Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

Introduction

Background to the Study This book explores the interplay between Muslim women and agency in the Republic of Niger as shaped by religion, ethnicity, class, schooling, and citizenship. Drawing on biographical and sociological data, these intersections of vectors of agency are examined in four domains: political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath. Hitherto dominated by men, these domains form areas in which Muslim women have begun to inscribe their agencies in a manner that is more visible than in any other sphere of society. The context of this study is principally urban and its temporal frame is the so-called democratization era that began in the early 1990s. A central theme is how Muslim women have seized the space opened up by the momentum of democratization to use their agency in the public and private spheres to inscribe a woman’s dimension in the transformations taking place in the nation during this period. The process has 3 Introduction sometimes involved the appropriation and recrafting of characteristics of identity traditionally associated with the male “other” and their mobilization toward particular women-centered ends. I employ the concept of agency to refer to a wide range of conscious actions and initiatives, large and small, that Muslim women in Niger (individually or collectively) have engaged in, as a response to their conditions of subordination emanating from multiple legacies—indigenous traditions, the Western impact, and Islam. This notion of agency that guides my analysis of Muslim women’s experiences throughout this book is in line with Saba Mahmood’s definition of agency, which is understood not as a synonym “for resistance to relations of domination, but a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create. . . . Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as a capacity to realize one’s own interest against the weight of customs, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collective). Thus, the humanistic desire for autonomy and self-expression constitute a substrate, the slumbering ember that can spark to flame in the form of an act of resistance when conditions permit”(Mahmood 2001, 203 –6). My contention, then, is that agency cannot be apprehended outside the realm of possibilities—material or otherwise—available to individuals or communities in the larger society. To use Mahmood’s words, it takes place “when conditions permit.” As a result, it can have various manifestations in both the secular and religious spaces, and may range in ideology from the conservative to the radical. Nor is it unusual, as demonstrated in this book, for agency to be exercised in overlapping boundaries of identity as defined by ethnicity, class, and political affiliations. What we see from these different expressions of agency is an emerging, though still diffuse, understanding of what modernity means for Muslim women in Niger. Kwame Gyekye (1997) explains that the idea and substance of modernity have tended to be so inextricably linked to the history and in- fluence of the West, that the possibility of a modernity without Westernism is often considered an absurdity. Against this Eurocentric and totalizing sense of modernity—whose historical legitimation has included enslavement , colonialism, and neocolonialism (Gilroy 1993, 46 –50)—several scholars have presented empirical studies that demonstrate the vibrancy of alternative articulations of modernity across and within cultures (Ong 1997). Some of these scholars consider these alternative modernities as derivative of Western modernity (Giddens 1990; Ivy 1995), others as reactive to it (Simone 1994), and others still as modes of expressions that, even when they incorporate the global, have their own independent local lives (AbuLughod 1998; Ong 1990, 1992, and 1997; Appadurai 1990 and 1996: 4; Pigg 1996; Rofel 1999; Bernal 1994; and Kane 2003). Trends and developments in 4 Introduction postcolonial African societies fall within the ambit of these varied discourses on modernity. In spite of their theoretical differences, however, these “alternativists” are in agreement that the phenomenon of modernity itself is plural and multidirectional (Schein 1999; Appadurai 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). The experiences of Muslim women explored in this book certainly confirm these plural and nuanced conceptions of modernity. In fact, within the national space of Niger, there are several competing modernities, from the Western mode to the Islamicist brand. Furthermore, within these varieties of modernity, there is the inscription of a phenomenon that is peculiarly feminine, suggesting distinctive Muslim women’s local modernities. It would be misleading...