Controversies among

female supporters of
Islamic moral renewal, and
between them and other
Muslims, pinpoint tensions
that arise between Muslim
women’s emphasis on the
primacy of deeds over talk-
ing about it, and the actual
narrativization of their
identity as proper Muslims.
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice:
Islamic Moral Renewal and Women’s
Conflicting Assertions of Sunni
Identity in Urban Mali
Dorothea E. Schulz

This article explores competing discourses and understand-

ings of proper Muslim practice as they are reflected in contro-
versies among female supporters of Islamic moral renewal,
and between them and Muslims who do not consider them-
selves part of the movement. Supporters of Islamic moral
renewal highlight the primacy of deeds, such as proper behav-
ior and correct ritual performance, as ways to validate their
newly adopted religious identity. Their emphasis on proper
action, and their dismissal of talking about religiosity, stand
in tension with their own tendency to construct elaborate
narratives about their decision to embrace what they con-
sider a more authentic form of Islam. The importance they
attribute to the embodied performance of virtue leaves many
supporters of Islamic renewal in a double bind: despite their
claim to unity, their conception of the relationship between
individual ethics and the common good, combined with the
tendency among supporters of Islamic moral renewal to set
themselves apart from “other Muslims,” reinforces trends of
differentiation among Muslims who aspire to a new moral
community.

Introduction

In August of 1999, during my research on religious education institutions for

adult Muslims in urban Mali, I visited a Muslim women’s learning group in
an older neighborhood of San, a town in southeastern Mali.1 After the usual
introductions and I had explained my interest in women’s learning activi-
ties, the group’s leader (tontigi) offered to respond “to any kind of question
I might have” on Muslim women’s attendance to the “learning group.”
 Prompted by my questions about the experiences that had motivated women
to join the group, the women discussed events and experiences, some of
them painful and worrisome, such as the passing of a close family member
and other events that put the family under heavy financial strain. Finally,
Mamou, who had introduced me to the group, turned to me and observed
matter-of-factly: “You know, ultimately, all these differences [in experience]
among us do not matter. What matters is that we all found the answer to our
africa today 54(4)

worries in God, in our search for greater closeness to him. Regardless of the
experiences we made, and of the sorrow they may have brought us, we all
realized one day that only God’s will counts, that we will be redeemed for
our mundane actions, that we will reach paradise only when we return to
the true ways in which God should be worshipped through all activities in
which we engage.” And to the murmuring sound of other women’s approval,
she added, “This is why we need to invite others to join us, to return to true
22

Islam; those others who may claim to be Muslim yet whose actions reveal
their denial of God’s truth.”
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

Mamou’s account captures in a nutshell the concerns articulated by

urban Malian people, who, to effect a moral renewal of society and self, a
renewal based on what they understand to be the authentic, unmitigated
teachings of Islam, as “true supporters of Islam” (silame kanubagaw) are
central agents in a process that has led to an unprecedented presence of Islam
in Mali’s urban and semiurban public arenas. Although their activities have
roots in processes that started in the 1940s and have accelerated since the
late 1970s, it was the introduction of multiparty democracy and the atten-
dant granting of civil liberties in 1991 that enabled the current forms and
infrastructure of Muslim proselytizing (da‘wa). In the streets of the capital,
Bamako, and in other Malian towns, mosques, and schools (medersa), huge
billboards and graffito-style Arabic inscriptions have multiplied. Muslims
of different orientations, affiliations, and pedigrees play vociferous roles in
public controversies that address questions of the cultural and ethical foun-
dations on which the political community should be based (Schulz 2003).
Their activities are most successful in urban areas in which lineages associ-
ated with Sufi orders and other traditional religious authorities formerly had
little political influence.
Women play a prominent role in the Islamic renewal movement. They
refer to themselves simply as Muslim women (silame musow) and thereby
set themselves apart from other women (muso tow), who, in their eyes, stray
from the path set by the sunna, the prophet’s example. Like many male sup-
porters of Islamic renewal, Muslim women thereby posit, if only implicitly,
their distance from practices referred to, in local parlance, as “traditional”
Islam (Brenner1993a:76–77).2 Still, they generally avoid making references
to the sunna a point of direct, public confrontation. They do so because
they know well that, by denying other women the status of Sunni Muslims,
they risk perpetuating earlier struggles among Malian Muslims over ritual
orthopraxy. Formerly, these struggles—at least those documented in the
scholarly literature—were fought primarily by men, sometimes by violent
means; they often crystallized in controversies over correct prayer posture
(Launay 1992).3
Throughout my research on Islamic moral renewal in Mali, I was
struck by recurrent elements in Muslim women’s self-portrayal, elements
that reverberate throughout Mamou’s account.4 First, there was a complete
absence of any term remotely comparable to the notion of conversion. Rather
than referring to their effort to “move closer to God,”5 or for that matter,

africa today 54(4)

to “embark on the path to God,”6 as conversion, the women described
their decision to join the movement as a “reverting” to older and more
original forms of religious teachings and practice. They emphasized that this
“embarking” should be seen as a cumulative, gradual process of self-making,
one that manifested itself in a continuously cultivated ethical attitude and
then in its performance vis-à-vis one’s social entourage.
What piqued my curiosity was that the women emphatically denied

23
that speech (kuma) or “mere words” (as opposed to deeds, kewale) could
validate their newfound piety. Whenever they felt compelled to assert the

