Page 148 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

attempt to extend his control over powerful segments of the religious estab-
lishment and over the new group of arabisants. The latter, because of their de-
grees from teaching institutions in the Arab-speaking world, soon occupied
leading posts in the state bureaucracy and occasionally entered into competition
with more established religious leaders. Moussa Traoré’s pro-Muslim policy was
instrumental in channeling the substantial ¤nancial contributions these Muslim
groups received from the Arab-speaking world from the late 1970s on. Spon-
sored by international public and private money, Islam acquired a strong public
visibility in the form of infrastructure (mosques and reformed Quranic schools,
the medersas) and a stronger discursive representation in the national political
arena (Triaud 1988a; Brenner 2000, chapter 5). The of¤cial creation of a na-
tional association of Muslims, AMUPI, in the early 1980s consolidated state
control over the activities of various groups of Muslims by simultaneously sup-
18
pressing and institutionalizing competition among them. It also enabled Mus-
lim spokespeople to make themselves heard in their role as Muslims. In this
process, Islam came to be seen by many Malians as an element of an at once
“tradition-conscious” and enlightened Malian identity.
In 1989, when a call for democracy and civil liberties swept the African
continent and reached Mali, representatives of the Muslim establishment were
among Moussa Traoré’s closest allies in his confrontation with an oppositional
“movement for democracy” organized by teachers, lawyers, and civil servants.
After Moussa Traoré’s fall from power in 1991, the leader of the putsch, Colonel
Toumani Touré, organized the country’s ¤rst democratic elections. The estab-
lishment of new institutions and ideologies of rule went hand in hand with
selectively rearranged and partially rejuvenated images of political allegiance
and community. “Democracy,” “transparency,” and the “rule of law” became
cornerstones of the common good to which President Alpha Konare and his
party, ADEMA, appealed. This orientation has continued under the new presi-
dent, Toumani Touré, elected in 2002. Paradoxically current governmental at-
tempts to prove the democratic nature of the new political system, such as the
organization of a public debate of individual political reform projects, often
undermine the regime’s credibility, because the majority of the population per-
ceives public controversy and opposition as an indicator of the state’s incapacity
to establish “law and order.” 19
One important change generated by the political opening since 1991 is the
rise to prominence of a type of Muslim actor that can be labeled “activist” be-
cause these players combine their political aspirations with a publicly declared
Muslim identity. Among them are the above-mentioned intégristes who contest
the institutional and ideological foundations of the secular state. But they are
relatively few in number and have not acquired signi¤cant momentum in the
national arena. The ties between intégristes and other arabisants and Muslims
with close ties to the Arab-speaking world are tenuous. Many Muslim activists
who defend “Arab-inspired” readings of Islam do not agree with the intégristes’
political agenda and de¤ne, instead, their own role as that of a moral watchdog
removed from the interested stratagems of politicians. Haidara exempli¤es this

Morality, Community, Publicness 137