‘How, for God's sake, can I be a good Muslim?’: Gambian youth in search of a moral lifestyle

Janson, Marloes

doi:10.1177/1466138115575655

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“… 7 For the study of Christianity and Islam as mirror images, see also Loimeier (2005), Cooper (2006), Marshall (2009) and Janson (2016). However, as Peel points out in his response (this issue), there are also irreconcilable differences between Christianity and Islam in West Africa, notably in the call for sharia and an Islamic state.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Although I do not deny that Christianity and Islam have their own distinctive traditions in Nigeria, my point here is that we should focus more on how people actually ‘live’ religion and how their ways of ‘living’ religion relate to each other. By focusing on lived religion, it will become apparent that the idiosyncratic ways in which religion is performed are often marked by contradiction, ambivalence and double standards rather than by neat divisions along religious boundaries (see also Marsden 2005; Schielke and Debevec 2012; Janson 2014; 2016). The challenge is thus to develop a new conceptual framework to explore mutual influences and interactions between Christians and Muslims, and Chrislam may help us in this undertaking.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos

Janson¹

2016

Africa

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This article presents an ethnographic case study of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that fuse Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices, in its socio-cultural and political-economic setting in Nigeria's former capital Lagos. In contrast to conventional approaches that study religious movements in Africa as syncretic forms of ‘African Christianity’ or ‘African Islam’, I suggest that ‘syncretism’ is a misleading term to describe Chrislam. In fact, Chrislam provides a rationale for scrutinizing the very concept of syncretism and offers an alternative analytical case for understanding its mode of religious pluralism. To account for the religious plurality in Chrislam, I employ assemblage theory because it proposes novel ways of looking at Chrislam's religious mix that are in line with the way in which its worshippers perceive their religiosity. The underlying idea in Chrislam's assemblage of Christianity and Islam is that to be a Christian or Muslim alone is not enough to guarantee success in this world and the hereafter; therefore, Chrislam worshippers participate in Christian as well as Muslim practices, appropriating the perceived powers of both.

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confidence: 99%

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Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos

Janson¹

2016

Africa

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“…Women found it impossible patiently to tolerate illness, tiredness, and neglect from family members, and communicated their silent suffering through explicit verbalizations and subtle signals to convey to others the extent of their self‐sacrifice. Their situational and sometimes inconsequent practice of sabar resonates with other critiques of excessive literalism in Mahmood's analysis of moral practices of submission, including those of Janson (), Marsden (), Schielke (), and Simon (), who have pointed out how the vast majority of ordinary Muslims relate to the practices of piety inconsistently; they often miss the mark and fail to live up to the perfectionist standards of piety; their efforts to lead virtuous lives are complicated and fraught with ambivalence. Moreover, I think it is important to push the critique further, as Mahmood's discursive analysis of morality and ethical subjectivity not only overlooks this ambivalence, but also potentially misreads sabar as an agential practice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 64%

Sabar:body politics among middle‐aged migrantPakistani women

Qureshi

2013

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle-aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter-generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self-sublimation and self-assertion in the practice of sabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.10.30 am on a brisk March morning in East London. Uzma, 1 a 44-year-old mother of four, had been called to attend her first retinal screening since she'd been diagnosed with diabetes, and she was scared. She'd asked her husband to go with her, but he worked nights and didn't want to take her for a morning appointment, so she called me instead. At the health centre that morning, Uzma was jittery. She'd panicked during the initial consultation, reluctant for the diabetes nurse to administrate the eye drops that were supposed to dilate her pupils and allow the retina to be imaged clearly, and then insisted that she was experiencing extreme stinging sensations and blurred vision. We'd been sent back to the waiting room to allow the drops to take their full effect. Uzma was fretting over her distorted vision, and I was trying to comfort her by repeating what the nurse had said about how the blurring would be only temporary. We fell into a troubled silence. I hadn't noticed before, but sitting among the other patients was Nasreen, a woman I knew well from fieldwork, who suffered from diabetes and glaucoma too. I greeted Nasreen and she peered up at me from beneath her scarf, at first not recognizing me -her deteriorating vision was something I knew she tried to hide as much as bs_bs_banner She'll keep it, bottle it in and think that bottling it in is OK but then that's what caused her depression, like not talking and not saying your opinions and not talking about what she wanted. She'd always do as others wanted even if it hurt her, she'd always do that and that's why she probably became like that. We're [herself and her siblings] not like that because probably we're born here, we've been brought up here so we have that equal opportunities m...

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“…In discourse, these men would speak of aspirations to be good Muslims, but in practice, they would go astray and chase the illicit. The ambition to live moral lives, then, entails a journey filled with “ambiguity” and “conflicting demands,” moral compromises, and failures (Simon 2009, 38; Janson 2016, 269). Morality is flexible, especially in matters pertaining to leisure and fun (Deeb and Harb 2013).…”

Section: Borderland Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Blaming Kehl: Muslim Turkish Men and their Moral Journey in the Franco‐German Borderland

Alyanak

2022

City & Society

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Geographical space is more than a Cartesian plane where actors move across coordinates. It has a moral weight that renders each move subject to moral discourse. Yet, rarely does this premise prevent people from exploring spaces that are associated with anything wrong or bad. In fact, we continue to find people in places where they should not be, and doing things that are not just communally shunned but also personally acknowledged to be wrong or bad. Why is that the case? This paper draws on my ethnography on Turkish men who live in Strasbourg and socialize in its German neighbor, Kehl, to examine the role of space in the production of moral and masculine dispositions and practices. Approaching the Strasbourg‐Kehl border as a moral boundary, I examine how crossing the border to Kehl constitutes an integral part of the journey that my interlocutors take in constructing their moral and masculine selves. In this journey, spatial transgressions are not diverted but embraced, and confronted. These transgressions also produce anxieties—mistakes which in moments of self‐reflection lead to regrets. In such moments, two logics come into play: consequentialism and blame. The first builds on Islamic notions of fallibility and nefs, while the latter brings Kehl into the picture as a moral alibi—a space that takes blame for sins. The latter also helps others in the community who fail to prevent men from going to Kehl and transgressing moral boundaries to transpose culpability. In conclusion, I emphasize the need to consider the making and maintenance of masculinities and moralities in conjunction with the lived environments where such identities are formed and performed.

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‘How, for God's sake, can I be a good Muslim?’: Gambian youth in search of a moral lifestyle

Cited by 23 publications

References 52 publications

Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos

Unity Through Diversity: A Case Study of Chrislam in Lagos

Sabar:body politics among middle‐aged migrantPakistani women

Blaming Kehl: Muslim Turkish Men and their Moral Journey in the Franco‐German Borderland

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