Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Orthography
- Glossary of Yoruba and Arabic Terms
- 1 Beyond Religious Tolerance: Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists in a Yoruba Town
- 2 Kingship and Religion: An Introduction to the History of Ede
- 3 Ambivalence and Transgression in the Practice of Ṣàngó
- 4 Ṣàngó's Thunder: Poetic Challenges to Islam and Christianity
- 5 Compound Life and Religious Control in Ede's Muslim Community
- 6 Challenges and Affirmations of Islamic Practice: The Tablighi Jamaat
- 7 The Baptist Church in Ede: Christian Struggles over Education and Land
- 8 Freedom and Control: Islam and Christianity at the Federal Polytechnic
- 9 Religious Accommodation in Two Generations of the Adeleke Family
- 10 Marrying Out: Gender and Religious Mediation in Interfaith Marriages
- 11 Everyday Inter-Religious Encounters and Attitudes
- 12 Outlook: Religious Difference, the Yoruba and Beyond
- Appendix 1 Ede Anthem
- Appendix 2 Songs of Ede
- Appendix 3 Oríkì of the Tìmì of Ede, Present and Past
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Beyond Religious Tolerance: Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists in a Yoruba Town
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Orthography
- Glossary of Yoruba and Arabic Terms
- 1 Beyond Religious Tolerance: Muslims, Christians and Traditionalists in a Yoruba Town
- 2 Kingship and Religion: An Introduction to the History of Ede
- 3 Ambivalence and Transgression in the Practice of Ṣàngó
- 4 Ṣàngó's Thunder: Poetic Challenges to Islam and Christianity
- 5 Compound Life and Religious Control in Ede's Muslim Community
- 6 Challenges and Affirmations of Islamic Practice: The Tablighi Jamaat
- 7 The Baptist Church in Ede: Christian Struggles over Education and Land
- 8 Freedom and Control: Islam and Christianity at the Federal Polytechnic
- 9 Religious Accommodation in Two Generations of the Adeleke Family
- 10 Marrying Out: Gender and Religious Mediation in Interfaith Marriages
- 11 Everyday Inter-Religious Encounters and Attitudes
- 12 Outlook: Religious Difference, the Yoruba and Beyond
- Appendix 1 Ede Anthem
- Appendix 2 Songs of Ede
- Appendix 3 Oríkì of the Tìmì of Ede, Present and Past
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since September 2001, religion has been recognised as an increasingly important factor in personal and group identification and mobilisation. In a global environment increasingly dominated by economic neoliberalism, tensions between Islam and Christianity have become especially salient. However, a detailed understanding of the dynamics of religious conflict – and accommodation – is obscured by the overwhelming focus of analysts and commentators on the global North. In this context, attacks by Islamic groups and the perception and treatment of Muslim minorities in the culturally Christian societies in the US and Europe are often seen to confirm the existence of a ‘faultline’ between ‘Western civilisations’ and ‘Islamic civilisations’, which has been transposed somewhat uncritically to different African contexts. In this way, Africa is treated as little more than a ‘reservoir of raw fact’, which is made to fit the theories and truths produced on the basis of European and North American knowledge and praxis.
But although the social and political transformations following the end of the Cold War reflected the politics of the global North, the complexity of their implications reveals itself more fully in the societies in the South. While Africa has its share of Muslim–Christian conflicts, not all religious violence on the continent takes place across a religious divide. In Uganda and neighbouring countries, the Christian Lord's Resistance Army has terrorised communities for many decades irrespective of religion. In the Sudan, the self-consciously Muslim Janjaweed militia has committed large-scale violence against coreligionists. Similarly, Islamic insurgent groups in Mali and northern Nigeria have targeted fellow Muslims far more frequently than Christians and other non-Muslims.5 While the implications of this phenomenon cannot be explored in detail here, the high incidence of intra-Muslim violence certainly challenges the notion that conflict is necessarily associated with religious difference.
But the opposite also applies: even in highly religious societies, religious difference is not necessarily associated with conflict. Thus Africa is also home to several states and regions where Muslims and Christians coexist without large-scale conflict. In South Africa, the country's liberal post-Apartheid Constitution has enabled a diverse Muslim minority to pursue religiously distinctive rights.
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- Beyond Religious ToleranceMuslim, Christian & Traditionalist Encounters in an African Town, pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2017