May 2005
The Role of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
Introduction
Dan Brumberg, Special Advisor to Muslim World Initiative
While the role of Islam and Islamists is critical to the political and economic future of Sub-Saharan Africa, it has received sporadic attention from scholars and policy makers. This paucity of concern is, of course, explained in large measure by the post-9/11 focus on the Middle East and South Asia, since it is from these two regions that Al-Qaeda and its allies mostly hail. Yet as the contributions to this month’s Muslum World Insights show, developments in sub-Saharan Africa may be widening the base for radical Islam, even as some courageous Muslim clerics (and their Christian counterparts) struggle to mobilize support for a peaceful approach to sectarian and inter-religious conflicts. Indeed, as Daniel Chirot’s essay shows, it is Christian-Muslim conflict, rather than simply the phenomenon of political Islam, that has given advocates of peace in Africa --and wider global community – good reason for concern. That conflict is not fed be religion itself. As the experiences of Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria demonstrate, the region’s “religious” conflicts are animated by economic crisis, by competition for scare resources, and by the cynical bid of political and religious leaders to use Christian and Muslim evangelism (or the fear of it) as a tool for protecting their power, or for assailing that of their rivals. Yet the news is not completely grim. As our two reports on “USIP Conflict Resolution Workshops for Southern Sudanese” indicate, Muslim and Christian leaders have defied the allure of sectarianism by backing pro-peace NGO’s, by and participating in conflict resolution seminars in Entebbe, Uganda and in Khartoum itself. The participation in the latter of members of the Muslim Brothers Party, the Umma Party and the South’s Sudanese Liberation Movement (SPLM)-- as well as actors from more marginalized if violence-ridden areas including Darfur-- offers some reason for a very guarded optimism. Similarly, USIP-supported interfaith conflict resolution programs in Kenya, as well as Rainer Klusener’s revealing report on “Islam in Rwanda” -- which highlights the efforts of Rwanda’s small Muslim community to save both Muslim and Christian Tutsis and Hutu—reminds us that “decency, every bit as much as its opposite, transcends the divisions that we so assiduously seek to construct.”
Could there be Muslim-Christian Wars in West Africa?
Daniel Chirot, Senior Fellow, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program
Most African states have been subject to a long series of violent internal conflicts since independence. Uppsala University’s Peace and Conflict Reach Department estimates that since independence, 21 out of 46 African countries have had serious warfare (more than 1000 battle deaths per year, but not counting the vastly larger number of civilian deaths that have resulted from these wars and other internal conflicts), and 13 others have had minor wars. Almost all the rest have had at least significant political violence, even without wars. The United States State Department lists more than 80 successful “coups, depositions, and assassinations” in independent African states from 1960 to 2005, and this does not count unsuccessful attempts.
Most of these conflicts have been primarily caused by competition for scarce resources between political groups, often acting or claiming to act as representatives of their ethnic groups. Yet, across a wide band of Africa running across the continent from Senegal to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, mostly in the Southern Savannah and northern forest areas through West Africa to the Nile, and then turning south through East Africa down into Tanzania and reaching further and further inland, Islam and Christianity have been in direct and increasingly heated competition for converts and influence. Why is this not a common source of war? Or is it, and we have not noticed? Religion has certainly played a major role in the north-south division in the Sudan, and it has come up repeatedly as a source of murderous conflict in Nigeria, but elsewhere, it seems to be secondary.
Limiting ourselves to just West Africa, should we think that the competition between Islam and Christianity is not a serious problem? There are certainly voices, including some involved in West Africa’s currently most dangerous civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, claiming that the rebel-held, mostly Islamic north and the government-held, mostly Christian south are at odds with each other in part over the religion issue. Others, including most Ivoirians, say that religion is not the issue at all. Who is right? Perhaps everyone has become so familiarized with these repeated West African conflicts that alarms are not sounded even as they turn more religious.
