Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Musa Ibrahim
(Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and technology, Kumasi)
Mohamed Ndaro (Moi University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Hassan Ndzovu
(Moi University)
- Discussant:
-
Britta Frede
(University of Bayreuth)
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Perspectives on current crises
- Location:
- S59 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 1 October, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how popular culture promotes or resists diversity policies in the context of global processes that threaten social cohesion, such as war, disinformation campaigns, migration, climate change, and violence framed within religious arguments in Muslim societies in Africa.
Long Abstract:
Muslims from diverse backgrounds, including actors, poets/singers, imams/ulema, activists, and ordinary persons, have used popular culture forms and expressions to engage in artistic productions and participate in public discourses. Regardless of their theological convictions, many Muslims participate in local cultural forms such as fashion, theater, TV dramas, movies, poetry performances, and music. The interactions with transversal popular media, cultural symbols and practices, and their accompanying discourses, have become the hallmarks of popular Muslim cultural production that has an impact and a capacity to transform Islam and Muslim societies across Africa.
This panel invites papers that explore ways in which popular cultural practices are involved in deciding, transforming, inducing, or resolving conflicts and crises in the African Muslim social and political sphere. We are interested in contributions that examine the crossroads of Islam and global popular culture in Africa and shed light on how Muslim practices that emerge from these dynamics have the potential to enable or disable inter and intra-faith contestations as well as influence social conflicts in the fields of gender, social status, and generational divide. The panel especially welcomes historical and empirical studies that explore how popular culture had and has the capacity to promote or resist diversity policies, specifically in the context of global processes that threaten social cohesion, such as war, disinformation campaigns, migration, climate change, and violence framed within religious arguments in Muslim societies in Africa. We invite contributions from a wide range of disciplines such as sociology, religious studies, media studies, and anthropology.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 1 October, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the crosscurrents between Islam and popular culture in the cosmopolis of northern Nigeria and attempts an understanding of the intricate intersections that steer the popular arts and entertainment vis-à-vis Islamic doctrine, r/evolving identities, and cultural forms.
Paper long abstract:
I explore the crosscurrents between Islam and popular culture in the cosmopolis of northern Nigeria and attempt an understanding of the intricate intersections that steer the popular arts and entertainment vis-à-vis Islamic doctrine, r/evolving identities, and cultural forms. I use the motif of 'un/becoming' to contend that the practice of Islam in northern Nigeria, particularly Kano state is at a critical crossroads for adherents caught between Puritanism and the socioeconomic opportunities that popular culture offers. In the paper, the concept of 'Un/Becoming' serves as a conceptual fulcrum that encapsulates the simultaneous processes of becoming 'a faithful' and unbecoming 'faithful' within the religious and cultural narrative. The paper unearths the tension between the preservation of authentic Islamic values and the transformative influence of a popular culture that challenges conventional boundaries while at the same time fostering a nuanced understanding of cultural r/evolution. The main method deployed in generating data is oral interviews with select popular music artistes who are Muslims and adherents of Islam. The key argument is that there is a dialectical relationship between Islam and popular culture, which is characterised by moments of conflict and harmony, adaptation and resistance, and fluidity and resilience that subsist within the hermeneutics of Islam.
Keywords: Islam, Kano, Popular Culture, Un/Becoming
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the depiction of Islam in home videos from the lenses of hermeneutics and textual exegesis to espouse societal attitudes or better put the cultural responses towards Islam as a domesticated religion. It reveals how the responses of the people towards Islam in home videos.
Paper long abstract:
Abstract
It has been recently pointed out that one of the most intriguing aspects of the processes which are covered by the term globalization concerns the role of fantasy and the power of images in the (re)creation of persons and societies; and that fantasy is now a social practice, which enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies. Representation of this fantasy and other aspects of life in diverse media, especially home video, is pertinent to understanding society. Home videos are central both in the production and consumption of societal knowledge and practices. As important and pertinent home video films are in the understanding of the Nigerian society, especially about religious matters, they have not been given the deserved scholarly attention.
This paper, therefore, uses performance and artistic production of home videos to explicate the bricolage in cultural encounters of the people and processes of cultural transfer and translation in creating identity.
Using selected Yorùbá home videos, the paper discusses how artists’ imaginations, experiences, and close observation of their universe in diverse interrelationships and intra-relationships regarding Islam are depicted in their artistic productions.
This paper explores the depiction of Islam in home videos from the lenses of hermeneutics and textual exegesis to espouse societal attitudes or better put the cultural responses towards Islam as a domesticated religion. It hopes to reveal that the adoptions of Islam in Yorùbá land, forms an integral fulcrum upon which their history, linguistic practices, and identity hinge; and that through these home videos, the responses of the people towards Islam can be properly understood, from both secular and religious perspectives. In conclusion, the paper reveals how Islam, as a domesticated religion affect peoples' lives.
Keywords: Yorùbá, Proverbial genre, Identity, Secularity, Islam, Religion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Muslim popular cultural practices as impetus for contesting and negotiating Imamship in Gonjaland. It explores how contestations over Imamship between Sakpares (the traditional imams) and Salafists (the reformist imams) manifest at the intersection of Islam and popular cultures.
Paper long abstract:
This study examines Muslim popular cultural practices as impetus for contesting and negotiating Imamship between traditionalists and reformist ulama in Gonjaland. The Gonjas are Mandes from the ancient Mali Empire of West Africa, whose ancestors entered into a working relationship with Muslim clerics to establish the Gonjaland (Northern Ghana). This relationship crystallized into a blend of local cultures with Islam, which has existed for centuries. As a result, traditional cultural practices have greatly influenced the practice of Islam in Gonjaland. The Gonja traditional clerics, or Sakpare, are the official Imams of the Gonja people, enjoying the backing of the Gonja traditional chiefs. However, with the emergence of reform Islam known as Salafism, some of its members began to challenge this long-standing dominance of appointing only Sakpares as Imams. They also question their Islamic knowledge and the version of Muslim practices they promoted as unauthentic Islam. While the Salafists were allowed to establish their own mosques and preach to people, their authority was limited because people preferred the Sakpare Imams to supervise their cultural practices, such as naming, wedding, and funeral ceremonies. The Salafists' attempt to reform some of those popular Muslim cultural practices by taking over their supervision in Gonjaland created tensions that, at some point, resulted in bloody clashes between these two religious groups. Against this background, this paper examines how contestations over Imamship between Sakpares (the traditional imams) and Salafists (the reformist imams) manifest at the intersection of Islam and popular cultures.
Key words; Salafism, Imamship, Popular culture.