Muslims And New Media In West Africa

Although Islam is not new to West Africa, new patterns of domestic economies, the promise of political liberalization, and the proliferation of new media have led to increased scrutiny of Islam in the public sphere. Dorothea E. Schulz shows how new media have created religious communities that are far more publicly engaged than they were in the past. Muslims and New Media in West Africa expands ideas about religious life in West Africa, women's roles in religion, religion and popular culture, the meaning of religious experience in a charged environment, and how those who consume both religion and new media view their public and private selves.

New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa casts a critical look at Africa's rapidly evolving religious media scene. Following political liberalization, media deregulation, and the proliferation of new media technologies, many African religious leaders and activists have appropriated such media to strengthen and expand their communities and gain public recognition. Media have also been used to marginalize and restrict the activities of other groups, which has sometimes led to tension, conflict, and even violence. Showing how media are rarely neutral vehicles of expression, the contributors to this multidisciplinary volume analyze the mutual imbrications of media and religion during times of rapid technological and social change in various places throughout Africa.

The book offers an examination of issues, institutions and actors that have become central to Muslim life in the region. Focusing on leadership, authority, law, gender, media, aesthetics, radicalization and cooperation, it offers insights into processes that reshape power structures and the experience of being Muslim. It makes room for perspectives from the region in an academic world shaped by scholarship mostly from Europe and America.

Although Islam is not new to West Africa, new patterns of domestic economies, the promise of political liberalization, and the proliferation of new media have led to increased scrutiny of Islam in the public sphere. Dorothea E. Schulz shows how new media have created religious communities that are far more publicly engaged than they were in the past. Muslims and New Media in West Africa expands ideas about religious life in West Africa, women's roles in religion, religion and popular culture, the meaning of religious experience in a charged environment, and how those who consume both religion and new media view their public and private selves.

This second edition of a collection of essays reports on how new media-fax machines, satellite television and the Internet - and the new uses of older media-cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone and the press - shape belief, authority and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The book suggests new ways of looking at the social organization of communications and the shifting links among media of various kinds in local and transnational contexts. The extent to which today's new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understanding of gender, authority, social justice, identities and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this work.

Living Knowledge in West African Islam examines the actualization of religious identity in the Muslim community of Ibrāhīm Niasse (d. 1975, Senegal). The realization of Islam was achieved through the enduring West African practice of learning in the physical presence of exemplary masters.

Exploring the history and religious community of a group of Muslim Sufi mystics who came largely from socially marginal backgrounds in colonial French West Africa, this study shows the relationship between religious, social, and economic change in the region. It highlights the role that intellectuals - including not only elite men, but also women, slaves, and the poor - played in shaping social and cultural change and illuminates the specific religious ideas on which Muslims drew and the political contexts that gave their efforts meaning. In contrast to depictions that emphasize the importance of international networks and anti-modern reaction in twentieth-century Islamic reform, this book claims that, in West Africa, such movements were driven by local forces and constituted only the most recent round in a set of centuries-old debates about the best way for pious people to confront social injustice. It argues that traditional historical methods prevent an appreciation of Muslim intellectual history in Africa by misunderstanding the nature of information gathering during colonial rule and misconstruing the relationship between documents and oral history. -- Description from http://www.amazon.com (April 24, 2012).

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, this handbook argues that despite often being overlooked or treated as marginal, the study of Islam from an African context is integral to the broader Muslim world. Challenging the portrayal of African Muslims as passive recipients of religious impetuses arriving from the outside, this book shows how the continent has been a site for the development of rich Islamic scholarship and religious discourses. Over the course of the book, the contributors reflect on: The history and infrastructure of Islam in Africa Politics and Islamic reform Gender, youth, and everyday life for African Muslims New technologies, media, and popular culture. Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions examine the connections between Islam and broader sociopolitical developments across the continent, demonstrating the important role of religion in the everyday lives of Africans. This book is an important and timely contribution to a subject that is often diffusely studied, and will be of interest to researchers across religious studies, African studies, politics, and sociology.