CONDITIONAL MOBILISATION: ISLAM, INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN AFRICA
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between Islamic traditions and social transformation in Africa, and advances three contributions. First, against both secularisation theory’s treatment of religion as residual and essentialist accounts reading social outcomes directly from scripture, it proposes a conditional mobilisation framework in which the transformative potential of religious tradition is neither inherent nor absent but is activated, redirected or foreclosed through the interaction of interpretive content, institutional form and political opportunity structure. Second, it constructs, from a genealogy spanning Islamic and European sources, a unified definition of social transformation as reconstitution, specifying six constitutive elements and resolving three contradictions that existing usages inherit. Third, it argues that the internal pluralism of African Muslim communities, meaning the capacity of Sufi, reformist, Salafi and traditionalist currents to contest interpretation peacefully, is the most consistent protective condition against the capture of religious authority, and that its erosion through state bureaucratisation, armed conflict or the displacement of scholarly by media authority is the clearest available predictor of extremist ascendancy. Working across the Maghreb, the Sahel, the Horn, the Swahili littoral and Southern Africa, the article concludes that Islamic traditions in Africa are neither an inherent obstacle to nor an automatic guarantor of social transformation: their transformative capacity is realised under specifiable institutional conditions. Because systematic quantitative evidence on these institutions does not exist, the analysis is offered as a provisional theory-building exercise that specifies a framework, codes eleven cases against it, and states the conditions under which it would be disconfirmed.
Keywords: Islam in Africa; social transformation; religious authority; maqāṣid al-sharīʿa; Sufism; Salafism; internal pluralism; Islamic finance; peacebuilding; hybrid governance
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