A well documented case in the central Nigerian region of Jos (Plateau State) highlights the key issues a stake. Nigeria itself is an economic and social mess. Since independence its population has tripled and its per capita income has declined, even as it has become a major oil producer. The courts system and police barely function and are corrupt. Repeated army coups led by kleptocratic officers alternating with corrupt civilian rule have delegitimized the state, and basic infrastructures have not been maintained. In this atmosphere, where political competition is about little more than securing the ability to distribute jobs and benefits to one’s kin and ethnic backers, progress is almost impossible. In Plateau State, that political competition has been primarily between “settlers” and “indigenes.” That the settlers, mostly Muslim Hausa-Fulani, migrated into the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century does not lessen the tension between them and the indigenes. Neither does the fact that for a long time they got along, because the “indigenes” were mostly farmers, and the “settlers” were more towns people, merchants, and Fulani pastoralists. The animist indigenes mostly converted to Christianity. As the economic situation degenerated and population pressure increased, serious conflicts developed between the “indigenes” and “settlers” over who would control local politics, land, and jobs. This took a religious turn, with evangelical Christians openly condemning those who believe that Muhammad was a prophet, and Muslim imams saying their community (mostly Hausa-Fulani) was being discriminated against. In September 2001, violence broke out and spread throughout the entire area. Ultimately, more than 8,000 people were killed. There were wholesale massacres of Muslims by Christians, and of Christians by Muslims. The killing spread north to Kano, which is majority Hausa-Fulani and where Christians are the “settlers.” Some 50,000 people in Kano and Plateau States fled from their homes and became internally displaced people. This “incident,” it should be noted, did not even make it into Uppsala University’s highly regarded list of African armed conflicts because it was not a formal “war” between military combatants. Was it religious? Clearly, the answer is yes and no. This was not about theology, but it did become a kind of Muslim-Christian conflict anyway. Subsequently, a USIP-supported inter-faith group has mediated between Muslims and Christians in Plateau States, and produced worthwhile episodes of reconciliation, but these hardly remove the basic problems.
Analogous stories could be told about the breakdown of order in Côte d’Ivoire. President Laurent Gbagbo and his wife Simone have made their evangelical Christianity one of the rationales for mobilizing support in the south, while many northern Muslim leaders have said the essence of the problem is religious intolerance on the part of Christians. In fact, the situation is far more complex and involves the competition between various communities for increasingly scarce resources, as in Nigeria. Most of these have nothing to do with a Christian-Muslim divide. Some leading rebel northern politicians are themselves Christians, while some Muslim leaders in the south have taken the government’s side.
How should we interpret this? It is a fact that evangelical Christians in West Africa (and elsewhere in Africa) have been proselytizing, often helped by American church donations. There remain many Africans who practice traditional local religions and are potential converts. Muslims have also been proselytizing among the same people, often helped by Arab (largely Saudi) funding. Given the general decline in the standard of living in West Africa (and in all of Africa) over the past 40 years, the hugely expanded population, and the massive migrations that have brought growing numbers of people to areas where they are not “indigenous,” the potential for conflict is huge.
States are inept and corrupt and do not provide aid or protection. Ethnic associations can, and eager politicians capitalize on this to obtain support for their ambitions. But among both Muslims and Christians, religious communities offer self-help, social support, economic benefits, and most of all, a promise of some safety in numbers. Therefore, it is entirely plausible that over time religion will play an increasing rather than a decreasing role. Most Africans are in any case very religious. It is not that religion as such is or will be the major issue, but that religious communities, Muslim and Christian, each with outside allies, will become ever more important as a socio-political sources of help for their followers. Then, the scene will be set for competition over resources to become open religious warfare.
