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Religious pluralism, as encountered in multi-faith settings such as Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, challenges much of what we have long taken for granted about religion, including the ready-made binaries of Christianity versus Islam, religion versus secularism, religious monism versus polytheism, and tradition versus modernity. In this book, Marloes Janson offers a rich ethnography of religions, religious pluralism and practice in Lagos, analysing how so-called 'religious shoppers' cross religious boundaries, and the coexistence of different religious traditions where practitioners engage with these simultaneously. Prompted to develop a broader conception of religion that shifts from a narrow analysis of religious traditions as mutually exclusive, Janson instead offers a perspective that focuses on the complex dynamics of their actual entanglements. Including real-life examples to illustrate religion in Lagos through religious practice and lived experiences, this study takes account of the ambivalence, inconsistency and unpredictability of lived religion, proposing assemblage as an analytical frame for exploring the conceptual and methodological possibilities that may open as a result.

The Pentecostal movement in Nigeria, with its emphasis on this‐worldly blessings and healing, has become so vibrant that today even Muslim organisations appear to be increasingly ‘Pentecostalised’. Nasrul‐Lahi‐il Fathi Society of Nigeria or NASFAT is a case in point. In an effort to compete with Pentecostalism on Yorubaland‘s religious marketplace, NASFAT has copied Pentecostal prayer forms, such as the crusade and night vigil, while emphasising Muslim doctrine. As such, the case of NASFAT illustrates that religious borrowing does not imply that religious boundaries do not matter: indeed, NASFAT is a powerful example of the preservation of religious differences through the appropriation of Pentecostal styles and strategies. In this spirit, religiously plural movements such as NASFAT prompt us to unlock analytical space in the nearly hermetically sealed anthropologies of Islam and Christianity and to develop a comparative framework that overcomes essentialist notions of religious diversity.

The Tablighi Jamaʻat—a transnational Islamic missionary movement that propagates greater religious devotion and observance in The Gambia—opens the door to a new experience of gendered Muslim piety.Tablighor Islamic missionary work results in novel roles for women, who are now actively involved in the public sphere—a domain usually defined as male. To provide their wives with more time to engage intabligh, Tablighi men share the domestic workload, although this is generally considered ‘women’s work’ in Gambian society. Contrary to the conventional approach in scholarship on gender and Islam to study such inversion of gender roles in terms of Muslim women’s ‘empowerment’ and Muslim men’s ‘emancipation’, in the Gambian branch of the Jamaʻat the reconfiguration of gender norms seems to be motivated by Tablighis’ wish to return to the purported origins of Islam. Following the example of the Prophet’s wives, Tablighi women actively engage intablighand, taking Muhammad as their example, Tablighi men have taken over part of their wives’ household chores. Paradoxically, by reconfiguring gender norms Gambian Tablighis eventually reinstate the patriarchal gender order.

While roads have often been studied from an infrastructural and functional perspective, or as the embodiment of civil engineering, the colonial experience, emergent capitalism, and more recently te...

Sub-Saharan Africa is frequently seen as the periphery of the Muslim world, in terms of both geography and religious influence. This chapter shows that Islam has had a presence in Sub-Saharan Africa since the earliest days of its history. Scholars studying Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa have long written about an ‘African Islam’, reflecting the Sufi bias typical of scholarship on Islam in the region. Janson demonstrates that this approach hampers a better understanding of the emergence of reformist-oriented movements. She concludes by pointing out new approaches to the study of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, which capture the fluidity of the different ways of ‘being Muslim’ in everyday living, thereby challenging ingrained analytical concepts such as an ‘African Islam’ versus ‘Arab Islam’, and an accommodating Sufi Islam versus an orthodox reformist Islam.

