Muslim Youth at a Crossroads: Media and Civic Engagement in Burkina Faso a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Scripps

Home , Bwa people, History of Burkina Faso, Islamic clothing, Islam in Burkina Faso, Islam in Ghana, Muslim social

Muslim Youth at a Crossroads: Media and Civic Engagement in Burkina Faso

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Lassane Ouedraogo

May 2020

Muslim Youth at a Crossroads: Media and Civic Engagement in Burkina Faso

LASSANE OUEDRAOGO

has been approved for

the School of Media Arts & Studies

and the Scripps College of Communication by

Steve Howard

Professor of Media Arts and Studies

Scott Titsworth

Dean, Scripps College of Communication

ii Abstract

LASSANE OUEDRAOGO, Ph.D., May 2020, Media Arts & Studies

Muslim Youth at a Crossroads: Media and Civic Engagement in Burkina Faso

Director of Dissertation: Steve Howard

This dissertation examines the civic engagement as well as the online and offline discursive and performative practices of faith among Muslim youth in Burkina Faso. It specifically maps out how members of Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au Burkina (AEEMB), a Muslim student organization with over 100,000 members, negotiate the meanings of their Islamic faith and participate in debates on issues of national and global interests. Since the emergence of violent radicalism in the French speaking, Sahelian West African region over the past decade, scholars have turned their attention to political Islam with a focus on established branches of Islamic denominations such the Sunni movement, the Ahmadiyya, and the Wahhabi and salafist reformist groups. Most scholars are now widening this scope to include less well-established

Muslim groups including youth associations and student militancy. One of the major underlying assumptions in this surge of research on religion in the Sahel is the persistent belief that, somehow, there is a correlation between the region being predominantly

Muslim and the rise of non-state armed forces. This study challenges such assumptions and examines the communication practices of Muslim youth with a specific focus on those educated in the secular education system of Burkina Faso. It analyzes the complexity of youth activism and how youth claim their religious and other various social identities online and offline.

iii Dedication

To my late father, Tassere, and my beloved mother, Alimata Ouedraogo.

iv Acknowledgments

I am hugely indebted to several people and institutions who contributed directly or indirectly to my journey to completing this dissertation.

In Ouagadougou, I would like to thank AEEMB and all of its members for granting me permission to learn with them and for being available to answer my questions, in person or through social media. A special thank you goes to former AEEMB national council president (2016-2018) Yaya Dama and all his staff for facilitating my access to various AEEMB circles and guiding me through my data collection process. I would also like to thank my family, my sister Adja Rasmata and her family in particular, for all their support during my fieldwork in 2018 and 2019. Also, during that time (and all other times), I benefited from the constant prayers and support of my mother. Thank you, mom.

At Ohio University, I owe a lot of gratitude to my dissertation advisor and bro,

Dr. Steve Howard, for his mentorship, guidance, moral and financial support, and for offering me the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in the first place. Bro: thank you for all, baaraka! I also thank my dissertation committee for their availability, support, and guidance. Thank you Dr. Devika Chawla for introducing me to critical ethnography and for inspiring me to seek my voice in writing and to be confident when I am not following scripted and normative academic formats. Thank you, Dr. Wolfgang Suetzl for pushing me to develop a critical cultural approach to research. Thank you for broadening my understanding of continental philosophy. A special thank you to Dr. Assan Sarr, for his mentorship and motivation, especially when things get tough. I couldn’t have done

v any of this without your constant support and motivation: I sincerely thank you for all of your advising.

I am also grateful for a 2019 Ohio University Student Enhancement Award, which allowed me to return to my research site to do more investigation.

Furthermore, it took a large network of friends and colleagues for me to grow as a scholar and to survive as a doctoral student. My bros: Keith Phetlhe, Mongi Dlamini,

Colin Lasu, Goitom Negash, Samuel Njai, Franklyn Charles, and Aggrey Willis: thank you for your fellowship and brotherhood. A special thank you to Abdoulaye Saadou

Yaye, Kumba Gborie, Sharmake Farah, Souzeina Mustaq, Nune Gregoryan, Mohamed

Ashour, Quang Ngo, and Laura Harbert, for your friendship during this journey. It meant a lot to have your companionship.

In Goshen IN, I would like to thank my “American family” for their support. I am particularly grateful to Cynthia and Galen Kauffman for always opening their home to me to rest and power up whenever graduate school became stressful and going back home to Burkina Faso not an option. Thank you for all the care packages and handwritten cards. You offered me a gift of family and I am very grateful. Sunday and Suzan Mahaja,

Carrie and Suman Bhandari, Moses Partalala Kaelo, my GC sister Alma Rosa: thank you for your support and friendship. I also would like to thank Dr. Patricia Lehman (Pat) from

Goshen College for her continued support and mentorship.

Lastly, I am transparently indebted to so many more people I have been fortunate to learn from and receive support, but I could not mention here. To you all, I say a big thank you.

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v List of Tables...... x Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 A Brief Genealogy of AEEMB ...... 3 The Researcher ...... 6 Significance and Rationale of the Study ...... 12 Outline ...... 20 Chapter 2: Media, Secular State, Colonial Legacy, and Islam ...... 22 Getting in Line on Christmas Eve ...... 22 Religion and Mass Media...... 24 Contextualizing Islam and Media in Burkina Faso ...... 28 Theorizing Politics and Religion ...... 42 Muslims in the Secular State of Burkina Faso ...... 46 Locating Islamic Expansion and Reform in Colonial Burkina Faso ...... 46 Meccan Scholars and Islamic Revivalism in Colonial Burkina Faso ...... 53 Gap in the Literature and Research Questions ...... 64 Chapter 3: The Research Experience...... 67 Introduction ...... 67 Theoretical Considerations ...... 70 Ethical Considerations ...... 75 a) Returning in...... 78 b) Getting along ...... 79 c) Getting out? ...... 80 Data Collection Methods ...... 82 a) Participant observation ...... 82 b) Mediated discourse analysis ...... 90 vii c) Qualitative interviews ...... 91 Summary ...... 93 Chapter 4: The Challenge of Communicating a Youth-led Islamic Movement ...... 95 Introduction ...... 95 AEEMB’s Use of Print Media ...... 96 Framing Youth Positions with a Religious Terminology in Print Media ...... 98 Understanding AEEMB’s Facebook Content ...... 108 Analyzing AEEMB’s Facebook Posts ...... 110 Sharing general information ...... 111 Opportunities ...... 112 Self-promotion ...... 112 Preaching (dawa) ...... 113 Activism ...... 113 Other ...... 114 Website as a Repository of Islamic Knowledge ...... 114 Putting AEEMB Media in Perspective ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 119 Chapter 5: Muslim Students Seeking the Right Path ...... 122 Introduction ...... 122 Creating Socio-economic Opportunities ...... 126 Improving the Art of Living Together ...... 135 Muslims Doing Politics ...... 138 Muslims Students at a Crossroads ...... 143 Promoting a Public Civic Education ...... 147 Conclusion ...... 156 Chapter 6: Gender Dynamics Through AEEMB ...... 160 Introduction ...... 160 Becoming an Internet Sensation ...... 161 To Wear or not to Wear the Veil: my Dress, my Faith ...... 165 Young Muslim Women Leadership through AEEMB ...... 172 Gender Dynamics in Burkina Faso ...... 180 Understanding Gender and Religion in a Postcolonial Context ...... 187 Conclusion ...... 191 viii Chapter 7: By Way of Concluding: Seeking Certainty in the Uncertain ...... 193 Introduction ...... 193 Summary of Learning ...... 194 Discussion ...... 199 Closing Comments...... 205 References ...... 208

ix List of Tables

Page

Table 1: Number and Types of Posts on AEEMB’s Facebook ...... 108

Table 2: Thematic Analysis of AEEMB Facebook Posts ...... 110

x Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction

In 2017, the European Union commissioned a social study to evaluate all academic research on religion in contemporary Burkina Faso, formerly known as Haute

Volta (Langewiesche, 2019).1 The EU’s ambitious project was undertaken within a context of growing presence of active non-state armed movements –arguably religiously inspired—in this country which has long been represented as a haven of religious tolerance (Otayek, 1987) and consensual secularism (Y. Ouedraogo, 2013; Idrissa, 2017).

While anxiety about an increasing Islamic radicalism in Burkina Faso has spurred a renewed interest in the subject of religion both locally and internationally,2 academic research on contemporary religious communities still remains largely limited to historically established religious groups and denominations. The study of Islam in

Burkina Faso remains mainly focused on the processes of Islamization, inter- denominational conflicts, ideological tendencies, and religious pluralities. Little do we know about the communicative practices of Muslims—Muslim youth’s in particular—

1 Burkina Faso means Land of Upright People in local Fulani and Djula languages. The name change was a strong anticolonial expression of ‘the right to name oneself’. While I know that up to 1984 Burkina Faso was known under its colonial name–Haute Volta—and the literature that I refer to in this dissertation may use that nomination, I chose to refer to this country by the name it gave itself regardless of any asynchronism that might bring. 2 An example of a recent local initiative on religion include the creation of l’Observatoire National des Faits Religieux (ONAFAR) or National Observatory of Religious Matters. This government-backed advisory board was created in 2015 to monitor religious discourses, especially religious messages broadcast on mass media. Foreign institutions such as the International Crisis Group, the European Union, and the US National Intelligence Council have also taken particular interests in the questions of religion in Burkina Faso recently. 1

their adoption and use of new media (Gomez-Perez & Madore, 2013), and their engagement with the secular state.

In general, in Burkina Faso, student unionism has historically constituted a counter-hegemonic force which the different successive political leaders of the country were compelled to reckon and compose with (Bianchini & Korbéogo, 2008). The current youth associative landscape in Burkina Faso is multitudinous, rich, vibrant, and complex.

In 2014, the country had 1884 formally registered and active associations according to official state records (Zida, 2015). These associations range from small community-based associations to nationwide associations with thousands of members. Some of these organizations are well structured and have strictly enforced membership-adhesion rules and elaborate leadership-election processes. Others have very loose membership rules and no regular meeting schedule. In general, youth associations are interest-based rather than ideology-based. Only a few of them can be defined as being both ideological and interest-based. Some of the youth associations are very active on social media while others are quasi-absent on the Internet. In particular, university-based youth associations and religious associations including Muslim youth associations have become politically assertive over recent decades.

This study explores the social, political, and economic forms of activism among

Muslim youth trained in the secular education system in Burkina Faso and how they communicate such an agency. In broader terms, it discusses current trends of Islam and examines the role of new media in enabling or challenging the emergence of new discursive, performative, and participative ideas and practices among Muslim youth. It

2 especially focuses on how members of Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au

Burkina (AEEMB), a nationwide Muslim student organization, negotiate meanings of their Islamic faith and participate in debates on issues of national and global interests.

Particular attention is paid to how AEEMB makes use of media in this process.

This study crosses the communicative, social, political, and theological boundaries of university Muslim youth to understand their use of media and their understanding of Islam. It addresses the following questions: 1) How do AEEMB members use media, including social media, to report and discuss current events and to co-construct meaning of Muslim identity? 2) In what ways do AEEMB discourses and praxis reflect a unique socio-cultural embodiment of Islam in the changing political landscapes of Burkina Faso? To gather data, I built on prior contact with AEEMB to spend six months (in 2018, and 2019) in daily interaction with its members and observe them in Ouagadougou. I interviewed its leaders and general body members to understand how they position themselves within the larger national Islamic community in Burkina

Faso. I interviewed former AEEMB leaders and prominent Muslim television and radio personalities. I also analyzed this community’s religious discourses and performances including sermons, brochures, and public service announcements, and posts on its official website and Facebook page. This introductory chapter offers a brief overview of

AEEMB, contextualizes Islam and media in Burkina Faso, and outlines the rationale and significance of this study.

A Brief Genealogy of AEEMB

According to the AEEMB website (www.aeemb.bf), the first Muslim student

3 organization that later became AEEMB was founded in 1975 by Muslim students at

Lycée Philippe Zinda Kaboré, a public high school located in the center of Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso.3 This first Muslim student union did not have any particular name and was simply known by its motto: Union-discipline-Croyance (Union-

Discipline-Belief). Between 1975 and 1985, Union-discipline-Croyance gained more popularity among Muslim youth as more Muslim students from other high schools of the capital city became members of it. Also, when its original members graduated from high school to attend the Université de Ouagadougou, the organization extended its reach to more Muslim college students who came from other high schools from all over the country. This latter group helped establish chapters in the high schools of their respective hometowns, turning AEEMB into a nationwide Muslim student’s organization.

From 1975, the year of AEEMB’s inception to 1985, the organization changed names several times. It was Troupe Mohamad (The Muhammad Troupe) from 1977 to

1980, La communauté Islamique de Muhammad (The Muhammad Community) in 1981, and then Association Musulmane des Scolaires Voltaïques from 1981 to 1985. AEEMB’s multiple changes of name over the first decade of its creation indicates the pace of growth of a student organization, revealing its resilience in adjusting and adapting to the sociopolitical contingencies of post-colonial Burkina Faso. It may also signal the difficult journey of a faith-based youth organization to become an important reference in domestic sociopolitical and religious discourses as well as a producer of knowledge about Islam.

3 This high school bears the name of Philip Zinda Kabore, a pioneer of the political struggle in Burkina Faso. Kabore was the son of a Mossi king and political figure in colonial Burkina Faso. He was elected Deputy to represent the colony of Cote d’Ivoire in the French parliament in 1946. 4 Although the education system is secular, AEEMB members are now indispensable interpreters and interlocutors of Islam in Burkina Faso (Vanvyve, 2016).

AEEMB is also a member of the government-sanctioned umbrella Muslim organization called Federation des Associations Islamiques du Burkina Faso (FAIB), which is composed of all officially recognized Muslim associations and organizations in the country. FAIB, which was created in 2005, took on the mission of coordinating all

Muslim associations and organizations to act as one national group in the best interest of the Muslims in Burkina Faso. However, as a Muslim youth organization AEEMB does not always necessarily have a consistent stance with FAIB on issues of national interest.4

Also, since AEEMB members must be high school or college students, the organization found a formula to keep its graduates together and assure a sort of continuity in graduate adherence to AEEMB’s Islamic orientation: an affiliate organization called CERFI was created in 1989 to bring together former AEEMB graduates, civil servants, and functionaries. CERFI stands for Cercle d’Etude, de Recherche et de formation Islamique

(Islamic Study, Research, and Training Circle). Its national headquarters are in

Ouagadougou, and it has decentralized cells in each of the 13 administrative regions of

Burkina Faso. CERFI offers a pool of committed advisors to AEEMB. Major local donors to AEEMB also tend to come from CERFI. The president of AEEMB described

CERFI to me saying “It is at the same time AEEMB’s junior and senior because its members are older than us and most of them have worked to make AEEMB what it is today. But it was also created a decade after AEEMB, so we as an organization outrank

4 This unique position of AEEMB within FAIB is further expanded in chapter 2. 5 them in longevity.”

This study focuses specifically on AEEMB and how it uses media to articulate and communicate its understanding of Islam. It discusses how AEEMB grapples with questions of Muslim identity, citizenship, and gender roles in a fast-changing socio- political context. As a Muslim youth organization, AEEMB was created to respond to the needs of Muslim students to express their faith in a secular education system, which did not provide such a place for them the way it did for students from other faith backgrounds

(Cisse, 2012, Y. Ouedraogo , 2019). AEEMB resiliently managed to grow and to become a referential point of Islam over time. The organization has over 100,000 active members as of June 2018 according to its official estimation.5 In contemporary Burkina Faso,

AEEMB emerged as a leading voice of the Muslim youth in current social, political, and economic activism. To understand how current members of AEEMB continue to engage with their faith, the secular political state of Burkina Faso, and the local and global discourses on Islam, it is important to explore the larger context of Islam in Burkina Faso and to situate AEEMB’s relationship with emerging technologies of communication. But first, I turn to my role as Muslim researcher of Islam in my home country and my positionality vis-à-vis AEEMB.

The Researcher

My first encounter with AEEMB took place in 2005 when I was still a high school student at Lycée Departmental du Tuy. I grew up in a Muslim family and a small

5 Membership record is loosely kept, and I had to rely on the organization’s official estimates that the leaders of national council gave me. 6 community in West Burkina Faso. My late father officiated most of the Islamic rituals at our local Mosque and my mother taught Quranic recitation to other women. The Islamic faith was not just part of my daily life: it defined its rhythm. When I returned home from school one day to tell my parents that I wanted their permission and money to spend my

December school break with AEEMB to learn about Islam, they thought I was just trying to make them spend their money on a city holiday. Besides, December was a busy time for my farming parents who had to use their family manpower to harvest their crops. My parents’ reasoning was also that I was learning Islam at home already and going on a school trip to be with students from the city would be of no use to my faith. If I needed to go to the city, they said, I should go visit my uncle who lives in Ouagadougou. At least, with him, I would not only be safe, but would also continue to receive a decent Islamic education.

Like my parents, my uncle was educated in the traditional Muslim school system before moving to the capital city where he served as Imam of a mosque. My parents’ reasoning fits well in the general perception that rural Sufi Muslims had about their city counterparts whom they believed to have been tainted with a profit-making lifestyle, which rendered their Islamic faith dubious and their capacity to teach Islam uncertain.

To my greatest surprise, my parents approved my trip to the city with AEEMB without offering any further explanation about their sudden change of mind. I spent one intense month in Bobo Dioulasso—the second largest city of Burkina Faso—with the

AEEMB members from various provinces and cities of Burkina Faso. The team leaders were slightly older than me and my high school mates; they were mostly college students.

7 Every day during this educational retreat, they would wake us up at 4 am to pray fajr, the first prayer of the day, and learn how to recite the Quran. They would then proceed to translate each new verse we learned into French and make long comments. I already knew most of the short verses they were teaching us, but I did not know their meaning, nor did I know the historical context in which they were revealed to Prophet Muhammad.

I was impressed by the confidence with which the young men and women explained the text and how committed they were to our faith. Also, this was the first time for me to hear anyone comment on the Quran and provide a historical commentary of it in French, a language in which I was developing fluency. We also learned some songs— mostly praises of the Prophet of Islam in French—which we sang very loud to stay awake between the long prayers, Quran learning, and food sharing sessions. It made this youth ministry all the more meaningful to me.

In high school, I remained close to our local AEEMB chapter and its members after this trip, which was my first real contact with AEEMB. I attended most of the events my high school AEEMB chapter organized. I even started praying at the makeshift mosque in my school. However, I did not commit myself to going on further study retreats with AEEMB, mostly because I did not want to make my parents spend money on an activity they were not fully convinced of the utility in my education as a Muslim.

When I graduated from high school and moved to Ouagadougou to continue my studies at the university, I cut ties with AEEMB. I was finally out of the control of my parents, and I could decide what I needed to learn aside from school. I immersed myself in reading philosophy and literature instead of religion as part of my extracurricular

8 training. During that phase of my life as a college student, I developed interests in writers such as Aimé Césaire, Joseph Ki Zerbo, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Frantz

Fanon, and Mongo Beti. It was the great days of the student activist movements in

Burkina Faso with anti-government gatherings and strikes happening almost every month to demand the improvement of student life. I even thought that existentialist philosophers such as Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre were much closer to my growth as a student and an activist in this campus than dwelling on religious education, which I was eager to stay away from since the time I left my parents’ home.

Contrary to the AEEMB members who first came to my high school and convinced me and my Muslim schoolmates to sign up for their Islamic immersion retreat program, the ones I met in college did not impress me as people who could teach me

Islam. They dressed very modestly compared to the average Burkinabè college student.

They were very kind as they tried their best to be good representatives of Islam on campus. For example, in most of my classrooms, there were not enough seats for all the students and often students fought over seats, especially those closer to the podium where the lecturer stood and spoke into a microphone. It became a known rumor that AEEMB members, especially the female members would not fight with anyone who took their seats after they stepped out of the classroom to pray during the long lecture sessions. And they did that frequently because they would not miss any of the five daily prayers while they were on campus. Although I did not witness such a case in my own classes, I have known some male students from other departments who would brag about coming late to class and waiting for one of the AEEMB sisters to go out for prayer, and they would rush

9 to take her seat. The sister would return only to find her seat taken, but she would not stand up for herself or make any argument in front of the large and crowded classroom.

Unlike the AEEMB members, I would not leave my class to go pray, and I would not let anyone steal my seat. I would fight for a seat in the classroom if I had to. I guess my

Islamic faith became tainted by the contingencies of life in the university and city. My parents would definitively agree with me on this statement.

By the time I arrived in the United States in the summer of 2011 to continue my undergraduate studies, I had already grown a bit suspicious of religion in general and as an institution. Although I strived to keep up with my daily prayers, at least, I did not observe my religious obligations strictly anymore. For instance, even though eating pork is forbidden in Islam, finding out that bacon was pork did not prevent me from continuing to eat it. But in the USA too, I soon found myself going from an English emersion program at the University of California San Diego to Goshen College—a Mennonite institution—where the Christ-centered core values were not just statements written and repeated to prospective students and their parents, but were actually interwoven in the college curricula and lived daily. While taking Bible classes which were a part of the mandatory general education requirements for all Goshen College students, I had the opportunity to reflect on my own faith. I found familiarity in biblical stories—the

Creation, Moses, and Joseph—with what I had learned as a Muslim child and a member of AEEMB in Burkina Faso.

However, my exposure to the Mennonite education did not push me to go back to being an AEEMB member. I did not convert to Christianity either. Instead, I took time to

10 read more about my own faith. Indeed, I was given countless opportunities to engage with some of the Mennonite community members on the subject and with my peers in religious classes like Reading the Bible (from cover to cover) and Introduction to Youth

Ministry. I found myself—a Muslim who was questioning his faith—becoming the resident expert on Islam. In this highly Christian faith environment, there were only four

Muslim students including me and just a few other non-Mennonite students.

But it was a particularly faith-growing opportunity when those of us from different faith backgrounds were expected to know more about our own faith traditions and to be the embodiments of them. In general, in this environment, I had to represent

Islam. I remember friends asking me what it was like growing up in a Muslim family.

Based on what they knew about Muslims and Islam, some people would ask me why I drank alcohol. The more I tried to justify my drinking, the more it became obvious that I was confusing them. Some of my Muslim fellows who faced similar dilemmas resorted to answers such as “I am a moderate Muslim” or “I am just culturally Muslim.” Of course, I found the use of these justifications unsatisfactory, but at times, they seemed to be the best option.

I resorted to reading more about Islam not so much so that I could justify my not being the ideal “good Muslim” who does not drink alcohol, but so that I could provide better answers to people when asked about my faith. I remember telling a dear friend who is a pastor that for Muslims, Jesus was a Muslim because he only preached submission to

God. This statement earned me many free cups of coffee from people who heard me say

Jesus was a Muslim. In the typical curious way, students who heard me would treat me to

11 coffee in our college coffee shop, and then they would probe me to explain my

“preposterous” statement about Jesus. It was entertaining for me to discuss this assertion with my friends who took their faith very seriously. I saw in them a mix of seriousness, zeal, and commitment to their faith similar to what I saw in the AEEMB fellows in

Burkina Faso. My time at Goshen College offered important transformative moments of a return to some interest in religion and, above all, the representation and perception of religion in the media.

In this current research, it is not so much about me as a Muslim who is navigating my own faith journey and its moments of disruptions and distractions, but rather about

AEEMB and its members’ work to define their own faith in a critical point of its history and the history of Burkina Faso. While, in general, the post 9/11 era discourses on Islam and media representations of it remain distorted by fear-mongering and continued orientalist tropes, Burkina Faso has witnessed its own chapter of violence in the hands of

Islamist terrorists over the past three years. As a Muslim youth organization, AEEMB understands that it has a role to play in the national effort to fight against terrorism and the effort to show what Islam is to them. Unlike me—who had the option of saying “I am a moderate Muslim” in order to be left alone to indulge myself with beer and bacon—

AEEMB members have to engage in much more complex local and global discourses on what it means to be a Muslim and participate in the political discourse about it. This dissertation seeks to understand how AEEMB communicates that orientation.

Significance and Rationale of the Study

In 1986, Talal Asad, a cultural anthropologist, rekindled a question that was

12 almost put to rest among scholars of Islam who are based in Western higher education institutions. He asked, when investigating the anthropology of Islam, what is the object of investigation? (Asad, 2009). While the answer to this question seemed obvious, it was far from that as Asad’s work quickly illustrated it complexity. In revisiting this question,

Asad presented a compelling case against some of the dominant voices in the anthropology and ethnography of Islam including Ernest Gellner, Clifford Geertz, and their students and contemporaries. Since then, Asad’s monograph has become a referential text for scholars engaged in critical ethnographic and anthropological study of

Islam.

Asad critiqued Gellner for reducing the locus of Islam to the Middle East and the locus of Christianity to the West by assuming that “Christian [Western] practice and discourse throughout history have been less intimately concerned with the uses of political power for religious purposes than the practice and discourse of Muslims [Middle

Eastern]” (Asad, 2009, p. 3). Asad further rejected other scholars’ arguments, which built on Gellner’s premise and suggested that classical and post-classical Muslim scholars showed less interest in the West than the contemporary Western scholars showed to

Islam. Using such orientalist views, Asad argued, ignored cultural motives that might give complex meanings to an actual historical comparison because the epistemological values of the anthropology of Islam become lost in a comparison when the anthropologist merely dwells on facile differences.

Asad reproached the Geertzian school for presenting a dramaturgical reading of

Islam “turning all Islamic behavior into readable gesture [original emphasis]” (p. 9). In

13 fact, according to Asad, Geertz’s focus on opposites and dualities (e.g. rural Muslims versus urban Muslims; reformers vs puritanical bourgeoisie, etc.) has given less than no role to the discourses of Islam. In this dramaturgical stage, the discourse of the Muslims is buried while their behavior is prominently assessed as key elements of the anthropology of Islam. In this case, “[Muslims’] language is no more than a facilitating instrument of a domination that is already in place” (p. 8). Yet, according to Asad, beyond “the fixed stage of the Islamic theater” that the Geertzian narrators cast as “a self- contained collective agent,” there is a discursive representation of Islam that must also be considered (p. 11). This dissertation is about the communicative and discursive representation of Islam among Muslim youth in Burkina Faso.

It is not difficult to concur with Asad’s contention that the above two dominant paradigms are theoretically inadequate. In fact, Asad argued that “no coherent anthropology of Islam can be founded on the notion of a determinate social blueprint, or on the idea of an integrated social totality in which social structure and religious ideology interact” (p. 14). Asad proposed that the answer lies in what he termed the discursive tradition. He defined the Islamic discursive tradition as being “simply a tradition of

Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present” (p. 14).

When I embarked on this research project to understand Muslim youth communicative practices and civic engagement, I too struggled with the question of what ought to be the object of my research. Is the object Muslim youth’s use of media? If so, how do I delineate what constitutes Muslim youth without falling into the Gellnerian or

14 Geertzian epistemological impasse that Asad so eloquently critiqued? What constitutes media in a technology-limited context? Although I entered this research with an interdisciplinary approach, my dissertation is in Mass Communication, and I wanted to find how Muslims communicate their habitus, or their everyday life, from an ethnographic perspective. As such, the dilemma of researching how faith is communicated became quickly obvious because it also entailed inquiring what is the particularity of that faith in the first place. I quickly realized that it is epistemologically problematic to dissociate the two without the risk of emaciating the object of the study.

Therefore, I sought to articulate how faith works conjointly in determining social action and vice versa and how AEEMB members communicate that co-constructed relationship both online and offline.

This approach allowed me to understand the particular Islamic discursive tradition of AEEMB and how its members communicate it. Asad’s concerns were essentially about making the discourse of Muslims prominent in the study of Islam and situating the religious subject within the historical power relation that allowed the formation of his particular religious discourse rather than embarking in abstractions that would leave it out. In other words, it is crucial to consider how the voices of Muslims are embedded into the process of abstracting the object of the study. In this research, it is not so much about simply understanding the discourse of Muslim youth, but also understanding it together with the structures that embed it. Proceeding this way allowed me to avoid totalizing what Muslim youth is and to articulate how AEEMB as a singular Muslim youth organization communicates its faith.

15 This study is about the trajectories of Islamic orientations among Muslim youth in

Burkina Faso, in particular AEEMB, and how they use media to engage societal and political nomenclatures or constellations around them. This process includes mapping how members of AEEMB use media to articulate their faith in the public sphere and to respond to national and international issues that affect their quotidian or daily lives. I argue that by critically examining and nuancing both the political and the moral agenda of Muslim youth, and analyzing how they communicate this agenda, we can begin to respond to the challenges in researching mediated religious identities. In fact, Herbert

(2011) argued that sociological theories of media and religion have not adequately theorized the relationship between media, culture, and politics while at the same time taking into consideration the intersecting nature of improved media technologies, transnationalism of media spheres, and the liberalization of media economies. This study addresses an important gap in our understanding of Muslims and their use of new technologies of communication in the sense that existing sparse studies on Islam in

Burkina Faso have approached the topic broadly and swamped it under the prism of Islam tranquile [sic] or quiet Islam (Otayek, 1987).6

Considering these issues, this study is an important addition to an emerging body of literature on the evolution, trends, and transformations of Muslims. It also responds to the crucial need to understand modes of communication among Muslims from less technologically developed social contexts. This study fills a gap by contributing to our understanding of the integration of Burkinabè Muslim youth into globalization, its mode

6 This idea is further developed in the next chapter. 16 of development, and the attendant questions of shifting identities, cultures, and ideologies. In fact, this study of university-educated Muslim youth offers a unique opportunity to highlight the efforts of these youth to define their identities within such troubled times. Therefore, this dissertation has the potential to provide insights to policy makers and decisions makers on how to invest resources for consolidating democratic institutions and fighting efficiently against terrorism because it opens new avenues for mapping the resilience of locally co-constructed solutions to religious extremism. My analysis and discussion of this research bring new insights to local and global efforts to understand the social and pollical nomenclature of Islam in Burkina Faso and even in the broader region.

The rationale for this study is that the intelligibility of the Islamic discourse coming from Muslim youth is tied to their understanding of the political context and other referential events that might not even be contiguous with religion in the first place.

For example, youth in Burkina Faso, as elsewhere, grapple with contemporary issues of unemployment, miseducation, unequal access to resources, etc., which are symptoms of the profound malaise of the modern world in which they live. That they communicate such concerns on media through a religious language is a case in point. Therefore, it would be an empirical and analytical shortcoming to study Muslim practice as a discrete cultural event that surpasses the complexity of the interlocking and interdependent sociological ecology in which Muslims live. Consider the Sahel region in general: here

Islam as an identity marker strongly overlaps with ethnicity and social status (Jourde,

2017). Although this generalized descriptions of a ‘Sahelian Islam’ often works fine in

17 countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and Mauritania—which have strong Sufi brotherhoods established through ethnic lineages and social statuses—it does not correspond with how

Islam is distributed across social organization in Burkina Faso (McMillan, 1995). In fact,

Burkinabè Muslims hail from all ethnicities and from all the social make-up of the country.

Hence, this study broadly considers the socio-cultural nomenclature of Islam in

Burkina Faso without distinguishing rigid identity markers such as ethnicity, caste, and political affiliations. Delimiting the study to a heterogeneous group of people of which the only common characteristics are that they are young Muslims and belong to the same

Muslim student organization offers the possibility of a clearer perimeter. This current study focuses on AEEMB as a distinctly religious youth association whose members are educated within the secular French education system. AEEMB members come from all the Islamic tendencies and sensibilities in Burkina Faso and it offers a cadre of expression to all Muslim students without distinction of denominational affiliation.

In this key transformative moment of media adoption and use within the shifting political landscapes of Burkina Faso in particular and the Francophone Sahelian African region in general, this study seeks primarily to communicate the experiences and statements of AEEMB members. We generally know media illiteracy is ubiquitous in

Africa’s southern region of the Sahara Desert and digital media access is particularly relatively insignificant due to several challenges, including low literacy rates—in French language—and lack of proper infrastructure in the region (Nyamnjoh, 2005; Bidwell,

18 2016).7 However, we know very little about modes of production and consumption of ideas in new media among Muslim communities, and this study wants to investigate that area for a segment of that community, i.e. the University Muslim youth of Burkina Faso

(AEEMB).

While, over the past decade, the rise of radical Islamist movements in this Muslim majority region has called for sporadic media coverage of it, contemporary Muslims in this region are still understudied. This study opens new venues to discuss the resilience of locally concerted solutions to the global issues of insecurity (terrorism) expressed through radical Islamist thought. It also highlights what a faith community does to challenge the dominant discourse about Islam and, notably, the tendency in the Western world to equate Islam and terrorism. In a time when terrorist attacks from radical movements are constantly threatening the social stability in Burkina Faso, this research underlines the discourses that AEEMB formulates to comfort its members or address the

Burkinabè in general with regard to religious inspired forms of violence and banditry.

Further, this study explores how AEEMB makes use of media to convey alternative narratives about Islam without compromising the role of Muslim youth in expressing their civic duty of holding political and religious leaders accountable. It examines the religious discourse within the political context of its formation. This study is grounded in a postcolonial theoretical tradition that privileges local framings against

7 The region of Africa situated in the southern side of the Sahara Desert is officially referred to as Sub-Saharan Africa in opposition to the northern side which is linguistically and politically Arabophone. In this study I reject the commonly used term “Sub-Saharan Africa” for “Africa South of the Sahara” because there is anything “sub” about the region. 19 dominant epistemological paradigms, which often overlook local accounts. However, it also departs from traditional neo-orientalist epistemologies that focus on just exploring identity misrepresentations; instead, it privileges a narrative that unfurls the representations of the self by the self.

Outline

This opening chapter offered a brief introduction to AEEMB and its place in the nomenclature of Islamic associations in Burkina Faso. It introduced the researcher as a

Muslim and a former member of AEEMB and how he relates to the research topic. It then offered the significance and rational behind the study.

Chapter 2 discusses relevant literature, highlights where this study fits in that literature, discusses the general and intertwined relationship between mass media and religion, and contextualizes media and Islam in Burkina Faso. It also provides a historiography of Islam in Burkina Faso: how early post-colonial reform movements and late colonial entanglements between Muslims and French colonial institutions created a blueprint for contemporary relationships between Muslims and the secular post-colonial nation-state.

In Chapter 3, I discuss the research methodology and theoretical orientation of the research. I present my fieldwork/homework experience and the theoretical underpinnings and ethical considerations I opted for my data collection and analysis.

Then, I present and discuss my learning in chapters 4, 5, and 6. In chapter 4, I analyze AEEMB’s use of media, particularly its Facebook page, newspaper, and its website. I discuss how these new media might be offering a departing point toward both a

20 secular reading of the Islamic text as well as a hyper sacralization of it. I relate this discussion to the still-developing media ecology of Burkina Faso to provide a better understanding of media adoption and use by a youth’s religious community within their specific socio-technological context.

In chapter 5, I describe the political engagement of AEEMB as a Muslim youth organization. I define what constitutes political Islam in the Burkinabè context and how

AEEMB communicates it. This chapter also discusses how youth political and civic engagement is different from the older generation’s and what that could mean for a

Muslim emancipation in political discourse at the national level.

Chapter 6 discusses gender dynamism among Muslim youth in Burkina Faso. It specifically focusses on how women’s identity expectations and identity performances are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed along their dress choice. Further, this discussion is placed within the broader discourse on Islam, modernity, and gender in

Burkina Faso.

Chapter Seven concludes the work with a summary and discussion of my learning. It brings together the discussions started in the previous chapters.

21 Chapter 2: Media, Secular State, Colonial Legacy, and Islam

Getting in Line on Christmas Eve

Red and white washed-out paintings of Père Nöel (Santa Claus) smiled joyfully on the glass doors of boutiques. Decorative lights, red, green, and yellow small flags hang on all metal poles along the arteries of the streets. The hubbub of laughter and shouting from onlookers, passersby, and shopkeepers mingle with the traffic noise. Motorcycles, france-au-revoir cars, trucks, and the honking of big trucks, all joined in an indeterminate scene of both chaos and grace. This cacophonic music was mingled with Adhan, the call to the Maghrib prayer, from an adjacent makeshift Mosque. Although the street merchants hear the prayer call, they pray quickly next to their merchandise spread along both sides of the road. After all, it is Christmas Eve, and Muslim merchants too have to make a buck. These Muslim street vendors are selling all kinds of goods from inflatable

Santas to plastic Christmas trees and myriads of decorations.

This is a Christmas Eve scene from the busy main throughway, Rue Kwame

Nkrumah (named after the first president of neighboring Ghana) in Ouagadougou. It is also the acoustics of modernity. Burkinabè modernity. Despite the December heatwave in this Sahelian city, the Christmas spirit has been tamed, tropicalized, and indigenized.

Père Nöel is now persistently part of Burkinabè children’s imaginations, especially urban children. The myth of the generous big-bellied old white man with a white beard has found a new home in a Muslim-majority country. While the secularism of the state makes this possible, it is also self-evident that modernity, or “that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms [….], of new ways of living and new

22 forms of malaise [..]” (Taylor, 2004, p. 1), has its own ways of imposing itself through historical events in many pre-programmed manners. In the present case, a close look at the history of colonialism in Burkina Faso offers an entry point for making sense of it.

It was prayer time, and I was riding home with my uncle. He parked the motorcycle, and we walked across the street and made our way into the makeshift

Mosque. “Get in line,” he said to me. The prayer proceeded calmly. As soon as the Imam said the Fatiha, the concluding verbal act of the prayer, my uncle rushed out to leave. I followed him. It is very unusual for one to just leave without listening to the Imam say a few things and without shaking hands with one’s fellow worshipers. Later at home, I learned through conversations with my uncle that we had prayed at a Sunni Wahhabi

Mosque and my uncle, who identifies himself as Tijaniyya Sufi, would rather avoid staying after the prayer to listen to the usual post-prayer sermons. While Wahhabi

Mosques in general do not prevent Sufi Muslims from getting in line with everyone else during prayer, I learned from my uncle that although fundamentally Sufi and Wahhabi are all Muslims, they often have opposing orientations regarding certain aspects of their faith as Muslims. That was his reason why it was not appropriate for us to listen to the

Wahhabi sermon.

