Short Abstract

This panel uses minoritarian perspectives across Africa and its diasporas to examine how religious authority, belonging and “Islam proper” are produced, contested, and negotiated through gender, ethnicity, language, race, and other forms of social difference.

Long Abstract

A prism is said to split a single beam, yet the spectrum was there before the light struck the glass. The illusion of unity is partly an artefact of the observer's position. Islam is imagined in much the same way, as originating from a centre and travelling outward, such that what is lived in Kano, in Cape Town, or in Nairobi appears as local inflections of a supposedly unified tradition imagined whole elsewhere. This panel reverses the optics. Rather than assuming an Islamic centre from which difference radiates, it examines through what apparatuses, and in whose hands, religious singularity, normativity and marginality are produced. To minoritise Islam, in a Deleuzian sense, involves moving beyond a focus on Muslim minorities toward approaching Islam from positions rendered minor in order to expose how particular practices, languages, bodies, and authorities become established as normative, while others are marked as local, heterodox, cultural, or peripheral. Approaching marginality as relational, the panel explores how Muslim belonging is negotiated through gender, ethnicity, language, race, class, migration and competing forms of religious authority. We invite interdisciplinary contributions from Anthropology, religious studies, history, sociology, political science, and related fields that examine how Muslim identities are embodied and socially inhabited across Africa and its diaspora, and how marginal positions can reveal the contingent processes through which notions of “Islam proper” and its imagined centres are continually produced and contested.

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