Religion and Globalisation: Sub-Saharan Islam to Conquer New Territories

Abstract

ABSTRACT No analyst today would ever dream of denying the fact that religious flows are in line with globalisation. As such, sub-Saharan Africa is not unaffected by globalisation, even if its share in international trade is minute. Different mechanisms are indeed working towards its insertion in the international system, including and perhaps especially the transnational religious networks that, due to their proselytism and mobilisation capacity, dominate as one of the privileged vectors of that insertion. This phenomenon has been the subject of in-depth studies on the Catholic and Protestant churches; however, this is not the case concerning Islam, even though the globalisation of Islam accompanied its expansion throughout the twentieth century in Africa and the Umma and is, by definition, supranational. The transnationalisation of sub-Saharan African Islam in fact follows several paths and combines individual and collective strategies; it does not deal only with institutions, politico-commercial or ‘material civilisation’ networks, but also with culture and symbols, where globalisation is also constructed and deconstructed in the imagination.