Title:	Islam and Social Change in French West Africa
Other Titles:	History of an Emancipatory Community
Authors:	Sean, Hanretta David Anderson Catherine Boone
Keywords:	History of an Emancipatory Community
Issue Date:	2009
Publisher:	Cambridge
Description:	Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals – including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor – played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and antimodern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history. the central events in this story took place in the riverside town of Kae´di in the French colony of Mauritania on February 15, 1930. That morning, two men, Mamadou Sadio and Dieydi Diagana, prayed together in a mosque in the neighborhood of Gattaga. Both members of the town’s Soninke ethnic minority, Mamadou Sadio was the son of one of Kae´di’s Islamic scholars, and Dieydi Diagana was the French-appointed chef de village for Gattaga, Kae´di’s Soninke enclave. This day, in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan, was supposed to have been a day of reconciliation, for the two men had been on opposite sides of a conflict that had unsettled Kae´di for months and were praying together to demonstrate their commitment to peaceful coexistence.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/9766
ISBN:	978-0-511-51789-1
Appears in Collections:	African Studies

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