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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007 African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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The marketing of "traditional" Islamic literary skills in globalizing Nigeria
Panel |
14. New Modes of Sociality in Muslim Africa
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Paper ID | 229 |
Author(s) |
Brigaglia, Andrea
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Paper |
No paper submitted
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Abstract | The profound educational changes which have occurred in Muslim West Africa since the colonial period and the increased use of new media technologies by new religious actors have markedly influenced local scholarly communities. Research has already drawn attention to the extent to which the curricular exigencies of modern (Islamic as well as secular) schools have challenged the ideological configuration and the epistemological basis of mainstream Islamic scholarship in the region. In additon, the opening of a new market for mass-mediated forms of religious knowledge has helped to undermine the economy of more traditional circuits of knowledge production and consumption.
In this paper, I show that there are some permeable spaces between old and new circuits of Islamic knowledge in which "traditional", supposedly local and decreasingly important forms of Islamic scholarship and writing have actually been revived, re-valued and improved by the presence of a modern and global market of Islamic knowledge. I consider three examples from contemporary Kano: the manuscript-writer Sharif Bala's re-marketing of his calligraphic skills; the intersections of modern (university or college) and traditional (majlis) education in the careers of young students; and the rising phenomenon of the publication of Hausa translations of books of the majlis curriculum by the actors of the traditional educational system. Building upon a self-consciously "traditional" aesthetics, locally-trained Kano 'ulama seem to have been able to protect and even re-enhance their presumably endangered role within a more diversified Islamic arena.
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