What can be done about this? The long term solution does not lie in simply encouraging different religious groups to tolerate each other. That is all to the good, of course, but it does not address the key issues which are not religious. To avoid such wars in the future, West Africa (and all of Africa) will have to reform by creating a better climate for economic growth, establishing more honest courts and police forces, and stimulating the growth of civil society organizations whose leaders can talk directly to each other and dampen local conflicts while learning to exert pressure on central governments to better use state revenues. That is a very tall order, and planning for this brings up a host of other contentious issues. We should remember that in Africa, Islamic-Christian conflicts are not legacies of colonial rule and what many Middle Eastern Muslims perceive as Western arrogance. They are not about a fight between modernizers and traditionalists. Nor are they about theological disputes between the two religions, particularly because among both Christians and Muslims there are many internal theological divisions. Rather, these religious conflicts are relatively new and are directly related to Africa’s other problems. Without major reforms that have little to do with religion, however, they will get much worse if present trends continue.
Islam in Rwanda
Rainer Klusener
As the world now knows, from April to June 1994, militant Hutu murdered approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in the small central African country of Rwanda. Nearly every domestic and international institution failed the Rwandan people: the UN reduced the number of peacekeeping troops in the country soon after the killings began; the United States famously drew a distinction between “genocide” and mere “acts of genocide” to justify its failure to intervene; even Rwandan churches, originally sought out as sanctuaries by Tutsi, turned into charnel houses—often with the willing participation of the church leaders. But one community stood out, both for its courage in protecting Tutsi and its refusal to draw a distinction between population groups: Rwandan Muslims. Their story has rarely been told.
Compared to most of their neighboring countries—like Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda—the history of Islam in Rwanda started relatively late. Only a few written sources are available regarding its origins. Some claim that Islam was imported by Arab merchants who first entered the country in 1901. Others say that Islam entered Rwanda with the advent of German colonial rule in 1894. In need of soldiers, clerks, administrative assistants, and merchants, the German administration recruited Muslims from the Swahili-speaking coast of Tanzania to help them forge a larger German East Africa. Rwanda’s first mosque was built in 1913, on the initiative of merchants from India. Many of these first-generation Muslims married local Rwandan women, thus creating a tradition of inter-ethnic marriages whose progeny would for a long time be regarded as foreign.
Because of this tradition of multiple “inter-ethnicity,” Rwandan Muslims tended to draw their identity through their religion rather than through their ethnicity. As a result, even though most Rwandan Muslims were sufficiently indigenized to be given the infamous identity cards recognizing them as either Hutu or Tutsi, most saw themselves as Muslim first and foremost. When the genocide began, few Muslim Hutu cooperated with the Interahamwe, the notorious extremist Hutu militia. In fact, quite the opposite: Not only did they not cooperate in killing their co-religionists, they often did everything in their power to save Muslim Tutsi. What is even more remarkable, however, is that they also saved the lives of thousands of Christians. The safest place to be during the genocide was in a Muslim neighborhood—many homes of Muslims were full of refugees, often complete strangers to their rescuers. Imams also spoke out publicly against the massacres and urged their congregations not to take part, reminding them that the killings were not reconcilable with the principles of Islam.
Only a handful of incidents have been reported in which mosques were attacked. The best known example occurred at Nyamirambo Main Mosque, where hundreds of Tutsi gathered to take refuge. With stones and bows and arrows they put up a brave front against the soldiers and militiamen of the Interahamwe. Only once the soldiers attacked with machine gun fire were the Interahamwe able to enter the mosque and kill the more than 300 people assembled there.
All this stands in sharp contrast to the vast majority of the Protestant and Catholic churches, where clerics sometimes allowed Tutsi to seek refuge and then surrendered them without protest to Hutu death squads. Indeed, there are numerous instances of Hutu priests encouraging their congregation to kill Tutsi. And while many clergy members struggled to protect their congregation and often died with them, more than 20 Catholic and Protestant religious figures have faced charges related to the genocide.
As a result of Islam’s brave performance during the genocide, it is now the fastest growing religion in Rwanda. In 1994, there were perhaps 300,000 to 500,000 Muslims in Rwanda—or roughly five percent of the population. Today, at least eight and as much as fifteen percent of the population is Muslim—a doubling or tripling of their number within a decade.