Dorothea E. Schulz
truth of their ethical quest, they emphasized the importance of “doing
the right things”—of engaging in proper ritual practice and behaving in a
morally acceptable way. Patently, by focusing on “right deeds,” they pos-
ited a close link between proper ritual and a believer’s right disposition.
This conceptualization can be seen as a feature of Muslim understandings
of ritual. Nevertheless, its central place in Muslim women’s discursive
constructions of self merits closer attention. The privileging of deeds as a
means of self-validation seems to be at odds with the analytical focus privi-
leged in anthropological accounts of conversion. Many of these accounts
deal with narratives of individuals’ conversion experience, and they thus
privilege precisely the kind of practice that converts in Mali denounce as
inauthentic, lacking the capacity to validate a Muslim’s claim to a renewed
religious faith.
More significantly, the ways in which Muslim women establish their
search and experiences as truthful raise the question of whether the notion of
conversion, with its heavy burden of a Christian-paradigm dominated legacy,
can be used to make sense of the process of ethical self-making promoted by
them in Mali. Many anthropological studies of conversion tend to focus on
the process that leads individuals to give up their “traditional” or “animis-
tic” religious beliefs and practices in favor of the religions of the Book, espe-
cially Christianity and Islam (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Grosz-Ngate
2002; Horton 1975; Jules-Rosette 1975; Landau 1995; Meyer 1999), yet, as
Talal Asad notes in the afterword to a collection of essays on “conversion to
modernities,” the notion of conversion that has dominated anthropological
studies articulates a Christian view of faith and its relationship to practice:
to understand how “conversion” processes shape, and are constituted by,
individual religious traditions, we need, he insists, an analytical framework
capable of explicating and understanding religious practice and belief beyond
the normative assumptions and analytical framework of a Christian-inspired
Western modernity (Asad 1993, 1996).
 The process of conversion to which Asad’s cautions refer differs from a
process described by Nock (1933:7) as a reorientation in personal piety and a
deepening of one’s relationship to God.7 Nock’s conceptualization of conver-
sion is relevant to my study, first because it centers attention on the moti-
vations and conditions that prompt adherents of a faith to convert to what
they understand as a “purer” or more authentic version of the same religious
tradition (Augis 2002; Janson forthcoming; Schulz 2004), and second because
africa today 54(4)

conversion as a form of reorientation and strengthening of personal piety is

presently gaining in importance, not only in contemporary Mali, but across
the globe, as manifested in the worldwide upsurge of religious-revivalist
movements.
Tendencies that favor a return to earlier, supposedly more authentic
practices have been a longstanding feature of Muslim discursive traditions,
not only in this area, but throughout Muslim Africa (Loimeier 2003). One
24

can argue that because of the social organization of knowledge production

and transmission in Islam, renewal tendencies, aiming to purge the religious
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

field from innovations in religious practice, have formed a constitutive fea-

ture in how Islam has always been practiced and debated. In West Africa,
the impetus to return to proper Muslim practice has been a core element of
reformist movements, including those associated with Sufi orders (turuq).
These movements have thus not shared a substantive definition of the kinds
of doctrines and practices they have been promoting; common to them has
been only the impetus to reform (tajdîd).
It is precisely this impetus that prompted my interest in understanding
the specifics of contemporary Islamic moral renewal in Mali. I here address
some of these specifics by examining the process of reorientation claimed
and discursively constructed by supporters of the movement. As in Bowen’s
(1997) analysis of the discursive genres and “rhetorics of persuasion” that
modernist Gayo Muslims in Indonesia employ, I explore how proponents of
Islamic renewal in Mali authenticate their self-definition as proper believers.
To do so, I engage the following questions. First, how can an understand-
ing of conversion as reorientation help us understand the notion of return
or reverting, which figures prominently in the women’s accounts of their
search for “greater closeness to God”? Second, given that these women dis-
miss any Muslim’s attempt to prove her true reversion experience through
words, what narratives of authentication do they create to validate their own
positions and attempts to “move closer to God”? How do they bolster their
claims to an identity as a “proper believer”?

Islamic Moral Renewal in Mali:

Historical Antecedents and Contemporary Modes of Intervention

Spokesmen of the Islamic moral-renewal movement in Mali call for a return

to “purer” and more authentic forms of religious practice and Islamic stan-
dards of daily conduct. Supporters of this renewal thus contribute to a field
of Malian Muslim activism, as it emerged from Muslim discursive tradi-
tions in the colonial period. Their claims and modes of intervention draw
on longstanding conventions of renewal in this part of Muslim West Africa,
conventions shared by movements affiliated with a Sufi order (tariqa, plural
turuq) and by their opponents, those who linked their call for renewal to a
vehement criticism of the practices and, according to their view, unlawful
innovations (bida‘) in which adherents of turuq engaged (Loimeier 2003).

africa today 54(4)

In present-day Mali, the reformist efforts of these critics date back to
the late 1930s and the 1940s, when numerous Muslim intellectuals returned
from extended stays in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and initiated educational and
other reforms to counter the effects of French colonial administration and
education. Their activities showed a marked concern with facilitating believ-
ers’ access to the written sources of Islam, in deepening ordinary believers’
religious knowledge, and in purifying conventional religious practice.

25
These reformists contributed to Muslim reasoning and activity in ways
that, regardless of local variations in forms and representatives, characterized

