Grounded in ethnographic and historiographic research and taking a cross-regional approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of similarity and difference, rapprochement and detachment, and divergence and competition between practitioners of Christianity, Islam and African religious traditions.
Across Africa, Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions live in shared settings, demarcating themselves in opposition to one another and at times engaging in violent conflicts, but also being entangled in complex ways and showing unexpected similarities and mutual cross-overs. However, while encounters and entanglements of African religious traditions with either Islam or Christianity have long been a central research issue, the configuration as a whole has barely been taken into account, even though Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of African religious traditions have long co-existed - and still co-exist - more or less peacefully in many settings in Africa. Building on recent interventions to move beyond the compartmentalization of the study of religion in Africa, this edited volume will spotlight why and how an integrated approach to Islam, Christianity, and African religious traditions is important. Bringing together stimulating case studies from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, and Mozambique that offer new directions for ethnographic and historical research, the volume will not only shed light on an important phenomenon out there in the world - the long-overlooked ways in which Muslims, Christians and practitioners of African religious traditions interact with one another in various majority-minority configurations - but will also engage with a critical rethinking of the study of religion in Africa (and beyond).
Author Biography:
Marloes Janson is Professor of West African Anthropology at SOAS University of London. Her publications include Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jamaʻat (2013), winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology, and Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and 'Yoruba Religion' in Lagos, Nigeria (2021). Kai Kresse is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Vice-Director for Research at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). His books include Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (2007), shortlisted for the ASA Herskovits Award, and Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience (2019). Benedikt Pontzen is an anthropologist and writer. He is the author of Islam in a Zongo: Muslim Lifeworlds in Asante, Ghana (Cambridge University Press/International African Institute, 2021; Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2023) and co-editor of a special issue on religious minorities in Muslim Africa (Islamic Africa, 2022). Hassan Mwakimako is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pwani University, Kenya. He has authored and co-authored articles published in peer-reviewed journals including Religion Compass, Islamic Africa, Journal of Eastern African Studies, and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a senior fellow at the New York University School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs, as well as a fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute of Theology. His books include Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria (2016), Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century (2014). Erik Meinema is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherland. He is a member of the research group 'Religious Matters in an Entangled World' (www.religiousmatters.nl. Hanna Neiber is a social anthropologist who holds a PhD from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Devaka Premawardhana is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, USA. In addition to authoring Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique (2018), he is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Between Life and Thought: Existential Anthropology and the Study of Religion. Kodjo Senah is emeritus Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Ghana. His publications include In Search of Health and Wellbeing in Africa (2013), Sacred Objects into State Symbols: The Material Culture of Chieftaincy in the Making of a National Political Heritage in Ghana (2015) and Ghana Studies: Health and Health Care (2013). Shobana Shankar is Professor of History at Stony Brook University in New York. Her books include An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race (2021), Who Shall Enter Paradise: Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1975 (2014), and Religions on the Move: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World, co-edited with Afe Adogame (2013).