Of course, not all of the converts did so out of admiration for Islam. Some Tutsi converted for practical reasons, as they feared continuing reprisal killings by Hutu extremists. These conversions tapered off by 1997, once the new, Tutsi-led government was able to guarantee security. Many Hutu converted as well. Some were seeking purification and wanted to leave their violent past behind them. There are also a few, isolated instances of murderers converting in the hope that they could hide within the Muslim community and thereby escape arrest.
Today, for the first time, Islam is accorded the same rights and freedoms as Christian denominations. Traditionally regarded as second-class citizens in a country that once boasted that it was “Africa’s most Catholic nation,” many former Rwandan Muslims are rediscovering their roots and returning to the faith of their forebears. Although estimates are inevitably rough, there is thought to be approximately equal numbers of Tutsi and Hutu Muslims. (In the wake of the genocide, the government has banned all discussion of ethnicity in Rwanda.) Meanwhile, Muslim leaders are in the vanguard of that country’s efforts to impart the importance of unity and tolerance, not only to their congregations, but within the country’s interfaith commission.
While political theorists posit the source of today’s conflicts as religious or civilizational in nature, the humble example of Rwanda and the little-noted role of the Muslim community there suggests that decency, every bit as much as its opposite, transcends the divisions that we so assiduously seek to construct.
Political Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa
David Dickson, Specialist, Africa
Accelerating with the attacks of September 11, 2001, but extending back more than a decade, studies of the growth of Islam as a source of political mobilization have proliferated, but few have examined political Islam on the African subcontinent or broadened the approach beyond transnational terrorism. On July 9, 2004, a conference of Africa experts from academia and the U.S. foreign policymaking community convened at the United States Institute of Peace to begin an examination of this shortcoming and its foreign-policy implications.
Ambassador George Ward, director of the U.S. Institute of Peace's Professional Training Program, and Taylor Seybolt, program officer in the Institute's Grant Program, chaired conference panels. Presenters included Howard University's Sulayman Nyang, the University of Connecticut's Lucy Creevey, and George Mason University's John Paden. Additional panelists included Malik Chaka, a staff member with the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, and Ambassador David Shinn, now at George Washington University and former ambassador to Ethiopia, and John Voll of Georgetown University. David Dickson specialist Africa organized the conference and wrote the report. Joseph Sany, an assistant in the Research and Studies Program, provided advice and assistance for the report. Paul Stares, director of Research and Studies, and Abdeslam Maghraoui, associate director for the Institute's
Muslim World Initiative, supervised the drafting of the report.
Read the complete report online.
USIP Conflict Resolution Training in Sudan
Jacqueline Wilson, Program Officer, Professional Training Program
Since September, 2004, the Institute’s Professional Training Program has made it a priority to conduct conflict resolution training in Sudan. Knowing that a comprehensive peace agreement was likely to be signed in the near future only complicated the planning effort. However, despite the considerable challenges, the Professional Training Program has completed two conflict resolution training workshops in Sudan and is in the process of planning a leadership development program.
Planning Stages
One of the initial questions that needed to be addressed with respect to working in Sudan was whether the training would be conducted separately in the north and south because the comprehensive peace agreement had not yet been signed, or whether it would make a more positive, supportive statement of the IGAD-sponsored and internationally-supported peace efforts to jump directly to workshops, bringing participants from northern and southern Sudan together. After considerable consultation with Sudan scholars and specialists, the training program decided it would be best to wait approximately six months after the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement to move forward with joint north/south training. The two initial workshops would be held—one in the north for northerners, and then one in the south (or near the south) for southern Sudanese—and would be followed approximately six months later by the first in what is hoped to be a series of comprehensive, joint north-south leadership development workshops.
