Page 150 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

instances of primordial social organization but result from recent recon¤gura-
tions and reappropriations of social and political alliances. These networks tend
to mobilize the disenfranchised, that is, people who remain by and large ex-
cluded from clientelistic connections that link the administrative-political cen-
ters in town to the rural hinterlands. Haidara’s movement, Ansar Dine, shares
many features with this type of network. Ansar Dine originated among the ur-
ban lower classes, but it is currently expanding into the surrounding areas of
rural towns. It is based on trust and mutual obligation, and yet its social back-
bone is structured along connections that transcend conventional ties of kin-
ship and patronage. Ansar Dine provides services and therefore creates securi-
ties, which the state is incapable of delivering. It does not offer its members
substantial donations from wealthy patrons but constitutes a network for com-
mercial activities and mutual support that reaches out to neighboring countries,
to the Ivory Coast in particular, and increasingly to immigrant communities in
France and the United States.

Broadcast Media and Competing Claims to
Authoritative Knowledge

Similar to developments in other areas of the Muslim world, current
changes in the social basis of religious authority and knowledge are played out
in con®icts among competing Muslim factions (see Eickelman 1992, 2000).
These changes presently concur with the spread of broadcasting technologies,
especially those of small media, that, among other factors, broaden the access
to religious knowledge and facilitate individual interpretation. In Mali the ori-
gins of these changes date back at least to the 1940s, when individual Muslim
reformists sought to adapt traditional religious training to the new demands of
the colonial social and political environment. Already at this time access to re-
ligious learning became less restricted and pedagogy inspired by the French-
language schools transformed conventional forms of learning, thereby weaken-
ing the existing foundations of religious authority (Brenner 2000, chapters 3, 4).
Mass higher education in French plays a comparatively minor role in effect-
20
ing these changes. But the trend toward a secularization of the Arabic lan-
guage, the expansion of its use to mundane matters and domains, crucially
contributes to the undermining of the basis of traditional religious authority.
This trend was initiated in the reformed Quranic schools since the 1940s and
continued through the post-independent integration of these schools as écoles
franco-arabes into the national educational system. The growing number of
arabisants who received a degree from institutions of the Arab-speaking world
since the 1980s furthered a diversi¤cation of the national ¤eld of contestants
over authoritative interpretation. Individual access to religious knowledge is
also facilitated by the current thriving of vernacular languages promoted by
governmental educational policy. Most religious debates are broadcast in Ba-
manakan, a language understood by the majority of the southern population.

Morality, Community, Publicness 139