Dorothea E. Schulz
social and political transformations throughout Muslim West Africa (Kaba
2000). Whether they drew inspiration from Salafi-Sunni influences in Egypt
or from Wahhabi reformist trends in Saudi Arabia (Loimeier 2003), they
were instrumental in a process during which the claims and credentials of
traditional religious leadership encountered new challenges and new debates
and controversies over authoritative interpretation were initiated (Brenner
2001). In Mali, Guinea, and Northern Ivory Coast, Muslim reformists’
efforts at renewal and purification manifested themselves in a stricter dress
code, the denouncement of practices associated with lifecycle rituals, and,
in some groups, the adoption of a prayer posture associated with Wahhabi
doctrine and practice (Amselle 1985; Kaba 1974; Launay 1992; Masquelier
1999; Triaud 1986).
Starting in the late 1970s, a new generation of Muslim reformists,
eager to expand the local infrastructure of Islamic education and welfare,
benefited from funds that flowed in from the Arab-speaking world (Brenner
1993a, 1993b; Mattes 1989; Miran 2005; Otayek 1993; Schulze 1993). This
funding has diminished considerably since the late 1990s, but political
changes during approximately the same period, initiated by the ouster of
President Moussa Traoré in 1991, opened up new spaces for Muslim activism
(Schulz 2003, 2006). As a result, the contemporary Malian field of Muslim
reasoning and debate continues to be characterized by a variety of interpre-
tations of Islam, sociopolitical positions, and relations to the state and the
government of President Amadou Toumani Touré (since 2002).8
The main divisions structuring present-day Muslim debate in Mali are
represented on one side by those close to (what in popular parlance is referred
to as) “traditional” Islam. Among them are established families of religious
specialists (in the literature often called “marabouts”), many of which are
affiliated with Sufi orders, which enjoy great prestige and influence in some
urban areas (Soares 2005). Other positions in the debate are taken by the
above-mentioned critics of practices and ideas associated with “traditional”
 Islam. These critics do not hold a homogeneous position, partly because they
occupy different positions vis-à-vis politicians and state administration, and
partly because they draw to different degrees on intellectual influences from
the Arab-speaking Muslim world, especially from Morocco, Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia. Most of them are vocal supporters of Islamic moral renewal. Their
objectives resonate with those of historical predecessors and with contempo-
rary movements throughout West Africa (Hanson 2007; Kane 2003; Loimeier
africa today 54(4)

1997, 2001, 2003). By mobilizing followers through networks of patronage

and financial support, they contribute to a complex structure of religious and
political patronage, which crisscrosses the divide between society and state
(Lemarchand 1992; Schulz 2004).9 Muslim women’s support of Islamic moral
renewal—and their conflicting constructions of Sunni identity—should be
understood against the backdrop of this field of debate and practice.
26

Muslim Women’s Forms of Religious Sociality

(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

The principal form of religious sociality through which Muslim women

insert themselves into the moral-reform movement are Muslim women’s
associations (singular, silame musow ton). Created at the neighborhood
level, they resonate with local conventions of socializing and mutual sup-
port, and resemble the forms of grass-root mobilization that are mushroom-
ing throughout West Africa and the wider Muslim world and that variously
address women and disenfranchised and privileged urban youth. In Mali,
except for relatively few learning cycles devised for youth, mobilization has
been directed mostly at married women.10 Members refer to their group as
kalani ton (learning group), a term that indicates that learning, conceived
as an individual striving for moral improvement and self-discipline, is the
common rationale of the (otherwise very diverse) associations. Most of the
time in women’s triweekly meetings is devoted to the acquisition of lit-
eracy in Arabic, to the learning of ritual and religious prescriptions, and to
memorizing verses of suras necessary for correct ritual performance.11
These women’s preoccupation with learning could be seen as a reflec-
tion of a longstanding concern with proper ritual conduct, but, as I argue
below, the “spirit” in which they engage in these learning activities reveals
a conceptualization of education that extends its relevance beyond the
ritual setting. They describe their learning of proper ritual performance and
of the rules of Islam (silameya saria) as a project of intellectual and moral
self-improvement, and thus as the prerequisite for inviting others to join
the movement. Their understanding of education carries with it notions
of enlightenment and progress in a broader sense. It is combined with an
unprecedented emphasis on personal responsibility vis-à-vis family members
and the community at large, and it is viewed as a comprehensive project of
personal reform, predicated on a process that involves emotional and cogni-
tive faculties and aims at the ethical remaking of oneself, not merely at the
expansion of one’s horizon of knowledge. By promoting a distinctive view
of learning as totalizing act of self-making, these women reveal that they
have been influenced, if often only tangentially and indirectly, by a transna-
tional da’wa movement (Otayek 1993), which draws inspiration from early
twentieth-century and present-day Salafi-Sunni reformist trends in Egypt
and other areas of the Arab-speaking world.
Many initiators and leaders of the groups occupied leading positions
under Moussa Traoré, the former president. Because of their positions

africa today 54(4)

between ordinary group members and sponsors at the national and interna-
tional level, they constitute crucial points of articulation between transna-
tional influences and local members’ material and moral aspirations (Schulz
2005).12 That many leaders once occupied leading positions under Moussa
Traore’s regime shows that they do not represent a “traditional” or “resur-
gent” Islam, but that they base their claims to authority on new credentials,
such as Western education, (former) employment in the state administration,

27
or an economically privileged family background.13 They thus exemplify how
the gradual unsettling of the foundations of traditional religious authority,

Dorothea E. Schulz
accelerated by educational reform and, more recently, by the introduction of
various mass media, broadens the spectrum of credentials on which claims
to normative guidance and religious leadership can be based in contemporary
public arenas (Larkin and Meyer 2006 Schulz 2007a).
Clearly, there are reasons to explain differences among the positions
and claims of supporters of the movement by reference to their relationship
to state institutions and actors, and to their diverging access to resources,
actors, and symbolic registers originating in the Arab-speaking world, par-
ticularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and North Africa, but taken in and of itself,
this interpretation is unsatisfactory. I propose instead to explore how the
understandings of religiosity and proper practice by female participants in
the movement interlock with the broader conditions and constraints that
they, as supporters of moral renewal, face. This exploration will shed light
on the background against which Muslim women’s conflicting constructions
of a Sunni identity should be understood.

