Paper short abstract:

The papers analyze how Kannywood, as a popular culture production site, generates new religious discourse and Islamic knowledge that (re)shapes local Muslim filmmakers' encounters with religion.

Paper long abstract:

Film is a mirror of culture and plays a crucial role in facilitating cultural dialogue in the society within which it is produced (John 2017). Moreover, fictional feature films, as Gray (2010) argues, act as a guide to cultural constructions of everyday life, to symbolic and metaphoric communication, and to social, political, cultural, religious, and economic forces.

In this paper, I share my observations from deep interactions with different Muslim social actors involved during my ethnographic experience, which reveal more complex narratives on how film serves as an impetus for religious knowledge generation and dissemination. Specifically, I analyze how Kannywood, as a popular culture production site, contributes to the generation of new religious discourse and Islamic knowledge that (re)shapes local Muslim filmmaker's encounters with religion. On the one side of the spectrum, we have Salafi-affiliated Mallams promoting strong views against Kannywood. On the other side, we have Sufis who counter the Salafis by pushing their views of Islam and popular culture based on Sufi values. In the middle is the central leadership of the Kano ulamā organizations, which is a semi-governmental organization mediating in the interests of all. These dynamic views and interactions resulted in neutralizing the strict religious censorship that previously hindered the artistic activities of Muslim filmmakers and threatened the collapse of the Muslim film industry.