AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	14. New Modes of Sociality in Muslim Africa
Paper ID	228
Author(s)	Zappa, Francesco
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Recently, considerable academic attention has been devoted to the transformations of Islamic education and genres of religious writing in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to the emergence of new forms of mass-mediated religious communication, including sermons and sessions of Qur'anic exegesis broadcast on radio and TV or marketed through audio-cassettes and videos. Most commentators assume that such mass-mediated forms of religious communication have been a privileged platform for the staging of reformist discourses, frequently exhibiting a strong puritanical strain, as well as bias against 'local' forms of religiosity. In this paper, I focus on cases of non-scholarly genres of oral Islamic texts, which do not promote reformist views about the modernization of religious attitudes. Examples considered include audio recordings of epic texts in Bambara praising past and present Muslim religious leaders, which are sold throughout Mali, and public sessions of what we may call "Hausa narrative tafsir", a kind of street dramatization and form of entertainment performed in the “non-places” of suburban Kano in Nigeria. Both of these genres have a "traditional" outlook, and pre-date recent transformations in the modalities of construction, socialization, and consumption of Islamic meaning. Yet, in this rapidly changing context, they might take on a new role (while in some cases their circulation is even enhanced by mediatization), insofar as they interact in creative ways with more formalized means of Islamic expression and engage in a lively and sometimes polemical way in the debates that animate the increasingly globalized African Islamic arena.

"Traditional" non-scholarly genres of oral Islamic texts in an increasingly globalized West Africa: cases studies from Mali and Nigeria