ECAS 2013

Religions are encoded in discursive and circulatory forms through which they are constituted and their claims enabled. Religious services, revival meetings, television programs, mosque lessons, public loudspeakers are just some of the myriad ways in which religions are made manifest in the world. As they do so they enter into public engagement with other religious movements within and across religions as well as with a broader secular world. I have been interested in what happens when those forms are promiscuous - when one religious public takes the discursive forms used to constitute another public. Sometimes these forms are labile so that the 'borrowing' from one realm to another goes unremarked. At other times there is an immanence between a form and the theologies that animate it so that any borrowing becomes a metareflexive commentary. In this paper I wish to examine how the emergence of forms used to constitute a secular public were adopted by Muslim reformists in northern Nigeria and, later, how new Islamic movements came to use the genres, speech forms, and institutional arrangements of evangelical Christianity as part of the constitution of Islamic revival. I examine this through practices of loudspeaker use and of religious evangelizing.

The proposed paper presents an ethnographic case study to explore the rise and expansion of "Chrislam", a series of religious movements that mix Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices in their socio-cultural and political setting in Nigeria's former capital Lagos. Nigeria is an interesting context in which to study Chrislam because its population, which is almost equally divided between Christians and Muslims, has increasingly become involved in religious violence. However, my paper illustrates that religious clashes are just one aspect of Christian-Muslim manifold relations in Nigeria. Lagos presents a challenging site for mapping the spiritual means that Chrislam offers its worshippers to deliver them from the socio-political anxiety and economic hardships that characterize their everyday lives. At a time when born-again Christianity and reformist Islam are among the world's fastest-growing religious traditions, this paper suggests that the expansion of Chrislam has to be seen as a part of a wider move towards "Islamic Pentecostalism". Placing Chrislam worshippers' perceptions of their own religiosity and their lived experiences at centre stage, it questions conventional assumptions of Christian-Muslim interactions in terms of a "clash of civilizations" and focuses instead on the convergence between the two religious traditions, thereby crossing boundaries and blurring sharp distinctions.