African muslims are actively transcending national and even continental boundaries to organize their faith and their lives. The panel will examine various instances of such transafrican movements and exchanges that, in the course of the last decades, have come to depend less on the personal networks of Islamic scholars but are increasingly organized by traders, migrants and western-trained intellectuals.
Colonial policies on religion were based on assumptions of a specificity of 'African Islam'. Assisted by anthropological and historical research, colonial administrations were keen on keeping the African Muslims apart from the ideologies prevailing in the Arab world. After political Independence, it seemed as if the new values of secularism were irreversibly inscribed in African societies and were never to be contested again as it was happening in Asia. Recent research is pointing out, however, that Africa is far from being bypassed by 'Islamic revisionalism' and processes of globalization. To the contrary, African muslims are actively transcending national and even continental boundaries in order to organize their religious, social, economic and political lives. They are connected as much with Europe and the Middle East as with South and Southeast Asia. Today, their transafrican movements and exchanges are no longer depending on the personal networks of ulama (Islamic scholars), but are organized in many cases by traders and workers as well as by intellectuals and politicians trained in a western way. The panel's papers will focus on these new trends. They will deal with the entanglement of faith and translocal practice in reconstructions of Islam as well as in the 'invention of everyday life'.
The paper analyses the underlying factors and far-reaching consequences of the drastic ideological and political transformation of the Sudanese Mahdiyya since the turn of the 20th century.This demonstrates that Islam could be properly understood as an inclusive and accommodative religion.
Founded in 1981 by a goup of Kuwaitis, the African Muslim Agency is probably the only arab NGO for development and Islamization whose activities are exclusively devoted to Sub-saharan Africa. The paper will try to draw up the evolution of this NGO, its main activities and the present state of the latter after September 11, 2001.
The 1990s were a period of intense political activism in Kenya. The Moi regime found itself beleaguered. Together with other opposition forces, Muslim activists mounted a direct challenge. Their political activism led to repression which in turn led many to leave.The result has been communities of Muslim exiles in Canada, Britain and the US.
Based on a case study of Senegalese in Germany, the paper shows how the Senegalese (mostly Mourids) have been driven by economic necessity to extend their local and later regional (West-African) mobility into transafrican commercial networks, and how religion has been a catalyst in the process.