Page 151 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Muslim women’s learning circles, which have been mushrooming in urban
areas over the past twenty years, illustrate some effects of the widening access
21
to religious knowledge. “Muslim women” organize themselves into groups to
learn to read, write, and memorize certain surats and to learn proper ritual con-
duct. Until the 1970s few elite women (generally older women from families of
religious specialists and merchants) engaged in this form of learning. Now the
majority of women in the literacy and prayer groups are from the urban middle
and lower-middle classes. This points to a widening access to religious knowl-
edge and to shifts in its mode of transmission. Even though the Muslim women
refer to their activities as traditional forms of learning, their new forms and uses
of literacy reveal an overlapping of conventional and new paradigms of knowl-
edge transmission. Broadcasting plays an additional role in undermining pre-
vious foundations of religious authoritative knowledge. Some leaders of wom-
en’s learning circles, the présidentes, make recordings of their sermons which
are then broadcast on local radio or circulate on tape among their followers.
In these tape recordings (caseti wajuli), présidentes sermonize on questions of
proper ritual and everyday conduct. While they seem to reproduce a conserva-
tive gender ideology, closer scrutiny of their sermons reveals that they respond
to concerns triggered by recent changes in gender relations and the undermin-
ing of patriarchal family authority (Schulz 2004, chapters 2, 6).
The unsettling of the social basis of religious knowledge, and the new power
constellations to which it gives rise, are re®ected in current confrontations be-
tween Muslim activists and traditional religious leaders who replaced the former
elite of experts in Islamic jurisprudence in the early colonial period (Stewart
1997). The confrontations are still presented as disagreements over ritual mat-
ters (see Launay and Soares 1999), but the lines of con®ict and alliance are
changing. Earlier confrontations between in®uential religious lineages and their
Muslim dissidents, whose reformist tendencies were inspired by intellectual
trends in Egypt and the hijaz (see above), have given way to their joint compe-
tition with the arabisants whose higher education at institutions in the Arab-
speaking world allowed them to occupy in®uential positions in the state bu-
reaucracy in the later years of Moussa Traoré’s rule (Brenner 1993c).
Haidara’s movement, Ansar Dine, with its uneasy location amid rural- and
urban-based networks and its explicit distancing from the realm of politics,
adds another dimension of complexity to the shifting alliances that characterize
the ¤eld of Muslim activism. Haidara, who comes from an unimportant rural
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branch of a prestigious religious lineage, combines traditional credentials of
leadership (such as genealogical prestige) with qualities of charismatic authority
(Schulz 2003). For years, representatives of the national Muslim association
AMUPI successfully blocked Haidara’s attempts to preach on national me-
dia, by denouncing him as a rabble-rousing upstart. However, in 2000 they ¤-
nally had to give in and admit him into a newly created administrative struc-
ture, Haut Conseil Islamique. Throughout the years of his exclusion Haidara
responded to his adversaries’ attempts to marginalize him by circulating his
opinions on video- and on audio-taped sermons, many of which continue to be

140 Dorothea E. Schulz