Janson Paper

‘We don’t despair, since we know that Islam is the truth’ New Expressions of Religiosity in Young Adherents of the Tabligh Jama‘at in The Gambia Marloes Janson Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin Paper to be presented at the conference Youth and the Global South: Religion, Politics and the Making of Youth in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Dakar, 13–15 October 2006 Introduction When my neighbour – an elderly imam and marabout trained in the Sufi tradition1 – in the Gambian town of Sukuta where I was conducting field research,2 learned that I was interested in the expansion of the Tabligh Jama‘at, a transnational Islamic missionary movement originating in South Asia, he summoned me to his compound. After showing me pictures of his master, a Tijani sheikh from Senegal,3 he warned me of the dangers of ‘asking children (dindingos) questions about Islam’. Instead of interviewing them I should have come to him: 1 My neighbour presented himself as an outspoken Tijani, but many of the ‘mainstream’ Muslims whom I interviewed did not formally affiliate themselves with any Sufi order. Nevertheless, I take them to be part of a Sufi tradition, since they involve themselves in mystical practices and employ special litanies of prayer and techniques of invoking God’s names as ways of approaching God (see Soares 2005: 37). Most of them have been trained in traditional Quranic schools run by marabouts in which the emphasis is on the recitation of Quranic verses. Knowledge is structured in this system in a hierarchical way and its dissemination is restricted to a few specialists. Muslim saints are believed to be at the highest point in the hierarchy before God. The reformist tradition, represented in the quotation below by the young adherents of the Tabligh Jama‘at, calls much of the Sufi tradition into question and seeks to change the way Islam is practised locally by modelling Islamic practice on the Arab world. In this reformist tradition knowledge is theoretically available to everyone, and the individual’s intellectual development is no longer associated with divine intervention (Brenner 2000: 7–8; Soares 2005: 9–10). 2 This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between November 2003 and April 2004, April and June 2005, and March and June 2006 in The Gambia (West Africa). The research between 2003 and 2005 was funded by a grant from the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), in Leiden (the Netherlands). The research in 2006 was funded by a grant from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), and conducted under the ZMO’s research project ‘Urban Youth Cultures in West Africa: Processes of Translocal Appropriation’. I would like to thank Mamadou Diouf, with whom I discussed my latest fieldwork data, for his valuable comments and suggestions. 3 The Tijani order was established in Fez, Morocco, in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was founded by the Algerian Ahmad al-Tijani. In the mid-nineteenth century Al 1 Sufis are willing to sacrifice in order to worship Allah, but Mashalas [see below] don’t do that. They are lazy Muslims. There are too many Mashalas here, especially among the youth. I don’t support them. They don’t act according to our ancestors’ ways. That is why I reject them. They don’t know anything about Islam. When we accept their ways, misunderstanding will enter into Islam. That is why I send them away when they come to the mosque in Sukuta (…). A child should obey an elder, a son should obey his father, a wife should obey her husband, and the Muslim congregation should obey its imam. But they don’t show any respect for the imam. These small boys are now provoking the elders. That shows that they are not true Muslims but hypocrites (...). If someone is more knowledgeable in Islam than you, why do you reject him? The Mashalas are ignorant; they only want to mislead people (…). Life in this world is very short. We should try to inquire into Islam before we die. You are welcome any time you wish to discuss more about Islam. My neighbour used the term ‘Mashalas’ as a pejorative nickname for the adherents of the Tabligh Jama‘at, a reformist movement encouraging greater religious devotion and observance that appeals especially to youngsters in The Gambia.4 Mashala is derived from the Arabic ma sha‘ Allah, ‘what God wishes’, an expression the adherents often exclaim. Since they do not show respect for the established Sufi Muslim elders, my neighbour condemns the Mashalas. In order to give vent to his contempt, he also called them dindingos, that is, children. By referring to them in this way the imam-marabout depicted Mashalas as idle and their knowledge of Islam as insignificant. Defining them as ‘small boys’, as people who are not entitled to speak in public since local power relations are of old embedded in gerontocracy, appeared to be a strategy to guarantee the Sufi elders’ hegemony. But although my neighbour called them ignorant, he considered Mashalas a source of danger since they introduce misunderstandings into Gambian society. This view was endorsed by the vice- president of The Gambia Supreme Islamic Council,5 who told me that he suspected that Haji Umar Tal disseminated its doctrine in Senegal, from where it spread to other West African countries. 