Politics and Islamization in African Public Spheres

Abstract

Public Islam and Muslim publics provide a useful framework for understanding how technology and new social and political contexts have impacted discourses of religion in the public sphere. This article proposes that scholarly attention on Muslim publics has been guided by the different impacts of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Jürgen Habermas. Smith’s theory of reification has focused attention on the production of Islam(s), while Habermas’s work has focused attention on the production of new values for democratic politics. Muslim publics in Africa and elsewhere point to a diversity of engagements that call for more critical reflection and analysis. This article suggests that politics and Islamization are the main preoccupations of Muslim public debates in Africa, and should be the focus of comparative and historical analysis.

Aesthetics of Muslim public and community formations in Cape Town: observations of an anthropologist

“…The new media and democratic politics enable ordinary Muslims -not only religious authorities and secular intellectuals -to articulate their views of Islam publicly and be part of the Muslim public (Eickelman and Anderson 2003;Salvatore and Eickelman 2004;Tayob 2007). Tayob (2012) points out the self-limitations in Eickelman, Salvatore and Anderson's confi rmative notion of a Muslim public which fails to include voices of the counter-public and critical expressions of public Islam. For this paper, the notion of a Muslim public includes confi rmative and critical expressions of Islam, but also includes all those who happen to observe it, Muslims and non-Muslims, including the readers of this paper.…”

Public Islam in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Radio Islam Controversy

“…Third, recent literatures on public Islam (e.g. Eickelman and Anderson, 2003;Eickelman and Salvatore, 2006;Tayob, 2012) have emphasized the extent to which new self-styled religious authorities -''secular intellectuals, Sufi orders, mothers, students, workers, engineers, and many others'' (Eickelman and Salvatore, 2006: xii) -have challenged the interpretive monopolies claimed, in theory if not always in practice, by traditionally educated Islamic religious scholars (the ulama). The ulama, in South Africa as elsewhere, have attempted to adapt to this terrain (Zaman, 2002), continuing a long tradition of public critique premised on the idea that a healthy polity depends on the moral integrity of individuals (Asad, 1993: 200-236).…”