Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state in Africa (review)

In April 2001, on the day of the legislative elections that were to consolidate the first democratic alternance in Senegalese politics, I had the privilege of interviewing President Abdoulaye Wade. When I mentioned that I had an interest in the political role of Senegal’s famous Sufi orders, he immediately responded: ‘Well then you must know my friend, the Irishman, Cruise O’Brien.’ The President’s assumption was of course quite right: as the keenest observer of the Senegalese religio-political landscape for some forty years now, Cruise O’Brien’s work has been an absolutely required passage for all who have hoped to understand Senegal’s religious system and its politics. In many ways his various works have framed and shaped much of the scholarship that has followed, whether by Anglophone, French or Senegalese scholars.

This rich and engaging book provides a retrospective look at Cruise O’Brien’s work on Senegal over four decades, while simultaneously broadening it and placing it in the context of his other work on Kenya, and even more broadly on African politics. While the ten substantive essays have been published previously in various forms, they are not just reprinted here. Rather, and to varying degrees, they have been reworked, updated and annotated. In addition, a long and rather personal introductory chapter explores the key themes of Cruise O’Brien’s work and traces his intellectual itinerary, while it also fleshes out the core guiding notions of his analysis. The point of departure is the centrality of religion in the process of conceptualizing and defining the political or, in Cruise O’Brien’s term, ‘imagining’ it (in a sense analogous to Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’). Religious interactions with the state, the author argues, are mediated through symbolic issues, which structure action and thus in turn shape the ‘confrontations’ which define the realm of the political.

Under the heading ‘Muslims Confronting the State’, the four chapters in the first part of the book include three on Senegal and a fourth on Kenya. Taken together, the first three describe and analyse the chronological evolution of relations between the Senegalese state and the Sufi orders – and most specifically the Mourides – while the fourth in effect serves to contextualize the exceptionalities of Senegal by contrasting it with a very different religiopolitical context. Part II (‘Around the State: Community, Culture, Evasion’) contains one chapter on the processes of ethnic and linguistic Wolofization in Senegal, one on the legacy of De Gaulle in West Africa, and a third on youth politics in West Africa. While these are not explicitly about Islam or about Muslims, they all discuss events and processes in Muslim-majority contexts and societies. Embedded in this work, they serve very usefully to suggest that Muslims may ‘imagine’ the state not only qua Muslims, but also as members of ethno-linguistic communities, heirs to a colonial legacy, and cohorts of a generation. Muslim imaginations, that is, can range well beyond the religious.

In Part III, ‘Engaging with the State: Democratic Dimensions’, the three chapters are linked via the interwoven theme of democracy. This core notion is analysed at various levels: in terms of the ‘voice’ of the people within putatively non-democratic religious systems; in the negotiation of a social contract between religious authorities and the state; and in the explicitly political arena of elections and opposition politics. In the context of the current – and frequently politically charged and highly simplistic – debates about the ‘compatibility’ of ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’, Cruise O’Brien’s nuanced and subtle discussion comes as an insightful suggestion of an alternative way to frame the question: what potential is there for the manipulation of symbols so as to allow for the expression of alternative voices – that is, for practising a form of democracy – in the complex political contexts of any given Muslim society? The answers, of course, must be highly contingent and variable, but are surely far...