McMaster University

PhD Candidate & Sessional Lecturer, Religious Studies

About

My doctoral research, to be completed by August 2012, sheds light on how transnational flows of money, coupled with a variety of Islamic religious ideologies, work to construct “Islamic” identities on the ground. I focus on Islamic education in Bamako, the capital of Mali. I spent two years in Bamako where I interviewed various employees and owners of médersas while simultaneously spending a great deal of time in the classrooms of the médersas, where I undertook participant-observation fieldwork. Through this field research I have come to the conclusion, which I argue in my dissertation, that Malian Islamic schools are significantly influenced by the religious and political ideologies at work in the broader Middle East due to the fact that the Muslim population of Mali largely depends on international funding for the education of its children. This international aid includes donations of popular literature, often religious in nature, as well as audio and video cassettes of sermons given by respected imams from across the Muslim world. My dissertation examines the connections between this type of education and the Malian arabisants (Malian whose language of education and communication is Arabic and who self-identify primarily as Muslims) who conceptualize their identity as Muslims in a pluralist secular democracy such as Mali. The study details how the arabisants, through both cooperation and opposition with the Malian government and funding from various Arab states, have reformulated their religious practice and sociability towards what has been called “islam mondain,” a term which refers to a moralization of the mundane not completely unlike a re-invention of the protestant ethic. Islam mondain offers a model for virtuous socio-economic comfort, and an islamization of the benefits of globalization and modernization which renders them morally pure. It also is the moralization of daily life for people disenchanted by the failures of the state and the moving away from political ideal (although not letting aside all activism) to focus on self-improvement and the correct practice of Islam within the current political and economic circumstances.
My dissertation thus contributes to a theoretical and anthropological study of Islam as a lived faith in a secular democracy based on two years of field research. This is central to an understanding of the developing relationships between Islam, modernity, and secular democracy across the Muslim world.