Piety, Publicity, Ethical Self-Making:

The Objectives of Female Moral Renewal

What are the concerns and objectives of the movement as they are articu-
lated by the initiators of Muslim women’s groups and by other female rep-
resentatives of the movement? And in what ways do their understandings
of religiosity and ethical responsibility continue with, or depart from, earlier
understandings and practices?
I mentioned above that the idea of a return to authentic Islamic teach-
ings and practice figures prominently in the account supporters of Islamic
renewal give of their moral endeavor. In some cases, these gestures involve a
claim that these practices actually existed historically in the area of present-
day Mali. In other cases, it is maintained that the notion of return implies
 a move toward understandings and practices that have never been broadly
shared by Muslims in the region. The second position gives a more realis-
tic and representative portrayal of the situation, especially with respect to
women’s practices and religious engagements, given that until the 1970s,
most women’s level of knowledge in ritual and religious matters was lim-
ited, partly due to limitations on opportunities for and access to religious
education. More importantly, the adoption of Muslim faith and practice
africa today 54(4)

was a recent phenomenon for these women. Broad segments of the Malian
population had converted to Islam only since the colonial period, particularly
after the 1910s. Even then, throughout southern Mali, families of Muslim
merchants and religious specialists continued to be a minority in areas where
animistic practices prevailed. Muslim faith and practice were closely con-
nected to family and professional identity. To the majority of these Muslims,
the practice of their faith was limited to the regular performance of ritual
28

worship and to a particular dress code. Hence, for the first time, many women
involved in the contemporary moral-renewal movement (or older members
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

of their family) are engaging individually in a variety of religious practices,

practices that, they feel, singles them out as true supporters of Islam. Their
learning activities include reflecting on transformations in institutions and
paradigms of religious learning and expansions of access to religious educa-
tion. These transformations were initiated by Muslim reformist activities
since the 1940s, yet have intensified since the 1970s. Whereas scholarly
erudition throughout the colonial period was the privilege of a few women
of Muslim elite background, the mass of women who meet in the learning
groups today comes from the urban lower and lower-middle classes.
The groups’ leaders constantly remind their disciples that they alone
are responsible for their relationship to God and for ensuring their ultimate
salvation—a view that departs from the conventional understanding of
religious merit, requiring the intervention of intermediaries.14 A woman’s
responsibility, the teachers argue, should translate into a persistent effort to
understand and appropriate the written sources of Islam. It should show in
her daily cultivation of a pious disposition. True religiosity should manifest
itself not only in the performance of the conventional obligations of wor-
ship, such as the five daily prayers, but in a range of religious and social
acts.15 Women’s self-disciplinary endeavor should show in specific disposi-
tional and emotional capabilities, among them (the capacity to feel) shame
(maloya ‘modesty’), endurance, patience, and a capacity for self-control and
submissiveness (munyu). Women should practice these virtues in social
and ritual activities in public and semipublic settings, so as to profess their
ethical quest to a broader, potentially nationwide, audience, with the aim of
extending their invitation to other Muslims.
The emphasis placed by the groups’ leaders on the collective relevance
of individual women’s propriety is in line with the moral guidance that
Malian women are generally expected to follow. Their emphasis on under-
standing, debate, and a believer’s personal relationship to God should be seen
as the culminating point of a reformist emphasis on text-based notions of
proper Muslim life and ritual orthopraxy. Their stress on individual responsi-
bility is noteworthy in yet another respect: it indicates a historical shift away
from understanding Muslim identity as a family and professional identity
(Launay 1992), and toward adopting proper Muslim conduct as the result of
individual conviction and choice.
What seems to indicate a relatively novel development is the high-
lighting of the obligation for women to become a more public (or publicized)

africa today 54(4)

example of moral excellence. The self-conscious adoption by women of a
public persona departs from the traditional relegation of female religiosity
and devotional practices to an intimate, secluded, domestic space.16 Before,
women’s spiritual experiences were predicated upon their withdrawal from
the area of worldly matters and mundane daily activities, but the emphasis
now placed by many leaders on Muslim women’s collective responsibilities
links the practice of piety and its public profession. Stress on the public

29
enactment of piety constitutes a characteristic feature of the current Islamic-
renewal movement, which condenses the particular mode of intervention

Dorothea E. Schulz
Muslim women choose to extend their invitation to others.
Into what concrete practices does their stress on collective responsibil-
ity and public presence translate? and what new challenges emerge from the
particular modes of intervention they choose?

Constructing Sunni Identity in a Heterogeneous Muslim

Discursive Field

In an analysis of the rhetoric of fundamentalist Baptist conversion, Harding

(1987) argues that the narratives constructed by converts should be seen
not just as factual reports on conversion experience, but as its performative
construction and authentification. Harding distinguishes between relatively
formalized sermons, which offer believers little opportunity to account for
their personal conversion experience, and personal testimony narratives, as
primary modes of authenticating the genuineness of a believer’s conversion.
Among female supporters of Islamic moral renewal in Mali, in contrast, ser-
mons (wajuli) or moral lessons (ladili) as the women themselves call them,17
constitute a central expressive register, through which women’s “moving
closer to God” is explained, performatively constructed, and validated. In
form and content, these sermons resemble local genres of moralizing that
have no connection whatsoever to the context of Muslim reasoning and
ritual practice: Muslim sermons draw on discursive conventions that are
not necessarily Islamic, but form part of an expressive repertory in which
various genres of (mostly mundane) oral performance intermingle (Schulz
2001a, 2001b).
Female leaders’ and male teachers’ sermonizing reveals a preoccupa-
tion with the social responsibility of individual believers, a responsibility
that translates into the obligation to invite others “to embark on the path to
God” (ka alasira ta18). Each act of daily behavior, they argue, should reveal a
 woman’s dedication to her spiritual quest. True religiosity should manifest
itself not merely in the performance of the obligations of worship, such as
the five daily prayers, but in a range of religious and social acts. Women
should make a serious and persistent effort to cultivate a certain bodily,
spiritual, and affective disposition. This endeavor should show in the acqui-
sition of specific emotional capabilities, among them maloya “modesty,
shame,” sabati “endurance, patience,” and a capacity for self-control and
africa today 54(4)

submissiveness (munyu).
Cultivating these virtues, the groups’ leaders and teachers argue,
helps women anchor their desire for greater closeness to God. It indicates
a woman’s return to proper Muslim faith and practice (ka sègin silameya
ma). These behavioral ideals are thus represented as principal criteria for
the genuineness of a woman’s decision to break with past practices, that
is, for their conversion; they serve as a way to distinguish between proper
30

believers and others.