In developing a strategy for conflict resolution training in Sudan, the Professional Training program also put forth considerable effort to research what was already being done in Sudan so as not to duplicate effort. Although considerable conflict resolution work is being done in Sudan, much of it is at the grassroots level and is designed to work explicitly within the context of existing, traditional conflict resolution mechanisms or to facilitate the work of local, grassroots NGOs that either participate in conflict resolution training or are practitioners of conflict resolution. For example, the Nairobi-based New Sudan Council of Churches with the Khartoum-based Sudan Council of Churches has conducted the People-to-People Peace Process, a highly successful endeavor at promoting local peace building and respecting local traditions. Paul Murphy of PACT has applied the Sudan Peace Fund Program to promote grassroots reconciliation and development tied to resolving conflicts over resources (if, for example, there are conflicts over water, they may drill a borehole at a mutually beneficial location). The women of South Sudanese Friends International (SSFI) enlisted ordinary village women and considerably strengthened the role of women in grassroots peacebuilding activities. This was all grassroots –level training which would not affect what USIP hoped to do.
The vast majority of these programs were working in southern Sudan. In the north, there seemed to be far fewer conflict resolution training programs. The Al Afhad University for Women in Khartoum worked in collaboration with the Babiker Badri Society, an indigenous NGO conducting conflict resolution training in northern Sudan. Douglas Johnston, of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, had conducted several workshops bringing religious leaders from various sects and denominations together. There did not seem to be any groups bridging the gaps between grassroots efforts on the one hand and the very capable religious communities and their successful work on the other, which is what the Professional Training Program hoped to do.
Once it was decided to try to bridge the gaps between diverse groups from various sectors of society, the program had to select partners that could achieve that goal. The Professional Training Program prefers to work with local NGOs that know both the needs of the community and how to bring participants to the workshop, and that have demonstrated the potential for development of a mutually beneficial long-term relationship with USIP. Working with the Institute’s Religion and Peacemaking program director David Smock, the Institute identified several potential partners that were already active in bringing civil society groups together. The partner in the north was identified as the Sudan Inter-Religious Council, and the partner for our work in the south was identified as RECONCILE, the Resource Center for Civil Leadership. Both groups have demonstrated past successes and wide-ranging relationships throughout many sectors of Sudanese society.
Even after crafting a basic strategy for our work in Sudan, there remained considerable obstacles, not the least of which were the U.S. government sanctions against Sudan. After receiving an OFAC license waiver to portions of the sanctions in order to do work that would help to relieve human suffering, we were on our way to putting together a firm plan for our conflict resolution training workshops.
Another potential obstacle was one that mostly went unspoken, but of which the Training Program was well aware. In short, there was considerable skepticism about “outsiders” not knowing Sudan and trying to teach “western” methods of conflict resolution. The Training Program representative spoke with many Sudanese experts, practitioners, and policy experts to determine the feasibility of presenting interest-based negotiation skills to Sudanese. Although the Training Program has worked all over the world, and has presented the same core set of skills in many cultures and many countries, the program was especially mindful of “doing no harm” by potentially exacerbating already sensitive areas of conflict in a country as war-weary and conflict prone as Sudan.
Taking into account all of these factors, the plan was laid out to hold two back-to-back workshops with similar participants, similar objectives, and as identical a curriculum as possible. One would be held in the north and one in the south, with a plan to begin joint north/south workshops approximately six months after implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement. The first workshop was held from March 30 to April 1, 2005 in Entebbe, Uganda, and the second was held April 12-14, 2005 in Khartoum, Sudan.
Participants
The participants in both workshops planned to bring together diverse elements of Sudanese society that might not normally attend conflict resolution training workshops together. The participants reflected political, geographic, tribal, ethnic, religious, age and gender diversity, yet also included the groups that have established access and credibility in addressing conflict in Sudan. The hope was also to facilitate access for other programs within the Institute, so participants were invited with interests in Education, Rule of Law, and Religion and Peacemaking.
