Until recently, Côte d'Ivoire mostly appeared as marginal and subaltern on West Africa's Islamic scene partly because of Islam's minority status — no longer a demographic but still a political reality — and the lack of visibility of Sufi orders. By contrast, since the 1990s Ivorian Muslim society and its distinctive "reformist" religious culture, represented by a "modern" élite in Abidjan, have become increasingly influential in the subregion and beyond. This article explores the socio-economic, political, and cultural processes behind this transformation as well as the shifting interface between the local and global in Ivoirian Islam. Specific attention is devoted to international migration to Côte d'Ivoire, as the many and mostly Muslim West African immigrants have sometimes played a role of cultural translators in the transmission of Ivorian reformist ideas and modes of community organizations abroad. Out-migration of Ivorian Muslims to the West and particularly to the United States is also considered. The article further explores why the Ivoirian reformist élite first sought to interact with international Islamic organizations based outside the Arab world and Iran and how exchanges of ideas with Muslims based in the West shaped its development in deeply original ways. These movements of people and ideas have contributed to the local dynamism of Ivoirian Islam and its growing transnational influence in French-speaking West Africa and the African Muslim Diaspora in the United States.
This article presents a synthetic, historical-cum-anthropological overview of the collective trajectory of Ivoirian converts to Islam from southern autochthonous lineages who can be referred to—albeit unsatisfyingly—as ‘native' Muslims. It focuses on what is effectively an invisible and silent minority within southern native groups and the majority Dioula Muslim society alike: a community that has barely received any attention from social scientists despite the transformative impact of its slow but steady Islamization process. The study aims first at shedding light on salient socio-religious and political aspects of this group's development, from colonial to postcolonial times. Given that this plural group is situated at the crossroads of various ethnic, national, and religious controversies, having enflamed Côte d'Ivoire in olden days as much as in recent years, the article eventually makes use of this group's distinct prism to question the contested Ivoirian interface between Islam, ethnic geography, and nationalism at large, and attempt some nuanced answers.
Media reports of the rebellion tearing apart C?te d'Ivoire portray the conflict as a rift between a Muslim North and a Christian South. They repeatedly refer to the armed conflict in religious terms by describing the country as split between a government-held area in the Christian and animist South and a rebel-held area in the Muslim North." This cultural/geographical description of the conflict inhibits our understanding of the situation. These newspaper reports echo the divisive statements of politicians and thus serve to widen rifts. In sum, the religious and geographical simplifications by the media do not contribute to our understanding of the conflict. Rather, they insidiously exacerbate it by reinforcing stereotypes and deepening social and political divisions.
Among the 18 districts of Odienné, a secondary town of northern Côte d'Ivoire, the district of "Texas" is known to host the highest concentration of bars called "maquis". When darkness falls this residential neighbourhood turns into a space for entertainment, pleasure and business. This chapter explores this effervescence of the forbidden (haram) in the context of a town in which public life is dominantly framed by Islam. It shows how the evolution of Texas by night reveals the centrality of urban margins for their implicit function of making possible the cohabitation of various lifestyles.
In this article, I propose to look at how class belonging, and shared notions of good religiosity are intertwined in the context of current ways to assert oneself as a “good Muslim.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019 in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, this article presents a series of portraits of women and their families. These portraits emphasize how the growing popularity of tourist travels towards so-called “Muslim societies” in the Arab world, and more recently in Morocco, plays a role in the construction of “good religiosity” as it is enmeshed in social class relations. The ethnographic data discussed in this article shows that travel consumption asserts class belonging as well as shared notions of “good religiosity.” To draw out this argument, I propose to revisit in a critical way Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of conspicuous consumption as processes of social distinction.
After an ill-fated religious revival, the Sufi teacher Yacouba Sylla and his followers became wealthy and politically influential in post-Second World War Côte d'Ivoire. They argued for an understanding of democratization and development that defined both ideas in terms of their community's own mystical experiences and world-historical significance, rather than in terms of modernity. As a way of making sense of their own past and defending their place in an increasingly tense political environment, these efforts achieved their most explicit articulation in a powerful story about Yacouba Sylla's refusal of a gift from Ivoirian President Félix Houphouët-Boigny.