While researching Islam in Burkina Faso, this memory from almost a decade ago came back to me. It guided my interests throughout my reflections on the literature and allowed me to formulate questions as I engaged with the literature and historiography of

Islam and media in Burkina Faso. In this chapter, I ask what is the genesis of Islam in

Burkina Faso and how can we understand distinctions between Islamic denominations

23 there? What was the impact of French colonialism and educational hegemony on the

Muslim doctrinal space in Burkina Faso at the end of the 19th century? Despite this, how did Muslims negotiate their multiple overlapping identities within the emerging political system under French colonialism and after Burkina Faso achieved formal independence?

Within the contemporary secular political space of Burkina Faso, how is that preceding colonial experience impinging on Muslim modernity, i.e. Muslims’ engagement with their faith and within the globalized, media-saturated world? How did the history of Islam in Burkina Faso allow for the emergence of a strong Muslim youth militancy within the

Burkinabè higher education system?

This chapter discusses the relationship between religion and mass media and situates it within the context of Burkina Faso. It then provides a historiography of politics and religion with a particular attention to state-sanctioned secularism in the context of a colonial Muslim majority nation and its attendant long-lasting entanglements in the contemporary Burkinabè society. The chapter ends with discussion of the gap in the literature to suggest that, given profound socio-political changes in Burkina Faso over the past decade, social research must incorporate non-traditional Muslim voices such as the youth of AEEMB and their use of media.

Religion and Mass Media

The relationship between religion and mass media is an old and complex one. de

Vries argued that religion and media are mutually imbricated phenomena that share an interface in contemporary societies (cited in Hirschkind & Engelke, 2011). de Vries

(2001) underlined an entwined and dependent relationship between religious traditions

24 and media infrastructures. In subtle contrast, Weber (2001) saw “an enigmatic and yet indissoluble relationship” between the two marked by repetition (p. 43). Derrida (2001) further pointed out that “the televisual globalization of religion is at the same time a

‘globalatinization’ of the very concept of religion” (p. 59). In Derrida’s understanding, globalatinization refers to the mediatization of religion at the world scale. It is important to note here that Derrida distinguished Christianity as a particularly media-transparent religion compared with Islam and Judaism. This transparency means that the religious media content becomes part and parcel of the religious ritual itself. Derrida argued that through the communion, the miracle, and “the mediation, the hoc est meum corpus, The

Eucharist: God become visible” in Christian television (p. 58). Meanwhile, for Muslims and Jews, “religion is spoken about, but the sacred event itself does not take place in the very flesh of those who present themselves before the camera” (Derrida, 2001, p. 58).

However, Derrida’s conceptualization of Islam as being less transparent in media than

Christianity must not be generalized when we consider certain mediatized rituals such as the dhikr, a whirling Sufi devotional prayer that often leads worshipers into a trance.

Although these kinds of rituals are not widespread among Muslims, their presence on televised programs challenges Derrida’s argument.

In a discussion paper by Hirschkind and Engelke (2011), Hirschkind critiqued De

Vries by arguing that “De Vries’ text repeatedly invites us to recognize religion’s condition of possibility in the mediatic, the artifactual, the technological, to the point of their virtual identity” (Hirschkind & Engelke, p. 94). Perhaps, what Hirschkind does not realize is that before De Vries equated religion with media, German social theorist Niklas

25 Luhmann had already linked the essence of religion to communication. According to

Luhmann, “Religion has only a societal existence as communication. What happens in the heads of the uncountable individuals can never build up a ‘Religion’—except through communication” (Luhmann, p. 137, cited in Laermans & Verschraegen, 1998, p. 17).

This means that from a communication standpoint, religion cannot be separated from its mediation or the exteriorization of faith and ritual through some sort of a medium.

Other scholars pushed the argument of a relationship between religion and mass media further to suggest the presence of contemporary mass media effect such as agenda- setting in early religious communication. In a critical study of biblical communicative perspective, Rashi and McCombs (2017) claimed that ancient human societies were already using agenda-setting through religion as a medium to sway audiences and support particular worldviews. They argued that early synagogues and temples functioned as places for mass communication and offered a certain “degree of exposure” (p. 84) with pilgrim festivals constituting a major timing factor for setting agendas (p. 85).

Mass media now constitute the primary source of knowledge about Islam in the

Western world, and according to Kivak (2016), “In social science, mass media refers to the mediums, or channels of communication, used to transmit information to large numbers of people through mass communication” (par. 1). The advent of the Internet has transformed what constitutes mass media, which traditionally comprised “books, newspapers, magazines, film, radio, television, audio and music recordings” (Kivak,

2016. par. 1). In fact, the Internet and social media have allowed users and traditional media consumers to also become producers. That contributed to blurring the boundaries

26 between mass media consumption and mass media production. This means that mass media consumers of Islamic knowledge are also, theoretically, becoming mass media producers of knowledge about Islam and Muslims.

The advent of 9/11, according to Rane, Ewart, and Martinkus (2014), has contributed mostly to make Western media audiences more aware of Islam although that awareness does not imply knowledge about Islam since media representation of Islam in the West remains mostly inaccurate. Nonetheless, new media including the Internet have allowed Muslims around the world to connect and create a new sense of ummah or

Muslim community and to communicate what is Islam. Mandaville (2001) described this mediated ummah as a Muslim reimagined community within a “cyber Islamic environment” (Bunt, 2003, p. 2) that has now become an important subject of social science research. As Hoover (2002) further argued, “The realms of both “religion” and

“the media” are themselves transforming and being transformed. Religion today is much more a public, commodified, therapeutic, and personalized set of practices than it has been in the past” (p. 2).

This study is not merely concerned with how Muslims and Islam are represented in media; instead, it examines how Muslim youth use media to negotiate the meanings of the Islamic texts and practices, and by the same token, creating new trajectories of Islam and proposing their own understanding of their Muslim identities. Considering the fact that despite the relatively limited access to Internet in Burkina Faso, Muslims are still making use of media to communicate, this study focuses on AEEMB’s use of social media instead of traditional media: the choice of it official Facebook page and website

27 are justified mainly by the fact that, as a Muslim youth group, AEEMB does not have a strong presence on traditional media such as radio and television. Instead, it is very active on its Facebook page and website. Even its monthly newsletter, An-Nasr (or the

Victorious) is distributed digitally via Facebook.

Contextualizing Islam and Media in Burkina Faso

In the Muslim majority world, new media technologies facilitate the emergence of new contributors to religious and political debates. According to Eickelman (2003),

access to new technologies [of communication] has multiplied the channels

through which ideas and information can be circulated and has enlarged the scope

of what can be said and to whom. It has eroded the ability of authorities to censor

and repress, to project an uncontested ‘central’ message defining political and

religious issues for larger numbers of people. (p. 33)

For instance, in the 1980s when the fax machine became an indispensable technology for institutions in Saudi Arabia, lay people used it to share religious ideas that were not sanctioned by the government. In doing so, they challenged the Saudi Royal Family’s monopoly on Islamic discourse and government (Eickelman, 2003).

In Burkina Faso, the adoption of the new technologies of communication has not resulted in a direct challenge to the central secular ruling systems. While over 60% of the

Burkinabè population are Muslim, Muslims have remained in a state of political subordination and social marginalization since the independence of the country in 1960

(Otayek, 1984, Vanvyve, 2015 & 2016). Even the majority of Islamic associations and organizations have always officially refrained from articulating any dissenting opinion

28 against the government. The only exception to this was Le Mouvement Sunnite created in

1973, which continually challenged the dominant Sufi Islamic establishment on moral grounds and overtly critiqued the secular government on some occasions (Gomez-Perez,

2017). Since Burkinabè Muslim associations and organizations have so far preferred to remain neutral or even take sides with the government, Burkinabè Islam has earned the sobriquet Islam tranquil (Otayek, 1987). Otayek stated that the specificity of Burkinabè

Islam is that it occupies an ambiguous position in the national political sphere and does not express any ethno-regional identity. He further argued that this ‘quietness’ of Islam in

Burkina Faso was possible because Muslims have not developed any uniform and specific doctrinal innovation similar to Muslims in Northern Nigeria or Sufi Muslims in

Senegal. In fact, the “Murridyya Sufi order of Senegal is one of the most powerful economically, politically, and culturally powerful Sufi organizations in Sub-Saharan

Africa” (Ngom, 2016, p. 1).

Nonetheless, “Burkina Faso is undergoing a significant wave of Islamic renewal” and media are certainly playing a crucial role (Gomez-Perez, 2016, p.16). According to

Gomez-Perez, the growing Islamic activism in Burkina Faso is characterized by the emergence of new Islamic associations and networks. In this research, I interrogate the intersecting dynamics of Islam, Muslims’ access to media, and the public sphere through the lens of the university-educated Muslim youth. Particularly, I explore these youth’s socio-economic and political activism couched in religious terminology, which I define in this dissertation as youth political Islam.

29 The sparse recent scholarship on the topic of Islam in Burkina Faso does not contest Otayek’s initial argument of quiet Islam, but they challenged the implied argument of a doctrinal inertia. Among them, Vanvyve (2016) advanced a more nuanced argument for the tranquility of Burkinabè Islam beyond the lack of a uniform doctrine suggested by Otayek. She argued that a major characteristic of the perceived political weakness of Islam in the Burkinabè public sphere is that Burkinabè Muslims do not have one central authority that speaks on behalf of all Muslims as far as political matters are concerned. In her study, Vanvyve found, among Muslims in the urban areas, a steady regression in the power of Islamic dignitaries. She then argued that this is not because of lack of doctrinal differences but rather because of political differences among different

Islamic denominational groups.

In fact, Vanvyve specifically noted, among Muslim youth receiving a western- style education, a change of attitude toward religious authorities: the Muslim youth challenged the neutrality of traditional Muslim leaders and preferred them to be more politically active and involved. For example, in a highly controversial 2013 national debate on the creation of an additional legislative branch called a senate, La Federation des Associations Islamiques du Burkina Faso (FAIB) which oversees all Muslim organizations in Burkina Faso offered its support for the bill. AEEMB, although a member of FAIB, defied this unanimous decision and made a public statement about its opposition to the creation of a senate (Vanvyve, 2016).

Harsh (2017) brings clarity to the complexity of the political context and the outcomes: civil society movements and opposition parties had rejected the bill and argued

30 that it was meant to help President Blaise Compaoré reinforce his position in the legislative branch of government. Harsh further points out that they also argued this would allow the president to advance his plans to amend the constitution in 2014 and seek reelection after 27 years in power. Perceived injustices and growing grievances against the government eventually coalesced until the very idea of revision of the constitution failed and, through a popular uprising in 2014, President Compaoré was forced out of office (Harsh, 2017).

Because FAIB supported the unpopular request to revise the constitution,

AEEMB perceived the FAIB’s position to be contrary to the will of the Muslim population in general. AEEMB believed that it was both a civic duty and a moral obligation for Muslim leaders to have a clear stance on political matters that affect the lives of Muslims as citizens. In taking this position, AEEMB presented itself as a strong contestant in the Islamic political associative landscape. By publicly countering leaders of the traditional Muslim establishment, AEEMB might have contributed to erode these leaders’ power in the public sphere. Vanvyve (2016) attributed the erosion of the authority of traditional Muslim leaders to, first, a general global trend of de-legitimization sustained by alternative Islamic figures and, second, to alternative means of access to

Islamic knowledge. She underlined how the emergence of new technology of communication offered alternative access to Islamic knowledge. For example, more

Muslims are turning to the Internet to read and listen to new religious commentators whose authority on the Islamic text is not endorsed by any central power (Vanvyve,

31 2016). The AEEMB leaders have certainly become new interpreters of Islam in Burkina

Faso.

While Western Europe and the United States often perceive political Islam as an analytical category that may correlate with violence, the exceptionalism of Burkinabè

Islam as Islam tranquil challenges, for the West, the stereotypes and feelings of anxiety and worry toward Islam. In the Sahel region in general, however, one of the specificities of the politics of Islam is that we have civil states ruling Muslim religious societies (Issa,

2017; Elischer, 2019). The Burkinabè civil state is a secular system inspired by the

French laïcité, a political system that rejects and effaces religious involvement in state policy-making. According to Tolan (2017), the concept of laïcité has gradually emerged out of conflicts and evolved after a 1905 law separating the Church and the state in

France. Now, although copious scholarship on secularism abounds among sociologists, political theorists, historians, and religious scholars (Asad, 2003), in France, the secular state has an ambivalent relationship with religion that is quite difficult to pinpoint. Tolan

(2017) further argued that,

It is impossible to understand current French attitudes toward religion in general

and toward Islam in particular without a sense of how laïcité grew out of both

France’s domestic struggles since the French Revolution and through the conquest

of an overseas empire where Islam loomed large. (p. 41)

Tolan’s mention of Islam in the context of the French colonial empire is of interest to me in this study. In this chapter, I add to this discussion about the complicated history of the relationship between religion and politics with a particular focus on colonial and post-

32 colonial Burkina Faso. Both the continuities and discontinuities of that relationship provide a matrix for understanding how Muslim youth engage with the secular state and how they communicate their faith.

The epistemological ground for this research imposes a need to investigate the idea of secularism as a political doctrine in the Burkinabè postcolonial state, which has a

Muslim majority population. It begs the question of how Muslims negotiate their place in political affairs while maintaining a non-radical outlook in the context of a secular political system where most of the people are Muslim. Examining how Muslim youth express their civic duty, including the duty to challenge government in light of their beliefs, this study promises a different understanding of how religious reformism that seeks to amend the practice of Islam emerges without undermining the sacrosanct principles of the secular political system. The current study presents an attempt to expand on these strands of thought by exploring how AEEMB members’ particular position as people educated in a secular education system could be taking a different trajectory within the current emerging public sphere in Burkina Faso.

Muslim communities of Burkina Faso have responded to the critique of the perceived weak political position of Islam in the public space with some innovations such as expanding their infrastructure and reinforcing the physical presence of religious institutions (Madore, 2016). In fact, according to Madore, over the past 20 years, the

Muslims in Burkina Faso have increased their “religious offer” as a strategy to build legitimacy in the public space (p. 8). That religious offer refers to the opening of multiple

Islamic schools and multiple Mosques, especially in urban areas. Citing Traoré (2010),

33 Madore noted that Ouagadougou alone had 632 official Mosques. Along with the increase in the numbers of Mosques and schools, the past two decades registered a proliferation of Islamic organizations too. In fact, Madore reported that in 2016, Burkina

Faso had 240 Muslim organizations officially under the umbrella of FAIB. Additionally,

Islamic private media outlets including radio stations, periodicals, and even television stations, were created by various Muslim denominations. For Madore, the mushrooming of Islamic schools, mosques, and media outlets is primarily a sign of religious vitality, but most importantly, it is an expression of a competition among the different tendencies of Islam in Burkina Faso (Madore, 2016).

Perhaps, it is important to clarify that the emergence of religion in the public sphere does not concern Islam alone. Muslims are not just competing among themselves for the public space, but they are also competing against other faith groups. In fact, other faith communities are persistently becoming present and more visible in positioning themselves in the same space. For example, traditional faith groups, and particularly their leaders—whose political powers were minimalized under the 1983-1987 regime of

Thomas Sankara (Martens, 1989)—have, over the past few decades, increasingly voiced their need to be part of the political affairs. The Assembly of God Church is an important

Christian religious group that is also persistently present in the public sphere. Laurent

(2005) discussed the case of the Assembly of God Church in Burkina Faso and the socio- economic and political dynamism it brought to both rural and urban host communities.

He argued that this church transgresses the old social structure by promoting “a violent and radical devaluation of the world now considered old fashioned” (p. 314) which is the

34 traditional belief system. New converts to this evangelical church must pay a stiff price consisting of losing the long social bond and web of safety based on mutual aid and respect that protected the individual members in their original communities.

Although Islamic religious institutions and infrastructure are increasing and growing in number and capacity in Burkina Faso, until recently, the Muslim elites have mostly continued to be absent from the sociopolitical debates at the national level. The internal doctrinal divisions between different Islamic denominations reinforced the neutral political positioning of Muslims in national debates leading to criticism against them for their alleged complacent attitudes toward the ruling elites of the country

(Madore, 2016). However, as a consequence of the political transition to constitutional democracy and a multiparty system that started in 1991, the growing competition among different Islamic groups has led to more visibility of Islam in the public sphere (Madore,

2016). Madore found that some Muslim leaders have increasingly invested in the emerging new media such as radio and television to defend their Islamic moral projects, including the question of Muslim citizenship in the public sphere (p. 9).

In the context of the liberalization of media in Burkina Faso that began in the

1990s, Madore (2016) offers two major and seemingly contradictory propensities enabled by media. On the one hand, the content of the Islamic discourse in the public space has increasingly standardized Islam through the use of media. This standardization means that Islamic messages and practices are almost the same among different denominational groups with a few exceptions. On the other hand, there is an emergence of new Islamic authority figures that are diversifying the interpretation of the Islamic text (Madore,

35 2016). Although the religious meta discourses remain the same throughout media, new interpreters of Islam are emerging and contributing to new socio-political debates engaging Muslims and Islam in the public space.

Despite the pronounced apoliticism of Islam and its actors in the public sphere, in the face of important questions of national interest as illustrated by the case of the proposed revision of the constitution in 2014, internal dissensions become clear. Vanvyve

(2016) asserted that on such occasions, AEEMB demarcated itself from the largest community by stressing the importance of morality in the Muslim person as a pathway that should inform the Muslim’s political choices (p. 17). One of the Burkinabè Muslim youth’s major criticisms of the old generation is that the old generation’s failure to openly critique the ruling government’s malpractices has compromised its Islamic morality.

According to Vanvyve (2016), under the long tenure of President Blaise Compaoré

(1987-2014), there has been collusion between the religious sphere and the political sphere in Burkina Faso, and their complicity has undermined the moral authority of the traditional Muslim elites in the eyes of the Muslim youth. In point of fact, AEEMB members have even alleged that the Muslim leaders have traded their spiritual leadership roles for financial favors from the government and, therefore, are not fit to legitimately lead the national Muslim community (Vanvyve, 2016). Madore (2016) corroborated

Vanvyve’s assertion when he pointed out that the leaders of Muslim youth organizations including AEEMB and CERFI (another Muslim interest group) encouraged citizen participation and engagement in the socio-political debates, even though that engagement still does not manifest itself beyond their defense of Islamic morality.

36 Islamic revivalism is not isolated to Burkina Faso. In a sense, AEEMB could be perceived as a youth Islamic revival movement similar to the growing revival movements across many countries in West Africa. Schulz (2012) argued that the new Islamic reformist movements in West Africa are not entirely political. They are primarily spiritually-inspired organizations because there is a perceived desire from their actors to redefine the guiding principles and practices of their spiritual needs. In her study of new

Islamic revival movements in Mali, Schulz (2012), suggested that the appeal of the

Islamic renewal movement is justified by a perceived belief that Muslims are disoriented from the true pathways to God and that they must work to “overcome that sense of disorientation” (Schulz, 2012, p. 3). For example, to experience the presence of God,

Malian Muslim women have chosen multiple pathways through competing to better embody and practice Islamic piety. Urban Muslim women encouraged one another to engage in religious learning activities and to take ownership of their religious knowledge.

This quest for a renewed religious piety also intersects with broader social concerns of pervasive moral degeneration and religious identity (Schulz, 2012).

However, according to Madore (2016), the moral project that Muslim groups such as AEEMB promote, whether collectively or individually, can be understood as social reform projects and are, therefore, political projects. Madore argued that in preaching about Islamic principles with the will to introduce Islamic norms on issues of gender, family, and other societal behaviors in either public or private space, those religious tendencies are entering into the domain of the political (Madore, 2016). Similarly, Issa

(2017) strongly argued that Islamic reformism becomes a political action when it seeks to

37 mend religious practice, and he added that such reformism can even lead to political radicalism.

Yet, the argument that Islamic reform is necessarily a political act also finds strong opponents; indeed, Kobo (2012) suggested it is a claim which cannot be universalized. Kobo further pointed out examples of more recent reforms in Burkina Faso that refute arguments like the ones advanced by Issa and Madore. According to Kobo

(2012), in the 1960s, the return of the early Meccan-educated Muslims or “Makka

Moinba” (Meccan Scholars) to Burkina Faso sustained one of the earliest noted reformist movements in the recent history of the country (p. 131). In fact, the Meccan Scholars led a Wahhabi-oriented movement which perceived local Sunni religious practices as un-

Islamic even though Islam in West Africa had historically been of Sunni orientation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Meccan-educated gained strength, and their disagreements with the Sunni movement often led to violent conflicts centered around who occupied certain

Mosques and who led the leadership of the Muslim community (Kobo, 2012, p. 198).

Nevertheless, such conflicts, which rested on purely religious grounds, have not escalated beyond the internal disputes between Wahhabi-oriented and Sunni-oriented groups.

Considering the rise of more proactive and assertive youth organizations like

AEEMB, even though doctrinal controversy among different Islamic tendencies is not critically acute among Muslims in Burkina Faso, the concept of an Islam tranquil needs a much more nuanced re-examination. Additionally, considering that new media are facilitating access to Islam from non-traditional interpreters and enabling a standardization of the Islamic message (Madore, 2016), disagreement between the

38 traditional Arabic-educated elite and the new French-educated youth elite must have a more subtle differentiated explanation.

Furthermore, the sociopolitical context of Burkina Faso and the francophone

Sahelian West Africa must be factored into the study of the current political and religious nomenclature of Islam in Burkina Faso. Yet, the literature on Islam in Burkina Faso is very scant on these issues. Also, in contemporary Burkina Faso, the Islam tranquil rhetoric is widely claimed by both political leaders and Muslim social actors as a way of bolstering the country’s image as a stable and emerging democracy. Studying AEEMB’s posture in the religious discourse and the public sphere and taking the current socio- political context into consideration reveal how Islam is a continued dynamic and vigorous terrain and challenge the dominant Islam tranquil paradigm.

Another important historical context to underline here is that Burkina Faso just entered a new era of democratic governance by ending a 27-year dictatorship through a popular youth revolution (Vincent, 2015). With the 2015 election of its first-ever civilian- elected president in 49 years, the country is entering a new era of representative democracy. A notable mark of this young democracy is that freedom of speech and media freedom are much more advanced in Burkina Faso than in most Muslim majority countries. As an illustration, Reporters Without Borders ranked Burkina Faso fourth in

Africa in terms of press freedom after Namibia (first), Ghana (second), and South Africa

(third). Worldwide, the same report ranked Burkina Faso number 42 out of 180 countries on its freedom of speech index, placing it above even the United States (43/180) and just a little below France (39/180) and the United Kingdom (40/180) (Reporters Without

39 Borders, 2017). One of the implications of the post-2015 political change and the strengthening of the freedom of press could be that movements like AEEMB have a window to fully express their political views in the public space.

Furthermore, as Audet-Gosselin (2016) argued, in a sense, the Burkinabè imagined community is much more defined in terms of the broader nation than it is related to religious or any other identity affiliation. In Burkina Faso, membership in the national community outranks all other attachments to sectarian identifiers and divisions.

A case in point is the Burkinabè diaspora youth from Cote d’Ivoire who returned to their parent’s homeland following the 2002 civil war in their birth country. According to

Bjarnesen (2014), these diaspora youth met social stigmatization when they branded themselves socially as different. However, more and more security issues are now emerging in this country that might hinder the nascent fragile democracy and undermine the social stability.

Geographically, Burkina Faso is located at the center of West Africa. Politically, because of emerging issues of international migration, human trafficking, and terrorism in the region, far from being at the margins of globalization, the country is now at the center of international security. Indeed, the entire Sahelian West African region is now in geopolitical daily news as the region is at a crossroads with transnational crisis and is stifled with internal social movements. Considering these changing political dynamics, it is crucial to expand this research on youth media use and political involvement beyond their moral projects and include the deeper socio-economic and political contingencies that nurture such projects.

40 Even though insurgent Islamism is rampant in neighboring Mali and Niger,

Burkina Faso has long been a haven of religious tolerance. However, terrorism became an immediate reality to deal with when on January 15, 2016, turbaned gunmen stormed two hotels in Ouagadougou, took hostages, and killed 30 people. Al-Qaeda, a multinational terrorist organization, and its Mali-based branch known as Al-Mourabitoun claimed the attack (Reuters Top News, 2016). Since then, sporadic terrorist attacks on police and military stations in the North and East of Burkina Faso have been recurrent.

Despite its location in the “notoriously volatile Sahel region,” Burkina Faso has remained an exceptionally safe and politically stable country until very recently

(Counter-Extremism Project, 2018 ). According to a 2018 CIA report, there are now two home-based and two foreign-based terrorist groups operating in Burkina Faso. The home- base groups are Ansarul Islam and Islamic State of Iraq and ash-sham networks in the

Greater Sahara (ISGS). The primary target of these two groups are Burkinabè security forces and civilians. Ansarul Islam seeks to end government control in the North of the country and to redraw the borders of Djeelgodji, which is an ancient Fulani empire that stretched across the Sahel region (on Djeelgodji, see Riesman 1974/1977). ISGS seeks to put in place Islamic governments at the head of existing regional countries.

According to the CIA, the foreign-based terrorist groups operating in Burkina

Faso are al-Mulathamun Battalion, which is based in the Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger tri- border region, and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), which is affiliated to al-Qaida and is based primarily in Mali. JNIM targets Westerners, security forces and peacekeeping forces in the region. al-Mulathamun Battalion seeks to found Islamic states

41 in the region. Its modes of operation include kidnappings and violent attacks on civilians and military positions.

There is no official link between any Burkinabè Muslim organization and any terrorist group at the moment, but Muslims feel anxious about the emergence of terrorists in the sub-continent who claim to belong to Islam. Organizations such as AEEMB and

FAIB have strongly condemned the repetitive attacks. Additionally, AEEMB leaders now regularly hold conferences with Muslim youth to urge them to understand what is happening and define themselves as against violent extremism. AEEMB is also active on its social media platforms where it sensitizes vulnerable populations that might represent ideal recruitment targets for extremist groups. My research examined such local efforts to construct Islamic identities with a focus on how youth grapple with their Muslim identities in their daily lives during these troubled times.

Theorizing Politics and Religion

Burkina Faso is a secular state with a Muslim majority population. Therefore, to study the political engagement of Muslim youth (in media and offline) necessarily requires an understanding of secularism as an everyday social experience and secularism as the state’s political doctrine. In this chapter, I discuss relevant literature and theory pertaining to the relationship between state and religion. I further discuss how the literature deals with the relation between Muslims and the secular state since the colonial period in Burkina Faso. My examination of theory in this context is not to complicate this already complex relationship. Rather, I sketch the possibility of a renewed engagement with the discourse on the relationship between these two seemingly distinct

42 phenomena—politics and religion—in the context of a secular state with a Muslim majority population.

Secularization is the process by which society distances itself from religion in its ways of governing itself. McLean (2003) defined secularization as “[t]he detachment of a state or other body from religious foundation” (p. 481). He cited multiple examples of secular states and the differences between them. For instance, the United States was a secular state from its onset by virtue of its constitution, which prescribes freedom of religion. Despite the predominance of Christianity, American state institutions theoretically separate themselves from religion. Another example of secularism is post- partition India, which claimed its secular status by opening its 1949 constitution with the declaration that India is a secular republic. In fact, Nehru, the then leader of India, sought to clearly separate religion from the state. Contrary to the United States and India,

England is a secular state, but the state is not fully separated from the Church: “The

Queen is still the head of the Church of England” (Mclean, 2003, p. 481). This indicates that even in modern democracies such as the above-mentioned countries, secularism has different meanings and in practice differs from country to country.

Furthermore, secularism emerged in Europe from conflict between state and church. Lincoln (2009) pointed out that, in the 17th century, the distrust between scientific knowledge and religious truth along with the disagreement between forms of

Christianity led to the rise of secularization in Europe. He offered that “[i]t was essential to put religion beyond the sphere of truth and refutation and to justify the authority of the state without recourse to (disputed) theological premises” (p. 457). Even so, the influence

43 of religion on politics remains true in secular countries. Often, religious groups organize themselves to voice a religious opinion in state matters. The position of the Roman

Catholic Church on abortion in most countries is a convenient illustration of the presence of religion in state matters. Sometimes, national identity is formed based on religious beliefs, which makes it difficult to separate the secular from the non-secular. Such is the case of Northern Ireland and Poland where Catholicism is indistinguishable from national identity (Lincoln, 2003).

Discussions about relationships between the state and religion inevitably invoke the concept of secularism. According to Goldmeier (2016), “[s]ecularism is a philosophical movement indifferent to or opposing religion” in the management of state affairs. He further noted that “[s]ecularism argues for strict separation between religion and government, education, and the law. Secularism rejects special considerations for religious institutions and practices” (par.1). In addition, Portier (2017) stated that, in the context of Western Europe, secularism entails both teleological and instrumental attributes. The teleological attribute is that a secular political system guarantees its citizens the freedom and the rights to have a religion or to not have one and the freedom to practice their beliefs and to spread such beliefs within specific limits delineated by the state. The instrumental attribute is that the state remains neutral when justifying its actions and motives. For instance, the state should not justify any deployed action based on a religious conception of good and salvation.

A major distinction between secularism in our contemporary world and secularism in the Islamic empires, medieval Christendom, and elsewhere is that—beyond

44 the idea of a separation of religion from government—in the modern nation-state, secularism “presupposes new concepts of ‘religion,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘politics,’ and new imperatives associated with them” (Asad, 2003, p. 2). Similarly, Goldmeier (2017) acknowledged that in modern secular societies, the line separating religion and government is never absolute. Religion continues to occupy an important place in the contemporary secular nation state. For example, although the United States is a secular country, the alliance between religion and the general perception of political orientation at the national level remains largely alive. Despite the steady growth of the percentage of agnostics and the official reiteration of religious plurality, the American imagined community is still largely tied to its narratives of founding fathers’ biblical imaginings

(Chelini-Pont, 2017).

In this study, particular attention is paid to the meanings associated with the concepts of religion and ethics, with a further attempt to discuss them in relation to

Burkina Faso. Foucault (1972), in outlining his pensée on why social phenomena must be approached through an archeological method, argued that

The history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive

refinement, its continuous refinement, […] but that of its various fields of

constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many

theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured. (p. 4)

In line with this thought, I hold that the phenomenon of Islam in Burkina Faso is lodged in Foucault’s premise of “various fields of constitution and validity,” which include the secular state and the historical condition in which it grew to become the faith of the

45 majority. Therefore, in this study I fully subscribe to the abstraction that the situation which defines the speaking subject of the discourse and his relation to the various other domains or groups of objects are a sine-qua-none condition for understanding discourse.

To arrive at that understanding in this study, I begin with a discussion of the literature on the history of Islam and the Muslim relationship with the state in the Burkinabè context.

Muslims in the Secular State of Burkina Faso

The next pages explore the complexity of Islamic identities and the production of modernity within the context of a secular political space in Burkina Faso. I examine the engagement and disengagement of Muslims with themselves and with the Western world and how late French colonialism influenced the ensuing doctrinal debates between competing denominational tendencies. The aim of this historiography is threefold. First, it seeks to discuss the impact of French colonialism and educational hegemony on the

Muslim doctrinal space at the end of the 19th century. Second, it examines how Muslims negotiated their multiple overlapping identities within the emerging political system under French colonialism. Third, it helps anchor my research in: how Muslims orient themselves in the contemporary political space in Burkina Faso, how the colonial experiences of Muslims impinge on the participation of contemporary Burkinabè

Muslims in the emerging secular democratic space, and how contemporary Burkinabè

Muslims negotiate modernity and secularism.

Locating Islamic Expansion and Reform in Colonial Burkina Faso

In the historiography of Islam in West Africa, the grand moments of power constellation around and often through Islam correspond with the periodization of the

46 adoption and expansion of Islam in the region. Even though this periodization is arbitrary, some historians of Islam in Africa, including David Robinson (1991), see heuristic values in making the distinctions of three stages in the expansion of Islam in

West Africa. In this study, without necessarily subscribing to it, I refer to this periodization with the aim of simply delimiting the scope of my analysis of the historiography of Islam in Burkina Faso.

According to Robinson, the first stage of the expansion of Islam in West Africa corresponds to the early adoption of it, when long-distance traders from Africa converted to Islam in the 12th century and brought the new religion back to their homes. The second stage corresponds with the spread of Islam as an imperial religion as exemplified by the case of the Mali empire, which was led by a Muslim clergy. In West Africa, from the end of the 17th century to the last quarter of the 18th century, well-established

Muslim authorities confronted and invaded each other as well as other non-Muslim powers to impose their own version of Islamic law. This invasion contributed to the expansion of the religion at a rate never achieved before (Lovejoy, 2016, p. 36). Paul

Lovejoy further documented at least ten such major expansionist movements in West

Africa during the second stage. The third stage of the expansion of Islam in West Africa, according to Robinson, was reached in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with two dominant Sufi orders, the Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya (Robinson, p. 109). Schulz (2012) agreed with Robinson and specifies that Sufi Islam expanded in West Africa during the colonial era. But Schulz distinguished the two main branches of Tijaniyya (Tijaniyya and

47 Tijaniyya Hamawi) and Qadiriyya-Mukhtariyya as being the dominant Islamic tendencies in the territory that was then known as French Sudan (p. 27).

According to Lapidus (1988), the first and second stages of the expansion of Islam had insignificant impact on Burkina Faso, which remained mostly Animist till the colonial era. My focus in this chapter is on the third stage of the expansion of Islam in

West Africa, as it is the most recent of the three stages and it has continued to impact the

Muslim religious landscapes of Islam in Burkina Faso even after the decolonization of the country in 1960.

The effective presence of Muslim settlements in the territory now known as

Burkina Faso goes back to the 15th century, when Soninke-speaking merchants from

Timbuktu and Jene were attracted by the Akan goldfields in neighboring Ghana and settled in Bobo Dioulasso, Kong, and Bunduku (Lapidus, 1988, p. 411). Levtzion (2000) also reported Muslim Arab expeditions to West Africa as early as the 8th century when the region was known as Bilad al-Sudan or land of the Black people (p. 63). Lapidus argued, however, that the North African Muslim traders refrained from trading with non-

Muslims until the 11th century when the progress of Islam into the Sahara and the Bilad al-Sudan was much better. He offered that Islam remained a marginal religion until the colonial era as its penetration was a very slow process hindered by the prevailing vast

Animist traditions. According to Otayek (1984), historically Burkina Faso was caricatured as an “animistic bastion” and later on as the “beloved daughter of

Christianism,” rendering it exceptionally impenetrable to Islamization movements (p.

299).

48 As indicated by numerous authors, the slow adaptation and spread of Islam was not unique to Burkina Faso, but it was a general fact across the sub-region. Schulz (2012) explained that in colonial French Soudan in general, Muslims were mostly the minority groups everywhere until the 1940s (p. 28). The only exceptions, according to Schulz, were “some urban centers of religious erudition such as Timbuktu, Gao, Mopti, Djenne,

Segou, and Nioro that thrived under the influence of lineages associated with Sufi practice” (p. 28). However, whereas Muslims were a minority by the time of the independence of Burkina Faso in 1960, Muslims now represent the largest religious group in the country. The past six decades (since independence) witnessed a substantial increase in the Muslim population in Burkina Faso. In fact, the Muslim population grew from 27.5 % in 1954 to 60.5 % in 2016. According to the most recent survey, the

Catholics were the second largest religious group, representing 19% of the population, followed by the Animists who were 15.3 % and the Protestants who were 4.1% (Saint-

Lary, 2011).

To understand the sociological forces that contributed to the religious demographic shift over time since independence, perhaps, one must also understand the early period of large expansion of Islam during the French colonial occupation. French explorers to Burkina Faso reported that they encountered people practicing Animism or ancestral religions exclusively. In the words of the explorer Binger, they were all

“fetichist tribes [sic]”. For example, the powerful Mossé who practiced Animism were able to fend off the Songhay and the Liptako Fulani (Issa 2017, p. 35). Issa further suggested that the second wave of the penetration of Islam in West Africa was not

49 successful in Burkina Faso which remained widely non-Muslim. However, the Mossé traded with a few Muslim peoples, including the Hausa to the North and the Yarsé and

Diula to the West. But these Muslims were polite and respectful of the Mossé traditions.

As a result, a handful of Mossé traders converted to Islam, although there was no large collective conversion to Islam among the Mossé at all (Issa, 2017). This did not, however, exclude that some individual Mossé converted to Islam since conversion to that early form of Islam did not entail a total abandonment of one’s own traditional beliefs.

The historiography on early pre-colonial Mossé Muslims might be scant, but there is evidence that different Mossé kings had their own Muslim Marabouts working ‘to strengthen’ their mystical powers or assuring their trade networks. In addition, the Fula and other nomadic peoples of pre-colonial Burkina Faso have a long history of Islam that challenges the representation of the region as an “animist bastion” and later as “the beloved daughter of the Church.”

In point of fact, many studies establish a solid link between Islam and the production, transformation, and trade of cotton in Burkina Faso (Bedaux, 1993, Guiré,

1988-1989). Through an anthropological study of the routes of the spread of cotton production and transformation in West Africa, Marie (2009) also pointed out that the

Bwa people from Western Burkina Faso learned this skill from their Muslims neighbors of the Mande region in the 8th century. In fact, Marie argued that the Bwa’s knowledge of the production and transformation of cotton products (ginning, spinning, carding, weaving, making, dyeing), comes from a long and complex historical process acquired from the Muslim cotton trade routes when Djenné was a cosmopolitan city in the 8th

50 century (p. 971). This example suggests that even the Bwa, who were well-known for living in aggregate societies and had no kings, had established relations with Muslims and Islam and some of them might have converted to Islam since that era.

