Page 147 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

1997; Stewart 1997; Triaud 1997), largely because the French colonial authori-
ties built them up as a stronghold against a new generation of “Wahhabi” mer-
10
chants and intellectuals with ties to the Arab-speaking world. The new gen-
eration of Muslim intellectuals was considered a threat to political stability both
by the colonial authorities and by established families of religious specialists
whose “non-Islamic” practices and distortions of the true teachings of Islam
the young critics attacked as instances of “unlawful innovation” (bid"a) (Am-
selle 1985; Brenner 1993a, 1993b, 1993c).
The social basis and political in®uence of established families of religious
11
specialists were weakened when the PSP party was defeated in the legislative
elections in 1959. It lost further political terrain after independence in 1960,
12
when Modibo Keita and his party, US-RDA, reached power. Very soon many
of their former Muslim opponents, the merchants with business ties to the
Arab-speaking world, who had originally supported US-RDA militants in their
struggle for independence, changed sides, too. The growing opposition of these
merchants, which substantially weakened Modibo Keita’s regime and ultimately
contributed to its fall in 1968, was a response to the socialist regime’s economic
policy and treatment of religious matters. While Modibo Keita’s regime never
went as far as to denounce the in®uence of Islamic clerics on local politics, his
13
secularist policy sought to neutralize them. By appealing to “African culture”
as the unifying principle of the new political community, the new leaders of in-
dependent Mali reproduced the tensions inherent in the conception of a shared,
public interest formulated by liberal Western political theory (Warner 1992). 14
“Culture” became the register through which claims to equal participation in
the new political community were expressed, and internal difference and hier-
archy denied. Modibo Keita’s explicit recognition of religion as individual faith
distinguished his “African path towards socialism” from the Marxist-Leninist
model (Snyder 1967, 85–86). Yet the US-RDA never framed its anticolonial,
nationalist struggle as a matter of Islamic resistance to the onslaught of West-
ernization. Instead, religion was considered an individual conviction and rele-
gated to the realm of the private. 15
Modibo Keita’s socialist endeavor never found widespread popular support.
It was aborted with the coup d’état in 1968 that brought Colonel Moussa Traoré
16
and his military regime to power. Public celebrations of the new regime re-
17
placed previous of¤cial appeals to a common nation-building project. The
“laissez faire, laissez passer” attitude of the new leadership undermined any ex-
isting sense of national unity and belonging. Starting in the late 1970s Islam
gained a new momentum. Members of rich and in®uential Muslim merchant
families, often with business connections to the Middle East, expanded their
in®uence in the public arena and yet only rarely were implicated in of¤cial party
politics. Their capacity to mobilize followers through Islamic welfare networks
and institutions was a major reason why President Traoré made substantial con-
cessions to the demands of Muslim authorities, in spite of Mali’s secular con-
stitution. Granting them privileges (such as reserving a greater share of broad-
casting time for them than for Christians) became part of Moussa Traoré’s

136 Dorothea E. Schulz