Page 132 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Chapter 5

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and

the Surface of Things

Brian Larkin

In 1992 when the Nigerian cleric Sheikh Abubakar Gumi died he left
1
behind him the Salafi inspired group, Izala, one of the most dynamic and
influential religious movements in West Africa. Scholarly analyses of
Gumi, Izala’s intellectual leader, have portrayed him as a quintessentially
2
modern religious figure. Colonially educated, cosmopolitan, the first
major Muslim cleric to use new media technologies, Gumi redefined reli-
gious practice in Nigeria, not just for his own adherents but for his Sufi and
Christian opponents. The modernity of religious renewal movements often
refers to a sense of rupture from previous traditions a rupture that is asserted
by those movements to define their difference and distinction. In this
chapter I wish to inquire into what exactly it is that is modern about Gumi
and why this is claimed by both his adherents and detractors. How might
we understand the causes of this phenomenon and the forces that drive it?
What does this tell us about religious movements more generally?
There are theoretical lineages one could draw on to answer this ques-
tion. One derives from media theory and explores how it is that the mate-
riality of technology organizes human experience. This point of view is less
interested in how humans use media to achieve certain ends, and more in
how communication machines create the technological a priori for human
experience and sociality. “[I]t is the medium that shapes and controls the
scale and form of human association and action,” Marshall McLuhan
argued (1994[1964], 20), standing in a line of technicist thinking that
moves from Martin Heidegger (1982) and Lewis Mumford (1963) through