Though the depiction of precolonial Burkina Faso as an “animist bastion” remains problematic in light of the evidence from the Fula and Bwa, there is, at least, a consensus among major historians that the rate of conversion to Islam increased during the colonial era. For instance, to Issa (2017), the change was mostly caused by the colonial disruption of existing socio-political structures. Issa added that Islam existed along with African ancestral belief systems in various accommodating ways, and people were, therefore, familiar with it. Between turning to Catholicism—the new religion brought by the colonizer—or converting to Islam, the choice was easy because Islam presented features that were appealing to most people. For instance, Sufi mysticism was accommodating of the traditional spirituality. Even when the sacred realm became a highly contested ground, Islam thrived side by side with local ancient religious traditions.

Similarly, Robinson (1991) argued that French colonial rule triggered the expansion of Islam in West Africa because the French found, in the West African

Muslims, a natural ally to use to impose their colonial domination in the region. Kobo

(2011) also corroborated the argument that European colonial rule had inadvertently expedited the expansion of Islam in their Muslim majority colonies in West Africa because the colonial administration sponsored Islamic practices and education. However,

Kobo noted that for Muslim-minority colonies like Burkina Faso and Ghana, understanding the expansion of Islam during the European colonial occupation requires a

51 much more nuanced explanation. He argued that in the predominantly Muslim colonies, the French and the English vested more interest in Islam by establishing specific policies with regard to Islam and a patronage system with these Muslims. This patronage helped the Muslim leaders influence non-Muslim populations by propagating their faith, at least, within the scope of what the Europeans deemed acceptable. Further, before the use of

French and English as administrative languages, both the French and the British used

Arabic in the so-called Muslim-majority colonies.

According to Kobo (2012), in The Gambia and in Sierra Leone, the British used

Muslim intermediaries who spoke Arabic to help run their colonial administration and also established Arabic schools. The French too established local Madrasa schools in

Jene (Mali) and Saint-Louis (Senegal) in 1908, and later another one in Timbuktu (Mali) in 1911. The aim of the British and French colonial investment in Islamic education was part of the so-called Mission Civilisatrice that perceived Islam as a backward religion full of mysticism and lacking rationalism. Therefore, both the British and the French sought to control the Islamic education in order shift the use of Arabic to respectively English and French and introduce European culture in the habitus of the African Muslims (Kobo

2012). In fact, these controlling mechanisms were officially adopted a few years earlier.

In 1906, Earnest Roume—then governor of Afrique Occidentale Française, the French colonial territory in West Africa—issued a policy to deal with Muslim affairs in the colony. The policy specifically aimed at controlling both the expansion of Islam and the

Muslim press, which was considered anticolonial propaganda. William Ponty who succeeded Earnest Roume pushed the policy further to include keeping a repertoire of

52 Muslim proselytism and a watchlist of individual Muslims (Vanvyve, 2015). However, despite all these policies toward Islam and Muslims in the colonies, Islam expanded during that period. This expansion of Islam in minority Muslim colonies like Burkina

Faso owe much to individual Muslim endeavors. One contributing factor was the

Meccan-educated Muslims. In fact, the Muslims who studied in Saudi Arabia and returned home during the late colonial era introduced various reforms that contributed to the expansion of Islam.

Meccan Scholars and Islamic Revivalism in Colonial Burkina Faso

“al- amr bil maroof wa nahi ‘anil munkar” is a Quranic injunction that prescribes to Muslims the obligation to enjoining good (the legally approved) and forbidding evil

(the legally disapproved). Muslim scholars interpret several passages of the Quran to support the idea that this injunction is fard kifaayah, i.e. a duty that Muslims should perform collectively as opposed to farḍ al-’ayn which is a task prescribed to Muslims individually such as the daily prayer and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Quranic passages often cited to support this injunction include the following two: “Let there be a group among you who call others to good, and enjoy what is right, and forbid what is wrong: those who do this shall be successful” (surah aal imran 3: 104) and “The hypocrite men and hypocrite women are all alike. They enjoin what is evil, forbid what is right and they are stingy when it comes to spending for the cause of God. They have forgotten God, so He has forgotten them. Indeed, the hypocrites are the disobedient ones” (surah at-tawbah

9:67). The distinction between a legal obligation imposed on the collective and that which is put upon the individual is an important aspect of Islamic discourse and praxis

53 which often divide Islamic legal scholars (Esposito, 2003, p. 82). In fact, different understandings and interpretations of this injunction often lead to new forms of Islamic revivalism.

According to Kobo (2012), the above Quranic injunction offered an intellectual and spiritual source of inspiration for Islamic revivalism among the Meccan-educated scholars in Burkina Faso in the early 1960s. Kobo traced the life stories of three of these

Meccan-educated scholars—El Hajj Muhammad Malick Sana, Imam Sayouba

Ouedraogo, and Aboubacar Kanazoé de Paghtenga—who returned home, respectively, in

1956, 1964, and 1968. Although these Meccan scholars studied Islamic figures and the

Islamic jurisprudence officially sanctioned by Saudi Arabia, they did not return home on any official duty to preach. They had taken it on themselves to do what they believed to be good and to condemn practices they believed to be bad. However, they interpreted the acts of doing good deeds and condemning bad deeds as a fard Kifaayah, i.e. a collective duty. Therefore, it made sense to them to seek to steer the Muslim community in their perceived good direction through reform. They criticized the then dominant Tijaniyya

Sufi Islam and rejected its leadership. They preached against the local practices of Islam and condemned the Tijaniyya practices as being bidda or unwanted innovations that were added to ‘the pure Islam’ (p. 11).

The discussion of the invocation of fard Kifaayah by these differently educated

Burkinabè Muslims for the purpose of religious reform must not be understood as a reductionist assumption that defines African Islam as an idiosyncratic trajectory of Islam as a faith. This new trajectory should not be viewed as an external construction either. In

54 the same line of thought, Lovejoy (2016) rightly suggested that scholars must reject analysis that attributes any major event in Islamic West Africa to pan-Islamic influences, because it is too simplistic and ignores the long history of Islam in the region. It is my contention in this chapter that, if in appearance Islam is moored in its traditions,

Burkinabè Muslims are innovative in their approach to Islamic doctrine. In interrogating the relation between Muslim identities and the production of modernity within the context of a secular political space, I do not define the emerging Islamic modernity as a simple product of an external influence. Rather, I conceive it in both the flux and the fusion of internal historical dynamics with the external political, economic, and ideological connections. Kaba (2000) offered a similar argument regarding Islamic revivalism in Francophone Mali, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire as being a local initiative. He pointed out that in these countries the Mandé Muslim traders supported the Islamic reform movements financially. He also added that the reformers’ political militancy was acknowledged and sought by the early leaders of the independence movement such as

Leopold S. Senghor (Senegal), Sekou Touré (Guinea) and Félix Houphouet-Boigny (Côte d’Ivoire) who were organized under the banner of Rassemblement Democratique Africain

(RDA). However, “the alliance between anticolonial and Islamic radicalisms came to an abrupt end after independence, as the new elite in control of power opted for a secular order” (Kaba, 2000, p. 191). While West African elites educated in the French colonial school understood that the support of Muslim reformists was crucial in the success of their anticolonial struggle, they soon distanced them from the political powers once they gained independence.

55 In Burkina Faso too, after the independence of the country in 1960, Muslims were relegated to the back seats in politics in two ways. First, the new government reinforced its power by instituting a single-party system a few months after independence

(Englebert, 1996). This single-party system did not allow any competing social power structure to emerge. Although labor unions and other pressure groups were allowed to be formed at times, they were not dogmatically oriented and had no affiliation to Islam.

Secondly, the leaders projected the new country as a Christian nation even though

Christians represented a small 3.8 % of the population at that time (Issa, 2017). Maurice

Yaméogo—the newly anointed president of Burkina Faso (then known as Upper Volta)– substantiated this hope in a letter to Pope John XXIII:

All of these regions which form the country of Upper Volta [Burkina Faso] have

been born, by the grace of God, under the patronage of Mary Immaculate, when

our early missionaries dedicated to her this field of their apostolate. And it is

again through a gentle consideration of Providence that the Republic of Upper

Volta is born under the sign of Mary Immaculate, the eleventh of December, at

the octave of her festival. (President Maurice Yaméogo to Pope John XXIII,

Bouron 2011, cited in Issa, 2017, p. 28).

That Burkina Faso’s political elite is majority Christian is not a surprise since the

Catholic church has played a pivotal role in the education of the cadres of the nation during the colonial era. The Burkinabè Catechists particularly, acting as autochthonous auxiliaries to the White priests, played an important role in the education of the elite

(Boron, 2011, as cited in Issa, 2017).

56 Today, it is epistemologically risky to research any aspect of Islam in Burkina

Faso without taking into consideration the secular political context in which it is embedded. Further, at best, it is a perilous undertaking to study a Muslim student organization such as AEEMB and fail to consider both the secularism of Burkina Faso and the presence of Christian traditions and strong Christian revivalism in the country. In her study of evangelical Christians in Niger, Cooper (2006) called our attention to the role of the Church in inhibiting religious rivalry and social tensions in what she referred to as “the Muslim Sahel.” Although this current research is not a comparative study of

Islam and Christianity in the public space of Burkina Faso, I take the coexistence of the two faiths into consideration in my approach to data collection as well as my review and discussion of the relevant literature.

Furthermore, the single-party system, which President Yaméogo instituted, has since changed to a secular democracy although not without its own tumultuous history. In fact, from 1966 to 1987, Burkina Faso had five successful military coups, if we define a successful coup, cynically, as one that resulted in an effective regime change with the killing or imprisonment of the seating president (Englebert, 1996). Also, the dominance of Sufism as the main Islamic orientation during the colonial era has since changed.

During those many years of political instabilities, Muslims were not part of any official exercise of political power in Burkina Faso. Now, Sunni Islam is the most dominant brand of Islam in Burkina Faso in terms of its presence in the public space. According to

Kobo, when the Meccan-educated scholars took upon themselves to reform Islam in

Burkina Faso in the early 1960s, they forged a new orientation of Islam commonly

57 referred to as Wahhabism, which is a Sunni-oriented denomination. It must be noted, however, that the followers of Wahhabism do not refer to themselves as Wahhabis.

Instead they call themselves ahl al-sunna, which means the People of the Prophet

Tradition (Kobo 2012, p. 3). In a lengthy footnote, Kobo offered a critical reflection on this name, arguing that “People of the Prophet Tradition” is equally problematic because, by definition, all Muslims follow the tradition of Prophet Muhammad.

Both the local Muslim engagement with the state-making process and the ways in which the state-making process dealt with local Muslims had a bearing on the ways

Muslims currently orient themselves in the emerging secular political space. I do not argue for a timeless meaning of Burkinabè Islamic revivalism, but I invoke this brief historiography as a way to allow for a better appreciation of the enduring nature of reform and political Islam in contemporary Burkina Faso. In colonial Burkina Faso, the secular education that provided literacy training as well as professional skills was offered by Christian missionaries. Few Muslims sent their children to colonial schools, but the

Westernized elites in Burkina Faso, early in the post-colonial era, played a pivotal role in the implantation of Wahhabism in the country.

Kobo’s study of Islam in Ghana and Burkina Faso found that, although the

Meccan-educated Muslims initiated the reforms that led to the implantation of

Wahhabism, the Western-style educated Muslims played a significant role in the expansion of Wahhabism as a reformist movement in both countries. The dilemma that the Western-style educated Muslims faced was the difficulty in reconciling their Muslim identities with their desire to frame a modern identity in the emerging postcolonial world

58 and to keep the privileges associated with their secular education (Kobo, 2011, p.

14). These ‘conscripts of modernity’, according to Kobo, quickly found an ally in the

Meccan-educated scholars who returned home. In fact, the Meccan-educated scholars confirmed parts of the colonialist arguments that the prevailing Sufi Islam and its mystical tendencies were superstitious and lacked rationality: a key drive in the French

‘civilizing mission’. The Tijaniyya Ulamas or dignitaries were disenchanted by their colonial occupants who taught Western values and scorned local cultural practices rooted in Sufi mysticism. The Meccan scholars critiqued the established Sufi orders and their followers. They particularly decried the Sufi worship of saints and rejected some of their rituals such as the celebration of Maulud (Prophet Muhammad’s birthday) and the worship of Sufi saints as being shirk, i.e., ascribing deity attributes to something or someone other than God.

In such a context, the Muslim students in the French education system, which was mostly influenced by Christian values, found themselves in a difficult paradigm whereby their Muslimness was questioned among their fellow Muslims. It is important to note that, during their enrollment in school, some of them were given Christian names as a logical first step in the French colonial education’s attempt to French-ize and ‘civilize’ them. The French-educated Muslims soon found in the Meccan scholars an ally in the sense that they were both critical of the Sufi traditions, which they perceived as being backward.

To further problematize the social identity challenge of the colonial Muslim students of Burkina Faso, perhaps one must return to the question of colonial and post-

59 colonial subjectivity. In that regard, Fanon (1952) raised concerns about the adoption of colonial languages and civilizations in the postcolonial world and asserted eloquently that

“To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (pp. 17-18). For Fanon, the colonial invitation to identity was, by the same token, a denial of identity. There is no doubt that the French-educated Burkinabè

Muslims had an ambivalent position in the emerging political system whereby their loyalty to French culture and their Islamic roots were difficult to reconcile. Hence, they supported the Islamic reform project of the Meccan scholars whose education in Saudi

Arabia also disconnected them from the prevailing Sufi Islam in Burkina Faso.

Secularizing Islam and De-secularizing Politics

The secularism paradigm that inspired state-making in Europe goes back to the

Enlightenment era when thinkers began to remove religion from their field of experiences and their horizon of expectation (Dieckhoff & Portier, 2017). For exemple, the Kantian’s

Sapere aude (Dare to know!) understanding of the age of enlightenment offered a weaning of religion in the management of state affairs (Kant, 1783). It proposed that to be enlightened implied thinking for yourself and not letting preordained religious institutions maintain man in a state of tutelage or self-imposed nonage.

Marxism and neo-Marxist thought have consistently rejected religion as being incompatible with the state. In 1905, Lenin and the Russian party of the socialist proletariat expressed some concerns about religion and its role in the socio-economic and political development of the state. According to Lenin (1965), the social party “enlists

60 science in the battle against the fog of religion and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them to fight in the present for a better life on earth” (p. 8).

While the role of the Church in the colonial enterprise cannot be underestimated, the colonial and the post-colonial states have generally tended to relegate it to a second rank, namely in providing education and other social services. Other faith traditions such as

Islam had to adapt to the emerging new world context in order to remain relevant.

Our contemporary world is now beginning to move out from a historical, scientific, and political conjuncture wherein the concept of modernity used to affirm the idea that the ideology of state-making must be constructed by a secularism that rejects religion. This move is only a new direction, and it is yet to be fully supported with empirical research. European colonialism in West Africa was also marked by an ambivalent relationship between secularism and religion.

In the contemporary world, political Islam remains a mystery within the Western context where anxiety about Islam and Muslims has mainly steered Orientalist discourses and Euro-centric tropes—real or imaginary (i.e. terrorism, fundamentalism, etc.).

Accordingly, “The analysis of political expression inflected through Muslimness remains undertheorised” (Sayyid, 2017, p. 65). Although Muslims practice politics every day, references to political Islam are quickly associated with the above-mentioned tropes.

Scholars are beginning to depart from this paradigm and starting to look into the everyday manifestations of Islam in politics. This new type of scholarship on political

Islam teaches us that, for example, in Burkina Faso, the legal system relies heavily on both formal and informal authorities to function. Muslim leaders play a crucial role in the

61 informal legal sector (Saint-Lary, 2013). Although religion, Islam particularly, has been relegated to the domain of the private sphere in the context of secular democracy, people have continued to define their social conduct within Islam and Islamic law. Muslim scholars simultaneously play important roles at the religious level and at the fundamental level of society within the state. For example, “Their opinion is regularly solicited on issues concerning inheritance, childcare and divorce” (Saint-Lary, 2013, p. 134). The proximity of the Muslim informal courts to the people and their conciliatory practices make them a prime choice over the formal legal system which is often considered dysfunctional and is misunderstood by most people.

Even if the totalizing tendencies of orientalist scholarship neglected the forms of doctrinal and identity pluralism that prevailed among African Muslims, the West African

Islamic landscape was a historically contested religious space. Islamic religious authority and state political authority shared the same space in West Africa even before the colonial institution of modern states. Both forms of authority have coexisted, competed, collaborated, and often confronted each other. This peculiar condition of the Islamic space and the plurality of actors who occupy it have prominently animated internal discussions among Muslims on how they ought to orient themselves within the politics of dunia—the earthly world—while remaining relevant to their attachment to matters of their din—those of heavenly concerns. According to Schulz (2011), “Controversy among

Muslim scholars over questions of how to order the life of the political community in accordance with Islamic principles predates the colonial period in Muslim West Africa”

(p. 27).

62 One of the most serious impediments to the understanding of how Muslims perform modernity within the emerging secular political space is the totalizing tendencies that deny modernity to Islam from within Islam. This denial stems from epistemological forces outside of Islam as well as from inside Islam. For example, Donohue and Esposity

(1982) argued that one of the questions of utmost concern in the studies of Islam now is whether Islam can meet the political, economic, and social demands of modernity (p. 3).

The underlying assumption in this prioritizing statement is that modernity is some sort of quality that is intrinsically external to Islam, and therefore, Islam must challenge itself to join it. Most of the scholarship that attempted to address the rapport of Islam and modernity seems to follow the same logic. This way of approaching the question of modernity denies Muslims the opportunity to live to their full potential in the emerging political sphere. It is against the backdrop of such flawed assumptions that I engaged in my research on Muslim youth civic engagement in Burkina Faso and how they communicate this civic engagement.

Colonial dealings with Muslims and Muslim engagement with their faith in the emerging secular political sphere in Burkina Faso created lasting entanglements that stretched temporally and ideologically. The French “mission civilisatrice” has prepared educated Muslims to challenge Sufism and embrace Islamic reformist projects proposed by their Meccan-educated fellows. In addition, at the independence of the country, the political power of Islam and particularly traditional Sufi power were sacrificed at the altar of the unique party system and secular democracy. The stamp of the colonial experience and the early postcolonial marginalization of Muslims have an enduring impact that is

63 difficult to grasp but equally difficult to ignore when we engage with political Islam. The ambiguous relations that the French colonial government had with Muslims in Burkina

Faso remains a blueprint for how Muslims engage with modernity and secularism today.

However, this is not to ignore Muslims’ agency in modernizing their traditions and traditionalizing their modernity. It is an argument I make with the aim of unsettling the complicated question of Islam in the public sphere in the context of a secular democracy.

Gap in the Literature and Research Questions

This dissertation fills an important gap in the literature by bringing up the contributions of Muslim students to the philosophical debate on Islam and their use of new media, especially its Facebook, newspaper, and website. It addresses important questions, which are contemporary to Islam and challenges the literature that consistently swamped Muslims in Burkina Faso in the mantle of Islam tranquil. It also adds a layer to the sparse literature on Islam in Burkina Faso, especially concerning the use of media among the Muslim youth.

Furthermore, multiples forces are at play in the emerging political space of

Burkina Faso. Lingering misconceptions that Islam in Burkina Faso is stagnant not only denies Burkinabè Muslims’ agency in history, but it also undermines a nuanced understanding of their continued involvement and contributions in the politics of contemporary state-making and democratic institution building. Also, it is now clear that

Burkina Faso is traversing a difficult moment in its contemporary history as a nation that faces both internal and external challenges including dealing with economic disparities, terrorism, global neo-liberal politics, neo-colonial market of goods and ideas, etc. In

64 such an emerging new socio-political and economic context, I contend, any scholarly argument that freezes the voices of an important group such as Muslim youth is counterproductive at best.

While the works of scholars including Robinson and Kobo have challenged the notion of a doctrinal stagnation among Burkinabè Muslims, and the most recent works— by Madore, Traoré, Saint-Lary, and a few other—have highlighted the complexity of the question of Muslims’ participation in the contemporary state, much remains to be studied about how Muslim youth continue to engage with their faith and the politics of the secular country in which they live, how that engagement impacts their faith orientation, and how new media such as Facebook and websites are used to that effect. To this end, this study seeks to understand Islam among the Muslim youth trained in the secular education system, their conceptions of their identities as Muslims, and their responses to current events through various media. Through a critical approach, this study is articulated to ask two related questions:

1) How does AEEMB use new media to report current events and to co-construct meaning of Islam? This question is concerned with determining the prominent themes and ideas AEEMB promotes on its Facebook page, newspaper, and website as well as defining the narratives that AEEMB employs to frame its understanding of Islam. The question seeks to underline specific ideological interpretations that AEEMB promotes. It also seeks to find specific political issues that AEEMB discusses online and offline, and the positions it takes in those discussions.

65 2) In what ways do AEEMB media discourses and praxis reflect particular socio- cultural embodiments of Islam in the changing political landscapes of the country?

Under this question, I seek to understand AEEMB’s particular Islamic identity and its modes of expression. I also consider how AEEMB tackles issues of concern for its members such as gender, economic development, and civism. This question is concerned with the ways in which AEEMB claims Islamic social identity in Burkina Faso and sets its unique trajectory within Islam in Burkina Faso.

The next chapter describes the research experience and the data collection process. It also outlines the theoretical framework that informs this methodology.

66 Chapter 3: The Research Experience

Introduction

Going to the field now often means taking a return trip to a lost home, or staying

where you are and trying to figure out what’s there in front of your eyes, or

examining the broken home down the road to understand our complicity in its

brokenness. (Behar, 2015, p. IX)

In conducting this study, going to the field meant a return home, though not a lost nor a broken one. I have physical and spiritual connections to this place I call home. In fact, I am not just a Muslim from Burkina Faso. I am also an alumnus of Université de

Ouagadougou where most of my informants go to school. Such a deep connection with my research site and my participants provided a unique opportunity for fostering a solid rapport of trust and having meaningful encounters with my informants. I chose qualitative research methods of data gathering because I was seeking to understand

Muslim youth habitus: a set of social realities that are “emergent and collaborative”

(Lindlof & Taylor, 2011, p. 8). I also wanted to understand how they use media to communicate that habitus. I combined three qualitative data gathering methods to have a more balanced understanding of this situated reality of Islam and Muslim identities among Muslim youth in Burkina Faso. I employed participant observation, semi- structured interviews, and archive analysis to investigate the subjective and socially created everyday practice and embodiment of Islam among members of Association des

Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au Burkina Faso (AEEMB). My research questions guided the choice of these methods.

67 The 2016-2018 term president of AEEMB—a then recent graduate from

Université de Ouagadougou working on a master’s degree in a private college in

Ouagadougou—was my primary interlocutor. He introduced me to the members of the national council of the organization even before I travelled back to Burkina Faso. In the

Fall Semester of 2017, I exchanged casual communication with him multiple times on

Facebook, informing him about my research interests in Islam in Burkina Faso and specifically my plans to study AEEMB’s civic engagement and media use. In the Spring

Semester of 2018, when I informed him that I got IRB clearance to start my research, he introduced my request to the other leaders of the national council. This meant I received the welcoming permission of the AEEMB’s national council before heading to Burkina

Faso in late May 2018.

I joined AEEMB at its national headquarters in the district of Wembtenga in

Ouagadougou and at the main campus of Université de Ouagadougou where, through

June and July 2018. I participated in their daily religious rituals and engaged in a systematic ethnographic observation. This included spending the last ten days of

Ramadan fasting and breaking the fast with the brothers and sisters of AEEMB. I observed the fasting for most of the first 20 days of Ramadan while I was still in Athens, in order to ready myself for my homework among young and dynamic Muslims. I was anticipating that when I return to Burkina Faso, fasting would be very easy since the

Burkinabè summer days are much shorter than North America’s 15 hours. However, I neglected to anticipate the Burkinabè tropical heat of June, which reaches 100 degrees

Fahrenheit some days rendering it particularly difficult to stay strong, smile, hold

68 conversations with new friends without drinking or eating from sunrise to sunset. This made my first ten days with AEEMB extremely hard since I was acclimating and working to upgrade my own faith by fasting and praying alongside my informants.

Nevertheless, the friendly atmosphere among the AEEMB members facilitated my

Ramadan fasting and eventually allowed me to blend in, especially at the headquarters where it is always crowded with dozens of people coming in and out all-day long. Also,

AEEMB members generously shared with me their food and beverages at the end of the day including millet porridge, galettes, zomkom, and gnamankudji. By the end of

Ramadan, I was completely absorbed in the group. At the headquarters, I was often mistaken for one of the daily volunteer workers and was assigned to fetch seats for guests. I appreciated such moments which I viewed as signs of being accepted into the group. I felt fully accepted as part of the larger AEEMB membership as I had in high school. In the summer of 2019 when I returned to Ouagadougou, once again, to learn along and with AEEMB, I felt entirely part of AEEMB.

My peculiar “narrative relation” to this study (Asad, 1986) is, to some degree, defined by my proximity with the organization. I have known AEEMB since my high school days when I took part in the activities hosted by its provincial chapter in my school. Although, over time and for many years now, I have not remained a duly registered member of this youth organization, my previous involvement with it became an asset in this work. I know the basic protocols: referring to others we do not know as brothers or sisters, the usual asalam aleikums, and leaving one’s belongings in the common room to rush into the large prayer room when it is time—knowing nothing will

69 be stolen. Most of the AEEMB members are almost my age and that facilitated my re- integration into their midst. I used my cultural fluency to blend into this congregation in

Ouagadougou to learn about them and their practices. Such a participant observation inspired by the ethnographic research method tradition of being close to and “part of what we seek to understand” (Howard, 2016, p. 8), allowed me to understand students’ Islamic practices as they engaged in given enactments of their faith through attending prayer, sermons, conversations, etc., and to place this research experience within a critical research paradigm.

Theoretical Considerations

I insert this current project within the critical research paradigm tradition.

According to Lindlof and Taylor (2011), the critical approach to qualitative communication research is one that rejects images of “universal grammar” and

“formulaic pronouncements” (p. 53). This entails the idea that although Islam is visibly part of the object of this study, I privilege the locals’ understanding of it in my study. To be more precise, in my data collection process, I sought to give preference to local epistemology and resisted to universal and totalizing approaches to the study of Islam in media. I specifically drew from the postcolonial theory consciousness of power at both the incremental and at the macro levels. My rational is that the relationship between state and religion in Burkina Faso is informed, established, and reinforced by colonial tropes, which I largely discussed in Chapter 2. My rational also acknowledges that the ways in which Muslim youth communicate their faith through media must be approached with a careful examination of the power relations that define availability of resources,

70 technologies, and knowledge of media use. Having said that, I am now left with the task of clarifying my understanding of postcolonial theory.

To understand postcolonial theory requires an understanding of how colonialism is conceptualized in the first place. Broadly, colonialism can be defined as “the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods,” (Loomba, 2015, p. 20). Shome and Hegde

(2002) defined postcolonial studies as “an interdisciplinary field of inquiry committed to theorizing the problematics of colonization and decolonization” (p. 250). So, postcolonial theories emerged as an awakening following the realization that the regimes of truth and the discursive formations, horizons, and limits set by the epistemological traditions of

Western Europe and later North America present aberrant limitations in historicizing the contemporary lived experience of all. Postcolonial theory must be understood in this study as a methodological attitude, which claims the right to exercise epistemological power: an epistemological power derived from the studied community and I, the researcher, acting as a tool in that process (Howard, 2016).

I follow the critical postcolonial line sketched by scholars like Edward Said in my approach to understanding the habitus of Muslim youth in Burkina Faso. In fact, Said

(1978) brought a novel way in showing how the Orient/Occident dialectics excluded the non-Western subject from the production of an effective history of modernity. For him, the orientalist inclinations of Western academics, who tend to reduce the Orient to the sole lens of the West while excluding the Orientals’ perspectives about themselves, have a long history that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Furthermore, these

(mis)representations of the Orient and the Orientals in Western imaginations are

71 reinforced within a historical relation of colonialism and neocolonialism between the

West and the East. For Said, only when we take into consideration the imbalanced power relationships of colonized/colonizer and the long-term influence of literary production on the imaginary creation of the different Other, only then can we begin to dissect and unravel the legitimization of the othering of the non-Western.

A key argument in Said’s Orientalism is that “the orient is not an inert fact of nature” but rather an artificial and inauthentic concept just like the Occident (Said, 1978, p. 5). Therefore, Said called upon Western academic institutions to reflect on their positions and relations vis-à-vis the political power structures. In a way, we can see how

Said challenged the absence of the Other’s perspective and agency in Western academic establishments. From the onset, Said sought to deconstruct the economic imperatives of the colonial framing of the Orient and the perceived necessity of defining the people of the Orient. However, what Said actually sought to propose was to reflect upon a certain number of questions such as: 1) Can the West unlearn the attributes and epithets it has imagined, created, researched, and associated with the East over time? 2) Is there a will to do so? And even if there is a will to do so, where can one start such a project? These are questions that challenge any researcher on Islam and particularly those in Western institutions.

Building on Said’s perspective, Al-Zo’by (2015) suggested that postcolonial theory is not immune to misappropriation. She argued that, in the Western academic world, there has been a shift from a classic orientalism to a neo-orientalism, which deploys the native as a voice “to authorize, facilitate, and authenticate” pre-established

72 misconceptions and misrepresentations of the Orient or Islam and the Muslim world by the dominant Western hegemony (pp. 223, 227). I strive to move away from such facile lenses that may lead to reproducing neo-orientalist readings of Islam and Muslims in

Burkina Faso. Hence, I entered this research scene with clear questions, but I privileged letting the research and its setting guide the research instead of imposing a rigorous pre- established method and research questions. Without any intention of changing my research in the field, nonetheless, I went in with a flexible approach that invited my participants to teach me about themselves and about their understanding of Islam as well as their use of media to communicate that understanding.

In her book, Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith (2012) underlined an urgent need for researchers and research institutions to find ways to reduce Western hegemony in the representation of indigenous peoples in research. She advocated for a consideration and valorization of the indigenous peoples’ own epistemologies. Smith argued that in the collective imagination of the formerly colonized people, the very fact of being a research subject conjures up memories of inferiority because they perceived that it is ‘the superior’ who researches ‘the inferior’. That it is ‘the enlightened’ who points his torch into the abyss of the darkness where dwells the Other, in order to discover his frightened and savage face, to catalogue him with the ultimate goal of making a more efficient use of him. To Smith, Western epistemologies still sulk about the indigenous peoples’ own yardsticks, preferring their own lenses and robbing the indigenous people of their rights to intellectual property (Smith, 2012). By claiming ownership of the indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, Western researchers are perpetuating a “collective memory of

73 imperialism” (p. 1). Research on Islam might evoke similar concerns and may require a rigorous and critical application of postcolonial theoretical orientation to help mitigate such concerns.

I insert this research project within a research tradition that critically acknowledges the ethical and epistemological dilemma of representing. Obviously, the

Muslim youth from Burkina Faso are not indigenous peoples to me nor am I a Western researcher, but my training in Western educational institutions predisposes adoptions of certain methodological rigors that are nonetheless not infallible. I locate myself as a student from American higher educational institutions, but also, I acknowledge that I do not derogate from the epistemological anxiety of being a Muslim and researching Islam with global research tools. Throughout the data collection and the writing process, I strived to show how my particular identity allows me to see my research in the way I see it. Just like in the data collection process, I am present in the written form of my research.

This inclination in this dissertation is a direct response to the postcolonial theorists’ concern that the postcolonial scholars—desiring to fit the expectations of the

Western epistemological whims—are reproducing the same frozen and inherent misrepresentations of the postcolonial condition. In that regard, Nyamnjoh (2004) has warned that while the unwritten rule among Western scholars is ‘publish or perish,’ their

African counterparts have published in Western publishing venues such as academic journals only to perish because they are compelled to sacrifice [re-presentative] relevance for [Western] recognition. I intentionally put representative relevance over Western recognition in this work.

74 Ethical Considerations

In qualitative social research, the training in procedural ethics places emphasis on non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy or self-determination, and justice (Wimmer &

Dominick, 2011). According to Babbie (2013), these ethical considerations were developed mostly following horrendous research practices and medical experiments such as the Nazi medical experiments on prisoners during World War II, the infamous Stanley

Milgram’s 1974 study on authoritative obedience, and the egregious Tuskegee syphilis experiment (1932-1972). Most research methods classes I took have stressed these broad ethical considerations. However, beyond my procedural ethics training and the approval of the Institutional Review Board of Ohio University prior to starting my research, I argue that research on Islam in general demands much more rigorous case-based additional ethical considerations. These additional precautions are justified not only by the sensitivity of the topic, but also because of the long tradition of misrepresentations associated with research on Islam. My research on Muslim youth, their political activism, and their use of media employs ethnographic data collection and analysis approaches. In the following section, I describe possible ethical challenges I encountered before and during the data collection and how I tried to honor and deal appropriately with them.

First, as a Burkinabè Muslim trained mostly (a third of my life) in the United

States, my own normative understanding of Islam conflicts at times with what my informants teach me about Islam in Burkina Faso. For instance, a male informant said at the end of a lengthy conversation with me that female members cannot be president of

AEEMB at the national level. His female counterpart agreed with him and added that “it

75 is because the president is the first Imam of the group and women cannot play that role.”

In my report of instances like this one, I treat the data with diligence by showing informants’ positions and how I felt about it at the time. Turner (2016) referred to such situations as “methodological vulnerabilities” in qualitative fieldwork (p. 78). The ethical challenge of such vulnerability derives from a deliberate imposition of the researcher’s own grid on the data without clearly showing their positionality in that specific moment of data collection. In the specific example above, I attempted to understand the informants’ positions further without contradicting them or judging them although I did not feel satisfied with their justifications. I think that methodological vulnerabilities are more common than most researchers might acknowledge in their work. Therefore, I emphasize my positionality throughout and especially at any moment I think that my own identity might be getting between my subjective report and my informant’s own meanings. I believe that applying Freire’s (1973) concept of conscientization in my approach in dealing with my own methodological vulnerabilities allowed a more in-depth understanding of Islam from the perspective of my informants while simultaneously advocating for their voices to be heard.

To explore more precisely, according to Freire, “Critical consciousness is integrated with reality; naive consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naïveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality.”

Throughout the process of this research, I strive to utilize critical consciousness by trusting my informants to guide me through their understanding and seeking to relay such understanding in my report. Thus, I consider the same methodological vulnerability in the

76 writing and analysis of my research because there is also a good deal of translation involved in this study. In my case, the vulnerability is not just about writing, but also about translating. After all, ethnographic work is cryptocentric (Clifford, 1986). First, I am translating a local African Muslim youth’s knowledge into an academic language.

Second, I am literally translating my research data from French, Mooré, or Djula into

English. Third, my research involves translating oral stories into a written document. All of these modes of translation call for ethical considerations beyond the IRB’s checks and balances as well as the traditional ethical procedural trainings. They demand an Afro- centric epistemological ethical code that includes sympathy, discernment, and an uncompromising stand with each informant’s partial truths. Partly, what I mean by

Afrocentric epistemological ethical code here must be understood as an urge to move away from recent “intellectual fashion” that talks about decolonizing research methodology yet fails to begin by decolonizing the researchers and the research tools they deploy including problems pertaining to all the above layers of levels of translations.

When researching about Islam in Burkina Faso, my ethical inclination is more toward relevance rather than writing to please or to fit and to satisfy Western publishing or institutional trends or even whims. I focus on what most closely constitutes knowledge according to my participants and how they think they know what they say they know.

Furthermore, my research is a group-focused study. This does not mean that I use focus-group interviews in my data collection, but rather that my study focuses on a well- known group of people, i.e. the university students who are members of the Muslim youth association known as AEEMB. Because I identify the research setting and time, it

77 is easy to figure out who my participants are. I think that de-identifying respondents in my research guarantees anonymity from people outside the group, but people within the group might still be able to read my report and know who said what. I strive to do a fair representation of the participants as they would wish to be represented because I know it is challenging to achieve total anonymity. To do so, I check and double check with informants to make sure I understood what they meant in their stories. To address this ethical concern, I offer participants the opportunity to hear their own responses after each interview. This allows them to adjust their statements and to collaborate with me in my understanding and interpretation of their stories.

Additionally, to inform my ethical approach to research, I evoke my short-term and long-term relationships with my informants. I do that by considering three interrelated points, which I developed for this study and which I briefly reflect on here:

“returning in, getting along, and ‘getting out?’”.

a) Returning in. I am a Muslim from Burkina Faso and an alumnus of Université de Ouagadougou. Doing research on Muslim students’ political engagement was just a return ‘in line’ within a familiar social reality. In that sense, my research is “homework” and not “fieldwork.” I believe that there are ethical considerations in doing homework as well. In as much as my negotiation of entry in the research scene was facilitated by my cultural familiarity, my insider-outsider-ness can pose ethical dilemmas. As a student from an American university, there might be some power dynamics between me and my informants. Informants often want to tailor their responses to fit certain perceived expectations based on their experiences with other researchers. In approaching my

78 fieldwork as “homework,” I appropriate the ownership of what I want to know. Howard

(2016) proposed that qualitative researchers get close to the phenomenon they seek to understand in order to see it from the informant’s perspective, but also to develop empathy toward the informant. I think that by treating my fieldwork on Islam as

“homework,” I have developed both the necessary discernment of a researcher and the equally relevant empathy of the self for the self.

b) Getting along. I was not naïve enough to think that I could easily return home and that everything would be as smooth as if I had never left. In ethnographic fieldwork, the key to getting along is negotiating access and building rapport with informants.