Drawing on a case study of a graveyard dispute in Numuyel, a Serahuli village in eastern Gambia, this article argues that conflicts between local Muslim communities are not so much a matter of how differently they bury their dead but of how differently they ‘live’ Islam in daily practice. It illustrates that graveyards are more than burial sites; they are spatial representations of the ways social order, religious authority, and political legitimacy are constructed. Although focusing on a dispute in a small West African village, the case has far wider applications in that it offers a window onto the impact of reformist Islam on local Islamic traditions and is linked to questions of how space is related to the formation of Muslim identity, how Muslim identities are (re)negotiated in daily life, how Islamic knowledge is defined, and who holds the power and authority to determine ‘true Islam’. Resume A partir de l’etude de cas d’un litige sur un cimetiere a Numuyel, un village serahuli de l’Est de la Gambie, l’article avance que les conflits entre les communautes musulmanes locales sont moins liees a la maniere differente dont elles inhument leurs morts qu’aux differences dans la facon de « vivre » l’islam dans la pratique quotidienne. Il illustre le fait que les cimetieres sont plus que des lieux de sepulture : ce sont des representations spatiales de la maniere dont l’ordre social, l’autorite religieuse et la legitimite politique se construisent. Bien que le cas concerne un litige dans un petit village d’Afrique occidentale, ses implications sont bien plus larges car il ouvre une fenetre sur l’impact de l’islam reformiste sur les traditions islamiques locales et touche aux questions des relations entre l’espace et la formation de l’identite musulmane, de la maniere dont les identites musulmanes se (re)negocient dans la vie quotidienne et dont le savoir islamique se definit, et de l’identite de ceux qui ont le pouvoir et l’autorite de determiner « le vrai islam ».

A striking feature of Gambian society is its tripartite social structure composed of nobles, artisans and descendants of former slaves. Among the artisans, the role of the finoo, or Islamic bard, is by far the least understood. While there is hardly any documentation on finoos, indications are This article is based on ethnographic field research conducted between November 2003 and April 2004 and between April and June 2005 in The Gambia. The research was funded by a grant from the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden, the Netherlands. Previous fieldwork, which was conducted between 1998 and 2001 and financed by the Centre for Non-Western Studies (CNWS) in

Based on ethnographic field research, this article explores religious discourses about proper ritual observance in The Gambia, a country where our understanding of processes of Islamization is largely lacking. These discourses centre upon the case of Berekuntu, a shrine guarded by a female saint in the village of Kartong. On the basis of three ‘texts’, the female saint's biographical narrative, a series of sermons delivered by reformist scholars, and a newspaper article based on an interview with the Supreme Islamic Council, the article shows that shrine and saint veneration are not relics of the past, but are part of a lively contemporary dispute about ‘authentic’ Islam and who represents it. While reformist Muslims seem to have conquered the public sphere during the last decade under the influence of President Jammeh's rule, the Sufi understanding of Islam, as embodied by the saint, still enjoys great support among the Gambian population. Although ‘reformists’ and ‘Sufis’ seem at first sight to be diametrically opposed, they sometimes borrow from each other. An analysis of the (re)negotiation of Muslim identities indicates that Islamization is not a single monolithic movement but, rather, a diffuse process happening at different levels.

The proliferation of the Tablīgh Jamā'at, an Islamic missionary movement that strictly observes the fundamentals of the faith, is a manifestation of the recent Islamic resurgence in West Africa. The movement originated in South Asia, but has expanded to Africa. Despite the Jamā'at's great influence on the lives of many West African Muslims, sub-Saharan Africa is a region that has been ignored almost completely in studies of the movement. This article focuses on The Gambia, which appears to be a booming centre of Tablīgh activities in West Africa. On the basis of the conversion stories of a male and a female Tablīgh activist, the central themes in the Gambian branch of the Tablīgh Jamā'at will be explored. These themes result from local factors such as the socio-economic crisis and gender relations. Nevertheless, they also bear similarities with recurrent subjects in other 'fundamentalist' movements throughout the world.

