Benjamin Soares's study of changing and contested notions of authority and discourses on proper Muslim practice in Nioro du Sahel, Mali, offers an important contribution to the anthropology of Islam in Africa as it has evolved over the past 25 years. Located at the crossroads of thorough historical (archival and oral) and ethnographic research, this work is a good illustration of the productive ways in which the two disciplines can engage and complement each other in mutually enriching ways.
Historically, the town Nioro has been an important regional center for transregionally oriented learning activities of two Sufi orders, the Hamawiyya and the Tijaniyya. For generations, clans associated with the two orders, and that claimed religious authority on the basis of special divine blessings, have played an influential political role in Nioro and its surroundings. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, changes in the social organization of the Sufi orders have taken place, and understandings of religious authority have been exposed to new challenges from within the field of religious scholars and specialists. These challenges and changes congeal in three competing regional traditions of Islam (‘Sufi’, ‘reformist’ and ‘postcolonial’) that emerged in a mutually constitutive relationship; their aspirations and activities were intricately related to the institutional context of the colonial and later postcolonial state, even if they occasionally employed an anti-colonial rhetoric. During the colonial period, reformists engaged in a thorough critique of understandings of religious authority and proper religious practice associated with Sufi orders. In the postcolonial period, Soares suggests, a third tradition has emerged in contradistinction from the reformist critique and religious practice on one side, and from Sufi religious conventions and sources of authority on the other. This third tradition is less rooted in local social identities and hierarchies, or in the practices and institutions legitimated by these identities. In present-day Nioro du Sahel, particularly among younger Muslims (Soares discusses almost exclusively male religiosity), attachment to Sufi orders and leaders has become more tenuous. Also characteristic of postcolonial developments in the field of Muslim discourse is what Soares characterizes as a ‘standardization’ of forms of Muslim piety.
The strongest chapters of the book are those thoroughly anchored in ethnographic and archival research in and on Nioro and its surroundings. Here, Soares shows in detail and with subtlety the multiple and contested forms through which Muslim practice has been debated and realized over the past century. For instance, in a chapter on the interlocking of the political, the economic and the spiritual in contemporary Nioro, Soares makes good use of the notion of ‘prayer economy’ (coined by Charles Stewart and taken up by Murray Last) to discuss the thriving business surrounding the esoteric knowledge/power complex associated with Sufi leadership in the town. As he shows in fascinating detail, there has been a long-standing system of delivering services (such as prayers and blessings) ensuring individuals' spiritual well-being, in exchange for various gifts. At present, religious specialists of different expertise and pedigree provide various spiritual services (which Soares describes as ‘commodities’).
The author's argument moves onto less secure ground when he shifts his ethnographic and theoretical focus from the local to the national level. Here, Soares's reflections on contested religious practice and understandings suggest that they derive significantly from conversations (that is, purely discursive representations of religious practice and debate) with certain Muslim leaders and intellectuals, and on archival and newspaper research. Also, some of his broader arguments (such as the one about the ‘standardization’ of forms of Muslim religiosity) raise the question whether a thorough reflection on the representativity of his regional study would have been in place. After all, some of the processes in Nioro are representative only of developments in urban centers under strong historical influence of families associated with Sufi forms of religious practice. Since major segments, particularly of Mali's rural populations in southern Mali, converted to Islam only over the colonial period (and thus learned proper ritual practice for the first time), one might wonder whether ‘standardization’ captures the complexity of, and regional variations in, the process by which people came to understand and define themselves as proper Muslims.
A strong merit of the book is that it synthesizes and illustrates in ethnographic detail arguments made by leading scholars of Islam in Africa, many of them historians, in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis of competing discourses on Muslim religious practice in Nioro shows the strong influence of Soares's doctoral advisor, Robert Launay, whose research on changing and contested Muslim identities, and on the tension between a ‘universalist’ and a particularist orientation among Muslims in northern Ivory Coast since the colonial period remains unparalleled in many respects. Soares illustrates in detail the on-going relevance of Launay's argument about the ways in which discourses on proper Muslimhood emerge in a dialectical movement.
Soares also illustrates successfully that scholars of Islam are well advised to take seriously Jean-Louis Triaud's caution not to conflate social manifestations of Islam in Africa with Sufi Islam, and hence to explore whether (rather than take for granted that) the majority of Muslims in Africa practice their religiosity in close affiliation with a Sufi order.
Soares might have situated his discussion more thoroughly vis-à-vis other classical scholarship on Islam in this area of West Africa, most notably the work of John Hanson and Louis Brenner. A closer engagement with Hanson's work might have helped to place Soares's case study rigorously in the political economy of Islam in this region. It could also have animated a reflection on the complexities of notions of ‘charismatic’ authority, and on long-standing patterns of validating and institutionalizing this form of authority. Brenner's book on the history of Muslim education in colonial and postcolonial Mali, without doubt the most important book on this topic, offers a rich and subtle investigation of changing discourses of ‘truth and ignorance’ and proper Muslim practice in this region. There are thus strong parallels in the analytical perspective and argument proposed by both authors. In fact, both books complement each other in important respects: Soares offers rich ethnographic detail and a discussion of the complexities, ambivalences and occasional inconsistencies in practicing Islam, and in discursively constructing proper practice, in one particular locale of Mali's Sahelian zone. Brenner's historical account remains unparalleled in its theoretical scope and in the representativity of his argument for broad areas of colonial French Sudan.
As should have become clear by now, Soares's discussion of changing and contested notions of Muslim religious practice shows his strong background in the classical scholarship on Islam in Africa and the anthropology of Islam. His reflections usefully integrate recent debates on Islam that seek to move beyond earlier dichotomies between ‘orthodox’ and ‘popular’, and ‘scriptural’ and ‘syncretistic’, versions of Islam. The author's engagement with some key terms of social theory, in contrast, is more open to question. For instance, given the complexity of Habermas's analytical account of historical transformations in the institutions and norms regulating public discourse, one might disagree with Soares's dismissal of Habermas's concept of the public sphere as irrelevant to his study. The author's primarily spatial understanding of the public forecloses a theoretical reflection on the (class- and often literacy-based, gender-specific) mechanisms of exclusion that structured – and continue to structure – the sphere of Muslim discourse from within. Similarly, the author's use of the concept ‘commodity’ does not lead to the theoretical reflection the reader would have hoped for. While Soares refers to a range of services offered by religious specialists as ‘commodities’, it remains unclear in what sense people conceive of them as commodities if, as Soares mentions, they understand some of them as gifts. This tension calls for a reflection on emic accounts of the transformation of services that are conventionally represented as ‘disinterested gifts’ into actual services, a transformation that is not limited to the context of religious patronage.
Soares's obviously strong background in the anthropology of Islam in Africa, and his privileging of questions and concepts that place him within this sub-field of Africanist anthropology, prove to be fruitful for this rich and thoroughly researched study. And it is certain that, within this sub-field, this book will leave a notable mark.
