Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (Islam in Africa, 6)

319 Pages·2006·0.96 MB·English

by  Benjamin F. Soares

Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa
Islam in Africa
Brill’s “Islam in Africa” is designed to present the results of
scholarly research into the many aspects of the history and
present-day features of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. The series
will take up issues of religious and intellectual traditions, social
significance and organization, and other aspects of the Islamic
presence in Africa. It includes monographs, collaborative volumes
and reference works by researchers from all relevant disciplines.
Editors
John Hunwick
Rüdiger Seesemann
Knut Vikør
VOLUME 6
Muslim-Christian Encounters
in Africa
Edited by
Benjamin F. Soares
BRILL
LEIDEN•BOSTON
2006
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are
available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov
ISSN 1570-3754
ISSN-13: 978 90 04 15264 9
ISBN-10: 90 04 15264 4
© Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic
Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS
Note on Transliteration ............................................................ vii
Acknowledgements .................................................................... ix
Introduction: Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa ............ 1
Benjamin F. Soares
Chapter One: African Muslims and Christians in World .... 17
History: The Irrelevance of the “Clash of Civilizations”
John Voll
Chapter Two: Flesh Soaked in Faith: Meat as a Marker .... 39
of the Boundary between Christians and Muslims
in Ethiopia
Éloi Ficquet
Chapter Three: Missionary Legacies: Muslim-Christian ........ 57
Encounters in Egypt and Sudan during the Colonial
and Postcolonial Periods
Heather J. Sharkey
Chapter Four: A Fifty-Year Muslim Conversion to .............. 89
Christianity: Religious Ambiguities and Colonial
Boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 1906–1963
Shobana Shankar
Chapter Five: The Time of Conversion: Christians and ...... 115
Muslims among the Sereer-Safèn of Senegal, 1914–1950s
James F. Searing
Chapter Six: Christianity as Seen by an African Muslim ...... 142
Intellectual: Amadou Hampâté Bâ
Ralph Austen
Chapter Seven: Fundamentalism and Outreach Strategies .... 159
in East Africa: Christian Evangelism and Muslim Da'wa
John A. Chesworth
vi contents
Chapter Eight: In My End Is My Beginning: Muslim .......... 187
and Christian Traditions at Cross-Purposes in
Contemporary Nigeria
Patrick J. Ryan S.J.
Chapter Nine: An Opportunity Missed by Nigeria’s ............ 221
Christians: The 1976–78 Sharia Debate Revisited
Philip Ostien
Chapter Ten: The “Sharia Factor” in Nigeria’s .................. 256
2003 Elections
Franz Kogelmann
Chapter Eleven: From Resistance to Reconstruction: ............ 275
Challenges Facing Muslim-Christian Relations in
Post-Apartheid South Africa
A. Rashied Omar
Contributors ................................................................................ 293
Index .......................................................................................... 297
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Transliteration of the Arabic follows the system in the Encyclopaedia
of Islam with the exception of the letter qàf, which is transliterated
as q. However, words such as jihad, sharia and ulama that commonly
occur in English and are found in dictionaries are not transliterated
or italicized. For personal names in Arabic and other languages,
orthographic self-representation has been followed. For transliteration
from other languages, including Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Wolof and
so forth, the individual authors have generally used the standard
transliteration rules for those languages, which in some cases have
been simplified.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Most of the essays in this volume were first presented to the colloquium
“Muslim/Christian Encounters in Africa” of the Institute for the
Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) held at the Program of
African Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston in May 2003.
The Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa has received
generous funding from the Ford Foundation and institutional support
from Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies, which
helped to make the colloquium and production of this volume pos-
sible. John O. Hunwick and Sean O’Fahey, the co-founders of ISITA,
along with Rebecca Shereikis, the ISITA program coordinator, have
centered many of the core activities of ISITA around the intellectual
production of African Muslims and their written traditions, particularly
in Arabic. In bringing together a group of scholars interested in the
complex ways in which Muslims and Christians have encountered
each other in Africa, this colloquium helped to broaden the perspective
of ISITA and its analytical focus.
I would like to thank John O. Hunwick and Sean O’Fahey for
the invitation to edit a selection of the papers from the colloquium
for publication, as well as the individual contributors, with whom it
has been a pleasure to work. Although Phil Ostien did not partici-
pate in the original colloquium, he agreed to let us include some of
his important work in this volume. I am grateful to Trudy Kamperveen
from Brill for her encouragement of the project. Jan Abbink, Rosalind
I.J. Hackett, John Harrelson, Franz Kogelmann, Ann Reeves, Rüdiger
Seesemann, Heather Sharkey, and Rebecca Shereikis helped enor-
mously in the preparation of the volume, and their assistance, input
and advice have been invaluable.