The emphasis on believers’ responsibility for individual ethical self-
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

making and collective well-being resonates with other dimensions of the

Islamic-renewal movement, dimensions that hint at the ongoing reassess-
ment of prevalent understandings of Muslim religiosity.19 The stress on
individual disposition echoes the conceptions of female piety formulated
by Salafi-Sunni–inspired reformist trends in contemporary Cairo (Mahmood
2005),20 a resonance that may have been effected by men who graduated
from institutions of higher learning in Egypt or who entertain other kinds
of ties to Egypt.
The emphasis on individual responsibility is not evenly shared by the
supporters of Islamic renewal: it does not serve everyone to claim and con-
struct an identity as proper believer, and to deny others this identity. The
lack of disagreement about the relevance of individual ethical action points
to the complexity and inconsistency in which intellectual influences from
the Arab-speaking world and other West African regions are introduced into
local arenas of religious practice and reasoning. Even more importantly, it
illustrates the heterogeneity of the Islamic-renewal movement, a hetero-
geneity that makes believers’ authentication of their own Sunni identity
even more desirable, timely, and poignant. Muslim women feel the need
to assert and perform their identities as true believers, not only vis-à-vis
Muslims who regard the renewal movement from a critical distance, but
also (as the introductory anecdote revealed) vis-à-vis some fellow supporters
of the movement.
Many of these contested constructions of Sunni identity center on the
question of women’s prominence in the movement and, more specifically, of
their visible enactment of piety. These disagreements emerge only because
many key protagonists of the movement—men and women—emphasize that
women’s emblematic position in moral reform, their role as promoters and
symbols of collective renewal, should translate into a greater public visibil-
ity of female piety. What these leaders—but, again, not all leaders—exhort
women to do is to extend their invitation to other Muslims by making ritual
worship and other markers of personal piety, such as dress (Schulz 2007b),
publicly more visible and audible. Their association of female Sunni iden-
tity with particular emblems, such as modest dress, and women’s public
enactment of a pious disposition, generates considerable controversy among
Muslims. It elicits a particularly adverse reaction from those who consider
themselves observant Muslims, without feeling compelled to adopt the
forms of intervention advocated by supporters of Islamic moral renewal.

africa today 54(4)

Not surprisingly, these Muslims take issue with the fact that support-
ers of the movement claim a Sunni identity for themselves, associate this
identity with certain religious practices and their public performance, and
deny any Muslim the status of a true believer who does not adopt their views
on the relevance of religious faith for the life of the political community. I
explore in more detail below how debates over specific forms of religious
practice give rise to competing constructions of a “true” Muslim or “Sunni”

31
identity. In discussing these dissonant views on ritual orthopraxy, I analyze
the claims through which they are asserted and the ways in which they are

Dorothea E. Schulz
constructed. I want to demonstrate that the definitions of proper Muslim
ritual and site of performance that emerge from these debates are central to
Muslim women’s constructions of their search for “closeness to God” as a
genuine and truthful endeavor.

Authenticating Female Sunni Identity

The heterogeneity of the moral-renewal movement in urban Mali makes it

difficult to identify clear-cut and consistent cleavages among Muslims who
that claim a Sunni identity for themselves. Competing claims to a Sunni
identity pit against each other supporters of the renewal movement and
“other Muslims,” but also different groups within the movement. It is dif-
ficult to classify the camps according to their views on proper ritual, its site
of performance, and on its broader relevance to collective moral transforma-
tion. Thus, rather than labeling distinctive groups of Muslim women by ref-
erence to the particular view on ritual they promote, my intention is to show
that Muslim women’s constructions of Sunni identity are contingent and
shifting. It is precisely through debates on ritual that claims to a genuine and
truthful act of return are effected, and Sunni identity is asserted, attributed,
and disclaimed. To substantiate my argument, I focus on two ritual domains
on which current debates over proper Muslim practice center: ritual worship
(seli) and the celebration of the prophet’s birthday (Mawlud).
Preoccupation with ritual orthopraxy is not novel in this area of
Muslim West Africa (Launay 1992), nor should it be considered a feature
unique to local Muslim discursive traditions (Bowen 1997): my point is that
since the late 1970s, the ways in which these debates are framed have gained
a more pronounced, gender-specific encoding: more than before, it is now
a question not only of the “which” and “how” of ritual practice, but of the
“who” and “where.”
 Bowen (1989) has argued that worship (salat)21 as the ritual enactment
of a worshipper’s submission—the literal meaning of the word Islam—to
God’s will constitutes, despite procedural variation and the absence of a
fixed semantic core, the common, even universal (Launay 1992:106–110),
denominator of Muslim religious practice. Whether one agrees with his
view or not, it is certain that throughout the colonial French Sudan, salat
has tended to occupy a central position in discursive constructions of proper
africa today 54(4)

Muslimhood (Bowen 2003; Launay 1992, chapters 5 and 6). Ritual worship
was one of the most important markers of Muslim religiosity and identity,
besides the choice of apparel. In the cultural milieu in which Islam spread
to wider segments of the population, communal worship asserted a moral
community and a particularistic identity, in a setting in which believers
coexisted and interacted with nonbelievers. Participation in congregational
worship was part of one’s ethnic and professional self-definition (Launay
32