Rapport includes “a range of traditional concerns with ‘getting there’ and ‘being there’ and the consequent reevaluation of where (and what) ‘there’ is” (Springwood and King,

2001, p. 404). Also, the goal of rapport, according to Marcus (2011), is the attainment of a “working” level of trust sufficient to facilitate access to sources of information and data that serve the inquiry (p. 520). I realized that for ethical research about Islam in an

African context, the goal of rapport needs to be stretched beyond getting along with the informants. It is not just temporary friendship: it must include a genuine engagement.

Thus, in my research on the Muslim youth, I do not use the concept of giving back because to me that may entail a transactional exchange where informants trust me with their knowledge, and I return that trust with a benefit of some kind. I do not believe in that nor do I think that my research can directly benefit my participants in a transactional way.

79 Instead, I thought that getting along with my informants, who are part of a faith community, would be ethical when they agreed to share information with me without expectation of immediate payback. My informants were just sharing their time, space, and knowledge with me by following the Quranic honorific injunction of fi sabilillah (for the sake of God or along the path of God). This gift of them giving to me, which exists in a non-immediately transactional way, and only expecting their reward from God—fi sabilillah, was a respectful, effective way to offer willing informants a path to remain in their own logic of engagement and faith and a meaningful purpose to be truthful. It also equally bound me as a Muslim to be faithful to their information and to share it in the best interest of social science and of all who would choose to use it.

c) Getting out? I was not returning to the research field to end up getting out and leaving it entirely. That is also why I refer to it as “homework” instead of fieldwork. The concept of the researcher negotiating their way out of the research field can imply a disengagement that might have ethical considerations. As a native researcher, I saw

“getting out” more like making a pause to go back and write up what I have learned but not really ending my rapport with my informants. I am still engaged as friends with my gatekeepers and some of my informants on Facebook. When I left the research scene physically, it did not mean that I stopped interacting with my informants. In fact, most of them are students who will, hopefully, read my work at some point and engage with it. I espouse the idea that “researchers do not exist in isolation,” but rather in a “connected social network” (Elis, Adam, and Bochner, 2011) that also includes informants. The social network of my research happens to be home and implies entanglements that

80 require careful negotiation of past, present, and future. This is, in actuality, setting the base for mutual consultation and interactive learning rather than a ‘hit and run’ project.

Indeed, I adopted the strongest end of the spectrum in the researcher’s positionality continuum. By that I mean, revealing my position in such a way “that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don’t exist”

(Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, 2015). This meant reflecting on my own experiences as I conducted my research and wrote my research report. It also meant allowing my readers to see the angle from which I conducted my research. Therefore, along with revealing my position in the field, I also strived to weave into my writing my own experiences as a

Muslim from Burkina Faso.

By making the researcher’s identity clear all through the research process, I am showing the strengths and also the subjective limitations of the research. According to

Said (1978), knowledge production itself is not an agenda-free enterprise. My research on

Islam in Burkina Faso is certainly not a value-free project. By revealing my agenda from the onset in my choice of the post-colonial lenses in my approach, I contribute to scholarship while allowing readers to see my subjectivity in that process.

To be more accurate in my report, I provided a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of the Muslim culture that I observed and that I saw and heard in the stories I collected from my informants. This implied quoting informants close to verbatim and, hence, bringing their voices to bear witness within the arguments and submissions I make in my

81 research. By providing evocative thick description of the culture I report, I allow my reader to access both my subjectivity and the culture as I experienced it.

Data Collection Methods

As indicated in the introduction to this chapter, in this study I sought to map out the trajectories of Islam in Burkina Faso and how new media intersects with the embodiments of faith among the youth. I combined three different approaches: participant observation, flexible semi-structured interviews, and archives from AEEMB’s official website (www.aeemb.bf) and Facebook page. Other archives I used include booklets written by AEEMB members as well as the AEEMB’s newspaper (An-Nasr). In my study of the communicative practices of AEEMB members, I took the critical approach of using my methodology of data gathering as a roadmap and not a rigid set of questions. This was a deliberate choice that let the emerging data guide my inquiry and not the other way around.

a) Participant observation. One of my goals in this study was to understand the trajectories of Islam in Burkina Faso from the perspectives of the educated Muslim youth who received their education through the classic secular education in French (as opposed to those educated in religious schools in Arabic or a combination of Arabic and French).

To that end, I conducted field observation on the campus of Université de Ouagadougou: a site where AEEMB members congregate—between classes and extracurricular activities—to pray, listen to sermons, discuss happenings, or just hang out in the campus

Mosques. I also spent a considerable amount of time at the newly constructed, four-story building that serves as a cultural center for AEEMB. Located a few blocks from the

82 university, this building houses the AEEMB’s library, its largest mosque, and many of its offices. Also, Université de Ouagadougou is the largest public university in Burkina Faso and, therefore, it certainly has more AEEMB members than any other educational institution.

As a Muslim student who attended this institution from 2008 to 2011, I had often participated in the prayer rituals on campus with members of AEEMB. I, therefore, have a familiarity with AEEMB and, even though my previous involvement was many years ago, I used this familiarity plus cultural fluency to negotiate my entry into this scene. For example, I visited former professors at Université de Ouagadougou who took pleasure in talking with me about my schooling in the USA, invited me to be a guest-lecturer in their classes, and advised me on how to cope with traffic from home to campus. Some even discussed their own research in Burkina Faso and gave me pointers about how to do mine. I also learned where to eat good and cheap lunches from a security guard who recognized me from the time that I was a student on this campus. He even helped me find a free parking space for my motorcycle. As Lindlof and Taylor (2011) suggested, casing the research scene requires that the researcher “recognize the unwritten rules of behavior for performing a public identity effectively” (p. 89). For me, this often meant showing up at people’s offices unannounced to say hello and chatting briefly with them before asking anything. It also meant saying “thanking you” to people even when I had no reason to thank them. For example, after I was given an unfavorable answer to my request to use a room in the University library to rest and wait for an appointment in an hour, a thank you sufficed to change the no to a yes. Though I was told it is impossible with my 2009

83 student ID from my former university, which has not only expired, but has since changed format, my “thank you, have a nice day” gave me “Ok, come in but try to get a new card if you want to come back tomorrow.” I did not renew my card, but the same front desk person was kind to offer me access to the library whenever I retuned there.

Also, my previous brief involvement with AEEMB was a valuable resource to recall as I attempt to re-adjust to the unwritten rules of the scene. In a sense, I can participate in the enactment of the rituals and listen to the sermons, while being engaged as an observer because I am a Muslim who is familiar with the culture of the campus. I knew from experience that membership in a Burkinabè Mosque is usually not a rigorously monitored list, and anybody can pray at any Mosque on any given day. I just get into line as anyone else does. Garfinkel (2002) advised that “Getting into line [in the research field] while wearing inverting lenses will reveal the phenomenological properties of bodily work and body parts that bear with immediate perspicuity on witnessable congregational competence with the exhibited order of service” (p. 257). I approached my research with the same ethno-methodological consideration. In fact, my role as a researcher within the Muslim students’ community was more like returning in line with an active ethnographic sensibility as a researcher. This allowed me to not only listen to the preaching from a privileged vantage point, but also to experience reactions, feedback, and facial expressions of the other participants around me. My engagement and participation in their daily activities gave me more insight when I later engaged with members of the organization in interviews.

84 However, I anticipated that my presence among the AEEMB members would be particularly complex because this research scene is both a field and a home to me. On one occasion, I was invited to lead an evening prayer small gathering in the four-by-three- meter narrow dormitory room of one of the brothers I was hanging out with. Three other brothers had joined us to watch a world cup football game on his tv set which sat on a tall wood woven table that serves as storage for his books, notebooks, and a green teapot and multiple shot glasses. Some of the brothers sat on foldable chairs they snatched from the dining hall in the next building. I sat on the side of the bed with my host. When one of the brothers said it was time to pray, to make room for us, chairs were folded and shove under the bed, knocking into cooking utensils that were stored under the bed. Shoes, water bottles, and other items on the floor were all put away, and then we had enough space to lay a clean prayer mat. All the brothers insisted I lead the prayer. I quickly realized that I could not recite a long verse of the Quran, which young Muslims often do when leading the prayer. I resorted to reciting short passages I am very familiar with and going slowly to avoid mispronouncing my words. The four bothers followed me in prayer calmly till the end. It is not usual for the AEEMB brothers to challenge another brother publicly. Insisting that I lead the prayer was just an extension of hospitality and validating my belonging in their community. Although they did not know whether I was able to lead a prayer, they trusted me and insisted that I do it. I took this invitation to mean my acceptance in their midst. But I also knew that any mistake in performing this ritual would expose me to more scrutiny, and informants may not trust me with their

85 stories. After all, if I cannot be who they know me to be—a Muslim—how can they trust me as an apprentice researcher?

On the one hand, I was dispensed from the researcher’s work ‘to go native’ as a way to get closer to the researched subject. In fact, as a Burkinabè Muslim myself, my presence in a Mosque was never a suspicious act to the congregation members. On the other hand, once I engaged in informal talks with Muslim students, being a graduate student from an American University was also a mark of an imbalance of power relation.

I kept awareness of this fact, but I did not perceive such discrepancy over my stay among the AEEMB members. One exception was perhaps when members insisted that I joined their English Club, which they host at the AEEMB headquarters on Tuesdays in the evening. When I attended, most people tended to side with me or agree with almost everything I said. Maybe, this was because my English skills were much better.

Attendees of the club meetings usually have a yes or no type of questions, and participants had to pick one side and try to convince the others that they are right. For example, one topic was titled “Illegal migration is not good for Africa.” Whenever I attended their club meetings, I ended up refusing to take sides in the debate and, instead, made a general comment.

Also, while the homeliness and familiarity of my research setting may have granted me a ‘native’ access, it potentially posed a challenge for establishing myself as a researcher. Sometimes, some participants did not take me seriously or proposed to help me do my research differently. Multiple times, I was reminded of a Canadian professor who conducted research with them and was apparently “very sophisticated,” had an

86 assistant who translated for her, and a taxi driver who drove her around. On one occasion, a former AEEMB member and now a high functionary in the government postponed a meeting with me several times only to suggest when we finally met that I use a questionnaire instead of “an investigative journalist style of interview.” In this instance, I side with Smith (2012) that indigenous researchers are often challenged within the indigenous research scene as the distrust and lack of credibility from their own people often bar them from the road. In anticipating these challenges, I identified gatekeepers and used their sponsorship to access the research scene. Those gatekeepers include both former and current AEEMB leaders as well as respected individuals whom are highly regarded among AEEMB members. Despite the above-mentioned challenges, I was able to do my “homework” without any major issue.

Most days, I arrived at the AEEMB headquarters at 10 am and would often leave around 9 pm. I greeted construction workers on the site. Other days, I bought tea at a kiosk owned by an AEEMB brother and his wife and waited to chat with other clients, who are also mostly AEEMB brothers, before heading upstairs to the mosque or to the offices. Most of the time, I learned about the program and news of the day from that kiosk: the speaker of the day, upcoming weddings to attend, volunteers needed for work, jobs opportunities from former members who would rather first advertise such jobs with current members, etc. Then, I would plan to attend some of these events. Some Fridays, I would stay in the mosque after the ṣalat al-jumu’ah, which is a very important prayer that brings many people including non-AEEMB members together, reminiscing on the hutba and how it might help me understand AEEMB and its mission better.

87 During Ramadan which is the fasting month for Muslims, prayers and preaching were much more intense. I spent the last ten days of Ramadan among the AEEMB members and that really allowed me to see how each member strived to be the best human he or she can be by offering their time to work for free and reading the Quran and other Islamic texts. Also, with the modest means they have, they make food for everyone who comes in for iftar or the breaking of fasting after sunset. Both male and female members work hard to cook the food and serve it. During Ramadan, they also raise funds and buy uncommon special items such as sugar, dates, rice, and other food which they donate to the poor and that are much appreciated. I was told that most donors are former members, but, from time to time, they would receive donations from other Muslims who wish to give to the poor without revealing their identity. AEEMB has a committee in charge of organizing all the gifts and identifying vulnerable community members all over the town to distribute their gifts. Some days, early in the morning, beggars including women with twin babies, disabled people, and blind men guided by children who holds the other end of their stick would wait in the lobby of the AEEMB mosque for small gifts of food or groceries before they continued their route. I observed the interactions between

AEEMB members and the beggars and took notes on how they often feel helpless when they cannot satisfy the needs of this inexhaustible list of misfortunate visitors known as

Meskina or Garibu.

I was also lucky to find out that AEEMB was hosting a three-day seminar during

Ramadan to train its leaders from the provinces. Selected leaders were all housed in the mosque of the AEEMB’s new cultural center. The training was done by former members

88 and leaders including a now-current member of parliament; two government members who talked about political participation and social engagement of Islamic youth; and a police officer who talked about Islam, social media, and security. This was an opportunity for me to learn about some of the challenges that different AEEMB leaders from remote provinces face as well as the effort of the AEEMB national council to give them appropriate skills and a code of conduct. I attended most of the lectures and activities of the seminar and spoke with some of the trainers as well as the attendees. The seminar during Ramadan seems to have intensified the practice of faith and offered me, as a researcher, a unique opportunity to gain a larger national perspective.

Throughout the first month of my fieldwork, a participant observation inspired by the ethno-methodological research tradition allowed me to understand students’ Islamic practices as they engaged in given enactments of Islam through prayer, sermon listening, conversations, etc. This immersive observation method also allowed for a better understanding of the symbolic meaning of the university as a space for learning and cohabitating with different ideological, political, and religious tendencies and also its use as a place for Islamic congregation. According to Atkinson, Delamont, and Housley

(2008), when studying bodies and their practices, one must consider the space in which they interact. After all, in a Foucauldian sense, bodies only exist in space, and

“organization of bodies in institutions represents one of the fundamental properties of power and social organization in institutional life” (Atkinson, Delamont, & Housley.,

2008, p. 161). By paying attention to locality and religious performance, this study places

89 this Muslim youth organization and its members within their distinctive socio-spatial context and underlying manifest social practices.

b) Mediated discourse analysis. The second method of data gathering in this study consists in curating archives from the official Facebook page of AEEMB and its website (www.aeemb.bf). These two online platforms are a repository of documents and a third space for constructing new Islamic identities. The media content of these platforms constitutes a set of discourses that are significantly shaped by the Islamic orientations and socio-cultural and political inclinations of their producers. I also consulted some issues of AEEMB’s newspaper—An-Nasr (The Victorious)—as well as booklets published by some AEEMB senior members. As Potter (1996) argued, discourses can be studied “in terms of how they relate to other social, cognitive, political processes and outcomes” (p. 138). In the same sense, I used these discourses to explore what other processes are associated with and embedded in Islamic identities framed on these specific sites. This approach allowed me to examine the mediated discourses and ask how AEEMB uses the Internet and print media to communicate ideas and beliefs. It also gave me an impetus to discuss the ways in which these mediated ideas and beliefs constitute forms of idealized Islamic orientations and identities.

I retrieved online data through a systematic netnography of the above-mentioned sites. Humphreys (2016) defined netnography as “The practice of conducting field research online” (p. 51). For her, researchers using this method, which is an adaptation from traditional ethnography, must involve themselves in the online community in order to gain insight into the social and cultural dynamics of the researched group. While in

90 practice netnography can mean interacting with research participants on their digital networks, I opted not to interact with AEEMB on its Facebook or website lest I might steer the conversation in a certain direction. Instead, I immersed myself in a passive observation, collecting selected official documents posted on these platforms. According to Lindlof and Taylor (2011), “official documents are a site of claims to power, legitimacy, and reality” (p. 232). However, I am not limiting my investigation to official texts from the association. I also looked into data from members’ posts and comments and the responses AEEMB gives to those interactions as additional valuable data. To get access to all official posts on Facebook, I “Liked” and “Followed” the page so as to access all posts on it. However, I refrained from interacting with any specific post with comments, likes, sharing, or any other interactive activity. My goal was to simply access all documents (videos, photos, flyers, events, leaflets, audio files, etc.) that AEEMB and its members posted on this platform.

c) Qualitative interviews. Lastly, I conducted 32 in-depth interviews with both leaders and members to probe individual narratives in order to capture detailed personal accounts of their understanding of their Islamic faith in relation to their commitment to

AEEMB. I specifically used semi-structured interviews because I was interested in extended narratives from participants. These interviews were tape-recorded, and some of them are as long as two-and-half hours. These interviews were largely informal. Some of them took place on campus, on the benches under the neem trees. Others were conducted at the homes of the participants or the small campus mosques and at the offices of

AEEMB during the quieter times of the day.

91 Of the 32 individuals I interviewed, eight were AEEMB leaders including four current leaders who are from the national council, the highest cell that oversees all the other chapters and cells around the country. Ten informants were either a current or former leader of a chapter of the association. The 14 remaining were lay members who had no formal leadership role, although everyone at AEEMB is considered a Muslim youth leader, a positive term that is often used to encourage participation and build youth confidence in leadership. I wanted an in-depth understanding of the practice of Islam and the anti-extremist social project that AEEMB promotes. This justified my heavy reliance on AEEMB leaders as informants. I believed that the leaders of the association were suited to give me insights in that regard. They were particularly invested in telling me more about what they do and how they do it. Also, as elected leaders, they speak on behalf of the entire members and they represent the official face of the organization.

Thirteen informants out of the 32 were female. I also had a lot of informal non-recorded conversations with several members of the organization, especially during the three-day seminar.

I used a semi-structured interview questionnaire because the study aims to probe individual narratives in order to capture detailed accounts of their understanding of their

Islamic faith. In practice, based on my main research questions listed at the end of

Chapter 2, I had a few primary questions, but based on the informants’ answers, I also asked unwritten questions and follow-up questions. These interviews yielded detailed information at the incremental individual level. Often times, interviewees talked at length about matters not related to my research, and I just bore with them till I had the

92 opportunity to ask a follow-up question or re-center the conversation toward the matter at hand.

These in-depth semi-structured interviews fit in with asking for extended narratives from participants. In some cases, informants shared with me stories about their experiences in AEEMB. Other shared stories of faith not directly related to AEEMB.

Although some of these stories seemed not related to AEEMB, I cherished them because they have the potential of revealing social knowledge about members. As Eickelman and

Anderson (2003) noted, Muslims do not act just as Muslims, they also act “according to class interests, out of a sense of nationalism, on behalf of tribal or family networks, and from all the other diverse motives that characterize human endeavors” (p. 1). Such stories often reveal how the Islamic identities of these youth intersect with their other identities.

Recruiting perspective participants to interview was an informal process. I identified persons of interest informally during my participant observation. Some of them were recommended to me by the leaders. I wanted people who had stories to tell and were willing to tell their stories.

Summary

To investigate how the subjective, socially created, everyday embodiment of

Islam among AEEMB members is communicated, I conducted participant observation, interviewed AEEMB leaders and other members, collected archives, and analyzed their media discourses. In this study, I committed to employing the following four key paradigms of qualitative research: “detailed description of human experience, dialogic encounters between self and other, sensitivity to ethical and political issues, and the

93 inductive development of theory from intimate knowledge of situated practice” (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011, p. 29). Through these three data collection methods, I captured individual stories that informed me about the emerging and the co-constructed understanding of faith at both the individual and collective levels and how AEEMB as a youth organization communicates such orientations.

The transcultural nature of this research is reflective of the dislocation of knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing. This evokes much methodological anxiety and serious ethical issues pertaining to the issue or question of representation. As a

Muslim from Burkina Faso researching Islam in Burkina Faso, I took a homework approach by using my cultural fluency to gain access and then reflecting on how my peculiar positionality allows or hinders my understanding of Muslim youth and their political, economic, and social activism. By critically positioning the project within the large postcolonial understanding of Islamic faith in Burkina Faso, I remained vigilant to other forms of powers that might be impacting the embodiment of Islamic identities online and offline among the youth of AEEMB.

94 Chapter 4: The Challenge of Communicating a Youth-led Islamic Movement

Introduction

This chapter analyzes AEEMB’s use of new media, particularly its newspaper

(An-Nasr), its Facebook page, and website (www.aeemb.bf), and examines how this nationwide Muslim student organization utilizes media to communicate its understanding of Islam and promote its socio-political, economic, and civic engagement. The chapter further discusses this media engagement as a way of understanding the Islamic orientation of the Muslim youth in Burkina Faso. To this end, it considers how the use of these media platforms (An-Nasr, www.aeemb.bf, and the Facebook page) may be presenting a point of departure toward both a secular reading of the Islamic text and a hyper sacralization of it. Sacralization of the text means a total upholding of its sacred value and a reading of the text that is centered on itself. The secular reading of the text is understood as an interpretation of the text that interrogates current and historical contexts to give meaning to the text.

Based on insights from this analysis, I argue that while this paradox—i.e., the presence of both a secular reading and hyper sacralization of the Islamic text—testifies to the diversity and plurality of Islamic faith backgrounds within this youth organization, it is also evidence of the formation of new trajectories of Islam among youth trained in a secular education system. While this ambivalent ideological state of the largest Muslim youth organization in Burkina Faso could offer an opportunity for religious reforms, it may constitute serious social and political impediments with regard to the emerging deleterious social context of Burkina Faso and the Francophone Muslim Sahel region in

95 general. In my discussion, I put my inquiry into perspective by interrogating the state of media in Burkina Faso, with a specific focus on new media and Internet penetration. This helps situate AEEMB’s use of media within the larger social context and opens the discussion to the question of media adoption, use, or abuse within the context of a relatively less developed media ecology.

AEEMB’s Use of Print Media

Since the earliest days of its creation, AEEMB attempted to use media, especially print media, to share its understanding of Islam in Burkina Faso and beyond. Successive leaders of the national council of this organization created special newspapers and magazines, which were quickly discontinued mostly because they lacked financial support to run them. In an interview with Imam Ilboudo, a former leader of AEEMB, now, a prominent television personality and an AEEMB advisor, I learned about the history of those discontinued papers. “Concerning media, he started, “We were very conscious at the very beginning of our organization that we needed to sensitize people on many issues related to Islam. And we knew that we could use media to do that.” He shook his head gently as to signify that there was a lost opportunity here or as if he was taken suddenly back to those old days. I could almost feel the nostalgia in the Imam’s trembling voice. Then, he cleared his voice, excused himself, and continued:

Unfortunately, we had a very small Francophone Muslim audience. We tried. I

don’t know if you have checked for those papers from the archives during your

research, but we tried many formulas. At the birth of AEEMB, we created a paper

titled Le Muezzin. It run for just one year. After that, we created another paper

96 which we called l’Appel. This one lasted ten years. It was a monthly paper. The

editorial was strictly religious. We failed to get advertisement contracts. People

from the informal sector [craftsmen and small traders] were the only people who

could support the paper. But they don’t read. They were mostly illiterate. So,

L’appel run out of money then and could not function anymore. A few years later,

AEEMB members at CERFI [an advanced Islamic learning center in Burkina

Faso] tried to relaunch the Islamic editorial by creating another paper, Le Cerfice,

which was just a bulletin, to keep all members connected. Lastly, there were also

some brothers who created La Preuve. I think it stayed alive for two years. I just

want to say that we were very conscious of the importance of these media, but we

did not succeed in finding a right formula to keep them running. Although, I must

say that for L’Appel, we were able to have a distribution channel in France

through the help of Tarik Ramadan and also in Côte d’Ivoire and Niger.8

Over its 30 years of existence, AEEMB utilized various print media to communicate its understanding of Islam with the Muslim community in Burkina Faso at large. Often time, the organization was even able to reach an international readership in France, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger. However, as Imam Ilboudo pointed out, “the editorial was strictly religious” and that was not a good business model to keep a newspaper going. Also, the

8 Tarik Ramadan is a Swiss Muslim intellectual whose writings on Islam and appearances on television debates about religion in Europe have earned him a reputation. He is reformist Salafist who taught at many universities including Oxford. Tarik’s grandfather—Hassan al-Banna—was the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and his father—Said Ramadan—was a leader of the movement till his exile to Sweden. Tarik’s detractors have often cited his family links with the Muslim Brotherhood in attempt to discredit him. Since 2018, Tarik Ramadan is involved in a legal battle against several women for alleged rape and sexual misconduct. 97 largest portion of Muslims in Burkina Faso who have money to subscribe to a Muslim newspaper, according to Imam Ilboudo, were not literate.9 For him, this was a key factor that undermined the development of a sustainable Muslim print media in the country.

One after another, these print media outlets ran out of business forcing successive

AEEMB leaders to start from scratch in an attempt to own and control their print media.

Currently, AEEMB has a monthly bulletin called An-Nasr, which means Victory in

Arabic. Although the print version of An-Nasr has limited circulation, it constitutes a solid platform where the AEEMB national council communicates its official positions to its decentralized members across the country. Digital copies in PDF format or carefully photographed still images of the pages of An-Nasr are also shared on its Facebook and its website (www.aeemb.bf ). During my fieldwork, I found that some local AEEMB chapters even have WhatsApp and Telegram groups—two end-to-end encrypted messaging apps widely used in Burkina Faso—where such digital copies of the paper are shared. I now turn to a closer look at the content of An-Nasr to understand its purpose through analyzing the meaning of its content.

Framing Youth Positions with a Religious Terminology in Print Media

Dear brothers and sisters, our country faces multiple challenges largely caused by

a betrayal fomented by its enemies as well as its own children. Yet, Islam

9 In colonial Burkina Faso, Muslims perceived formal school to be a Christian tool aimed to divert their children. Since the Catholic fathers who run those schools did not distinguish imparting literacy from teaching Christianism, most Muslims resisted French education and did not send their children to those schools. At independence (See Ouedraogo, Y., 2019; Coulon, 1983). This idea was further discussed in chapter 2. 98 condemns and rejects betrayal. Both humans and animals naturally perceive

betrayal to be wrong.

Opening line of An-Nasr, No 777, July 2018

An-Nasr was created in 1992 and is managed by Le Comité Press, a special editorial committee composed of elected advanced students and headed by the president of the national council of AEEMB. An-Nasr is mass distributed electronically mostly via email and Telegram and WhatsApp. AEEMB also shares An-Nasr on its Facebook page and website (www.aeemb.bf ).

The basic élan in An-Nasr is an exhortation to and reinforcement of faith to the readers through an interpretation of the Quranic teachings. An-Nasr is a vehicle to deliver

AEEMB’s basic religious and moral principles. Although, sometimes, the content reflects the organization’s position on ongoing major national or international happenings, it is not a paper that reports the news of AEEMB. Each An-Nasr publication is comprised of four-page length articles written by individual senior members of the organization. The special committee serves as an editorial board which proofreads and, most importantly, peer-reviews all articles before publication. Content of An-Nasr stands, therefore, as the official position of AEEMB. The president of AEEMB serves as the editor-in-chief in the press committee. In this study, I analyzed nine essays published in An-Nasr over a nine- month period. This time period corresponds with the time I started researching AEEMB and its use of media to the time I started the writing process.

In An-Nasr, AEEMB discusses issues of national or international concern drawing from its understanding of the Islamic faith. The organization proposes a certain

99 understanding of events through the angle of Islam as an alternative. This position is better understood through AEEMB’s use of the concept of ihram. A prominent AEEMB elder told me that ihram is a state of sacralization in which the individual is removed from his or her ordinary subjectivity and is transformed in a state of direct harmony with his/her primordial state of talbya—or response to the call from God—which reconciles him or her with the initial pact that God made with mankind. In a special article released during the celebration of eid el kabir, AEEMB explained ihram within the context of the pilgrimage to Mecca. It presented it as a purity that pleases God but is modest enough to avoid attracting attention. The Muslim youth must behave in such a manner by embodying both purity and modesty. “The hearts and the souls are hungry and thirsty: only the divine presence reassures and satisfies these needs,” the article added. For

AEEMB, ihram stands as a necessary path to experience that divine presence.

In the nine articles selected for analysis, three articles can be read as open commentaries on current issues, and the remaining six are centered on AEEMB’s

Quranic thought. For example, the first of those three articles is about teen pregnancy in the school system in Burkina Faso. It was released and distributed on March 8, 2018 during the celebration of International Women’s Day. The article promises to “lift the veil from a silent pain” that fails girls in their pursuit of education and wellbeing. Citing a study conducted by UNICEF and the Department of Education of Burkina Faso, the article highlighted the prevalence of teen pregnancy in the world and in Burkina Faso, by placing these statistics side by side. The article detailed the statistics on young schoolgirl pregnancies and offered a list of social categories of men responsible for those

100 pregnancies: “First, we have male students. Youth from the informal economy sector come in second position. The small business owners rank number three and are followed by schoolteachers, other government employees, and mine workers.” The article then outlined factors that possibly contribute to teen pregnancy citing “a total moral depravity among youth” that stemmed from the lack of modules on sexuality in the school curricula and negligent parents who fail to provide a proper education to their children.

The concluding section of the article outlined some ways to reduce teen pregnancy in schools. It stressed the religious responsibility of parents to educate and provide for their children by citing hadith and renown wisdom. A remarkable point that goes almost unnoticed, though, is the article’s stipulation concerning the use of contraceptives:

Muslim parents must no longer keep talking about sex as a taboo. They should

educate their children about sex and put emphasis on the religious prescriptions

around it so that the children would fear God even when they are tempted to try

sex [...] Parents must not recommend contraceptives to their children less it

encourages them to try sex.

AEEMB presents the problem of teen pregnancy with scientific data but proposes a religious solution to combatting it. By situating its position on the use of contraceptives within the discussion on teen pregnancy, AEEMB passes a message in a very subtle way and hopes to convince its readers. Yet AEEMB’s position on contraception is not any different from the normative injunctions of the Muslim establishment in Burkina Faso which preaches against non-marital sexuality and rejects Western contraceptives. The use

101 of credible institutional data (UN and Ministry) on teen pregnancy, allows AEEMB to join the national media conversation on family planning. It also allows the organization to frame the issue with a theological reading that rejects contraceptives.

Africa south of the Sahara Desert has the world highest fertility rate and lowest contraceptive prevalence (Rossier, Senderowicz, & Soura, 2014), and Muslim women in this region use less traditional, and modern methods of contraception compared to women of other faith traditions (Rossier & Corker, 2017). The use of modern Western contraceptives in family planning is yet to be fully accepted among Muslims in Burkina

Faso as social norms continue to favor abstinence as a method of pre-transitional and postpartum fertility. AEEMB’s position on the use of contraceptives is clearly in line with the dominant position among Muslims in Burkina Faso in this regard.

An-Nasr presents improper use of social media as being against the principles of its Muslim faith. The second article—How should a Muslim behave on social media?”— deplores how time wasted in social media is affecting the lives of Muslim youth negatively. The author cited and interpreted four hadith and surah and argued that users should be careful to avoid certain behavior on social media, which leads to fitna—chaos or conflict—and is therefore prohibited in Islam. For example, using lewd language on social media and visiting obscene websites are to be avoided at all cost because even when users can hide behind anonymity, God still sees them and will punish them for their transgression. Instead, youth are invited to do dawa (preaching).

The third article titled “The Tariq Ramadan Case: A double-standard justice system?” is an opinion piece on an ongoing investigation for sexual misconduct and rape

102 allegations against Tariq Ramadan, a prolific Swiss Muslim academic at Oxford

University. The article cites a Quranic passage to support the main idea of the article that

Tariq Ramadan is targeted by his accusers because of his religious activity and his political positions: “They want to extinguish the light of Allah with their mouths, but

Allah will perfect His light, although the disbelievers dislike it” (surat 61, verse 8). In this

Quranic passage, “They” refers to wrongdoers who reject God and his messengers. Tariq

Ramadan is presented as a victim of an anti-Islam movement which hides behind women from “the #Balancetonporc movement”—the francophone equivalent of the #MeToo movement—whose claims against the professor are dubious. The article then denounces

French media coverage of it as biased and lacking professional caution. It then closes with an invitation to pray for God “to put an end to the stratagems of our brother's enemies.” I learned during my fieldwork that Professor Tariq Ramadan has facilitated the circulation of earlier forms of AEEMB’s papers in France, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger in an effort to support inter-religious dialogue and religious reform in Muslim circles.

Even in these above articles, which can be considered as a general commentary on social happenings, AEEMB still made use of multiple religious references to support its position. The three articles all combined cited the Quran and hadith five times. All other sources combined (academic, state official documents, general local sayings sources) were cited only three times.

The other six articles deal with abstract or existential concepts such as death, fear of God, betrayal, “education of the heart”, worshiping, pilgrimage, and experiencing hardships as a Muslim. In these articles, AEEMB draws heavily from the Quran and

103 interprets Quranic injunctions to discuss these concepts. Through that process of quoting and interpreting, the organization proposes its understanding of the concepts and prescribes the line of conduct which members should follow. For example, an article of

August 2018 details Quranic theology regarding the celebration of eid el-kebir— commonly known as the Feast of the Sacrifice—which commemorates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God upon God’s command. The article also highlights the role of the Burkinabè government in facilitating hajj which takes place in Mecca during that period.

Drawing from the story of the ultimate sacrifice Abraham was prepared to do to prove to God his unweaning faith, AEEMB discusses the rise of fundamentalism in

Burkina Faso and what members of AEEMB who understands Islam properly must do. It argued that most fundamentalists misinterpret that specific Quranic narrative to convince prospective suicide bomb careers. In the article, AEEMB reinforced its position that terrorism has nothing to do with Abraham’s intended sacrifice because it is not commended by God. Besides, the article cites the Quran 15 times and each citation is interpreted to support a claim. For example, the article cites surat 3 verse 110 of the

Quran which presents Muslims as “the best community” to suggests that as a Muslim community, Muslim youth should show an unparalleled exemplariness by being good citizens.

The election doctrine, which consists in defining Muslims as the chosen people,

“the best of community,” or “the preferred community of God” is prominently in

AEEMB’s writing. In all of the articles, the concept of “the chosen community” is

104 evoked at least once. This doctrine is evoked to articulate support for secular (non- reigious) conceptions such as citizenship, as in the above article, but it is also often used to promote a return to a certain puritanical understanding of faith that delineates the concept of “al-wala wa-l-bara,” which distinguishes what constitutes loyalty and disloyalty. To be a valuable member of the “elected community” then implies total loyalty to and acceptance of a certain understanding of the Quranic text.

While most of the articles in the paper offer a secular interpretation of the Quranic text that historicizes and contextualizes the religious message in light of current realities, some of the editorials look inward into the text for guidance. Such writings present

Quranic interpretations by approaching the Quranic historical timeline and present-day timeline with little differentiation. By reading the ordinary experience of Muslims through a transcendental timeline in which the Quranic message has supposedly conserved its meaning, authors of such articles present a deeply spiritual message to their readers and often reject current understandings as being “earthly” and, therefore, of less importance. For example, one article titled—The Difficult challenges and the easy tests of life: What does Quran say? —comments on Islamic prescriptions on life as a test that can be easy to win and also a hard test requiring strong faith and a rejection of the current life in order to earn rewards in life after death. In another article on the theme of death, the author invites readers to not dwell so much on just seeking life too much at the point of forgetting that “everything on Earth is condemned to nothingness in the end.” In these types of articles, the Prophet of Islam and his companions are cited as an exemplary

Muslim community. Readers are exhorted to strive to accomplish deeds that would be

105 similar to that of the Prophet or the al-insan al-kamil (The Islamic prototype of perfect human) or deeds that he would approve.

From a mass media perspective, the Arabic-language concepts such as “al-wala wa-l-bara” (often shortened with local inflections walahi), fitna, and dawa, represent popular local Muslim slogans that set the pace for how one must behave as a Muslim within a Muslim space. These Arabized concepts are used—even by French-educated

Muslims—in the writing without much explanation because they have entered common parlance as common knowledge and work as slogans. Adhesion to the spirit and meaning of such slogans indicates, in this context, whether Muslim youth will meet their promise to God or be outside the ummah, or Islamic community.

In general, Burkinabè university students are pedant in their use of language. In fact, the Burkinabè education system is often critiqued for its heavy reliance on abstract theory and its stark lack of practically. Students trained in such a system have a certain approach to communication that puts emphasis on style and degree of cleverness. An

English lecturer at Université de Ouagadougou said to me while commenting on a presentation I did on postcolonial theory and language: “It is not what you said that matters, but it is how you said it, what style you used to say it, i.e. your careful choice of sophisticated language determines how your interlocutor appreciates the meaning of your statement.” During my research process, I often asked informants to explain certain phrases or words. Bright students would sometime tell me the etymology of a French word and proceed to explain something that could have been put simply. Muslim students

106 do not derogate from this common way of speaking. Their use of Arabic words and concepts as Islamic slogans is indicative of that pedantry too.

Among AEEMB members, it is almost taken for granted that when Arabic language concepts and words are injected in statements, they reinforce the Islamic value of such statements. The common phrase one hears at AEEMB gatherings is “salaam alaikum” an Arabic greeting that means “peace be upon you”. The use of Arabic concepts and phrases in this context is also testimony of a long durée impact of communication and exchanges that the Arabo-Islamic world has had on the peoples of the Sahel region of

West Africa. Wrapping media statements within shorthand Arabic phrases or their

French-ized versions also allows the sender of the message to signal that this is a religious message and must be taken seriously.

While still struggling to maintain its newspaper (An-Nasr), AEEMB has turned to social media such as Facebook to share content and connect with members. I now turn to the netnographic analysis of the Facebook page and website to understand AEEMB’s current use of new media. I considered the Facebook content from the period of January to September 2018. This analysis paid attention to the themes of the content and the nature of issues the media content addresses. For example, it considered whether a post has text, a video, or a poster, and also whether it is a content created by a third party or by

AEEMB. Then, the analysis paid attention to the themes and meanings of each post

(information about jobs, training, religious message or dawa, etc.).

