Paper short abstract:

As a social history, my paper focuses on the production of Muslim popular culture and its entanglements with contestations, conflicts, and coexistence in two Accra-based inner-city Muslim communities, Maamobi and Nima, since the 1950s.

Paper long abstract:

My paper focuses on the production of Muslim popular culture and its entanglements with contestations, conflicts, and coexistence in two Accra-based inner-city Muslim communities, Maamobi and Nima, since the 1950s. Mediated by the Hausa-Fulani cultures, some of whom served as religious and political figures, popular culture was Islamised and mainstreamed for social cohesion. For example, Agyaa wondo; Maadandala for males, and Otofo, for females, were anchored on cultural hybridity that indexed the coexistence among the major cultural groups in the communities. In my presentation, I will analyse the role of this popular culture in fostering social cohesion and inter-religious coexistence in these communities from the 1950s, until the turn of the millennium. I will argue that the rise of reformist religions, such as Salafism and the neo-Pentecostal movements, enabled religious figures in pursuit of reformation to profile the performance of popular culture as a dent in religious purity, and consequently advocated their abolishment. Coinciding with the social media revolution in the 2000s, popular culture significantly lost its role in serving as a crossroads for Islam and popular culture production. In the end, local inter and intra-faith contestations, reflecting global surge in religions, threatened religious tolerance in the communities, with metastasising impact spreading across the rest of the country. Casting my presentation as social history, I will discuss popular culture and religious interaction as a complex vortex of cultural hybridity and religious flexibility as the basis of inter-religious contestation, conflicts, and coexistence in the inner-city Muslim communities of Accra.