143144 SE Aspirations to Social Advancement and Religious Reform through Christianity and Islam (2022W)

How do aspirations to a better life have inspired religious reform? How do the social and the religious become the sites where reform and aspirations to a better life become entangled? This seminar offers an examination of the ways in which Muslims and Christians in Africa have articulated, formulated and negotiated their aspirations to a better life using a religious frame and agenda. Over the last few decades, the claims and initiatives of religious reform both among Muslims and Christians have resulted in social transformations processes that have relied heavily on social categories such as youth and women, and religious figures such as pastors and preachers. Gender and generational shifts within religious spheres came to matter where until more recently elders or male and established figures remained rather unchallenged.
What are these processes saying about being religious? How does religion become the avenue and the tool to transform the society? A shift to youth, women and emerging figures, as indicated above, may be interpreted as the sign of a social transformation process underway and as a response to the impact of liberalization and democratization. It may be read as the result of various dynamics that are generally reshaping contemporary Africa. The course will use the lens of religion and religiosity to examine how youth and other social groupings have become social agents in their own right and not mere subservient of an order they have to obey to.
The course requires you to read a set of secondary literature on religious transformation in both Christian and Islamic contexts. Through ethnographic materials and films the course offers an empirical and critical examination of these processes as they become the sites of identity formation, construction of authority, reformulation of gender roles and expression of agency, all in a context where poverty, prosperity, democracy, freedom, women’s rights are major preoccupations.