There are many ways one might approach the study of Muslims as minorities in a given region. One theme of this paper on Muslim minorities in West Africa is Muslim involvement in artistic traditions both on an individual and a group level. This is illustrated with the case of Lamidi Fakeye, a Muslim Yoruba carver living in Nigeria. Fakeye is adamant that maintaining and enriching the artistic traditions of his people need not be incompatible with life as a pious Muslim. A second theme of this paper is stability and transformation in communities where Muslims as minorities live either in orthopraxis (upright practice) or in a 'mixed' state. This theme is illustrated with the cases of the city of Bonduku, located in the Akan State of Gyaman which today lies in eastern Côte d'Ivoire, where Muslim minority communities moved towards orthopraxis, and Bole, located northeast of Bonduku in the Gonja State, which is today in northern Ghana. Bole is an example of a Muslim community which sought to establish orthopraxis in an independent community, but failed. Attention is paid to one other pattern of relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims which is known today in the area west of the Black Volta region, where Muslims are involved in masking cults ('gbain'), which are used as mechanisms for controlling antisocial behaviour.
In 2021, the United Nations noted the newfound threats of the Group for Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), a branch of al-Qa`ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), that extended into Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast, stretching farther yet into Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Had an observer in 2006 had this information presented to them, they might have scarcely believed it. That year, in which AQIM was formed, the group was a thoroughly North African organization and based primarily in Algeria. Fast forward 15 years, how did AQIM end up nearly 1,300 miles away, now posing immediate threats in the states of littoral West Africa?
Relying on a combination of primary source jihadi propaganda and historical research, this report argues that over the past 30 years, al-Qa`ida and its branches and allies in North and West Africa have followed what this report calls “al- Qa`ida's Imperial Playbook,” as they have sought to expand their areas of influence southward. Al-Qa`ida's “playbook,” this report shows, is composed of five fundamental tactics: befriending or creating militant groups operating in the midst of conflict; integrating themselves into communities where those militants exist; exploiting grievances of those communities to gain sympathy; addressing internal or external dissent either passively or aggressively; and looking toward new theaters once their base is solidified. Al-Qa`ida has subsequently utilized this playbook to expand southward from its Algeria base in five distinct historical periods: from 1992- 1998; 1998-2006; 2006-2012; 2013-2017; and 2017-present. The report concludes that al-Qa`ida and its affiliates in northern and western Africa are likely to continue to use this playbook as they continue their contemporary expansion into West Africa.
La Côte d'Ivoire compte aujourd'hui 33% de Musulmans, le Bénin 13%, le Ghana 12%, le Togo 10% et le Nigeria 46%. Le premier point qu'on examine, est l'expansion de l'Islam vers le sud, le golfe de Guinée; le deuxième phenomène est l'approfondissement de l'Islam. L'auteur étudie ces deux phénomenes en prenant deux exemples: le Togo et Abidjan.
Cet article donne la parole à cinq guides religieux musulmans et chrétiens de la ville de Duékoué, dans l'Ouest ivoirien, où les pires tueries de la crise post–électorale ivoirienne se sont produites fin mars 2011. Dans ce contexte très sensible sur lequel la justice n'a pas encore fait toute la lumière, l'objet des entretiens n'a porté que sur le rôle qu'a pu jouer le facteur religieux dans la production ou l'effort de prévention de cette grave crise locale aux ramifications régionales, nationales et supranationales. Il ressort de ces témoignages que les guides religieux ont mené nombre d'actions concertées pour tenter de rétablir la paix sociale, sans pouvoir enrayer la marche morbide des événements. S'il y a eu des tensions et certaines violences interreligieuses à l'échelle méridionale (principalement contre la communauté musulmane), à Duékoué tout au moins, ces imams et hommes d'Église ont contribué au mieux de leurs possibilités, au vu des circonstances délétères, à empêcher que la flamme religieuse ne vienne embraser le conflit militaro–politique.
The Dyula are Muslim traders who form a religious and ethnic minority in Koko, an urban neighborhood in northern Côte d'Ivoire. Although on the fringes of the Islamic world, for centuries they have maintained ties to the universal Islamic tradition while adapting their everyday religious rituals to their local context. Through a well-integrated analysis of the history and culture of the region, Launay evaluates the ways in which Muslims on the frontiers of the Islamic world define and redefine their beliefs, practices, and rituals as they face a series of challenges to Islam and what it means to "be Muslim." He elucidates the interaction among the universal Islamic tradition, anchored historically in the Arab Middle East; the local variations wrought by Islamic practice; and the profound, continual changes in the way Islam is lived, wherever it is professed.