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Epilogue
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Epilogue IN DECEMBER 2009 I returned to Mali after a three-year absence. Upon visiting members of the Muslim women’s group in Bamako-Missira whom I had contacted intermittently during my stay abroad, I had difficulty absorbing all the family news. Sons had left home, braving the dangers of crossing the Sahara and seeking entrance into the fortress of Europe in search of a job, leaving their parents without support and ignorant of their whereabouts. Daughters had been married off, some advantageously and to everyone’s approval, others causing family disputes among new in-laws and hence chagrin for their mothers. The group leader’s husband and sister had returned home after extended sojourns in Saudi Arabia and Syria, which meant that conversations during women’s learning sessions now had to be conducted in a more solemn, less gossipy manner. A group member with whom I had been only loosely acquainted had left her husband and returned to his homestead only after family negotiations, in which a decisive role had been played by the hadja’s intervention on the woman’s behalf. A close friend of mine had moved to another neighborhood, where, to everyone’s delight, she founded a branch of the Muslim women’s group. And Aissetou, a friend with whom I had often talked (and sometimes joked) about her unhappy marital situation, could hardly wait for me to sit down so she could gleefully show me her new acquisition, a tape recorder, sent by a dutiful nephew working in neighboring Senegal. The recorder, she said, “made her wishes complete,” allowing her to follow her hadja’s radio lectures regularly. “This recorder,” she added, to the murmuring approval of other Muslim women present, “is a sign of God’s love. How else could I explain this sudden, unexpected gift from a nephew who lives far away? God sees my struggles, with my situation and my husband, and wants me to feel His presence in my life. He sent me this recorder so that I see the path that leads to Him and invite others to follow my example.” Aissetou succinctly and seamlessly weaves together Islam’s literally pathbreaking appeal with its mass-mediated forms, gender-specific meanings and repercussions, and role in remaking society. Since the 1990s it has become commonplace in scholarly circles to observe that current Islamic revivalist tendencies reflect Muslims’ various engagements EPILOGUE n 229 with modernity rather than constituting signs of cultural atavism. The diverse modernist aspirations that Muslim actors articulate throughout the Muslim world mirror a historical consciousness shaped by a long-standing encounter with modern state institutions and government rationales. The crucial question, then, is not whether Muslim actors of different couleurs and persuasions are part of modernity but what forms their visions of modern politics and social life take. As suggested by Aissetou’s remark about the tape recorder’s role in mediating her access to God and facilitating her relations with her husband and social surroundings, Malian Muslims’ discursive constructions of the modern self are to be understood by recognizing both their mass-mediated and gender-specific articulations. The stress on gender as an important analytical key to Islamic renewal is not the same as exploring the effects of an allegedly conservative Islam on women. The central point here is not even the demonstration of women’s agentive capacities , their capabilities to act within the parameters of Islamic reformist trends. Instead, in an expansion of Taylor’s (2007) argument that religion in modern society is being reconfigured, neither disappearing nor “resurging,” the main question is how the forms and meanings of Islam in Africa and beyond are changing, and where these changes have gender-specific manifestations. Islam’s emotional appeal and recent move to the forefront of public debate in Mali crystallize people’s efforts to come to terms with moral issues, media, and diminishing incomes. Islam’s high currency in Malian politics and social life, as this book has shown, is related to its privileged representation in a feminine symbolics , and thus in a profoundly gendered idiom of community, modern ethics, and ethical politics. The challenge facing an ethnography of Islamic renewal in West Africa as well as its gender-specific ramifications, therefore, is not just to make up for the gaps in the documentation of Muslim women’s religiosity (e.g., Boyd and Last 1985; Hodgkin 1998, 210) or the implicit equation between female Muslim religiosity and Sufi-related religious practices (e.g., Coulon 1988; Evers Rosander...