Paper short abstract:

In this paper I examine the lability of religious forms analyzing how new Islamic movements came to use the genres, speech forms, and institutional arrangements of evangelical Christianity as part of the constitution of Islamic revival.

Paper long abstract:

Religions are encoded in discursive and circulatory forms through which they are constituted and their claims enabled. Religious services, revival meetings, television programs, mosque lessons, public loudspeakers are just some of the myriad ways in which religions are made manifest in the world. As they do so they enter into public engagement with other religious movements within and across religions as well as with a broader secular world. I have been interested in what happens when those forms are promiscuous - when one religious public takes the discursive forms used to constitute another public. Sometimes these forms are labile so that the 'borrowing' from one realm to another goes unremarked. At other times there is an immanence between a form and the theologies that animate it so that any borrowing becomes a metareflexive commentary. In this paper I wish to examine how the emergence of forms used to constitute a secular public were adopted by Muslim reformists in northern Nigeria and, later, how new Islamic movements came to use the genres, speech forms, and institutional arrangements of evangelical Christianity as part of the constitution of Islamic revival. I examine this through practices of loudspeaker use and of religious evangelizing.