1992, chapter 4; Soares 2005, chapters 1 and 7),22 and allowed individuals
to experience themselves as members of the community of believers. Yet
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

many worshippers performed ritual worship only irregularly, or, in the case
of women, only at a certain age. Women’s ritual performances formerly took
place in a demarcated area of the mosque or within the courtyard, withdrawn
from onlookers’ scrutiny.23
Today, ritual worship still operates as an indicator of Muslim identity,
but many Muslims limit their performance of it to Friday congregational
worship. It is this attitude toward religious practice that the many propo-
nents of Islamic moral renewal decry. They attribute a new importance to
it by presenting its regular and proper performance as a symbol of the new
moral community of “Sunni believers” they strive to establish.
Conventional understandings of ritual worship view it as establishing
direct communication with God.24 Supporters of moral renewal share this
understanding, yet, in line with their tendency to highlight individuals’
social responsibilities, they emphasize the broader significance of worship
(and the ethical attitude it stands for) for collective well-being. They stress—
and this is the point that generates the most vehement reactions on the part
of Muslims critical of the movement—that a believer should render his or
her worship publicly more accessible. As many participants in the moral-
reform movement point out, Muslims should manifest their decision to
“embark on the path to God” by participating in public, communal worship.
Implicit in this call to join their ranks is that only those who decide publicly
to profess their newfound faith may consider themselves true supporters of
Islam—because only they do, rather than just act. This approach to worship
and its sign function follows closely from their reflections on how to anchor
one’s cultivation of a virtuous disposition in daily practice. Ritual worship,
properly and regularly performed, becomes the epitome of a superior moral
order.25 An almost paradoxical implication of this view is that public worship
once again serves to posit a particularistic identity, this time the identity of
a true believer.
 Perhaps other Muslims would take less offense with this assertion of
a Sunni identity were their critics’ emphasis on the collective significance
of ritual worship not combined with a gender-specific encoding of publicly
enacted piety. It is not that Muslim women suddenly take to the streets of
Bamako and other towns to perform ritual worship in public, yet the sheer
number of Muslim women who pray together as part of their associational
activities, renders their joint religious performances more visible and audi-

africa today 54(4)

ble. Many conversations and spontaneous remarks I overheard during my
research in San and Segu suggested that it has become impossible for neigh-
bors or any passerby not to notice the presence of a considerable number
of women, who are engaging in worship in the courtyard next door. Even
within the courtyards that serve as the tri-weekly meeting place for Muslim
women, the location of their practice has shifted to a zone that is open to
public scrutiny. Their worship can be easily viewed by men if the latter

33
do not withdraw to a separate section. As I regularly witnessed during my
participation in women’s learning activities, women’s joint ritual practice

Dorothea E. Schulz
results in a temporary inversion of the conventional separation of male and
female realms within these courtyards.
Some supporters of Islamic renewal denounce the pressure toward
more publicized (and feminized) forms of ritual practice, but most objec-
tions to this view come from Muslims who keep a critical distance from the
Islamic-renewal movement.26 These Muslims particularly resent the claim
that doing—that is, realizing proper Muslimhood—should manifest itself in
more publicized forms of ritual practice. For some of them, this resentment
crystallizes in the angry reply that publicizing personal piety through dress
and ritual simply denotes a pretense at moral superiority.
Similar conflicted assertions of true Muslim identity emerge in
debates over the orthodoxy of celebrations of the prophet’s birthday
(Mawlud, from Arabic mawlid al nabi). Here, too, a bone of contention
is how gender-specific norms of propriety should translate into religious
practice and the ways in which religion is shown to be relevant to collec-
tive life. Again, supporters of Islamic renewal make questions of ritual
orthopraxy central to their assertion to have returned to the true teachings
of Islam, but to a greater degree than in discussions about public wor-
ship, debates over the Mawlud reveal and reproduce divisions within the
Islamic-renewal movement.
In local traditions of Islam, the celebration of the Mawlud forms part
of conventional religious events. Women play an important role in its orga-
nization and in the preparation of food and drinks, and contribute to the
ceremony itself, in the form of praise songs on behalf of the prophet and of
other musical entertainment that is considered morally edifying. Even if
there exists considerable regional variation in the celebration of the Mawlud,
a common feature of these ceremonies is that they are pervaded by a sense
of liminality, played out for instance in the transgression of the boundaries
of proper conduct.27
 Numerous supporters of Islamic renewal, men and women, are con-
vinced that this event forms part of the ritual activities in which a proper
believer should engage. They endorse women’s key role in it and maintain
that women’s willingness to participate in these ceremonies reflects on
their genuine endeavor to contribute to the well-being of the community.
This view elicits vehement criticisms on the part of some Muslim women’s
groups and their leaders, many of whom point to Saudi Arabia as a model
africa today 54(4)

case for eradicating this un-Islamic practice. In line with the criticism of
earlier generations of reform-minded Muslims (Brenner 1993a, 1993b, 2001;
Launay 1992), these critics denounce local celebrations of the Mawlud as
unlawful innovation (bid‘a), and they assert that “no true Sunni Muslim
(woman)” engages in practices that venerate any being other than God.
Though many of these critics from within the movement generally endorse
women’s participation in public manifestations of Muslim virtue, they ada-
34

mantly contest that the Mawlud should be such an occasion. Those whom
they criticize retort by charging the critics for their “arrogant” attempt to
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

establish their moral superiority and their monopolizing of Sunni identity.

