The politics of Islam in the Sahel : between persuasion and violence /
'Ideologies need enemies to thrive, religion does not.' Using the Sahel as a source of five comparative case studies, this volume aims to engage in the painstaking task of disentangling Islam from the political ideologies that have issued from its theologies to fight for governmental power...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
London ; New York :
Routledge,
[2017]
|
| Series: | Europa regional perspectives.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 'Ideologies need enemies to thrive, religion does not.' Using the Sahel as a source of five comparative case studies, this volume aims to engage in the painstaking task of disentangling Islam from the political ideologies that have issued from its theologies to fight for governmental power and the transformation of society. While these ideologies tap into sources of religious legitimacy, the author shows that they are fundamentally secular or temporal enterprises, defined by confrontation with other political ideologies, both progressive and liberal, within the arena of nation states. Their objectives are the same as these other ideologies, i.e., to harness political power for changing national societies, and they resort to various methods of persuasion, until they break down into violence. The two driving questions of the book are, whence come these ideologies, and why do they sometimes result in violence? Ideologies of Salafi radicalism are at work in the five countries of the Sahel region, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, (northern) Nigeria and Senegal, but violence has broken out only in Mali and northern Nigeria. Using a theoretical framework of ideological development and methods of historical analysis, Idrissa traces the emergence of Salafi radicalism in each of these countries as a spark ignited by the shock between concurrent processes of Islamization and colonization in the 1940s. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xii, 275 pages : maps ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [251]-261) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781857438666 1857438663 |