Islam and the Prayer Economy

History and Authority in a Malian Town

Bibliographic Data

ID7425465
AuthorsBenjamin Soares (0000-0002-2340-5946), Benjamin F Soares (California University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author)
Year2005
Publication date2005-07-26
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueIslam and the Prayer Economy (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1515/9781474472753
OpenAlexW1601305942
ISBN9781474472753
LanguageEN
Citations received122

Benjamin F. Scares. Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in Malian Town. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. xiv + 306 pp. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $29.95. Paper. Islam and the frayer Economy is an ethnographic and historical study of Muslim society among the people of Nioro, town in western near the border with Mauritania, which the French colonial administrator Paul Marty once described as veritable boulevard of Islam in the region (58). Benjamin F. Soares has drawn upon extensive fieldwork in and archival research in France and Dakar to produce this nuanced and smoothly written study of Muslim leadership, practice, and culture in this community from the nineteenth century to the present. He argues that in the postcolonial period Nioro has witnessed the growth of driven most powerfully by the town's major Sufi leaders, representing the Hamawiyya and Tijaniyya orders. He explains, prayer economy is, in effect, an economy of religious practice in which people give gifts to certain religious leaders on large scale in exchange for prayers and blessings (153). The book's title notwithstanding, discussion of the prayer economy forms only small part of Soares's story. It would be more accurate to describe the book, instead, as an analysis of the complex social, political, and economic mechanics of Islam in Nioro that situates this locality within the broader frameworks of Mali, West Africa, the former French empire, and the world. Historically Nioro served as an important center for the Saharan trade with West Africa; during the nineteenth century it served as capital for the state formed by al-Hajj 'Umar Tall; and during the twentieth century it was an Islamic pilgrimage center. Yet if Nioro has become a relatively small and economically marginal town in Mali ( 11 ), it is neither somnolent nor isolated today. Soares mentions that during the early stages of his fieldwork in the 1990s, he met Nioro Muslims who had relatives in countries such as France, Oman, and Thailand, or who later moved there themselves. Likewise, the Islam of Nioro, as Soares presents it, has been culture in constant motion. In this sense the town is surely representative of as whole. For while Islam has been present in the region's trading centers for more than millennium, Islam became the religion of the overwhelming majority only during the twentieth century. Soares rejects an earlier model of anthropological scholarship, represented by the works of Ernest Gellner, which portrayed Muslim societies as either traditional or modern, orthodox or heterodox, and which assumed that rising levels of education and urban living would lead away from folk and toward religion grounded in scholarly and textual mode. Instead Soares approaches Islam as series of interrelated practices and examines Muslim vis-a-vis Sufism and what he calls the esoteric sciences, which include geomancy, divination, and the use of amulets

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Economy · Empire · Ethnography · Islam · Political science · Politics · Prayer · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · African Studies and Geopolitics · History · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy · Religious studies

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