Brian Larkin

Ahmed Deedat and the Form of Islamic Evangelism

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2008-006

Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria

This article examines the religious use of loudspeakers on churches and mosques in Jos, Nigeria. It examines the medial form of the loudspeaker, how this medium technologizes urban space, and how urban residents generate cultural techniques to live with the sounds it produces. More precisely, I focus on how loudspeakers seek to compel attention by disbursing religious messages and how, in a city riven by religious conflict, residents cultivate practices of inattention in order to ameliorate the possibility of religious violence.

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things

In 1992 when the Nigerian cleric Sheikh Abubakar Gumi died he left behind him the Salafi inspired group, Izala,1 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 modern religious figure.2 Colonially educated, cosmopolitan, the first major Muslim cleric to use new media technologies, Gumi redefined religious 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?

Entangled religions: response to J. D. Y. Peel

When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Islam and Christianity, it was intended to interrupt what seemed to us then, and still seems to me now, the tendency for studies of Christian movements to be written as if Muslims did not exist in the same polity and vice versa. Difference has been the normative grounds upon which the scholarly literature on religion in Africa has been based, usually organized around a set of binary distinctions: animist movements are opposed to mission Christianity; traditional (often Sufi) Muslims are opposed to Salafis; mainline churches to the Born-Again movement; Islam to Christianity; both of them to animism; and, finally, religion to secularism. While the particular content changes, the structural ordering does not. It is undoubtedly important, as Peel argues, to understand the theological traditions that orient the attitudes and regulate the practice of adherents, but there are other dynamics that are also important and which the emphasis on difference occludes.

Book Review: Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India

Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015, 256 pp., US

The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

85, ISBN: 978-1-4384-5829-8