This monograph deals with the sweeping emergence of the Tablighi Jama'at - a transnational Islamic missionary movement that has its origins in the reformist tradition that emerged in India in the mid-nineteenth century - in the Gambia in the past decade. It explores how a movement that originated in South Asia could appeal to the local Muslim population - youth and women in particular - in a West African setting. By recording the biographical narratives of five Gambian Tablighis, the book provides an understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions young people are confronted with in their (re)negotiation of Muslim identity. Together these narratives form a picture of how Gambian youth go about their lives within the framework of neoliberal reforms and renegotiated parameters informed by the Tablighi model of how to be a 'true' Muslim, which is interpreted as a believer who is able to reconcile his or her faith with a modern lifestyle.

Every morning my host Bachir,1 a Gambian Muslim in his late twenties, solemnly removed the lace doily protecting his cassette recorder against dust. In his small livingroom, decorated with Islamic wall hangings, posters of Mecca, and plastic flowers, we listened to tape-recorded sermons. That morning he selected an audiocassette of Ahmed Khatani, a South African preacher who visited The Gambia several times to deliver sermons in the mosque where Bachir and his comrades pray. On the tape Khatani preached in English with a strong Indian accent, alternated with words and Quranic verses in Arabic, about the purpose of human beings on earth, that is, worshipping God. When he raised his voice, Bachir’s one-year-old daughter, believing that the preacher was singing, started to dance. Bachir exclaimed, “Astaghfirullah (I seek forgiveness from Allah), this must be my mother’s influence.”2

This special issue brings together four case studies that explore, from a comparative angle, the interrelation between current trends towards moral renewal in Muslim Africa on the one hand, and transformations of gender relations on the other.1 The case studies illustrate that current attempts to return to more ‘authentic' interpretations of Islam are effected partly through substantial reconfigurations of prevailing gender norms and practices.Journal for Islamic Studies Vol. 28 2008: pp. 2-8

Over the years, the Tabl¥gh¥ JamOE>at has expanded into what is probably the largest Islamic movement of contemporary times. Despite its enormous influence, scholars have paid almost no attention to the movement in sub-Saharan Africa. This article focuses on The Gambia, which has grown into a flourishing centre of Tabl¥gh¥ activities in West Africa during the last decade. Whereas Gambian Tabl¥gh¥s understand Tabl¥gh¥ doctrine as a return to the original teachings of Islam, and as such to a traditional patriarchal gender ideology, the effect of their interventions is that they redefine prevailing divisions between female and male spheres of moral practice. By setting out on missionary tours (khur´j), Tabl¥gh¥ women have gained greater prominence in the public sphere, a sphere generally considered ‘male'. In order to provide them with more time to perform missionary work, male Tabl¥gh¥s have taken over part of their wives' domestic workload. This reconfiguration of gender roles is studied as the outcome of a reorientation to a new form of piety as a means of realising a virtuous life that brings one closer to God.Journal for Islamic Studies Vol. 28 2008: pp. 9-36

Gambian griottes, or female bards, are in a serious predicament. Islamic ethics prescribe that women should behave in a modest way, while conversely the griottes' very profession implies that they stand out by their behaviour and the way they dress. How do these women reconcile their identity as female performers with Islamic values? The Gambia is an interesting setting in which to explore this question because of its long history with Islam. There was even talk that President Jammeh wanted to impose the sharica in this small West African country.

By analysing the case study of a young Muslim man's conversion within and between different expressions of Islam in the Gambia, this article challenges common understandings of conversion that see it as a transition from one form of religious belief or identity to another, as well as theories of Islam's place in Africa that distinguish between ‘local’ traditions and ‘world’ religions. The ethnographic case study illustrates that, for Gambian youth, conversion is not a unilinear path but entails the continuous making of moral negotiations and a preparedness to reflect on the ambiguity of selfhood – an inevitable result of the making of these negotiations.

This article presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that fuse Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its socio-cultural and political-economic setting in Nigeria's former capital Lagos. In contrast to conventional approaches that study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading term to describe Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical case for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious plurality in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory because it proposes novel ways of looking at Chrislam's religious mix that are in line with the way in which its worshippers perceive their religiosity. The underlying idea in Chrislam's assemblage of Christianity and Islam is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislam worshippers participate in Christian as well as Muslim practices, appropriating the perceived powers of both.