107 Understanding AEEMB’s Facebook Content

AEEMB created its Facebook page in 2015. As of October 2018, when the curation of data for this research was completed, the AEEMB official Facebook page had

7.1 thousand “Likes” and an equal number of followers. By September 2019 when I completed the draft of this chapter, the page had 10,774 Likes and in Burkina Faso, it ranks among the most followed youth organizations in social media. Data curation from

Facebook consisted in manually scrolling up the AEEMB Facebook page, reading every single post, and coding it thematically in a spreadsheet. In doing so I studied AEEMB’s public Facebook content from January 2018 to September 2018. Often, content from its website, especially PDF copies of its newspaper (An-Nasr) are photographed and posted on Facebook. There was no single Visitor Post on the page during that period although that function has not been disabled. A Visitor Posts is a post by a third party directly on the Facebook Wall of someone else.

Table 1: Number and types of posts on AEEMB’s Facebook

Post Te Photo Poster Video Repost 3rd party 3rd party Interaction

xt Content about content

AEEMB

213 16 122 57 13 16 11 10 31438

108 Over nine months, AEEMB posted 213 times on its official Facebook page. These posts registered 31,411 interactions during the same period. In this study, interactions are defined as comments, shares, video view count, and reactions (likes, loves, and other emojis such as the sad and angry emojis). 76.05% of the posts have text and 57.27% have at least one photograph. Only 21 posts out the 213 posts constitute a third-party content and over half of those posts are clearly about AEEMB. Examples of those third-party posts include newspapers reports of some AEEMB events. Designed posters appeared in

26% of the posts. AEEMB does not repost content very often. Only 16 times did the organization repost content previously shared on the platform, and I did not see any post re-posted more than once.

While I found a high percentage of posts containing texts and/or photos, very few posts contained videos. In fact, over the period under study, only 13 posts contain a video. A few times, AEEMB’s events are broadcast live on Facebook to give a virtual live experience to connected members, but my observation is that such kinds of media use is limited. Only eight posts were Facebook Live videos. However, video content tends to generate more visible interactions. For example, I could see how many times a video was seen, but Facebook does not make such data available to the public for photos and texts.

Furthermore, the object of each post is clear. I did not find any ambiguity in the intended message of AEEMBB Facebook updates. In fact, AEEMB does not communicate two things in the same post. For example, when there are two upcoming events, the organization would make two separate posts about the two events. Each time

109 that multiple events are happening at AEEMB, one notices that there is a post for each one of them. As a result, it is common to see multiple posts on a single day. However, there are days when the organization does not post anything at all. For instance, on May

25 alone AEEMB posted nine different items about different things on its page while from September 19 to September 26, nothing was posted. This shows that posts reflect important happenings. When nothing is happening at AEEMB, it does not post on its page. In fact, re-posts are very limited. Only 16 times did AEEMB re-post content it had previously posted.

Analyzing AEEMB’s Facebook Posts

The analysis of the content of AEEMB posts on Facebook reveals five major themes and a sixth one that encompasses posts which did not fit any of the other five.

This analysis indicates that over 97% of the posts can be grouped into five regular themes: dawa (preaching), general information, self-promotion, invitation to action, and opportunities. Only five out of the 213 posts do not fall into any of the above themes.

Posting on the official Facebook page is done by a restricted number of people. Other members are encouraged to share posts and tell their friends about what is on the page.

Table 2: Thematic Analysis of AEEMB Facebook Posts

Theme Number of Posts Percentage

General Information 73 34.27%

Self-Promotion 40 18.78% dawa 39 18.31%

110 Table 2 Continued

Opportunities 30 14.08%

Activism 26 12.21%

Other 5 2.35%

Total 213 100%

Sharing general information. The official Facebook page of AEEMB is mostly used to share general information that is primarily directed to AEEMB members at large.

This study found that 34.27% of the content was about general information about the organization and its members. This include informing members about upcoming activities, reporting on AEEMB activities, happenings such as the wedding of a member, meetings’ minutes, and important decisions that are made at the national level, which must be shared with the members at large. Examples of informative posts are:

AEEMB will host a conference for its Sisters next month. Registration is open

now and can be done through the following web link or by calling the following

number” and “God blessed Brother Seydou with a wedding that will take place

next Sunday in Po. There will be a bus departing from Ouaga. The AEEMB

family in Po together with the family of our sister welcome everyone in Po during

this event.

During my fieldwork, most of my interviewees reported that they go to AEEMB’s

Facebook page to learn about what is happening.

111 Opportunities. Although posts in this theme could be easily put under the information theme, they constitute a specific type of information in the sense that they invite members to take advantage of certain opportunities, not just informing them about happenings. In total, 30 posts out of the 213 posts invited AEEMB members to join non- religious trainings offered by either AEEMB or a third-party. Usually it has coordinates and targets AEEMB members from a specific town or locality. This type of post represents 14.08% of all posts. It is important to note that the posts that offer training opportunities related to faith are coded under the dawa theme and are not included in this theme. The opportunities represented here include skill-building training such as language learning, computer skills developments, job opportunities, and other services.

Specific examples of posts that are coded as opportunity and training include posts about services and training such as: “The AEEMB women cell is offering a training on women reproductive health in all the regions of Burkina. All women are encouraged to attend, learn, and return home to teach their own community members”, “AEEMB is organizing a mock exam free of charge for high school students”, “AEEMB encourages all its qualified members to apply to the African Union sponsored scholarships through the link bellow” and “AEEMB chapter in Koudougou offers private tutoring in English and Math for free. Contact this number for more information.”

Self-promotion. The self-promotion theme comprises all posts that can be coded as defining self, projecting ideal self, or promoting self. It constitutes the second largest type of post on AEEMB Facebook page and accounts for 18.78% of all the posts. It includes posts which celebrate the accomplishment of members such as passing their

112 exams or achieving other life milestones, especially post that links their success to their

AEEMB membership. It also includes posts that define AEEMB and its mission and goals as a Muslim youth association. Examples of posts that are under the self-promotion theme include: “AEEMB is a youth association of public interest,” a newspaper report on

AEEMB’s work to enforce civic behavior in the traffic in different cities, and a still image of AEEMB’s official statement condemning a terrorist attack in Burkina Faso.

Preaching (dawa). Unique posts which can be termed dawa as preaching or proselytizing or simply posts that talk about faith. Some of these posts remind members of certain Islamic prescriptions such as fasting and what constitutes a Muslim proper conduct. Dawa posts also encourage AEEMB members to improve their faith. Dawa posts come in third position with 18.31% of the post falling under this category. Only 39 posts out of the 219 posts contain messages that can be described as being dawa. Besides, these are very subtle messages. Examples of posts coded as dawa are the following:

“Ramadan fasting begins tomorrow. May Allah grant all of us the strength and the wisdom to accomplish it”, “There is a proper way to give alms in Islam. Your almsgiving must follow that way, or it won’t mean anything. Click on this link to read more.” All dawa posts are AEEMB created content and have no third-party content. This suggests that AEEMB presents itself as an able interpreter of the Islamic text and prefers sharing its own understanding of Islam with its members rather than showing them content of which production they do not necessarily have control.

Activism. Posts which invite members to non-religious social actions are coded under the activism theme. This category of posts represents 12.21% of all the posts and

113 comes in fifth position of all the types of posts in this study. Often, these are events that

AEEMB co-organized in partnership with other youth associations. Examples of posts that are defined as activist include posts that invite members to come together to “a clean campus day event”, “the launching of AEEMB’s tree planting campaign” and “a popular cross for peace.” Muslim youth activism on social Facebook is social and collaborative.

Other. Posts which did not fall into any of the above five categories are labeled

“Other”. This category is very minimal and represents 2.35% of all the posts. These are usually postings that are vague and cannot be attributed to any of the above categories.

They tend to be photos with no text and have no clear context to give any meaning. The limited number of posts which do not belong to any specific category suggests that

AEEMB is consistent in its objectives in posting, which is to share general information, provide information about opportunities, preach faith, or invite members to action.

Website as a Repository of Islamic Knowledge

“Go to our website and you will find all the information you need,” said one

AEEEMB sister to me when I asked her if I can interview her for my research. On several occasions, I have received a similar reference to the AEEMB website (www.aeemb.bf) from prospective interviewees, who thought I could get all possible information I need from their organization’s website. While this might be indicative of AEEMB members’ reliance and trust on their website for information, I still conducted interviews, did participant observation, and collected archives. But I also returned to the website which I combed through thoroughly, read all content, and observed and analyzed how it became a key media platform for members of this youth organization.

114 Currently, the website has not changed much from its 2009 basic configuration, which makes it hard to open its dense green pages, even when using fast Internet. This is not an easy to navigate or an aesthetically pleasant website to visit, but it is an omnibus site that contains a vast amount of information. The website has developed into a complex web with multiple drop-down menus where administrators add more pages and more links to other sites.

The AEEMB website has become a hub, a digital space where visitors can access basic information about AEEMB and read about Islam, connect with AEEMB leaders and participate in an online forum where they can add comments to discussion topics published on the website. Also, this website is an archival box that stores important public reports of AEEMB. The archives include scanned copies of AEEMB’s paper (An-

Nasr), selected essays on Islam, and select audio sermons from different mosques and

Imams. Visitors can download these audio files in mp3 format and listen offline at their convenience. Moreover, there are multiple samples of short level tests which visitors can download to test and determine their understanding of Islam. These learning tools offer members the opportunity to upgrade their knowledge of Islamic history and principles.

Most importantly, the website features a forum page where members can post their own comments on a given subject. Although the discussion board has not been active since February 2017, it constitutes one important page where visitors can sign up with a username and a password and join the discussion forum on the website. The lack of activity in this platform might be justified by the fact that AEEMB is now on much more interactive social media such as Facebook.

115 The landing page of the website also shows current construction projects that

AEEMB is undertaking and links where one can donate to support such efforts.

AEEMB’s bank account information is listed on that page together with ways to donate:

Western Union, PayPal, Debit card, or via phone transfer. Fund-raising efforts targets small local donors who can donate securely from their cellphone banking to International private persons or institutional donors who can support AEEMB using wire transfer to any of any of AEEMB three bank accounts.

Visitors of the AEEMB website can access a select number of important Islamic online resources composed of links to other websites. In point of fact, the website features links to sites of other Muslim youth associations such as the Ivorian Muslim youth association (AEEMCI), and the West African Muslim youth association

(OJEMAO). Other important Muslim media linked to the AEEMB website include the websites of Federation of Islamic Associations in Burkina Faso (FAIB) and Islam in

Burkina Faso. This is indicative of how AEEMB projects its website to be: a place where

Muslim youth can read and improve their knowledge of Islam by accessing readily available material to read, listen to, or test themselves. It also shows that the organization perceives itself as belonging to a network of shared knowledge and shared faith—a digital ummah—where one can enter and learn as much as one can. That is certainly why most AEEMB members would recommend their website as place to “find all the information you need.”

116 Putting AEEMB Media in Perspective

To better appreciate AEEMB’s use of media, especially new media such as website and Facebook, an assessment of general media access in Burkina Faso is necessary. Burkina Faso has the most expensive broadband in the world according to a

Cable.co.uk report (McCarthy, 2017). The report indicated that the average cost for a monthly subscription to Internet is $961.22 in Burkina Faso. To put this high price in perspective, compare it with the average cost for a monthly subscription in other countries. For example, Iran has the cheapest average cost of Internet subscription equals to $5.37. In the USA the average cost for a monthly subscription to Internet is $66.17.

The second most expensive country in average cost for a monthly subscription to Internet is Papua New Guinea, $597.20, which is still almost half what Burkinabè pay on average to access Internet (MacCarthy, 2017).

Yet, a growing number of youth make use of media. In 2002-2011, the United

Nations reported that in Burkina Faso, 55% of women and 61% of men between the age of 15 to 19 “use at least one type of information media at least once a week” (UNdata,

2011). Mobile telephone penetration has increased significantly over the past decade and will likely continue to increase. According to the International Telecommunication Union

(2016), in 2014, 71 % of the population had a mobile phone. In 2000, that number was

0.2%. The same report indicated that as of 2014, only 9.4% of the Burkinabè used

Internet. It is, however, important to consider that data on media access is sparse and for the most part not quite recent. Nevertheless, media adoption is expanding exponentially mostly due to the availability of cheap made-in-China smartphones and tablets in the

117 Burkinabè market. More people are accessing Internet via their telephone data rather than

Wi-Fi. Most people are connecting to Internet via those smartphones and their phone service providers who also provide Internet.

Burkina Faso is almost a technology disenfranchised country. However, the country is in a linguistic, discursive, even political mass media space that facilitates the circulations of ideas and information: French speaking Sahelian Africa. This complex media space is also one that is very anxious about the integration of Muslims in the secular political system which is transparently Judeo-Christian by orientation despite

Muslims representing the majority in that space. But the induction of Burkina Faso in this space was not only preceded by a long history of interaction and interconnectedness that produced a strong religious legacy. This induction also took form on the base of a colonial legacy that shaped the modes of Muslims’ participation in the postcolonial nation state. Their relative emancipation often celebrated as exceptionally singular in the

Sahel region—i.e. Islam tranquil—is now failing the test of new global fundamentalism currants that are sweeping through the Sahel.

In such a context, when young Muslims seek new ways of articulating and communicating their own understanding of their faith, which they communicate and put into practice, them and their communities are more likely cushioned by ‘radical ideological shocks’ from the outside world. The main challenge remains upgrading student’s media skills and improving their access to media.

118 Conclusion

This chapter discussed AEEMB’s use of newspaper, Facebook, and website in its effort to communicate with its members at large, but also to reinforce its position as a local able interpreter of Islam. Through a thematic analysis of select articles of AEEMB’s newspaper (An-Nasr), its nine-month Facebook posts, and its website, this chapter found that: 1) AEEMB use Facebook mostly for sharing information. 2) It uses An-Nasr to formulate its understanding of Islam, with two distinct and paradoxical orientations toward the text. 3) AEEMB’s website serves as a repository where content from its newspaper and sermon is often stored. The website is also a digital hub that opens doors to other external Islamic educational resources for AEEMB members. Most importantly, the AEEMB national council, spearheaded by its president, oversees all publications and communication and assures that media content reflects the organization’s mission and core values.

AEEMB’s ebullient religious activism is not entirely visible in its media content, which it uses to share information including non-religious information with its members.

This limited use of Facebook for preaching and proselytism can be understood as sign of

AEEMB’s secular approach to religion whereby invitation to religion is not pushed on non-members. The Facebook page is used as a space for people who have already joined

AEEMB’s trajectory of Islam. Therefore, what they need is a little reminder of what good deeds to do and, most importantly, what information and opportunity to have in order to be successful in life. Contrarily to Facebook page, the print media—An-Nasr—is used to support and distribute AEEMB’s Islamic orientations. It is in An-Nasr that one can have a

119 sense of AEEMB’s Islamic theology. The website, though not sophisticated, represents a hub where most of the information on the Facebook page and An-Nasr can be retrieved. It is expanding with new pages and new archives that link to other online resources where

Muslim students can exploit to improve the knowledge of their faith.

To study religion and mass media in a social context—like the one of Burkina

Faso—where access to Internet is still relatively limited, means being open to the risk of misplacing, misrepresenting, underrating, and emaciating the religious phenomena and all its complexity. It calls for a careful consideration and balance between the use of available media and how information is disseminated between those who are connected and those who are not. As Parks and Starosielski (2015) argued, studying media

“infrastructure brings into relief the unique materialities of media distribution—the resources, technologies, labor, and relations that are required to shape, energize, and sustain the distribution of audiovisual signal traffic on global, national, and local scales”

(p. 6). This chapter takes into consideration the media ecology of Burkina Faso which is mostly define by limited development of communication infrastructure.

Considering this limited infrastructure, I expand my understanding of mass media beyond its modern technological and material components—which are limited in my research context—and I include the interactive and immersive social environments of my informants to propose a more inclusive socio-technological understanding of how

Muslim youth communicate their faith. This expansion, in the next chapters, also allows better appreciation of the scope of my informants’ use of the available media. In other words, when the information technology such as Internet comes short in uncovering the

120 complexity of the habitus of Muslim youth, their offline social and political environments constitute another valuable terrain to understand their media adoption and use. It is therefore crucial to envision the point of entrenchment between religion and mass media beyond the Internet, social media, and print media even when the researcher’s main interest lies in mass media and how it is used to communicate religious phenomena.

In a faith community like AEEMB, there are multiple socio-technological relations that facilitate the mass circulation of information and religious ideology beyond the relatively limited access to Internet. Such socio-technological relations are found in the nexus of the religious infrastructure (i.e. Mosques), social structures (i.e. AEEMB as a youth organization), and the actors’ capacity to find unifying interests to stand for (i.e. seeking social wellbeing, performing civic duties, standing against government malpractices, and seeking a voice, etc.). While the public university standing as an outpost of religious practice for Muslim youth is consistent with the secular ideal of state theoretical equidistance visa-a-vis its different religious communities in Burkina Faso, the particular case of Muslim youth offers an opportunity for the current research.

121 Chapter 5: Muslim Students Seeking the Right Path

Introduction

On March 30, 2001 an event of unprecedented historical significance and symbolism took place at Stade du 4 Août, the largest stadium in the capital city of

Burkina Faso. Coverage of the event in various news outlets indicated that between thirty and forty thousand people coming from all over the country were in attendance. This crowd did not come to the stadium to cheer the national football team, which was doing rather poorly at the time, but nonetheless was very much loved. The crowd at Stade du 4

Août was attending an official ceremony, which would have free transportation, food, and music, hosted by Le Conseil des Sages (The Council of Wise Men). It was a highly unusual gathering at the invitation of The Council of Wise Men to hear Blaise Compaoré, the then 13-year president of the country, solemnly ask forgiveness, not for his crimes alone, but for the entire nation to forgive “all the crimes committed in the name of the state since independence in 1960” (B. Ouedraogo, 2001).

The institution of what came to be known as La Journée Nationale du Pardon

(the National Day of Forgiveness) on March 30, 2001 was in response to three years of unprecedented, across-the-country social unrest and unending street protests triggered by the uninvestigated state role in the murder of investigative journalist Norbert Zongo in

1998 (Chouli, 2013; Hilgers & Mazzocchetti, 2006).10 The government had appointed

10 Norbert Zongo was an investigative journalist and the managing director of L’Independant, a private newspaper he founded in 1993. He achieved public fame for his reputation for investigating and publishing on high profile issues. Zongo was investigating a murder case incriminating Francois Compaoré, the younger brother of President Blaise Compaoré, when he was killed along with four companions: their bullet-riddled bodies were found in their burned car. State 122 The Council of Wise Men—a board mostly composed of traditional chiefs and Christian and Muslim clergy—to reflect on how to bring peace and reconciliation to the country.

The observance of the National Day of Forgiveness was the culmination of several months of work by that council in consultation with civil society leaders and families of victims.

In his opening remarks during the gathering in the stadium, Monseigneur

Anselme Titiama Sanon, the Archbishop of Bobo Dioulasso who directed the work of the council, talked about the rationale behind this event: “We needed to stop for a moment.

To observe and to think. To mark a pause in order to find, together, the ways and means of reinstating and maintaining social peace” (quoted in Ouattara, 2006, p. 133).

Monseigneur Jean Marie Compaoré, the Archbishop of Ouagadougou spoke of forgiveness as a condition for peace, emphasizing, “The only way to peace is forgiveness.

To accept and to give forgiveness make it possible to foster a new quality relationship among the people, to stop the spiral of hatred and vengeance, and to break the chains of the evil that is holding the hearts hostage” (quoted in Ouattara, 2006, p. 133).

Cheikh Aboubacar Sana, then President of la Communauté Musulmane (The

Muslim Community) spoke rather vaguely and with abstraction: “A chief reigns because there are a people to reign over. Our leaders must know that they are governing on behalf of the people” (quoted in Ouattara, 2006 p. 134). Some media commentators read the

media first reported their death as being a country-road accident before nationwide spontaneous protests forced them to call it an assassination. But over the three years following Zongo’s death, civil society movements and students’ organizations continually demonstrated and asked for justice. Although Compaoré continued to have international support, the National Forgiveness Day was his almost desperate move to end the nationwide protests using religious leaders to plead for peace. 123 Muslim clergy’s statement as a bold move that critiqued the Compaoré regime while others suggested it was a reckless one which reveals his lack of political dexterity.

In any case, the observance of the National Day of Forgiveness was not a unanimously welcomed and celebrated event in Burkina Faso. Some civil society groups and some relatives of the victims of state violence protested it and refused to affirm the initiative because they perceived it to be a pure denial of justice. B. Ouedraogo (2001) reported that “Critics called it a government bid for impunity, and they organized a counter National Mourning Day” (para. 7).

However, despite the criticism of the failure of the National Day of Forgiveness to include an avowal of crimes from the state and to seek justice, it has merit for both contributing to appeasing the deleterious social climate of the time and offering an important historical starting point for participatory democracy in Burkina Faso. In point of fact, Miniwo (2010) offers an extended discussion of how the National Day of

Forgiveness actually contributed to the opening of the political game, the amending of the constitutional rules, and the appearance of new players on the political chessboard.

Most importantly, one historical significance of this event lies in the unprecedented public presence of Muslim dignitaries together with Church leaders and traditional chiefs to act as a moral force for reconciling this nation at a difficult turning point in its history. Although some observers still saw the event as “a political recuperation” attempt on religious leaders from a failing regime (Vanvyve, 2015), it marked a new departure point of Muslims’ emancipation in state politics in post- independence Burkina Faso. Seldom, if ever, had a government in contemporary Burkina

124 Faso sought Muslim leaders to play such an important public role. The leaders of the

Church and the traditional chiefs were not novice players in this exercise (Otayek,1997 &

Issa, 2007), but, for the Muslim clergy, this publicly staged forgiveness event was an opportunity to take up a front seat in public expression of power where previously they had been conspicuously absent. Of further import, President Blaise Compaoré took the initiative to follow the recommendations of this council, and he appointed a committee that included Muslim dignitaries to ensure the implementation of the promises he made during the National Day of Forgiveness.

The Compaoré regime might not have intended to legitimize the presence of religious leaders in secular politics by staging the National Day of Forgiveness.

Nevertheless, the broader outcome of this event indicated much evidence to that effect.

Two decades later, the outcome of the National Day of Forgiveness, subsequently renamed National Remembrance Day in 2003, is still unclear. But it has the merit of bringing different religious leaders, including the Muslim clergy at the forefront of the contested political discourse on state-making in contemporary Burkina Faso. The role of the religious clergy in Compaoré’s show of forgiveness in 2001 was critiqued for being complicit with a criminal regime (Ouattara, 2001). However, their participation in this event had the merit and distinction of heralding the end of a local political establishment that excluded Muslims in its public performance.

While contemporary literature on political Islam in Burkina Faso either builds on the dominant quiet Islam rhetoric (Otayek, 1987) or focuses on a search for possible radicalization of Muslims, it appears that Muslim emancipatory struggle and their civic

125 engagement remain largely misunderstood. My research indicates that substantial transformation is taking place every day, and Muslim political activism is neither always dramatically staged nor violent but rather an elaborate ongoing process. Muslim youth, in particular, have taken multiple trajectories to negotiate their place in the political discourse and praxis. It turns out, as discussed in this chapter, that their role as power brokers surpasses far more than the roles of their parents’ generation in complexity, creativity, and boldness. I found that the university-educated Muslim youth are taking multiple and complex approaches in their political emancipation that would have been unimaginable before 2001.

In fact, following the Islamic injunction that Islam is a religion of good action,

AEEMB members are rolling up their sleeves and implementing what most of my informants referred to as “le travail Islamique” or Islamic Work. Political Islam in this context is a shorthand description of the various forms of religiously grounded actions undertaken by the Muslim youth focusing on that Islamic Work. Investigating this

“travail Islamique” also reveals the trajectories AEEMB undertakes to secure a role when questions of national and global interests are debated in the public sphere. These trajectories are co-constructed through creating socio-economic opportunities for members, improving the art of living together, performing Islamic Work, and actively promoting anti-fundamentalism discourses through public civic education on media.

Creating Socio-economic Opportunities

God Himself teaches us to be useful members of our communities. We can be

useful in several ways, but we can also be useful by being successful. I said this

126 before [in our previous informal conversation] that in the Quran, God commands

that soon after the prayer, Muslims must disperse through the land and seek the

bounty of Allah. Abdoul Karim, a self-described “Muslim entrepreneur” and

AEEMB member

The Quranic reference that Abdoul uses here is an excerpt from surat al-jumu’ah,

(Chapter 62 of the Quran), a passage that prescribes the obligation for Muslims to find a balance between their worldly needs and their religious obligations. That Abdoul Karim paraphrases parts of the surah and leaves out parts of it is of little interest to me for this study. Rather, what is most important is his use of the passage to show that, at AEEMB, creating economic opportunities for the wellbeing of society is equally weighted with the members’ religious devotion. According to Abdoul Karim, “being useful to the community by being successful” is just as important as the Muslim youth’s obligation to observe their prayer duties.

Abdoul Karim’s interpretation of the above Quranic injunction is widely shared among AEEMB members. I learned more about this philosophy in interviews with individual AEEMB members, but I also was vividly reminded when I attended a three- day annual seminar that AEEMB hosted in June 2018: the Intra University Forum. This was its fourth year, and it took place at the AEEMB national headquarters in

Ouagadougou. Attendees included 67 provincial leaders of AEEMB hailing from nine universities and professional schools across the country.

The principal theme of the forum was “Dynamisme et conviction des sahaba : quelles leçons pour la jeunesse musulmane estudiantine ?” (What Lessons Should

127 Muslim Youth Learn from the Dynamism and Conviction of the Sahaba?). The conference sought to draw lessons from the lives and experiences of the sahaba or companions of the Prophet of Islam to boost the socio-economic wellbeing of AEEMB members. Over the three days, ten panels of prominent guest speakers and individual presentations took place. Topics ranged from how Muslims can use Facebook to gain barakat—understood as a blessing or some positive points from God—to how to be a successful young Muslim leader as well as from Islamic banking to how to respond to fundamentalist Islamic recruitment, etc.

Mr. Koné, an elder of AEEMB and currently Secretary General of the umbrella

Muslim organization FAIB (Federation of the Islamic Associations of Burkina Faso), detailed the need for excellence in both faith and success in his opening remarks. He argued that the major challenges at hand for Muslim youth are “Comment militer,

étudier, et puis gagner sa vie” (How to be an active or “militant” AEEMB member while studying and earning a living). He began with defining Islamic activism:

At the Islamic level, militancy has a broad meaning. The activist of Islam—who

is it? The activist is anyone who commits himself [Koné chose the masculine

pronoun] with his means, his skills, his resources to the development of his

religion. The contribution can be your physical labor. It can be your financial

means. It can be your intellectual resources. And others. Anyone who consciously

engages in promoting our religion is in the field of activism. This is to say that

there are visible militants and invisible militants, meaning militants we do not

know. But we are going to situate ourselves in the case of the visible activists in

128 referring to AEEMB. I want you, however, to have a broad understanding of

activism. The activists among you are not limited to the people who attend your

events every day. They are not the ones always in places of worship. They may be

in places where you are not, but they are activists. Now, in the context of

AEEMB, it is really challenging to be able to accomplish these two things: being

an activist student, and then succeeding in one’s life.

Participants listened raptly waiting for the speaker to expand on his idea of invisible militants, which evokes a larger spiritual realm as a commonly accepted belief among

Muslims in Burkina Faso. He visibly relaxed: now he had the full attention of his audience.

Mr. Koné then evoked the history of the establishment of AEEMB to support his case, urging participants to use the opportunities that membership in youth organizations such as AEEMB offers them to become “indispensable members of their communities.”

He spoke at length while participants continued to take notes:

You know that, not so long ago, in this country, there was as a career orientation

based on religious belonging. Well, all those who are illiterate, beggars, and who

do not understand anything, and who speak a language we do not understand, are

Muslims. And all those who speak French, who have some Western style of

dressing, I would say people who have a certain fine style, who have a certain

ease of life, they are of another religion, which is the religion of the colonizer. [He

pauses.] It must be said, [He pauses.], well, this cliché there...it weighed a lot on

Muslims. And also, the colonizer did not do anything to improve that. They set

129 this system on purpose; it’s fair game. Their system had to perpetuate it with all institutions around it.

So, that’s what we inherited. This system creates a number of difficulties for those who escaped all of these filters and found themselves studying on the “opposite” side. From childhood already, you start to have small conflicts with children your age. Those who go to Quranic school, well, they think that those who go to the

French school are doomed. The other group also mocked those who went to

Quranic schools saying that, well, here are unfortunate people who sit on the bare floor to study. So, there was already an [inferiority] complex on both sides. And this complex has already created a cleavage so that someone who went to Western school was considered by our parents at the time to be a loss. And this idea is so deeply rooted that there are areas where until now it’s hard to convince some

Muslims to send their children to school.

For most of those who were sent to school, there was also a problem. You see it in the double first names that most of them have. People were often forced to give

Catholic first names to their offspring in order for them to fit into a system that they themselves felt was contrary to their religion. These two problems together justify why few Muslim children went to school. The mold that was there, well, there was no mold for the Muslim. At boarding schools too, it was necessary to organize oneself to be able to pray, to be able to enforce one’s eating habits, and so on. This led to the creation of Muslim interest groups to defend the right to maintain Muslim faith: AEEMB.

130 You already know the history of AEEMB, which was designed to be the crucible

in which one can meet and reflect on how one can be a good Muslim activist, and

be excellent in school, and have an elevated status in society. That’s the challenge

that was there at the beginning. This is to remind you that the basic idea of the

association is to build on the ideal of excellence. So, we should not even hesitate

for a moment.

Among AEEMB members, the story of how Muslim students used to struggle when trying to learn about Islam and keep their faith in the secular education system is well- known. Reminding them about the historical context of the creation of AEEMB and its link to that struggle seemed to be relevant for Mr. Koné. From a rhetorical standpoint, he had won the attention of his audience.

For Mr. Koné, having an elevated status in society as a Muslim is attainable through excellence in school. He sees that AEEMB members are lucky to be part of an organization that gives them the possibility and clarity to accomplish that mission. Mr.

Koné also talked more about what is required of AEEMB members now by invoking the

Prophet of Islam to define excellence in school and as a way to become a good role model in society. Excellence attained with good intentions in mind represents, for him, the highest form of Islamic achievement or jihad. He continued:

To be an AEEMB member you have to be a high school or a college student.

Right? If you are not a student, you must find yourself in another setting

[Laughter in the room]. You know that for someone who has understood Islam, he

will understand that Islam is all about excellence. So, if I am a Muslim student, I

131 must be excellent. These two things, there, are nested in Islam. Because when you go to school, if you make the intention to be excellent, it can be your jihad. I'm talking about good jihad, right. Right? [Laughter and applauding in the room].

That is, your effort to be useful to yourself, your family, your community. And as the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam [Peace be upon him] said, the best of you are the most useful ones.

But how can one be useful if one does not have a skill or value that can be shared?

So, that’s what I mean by Muslim activism. It is in itself the ground on which one finds means to be excellent at school. You know well that in the Quran God has praised knowledge. It is not acceptable to be mediocre in your given field of study and claim you are a Muslim or that you are an AEEMB member. It is important to be excellent because by nature a Muslim must count himself among the excellent ones. This also includes excellence in your behavior and your usefulness to the whole society. By combining the two, we can accomplish our goal of having an elevated position [in society] and putting that elevated position in the service of

Islam.

There is a part of calling to Islam, which we commonly refer to as dawa. There are some who are trained to call people to come to religion. There are others who do not even need to speak. Because God gave them a status. It’s not just religious knowledge. It’s all skills. Are those who know and those who do not know the same? No. That means they have a high status. If someone is a believer and you are a believer, if he has a set of skills that you don’t, you must follow him. It’s

132 that simple. So, because of this challenge already, everyone has to answer the

question how I can be useful to myself, to my family, and to my community.

And in our case, you have to be excellent. This is where I would really like to

greet the teacher’s presence here [Turning to his co-panelist who is a professor of

physics and a served as ministry of energy in the previous government: Professor

Dissa]. I’m going to bother him a bit by pointing him out, but he fits the

description I offered here. He is a scientist who is recognized in this country, who

has made a very remarkable contribution to society. He is appreciated by the

Muslims and the non-Muslims.

When people talk about him and you are around, you are proud. Professor Dissa

no longer needs to go around preaching and calling people to be Muslims. When

the professor opens his door, throws his prayer matt on the ground, and puts his

forehead on the ground, this is enough to get Muslims to join in the prayer. That is

the kind of impact you can make by being excellent. This is what we call the

silent dawa. It is dawa through your behavior. We must be good role models in

our communities through excellence and good work. We must strive to become

indispensable because of the quality of our work.

The idea of “winning one’s life” through excellence is prominently stressed in AEEMB’s code of conduct.

Over the past years, the organization has strived to become financially independent by relying on the goodwill and modest contributions of its members. Senior members who are now state functionaries, employees in the private sectors, or

133 entrepreneurs in the informal sectors of the economy are among its major donors. Also,

AEEMB has launched a number of projects that align profit-making with community service, though profit-making still remains the least of the organization’s priorities in said projects according to its current president. Such ongoing projects include the construction of a five-story building that now hosts AEEMB’s national headquarters. This building— still under construction—has a large mosque, a library, and multiple conference rooms.

According to the chief auditor (the secretary in charge of AEEMB’s finances), this building cost AEEMB 810 Million CFA (about 1.5 million US dollars). Other similar projects undertaken by AEEMB include a high school, a dispensary, and a maternity hospital that are fully functional and serve people in Ouagadougou.

Many more similar projects are being considered for the coming years. According to the AEEMB president, these projects are all part of the larger AEEMB’s mission to

“promote Islam among students, cultivate fraternity among the youth, to defend the spiritual and material flourishing of its members, and participate in the development of the country.” This idea mirrors Abdoul Karim’s reference to Islamic entrepreneurship.

Also, Mr. Koné’s talk at the Intra University Forum served to remind attendees that it is their role as AEEMB elected leaders to embody the spirit of these core values and to transmit them to their constituents when they return home. AEEMB advocates the personal development and excellence of Muslim students as a way to participate in the development of their country. However, the organization also remains cautious about the social environment of its members. It emphasizes the role of Muslim youth in fostering good cohabitation among themselves and with non-Muslims.

134 Improving the Art of Living Together

In a booklet published in 2017, Imam Alidou Ilboudo, another AEEMB elder, sketches what he perceives as a recipe for “a return to the ideal Quranic and prophetic teachings for better living-together.” In an interview I conducted with him, he explained further that “If some Muslims appear disoriented in the modern world, it is because they have failed to follow the right path, which can be seen in the basic teachings of the Quran and the different prophets of God.” For Imam Ilboudo, there is no incompatibility between being a devout Muslim and being à l’aise (at ease/at home) with the new world around us. He argued that Islam is designed to allow Muslims to thrive in all societies if

Muslims would only follow carefully the path as it was traced by the prophets of God. In the introduction, he offered why it was necessary for him to write: “Because I am a

Muslim and I notice that the ‘dividers’ have stolen our revelation, I have decided to write this book in order to join my frail voice to the voices of all the people who believe that human fraternity is still possible” (p. 1).

According to Imam Ilboudo, the primary intended audience of his work is the

Muslims of Burkina Faso in general, but more specifically its youth. However, he does not seek to talk to them about the faith of Islam. Rather he is interested in Burkinabè

Muslims and their rapport with their non-Muslim compatriots. For young people who have limited knowledge of the Quran, Ilboudo argued, this book synthesizes “essential responses to questions that are raised frequently.” It is in Imam Iboudo’s words, a

“tafsir,’’ i.e., a commentary that uses the Quran and the hadith to facilitate people’s understanding of Islam by answering questions about living together. In fact, this booklet,

135 and many others that he said he had written, were to provide simple and short answers to various questions that the author collected during his radio and television talk shows. He explained to me: “Sometimes people ask very basic questions, and because they don’t often get the answers from people who understand the Quran, they are stuck. And this leads to conflicts”.

As a Muslim youth leader and a public figure who talks on television and radio and is often consulted by government and non-government organizations, Imam Ilboudo is worried that, in Burkina Faso, religious tolerance is threatened. During my interview with him, he talked about his perception of this threat and what he thinks is nurturing religious intolerance:

The idea of religious tolerance so much talked about in our country…well, that is

something I’d say, is partly true. Today, that is changing. What you call religious

tolerance is a superficial thing. People from various faith groups go on about their

lives and faith and it does not inconvenience anyone. But if you observe closely,

you will find out that this was the case because each one had their own place;

there was no organic contact and a real need for confrontation.

Clearly for so long, Burkinabè did not make a big deal with religion even though

we know that elsewhere religion is often defined by exclusion. It is either a you-

are-in or you-are-not sort of an understanding. On special occasions, we see the

Imams and the pastors of the Church shake hands. But that is just for the media.

In recent years, we see that this is all changing. This change is beginning to be felt

136 at two levels. One is between the various Muslim communities themselves. The

second is between the Muslim communities and the other faith traditions.

In the first case, for me whether we want it or not, the teachings of the salafist,

which call for a purification and a return to an unadulterated Islam ridden of our

traditions, and what they call innovations, these teachings represent a fundamental

problem against religious tolerance. That is as far as Islam is concerned.

In the second case, we can say that the Evangelical churches, above all, together

with the churches of prosperity have tendencies to distinguish themselves from

the others. They tend to bring conflicts where there was none in both our cities

and villages.

The next thing I will add to the list of the menace against religious tolerance is

really the problem of land. The occupation of the land. This happens among

people from the same community as well as people from different communities. It

is a serious problem. I am afraid the land issue might be the cause of the next

popular uprising in our country.