Others who are equally in favor of the celebration of the Mawlud, denounce
the critics for undermining the joint quest for moral reform and assert that
the Mawlud constitutes an important occasion to invite others to return
to the authentic teachings of Islam. These conflicting constructions of the
relationship between Mawlud celebrations and proper Muslim practice illus-
trate that Sunni identity, rather than existing prior to debate and practice,
emerges only in the process of Muslim discourse and refers to a temporary
state, a work in progress.
Controversial constructions of one’s truthful ethical search commonly
arise around other elements of ritual. In November 2003, for instance,
Muslim women’s groups in Bamako and Segu engaged in a heated, only partly
publicized, debate over whether the special, nonmandatory nightly prayers
during the last two weeks of the Ramadan (the period of the commemoration
of the Qur’an’s delivery to the human world) were a new invention or an
element of traditional religious practice. Several Muslim women’s groups,
which, as I knew from our multiyear acquaintance, were highly critical of
the celebration of the Mawlud, emphasized the importance of these prayers
and the special merit (nafa) they generated for those who engaged in them.
They repeatedly referred to these prayers as Sunni practice that, they main-
tained, had been introduced only recently into local religious practice and
thus clearly distinguished those who endorse a return to Islam’s authentic
teachings from the mass of other Muslims. Not surprisingly, members of
other women’s groups with whom I discussed these prayers adamantly
rejected this portrayal and the implicit claimed that they themselves were
not proper Muslims. They observed that this practice not only formed part
of local religious conventions, but was not a mandatory act and therefore
should not be used to claim a Sunni identity.
Implications of local discourse

These disputes are suggestive in several ways. One is that the significance
of Muslim women’s current interventions resides not in their ritual acts per
se, but in their explicit orientation toward an audience. Their ritual perfor-
mances acquire the diacritic and iconic meaning of ritual (Bowen 1989:612).
Muslim women’s worship not only signals collective submission to God’s

africa today 54(4)

will: it acquires a strong representational function in signifying the moral
community to which supporters of Islamic renewal aspire.
Second, and closely related to the marked emphasis on publicized
female virtue, these women’s preoccupation with ritual orthopraxy allows
them to emphasize practice central to their constructions of proper Muslim-
hood. Similar to the previously analyzed debates on the proper site of ritual
worship, questions about the orthodoxy of Mawlud and about the novelty

35
of surregatory prayer helps women of different persuasions to claim a pious
disposition, while denying the relevance of talking as a way to prove one’s

Dorothea E. Schulz
identity as proper believer.
How do these conflicting views relate to earlier controversies over
ritual orthopraxy and to the discourse of “truth and ignorance” (Brenner
2001) that has structured Muslim debate in this region for more than a
century (Last 1992; Launay 1992; Launay and Soares 1999)? Current con-
troversies among supporters of Islamic renewal, and between them and the
Muslims they criticize, clearly continue with earlier disputes centered on
elements of ritual procedure, such as the positioning of one’s arms during
worship (Launay 1992, chapters 3–7), yet contemporary disputes oppose
different categories of Muslims (Otayek 1993; Schulz forthc.). More than
before, debates revolve on the proper site of worship and its visible and gen-
der-specific encoding. This insight prompts me to refine Soares’s argument
(2004) that transformations in Malian Muslim public discourse since the
colonial period should be seen as the emergence of public signs of piety. With
this proposition, Soares demonstrates that Launay’s analysis of discursive
constructions of Muslim identity in northern Ivory Coast can be fruitfully
extended to other areas of the colonial French Sudan. Still, I would argue that
the incentives (and the pressure) to present oneself as a Muslim in a public
arena not only generate new controversies over what signs should be chosen.
These signs, and the controversies they create, should be understood in their
decided gender-specificity. Some of them are encoded as feminized emblems
of piety. Some of the differences or changes I (mean to) discern may be just
due to the analytical focus I bring to my research as a female scholar. Never-
theless, it is a fact that, because of the new opportunities offered to women
by mass religious education and by the possibilities of self-organization
under postauthoritarian conditions, women can contribute in unprecedented
ways and degrees to these disputes, and they can make feminized signs of
piety more central to public interaction and controversy.
Finally, the term Sunni occupies a more central position than it seems
to have occupied in preceding controversies (Brenner 2001). Most discussions
 of whether women’s public performance of ritual worship resonates with
Islamic standards of propriety are framed through competing claims to being
Sunni. The same applies to controversies among different Muslim women’s
groups. Some of these controversies are publicized in newspapers and on
local and national radio. As I realized during my attendance at Muslim
women’s gatherings, the term’s high currency in debates among women is a
direct result of the instruction they receive.
africa today 54(4)

Even if the widespread use of the term Sunni by members of the

renewal movement suggests that their views of proper Muslimhood are for-
mulated under direct influence from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, this impression
is misleading. It is impossible to draw a clear line between Muslim women
whose practices are in continuity with conventional views of religiosity and
women whose views are informed by Salafi reformist thought or Wahhabi
doctrine. Muslim women who claim a Sunni identity do not necessarily do
36

so to express their closeness to these trends. It is more useful to think of their

positions, and of those of fellow male activists, as ranging on a continuum of
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

positions and local reformulations. This means that, rather than referring to
substantive difference, the recurrent assertion of a Sunni identity seems to
serve a primarily performative function in authenticating an understanding
of religiosity and proper ritual as the true, and thus exclusive, path toward
God. The term Sunni becomes more central to the narratives that Muslim
women and male supporters of Islamic moral renewal construct to assert and
validate the truthfulness of their decision to “move closer to God.”

Conclusion

The controversies among female supporters of Islamic moral renewal, and

between them and other Muslims, pinpoint tensions that arise between
Muslim women’s emphasis on the primacy of deeds (manifested in proper
behavior and correct ritual performance) over talking about it on one side,
and the actual narrativizing of their identity as proper Muslims on the other.
Muslim women dismiss attempts by Muslims to prove their return to authen-
tic Islam, and the reorienting and return experience that goes with it, through
words; yet, by this discursive move, they do narrativize their experience
and engage in the kind of practice they otherwise denounce. By devoting an
important share of their sermonizing and learning to the assertion of differ-
ence from other Muslims, they establish a discourse on ethical distinctiveness
that undercuts their own rhetorical privileging of deeds over words.
There is yet another insight to be drawn from the disputes between
Muslim women and the Muslims whom they criticize for their lack of genu-
ine devotion to the cause of Islam. The emphasis that many supporters of the
moral reform movement place on the embodied enactment of virtue leaves
them in a double bind: contrary to their claim to moral unity, their concep-
tion of the relationship between individual ethics and the common good,
combined with the tendency among Muslim women (and men) to claim
a truthful reversion process for themselves by distancing themselves from
others, reinforces existing trends of internal differentiation among Muslims
who aspire to a new moral community. Therefore, both the new emphasis
on public ritual and the trend to authenticate one’s true Muslim identity by
dwelling extensively on the larger significance of public ritual undermine
activists’ claim to base their renewal endeavor on ijma, consensus among
Islamic scholars.

