Notes on the anthropological study of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the interpretation of and the ethnographic production about Islam and Muslim societies, particularly in Africa. The Orientalist ‘doctrine’ of an unchanging and timeless Islam has long been shown to be inadequate for understanding the obvious diversity and complexity within and between Muslim societies. However, the limitations of certain anthropological studies—notably, their almost exclusive focus on local context and cultures to which they sometimes attribute different ‘Islams’ (e.g., African Islam)—have not been critically examined to the same degree. I argue that one must study Islam as a discursive tradition at the intersection of the local and the supralocal, including broader scriptural traditions of Islam. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research on Islamic law in West Africa, I show how Muslims in Mali participate in the supralocal discourses of Islam and some of the ways in which local and regional history and culture shape their participation in these discourses.

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