Kaffir' Renner's Conversion
Being Muslim in Public in Colonial Ghana
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4824693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sean Hanretta (Stanford University, corresponding author), Hanretta |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 210 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 187-220 |
| Publication date | 2011-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gtq009 |
| OpenAlex | W2317360728 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
In the mid-twentieth century, religious affiliation emerged as a key organizing principle in anti-colonial movements across the British Empire, including the Muslim League in India and the Khilafat and Khaksar Tehrik movements before it, the Northern People’s Congress in Nigeria, the parties that grew out of the General Council of Buddhist Associations in Burma, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, so-called Neo-Mahdism in Sudan, and even the re-imagining of Hinduism at the centre of ostensibly secular Indian nationalism. These were once embarrassing anachronisms for analysts from a wide range of perspectives, who typically saw them, particularly in their Islamic varieties, as insufficiently modernized, overly communal, less sophisticated (and thus easily co-opted), and simply less effective than the alliances of labour and bourgeois organizations that ‘achieved’ decolonization.1 Such movements and their post-colonial successors have now moved to the centre of many histories of anti-colonial activity. Their perceived autonomy, imbrication with personal and social life, and resistance to explanation within discredited universal and stagist frames — that is to say, the very things that had made earlier analysts suspicious — have marked them as harbingers of a new order. The apparent capacity of religious affiliation to facilitate involvement in the public sphere and ground civil society in its relations with state power is a centrepiece of this renewed attention to the role of belief and identity in decolonization.2 These approaches have as their great virtue the capacity to startle through juxtapositions of scale and setting; they link together the body, conceptions of the self, domestic life, popular intellectuals, social relations and global politics. In that spirit, I propose that one unlikely organization, the Moslem Association Party of the Gold Coast, in West Africa, and its even more unlikely chair, Bankole Awoonor-Renner, provide a good vantage point from which to evaluate these new histories.
Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Political science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Race, History, and American Society · Religion and Sociopolitical Dynamics in Nigeria
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,36 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2025 (14) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |