Introduction to the Special Issue on Religious Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Islamic and Christian societies in Africa are at the heart of thriving religious developments amid challenging economic and political transformations. This article introduces the special issue by laying out the current state of the literature on religious entrepreneurship and religious transformations and demonstrates how our contributors position themselves vis-à-vis this literature. It explains how, by analyzing select individual trajectories of Islamic and Christian religious entrepreneurs, contributors to this special issue shed light on logics of upward social mobility whereby these individuals seize the new opportunities provided by social and political liberalization. But beyond the notion of individual success, these entrepreneurs are deeply embedded within various social networks, without which their trajectories would be impossible to decipher.