Introduction: towards a framework for the study of Christian–Muslim encounters in Africa

For John – sharp and inspiring friend and mentor

In research on religion in Africa, the study of both Christianity and Islam is thriving. Alas, these fields exist more or less independently from each other. Scholars with expertise regarding either Christianity or Islam barely engage in conversations with each other. And yet, the long history of encounters between Muslims and Christians – involving a complex dynamic of becoming similar and asserting difference, of approach and detachment – calls for an encompassing conceptual framework that is devoted to drawing out similarities, differences and entanglements. It is the central aim of this special section of Africa to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of a comparative study of Christianity and Islam. Such a comparative approach requires that we study Christians and Muslims within one analytical frame. While there is a growing consensus to move beyond the bifurcation of the study of religion in Africa, scholars are just beginning to develop and debate productive analytical perspectives that enable a better understanding of the ways in which Christians and Muslims engage with each other in various configurations and modalities.

The call to devise better ways of understanding interactions between Christians and Muslims in Africa – and beyond – is not new. In his edited volume on Muslim–Christian encounters in Africa, Benjamin Soares stated that the dynamics of ‘their interactions in Africa are still not properly understood’ (2006: 1). Around the same time, Brian Larkin and one of us, Birgit Meyer, proposed to look at evangelical Pentecostalism and reformist Islam in West Africa as doppelgängers –‘enemies whose actions mirror each other and whose fates are largely intertwined’ (2006: 287).¹ This proposition raised a critical response from J. D. Y. Peel, who presented his position in an IAI-sponsored panel entitled ‘Studying Islam and Christianity in Africa: Comparisons and Interactions’, convened by Meyer and Peel at the Fifth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS) in Lisbon in 2013. This special section of Africa is based on this panel, where earlier versions of the contributions by Peel, Larkin and Janson were first presented; the contributions by Meyer, Obadare and Soares were written for this special section.² We are filled with sorrow that J. D. Y. Peel died while we were preparing this section for publication.

New directions in the study of religion that appreciate its material and corporeal dimensions, and that take religion seriously as a set of practices that shape the world, were productively taken up in relation to the study of both Christians and Muslims. However, the common bifurcation between Christianity and Islam still largely dominates scholarship on religion in Africa. It cannot be emphasized enough that the division of labour in studying religion along these lines – in Africa and elsewhere – is highly problematic. It ignores the fact that, despite the differences in the historical development of Christianity and Islam, in many settings in Africa Christians and Muslims have long lived side by side, often in harmony with ‘traditional’ practitioners – the boundaries between the three not always sharply demarcated (Peel 2000; 2016). Notwithstanding frequent outbreaks of religious clashes in Africa, for centuries there have been high levels of social interaction between Christians and Muslims, and interfaith marriages and reverted conversions were not uncommon (Soares 2006). So, rather than focusing on single religious traditions, it makes more sense to work with the broader notion of a ‘religious field’ in which several religious groups coexist in ever shifting dynamics of similarity and difference.

CROSSING BORDERS

This special section has two parts. It starts with a debate triggered by the already mentioned essay by Larkin and Meyer. Its main argument was that Pentecostalism and reformist Islam share a great deal of common ground and, while disagreeing on doctrine, overlap in several of the religious practices on which they depend and the social processes they set in motion. Larkin and Meyer (2006: 287–8) identified three basic commonalities between Pentecostalism and reformist Islam in Ghana and Nigeria: both religious traditions distance themselves from local religious and cultural traditions; both offer their adherents new ways of becoming ‘modern’; and...