Religiosity and its others: lived Islam in West Africa and South India

Abstract

Drawing on research about settings in South India and West Africa characterised by significant religious diversity, we reflect on the ways in which everyday religiosity among contemporary Muslims is constituted through difference and contestation. Our cases are from two ostensibly secular states – India and Nigeria – both former British colonies where secularism has been interrogated over the past few decades. In our focus on what we call ‘lived’ Islam, we pay attention not only to intra‐Muslim differences but also to how religiosity is formed and experienced through engagement and encounters with Others, whether religious, ethnic or political, both locally and globally. Everyday religiosity in such settings as South India and Nigeria emerges at the interstices of such encounters where Muslims often seek to draw boundaries at the same time as they fashion themselves – in lifestyle, sociality, aesthetics – in relation to various Others. As we argue, such ethnographic cases with their comparative angle underscore the importance of studying religiosity in heterogeneous settings so as to explode the flawed, idealised sense of wholeness that emerges in some of the literature on the anthropology of one religious tradition or another with such traditions sometimes represented as deriving from self‐contained theologies.

Introduction

“…The chapters in this volume postulate that the diversity of Islamic understandings observed in the western regions of the Sahara largely transcend the prevailing scripturalist focus of some previous studies. They testify to an explicit adaptation of religiously based discourses that take into account and encompass most aspects of contemporary life (Osella and Soares 2020), likely closer to Soares's suggested reading of Islam in Mali as 'a discursive tradition at the intersection of the local, the supralocal, and the translocal ' (2000: 283). These readings now fully incorporate the voices of students (see the chapter by Baba Ahmed and Horma), descendants of hereditary social categories such as blacksmiths (see the chapter by Freire), and other 'uncertified' actors lacking conventional Islamic authority who have questioned the long-established predominant voices in Islamic matters, notably associated with the zwāya/'religious' status groups (see the chapters by Cardeira da Silva and Malluche; see also Esseissah 2016Esseissah , 2021Frede 2020).…”

Case Study: The Concept of 'Religious Tolerance' in the Socio-Religious Construction of Islamic Schools in India

“…These communities' interactions shape the prevalent religious tolerance in India (Jha, 2018). Due to the country's lengthy history of diverse religious traditions that have evolved and interacted over centuries, historical factors play a significant role in determining religious tolerance (Kronstadt, 2018;Osella & Soares, 2020). Shared festivals and rituals contribute to interreligious understanding and dialogue via cultural factors.…”