Imam Ilboudo perceived that although religious tolerance is much better in

Burkina Faso than in many other countries, it could become a significant issue. He cited the salafist Islamic revival movements, the Evangelical Church, and the Church of

Prosperity as new players that are already disturbing the calm. He also pointed out land- grabbing, which he forecasted as a possible cause of future social conflict. While young

Muslim leaders like Imam Ilboudo are returned to the Islamic text for guidance on how to

137 foster peaceful co-existence, other turned to participative politics in a bid to apply their

Islamic Work.

Muslims Doing Politics

One of the talks on the agenda of the Intra University Forum was titled “Social and political activism: Taking Muslims’ concerns into account.” This talk seemed to be the most anticipated one among the attendees, although advertising around it remained unclear to me as well as to most of the participants. For example, on the flyer that advertised the event, the name and information about the guest speaker was left out while the other speakers and panelists were identified on the flyer. This talk was also scheduled to take place at 9 pm after isha, the fifth and last prayer of the day. It was the only talk to have been scheduled this late in the evening. Even more intriguing, it was the only event of AEEMB I was told in advance not to record although I was allowed to attend. One brother assured me that the decision was made in consultation with the speaker who wanted to keep this talk private. Programming it late in the evening also meant that the few non-AEEMB members who usually hang out at the mosque after the last prayer would be gone, making it an exclusively AEEMB gathering. But I wondered what could be so unique about this guest or the content of his speech that it required this much privacy. It is very unusual for AEEMB to have an exclusively AEEMB gathering.

Twenty minutes before the start of the talk, the provincial delegates and most of the national council members were already taking their seats in the room to wait for the guest speaker to arrive. Excitement filled the room. At 9 pm, the guest finally arrived accompanied by his spouse. His “Excellency Tahirou Barry or if you want, Brother Barry

138 has arrived,” the AEEMB moderator announced on the microphone as the couple walked in the room preceded by the president of AEEMB who, as a sign of respect, had meet them at the garage downstairs and walked them up to the meeting room on the third floor.

Barry smiled graciously with a loud assalam aleikum, shaking hands with some of the brothers from the front row seats before proceeding to sit down. Madam Barry sat down with the sisters who occupied the right-side seats of the room. Barry’s half-bald head reflected the ambient light of the bulb above him as he leaned closer to whisper something to the AEEMB president on his right.

Barry and his spouse were former leaders of AEEMB. He is currently serving as a

Member of Parliament and was the then head of National Renaissance Party (PAREN), a left-wing opposition party. In the 2015 presidential election, Barry was the nominee of

PAREN, but he came in third position with 3.09 % of the votes (Ariotti, 2016). Although these results are low, PAREN did relatively better than in previous elections.

For the present occasion, Barry was facing a much friendlier crowd of fellow

Muslim students. Shaking hands and referring to some of the AEEMB leaders by their first names, he clearly felt at ease with his audience. But he also appeared a bit apprehensive. When he returned to his normal sitting position, he glanced around the crowded room and reminded his audience that this is a “friendly family conversation and we wish to discuss things here with no strings attached, but we also wish that all that is discussed here remains here between us. No Facebook posts.” Barry’s use of the first- person plural (we) in reference to himself is not uncommon among Burkinabè politicians.

139 It also seemed to suggest that although Barry is among fellow AEEMB members, he wished to maintain his identity as an authority.

Following this repeated instruction, I put my tape recorder and cellphone in my backpack and asked a brother to keep it for me in the office of the president. By getting rid of my phone and recorder, I was avoiding any suspicion that I might be hiding a recording device. AEEMB members will certainly not ask to check if I recorded the event secretly, but any suspicion that I did record it could impact the strong rapport I have with them so far. Notetaking was allowed. Since they granted me access to the event for my research, I took a lot of notes, like most attendees.

After reciting a short prayer, Barry proceeded quickly to the substance of his talk and he paused multiple times to ask questions of the audience or urge them to ask their own questions. “What is politics anyway? Does the Muslim have a duty to engage in political debate and action?” He went on:

We will begin with the second part of our question. Well, we will paraphrase the

illustrious journalist Zongo who said, “No one can have a future in a country that

doesn’t have one.” By extrapolation, we’d say, Muslims cannot expect a future in

a country that does not have one yet. They must be agents of that future. Now,

you can choose to let others build the future and you may not recognize yourself

in it. Or, you can actively work hand-in-hand with everyone else. That is how you

will make the future that you want. Now, what is politics? You are all students

here and you know the classic definition. It is the management of the polity. Silly

and simple. We must affirm strongly that Muslims have an obligation to

140 contribute to that work. It is an obligation bestowed upon us by God. Read surah

16 in its verse 90 for example and you will understand what we are talking about.

This is a verse that talks about justice in society. In fact, you cannot close your eyes to injustice happening around you and pretend to be a Muslim. We cannot let politics, the management of the common good, be in the hands of blind people. If we lock ourselves up in the mosque, stay busy praying and making invocations, that is good. But faith and action must go hand-in-hand to make us Muslims. We will illustrate all of this with three clear examples, so that you will understand that our conversation tonight does not dwell on abstraction only. First, consider the recent surge of debates in the news about the death penalty law. Death penalty is prescribed in Islam, but we just passed a law at the National Assembly to outlaw it without any serious discussion. Number two: homosexuality. We all know that

Muslims here, even culturally, condemn it. Now, because of international laws and pressure, we are unable to even introduce a bill to legislate it, outlaw it, or legalize it. What is going to happen when the West tells us to legalize it? Our country will just do it without any serious discussions. May God forbid! But it’s a reality that we all have to deal with. This is because, the Muslim majority is represented by people who do not have Muslims’ interests in mind. Even if individual MPs are Muslims, they are not there making laws on behalf of their constituents based on their constituents’ faith. My number three example is the increase of prostitution in the streets of our cities.

141 On this note, murmuring in the back of the room grew louder. One brother attempted to bring order back. He interrupted with a loud “at-takbir!” and then a louder “at-takbir !”

The audience responded in chorus: “allahu akbar” (Allah is great!). at-takbir is a slogan that AEEMB members use at their gatherings to interrupt or to bring back order. “at- takbir!” the voice went on again. The same response came from all the participants, and this time it was much louder: “allahu akbar.” Order was restored. Barry can continue his talk. But one of the young men in the back corner of the room where most of the disturbing noise was coming from asked loudly: “We are a secular nation. Are you suggesting that Muslims should be the ones in charge and that our secularism must take the tone of an Islamic understanding of the world? Can you clarify that here?” Barry answers him:

alhamdu lillahi rabbil alamin [all praise and thanks be to Allah], the brother here

asked a very good question. Here is how you should understand our argument.

AEEMB is not a political organization. But that does not mean that, legally,

individual members of AEEMB cannot get involved in politics. It does not mean

you must not engage in civil society movements either. You must understand that.

Also, Muslim elected officials don’t have to impose Islamic laws to regulate

crime, prostitution, and other social phenomena like homosexuality. But we must

certainly have a voice in helping shape our country’s position in that regard. If we

spend all our time meditating and saying that we are Muslims, then we are failing

our public duty as Muslims. All what we are saying is that Burkina Faso is still a

142 building site, and we must not lock ourselves in our spirituality and fail to get our

hands in this work. That is what we understand to be Islamic Work.

The remainder of the evening with Barry turned into a Q & A session with Barry’s spouse intervening to answer some of the questions and providing advice “especially to my sisters” as she put it. “For our Muslim sisters it is even much more difficult to do politics. But I tell you, you must not fail. If you invoke God, you will find the strength you need to carry on your work,” Madam Barry said.

The Barrys’ evening with their cadets at AEEMB reveals the challenge of trying to carve a place in Burkinabè politics using an Islamic discourse. While Barry deliberately chose topics that he thought might arouse interests in his audience, he received the opposite effect. The questions from the audience clearly indicated that

AEEMB leaders at this closed-door meeting did not unanimously approve his political line. Although they agreed that the prescription of Le Travail Islamic must be taken seriously the AEEMB youth opt a cautionary approach.

Muslims Students at a Crossroads

AEEMB expresses a sense of urgency in dealing with most of the challenges its members and the Burkinabè Muslim community at large face. Some members demonstrate a deep understanding of those challenges and express concerns for them. In the following excerpt of a conversation with Zakaria, an AEEMB member with whom I spent a lot of time visiting places in Ouagadougou and discussing politics, I was made aware of that sense of urgency. Zakaria is a law school graduate, who talks fondly about

Thomas Sankara, the leader of Burkinabè 1983 revolution. During our multiple meetings

143 between watching the World Cup games or just hanging out, it became clear to me that we both share an admiration for Sankara. During such informal conversations, Zakaria shared with me his desires to see the Muslim youth actively involved in local affairs.

“Why do you say that Muslims must be active in politics?” I asked him as we made our way into a large pavilion of the SIAO campus to see England play Croatia.11 We sat in the far back of the rotunda, sipping some soda and watching the game from the giant screen as Zakaria continued his explanation:

We have come to a crossroads. We must act with much care. May Allah assist us.

But we must also act quick. We cannot stand here any longer. We must decide

where we are going. In any case, we have to keep going. Our predecessors have

fought to clear a path for us to follow. Now the path is long and strewn with

pitfalls. The context has changed, and many challenges are now facing us. The

Muslim youth, if we are organized, we have a role to play. In general, Burkina

Faso is, between quotation marks, a minor country. Our people are a minor in the

first sense of the term.

I interjected: “Wait, what is that role? What do you mean by minor here? And what are the challenges you are talking about?”

11 SIAO (Salon International de l’Artisanat de Ouagadougou) is a biannual art festival that brings artists and craftsmen from all over the world to Burkina Faso. The University of Ouagadougou uses the rotundas at the headquarters of SIAO as classrooms for its large cohorts of students when SIAO is not in session. But all year round, students share the space with small promotors of various spectacles including musical concerts, theatrical performances, and live football watching sessions on giant screens. 144 This [minor] means that we are a young country and our people have begun to

live together as a nation called Burkina Faso, not so very long ago. You

understand where I am headed to? In historical terms, five or six decades is

nothing. Our people are learning to live together as citizens of the same country

who must compete for the same resources, the same jobs, the same opportunities.

And this is not yet happening in the most equitable ways. The rules of the political

game, between quotation marks, are not always reliable. The good news is that

they are being rewritten constantly. It is the task of our generation to say this: hey,

we are here, and the rules must also take us into consideration. What I meant is

that the rules must take the realities of Muslims into consideration. We are not

saying let’s turn this country to an Islamic constitution. But we are saying that if

we really have to be democratic, then the needs of the Muslims must be taken into

consideration. Fanon said it and Sankara too said it: each generation must

discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it. The Muslim youth is on the right path.

Already, most of us have learned to live modestly. That is a good starting point to

be a leader who refuses corruption.

For Zakaria, Islam offers a strong moral ground for forging good leaders that are less likely to be corrupt. He believes that that idea is part of the mission which Muslim youth have discovered, and they must not betray it. However, he does not see an “Islamic constitution” as befitting that objective either. Later, on that day, I continued probing him to explain his ideas further. “So, if an Islamic constitution is not the model you advocate for, what is it? How is your model going to be different from what we have already?” I

145 asked him as we took a seat in a coffee shop and ordered some Nescafé. “What do you mean?” He responded. I explained my question further: “Well, this is a secular nation and we have Muslims voting like everyone else, and also Muslims and non-Muslims alike are in leadership position.” After my clarification, Zakaria said:

That is not enough. The Muslims’ vote has nothing to do with their faith. And the

Muslim politicians out there are not seeking to appeal to Muslims either. That is

fine. I am not suggesting that they change that. Our organization [AEEMB] is not

asking that. You see, the problem is that, as leaders, they [the Muslim politicians]

are not acting as good Muslims. They are corrupt, they steal, and they lie like

everyone else. We must have leaders who will not do those things. All I am

saying is that the youth who take their faith seriously will do a better job.

Although most AEEMB members I talked to did not put it blankly like Zakaria did here, the general perception is that it is high time Muslims got actively involved in politics.

This does not necessarily mean that Muslims are not doing politics already. What Zakaria and most of his peers really mean is that, in doing politics, Muslims must put forth their faith as a moral compass that guide their actions for the betterment of their society.

Zakaria’s perception is that corruption and other poor governance practices are rampant because, unlike the youth, Muslim politicians are not taking “their faith seriously” and applying it to their political actions. AEEMB members have joined other youth movements to promote a culture of public civism as part of their political emancipation.

146 Promoting a Public Civic Education

Le Cappuccino, a luxurious café/restaurant in downtown Ouagadougou, has become a symbol of resistance to terrorism in the local business world. After a terrorist attack killed 30 people in this establishment in 2016, most people responded by going to eat there when it reopened. In a sense, going to Le Cappuccino is to make a public statement that terror will not prevail in their city. Customers and mostly young people would go there, get a coffee, and take pictures of themselves, which they post on their social media. The trend started immediately a few months after the attack when Le

Cappuccino reopened with colorful slogans on TV and on billboards advertising that terrorism will win if people were afraid to come to their establishment. One such text that was copied and shared as a caption to individual photos on Facebook and Twitter is “Je bois du Cappuccino dans un Burkina Splendid. Allons seulement … Ils ne pourront rien contre 18 millions #Lwili.”12 Before this trend, a public Facebook Event titled “Buvons un Cappuccino dans et pour un Burkina Splendide”13 rallied over 4400 people on January

22, 2016 and more than 700 posts in the discussion section of the event. Facebook users’ comments were mostly positive and expressed compassion for the victims of the attack.

L’Évenement, a bi-monthly private newspaper in Ouagadougou, reported the event on its publication of February 18th, 2016 emphasizing on the composition of the participants as being people from all walks of life: “They [participants] are from all the social strata and

12 This trending post can be translated as “I am drinking a Cappuccino in a Splendid Burkina Faso. We are moving forward. They cannot kill all 18 million of us. #Lwili” The use of the adjective Splendid here is a reference to Splendid Hotel, another establishment that was attacked simultaneously with Le Cappuccino 13 Let’s all drink a Cappuccino in a Splendid Burkina 147 from different races, young and old folks, some were disabled people on tricycles.14

Among them, political figures, leaders of the civil society, comedians, musicians,” the report specified (Traore, 2016). Although these efforts contributed to keep the

Cappuccino open, it is now highly guarded by uniformed guards with AK 47s and customers are checked with metal detectors before they proceed in.

In July 2018, during my first homework, I invited Soraya and her friend Madi, both Muslim students in Ouagadougou to join me at Le Cappuccino to have coffee and talk about how they experienced the news of the first major terrorist attack in Burkina

Faso and especially how the Muslim youth responded to it on the days following the attack. Soraya is Muslim, but unlike her friend Madi, she is not an AEEMB member.

Both of them are graduate students and were in Ouagadougou during the first terrorist attack. They agreed to hang out with me and discuss about their experiences with the tragic events. Madi added jokingly, “Even just for the free Wi-Fi I will go with you.” In fact, providing free access to Internet in public places and businesses is not a widespread practice in the capital of Burkina Faso, and most of the time, the Internet service is not as good as the one we used at Le Cappuccino.

As many people including expatriates and local middle-class men and women converge to venues like Le Cappuccino every day, they pick up or propagate rumors of all kinds. Sometimes, these rumors are just shared on WhatsApp. During our visit to Le

14 The evocation of race in this news report stands out as very unusual in the Burkinabe context. But it contributes to highlight that even White people joined the gathering. This could also be part of the local media effort to counter global media sensational reports on Burkina in an effort to tamp down the fears of Western tourists to visit the country. 148 Cappuccino, a somewhat different type of conspiracy theory caught my attention. This is not the usual online rumors that have no clearly identified source. It is rather happening in a public space and the people who partake in it were willing to talk to me about it.

A man walked in the Cafe and the security officers saluted him. He seemed to be a regular in the place. The employees referred to him as Naaba, a common nickname that means Chief in Mooré. Naaba sat down across two tables in front of me and my friends and put down two large smartphones on the table. It is very common for most people in

Burkina Faso to own two or more cell phones. This allows them to take advantage of choosing cheaper service from the competing major network providers in the country.

Naaba is soon joined by a large-shouldered man and an overweight woman who are directed to his table by the security agent posted at the entrance. When we made eye contact, I waved, and he waved back. Then, I made my way to the table and greeted

Naaba and his two friends. Soraya and Madi followed me. I thought I might be lucky to meet someone who witnessed the attack in 2016 at this place. We are invited to sit with the three people. I proceeded to introduce myself and my companions to Naaba and his friends. We all then ordered some food and continued in a conversation. This is some of the few moments when my coming from the United States matters. In these environments where people are quick to express narcissistic self-importance or dismiss others, I have learned that introducing myself as a PhD student from an American university could be an effective way to establish interests in others.

Through our conversation I learned that although Naaba, a police officer himself, is a regular of Le Cappuccino, he was not in Ouagadougou during the time of the 2016

149 attack. “I was on a mission somewhere in the country,” he said. What was very surprising to me was that an off-duty officer was supporting what can be termed a conspiracy theory. He goes on:

I am telling you. You should know that the White people [Westerners] are behind

all of this [terrorism in West Africa]. Just think about it. Don’t you think so?

What would France be without us? Mark my words. If we have peace, we have

time to say we do not want the CFA currency, we would see how their

Multinational companies are syphoning our resources. But when we are busy

fighting an unknown enemy, business is good for them. They could have gotten

rid of this nebulous force we call terrorists. Also, why do you think some of them

refused to support the G5 Sahel financially? Just think about this and you will find

all the answers to your questions.

Such discourses, although unofficial, from a state functionary reinforce rumors and conspiracy theories that run both online and offline. Later, on our way home, I asked

Soraya and Madi what they thought about the idea that Western powers are behind the terror in the Sahel region including in Burkina Faso. Soraya hesitated a bit and then said:

“All of this is possible. Don’t you see that it is odd that the Americans refused to support our government and the G5 Sahel force when it was first created? And aside from that, it leaves the perception that Islam and Muslims are behind it.” And Madi added “For sure, terrorism is an assault on Islam. We all know that whenever a terrorist attack occurs, it is always reported that the terrorist said allahu akbar [allah is the greatest] before his act.

So, I don’t know, but something is not clear.”

150 This example is not the first time I heard off the record that the terrorist activities in Burkina Faso and in the wider Sahel region are organized and funded by some powers that want to keep people busy fighting while they exploit natural resources or that it is a scheme to undermine Islam and the Muslims. Some of my informants also hinted during my interviews of them that they have reason to believe that the forces behind the terror in the axe Burkina Faso-Mali-Niger are viciously trying to destroy Islam by posing as

Muslims.

These stories can be easily dismissed as being conspiracy theories with no solid argument to back them up, but they constitute a solid measurement of the confusion about terrorism among Burkinabè in this troubled socio-political context. The prevalence of such stories is a significant indication that communication around fundamentalism needs more attention. I talked to more AEEMB members, especially its leaders, to learn about how they grapple with the emergence of fundamentalism and the lack of clear communication from state official regarding it.

While at the state level, a military solution is privileged against the rise of terrorism, as exemplified in the creation of the G5 Sahel, social actors like AEEMB are subscribing to a set of discursive anti-terrorist actions. In this section I explore how

AEEMB tackles the issue of the rise of fundamentalism in Burkina Faso. As a Muslim youth organization, AEEMB responded swiftly to the emergence of fundamentalism in its programing.

That response was primarily discursive as seen in the AEEMB statements condemning the terrorist attacks in print and on radio and television broadcastings. In

151 fact, every time there was a terrorist attack in Burkina Faso, AEEMB released a statement cosigned with other Muslim organizations to condemn it. While such declarations are known through mainstream media in Burkina Faso, the organization also subtly disseminates the same message during its gatherings. During daily prayer sessions and major celebrations, AEEMB crafts and shares its civic messages with its congregation members.

In August 2018 during the celebration of eid al-adha or eid el kebir, also locally known as Tabaski, which is a Muslim holy feast honoring Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God’s command, AEEMB gave a sermon focused mostly on the question of fundamentalism. The Imam talked about the topic more vaguely first by starting with what he called the growing concern of lack of civism in the country. He denounced, “with the utmost force, all the growing uncivil behaviors that undermine the development of our country.” He called onto all Muslims to observe some respect for the national symbols and to adopt a much more patriotic behavior given the circumstances of the moment. The Imam underlined multiple infractions that are of common occurrence and he believed constitute uncivil behavior and therefore un-Islamic.

Those actions include the use of telephones while driving, the violations of speed limit in traffic, the destruction of state symbols during protests, accepting or giving bribes, using profane language. He suggested that “these are acts that are contrary to being a Muslim citizen as represented in the teachings of the Prophet.”

The Imam also reminded the audience of the state of the nation, which is constantly under terrorist attacks and the role that each one of them must play in order to

152 help eradicate “this hydra that constantly brings death and desolation to many families in the country.” He warned the congregation members that Burkina Faso will fail in the battle against radicalism if all the Burkinabè and the Muslim youth above all do not get involved in the various anti-terrorist campaigns promoted by civil society movements and the government. Through the hutba, he invited everyone to collaborate with the security and military forces and to support them in prayers as well.

To better appreciate AEEMB’s direct and overt conversations about terrorism, it important to compare it with a similar discourse from other Muslim establishments.

Although all the Muslim associations and denominations in Burkina Faso have publicly condemned Islamic fundamentalism, they do not all speak about in a direct language in their preaching. I had the opportunity to attend the prayer celebrating the end of Ramadan in a Sunni community in the outskirts of Ouagadougou. We gathered in a football playground in an open space where multitudes of men, women, and children put down their prayer matts in long rows. Some megaphones and speakers powered by a small generator amplified the prayer, the sermon, and other announcements. I tape recorded the post prayer sermon. At some point the Imam referred to the national situation, talking specifically about the insecurity brought by terrorism:

Today marks the end of something great. It is a day to rejoice, but it is also a day

to reflect on our achievement in fasting, praying, expressing solidarity and being

with God. What is next? What do we do now that the blessed month of Ramadan

is over? You all know the answer. Ramadan is over, but we must not stop being

good Muslims. Muslims must be good citizens and Good citizens respect the laws

153 of their country and help to build it instead of breaking it and bringing desolation.

That is against Islam. We could not gather here today and fail to remind one

another that the fitnah that is brought in our midst is God testing us. We must not

fall prey to it. We must show more strength in our faith. We pray that God help us

see through the light. We pray that God give strength to our country leaders. We

pray that peace returns here.

This hutba that the Imam delivered during the celebration of Tabaski was co- sponsored by AEEMB as a youth organization in partnership with CERFI, a local Islamic research center. This hutba was later published in a special edition of AN-Nasr, the

AEEMB’s newspaper, and also shared on its Facebook page. According to most leaders I talked to, this is part of AEEMB’s effort to serve Muslim communities and the nation. In general, AEEMB’s media discourse seeks to transform the minds and change the behaviors for the long-term, especially concerning civism. Very recently, in September

2018 AEEMB joined other religious communities including the church and the traditional religious groups to promote a National Day of Fasting upon request of the Burkinabè government. This fasting ritual was observed by members of different religious confessions all across the country. Abdoul Rahmane, one AEEMB elder explained to me the reason AEEMB invested in mass civic education: “The growing urbanization you see in our townships was not followed by an urbanization of the minds. Literally,” he said as he formed the quotation marks for “urbanization of the minds” with two fingers from both hands in the air. Then he continued:

154 Yes, literally. In general, most people have remained in a mindset that is not good

for the development of our country. That include Muslims. As for us, we went to

school and we are Muslims. So, we have a moral obligation to contribute to make

things better. You just need to go out in the traffic to see how people do not care

about the law. That is why we have to continually work with the youth, especially

those who are still in high school.

The above statement shows how some AEEMB members justify their involvement in mass civic education. It highlights what they perceive to be their duty toward the wellbeing of their country. This is captured in the metaphor of “urbanizing” the minds of

Muslims and bringing them up to date with the youth’s understanding of secularism, religion, and modernity.

Seydou Diallo, an AEEMB member sums up the dilemma facing Muslim youth in expressing their civic duty:

Only a blind fly follows a corpse inside a grave. In general, what we

communicate to youth through AEEMB concerning non-state dissident armed

forces is how not to be a blind fly who follows the corpse at their own peril. That

corpse can be wanting easy money, following false promises, or blaming others

for your misfortunes. However, that does not mean they should be like docile

sheep who follow their secular institutions and state actors with no criticism just

because they are Muslims. Don’t be a fly on a corpse which is being buried, but

don’t be a sheep either, especially under the current circumstances of our country.

155 In a social context where conspiracy theories on prominent issues including national security abound online and in the public space, articulated statements like the ones made by AEEMB are very constructive and useful discursive references. In fact, they are statements that provide comfort and direction to its mostly Muslim audiences. While the mosque and the prayer sessions remain the focal point of articulation of these discourses, print and social media are used to disseminate them widely. In the process of making those discourses, AEEMB benefits from the assistance and guidance of former AEEMB members and affiliates at different Muslim institutions and associations such as CERFI and FAIB. Also, while social media campaigns like the one initiated by Le Cappuccino mobilize hundreds of people to stand up symbolically against terrorism, AEEMB’s campaigns take a long-term vision.

Conclusion

In my study of Muslim youth political engagement, I learned that Muslims in

Burkina Faso tend to come from marginalized social categories. This marginalization is partly a condition that traces its roots back to the colonial education system that provided formal education through Judeo-Christian values so that any social advancement was conjugated through the catholic sanctioned education. In post-colonial Burkina Faso,

Muslim students organized in an association—AEEMB—in order to claim their place in secular educational spaces such as schools. While it can be safely said that observing one’s Islamic faith in Burkinabè public schools is now a secured right, Muslims’ voice in political matters remains very weak. The institution of the National Day of Forgiveness in

2001 was a significant event that brought Muslim leaders to the forefront of

156 contemporary state politics. The leaders who represented the Muslims at that gathering and throughout the process of negotiations for reconciliation had no idea that they were partaking in a historical event that would be a starting point for legitimizing Muslim political discourse.

For the Muslim youth from Burkina Faso under the tutelage of AEEMB, the nexus of religion and politics is a blurry line. While their parents’ generation has been noticeably absent from the politics of contemporary nation-state until around 2001, the

Muslim youth have claimed their rightful place as a worthy interlocutor in the political discourse at the national level. The civic engagement of members of this organization is key in helping establish the reputation of AEEMB as an organization of public interest.

What is very peculiar about AEEMB is not that it is doing politics, but rather that its civic engagement is couched in religious terminology, yet it does not reject the secularism of the state’s politics. Instead, AEEMB works to reinforce Muslims’ political and civic emancipation in the modern nation state. In fact, AEEMB is not seeking to challenge the state secularism in favor of a non-secular political orientation. Instead, it is interested in emancipating their faith in the secular democracy.

Further, AEEMB’s openness to working with organizations from other faith traditions and with non-religious organizations, allowed it to foster interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding. This in turn earned AEEMB a respectable place in the political and religious discourse in Burkina Faso. While the education of its members in the classic secular education system might give them limited to no access to the Islamic

157 doctrine, Muslim students come together through AEEMB to find their own ways of accessing, learning it, and defining what it means to be a Muslim.

This chapter bore witness that the Muslim youth from Burkina Faso have taken upon themselves to contextualize their faith by finding ways of re-instituting the compatibility between faith and secularism. Although the Muslim establishment spearheaded by Sheiks, Sufi spiritual leaders, marabouts and other clergy remain the main reference in Burkina Faso in terms of theology, AEEMB is becoming more and more relevant as an Islamic reference in the country. As we have seen in this chapter, the organization achieved that recognition through its work and its socio-political and civic engagement.

From its theological standpoint, AEEMB is an Islamic reformist movement although this reformism is a practice-base one and not one that seeks to propose its theology to the larger Muslim community. At the same time, it mocks the scholars still moored in the ‘Islam tranquile discourse’ as well as those in search for new sensations in supposed radicalizing Muslim youth. The practice-base reformism of AEEMB means that the organization experiments and puts into practice what it believes. While the ideological and theological questions remain central to the Muslim youth, they understand the necessity of incorporating a social and economic dimension to their faith.

In doing so, they had to rethink the meanings of the texts in light of their socio-political context. It is not a surprise that AEEMB often receives criticism from other Muslim groups, especially those educated in Arabo-Islamic traditions for being westernized.

158 The postcolonial subjectivity demands a certain adaptability and versatility for the survival of the subject. The Judeo-Christian narrative and values that came to dominate and, perhaps, shape the postcolonial normative understanding of modernity constitute a particular framework that may hinder Muslims’ socio-political emancipation. In Burkina

Faso, AEEMB seeks to conciliate Muslimhood and secularism. While remaining critical to the state for its shortcomings, AEEMB pleads for the full contribution and adaptation of Muslims in modern state-making efforts.

159 Chapter 6: Gender Dynamics Through AEEMB 15

Introduction

This chapter discusses how young Muslim women negotiate their multiple identities both online and offline in Burkina Faso. It focuses on female members of the

Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au Burkina Faso (AEEMB) and especially those commonly referred to as “Adja,” in reference to their sartorial choice.

Although there might not seem to be any malice associated with this common nickname,

Adja, given to women who adopt this pious fashion, the experiences of some of these women provide a much more nuanced understanding of media, Muslimhood, womanhood, and dress. In this chapter, I discuss how the identity expectations and identity performances of Adjas are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed along their sartorial choice. I further placed the “Adja construct” within the broader discourse on Islam, post-coloniality, modernity, and gender in Burkina Faso.

In Burkina Faso, young Muslim women are often referred to as Adja, a nickname primarily tied to “the pious fashion” they wear.16 Using the “Adja construct” as an entry point, this chapter discusses gender dynamics among AEEMB sisters who show their faith through Muslim pious fashion. It focuses primarily on members of the nationwide

Muslim student organization called Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au

Burkina Faso (AEEMB), with over 100,000 members, half female according to its

15 An earlier draft of this chapter was published in The Communication Review under the title Muslim Women and Pious Fashion in Burkina Faso as Identity, Pose, and Defiance. 16 I borrow the concept of “pious fashion,” from Elizabeth Bucar who uses it as an alternative to other commonly used terms such as veil, Muslim clothing, modest fashion, which she perceived to be inadequate in capturing the complexity of Muslim women’s sartorial choices. 160 official estimations. While research on gender and Islam in Burkina Faso is sparse, for the most part, it is devoted to the Arabic-language-educated women and leaves out their counterparts who received their training in the French secular education system. In this chapter, I discuss how the identity expectations and identity performances of young

French-educated Muslim women are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed along their sartorial choice by placing the “Adja construct” within the broader discourse on

Islam, modernity, and gender in Burkina Faso.

Becoming an Internet Sensation

It is now almost a tradition for newly elected presidents of France to travel to one of the former French colonies to deliver a speech about his/her regime’s program for

Africa. In November 2017, President Emmanuel Macron went to Burkina Faso to deliver his “Africa Speech.” He justified his choice of this country as a show of goodwill to the

Burkinabè youth who deposed their 27-year president in a peaceful revolution and elected their first civilian president since 1966. President Macron further proposed a direct dialogue with the students of the University of Ouagadougou after his speech. He offered to answer four direct questions from them. Some media commentators saw this act as a bold move exemplifying a strong will to establish a true dialogue between the French president and African youth. Others pointed out that the students who asked questions were preselected and their questions were simply censored by the university officials to accommodate their French guest.

Amidst the ensuing debates that followed this speech and the Q&A session between President Macron and the students at Université de Ouagadougou, one Muslim

161 student rose to fame on social media, particularly Facebook. While her remarkable rhetorical skills and the relevance of her questions clearly set her apart from the other students and led to that recognition, her pious fashion caught the attention of many people who focused their comments on it rather than the matter at hand. A photograph of her taken during her performance went viral on the Internet. The still image shows a female student in a red robe and a black headscarf that overflows on her shoulders, clearly establishing that she is a Muslim woman in the Burkinabè context. Over 600 hundred people thronged the amphitheater. About five meters away from her, President

Macron still stood behind the white podium where he just delivered his speech. To his left, President Rock Mark Christian Kaboré of Burkina Faso was still in his seat. A host of high-ranking government officials occupied the front seats.

I interviewed the student about her experience as both an outspoken Muslim woman who identifies as Adja in a secular university campus and how she managed and still manages the social media attention on her after her performance in front of the authorities. In this article, she is referred to as Esperanza.17 Macron managed to turn some hostile questions to his favor, maintained and composed his allocution, and even elicited applause from the crowd occasionally, yet he seemed very nervous and apprehensive in front of the young woman. Esperanza realized Macron felt nervous. She

17 Although some of the interviewees did not mind if I used their real names in my writing, I have asked them to choose pseudonyms. All the names used here are pseudonyms provided by the informants with the exception of Imam Ilboudo who kindly insisted I use his actual name. While my idea of having participants choose their own pseudonyms was primarily an attempt to give them agency in my writing process, it also provided new insights to my study. For example, Esperanza said she chose her pseudonym because it means hope in Spanish. That a Muslim woman in Burkina Faso chooses a Spanish name for a pseudonym or that others choose names that do not have Islamic roots provides clues which can help understand the question of femininity, identity, Islam, and modernity. 162 later attributed that to the heat in the room: “I mean, the heat in the amphitheater was unimaginable. I was nervous too, but I maintained my composure.” Then she started:

“Mr. President of the Republic of France, we, students of Burkina Faso, were impatient to welcome you here, and now we say welcome to the Homeland of the Upright People.”

She paused to control the pace of her voice. A loud applause from the room came to take over her silence as if the crowd wanted to indicate its approval of her opening statement.

The blurry photograph of this veiled young woman with the microphone in her hand went viral in the hours following her questions to Macron. She remembers that several members of civil society movements in Burkina Faso praised her for her eloquence on their social media and claimed she is a member of their organization. For example,

AEEMB, which she did belong to, shared her photograph on its official Facebook page with the following caption:

“A product of AEEMB, school alone is not enough. One must learn to be a militant

and to have strong convictions and solid arguments. Your questions to the French

president were the best. Bravo. The best is yet to come, sister.” (AEEMB’s

Facebook, Nov 29, 2017)

Esperanza was one of the four preselected students, who confronted Macron with a challenging question. For example, she asked President Macron about declassifying the

French archives on the assassination of former revolutionary President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, whose death is believed to have been orchestrated by France. She also asked him about France/Burkina judicial cooperation and the French hesitation to deliver alleged Burkinabè criminals in hiding in France:

163 We had really hoped, and I assure you all here, we had hoped—without grand expectations, that you would be coming with the junior brother of our former president,

Mr. Francois Compaoré, in your suitcases.18 But unfortunately, no. You did not. Now I want to know, if as token for the friendship you have for us, will you send him to us via

Air France when you return home?”

A loud applause roared again as she sat down.

The photograph of Esperanza has become quite recognizable now among most

Burkinabè Internet users and most people even recognize her in person. “Now I cannot go anywhere in a public space without someone recognizing me,” she told me. After her performance, hundreds of people went online to look her up, to make connections with her. They sent her friend requests on Facebook. They posted congratulatory messages on her Facebook page. They flooded her Facebook inbox with messages. They scrolled down her page and liked her old pictures. They thanked her for her courage and wisdom.

They thanked her for saving the face of the Burkinabè education. Esperanza recalls: “I was receiving a lot of requests for friends on Facebook. Some of them were commenting and threatening that I was not responding to their request for friends. But overall, it was all a positive experience.” While Esperanza’s eloquence in front of the officials and the challenging nature of her questions earned her a fan base on Internet, her identity as Adja certainly played a significant role as well. My interviews with other young Muslim

18 Francois Compaoré, a politician and younger brother of the deposed president fled to France since the fall of the regime. Despite Compaoré being under an Interpol arrest warrant for alleged crimes committed in Burkina Faso, France’s judicial system has not yet agreed with Interpol to deliver him. 164 women from AEEMB revealed that wearing pious fashion has nuanced meanings and implications.

Like Esperanza, many other young Muslim women who wear such dress are commonly called Adja. They are easily recognizable in their classrooms, in the busy traffic of Ouagadougou, anywhere they go. Their clothing is mostly what sets them apart from other young women. They shun miniskirts, leggings, distressed jeans, hair extensions, and other trendy clothing accessories that are commonly worn by young urban women in Burkina Faso. Young women who are referred to as Adja prefer more conservative long dresses. Sometimes they would wear jeans and pants, but they always don a headscarf that covers their head entirely. Long robes and other long dresses are also their preferred public dress choice. Although there might not seem to be any malice associated with this common nickname, Adja, given to young Muslim women who adopt this pious fashion, the experiences of some of these women provide an impetus for understanding media, Muslimhood, womanhood, and dress.

To Wear or not to Wear the Veil: my Dress, my Faith

My name is Mimi. They call me Adja. My classmates, my teachers, everyone.

They know my actual name, but they pretend they don’t know it. I used to like it.

Not anymore. My mother is Adja too, but she got this honorific name because she

performed the hajj….She went to Mecca. Just like my father is known as Ladji,

because he too went to Mecca. Unlike my mom, my “Adja” is just a reference to

my dress. I wear the headscarf every day and that is often viewed as a sign of

good behavior for a good Muslim girl. So much so that when people see me in

165 company with a male friend in certain places, they are puzzled. They wonder

what an Adja is doing in a bar, for example. But that is not a problem because I

don’t go to bars often. The problem is that once people know you as Adja, it is

just difficult to be something else.

