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(En)countering Orientalist Islamic Cultural Heritage Traditions: Theory, Discourse, and Praxis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann
Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann*
Affiliation:
Hampshire College
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Extract

West African Islamic cultural heritage is recurrently overlooked or marginalized in scholarly, museological, and popular imaginaries, despite contemporary burgeoning Western attentiveness to Islam. Historically, Orientalists and/or Islamicists exclude West Africa, and anthropologists study West African Islam due to its alleged lack of written Arabic and Ajami texts (Loimeier 2013; Saul 2006), despite textual and material evidence to the contrary. Existing literature on the material expressions of West African Islam, largely edited volumes and museum catalogues, direct attention to Islamic West Africa, rather than Islam in West Africa, in other words, predominantly West African Muslim societies, and not those for whom Muslims comprise a minority (Adahl 1995; Insoll 2003; Roberts and Nooter Roberts 2003; for exceptions cf. Bravmann 1974, 1983, 2000). Analytically, the “Islamization of Africa” and “Africanization of Islam,” standard nomenclature customarily employed to describe the simultaneous processes at play in West African Islam (Loimier 2013), note the reciprocal relationship between Islam and pre-existing West African religious traditions shaped by local contexts, circumstances, subjectivities, and exigencies (Fisher 1973; Trimingham 1980). Accordingly, West African Islam's material manifestations labeled “inauthentic,” “syncretic,” “vernacular,” and “popular” are considered, inter alia, antithetical to “classical” Islam. Notwithstanding, so-called classical Islam represents the embodiment of a locally synthesized form that, over time and with repetition, has come to be conceptualized as “classical.” Yet, Islam has incorporated and translated an assortment of pre-existing ideals to adjust in ways viewed as neither regression, apostasy, plurality nor heterodoxy. And, West Africa proves no exception. Indubitably, West African Islamic cultural heritage is the heritage of the “‘Othered’ religion par excellence” (Preston-Blier 1993:148).

Type
Roundtable
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , August 2017 , pp. 188 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2017 

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