In truth, representation in both workshops ended up being broad based and as diverse as hoped, with many important sectors of Sudanese society participating. Political groups represented in the Khartoum workshop included members from several of the main political parties in Sudan, including the DUP, the Umma Party, and the Muslim Brothers Party. In terms of leadership in southern Sudan, several members of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) participated, as did a payam administrator and two tribal elders. Religious groups were well represented in both workshops. Several religious denominations participated, including the West Sudan Evangelical Churches and the Coptic Church as well as several NGOs that work on increasing religious tolerance. The Entebbe workshop included the Chairmen of both the New Sudan Council of Churches and New Sudan Islamic Council as well as other religious representatives.. Participants also came from various elements of civil society, including youth groups such as the Equatoria Youth Association and the Rumbek Youth Union and women’s organizations such as the Sudanese Women’s Voice for Peace and the Sudanese Young Women Empowerment Network. Both workshops had representatives from the media, and several participants represented International NGOs.
From a geographical perspective, it was important that the participantscome from the areas that consider themselves marginalized, such as Darfur and the east, as well as from the three areas specifically addressed in the north/south peace protocols. The Khartoum workshop drew participants from several areas in Darfur, West, North and South Kordofan states, and Red Sea, Kassala and Blue Nile states in the east. Geographically, participants in the Entebbe workshop came from Eastern Equatoria (Yei), Western Equatoria (Yambio), Jonglei (Akobo), and Rumbek. The remainder were from the vast Sudanese diaspora living in either Kenya or Uganda. Most do considerable work in southern Sudan and all are involved in southern Sudanese life, and many have families that are considering returning to southern Sudan. Some participants are practitioners who are actively working in conflict resolution in areas such as western Upper Nile where oil is present and conflict has been persistent.
Objectives
These back-to-back workshops focused on accomplishing the same primary objectives:
- To increase trust and understanding within various elements of Sudanese society that are represented at the workshop
- To improve participants’ conflict resolution skills
- To invigorate a Sudanese “peace network” that crosses sectoral, religious, ethnic and geographic boundaries.
During the planning phase, it had been pointed out that there is already in existence in Sudan a rather extensive peace-building network. We hoped to energize that network and to create linkages among the networks working in various sectors (the women’s network, the religious network, the civil society network and so forth).
Content
For both workshops, these objectives were achieved through presentations, simulations, and training exercises focusing on building strong communications and negotiations skills. Cross-cultural factors were integrated into all elements of the program, and every attempt was made to integrate and refer to traditional, culturally appropriate methods of solving problems, as well as locally-respected techniques. For example, third party mediation is a commonly-used technique in Sudanese society, and the participants utilized third party skills extensively through role playing. The training was sensitive to, and drew extensively from, traditional cultural norms of conflict resolution in Sudan.
Special presentations were incorporated into the training program to address this challenge. The workshop in Khartoum included a panel discussion with presentations on these three conflict resolution mechanisms. The Reverend Ezekiel Kutjok spoke about Conflict Resolution: A Biblical View Point. His presentation focused on the definitions of conflict, on the definition of resolution, as well as topics such as forgiveness and reconciliation. Dr. Al Tayib al Zain, representing the Sudan Inter-Religious Council and speaking about Islam, focused on many of the same themes, discussing reconciliation and forgiveness. The consensus was that reconciliation means restoration of a broken relationship, which creates a new situation of peaceful coexistence or at least restores stability. Lastly, Dr. Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the University of Khartoum, gave a very interesting and thought-provoking presentation on An Anthropological Perspective on Traditional Mechanisms for Conflict Management: An Example from Darfur, Sudan, which talked about the use of judiya to help resolve conflicts.
Dr. Musa’s presentation certainly demonstrated the vast differences between traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, particularly as practiced in Darfur, and the way we tend to resolve conflicts in the west. In another special presentation, Dr. Abuel Gassim Gor of the Drama and Conflict Resolution Program at the University of Khartoum and his group demonstrated how they use drama to help teach traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution. The lively and vibrant discussion was extremely helpful in giving insights into how situations can be resolved through collective councils and the intervention of respected elders.
