The Religious Traditions of Africa: a history (review)

about the ‘compatibility’ of ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’, Cruise O’Brien’s nuanced and subtle discussion comes as an insightful suggestion of an alternative way to frame the question: what potential is there for the manipulation of symbols so as to allow for the expression of alternative voices – that is, for practising a form of democracy – in the complex political contexts of any given Muslim society? The answers, of course, must be highly contingent and variable, but are surely far more reflective of the politics of the possible than much of the Islam and politics literature might suggest. By engaging with a broad and impressive range of subsequent literature on Senegalese religion and politics (including, I should note, some of my own), this book gracefully reworks much of Cruise O’Brien’s oeuvre into a sort of engaged conversation with a wide range of scholars. The result is a richly textured and endlessly insightful exploration of scholarly understandings of the rather unique Senegalese ‘success story’. At times, the conversation is actually with himself; the author’s voice is present in the background throughout the writing, and he occasionally steps into the foreground. ‘One broadcaster in 1975 self-consciously stated his task in Wolof Radiodiffusion to be one of ‘‘nation-building’’’, Cruise O’Brien reports in one passage, and then adds, ‘But then he knew that I was interested in political questions.’ Thus also, in the end, through this internal commentary on the motivations and contexts of his interlocutors, Cruise O’Brien’s work incorporates a sort of epistemological rumination on how we know and understand societies, as they are imagined into existence by their participants. The writing, so characteristic of Cruise O’Brien’s scholarship, is thick and rich, marked by witty asides and commentaries. This is a book to be savoured and not just read for the empirical content. It provides not only a rich description of some key African Muslim societies, but also a complex argument for understanding religious politics as both symbolic and imagined, played out in the displaying, negotiating, and manipulation of symbols of authority, and in the struggles for control of the terrain that define the landscapes of symbols. Cruise O’Brien is never tempted by the facile explanations, recognizing throughout the complex and at times contradictory motivations that guide human behaviour, and through which religious symbolisms intertwine with other factors to shape social lives.