Mimi—a college junior and AEEMB member

Muslim women’s clothing in Burkina Faso is as eclectic as that of any other group of people anywhere. The Islamic dress for women in Burkina Faso refers to a range of clothing styles from a wide variety of long robes and tailor-cut flowing skirts to jeans and headscarves. The headscarves that women and young girls wear range from a simple wool hat, half a meter rectangular piece of scarf holding the hair or braids, to fully enveloping head garments. These head garments can be found in local material, but they are mostly imported from China, Dubai, India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. A woman who manages their large family-owned store that carries such clothing at the Grand Marché de Ouagadougou, said to me that her husband goes to all of these places to bring the

“original” clothing back—“original” implying that the goods are of excellent quality. It is, however, difficult to reduce Islamic clothing to a religious symbol. In Burkina Faso, although some people may see it as a measure of religious engagement, Muslim women are not alone in wearing these headscarves and long robes. Non-Muslim women wear them too. Whether they wear it due to conformism, since most people in Burkina are

Muslim, or just following a simple fashion effect, remains another question to investigate.

Muslim women and men who have successfully performed hajj to Mecca, the

166 fifth pillar of Islam, are respectively designated with the “honorific” names Adja and

Ladji–local inflections of the Arabic hajj.19 Today, the noun Adja is used in popular parlance to refer to young Muslim women who adopt a pious fashion style. It is also used as a sign of respect toward elderly women even if they did not accomplish the pilgrimage to Mecca. Although most young women do not reject being called Adja, it is important to note that young Muslim men who wear the equivalent Muslim clothing are not called

Ladji. During my fieldwork on Islamic tendencies, media, and Muslim youth identities, some of my female participants talked about their garment choices and how that constituted part of their identities.

As a male Burkinabè Muslim myself, I had never associated the term Adja with any other meaning than what most people intend it, i.e., a respectful way of addressing a

Muslim woman even if she has not performed the rite to earn the title. Adja is a common nickname for young women who not only embody their faith, but also exteriorize it in their sartorial choices. However, my interviews of these women revealed that the word

Adja often bears some kind of social stigma. Mimi’s concern that her classmates, teachers, and others “refuse” to acknowledge her real name, preferring to call her Adja, does not necessarily imply she does not like the way she expresses her faith in clothing.

She even acknowledges the honor attached to being Adja when it is used in the proper

19 The first pillar of Islam is shahada or the testimony of faith that there is only one God and Muhamad is a prophet of God. The second is salah or prayer, which is performed five times per day. The third is zakat or alms giving. The fourth is sawn or fasting between dawn and sunset for the entire month of Ramadan. Unlike these four pillars, which are mandatory, the fifth pillar is conditional because Muslims are required to perform it once in a lifetime only if they can afford to (Armstrong, 2006). In most African contexts, performing hajj also offers social status.

167 context such as in the case of her parents who won it through their successful accomplishment of hajj.

Rama, another college student, who is beginning to dislike her nickname, reflects on why she now rejects it: “I think that some men think that when you are Adja, you are just a sheep. It is almost like the way the White people make jokes about blonde girls on the Internet.” At first, I did not know how to follow up with this assertion because at this point, I continue to call some of my high school friends by the same name, Adja. “So, I am guilty too because I never thought that Adja had any negative connotation,” I said apologetically. When Rama noticed my discomfort, she quickly adjusted her tone and said, “But you can call me Adja. It is not every time that Adja is intended to mean stupid cow. In fact, when people use it respectfully, it is really humbling, and I like it. And many people like you mean well when they say Adja.”

This is the second time Rama used an animal metaphor to describe her perception of what the portrayal of Adja means to her. In the Burkinabè context, the use of sheep and cows as metaphors to describe someone is charged with underlying meanings suggestive of unintelligence and submissiveness. Rama is not the only one who thinks that Adja has pejorative associations. Mimi too alluded to the same denigration toward young women who wear overflowing Muslim dress although she did not state it directly like Rama: “I wear the headscarf every day and that is often viewed as a sign of good behavior for a good Muslim girl.” Clearly, the idea of submissiveness in “a good Muslim girl” is not any different from that found in characterization of her as a cow or a sheep.

Further, Rama’s comparison of the Adja’s experience with white blonde girls on the

168 Internet is an awareness of stigmatization against certain self-representations that transcends the Burkinabè case. It is also indicative of widespread forms of micro aggressions toward women that targets their bodies, their appearance, and their dress.

While some women see this reference to them as a pure debasement of Muslim women and a call to submissiveness, others perceive it as a sign of appreciation, but also indicative of male gaze and male sexual desire. According to Zoenab,

All the time, men and even old men make [sexual] advances to me. They always

say clearly that they want to take me in as their spouse. They say that they are

proud of the way I carry myself. When you are dressed like an Adja, people just

respect you for that. I know that sometimes those men are just joking and are just

complimenting me for just being who I am and not dressing up like a bad girl.

There are also some men who just fantasize about Adjas. Maybe they just like to

see what you are hiding. They fantasize about the Adjas as if we are different

from other girls. Those are terrible people, and I encounter them every day. The

other day I was at the gas station, and this young man started talking to me. He

said some nasty words I don’t wish to use here.

The objectification of women ranges from the subtle male gaze to the open vulgar verbal aggressions which Zoenab modestly refuses to repeat in her answer. Oppositely, being

Adja can be an opportunity for the young woman to be left alone by hagglers and sexual predators who spare her because they take her to be the epitome of Muslim piety. Saadia, another Adja, told me that when she was in high school, her schoolmates never invited her to birthday celebrations that are held at night because they thought Adjas don’t go

169 out. “That is why Adjas are not likely to get pregnant as teenagers,” she added. However, what seems to be more common is the naïve reduction of the woman to her dress that equates her clothing choices to a sign of potential good womanhood. Less intrusive too is that Zoenab contrasts her dress code with that of other women who adopt a much more common style of dressing as being “bad girls.” This further shows that religious traditions offer both explicit and implicit norms about gender performance. Young Muslim women who express their religious identity through adopting certain clothing styles have internalized certain social stigma toward those who do not by categorizing them as “bad girls.” They too are not immune to using the same poor judgements toward other women.

Another crucial point that Zoenab brings is that the objectification of Muslim women is characterized by explicit sexual advances and implicit fantasy hidden in the desire to marry, as well as men expressing genuine pride for her sartorial choices. In any case, the Adja is viewed as both a sexual object and an embodiment of what should be a submissive wife. Her presence in the public space is scrutinized. There is almost a perception that someone who displays certain cultural artifacts of Islam, such as the headscarf, should not be associated with secular lifestyle such as going to taverns, bars, and nightclubs. Doing so puts them at the risk of being scrutinized by both Muslims and non-Muslims. While drinking alcohol is prohibited in Islam, what is being shunned here is not the act of drinking itself, but rather that of being identifiable as a Muslim woman and being in that place where alcohol is served.

Perhaps, one of the most puzzling findings from these interviews came from Safi, a young primary school teacher who has just recently started to identify as Adja by

170 changing her clothing style. “When I was still in college, I used to wear all kinds of clothes. I spent a lot of money on Brazilian hair extensions, and I always drank beer with my friends,” she laughed. And then she added: “I am not necessarily proud of that college lifestyle. But now I am an Adja. I encourage young girls in my school to respect their bodies. You know, I have just realized that men will play with you, but they will marry a woman who respects herself.”

Beyond its scriptural and religious prescriptions and societal enforcement, the adoption of a pious fashion has personal motives (Schulz, 2012; Watson, 1994).

However, such personal motives are always in relation to the outcome when it matches the social expectations. In fact, I learned through my conversations with Safi that she adopted her Adja dress code only after she graduated from college, got a job and moved to a different city, and was seriously considering finding someone to marry. For her, being Adja still symbolizes the ideal woman that most men would like to marry. As a single professional woman, Safi found it redeeming and respectful to wear her Adja clothing, and she encourages her female students to do the same and “to respect their bodies.” In a society where marriage is still highly regarded as a social status, becoming an Adja with the hope of attracting men accustomed to the idea of a submissive partner is a strategic move. However, when I asked Safi if she considers continuing to dress as an

Adja after she gets married, she said she does not know. Then, she added jokingly: “I would not mind that if he [her future husband] sends me to Mecca,” which suggests the conditional status of her option to become Adja. When some young women like Safi are pushed into opting for pious fashion, they proceed with some clear goals in mind,

171 negotiating their way through the demands of their society.

The nimble-footedness of Muslim woman identity as Adja cannot be fully understood outside the social structures that produce, reproduce, and sustain it. Although prior to becoming Adja, Safi did everything an Adja was not expected to do—dressing in

“all kinds of clothes,” using Brazilian hair extensions, and drinking beer with her friends—she now advises her students not to do the same. This double discourse is only intelligible when we place it within the larger Burkinabè contemporary understanding of gender norms, religiosity, secularism, and modernity. A close look at Female members leadership in AEEMB provides an entry to start such a discussion.

Young Muslim Women Leadership through AEEMB

When I asked Asmao if she would be interested in becoming the next president of

AEEMB, her response was categorically “No, I am not.” Then, she started to explain that such a thing is structurally unacceptable and that she does not intend to be the first person to challenge it. Asmao does not see herself or any other woman, for that matter, in the position of president of AEEMB because it would be against the commonly accepted understanding of the idea that Imams must always be male. Her point is that the president of the association is the supreme Imam of the organization and, therefore, has to be chosen among the brothers. Although in some of its decentralized structures, AEEMB has elected females in higher positions such as vice president and general secretary, in general, female members remain in secondary position in the hierarchy of the organization. At AEEMB gatherings, female members tend to outnumber male. Roukiata, another female member offers her understanding of why this seems to be the case in the

172 following way: it is “[…] simply the reflection of the general population of Burkina Faso, which has more women than men.” And she added, “But my take is also that most

Muslim young girls are more likely to keep their faith, practice it, join a structure like

AEEMB than men.” Despite outnumbering the male members and showing more visible signs of their religiosity, female members leaders still support male leadership.

The president of AEEMB gave an additional reason why the question of a female president of the national council of AEEMB is not a relevant concern for the time being.

“Fundamentally, it is not a problem. But realistically, it won’t work because this position demands a lot of sacrifice and our sisters have not been adequately equipped to fulfil it,” he said. I asked how so and for him to explain that. He continued:

At AEEMB, the question of gender suffers no debate. Because we are convinced

that men alone cannot achieve anything without the support of women. Now,

what the West wants to make you believe when talking about gender…That is not

the way we see things here. Women play a key role in the life of Muslims. As

Muslims, we understand that we cannot joke with such an important question.

While the president stressed that women have a strong place in AEEMB, he differentiated their role as AEEMB understands it to be from what he perceives to be a Western conception of women’s roles. By having women run the department of women affairs, where the bulk of the (females) members of the organization actually are, AEEMB justifies how they can better serve their whole community. They also represent the entire organization in some capacity whenever necessary such as events and activities hosted by the government, NGOs, and other organizations who might want specific types of

173 representation. Over the past few decades, NGOs have worked to promote women leadership. It is hardly a surprise to see that AEEMB sends off women to represent it when collaborating with such organizations. Women also play important leadership roles in the decentralized branches of AEEMB. For the president of AEEMB, because women are sent to represent them in national and international institutions, women can play much more important roles than leading prayers.

In Burkina Faso, socio-cultural interpretations of Islam constitute a strong barrier to a full emancipation of female Muslim youth. According to Badri (2017), “The greatest challenge facing Muslim women’s movements in African countries with regard to gender equality relates to family law, especially as it relates to Islamic law” (p. 232). Among the

AEEMB sisters, there is very little challenge to the social structure beyond the local interpretations of Islamic laws. The male members are not alone in believing that a woman cannot lead the organization. In fact, most female members including leaders, too think that it would not be “Islamically correct” to have a woman lead the national council.

Despite their almost secondary role in leadership positions, AEEMB sisters are engaged on other platforms where they believe they can be as important as leaders of the group. Some of the senior female members are engaged in issues that affect women directly. These issues include female reproductive health and what one of my informants called “monetary marriage.” In the first case, some female members, because they have access to scientific knowledge about reproductive health, share that knowledge with their sisters. These include teaching young Muslim women how to perform breast self-

174 examination to diagnose breast cancer, advising and encouraging those who underwent some forms of female excision on reconstructive treatment. Asmao explained that “These are subjects that are taboo, and Muslim girls and women are likely to shy away if the talk is not happening in the right place where they feel comfortable.” She added, “Now, some of us are medical students and we can, at least, share what we know about self-care with our sisters.” Other women who participate in these talks as experts or advisors, whom I asked, did not see the relevance of my question and contended with a “Yes, we do it, but this is women’s talk.” Twice, at least, I heard a similar response, and I understood that informants did not wish to say more, so I changed the subject.

Concerning the issue of “monetary marriage,” a form of arranged marriage between a young Adja and a wealthy man, Balaguissa highlighted both its recurrence and how some of the sisters tackle it. At age 17, Balaguissa was given in marriage to a man twice her age whom she had never met before. When she found out she was being married off, she recalled, her “AEEMB sisters were supportive throughout the process.

They gave me courage to say no to this man.” She explained, “I cannot give you the details, but it was a really difficult experience to see my parents’ disappointment in me.”

She emphasized that, “My mother could not comprehend why a poor girl from a poor family would say no to marry a gentleman with a stable life.”

Having been rescued from an arranged marriage herself, Balaguissa understood the need to counsel other women who are facing the same problem. She also understood the limits of the help she can provide by referring victims to appropriate institutions.

Another important dilemma Balaguissa and her sisters often face is that arranged

175 marriages are a complex issue where the young women and their families often partake in sealing the contract creating their own predicament. Women’s financial dependence on men seems to be the main drive behind arranged marriage more so than the religion of their parents. As Balaguissa put it, “It is a very delicate matter because most girls will accept to marry provided the man is wealthy. It is sad, but it makes our attempt to help very hard.” She described the predicament: “You know, here, men who have money and want to marry are not roaming the street. So when these kinds of men come to see your family, you are in trouble.” She added, “Most sisters at AEEMB face these kinds of issues.” AEEMB prepares female members to be actively defiant when their families make poor decisions about their lives. It equips them with the necessary skills through their leadership training programs to stand their ground against any perceived imposition.

Esperanza understands that her fame on social media can be exploited for a noble cause without falling prey to people and Muslim associations that want to maintain her as the face of Muslim female youth in Burkina Faso. In the following, she explains her approach to being an advocate without necessarily being reduced to her Islamic identity:

I receive suggestions from both Muslim leaders and associations that I should post

Quranic quotes on my Facebook instead of the non-religious content I post from

time to time. But I say no. I want to continue being me. I can be the face of

Muslim girls without telling people what Islam is and how they should live their

lives. Instead, what I do is be me and let everyone who follows me on social

media see that a Muslim girl can be famous, talk politics, inspire other girls,

176 empower them without necessarily bringing Islam into her online conversation.

That too is Islamic.

University-educated Muslim women are progressively making their voices heard even when they have a secondary role in the organization. Through AEEMB, they are empowering other women and helping them improve their reproductive health.

Balaguissa now advises many sisters who are in similar situations: “But there are also cases where I and my sisters advised some sisters to go see competent government institutions for help.” The AEEMB sisters like Balaguissa are contributing to the education and the social wellbeing of the youth. By doing so, they stage themselves not just as righteous “claimants to the task of staging virtue” (Eickelman & Anderson, 1999, p. 2), but also as indispensable stakeholders in the organization.

Through AEEMB, Muslim female students are not only learning how to stand up for themselves, they are also developing a keen sense of a need to educate others about gender emancipation. I witnessed one such educational moment at an event hosted by the

English Club of the University of Ouagadougou (ECUO). The ECUO is a student-led club that was set up to offer a platform to fellow students from the English department to help them improve their spoken English skills. The club meets on a weekly basis during the regular school year. On this occasion, I attended the meeting as a former member of the club. This week was a special one because it was the end of the semester and the club leaders had organized a special celebration over three days, which they termed “English

Club’s 72 Hours.” One of the events was storytelling. Participants came forward in the classroom, took the microphone, and told a short story. This form of mini stand-up

177 comedy is very much appreciated for the entertainment it provides. It also has a pedagogical importance in the sense that members not only improve their English language skills but also their rhetorical performance. During this event, the intervention of one AEEMB sister caught my attention. She did not share a short story, but she took the floor to talk to the female students:

None of you thought of writing a story that puts a woman like yourself in a

position of power. The teacher was a man and the students were girls and boys.

Even the story of the lion and the hyena. The lion was male. Why couldn’t we

have the same story with a lioness? That is where I think we must work on.

From the back of the room, a few people clapped in support as the sister put down the microphone on the table and walked back to her seat. Other people next to me murmured in disapproval. They clearly did not appreciate the preaching tone of their schoolmate, but what they were mostly disapproving of was her interrupting the fun and interjecting her “feminist lessons.” When I later shared this story with an AEEMB elder, she observed that if this was at an AEEMB gathering, the sister would not have been heckled even if there were disapproval of her opinion. “But the world out there is not necessarily prepared for the kind of social emancipation we want for our daughters and sisters. That is why we encourage our members to be ready for all situations,” she added.

AEEMB female members are now more and more visible in the public space doing things that were traditionally not the prerogative of Muslim women in Burkina

Faso. These activities include singing nashids (religious chanting) and performing music.

Some former members of the organization have even managed to carve their share in the

178 developing urban musical scene. According to the president of AEEMB, the organization

“does not necessarily take credit for their musical talents, but their time at AEMB has definitely impacted them positively to sing religious songs.” He explained, “That makes people realize that one can be a Muslim girl and still do amazing things with music.”

Following this conversation with the president of AEEMB, I saw firsthand the AEEMB women choir chanting during the celebration of the 40th anniversary of a theater company in downtown Ouagadougou.

At each short pose in their chanting, the crowded theater room responded with loud applause and whistling. Those were signs of approval and appreciation. The other women choirs that followed on the stage and chanted were equally celebrated and the celebration went on till one in the morning. I asked one of the women in the AEEMB sisters’ choir how she felt about being part of this event: “In the past, it would have been inconceivable for Muslim women to join other people from other faith groups including men they don’t know on a stage and face a public. Especially late night.” She confirmed,

“Now things are changing, and we want to be part of that too. We want to bring our faith to the public to let them see that we are veiled, and we worship God, but we also do it with fun.”

The sister’s observation that the presence of the women’s choir at ATB late night was something progressive was also shared by Imam Ilboudo, a former AEEMB leader and now a prominent television and radio Muslim speaker. For Imam Ilboudo, “When we were in charge, we had more pressing issues to deal with than fighting for our women to be singing in public space.” He clarified, “But if they are able to do it now while

179 respecting the principles of their faith, then that means we have recorded some progress.”

This statement reflects AEEMB’s deployment of popular culture to negotiate its faith trajectory. As Eickelman (1999) argued, “the importance of nashids [religious chants] and rap music is that they represent the ways in which popular cultural forms can be mobilized to foster claims and counterclaims in Muslim politics” (p. 37). As the above anecdotes illustrate, gender dynamics among AEEMB members is very complex. Men still have the leading roles, but women are also increasingly present in the public space, working to improve their social condition, and challenging the patriarchal structure in which they live.

The questions of religious and gender identities articulated by Esperanza, Saadia,

Mimi, Safi, Rama, Zoenab and other AEEMB members intersect with a larger contemporary socio-political reality that I define here as being part and parcel of

Burkinabè modernity. This modernity I attempt to chart in this chapter must also be understood as a byproduct of an ongoing postcolonial world order in which being and becoming a Muslim woman are two interlocking constants that defy sweeping generalizations. Although the questions of gender and religion could be invoked and discussed as standalone social phenomena—and there is abundant literature on it—I wish to take a different approach here. As such, I use these questions as an entry point to redirect my reflection toward that of post-coloniality.

Gender Dynamics in Burkina Faso

In Islam, according to Chebel (1984), the body is more than anatomic: the body is a living element and a linguistic dispositive of beliefs and myths. It is a body that is

180 directly submitted to dogma and bears the protocols of rituals, faith, and spirituality. The

Muslim body, which rejects all forms of impurity, is socially constructed primarily through a complex ritualized set of techniques of hygiene and prayers (Chebel, 1984).

Although, throughout the history of Islam, the body remained a space and a conduit of display and manifestation of faith, it was only in the twentieth century that the behavior of the body in relation to its modes of coverage began to emerge as a significant concern beyond its religious protocols. The nexus of the image of the body—as a covered body— and the spirituality it embodies became the center of attention in the conflict between traditional and new forms of covering the body—characterized by the appearance of new vestimentary lexica dominated by imported signs and symbols (Chebel, 1984).

While the introduction of new commodified symbols in religious vestimentary habits often generated tensions in religious protocols among Muslims, Islamic dress has also raised some concerns in Western Europe and Northern America, where it is prominently featured in contemporary discourses on national security and national identity (Ahmed, 2011; Laurence & Vaisse, 2007; Portier, 2017). In fact, this linguistic dispositive is decoded as symbols of an incompatible Otherness. Salim (2013) argued that

“what Muslim dress and particularly the hijab connote for many people who do not live in Muslim-majority areas, is Islam, and by extension, difference” (p. 211). As discussed in this chapter, however, the nexus of the image of the Muslim body—as a linguistic dispositive of faith and myths—and the ways its coverage is codified is not a mere visceral imagery of faith, but a contextually and constantly negotiated social practice.

181 The codification of Muslim women’s vestimentary habits continues to influence the discourse on gender, Muslimness, and power relations. Bucar (2017) argued that, in the West, the “pious fashion” of Muslim women continues to be equated with the desire of the Muslim patriarchy to control her body. Similarly, Anderson and Greifenhagen

(2013) found that Canadian media present veiling as a dehumanizing practice forced upon Muslim women. In the same vein, Ahmed (2011) discussed the Westernization of dress and fashion to point out how, in colonial Egypt, “the most prominent proponents of unveiling were men who had the privileges of class and status and carried political clout in the social and cultural domains” (p. 35). Ahmed further argued that although Muslim women, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, were already unveiling for variety of reasons independent from Western dictates, the European perception of the veil

“as a symbol of the inferiority of Islam as a religion, culture, and civilization” came to dominate the discourse on the emancipation of Muslim women (p. 45).

In Africa, European colonialism created long-lasting blueprints for gender relations that still undermine women’s full emancipation in modern society and impact the gender discourse in the continent. For example, colonialism has endowed African men with Western education and set the course for a skewed and unequal access to literacy as well as introduced Western conceptions of gender (Griffith, 2011; Nfah-

Abbenyi, 1997). This led some African thinkers including Oyewumi Oyeronke, to vigorously question feminism as an analytical category for the study of gender in Africa.

Oyewumi (1997) argued that there are different sociopolitical categories of “women” and that to study women’s issues in Africa with a Western feminist lens is a dangerous

182 transcultural imposition. According to her, “Womanhood has been pathologized, at a global level, and the concerns of the feminist international have underlined this globalization of what was once a local Western preoccupation” (p. 177). While

Oyewumi’s intervention resonated well with most third-wave feminists in Africa, it also met a sound critique. Bakare-Yusuf (2003) argued that Oyewumi’s oversensitivity, antipathy, and suspicion toward Western episteme regarding gender as a social concept is unnecessary. She posited that “the polytheistic and polyrhythmic structure of many

African cultures already suggests a framework which courts and positively invites alterity, in order to transform it” (Bakare-Yusuf, 2003, p. 122).

This chapter acknowledges the validity of these two arguments, but it also seeks to depart from them by considering the entanglements of the historical and ideological encroachments of gender within a postcolonial secular Muslim majority context. As

Minh-ha (1989) pointed out, “all categories leak, change, and evolve” (cited in Rodriguez

& Chawla, 2008, p. 43). The gender category in Africa certainly does not derogate from that condition. I argue that to understand contemporary, mediated gendered Islamic dress in Burkina Faso, we cannot reject the fact that it is important to open the analysis to larger discussions on gender in the country while taking into consideration the local specificities. This chapter focusses on current gender dynamics in a social context where

Islam cohabitates with other religious sensibilities within a secular postcolonial nation.

As Bucar (2017) put it, “The story of pious fashion is not a simple one of patriarchy or orthodoxy; rather, it is one of religious politics grounded in local debates about taste, nationalism, authenticity, and public norms” (p. 171).

183 Burkina Faso is a secular state with a Muslim majority. According to the most recent census, 60.5 % of the population are Muslims (Vanvyve, 2016). However, this country is barely of interest to scholars focusing on contemporary Muslim societies. The dominant misconception about Burkina Faso in history as “an animist bastion” and a land of Christianity (Otayek, 1987) has partly justified this gap in interest. Ilboudo (2007) discussed feminism in Burkina Faso as being both a myth and reality. She argued that although the presence of strong women figures punctuates the history and mythologies of

Burkina Faso, feminist discourses tend to be relegated to the confines of elite women.

Ilboudo further pointed out that men–and women, by “cultural solidarity” with their men—reject the feminist epithet even when they are engaged in works that improve women’s living conditions and rights (Ilboudo, 2007). Perhaps, this is due to the fact that feminism is often presented as a Western anti-man construct.

It is not a surprise then that the question of gender in relation to Islam is given a minor significance in the literature on Burkina Faso despite the existence of high-profile feminists and gender equality advocates in the country. However, three exceptional works are worth mentioning in this regard. The two first are Saint-Lary’s 2011 and 2013 ethnographic research on Islam in Burkina Faso, which deal with French-educated

Muslim elites and informal Islamic judicial practices. The third is Madore and Gomez-

Perez’s (2016) article on female Muslim authorities. While the country itself is beginning to get attention in Western media since its 2014 popular revolution and the emergence of terrorism in the past two years, the subject of Burkinabè Muslim women remains vaguely

184 swamped in larger regional references in academic works and the unique experiences of

Burkinabè women are lost in that process.

Although Burkina Faso has ratified all regional and international conventions on gender equality so far, current data still show significant gaps between the stipulations of these laws and daily reality of women. For example, girl-child marriage is still widely practiced, especially in rural areas. A Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC)’s 2018 report indicates that, in Burkina Faso, almost half of the women are married before they turn 18 and that the same percentage of the population think it is acceptable to do so. Also, women are less represented in the leadership of modern political institutions. For example, women occupy less than 10 % of the parliamentary seats compared to the global average of 23%. While national efforts, including the adoption of a comprehensive gender policy in 2009 and the establishment of a gender issues department since 1997, are now contributing some improvements such as equal access to education for men and women and free access to health services for pregnant women, much work remains to be done. The SWAC report added that,

[D]iscriminatory social norms and informal laws challenge the implementation

and efficiency of policies and programmes promoting gender equality across the

country. Gender inequalities therefore persist, and national averages often mask

strong regional disparities. Urban settings are generally more favourable to

women’s empowerment compared to rural areas. (SWAC, 2018)

To understand the experiences of young Muslim women who wear what can be described as conservative Muslim women dress, we need to reach beyond these empirical

185 measurements of gender inequality. In recent years, there have been many debates among feminists in Western Europe and the United States about the donning of the veil by

Muslim women. Often, those debates were rekindled under much larger issues related to the expression of faith in the public space and overshadowed by Islamophobia. In France, for instance, around the year 2000, the donning of the burqa in the public space sparked controversial national debates about Muslims’ integration, French laïcité, and the balance between a French national identity within a European space that was discussing the integration of Turkey, a Muslim majority nation, into the European Union (Pelletier,

2005). While these global discourses on religion and feminism could be influencing local gender politics, they are not adequate in helping us understand young Muslim women experiences in Burkina Faso. As Moghadam (2002) emphatically argued, there is a strong need for “more understanding and cross-cultural definition of feminism and the global women movement” (p. 1136). In fact, the gender norms that are undermining women’s full emancipation are not limited to the constraints of access to resources, weak institutions, and religion. Gender inequalities, forms of gender violence, and relative emancipation of women are also deeply rooted in the socio-cultural makeup and practices of the people. Female excision is one such practice that is associated with local cultures.

According to Hayford and Trinitapoli (2011), as of 2003, three out of four adult women in Burkina Faso had undergone some form of female genital cutting and this practice is distributed across the sociodemographic spectrum of the country. This suggests that female genital cutting is not exclusively limited to any region or religious group although

Muslim women are still more exposed to it.

186 Statistics on gender inequality in Burkina Faso hide the significant contributions of Muslim women who have achieved visibility and legitimacy and responded to the larger problems that women face (Saint-Lary, 2011). Yet, some educated Muslim women have strongly interpreted “the [Islamic] texts through the lens of gender equality and in opposition to male-centred interpretations of Islam,” (Madore and Gomez-Perez, 2016, p.

190). In a different article, Gomez-Perez (2016) highlighted the contributions of Muslim women preachers mostly trained in Arabic by Muslim associations such as Communauté

Musulmane du Burkina Faso (CMBF). Although many challenges undermine the pioneering roles of these female activists in claiming a new Islamic identity for Muslim women, they contributed in numerous ways to improving women’s stand in Islam.

According to Gomez-Perez, the activism of these Arabic-educated Muslim women consists of educating other women on how to read the texts in Arabic and specializing in commentaries on the hadiths or deeds of the Prophet of Islam. Indeed, some of them are hosting talk shows on Muslim radio stations to expand their reach to larger audiences. The Arabic-educated women are not alone in challenging a religious discourse highly dominated by men. In fact, according to Saint-Lary (2016), women educated in French in the secular education system of Burkina Faso are beginning to argue for more gender equality in their reading and interpretation of the Islamic texts.

Understanding Gender and Religion in a Postcolonial Context

In urban Burkina Faso, women’s clothing as a phenomenological form of their faith often appears as a challenge to local expectations of modernity and consumerism. I discuss this malaise by considering the post-colonial condition of Muslims in the nexus

187 of modernity, gender, and religion. In Burkina Faso, the political engagement of Muslims in state’s public affairs is very recent compared with other religious groups such as the

Catholics (Kane, 2016, p. 66). This trajectory of “Islam tranquile [sic]” (Otayek, 1987, p.

300) fostered a rapport that did not set the Muslim majority and its culture as a national model. Although they are a majority, the Muslims’ constitutive view of modernity does not correspond with that of the general Burkinabè secular experience of it. The Judeo-

Christian values that shaped formal education equated being modern with adopting

Western values including dressing codes. This fact goes back to colonial Burkina Faso where formal education was dispensed by the Catholic Fathers, and, since modernity was equated with education in the colonial language and manners, those who did not accept it were perceived as remaining behind even after the decolonization of the country. The antecedence of Islam along African belief systems did not guarantee it a place in contemporary perception of modernity in this postcolonial state.

Modernity is both a compact and hollow concept. It refuses a discernible linear time point that would determine where it starts and ends. At the same time, one cannot ignore it and its grip. However, in the western thought, as Wallerstein (1995) suggested, the core of the idea of modernity stands the ideal of progress, i.e. the way forward. In that sense, modernity is a present that never exhausts itself. It is a present that forgets itself as it sheds over time and leaves behind almost nothing. Perhaps, that uncontainable- ness of modernity is what makes our attempt to define it self-defeating. In fact, when modernity sheds itself, we can pick up the crumbs left behind. But the crumbs of modernity are not firm enough to stand as its artifacts. They are just good enough to be

188 placed in a Western linear timeline and be called antiquity, Middle Ages, the

Enlightenment era, or simply the past. In anticipation of the next round of shedding, the

Western episteme introduces postmodernity: the forward gaze remains constant. Perhaps,

Wallerstein’s idea of “a fleeting modernity” captures that essence better (p. 471). In cultural terms, too, modernity is both the present and the mirage of the horizon of its gaze. That is how we must understand my use of modernity in the postcolonial context, by going beyond the uncertainty of the meaning of modernity and trying to capture what it conveys at its core. Vexing though this might be, already you see the problem with this cultural understanding of modernity because culture too can have a core, which is perceptible through artifacts and rituals. And this time it is not the ideal of progress that constitutes the core of culture; it is rather that of memory.

Yet, to talk of modernity while invoking memory may also seem counterintuitive.

In fact, memory, in a sense, is the act of remembering the knowledge and experiences that we have accumulated in ways that they can survive our individual mortal lifespans.

Religion is such an example whereby what we have learned is passed to the next generation, which also passes it on to the next, and so on. Hallisey (2013) wrote: “It is not hard to find in different religious communities a concern for transgenerational projects, those human projects that by their very nature assume that many individuals and communities will participate in them, care for them, across time, in different times and places” (p. 89). The persistence of religious norms as a transgenerational project may seem to further challenge any claim for modernity in relation to it. However, the link can be made easily visible when we depart from this rhetorical aporia and look critically into

189 how memory intersects with a much more recent trope which modernity has shed: postcolonialism.

The postcoloniality of the modernity and the gendered identity of Adjas manifest in processes that escape any attempt to essentialize them in vain definitions. Still, by using the concept of gaze, one can problematize this paradox in the encounter between

President Macron and Esperanza. The idea that the very symbol of neo-imperialism in the person of the French president could feel nervous in front of a veiled young Muslim woman from the former colony forces us to interrogate the paradox of malleability and indocility of modern postcolonial gendered-ness. In fact, this Adja has offered Gayatri

Spivak a speaking Subaltern.20 And it is no longer a Subaltern who merely echoes. It is one who is gazing back, interrogating, dialoguing, and asking for accountability. In the meantime, this Adja is objectified and reduced to an item and a desirable sexual object.

This double encroachment is now part of the make-up of being Adja. Even when she is eloquent, she inspires admiration but also fear. But it does not stop there. She is also reminded of her gendered identity and her prescribed responsibility to be the embodiment of the transgenerational memory of her faith community; the body that is the conduit of spirituality and must follow a certain regime of coverage. And it does not stop here. She is expected to embrace global consumer goods. She must have Brazilian hair extensions, so she can hide her curly hair and get rid of her headscarf: relics of the past which does not have a place in this modernity. In a sense, subalternity is demanded to be loyal to the

20 In her famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Spivak used Sati, an ancient Indian ritual consisting in burning widows alive on a pyre, as a case to reflect on the possibility of the downtrodden to represent themselves. 190 cultural memory and to open to the neoliberal economy of modernity through consumerism. She is constantly pulled toward colorism, a conception of aesthetics that equates beauty to Whiteness (Jha, 2016). Wearing pious fashion as an Adja is a form of religious rite that locates the subject and imposes upon her a certain number of expectations. This rite is better understood through what Appadurai (1996) defines as

“complex social techniques for the inscription of locality onto bodies,” and also “ways to embody locality as well as to locate bodies in socially and spatially defined spaces” (p.

179). Jha (2016) showed how iconic female figures such as singer Beyoncé from the

USA and actress Aishwarya Rai from India are seen as torchbearers of a feminist discourse for brown women, yet remain, paradoxically, embodiments of colorism that mimics whiteness. This colorism is a cultural force that goes beyond the American,

Chinese, and Indian contexts presented in Jha’s work. In Burkina Faso, bleaching of the skin is a widespread practice among women. It is sustained by both local and global advertising industries, but it is also reproduced by the alienated postcolonial subjectivity, which persistently fails to rid itself of the complex of inferiority vis-à-vis Whiteness

(Fanon, 1970).

Conclusion

In Burkina Faso, gender and Islam are interrelated social categories that cannot be understood through separate analytical lenses. Their imbricated reality, mediated through pious fashion, offered an impetus for discussing the experiences of young Muslim women. But this discussion is also open to the socio-economic context in which these categories are embedded. Further, the chapter suggested that the interlacement of the

191 neoliberal economy and the postcolonial condition of Muslims must not be separated from the visual manifestation of religion in clothing. Since postcolonialism remains an enduring condition of Muslims in a neoliberal economic world order that constitutes the driving force of modernity, the gendered-ness of Muslim identity also finds meaning in that intersection. Therefore, the episteme of Western feminism is clearly not in tune with the above possibilities because its universalizing and totalizing approaches to gender fails to see the imbrications and interlacements in which the categories of gender and religion negotiate one another.

The stories of young Muslim women who wear pious fashion and are locally known as Adjas constitute the subject of this chapter. Their experiences both online and offline offered an entry point to discuss questions of gender, modernity, and faith.

Clearly, the experiences of the Adja as interlocutors, objects of male gaze, and expected consumers offer a departing point to reflect on gender, Islam, and modernity in the postcolonial context of Burkina Faso. It is not just the Muslim patriarchal social system alone that undermines her subjectivity, but it is also the neoliberal world order that still refuses to give her a slot. However, the Adja’ stories also remind us that Muslim femininity can be fragile in the face of change but also indocile. In fact, these young

Muslim women in Burkina Faso are braving all the constraints of their social context and redefining their own rules of the game. By choosing to be Adja until they get married or blatantly refusing to filter their social media to fit the requests of the mostly-male Muslim clergy, they know how to negotiate their gender and faith identities.

192 Chapter 7: By Way of Concluding: Seeking Certainty in the Uncertain

Introduction

This dissertation sought to understand the use of new media—particularly

Facebook, website, and newspaper—by members of Association des Élèves et Étudiants

Musulmans au Burkina Faso (AEEMB) in reporting and discussing current events and co-constructing the meanings of their identities as young Muslims. It also attempted to identify the ways in which AEEMB’s discourses and praxis reflect a unique socio- cultural and political embodiment of Islam within the changing political landscapes of

Burkina Faso. It further explored the paradox of a secular expression of faith and a theological expression of secularism. This dissertation pursued two questions: 1) How does AEEMB use new media to report current events and to co-construct meaning of

Islam? 2) In what ways do AEEMB media discourses and praxis reflect particular socio- cultural embodiments of Islam in the changing political landscapes of the country?

The dissertation addressed these two learning objectives through a set of critical qualitative methods of learning: semi-structured interviews, a six-month participant observation in the summers of 2018 and 2019, an analysis of AEEMB’s newspaper and website, and a netnographic study of AEEMB’s Facebook page. These qualitative methods of data collection and analysis took a postcolonial theoretical orientation that prioritized how Muslim youth represent themselves as opposed to how they are represented by others. This final chapter sums up insights from my research and expands discussions of the central questions of communication and media, Muslim youth, and civic engagement in Burkina Faso.

