Muriel Gomez-Perez

Political Islam in Senegal and Burkina Faso : contrasting approaches to mobilization since the 1990s

Abstract This article compares the strategies devised by two Salafi-oriented Islamic associations, the Senegal’s Jamaatou Ibadou Rahmane (JIR) and the Burkina Faso’s Mouvement Sunnite (MS). Drawing on extensive field research conducted between 2002 and 2013, it shows that both organizations have been engaged since the 1970s in a similar legitimacy-building process, using contrasting strategies. The JIR intends to build a more constructive relationship with the State and the brotherhoods, while still continuing to cast a critical eye on these two groups. In Burkina Faso, recurring leadership crises and violent incidents has sapped a great deal of the MS’s energy. It therefore has to regain visibility and legitimacy by maintaining a certain distance from political debates. The comparison shows that political Islam has entered in both countries a transitional phase that took into account the emergence and perhaps even the consolidation of a cultural and religious form of citizenship.

Muslim Women in Burkina Faso since the 1970s: Toward Recognition as Figures of Religious Authority?

This paper examines how visibility and legitimacy have been defined and achieved by Muslim women who have contributed to the development of Islam in Burkina Faso since the 1970s. We undertake a transversal study of the trajectories of women belonging to different cohorts of Arabic- and French-educated Muslims. In doing so, we highlight identity markers closely associated with key moments in their lives (activism through associations or personal initiatives, religious studies, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and media activities). Through the lens of performativity, we show how women have progressively gained visibility within the Muslim community. And although figures of religious authority remain uniformly male, women are increasingly able to claim legitimacy thanks to their flexible approach.

Women’s Islamic activism in Burkina Faso: toward renegotiated social norms?

Abstract Recent studies have described the active participation of women in local associations as well as in public and national debates about secularism, the Family code, and women’s rights within Islam. In this article, I explore how female preachers have claimed a new role for women within Islam through a better knowledge and understanding of Islamic texts. In doing so, these women drew on modernist speeches made by men, used the media and aligned themselves with international movements with the aim of claiming a new social identity for their sisters in Islam, establishing greater equality between men and women in the religion, and finding a way of being a good mother and woman while maintaining an independent social position. In fact, these female preachers sought to spark a quiet yet real social revolution in religion by casting a critical and modernist eye on local cultural traditions and Islamic identity.