4 Because of its negative connotation the Gambian adherents of the Jama‘at usually do not use the term Mashala to describe themselves. Several adherents told me: ‘We call ourselves just ordinary Muslims. All we do is follow the Prophet’s footsteps.’ But ‘ordinary’ may be interpreted here as ‘extraordinary’. In an attempt to indicate semantically that they are the only ones who correctly practise the Sunna, that is the Prophetic traditions, the adherents also call themselves Sunnis or Ahl-al-Sunna (the people of the Sunna) (cf. Augis 2005: 311). They cited a common Hadith (account of what the Prophet said or did) which claims there are 73 denominations in Islam, only one of which, in their opinion the Tabligh Jama‘at, is destined for Paradise. Worldwide Mashalas are known as Tablighis, a term I will also use in this paper. 5 This is an umbrella Muslim organization established in 1992 with the aim of facilitating communication between Islamic associations and the government on the one hand and the outside Islamic world on the other. 2 Mashalas will ‘dominate The Gambia within a period of five to ten years and will eventually destroy the country’. This picture of Mashalas corresponds to the image in social science literature on African youth cultures, in which there is a tendency to define youth as a ‘problem’ and to depict them as a ‘lost generation’ (e.g. Cruise O’Brien 1996; Seekings 1996; De Boeck and Honwana 2005). Youth is frequently associated with social marginality, and, since it has little to lose, it is often stigmatized as radical and violent (e.g. Wulff 1995; Cruise O’Brien 1996; Diouf 2003). However, the Gambian adherents of the Tabligh Jama‘at with whom I worked do not correspond to the stereotyped image of marginalized youth. This paper endeavours to study these youngsters as agents rather than as victims of societal change or objects of adult activity. It will do so by exploring how they appropriate the ideology of the Jama‘at in their daily lives, and adapt it to the local, mostly urban, context in which they operate. Instead of talking about young people, my paper will focus on how Gambian youngsters themselves imagine ‘youth’ and how they produce a youth culture centred upon Islam. Although most Gambian Tablighis are of young age, ‘youth’ is not a fixed social category and indicates a wider meaning than age (e.g. Wulff 1995: 6–8; Durham 2000: 115– 116; De Boeck 2005: 204–205; De Boeck and Honwana 2005: 4). Instead of providing a definition, Durham (2000: 116) thinks of youth less as a specific age group, but as a ‘social shifter’ – a term borrowed from linguistics. A shifter is, according to Durham (ibid.), a special kind of indexical term, a term that works not through absolute referentiality to a fixed context, but one that relates the speaker to a relational, or indexical, context. The concept of youth should therefore be studied relationally, situated in the field of generation, authority and knowledge claims. It will appear that ‘youth’ in the context of the Tabligh Jama‘at should first and foremost be interpreted as having an awareness of what are considered the ‘real principles’ of Islam, as described in the Quran and Hadith, and a willingness to live accordingly, as expressed in the Tablighis’ codes of conduct and dress. The Tablighis equate being ‘old’ with being rigid and holding on to sinful customary practices. During my field research it emerged that intergenerational competing notions of Islam are expressed particularly through life-cycle rituals. By using a wedding as a case study I will illustrate that Tablighi religiosity is a kind of protest against the ritual festivities of the more traditional Sufi Muslims – that is, the older generation – and their conspicuous consumption during such festivities. Religiosity may be defined here as a concern to conform with God’s commandments, live according to the dictates of the Quran and Sunna (the Prophetic 3 traditions), typically by following in the footsteps of the Prophet and his Companions.6 In the celebration of Tablighi rituals, established social and religious values, such as a hierarchy based on seniority and expressed through gift relationships, are redefined. The principles of seniority and gerontocracy have become the ground for a generational conflict, which is expressed in terms of a ritual transformation of Gambian society.7 Before recording the case study and analysing it, I will begin with a brief history of the Tabligh Jama‘at, its establishment in The Gambia and its central features.

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