193 Summary of Learning

My analysis of AEEMB’s nine-month posts on Facebook (January through

September 2018) found that this youth organization uses its official Facebook page mainly for sharing information with members (34.27%). Other important uses of the

Facebook page include self-promotion (18.78%), dawa or call to Islam (18.31%), sharing opportunities (14.08%), activism or call to non-religious actions (12.21%), and other miscellaneous posts (2.35%). These findings suggest that Facebook is used casually to keep members informed about major happenings, to organize them around a shared idea of intellectual and social wellbeing (information, employment opportunities, etc.), and gently remind them about their faith (dawa). Indeed, it is clear to AEEMB that the faithful also need a constant reminder of what is good and what is forbidden in their faith tradition, hence the deployment of dawa. That the Facebook posts can be easily categorized into five distinct themes suggests an elaborate and purposeful habit of social media usage.

The analysis of AEEMB’s website (www.aemb.bf) suggested that the website is mainly used as a hub for storing resources that members can access to cultivate their knowledge of Islam. This website, although complex and not user-friendly, constitutes a repository of archives and learning tools carefully selected and organized for those

Muslim youth in need of access to Islamic knowledge including the Quran and hadith and their interpretations. This Islamic knowledge includes AEEMB’s own created content but also web links to other learning tools such as videos and websites developed by third parties. Most members I interviewed referred me to this website. I took that to mean that

194 AEEMB members’ heavy reliance on the content of the site is a testimony of what they believe and want to learn as Muslims.

While AEEMB’s social media posts and website content do not offer much insight into its religious ideology at first sight, an analysis of its newspaper—An-Nasr— reveals the presence of two distinct approaches or schools of thought: a secular interpretation of the Islamic text and a hyper sacralization of it in terms of how they use

Islamic texts to support their commentary of current events. Both religious currents are presented as AEEMB’s official commentary on social events. AEEMB also borrows common Arabic words and phrases from the Quran and uses pedantic language to establish its authority on the religious discourse presented in this publication. However, a remarkable and prominent recurrent theme includes “the election doctrine,” which defines Muslims as “the best of communities,” i.e. the one chosen by God. This election doctrine is evoked to make secular arguments as well as to sustain purely spiritual ones.

Despite the challenges associated with developing a strong Muslim media in

Burkina Faso, AEEMB media contributes to ‘reassuring’ the identities of the Muslim youth at this particularly unsettling time. The election doctrine and its mediated forms— whether expressed with strong textual attachment to the Quran and hadith or presented with secular arguments—allows members to consolidate their Muslim identities in the secular education space.

These different uses of media suggest that, even within AEEMB, there is a plurality of Islamic identities and orientations. The fact that AEEMB members are young

Muslim students hailing from all the Islamic denominations of the country might also

195 explain this plurality of tendencies within the official voice of the organization. However, an observation of utmost importance here was that AEEMB does not privilege any specific Islamic tendency over the others. Muslim youth who become members of

AEEMB are simply exhorted to become the best Muslims they can be. They are not encouraged to conform to any single way of being Muslims other than being conscientious Muslims and good citizens who can contribute to the wellbeing of their communities and society in general. Yet, AEEMB’s position concerning certain social issues such as gender norms and teen pregnancy prevention remains closely similar to the dominant orthodox one among Muslims in Burkina Faso. By orthodox Muslims here I mean those who adhere to the local dominant and commonly accepted Islamic principles.

It was through my interviews and observations that I found a much clearer articulation of AEEMB’s social and civic engagement. In fact, the leaders of AEEMB devised what they call Le travail Islamique (The Islamic Work), which they implemented through multiple practices: creating socio-economic opportunities for members, developing activities and ideas to improve the living together of Muslims and non-

Muslims, and actively promoting anti-fundamentalism discourses through public civic education (radio programs, booklets, public conferences, seminars, etc.). The Islamic

Work is not just a concept but a practice that members try to excel in. In doing so, they draw from their understanding of Islamic texts to encourage each other to become young

Muslim role models for their peers.

While the Islamic Work prescribes AEEMB members the personal responsibility to be good citizens, it also compels them to denounce what they often perceive as state

196 institutional malpractice and shortcomings. However, it has become clear to me that the

Muslim youth’s critique of secular institutions does not mean their rejection of such institutions. It rather testifies to the youth’s desire to improve secular institutions and to become fully integrated members. The AEEMB members understand that they are at a crossroads with emerging new media with endless possibilities and that they must be careful not to act in a way that will move them in a wrong direction. They also understand the necessity of moving forward in their search for better conditions even if that means critiquing government actions or reflecting on how to apply faith in every other aspect of their lives.

Even so, AEEMB has yet to develop a strong Islam-aligned political movement although that can become the case in the next decade as graduates join the workforce as intellectuals and highly skilled professionals of the nation. In Burkina Faso, the social influence of Muslim youth affiliated with AEEMB is growing. They are showing that exercising their youth citizenship duty of questioning government malpractice and being

Muslim do not exclude one another. Their communication skills are still relatively rudimentary even when they are using new media, but with the gradual improvement of communication technologies in the country, Muslim youth will continue to develop media literacy which they use to articulate their civic engagement.

Already, that engagement is much stronger offline. When transposed online and through various new media, the impact will certainly be felt at the national level, as

Muslims continually seek to play a role in determining “the code of public morality”

(Cesari, 2014, p.111) and bridging the gap (if there is even any gap at all) between their

197 national identity as Burkinabè and their religious identity as Muslims. Nowhere else is the battle for the enforcement of a Muslim code of morality more visible than in the discourse on Muslim women bodies and their modes of coverage.

To understand and contextualize that feminist discourse, this dissertation paid attention to gender dynamics among Muslim youth in Burkina Faso in general and those affiliated with AEEMB in particular. It centered that analysis on discourses surrounding

Muslim women’s sartorial choices and how that can teach us about the ways in which female members of AEEMB grapple with gender issues within AEEMB and within the

Burkinabè society at large. My research found an ambivalent acceptance of gender equality among AEEMB members even though some of its female members are pushing the limits and working toward upgrading their own social standing within AEEMB and the Burkinabè society at large. Yet, AEEMB’s position regarding gender emancipation is comparative to that of the larger Muslim society, with the exception that within AEEMB, more room for improvement is allowed and often encouraged especially by senior female members. In addition, because they come from all Islamic tendencies, female AEEMB members constitute a disparate fusion of adherents that have the potential to negotiate established gender norms.

With regard to Islamic pious fashion, most of the young women adopt it consciously to attain certain personal goals that, in this process, showcase their agency.

Most Adjas or young women who adopt a pious fashion understand that their sartorial choice invites a male gaze (online and offline) that perceives them as submissive, unintelligent sexual objects. The Adjas’ choice of this dress code is not necessarily

198 guided by spiritual ascent but rather a clever way of negotiating their identity in a social context where the Muslim body, especially the Muslim woman’s body is seen as an embodiment of her faith. Often, they do opt for this fashion to play ‘the game’ of the patriarchy to get access to things such as marriage proposals, respect, and safety.

However, it is argued in this dissertation that to understand the nexus of pious fashion and gender normativity within the Burkinabè context, it is crucial to take into consideration the neoliberal economic system that promotes such clothing and the postcolonial context of Burkina Faso that contributes to widening the gap of gender inequality.

Discussion

The data presented in this study showed that in “the highly competitive religious market” of Burkina Faso (Madore, 2016), the youth of AEEMB have forged an admirable trajectory as worthy interlocutors of Islam in the eyes of the Burkinabè society and government. In fact, the government awarded them the public recognition of “an organization of public interest” status. Muslim youth in Burkina Faso are developing communicative practices to sustain that new trajectory of Islam, which is more and more organized and capable of making itself heard within the national political discourse.

While previous successive leaders of AEEMB did not succeed to develop a strong print media, the current leaders are on their way to combining print and social media to communicate their understanding of Islam and to inform, support, and train their members in their Islamic faith. To date, these combined communication formats present

199 an Islam that is more and more open to incorporating secular civism in its everyday approach to faith.

The socio-political landscapes and the dynamics of the formation of a Muslim youth political discourse in Burkina Faso are important paradigms for the analysis of the

Muslim youth’s religious and media discourses. This dissertation acknowledges that invoking the Muslims’ religious and media discourses to explain their political orientation was not sufficient to fully understand the deeper relationships Muslims have with other socio-economic and political forces beyond their mere appurtenance to a

Muslim ummah. It was therefore crucial to observe their practice of faith and their parallel activities and social engagements expressed in religious terminology beyond print and social media.

This research orientation allowed me to understand that these trajectories of

AEEMB’s religious formation and its members’ education in a secular and pluri-religious space—the Burkinabè public school—are contingent upon the many ways state power deals with Muslims and Muslim issues. From the colonial and early postcolonial states’ difficult and dismissive attitudes towards Islam as a major religion of the land to the recent manipulations of the Muslim clergy in national democratic politics—for example, support of hajj and invitation of the Muslim clergy to mediate between different political actors, etc.—Muslim youth made enormous efforts to gain recognition as an association of public interest within democratic institutions. This is indicative of a new dynamism which challenges the historical blueprints for “how to govern the faithful” and the

200 dominant “quiet Islam” rhetoric that colored most of the literature.21 It is clear from the literature that, historically, the colonial and early postcolonial states in Burkina Faso did not have an equidistant perspective regarding all religions in its conceptualization of secularism inherited from the French governance system.

However, despite being formed mostly in response to Muslims’ perception of being marginalized, the civic engagement and media activism of Muslim youth are not moved by a psychology of resentment toward secular democratic institutions or other religious denominations in Burkina Faso. The civic engagement of the Muslim youth is not antagonistic. Rather, it is an emancipatory movement that seeks inclusion and democracy. As such, governance structures and democratic institutions could act diligently in response to youth concerns to reinforce collaboration and provide institutional mentorship.

AEEMB does not trouble the public repose, but by seeking to shape the public or private behavior or their members through the lenses of their religious morals, they are stepping into the domain of the political sphere (if there is anything separating religion and politics in the first place). This calls for rigorous attention to the modes of formulations of such actions. For AEEMB members, faith is also a technology of citizenship, i.e. a set of tools at their disposal to engage in the exercise of becoming fully acknowledged citizens. Their religious discourse responds to socio-political issues of

21 This is a subtitle reference to a recent paper in Comparative Politics by Sebastian Elischer (2019), which examined the intricacies of state management of Salafi groups in Sahelian Africa. 201 their time and stands as a firm mark of their individual and collective guidance toward civic expression and civic participation.

What is clear from this research on AEEMB is that there is the development of a new form of religiosity that does not separate itself from other domains such as politics.

This form of religiosity is informed by an “uninhibited attitude toward Islam” (Y.

Ouedraogo, p. 75), which draws from students’ home religious upbringing and their secular education. The public higher education institution as a space for religious formation is in itself a subject that has not received much attention in the literature.

AEEMB seeks to become a fulltime player in the political arena of the country. With the help of graduates and other Muslim intellectuals who often act as advisors and providers of financial support, this goal of becoming active participants in the democratic search for political power no longer seems, to them, far from their reach.

In Western Europe, the academic debate on Islam and modernity has reached a bargaining impasse around a supposed need to reform the Islamic faith especially aspects concerning its public expression. Though this discourse echoes in West Africa where the grip of religious extremism seems to have awakened the need for social and institutional reforms in public institutions, in Burkina Faso, it is the Muslim youth themselves who are demonstrating that Muslims can become active agents in the growing secular institutions.

Thus, in order to adapt their understanding of the Islamic theology to include thoughts and practices inherited from other faith traditions different from Islam, the AEEMB youth are developing practical teachings of an Islam that reinvents itself. Perhaps

AEEMB youth are indirectly adhering to what Mungwini (2014) argued:

202 The promise of a genuine African modernity is not found in a life of mimesis, but

in the ability to re-appropriate indigenous forms of knowledge capable of

providing alternative interpretive and normative frameworks upon which the

epistemic liberation of Africa can be grounded. (p. 78)

For the modern Muslim youth in Burkina Faso, Islam constitutes that “indigenous forms of knowledge” and represents the way through which modernity may be imagined or reimagined.

A closer look at a youth association like AEEMB and their praxis of Islam can contribute to tamping the growing Islamophobia in the West and western transnational media. Through AEEMB, there is an opportunity for opening a space of discernment between seeking to consolidate faith, or even calling others to faith, and a purely uncalled for proselytism. When Muslim youth of AEEMB talk about faith, they do so, knowing that on the campus not everyone is a Muslim and that not everyone is interested in hearing what they have to say. Therefore, on campus, they target their call to Islam to specific Muslim youth who have shown interest in practicing their faith. Online, they talk to their Muslim peers and invite them to become better Muslims.

Theoretically, doctrinal antagonisms derived from the different turuq or tendencies in the communities that AEEMB members come from are taught to be accepted and tempered with AEEMB membership in favor of a “neutral” and “secular”

Islamic doctrine. But in practice, it is clear that different AEEMB leaders come with different approaches inspired by their own “home” tariqa. This might justify the existence of a plurality of reading of the Islamic texts even though such differences are

203 still mitigated to represent the official voice of the youth. Additionally, the election of

AEEMB national leaders for a non-renewable two-year term prevents the potential development of a strong individual religious figure among them. Instead, it offers an opportunity for a leadership exercise in democratic principles. Nonetheless, former leaders often remain close to the newly elected leaders to offer them support, guidance, and access to institutional memory.

The civic engagement of these Muslim “social cadets” (Vanvyve, 2016), far from being a hindrance, offers an opportunity to boost the political and social inclusion of a section of people who always felt marginalized and to consolidate the country’s weak democratic institutions. To foster a resilient Muslim youth civic community, decision makers may need to pay attention to their grievances, which often are built upon the idea that being a Muslim does not guarantee social ascension. They could also provide professional guidance for youth initiatives. The youth’s religiously inspired civic engagement through Le Travail Islamique could be promoted and guided so that it may contribute to promoting entrepreneurship. In Burkina Faso, a purposeful, professional guidance of Muslim youth entrepreneurship could in turn help absorb youth unemployment and its potential corollary consequential implications that include the risk of falling prey to extremist recruitment.

It is clear that the Muslim youth in Burkina Faso support conflict mitigation activities. At their own modest level, they even try to develop and communicate anti- fanatic discourses in their gatherings. Samson’s (2017) argument that Islamic associations in Burkina Faso are more in the quest for legitimacy vis-à-vis the state than

204 in a desire for emancipation still hold true for AEEMB. This means that AEEMB not only presents a unique, positive story of Muslim civic engagement with modern secular institutions, but it also constitutes a key ally in the fight against the rising religious fundamentalism in the country and the Sahelian West African region. The rhetoric of

AEEMB’s mediated messages constitutes a counter radical message that can dilute any extremist rhetoric which youth at large might be exposed to in other circles.

The Muslim public space in Burkina Faso—beyond its physical dimensions

(mosques, streets, schools, etc.) and its online extension—is also an ideological space of confrontation of ideas and practices. Since this Muslim public space is located in a nexus of multiple forces such as the neoliberal economy and the postcolonial condition of the state, for the Muslim youth of Burkina Faso, defining and maintaining a Muslim identity in such a complex space constitutes a daunting challenge. In addition, the Islamic space is plural and not unified despite the efforts of its actors (Samson, 2017). In such a context, any criticism of the state or the economic system, when articulated through Islam, can be quickly suspected of connections to radicalism. The recent surge of academic interest in

Islam and particularly in Muslim youth in Burkina Faso may be the result of the intense visibility of this complex Islamic public space and the anxiety around the emergence of violent non-state armed groups in the country.

Closing Comments

As I come to the final pages of this dissertation, I am reminded of the spoken wisdom in the sermon of one Imam at an AEEMB Friday prayer worship in the summer of 2019:

205 You must retain that it is our duty as young Muslims to plunge into our faith in

order to give certitude to this uncertain world of ours. This can be a daunting task,

especially considering the current social climate. The Quran teaches us that man

is nine, never ten. It is the awareness of that imperfection of ours that requires that

we unite around the AEEMB vision.

When I embarked on this study of Muslim youth and their communicative practices in

Burkina Faso, I hoped to provide more clarity through articulating an understudied, yet important voice in contemporary Africa. I sought to avoid conducting a ‘disaster ethnography,’ considering the socio-political context of the country. As a Muslim myself,

I understood the daunting risks I expose myself to in studying a reality that is still unfolding. This Imam’s emphasis on the duty of Muslim youth to return to their faith to seek meaning in their uncertain and incomplete world serves as a reminder of my own uncertainties as to what degree I understood him and his congregation. I take ownership of any misreading and misinterpretation I might have given to the events and stories I reported in this study. I invite readers to find in them my own imperfections but, nevertheless, to join me to continue this exploration.

Future research related to this dissertation could pursue a comparison between different religious youth groups. Although AEEMB is the largest and most visible

Muslim youth organization in Burkina Faso, there are other Muslim youth organizations in the country. Additionally, a comparative study of AEEMB and another Muslim youth group or a Christian youth organization in Burkina Faso would provide a different dimension to our understanding of youth religious activism and identity formation.

206 Moreover, future research could consider Muslim youth regional associative networks to trace how youth associations across French-speaking Sahelian West Africa communicate faith. Furthermore, a parallel and yet central question that this dissertation research prepared me to undertake is that of media, religion, and the production and dissemination polemical information. To further explore these above mentioned questions, I now summon my reader to imagine and reimagine other ways of researching

Muslims and communication in ways that honor what is of value to those I learned along with.

207 References

Ahmed, L. (2011). A quiet revolution: The veil's resurgence, from the Middle East to

America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Al-Zo’by, M. (2015). Representing Islam in the age of neo-orientalism: Media, politics

and identity. Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 8(3), 217-238.

Anderson B. & Greifenhagen, V. F. (2013). Covering Up on the Prairies: Perceptions of

Muslim Identity. Multiculturalism and Security in Canada. In Emma, T. &

Annelies M. (Eds.), Islamic Fashion and Anti-fashion. New Perspectives from

Europe and North America (55-72). New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Vol. 1).

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Ariotti, M. (2016). Election note: Burkina Faso’s 2015 presidential and legislative

elections. Electoral Studies, 44445-448.

Armstrong, K. (2006). Muhammad: a prophet for our time. New York, NY: Atlas

Books/Harper Collins, c2006.

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Palo Alto,

CA: Stanford University Press.

Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown

University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Audet-Gosselin, L. (2016). Une nation pluraliste Les limites du dialogue

interconfessionnel chez les jeunes militants religieux Ouagadougou. Canadian

Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines.

208 Badri, B. (2017). African women activists: contributions and challenges ahead. In Badri,

B., & Tripp, A. M. (Eds) Women’s activism in Africa (224-240). London: Zed

Books

Bakare-Yusuf, B. (2003). “Yorubas don’t do gender”: a critical review of Oyeronke

Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western

Gender Discourses (Book). African Identities, 1(1), 119–140.

Bedaux, R. M. (1993). Les plus anciens tissus retrouvés par les archéologues. Vallées du

Niger, 456-463.

Behar, R. (2005). Foreword. In Straight B. (Ed.) Women on the Verge of Home, (ix-xi).

New York: State University of New York Press.

Bianchini, P., & Korbéogo, G. (2008). Le syndicalisme étudiant, des origines à nos jours:

un acteur permanent dans l'évolution socio-politique du Burkina Faso. Journal of

Higher Education in Africa/Revue de l'enseignement supérieur en Afrique, 6(2-3),

33-60.

Bidwell, N. (2016). Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa. AI &

Society, 31(1),51-77.

Bjarnesen, J. (2014). Social Branding in Urban Burkina Faso. Nordic Journal of African

Studies, 23(2), 83–99. Central Intelligence Agency (2018). The world factbook.

Africa, Burkina Faso. Retrieved from

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/uv.html

Bucar, E. (2017). Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press.

209 Chelini-Pont, B. (2017). La croissance des sans-religion aux Etats-Unis. In A. Dieckhoff

& P. Portier (Eds.), L'Enjeu mondial. Religion et politique (105-113). Paris:

Presses : Sciences Po.

Chouli, L. (2013). Les mouvements sociaux de 1998 et 2011 au Burkina Faso comme

indices et réponses à la crise de la représentation politique. Le retour de la

question politique : crise de la représentation et luttes démocratiques en Afrique,

Colloque International de Dakar, 22-24 May 2013. 1-7.

Clifford, J., (1986). Introduction: partial truths. In Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.).

Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography: a School of American

Research advanced seminar (1-26). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coulon, C. (1983). Les musulmans et le pouvoir en Afrique noire: religion et contre-

culture (Vol. 26). Paris: Karthala Editions.

Counter-Extremism Project (2018). Burkina Faso: Extremism & Counter-Extremism

[Press release]. Retrieved from

https://www.counterextremism.com/countries/burkina-faso de Vries, H. (2001). In media res: global religion, public spheres, and the task of

contemporary religious studies. In H. de Vries and S. Weber (Eds.), Religion and

Media, (4-42). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Derrida, J. (2011). “Above All, No Journalists!”. In H. de Vries and S. Weber (Eds.),

Religion and Media, (56-93). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Diekhoff, A & Portier, P. (2017). Introduction. La religion recomposée. In A. Dieckhoff

& P. Portier (Eds.), L'Enjeu mondial. Religion et politique (7-19). Paris: Presses :

210 Sciences Po.

Ellis C., Tony E. A., & Bochner A. P. (2015). Autoethnography: An Overview.

Astrolabio: Nueva Época, Vol 0, Iss 14, pp 249-273 (2015), (14), 249.

Eickelman, D. F. (2003). Communication and control in the Middle East: publication and

it discontents. In D. F., Eickelman & J. W. Anderson (Eds.), New media in the

Muslim world: the emerging public sphere (33-44). Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Elischer, S. (2019). Governing the Faithful: State Management of Salafi Activity in the

Francophone Sahel. Comparative Politics, 51(2), 199-218.

Englebert, P. (1996). Burkina Faso: unsteady statehood in West Africa. Boulder:

WestviewPress.

Esposito, J. L. (2003). The Oxford dictionary of Islam. New York: Oxford University

Press, 2003.

Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin white masks. New York: Grove Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. trans. (A. S. Smith, Trans.).

London: Tavistock, (Original work published 1969)

Freire, P., & Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: Seabury

Press [1973].

Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Goldmeier, H. E. (2016). Secularism. Salem Press Encyclopedia.

Gomez-Perez, M. (2016) Women’s Islamic activism in Burkina Faso: toward

211 renegotiated social norms?, Canadian Journal of African Studies /Revue

canadienne des études africaines,50:1, 45-63.

Gomez-Perez, M. (2017). “Political” Islam in Senegal and Burkina Faso: contrasting

approaches to mobilization since the 1990s. Mediterranean Politics,22(1), 176–

195.

Gomez-Perez, M. & Madore, F. (2013). Prêcheurs(ses) musulman(e)s et stratégies de

communication au Burkina Faso depuis 1990 : des processus différentiés de

conversion interne. Théologiques, 21, (2), 121–157.

Griffiths, C. H. (2010). Globalizing the postcolony: Contesting discourses of gender and

development in Francophone Africa. Lexington Books.

Guire, D. (1988-1989) Approche anthropo-sociologique du tissage, de la teinture et des

pratiques vestimentaires dans le Moogo (Burkina Faso) : des colporteurs yarse

aux centres de formation artisanale, Memoire de maitrise, Universite Paris 8-

Vincennes.

Hallisey, C. (2013). The care of the past: the place of pastness in transgenerational

projects. In B. Hellemans, W. Otten, & B. Pranger (Eds), On religion and

memory (89-99). New York: Fordham University Press.

Harsch, E. (2017). Burkina Faso: A History of Power, Protest, and Revolution. London:

Zed Books.

Hart, A. (2014). Peace in the Land of Upright People: Religion and Violence in Burkina

Faso. Journal For The Study Of Religion, (2), 172.

Hayford, S. R., & Trinitapoli, J. (2011). Religious Differences in Female Genital Cutting:

212 A Case Study from Burkina Faso. Journal For The Scientific Study Of Religion,

50(2), 252-271.

Henry, V. (2015). Mouvements Citoyens Engagés en Afrique de l’Ouest; Le Cas du

Burkina Faso. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Europaea, 60(3), 57-72.

Herbert, D. (2011). Theorizing religion and media in contemporary societies: An account

of religious 'publicization'. European Journal Of Cultural Studies, 14(6), 626-648.

Hilgers, M., & Mazzocchetti, J. (2006). L'après-Zongo: entre ouverture politique et

fermeture des possibles. Politique africaine, (1), 5-18.

Hirschkind, C. (2011). Media, mediation, religion. Social Anthropology / Anthropologie

Sociale, 19(1), 90–97.

Howard, S. (2016). Modern Muslims: A Sudan Memoir. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Humphreys, A. (2016). Social Media: Enduring Principles. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Ilboudo A. (2017). Le vivre ensemble selon l’islam. Pour un retour à l'idéal des

enseignements coraniques et prophétiques. Ouagadougou : Impression ESIF Sarl.

Ilboudo, M. (2007). Le féminisme au Burkina Faso : mythes et réalités. Recherches

féministes, 20(2), 163-177.

International Telecommunication Union (2016). Mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions

per 100 inhabitants. Retrieved from

http://data.un.org/Data.aspxq=Burkina+Faso&d=ITU&f=ind1Code%3aI911%3bc

ountry Code%3aBFA#ITU

Issa, R. (2017). The Politics of Islam in the Sahel: Between Persuasion and Violence.

213 London: Routledge.

Jha, M. (2016). The global beauty industry: Colorism, racism, and the national body.

New York: Routledge.

Johnson, B., & Christensen, L. (2008). Educational research: Quantitative, qualitative,

and mixed approaches. California: Sage.

Jourde, C. (2017). How Islam intersects ethnicity and social status in the Sahel. Journal

Of Contemporary African Studies, 1-19.

Kaba, L. (2000). Islam in West Africa: Radicalism and New Ethic of Disagreement,

1960-1990. In Levtzio, N. & Pouwels, R. L. (Eds.), The History of Islam in Africa

(189- 208). Athens: Ohio University Press

Kane, I. (2016). “Les catholiques sont l’élite!”: représentations de l’espace politique par

une minorité religieuse au Burkina Faso. Canadian Journal of African

Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines, 50(1), 65-86.

Kant, E. (1783) Qu’est-ce que les Lumières (S. Piobeta, Trans.) France : Larousse.

Kivak, R. (2016). Mass Media. Salem Press Encyclopedia. Retrieved from

https://proxy.library.ohio.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=ers&AN=119214531&site=eds-live&scope=site

Kobo, O. (2012). Unveiling modernity in twentieth-century West African Islamic

reforms. Leiden: Brill.

Laermans, R., & Verschraegen, G. (2001). “The late Niklas Luhmann” on religion: an

overview. Social Compass, 48(1), 7–20.

Langewiesche, K. (2019), A Review of 6o Years of Scholarship on Religions in Burkina

214 Faso, (Working Papers 164 Anthropology and African Studies) retrieved from

http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/eng/92.php.

Lapidus, I. M. (1988). A history of Islamic societies. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Laurence, J., & Vaisse, J. (2007). Integrating Islam: Political and religious challenges in

contemporary France. Brookings Institution Press.

Laurent, P. (2005). The Process of Bricolage Between Mythic Societies and Global

Modernity: Conversion to the Assembly of God Faith in Burkina Faso. Social

Compass, 52(3), 309-323.

Lenin, V. I. (1969). On religion. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Levtzion, N. (2000). Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800. In Nehemia Levtzion &

Randall L. Pouwels (Eds.), The History of Islam in Africa (63-91. Athens: Ohio

University Press.

Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2011). Qualitative communication research methods.

California: Sage Publishing.

Lincoln, A. (2009). Religion and politics. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics.

(3rd ed., pp. 456-457). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Loada A. & Romaniuk, P. (2014). Prévention de l'extrémisme violent au Burkina Faso.

Vers une résilience nationale dans un contexte d'insécurité régionale. Goshen:

Global Center on Cooperative Security.

Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/postcolonialism. New York: Routledge.

Lovejoy, P. E. (2016). Jihād in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions. Athens:

215 Ohio University Press, [2016].

Luhmann, N. (1998) “Religion als Kommunikation”, in H. Tyrell, V. Krech and H.

Knoblauch (eds) Religion als Kommunikation, pp. 135–146. Würzburg: Ergon.

Madore, F. (2016). L’islam ivoirien et burkinabé à l’ère du numérique 2.0. Journal des

anthropologues, (3), 151-178.

Madore, F. (2016). Islam, médias, mise en place du Sénat et article 37 de la Constitution:

changement de paradigme au Burkina Faso (1991–2014)?. Canadian Journal of

African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines, 50(1), 7-27.

Madore, F., & Gomez-Perez, M. (2016). Muslim women in Burkina Faso since the

1970s: toward recognition as figures of religious authority?. Islamic Africa, 7(2),

185-209.

Malek, C. (1984). Le corps en Islam. Paris : Quadrige/PUF.

Mandaville, P. (2001). Reimagining Islam in diaspora: the politics of mediated

community. Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands), 63(2-3), 169-186.

Marie, P. (2009). Micro-histoire de la diffusion de l'islam en Afrique de l'Ouest. Création

de réseaux et de chaînes d'enseignement en Bwamu (Burkina Faso) (Micro-

history of the Spread of Islam in West Africa. The Setting up of Teaching

Networks and Teaching Chains in Bwamu (Burkina Faso)). Cahiers D'études

Africaines, (196), 969.

Marcus, G. E. (2001). From Rapport Under Erasure to Theaters of Complicit Reflexivity.

Qualitative Inquiry, 7(4), 519-528.

Marcus, G. E. (1986). Ethnography in the Modern World System. In J. Clifford &

216 Marcus, G. E. (Ed.), Writing Culture the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp.

163-188). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martens, L. (1989). Sankara, Compaoré et la révolution burkinabè. Editions Aden

McCarthy, N. (2017) The Most and Least Expensive Countries for Broadband

[Digital image]. Retrieved from

https://www-statista-com.proxy.library.ohio.edu/chart/11963/the-most-and-least-

expensive-countries-for-broadband/.

McLean, I (2003). Secularization. In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (2nd ed.).

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McMillan, D. E. (1995). Sahelisions: planned settlement and river blindness control in

Burkina Faso. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Moghadam, V. M. (2002). Islamic feminism and its discontents: Toward a resolution of

the debate. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27(4), 1135-1171.

Mungwini, P. (2014). The African renaissance and the quest for epistemic

liberation. Australasian Review of African Studies, The, 35(2), 88.

Nfah-Abbenyi, J. M. (1997). Gender in African women's writing: identity, sexuality, and

Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ngom, F. (2016). Muslims beyond the Arab world: The odyssey of ajami and the

Muridiyya. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2004). From publish or perish to publish and perish: What ‘Africa’s

100 best books tell us about publishing Africa. Journal of Asian and African

Studies, 39(5), 331-355.

217 Nyamnjoh, F. B. (2005). Africa's media, democracy and the politics of belonging.

London: Zed Books

Ouattara, V. (2006). L’ère Compaoré. Crimes, politique et gestion du pouvoir. Paris :

Klanba.

Ouedraogo, B. (2001). African leader asks pardon in bid to quell public anger. Associated

Press. Retrieved from

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_

style_guide/reference_list_electronic_sources.html

Ouedraogo, L. (2019). Muslim women and pious fashion in Burkina Faso as identity,

pose, and defiance. The Communication Review, 1-25.

Ouedraogo, Y. (2013). Diversité musulmane et laïcité au Burkina Faso, de 1960 à nos

jours. Cahiers du CERLESHS Lettre, Sciences Humaines et Sociales, Tome

XXVIII, N°45. 1-28

Ouedraogo, Y. (2019). Le réformisme Islamique Francophone au Burkina Faso. In D.

Alice, L. O. Kibora, & L. Katrin (Eds.) Rencontres religieuses et dynamiques

sociales au Burkina Faso (pp. 74-89). Dakar : Amalion Publishing.

Otayek, R. (1984). La crise de la communauté musulmane de Haute-Volta : L'islam

voltaïque entre réformisme et tradition, autonomie et subordination (Crisis in the

Upper Volta Moslem Community: Islam between Reform and Tradition,

Autonomy and Subordination). Cahiers D'études Africaines, (95), 299.

Otayek, R. (1997). L’Église catholique au Burkina Faso. Un contre-pouvoir à

contretemps de l’histoire?. Religion et transition démocratique en Afrique, 221-

218 258.

Ott, B. L., & Mack, R. L. (2014). Critical media studies: An introduction. Hoboken, NJ:

John Wiley & Sons.

Oyewumi, O. (1997). The invention of women: Making an African sense of western

gender discourses. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Parks, L. (2015). Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures. Lisa, P. &

Nicole, S. (Eds.). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Pelletier, D. (2005). L'école, l'Europe, les corps: la laïcité et le voile. Vingtième Siècle.

Revue d'histoire, (3), 159-176.

Portier, P. (2017). Les régimes de laïcité en Europe. In A. Dieckhoff & P. Portier (Eds.),

L'Enjeu mondial. Religion et politique (211-221). Paris: Presses : Sciences Po.

Rashi, T. & McCombs, M. (2017). Biblical antecedents of modern Agenda-Setting:

religious platforms in lieu of mass media. Essachess, Vol 10, Iss 2, Pp 77-92

(2017), (2), 77.

Robinson, D. (1991). An Approach to Islam in West African History. In K. Harrow (ed.),

Faces of Islam in African Literature (107-129). Portsmouth: Heinemann

Rodriguez, A., & Chawla, D. (2008). Locating Diversity in Communication Studies.

International & Intercultural Communication Annual, 31, 33–57.

Reporters Without Border. (2017). Burkina Faso: Real but fragile media freedom |

Reporters without borders. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from

https://rsf.org/en/burkina-faso

Reuters Top News [Reuters]. (2016, January 15). BREAKING: Al Qaeda of Islamic

219 Maghreb says it is responsible for Burkina Faso hotel attack: SITE Intelligence

Group [Twitter moment]. Retrieved from

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/688133363111079937

Riesman, P. (1977). Freedom in Fulani social life: an introspective ethnography (M.

Fuller, Trans. ). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Sahel and West Africa Club (2018, February 02). Burkina Faso. Retrieved April 30,

2018, from http://www.west-africa-brief.org/content/en/burkina-faso-still-has-

long-way-go-gender-equality

Said, E. (1995). W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Saint-Lary M. (2011). Le Coran en cours du soir. La formation comme outil de

réislamisation des musulmans francophones. Ethnographiques.org, 22 - May

2011. Les outils d’un islam en mutation. Réislamisation et moralisation au sud du

Sahara. Retrieved from http://AEEMB.ethnographiques.org/2011/Saint-Lary

Saint-Lary, M. (2013). From Settlement to Divorce: An Islamic Judicial Practice in

Burkina Faso. Diogenes, 60(3/4), 133-142.

Salim D. (2013). Mediating Islamic Looks. In Emma, T. & Annelies M. (Eds.), Islamic

Fashion and Anti-fashion. New Perspectives from Europe and North America

(209-224). New York: Bloomsbury.

Samson, F. (2017). Pluralisme et concurrence islamique dans l’appropriation d’un espace

public religieux. Analyses comparées au Sénégal et au Burkina Faso. In G. Holder

et J.P Dozon (Eds) Les politiques de l’islam en Afrique. Mémoires, réveils et

populismes islamiques (281-298). Paris : Karthala.

220 Sayyid, S. (2017). Political Islam in the Aftermath of “Islamic State”. ReOrient, 3(1), 65-

82.

Schulz, D. E. (2012). Muslims and new media in West Africa: pathways to God.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c2012.

Shome, R., & Hegde, R. (2002). Postcolonial approaches to communication: Charting the

terrain, engaging the intersections. Communication Theory, 12(3), 249–270.

Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples.

London: Zed Books Ltd.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak?. Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on

the history of an idea, 21-78.

Springwood, C. F., & King, C. R. (2001). Unsettling Engagements: On the Ends of

Rapport in Critical Ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, (4). 403.

Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tolan, J. (2017). A French Paradox? Islam and Laïcité. Georgetown Journal of

International Affairs, 18(2), 41-50.

Traoré, B. (2010). À la recherche d’une voie africaine de la laïcité. Islam et pluralisme

religieux au Burkina Faso. Islam et société au sud du Sahara, 2, 9-54.

Traoré, H. (2016). Chaîne de lumière pour les victimes du 15 janvier. L’Evènement.

Retrieved from https://www.evenement-bf.net/spip.php?article1356

UNdata (2011) The state of world children. (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=media%20Burkina%20Faso&d=SOWC&f=inID:2

27;crID:302

221 Vanvyve, A. (2015). L'islam burkinabé sous la IVe République. Cahiers d'études

africaines, 219 (3), 489-5008.

Vanvyve, A. (2016). L’érosion de l’autorité musulmane à Ouagadougou: le discours de

militants de l’Association des Elèves et Etudiants Musulmans au Burkina.

Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines,

50(1), 29-44.

Vitale, M. (2012). Trajectoires d’evolution de l’islam au Burkina Faso. Cahiers d’Études

Africaines, 52(2–3), 367–387.

Watson, H.(1994). Women and the veil: personal response to global process. In A. S.

Ahmed & H. Donnan (Eds.), Islam, globalization, and postmodernity (141-159).

London: Routledge.

Wallerstein, I. (1995). The End of What Modernity? Theory and Society, (4), 471.

Weber, S. (2001). Religion, repetition, media. In H. de Vries and S. Weber (Eds.),

Religion and Media, (43-55). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution (Vol. 1253). Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Wimmer, R. D., & Dominick, J. R. (2011). Mass media research (9th ed.). Boston:

Cengage Learning.

Zida, Y. I. (2015). Discours sur la Situation de la Nation. Retrieved from

https://www.burkina24.com/2015/06/12/lintegralite-du-discours-du-premier-

ministre-isaac-zida-devant-le-cnt/

222 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Thesis and Dissertation Services ! !