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3 Among the Unbelievers “Hold fast to prayer,” Vieux Diallo counseled me as we walked back into the market from the nearby zawiya, the modest Sufi mosque, after the midday prayer. “All the other things, family, wealth, will abandon you at the grave,” he said, “but the rewards from prayer, and fasting, and zakat [sacrifice] are the only things you can take with you after you die.” Diallo was more than devout in his Muslim faith. Not only did he perform all five daily prayers, but he did so in mosques near his work or home. Despite being in his seventies, he had recently made the decision to begin studying Arabic, the language of the holy Qur’an. Among West African men in Brazzaville , Diallo was by no means unusual in his devotion to Islam. Mali’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, and signs of Islamic influence are omnipresent there: most Malians bear Muslim names, and many Bamanan nouns—from the names of the days of the week to the words for book, luck, obligation, and blessing—are derived from Arabic. I recognized all this during my initial years in Mali, and yet I was influenced by those who, following the lead of French colonial administrators, characterized West African societies as superficially Islamized. Islam, according to their logic, was only a veneer covering a more substantial African identity based on local “traditional beliefs.” I held to the notion sometimes expressed by Western expatriates that “Mali is 90 percent Muslim and 100 percent animist.” Most Malians I knew seemed sincere in their Muslim faith, but they did not wear it on their sleeves. The Malian state is proudly secular, and though Among the Unbelievers / 93 I often heard recorded Islamic sermons in marketplaces and on public transport , few Malians ever talked to me about Islam, let alone tried to convert me. It did not appear to me that Islam had an especially privileged place in Malians ’ self-definitions. First and foremost they were Bamanan, Senufo, Soninke, or Halpulaaren; they were blacksmiths or griots, nobles or slaves, merchants or farmers. Islam seemed only a minor part of who they were, and an alien part at that. I was conditioned to believe that “true” Islam was elsewhere, particularly among the Arabs whose homeland was the cradle of the faith; the Islam practiced in West Africa had to be an adulterated, impure version.1 My first visit to Brazzaville forced me to rethink these perceptions. The most striking observation from my initial stay in the Congolese capital, abundantly clear from the morning of the first day, was the heightened importance of Islam for the West Africans living there. In the predawn hours, from my room on the southern edge of the Poto-Poto market, I heard at least four calls to predawn fajr prayers emanating from loudspeakers within half a mile. Many people I got to know in Brazzaville regularly attended prayers in any of the half-dozen neighborhood mosques. Back in Mali I had hardly known anyone who went to the mosque for all five required daily prayers, and those who did were almost exclusively elderly; in Brazzaville, it seemed, such men (for they were always men) were everywhere, and even for early morning prayers the neighborhood mosques were thronged with worshipers. Qur’anic study was a common activity for both males and females, young and old alike. And whereas in Mali males and females commonly wear Western clothes, the immigrants in Brazzaville tended to wear clothing more obviously Islamic in style—loosefitting gowns (boubous) for men and Arab burnooses (jelaba) for women. In every respect these immigrants were more “visibly Muslim” than their peers back home. Anthropologists have observed similar high levels of religiosity among Muslim strangers in other African communities. What accounts for it? Even during my initial visit to Brazzaville I suspected it was not entirely a matter of “selection bias” (a distinction based on the assumption that migrants are necessarily different from nonmigrants in certain respects): I spent most of my time with immigrants from the same town and even the same household where I had lived and conducted fieldwork in Mali the year before, and yet the contrast between their religiosity in Congo and in Mali was remarkable. Why were the immigrants I met in Brazzaville more likely than their kin back home to practice certain public expressions of their faith? I realized I could no longer as- [3.141.244.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 05:20...

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