Paper short abstract:

Through an emic approach at the notion of jihad, often relegated by scholars to its extra-ordinary and radicalized meaning, this presentation intends to highlight the ordinary, familiar, and generative dimension of this ethical and religious concept of the Islamic piety for Senegalese youth.

Paper long abstract:

In Senegal, the religious imagination gathers and produces important forms of social belonging and moral repertories among youth. Instead of thinking about it in terms of codes of behavior extrinsic to the subject or of pre-established rules of conduct, it is necessary to look at the way in which these imaginaries are intertwined with lived and embodied experiences of piety capable of generating “orientations toward the future” (Bryant and Knight 2019). Piety refers to something more than prayer or public and visible sign of faith (Soares 2004). It involves a daily cultivation of attitudes, virtues and ethical principles (Mahmood 2005; Hamdy 2009; Janson 2013, Faubion ; Laidlaw 2014). The transformative nature of imaginaries and piety also encompasses a deep political dimension: it proposes ways out of the sense of abjection and marginality of many young people (Ferguson 2006) while trying to craft a respectable adulthood, which does not require a material counterpart. This “struggle with the self” (Pandolfo 2007) is often expressed in the notion of jianté in wolof, jihad. The term contains the double and ambivalent meaning of sacrifice and liberation, “subjection that liberates” (Audrain 2004). Through an emic approach at the notion of jihad, often relegated by scholars to its extra-ordinary and radicalized meaning, this presentation intends to highlight the ordinary, familiar, and generative dimension of this ethical and religious concept of the Islamic piety for Senegalese youth.