Senegal: Muslim Youth Identities in a Secular Nation

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of the ways youth in Senegal articulated their identities with respect to nation, religion and gender. Identity was understood as an ongoing discursive production involving differentiation against constitutive ‘others’. Youth’s identity constructions were explored through focus group discussions which gave space for their identity work. The focus groups involved 75 youth (35 females and 40 males) in Dakar and its vicinity. Forty-seven of these were Muslim and 28 were Christian. Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country which became a secular republic after gaining independence from France in the 1960s. The analysis highlights the complex ways in which nation, gender and religion intersected in youth’s identity constructions. Youth’s narratives show how their national and religious affiliations were sutured together, in contrast to the strong separation of nation and religion that is assumed within some understandings of the modern ‘secular’ nation. The entanglement of their religious and national belongings was also integral to the ways their nation was defined against its colonial past, with Sufi leaders in particular being singled out as national heroes for having unified the nation in opposition to the colonial other. Senegalese youth further proclaimed the distinctiveness of Senegalese or ‘African’ Islam. Its fusions with traditional customs and beliefs allowed Islam to take root in multiple syncretic forms across Senegal. This syncretism and ‘Africanity’ were valued, and constructed in opposition to the other of the ‘diabolized’ or ‘jihadist’ Islam that youth felt was practised in other contexts, such as the Middle East, or Afghanistan. However in relation to gender, considerable tensions were evident in how this intersected with youth’s discourses of nation, religion and ethnicity. Within national, religious and sometimes ethic discourses, powerful gender hierarchies emerged, which often left women constructed in a subordinated position. Each of these discourses (nation, religion and ethnicity) could be recruited individually to justify unequal gender norms. Their power is intensified when recruited together, and conjoined with potentially negative associations with modernity as an imposition from the Global North. Although contested in female focus groups in particular, promises of equality that are supposedly at the heart of republican values prove evanescent.