Islam, histoire et modernité en Côte d'Ivoire (review)

Côte d'Ivoire has not yet captured the attention of researchers interested in studying contemporary African Muslim societies; it is often seen either as an animistic stronghold or a land of Christianity—either way, Islam is given a minor significance. The purpose of this book is to write a history of Ivoirian Muslim society from the 1950s to around the year 2000, through a case study of the country's political and economic capital and Islamic intellectual center, Abidjan. The emphasis is on the social and political history of the local Muslim communities living in the Abidjan neighborhoods, in their diversities and divisions, as well as on the "national" Muslim community that was emerging in the sixties. More broadly, this study questions the way religious changes both reflected and contributed to fostering other fundamental transformations in the contemporary Ivoirian state and society, and on the way they contributed to deeper global changes, whether religious or not, within the globalization of the seventies.

The book includes nine chapters and a conclusion; the organization is basically chronological, while it also includes some thematic sections. Chapter 1 comprises three sections. It provides an overview of the development of Islam and the history of the Muslim communities within Côte d'Ivoire, while excluding the precolonial and colonial periods, and explores the socioeconomic development of Muslims in Abidjan to the 1990s. Thus it seeks to assess the process of Islamization within the country and its capital from the early sixties.

Chapter 2 describes the Muslim communities in the various Abidjan neighborhoods, from the late fifties to the mid-seventies, with a focus on Treichville and Adjamé. The relatively hardened forms of "traditional" Islam and the somewhat "fading identity," or even secularization, that was developing among youth are also described in this book. Chapter 3 offers a synopsis of the relationships and interactions between Houphouet's state and Islamic society until 1990. Chapter 4 addresses the earliest major national Islamic associations that dominated the Islamic sphere until about 1985; the issue of Islamic education and that of the relations between the Ivoirian Muslims and the Pan-Islamic charitable bodies are also addressed in this chapter. A diachronic study of the "reformist" Wahhabi movement forms the focus of chapter 5. Chapter 6 explores the early development of modernity-oriented "reformism" (as opposed to Wahhabism) from the late sixties to the mid-eighties; such reformism gradually but critically reformulated the local interpretation of the dogma, and then helped to reshape the community organizational patterns. Such a renewal is addressed through the genesis of a new sociocultural Muslim elite and networks, such as the Association of the Muslim Students of Côte d'Ivoire (AEEMCI) as the earliest such association. Chapter 7 continues the study of the reforming movement of the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, and studies the deep changes within the movement, as illustrated by the Da'wa (new Islamic proselytism). As a result of those years of maturation, the National Islamic Council (the CNI), the most influential of all the Islamic organizations established in Côte-d'Ivoire, was created in 1993. Chapter 8 focuses on the future of relations between state power and Islamic society, from the democratic openness in 1990 to the downfall of Bédié's regime in 1999. Chapter 9 provides a synopsis of the reforming interpretation of Islam, or "genuine" Islam. The conclusion reiterates the major goals of this study, while an epilogue surveys the changes in the Islamic sphere from Robert Guei's coup in 1999 to the period following the civil war in 2002.

The tragic attacks of the Al Qaeda terrorists on the United States of 9-11 has come to blur the external perception of Islam, which is often confined only to Jihad. By documenting the local communities that have developed a pragmatic, tolerant, and liberal approach to Islam, such as the civic and consensus-based "reforming" type of Islam, this study ultimately...