However, in the end, a point was made by one of the Khartoum participants which put all of this into perspective. In his remarks at the end of the workshop, the student summarized the success of the workshop by indicating that after having looked at conflict resolution mechanisms in Islam, in Christianity, and looking at traditional mediation mechanisms such as judiya and at traditional councils, the skills taught by USIP for communication, negotiation, mediation, and problem solving, were applicable in all situations. It does not matter whether one is Muslim or Christian, African or Arab, northerner or southerner, but that one can use these skills, frameworks and thought processes to resolve conflicts peacefully. That was the entire goal, and hearing it from a participant only made the feedback that much more rewarding.
The USIP Professional Training Program plans to build on these two initial workshops for Sudanese toward integrating participants from north and south, and working toward a leadership development program for all Sudanese.
May 2005 Update from the USIP Grant Program
The Institute’s Grant Program is currently supporting several research and action projects on Islam in Africa. Two of the four projects highlighted below address the peaceful resolution of inter-communal conflicts. The other two projects explore the process of democratization in predominantly Muslim countries.
- In Sudan, CARE USA is engaged in a project under the direction of Leo Roozendaal to identify and examine the most effective traditional conflict mediation and transformation mechanisms in Wau, a town in Bahr El Ghazal state. Roozendaal and his colleagues are focusing on disputes over land, property, marriage and power relations. They identify disputes and mediation practices through surveys, group discussions and interviews. To date, the project has determined that individual disputes over land often lead to tribal conflict because of the social nature of customary access rights to land. Customary law, which is the most common mechanism for dispute settlement, has several weaknesses that hold the potential for increased conflict. It is not documented, not uniformly applied among ethnic groups and not sensitive to the rights of vulnerable groups, especially women. The project team plans to work with community members to address these weaknesses through traditional mediation practices. They will publish the results of their work in a report to be disseminated among local leaders and communities, governmental bodies, courts, the academic community, NGOs and other local, national and international stakeholders.
- In Kenya, Catholic Relief Services has recently begun a project directed by Shirley Dady to reduce tensions, suspicion and mistrust among the coastal and northern eastern communities that are experiencing inter-religious divisions. CRS/Kenya is working with the Coastal Inter-faith Council of Clerics to gather information on the status of inter-religious divisions by providing technical support in participatory research, strategic planning, peacebuilding, and monitoring and evaluation. The Council of Clerics is engaging local communities, government officials and theologians in the districts of Lamu, Tana river and Mombassa. Their report will provide peacebuilding material based on inter-faith theories and practice, will serve as a scholarly reference and will inform the project's strategic planning to enhance inter-faith interventions through churches, mosques, temples and shrines.
- A research project by Robert Pringle is exploring the dynamics of democracy in Mali and its implications for western Africa. A former Ambassador to Mali, Pringle is interviewing Malians to inform his assessment of the reasons for the success of the country's democratic system. His research focuses on three related topics: the relative importance of leadership, cultural and historical precedents, and international support in Mali's democratization; the risks still facing Malian democracy, including unabated poverty and the possibility of Islamic radicalization, and what might be done to mitigate them; and the applicability of Malian experience to other countries in West Africa, particularly Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso and Guinea. The project will produce a monograph designed primarily for policy makers, a magazine article for the broader public, and a series of policy briefings.
- A research project led by Richard Vengroff of the University of Connecticut is exploring the process of democratization and its relationship to Islam in the predominantly Muslim country of Senegal. Based on surveys and other field-based assessment tools, Vengroff’s study examines attitudes, values and beliefs of both the Senegalese public and Islamic leaders on such issues as electoral reform, democratic consolidation and confidence in government institutions. Interviews with over 200 Islamic leaders in Senegal have been completed and will inform the book that is currently being drafted. The purpose of the book is to enhance understanding of the transition to democracy in Senegal and inform efforts to promote similar transitions in other Muslim countries.
Muslim World Experts
The work of the Muslim World Initiative is being coordinated by Dr. Abdeslam Maghraoui who joined the Institute in September 2004 as Associate Director of the Research and Studies Program. Beyond Dr. Maghraoui, the Institute's expertise on the Muslim World is extensive. Please click here for more information.
