Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (review)

Although appearing as the sixth volume in Brill’s Islam in Africa series and edited by a specialist in Islam, Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa will be of great use to researchers interested in Christianity as well as Islam, in religion in Africa in general, or in recent cultural and political developments in the continent that have involved religious movements.

The “Muslim-Christian encounters” rubric is a rather unfortunate one, but the editor, Benjamin F. Soares, makes the best of it. Given the tendency of scholars interested in religious matters to segregate their analyses by focusing on either Muslim or Christian communities, Soares promises instead an interactional approach that relies on recent anthropological and social theoretic tools rather than on orientalist clichés, ecumenical polemics, or confessional apologetics. The book largely delivers, going far beyond most existing comparative work. It nonetheless raises the question of the extent to which Muslims and Christians in Africa have in fact “encountered” one another qua Muslims or Christians, and therefore whether it is possible to find a meaningful framework for interpreting such interactions. The notion of the encounter, so popular of late, lends itself well to a collection of case studies, but the case remains to be made that such interactions constitute a better approach to comparison than do more sociological studies in which religious affiliations are one of many factors whose significance is varied, contingent, and situational.

Framing issues aside, the value of the collection rests largely on the merits of the individual contributions, and here too the editor is to be commended for keeping standards high and enforcing the requirement that topics be cross-confessional. Many of the chapters present valuable new research; others offer fresh conceptual tools. While it is unfortunate that the “clash of civilizations” pseudo-thesis still lives, as long as it does, John Voll’s demolition of it in an African context is welcome. Heather J. Sharkey and Ralph Austen offer new insights into Muslim representations of Christianity, the former illuminating Muslim distrust of missionization, the latter adding useful detail to Louis Brenner’s earlier work on Amadou Hampâté Bâ. Shobana Shankar and James F. Searing bring much-needed specificity to the study of conversion, and Searing in particular shows how much can be added to theoretical models by looking at small contingencies and rapid transformations in belief and practice. A. Rashied Omar criticizes the failure of South African religious institutions (like so many other institutions there) to “make the transition from a ‘theology of resistance’ to a ‘theology of reconstruction’” (292), with a resulting increase in interfaith violence.

A couple of chapters are more limited in their successes. Éloi Ficquet traces the use of meat as a marker of religious boundaries in Ethiopia; the essay offers some intriguing if free-floating ideas about how communities are constituted, but it would have been more effective if it had been presented in relation to the reworking of Ethiopian religious historiography being undertaken by Hussein Ahmed and others. John A. Chesworth reveals how Muslim and Christian outreach specialists have borrowed techniques from one another and from international models in their competition for adherents, but he does not shed as much light on the deeper forces driving what he sees as an alarming turn to fundamentalism in both communities in Tanzania. A few other chapters mix their insights with frustrating elements. Philip Ostien provides a thorough recounting of the political maneuvering around the place of shari’a courts in Nigeria in the late 1970s and in the process reveals the dangers of communal recalcitrance; but his piece is aimed more for political consultants and strategists than analysts. Franz Kogelmann examines the 2003 version of those same debates, and while he suggests up front that the shari’a controversy may be only a symptom of deeper social and political problems, he backs away from that insight and provides a fairly straightforward examination of election rhetoric. Kogelmann quotes Sanusi Lamido Sanusi to...