Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Titre : The contemporary expansion of Corporate Islam in rural West Africa

Numéro  : 186907

Début/Fin : 01.04.2020 – 31.03.2025

Requérant  : André Chappatte : Global Studies Institute Sciences II Université de Genève
Collaboratrices/teurs : André Chappatte, Global Studies Institute Sciences II Université de Genève Bourahima Diomande Bassirou Gaye Salomé Okoekpen, Institut de Sciences Sociales des Religions Université de Lausanne Aline Nanko Samaké

Présentation partielle
According to mainstream media, as a result of the pressure of armed groups of Islamic allegiance, the State has recently withdrawn from large areas of the Sahel (central Mali ; northeast Burkina Faso, northeast Nigeria). Alarming discourses have also been thriving among experts on West Africa since the fall of Gaddafi in the region. Security advisors are even speculating that southern regions of Muslim West Africa were about to fall in the hands of terrorist organizations promoting anti-Western agenda. While acknowledging the issue of insecurity in the Sahel, arguments for a southward spread of terrorist Islamist organizations are based on emotional speculation rather than solid empirical foundations. Faced with a post 9/11 revival of a fear of an „evil” pan-Islamism which is also nurtured by the current Global War on Terrorism, there is an urgent need to offer concrete depictions of Muslim organizations operating in rural West Africa in order to decipher the actual motivations of those who choose to join these Muslim organizations. It is also of crucial importance to understand the genuine aspirations, tensions, and transformations that mobilize their members in an era marked by new forms of organization, growing connectivity (e.g. mobile internet access), and a search for a moral, prosperous, and modern life. This urgency is moreover enhanced by the scarcity of ethnographic work on Muslim life tout court in rural West Africa. This research project thus explores, through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, four representative case-studies of Muslim organizations (an organization of Muslim women in Niger, a youth organization of modernist Salafi inspiration in Nigeria, a Muslim NGO in Ivory Coast, an organization of new Sufi inspiration in Guinea and Mali) which are expanding their activities in rural areas. Accumulating 40 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Muslims living in rural regions of a pre-crisis southern Mali (2008-2010) and a post-conflict northern Ivory Coast (2014-2018), the project investigator has the necessary experience to supervise with carefulness this demanding ethnographic inquiry. T

Mots clés : rural lifeplace, phenomenological anthropology, corporate Islam, West Africa, living religiosity, connectivity, bureaucratic practices, social form of power, Muslim organization

Financement : 1 805 144 CHF

Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique