchal morals. As for the many women who support them, I tell you: they only want to have their share of the Arab money that is distributed behind the scene; it s economic interest alone that makes them join the movement.
Alas, this was only the first of many disapproving comments on my new research topic. Over the following weeks and months, other long-standing friends and acquaintances were similarly negative in their responses. Although disappointing, my friends dismissal of the Islamic reform movement also piqued my curiosity: almost unanimously, they explained its origins and success by its-alleged-external, Arab funding. The argument that economic interest alone motivated women to support Muslim leaders and their organizations whose conservative gender morals were detrimental to their own cause did not appear convincing. Too strong was its resemblance to the brainwashing argument frequently employed in depictions of dangerous religious sects in Western society. Also, although my friends frequently alluded to the key role played by audio recording and broadcasting in the propagation of Islamic renewal, it seemed that the transformative effects of these media for existing forms of religious practice and authority needed closer scrutiny. With these questions in mind, I approached several radio preachers as well as female leaders of the Islamic renewal movement to find out about their motivations. In San, in particular, the relatively novel and pervasive presence of signs and sound bites of Islamic piety in public arenas was striking, given that this town had historically never been a place where Muslim religious traditions and families had played an influential role.
This book is about Islamic renewal in West Africa, and about the particular, institutional, symbolic, and material forms it takes in urban arenas of southern Mali. It examines the understandings of religious subjectivity and authority articulated by those men and women who favor an Islamic moral reform of society and self, and analyzes the pivotal role that new media technologies play in these reconfigurations of conventional forms of religiosity. The book is based on eight intensive periods of field research in San, a market center of approximately twenty-five thousand inhabitants located between the Bani and Niger rivers. Here, at a dusty and busy intersection behind the central marketplace, several important roads intersect that connect trading towns in southern Mali and in Burkina Faso to the capital Bamako (to the southwest), and to towns located farther northeast on the road that ultimately leads to neighboring Niger. My research took place between July 1998 and July 2006, and lasted more than sixteen months. Though drawing intensely on research conducted in San, I sought to place my investigation in a broader politico-economic framework and to move beyond ethnographic approaches to the study of Islam in Africa that, based on research in one location, seek to draw far-reaching conclusions about wider societal, political, and religious ramifications and resonances. For this reason, I collected extensive comparative data in three old neighborhoods of the capital Bamako.
An important rationale for choosing San as my first research locale was that in this town, similar to Bamako and most towns of southern Mali, the majority of the population converted to Islam only during the colonial period. Islam, as a discursive tradition, was never as closely associated with the spiritual economy of an established Sufi order as in Nioro, Djenne, and Timbuktu. Much extant research on Islam in Mali has been conducted in these towns with a long history of Muslim erudition. My concern was to assess whether the insights drawn from these studies applied to the numerous urban and semi-urban areas of southern Mali where Muslims, if they were present at all in the early days of colonial rule, had formed a-sometimes negligible-minority. Given the historically and politically marginal position of Islam in towns such as San-a marginality reflected in the absence of prestigious families of religious specialists-I was also curious to know how the present success of reform-minded Muslim leaders in these towns could be explained. 1
Bamako, until the late nineteenth century an insignificant town on the border of the River Niger that gained importance only under French colonial administration, occupies a somewhat special position in the Muslim religious field. Yet Bamako resembles San in that, throughout its colonial history, it never constituted a stronghold for powerful clans of religious specialists. The success of Islamic revivalist trends in Bamako dates back to the 1940s, when it became a hotbed of reformist activities by a younger generation of Muslims whose challenge to conventional practices and credentials of religious authority was influenced by Muslim modernist trends in Egypt and the hejaz. Hence common to the situation in present-day San and Bamako is that, in the absence of a sufficient number of eminent religious specialists and scholars capable of controlling religious interpretation, both urban centers allow various Muslim reform discourses and activities to thrive.
Another chief reason to situate my exploration of Islamic moral renewal in San was that this town typifies other smaller towns of southern Mali, not just in its long-standing coexistence of Muslim and non-Muslim inhabitants but also in its multiethnic composition and the ways that these multiple social identities and religious affiliations played out in the political history prior to colonial rule. San, historically and still today a place where vectors of travel and trade intersect, formed a small settlement within a zone referred to as Bendugu ( meeting place ) that was under the influence of the eighteenth-century kingdom of Segou. In 1898, a few years after the French colonial army had arrived in town (in 1891), Sa