africa today 54(4)

This leaves us with the question of whether it is possible to iden-
tify practices of validating conversion experiences that reveal a specifi-
cally “Islamic” inflection and can be considered equivalent to the ways in
which conversion experiences are narrated and performatively constructed
in Christian contexts (Harding 1987). Supporters of Islamic moral renewal in
Mali stress the importance of deeds over words, and therefore account for and
simultaneously construct the process of reversion that allows them to “move

37
closer to God.” In doing so, they rely not only on Islamic discursive conven-
tions, but on an expressive repertory in which genres of (mostly mundane)

Dorothea E. Schulz
oral performance intermingle. The discursive tradition of Islam, in Mali and
elsewhere, is deeply immersed in the structures, technologies, and rationali-
ties of modern state governance (Asad 1999). This context of modernity has,
it seems, standardizing effects on the ways in which Muslims and Christians
come to voice their convictions in a broader public realm and seek to invite
others to follow their moral call. The setting in which Malian Muslims claim
and disclaim Sunni identity is deeply shaped by the terms set by modern
state politics and its attendant institutions and representatives. These con-
ditions, and the ethical concerns and sensibilities that emerge from them,
structure Muslims’ self-understandings as believers, their formulations of
the relevance of a religious ethics to everyday life, and, by implication, their
discursive constructions of the right path to God. Therefore, to fully under-
stand the forms of reorientation promoted in contemporary Islamic renewal
movements, we need to draw attention to the social and political conditions
under which conversion processes are narrated and validated because these
conditions deeply affect the spiritual experience and ethical responsibilities
that are claimed through these narratives.

Notes

1. This article is based on data collected in the southern towns of San and Segu, and in the
capital, Bamako, between July 1998 and August 2006 (altogether twenty-one months). I
conducted the research in Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali, and in French.
In addition to participant-observation, and more than sixty semistructured interviews with,
supporters of the Islamic moral-renewal movement, I regularly attended the two- or three-
weekly learning gatherings. Muslim women in San and Bamako, and I participated in a range
of religious ceremonies and social events. Unless stated otherwise, all foreign terms are in
Bamanakan, the lingua franca of southern Mali.
 2. These religious practices include expressions of devotion to religious leaders and other acts
that are inspired by the assumption that a believer needs the mediation of spiritually blessed
leaders to communicate with God. The proponents of Islamic renewal denounce as unlawful
innovation (Arabic, bid‘a makruha; Bamana, a yelema donna silameya la) spirit-possession cults
and the use of Islamic esoteric knowledge for divination or protection.
3. Starting in the 1970s, Muslims influenced by intellectual trends in Saudi Arabia dismissed
with greater vehemence the conventional posture of worship. They promoted their praying
africa today 54(4)

with crossed arms (bòlòminènaw, “bras-croisés” in French) as being the only practice in accor-
dance with the Sunna. Their claims translated into bloody confrontations between them and
representatives of conventional views of Muslim orthopraxy. In the end, the ahl-Sunna, as
many reformists called themselves, built their own mosques, in which to practice what they
considered to be the correct prayer posture, but this development did not always end con-
frontations between them and representatives of the religious establishment. An incident of
violent confrontation occurred in 1996, when a mosque in Sikasso was bombed. (This mosque
38

had been erected by proponents of the “new” prayer posture.) After the incident, there was
a general agreement that those aiming at the destruction of the mosque had come from the
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

ranks of the local religious establishment, which opposed the prayer posture, and the claims
associated with it, of reform-minded Muslims.
4. The terms renewal and reform are translations of the Arabic term tajdid. Much of the literature
on movements in Muslim Africa that correspond to the Malian movement uses the term reform,
but I prefer the terms renewal and rejuvenation because they come closest to how participants
of the movement describe their efforts (ka sègin silameya ma; a yèlèma donna silameya la).
5. K’i magrè ala la.
6. K’ala sira ta.
7. Nock has come under the attack of scholars’ because of his focus on individual conversion
and his distinction between conversion on one side, and adhesion (as a less radical form of
conversion) on the other. As his critics point out, his focus on the isolated individual and his/
her experience is misleading and reveals the legacy of the Augustinian paradigm. His assertion
that only conversion to Christianity and Judaism can be described as processes of reorienta-
tion is exclusionist and mistaken. The validity of these criticisms notwithstanding, I find that
his notion of reorientation, and the spatial movement it implies, come closest to the terms
used by Muslim women to describe their “search for greater closeness to God.”
8. One year after a military putsch had ended the single-party regime of President Moussa
Traoré (1968–1991), Alpha Konaré and his party, ADEMA, won the first democratic elections
and were reelected in 1997. In June of 2002, Colonel Toumani Touré, leader of the putsch that
had overthrown Traoré, was elected president.
9. As has been demonstrated for Senegal (Villalon 1995), these networks of religious patronage
have been constitutive of political processes in local, regional and national arenas since the
colonial period.
10. Because the meeting time (about two hours in the afternoon) cuts importantly into mar-
ried women daily schedules, the only women who participate regularly are those who have
adolescent girls (or daughters-in-law) to do cooking and other household chores while they
are away from home.
11. For a more detailed account of the contents and paradigms of learning of these educational
circles, see Schulz 2004, chapter 6.
12. That female leaders refer to these sponsors in much the same fashion as ordinary group mem-
bers do—that is, as someone who offers support or hope ( jigi) in times of distress—suggests
that their activities are embedded in the moral matrix of patronage typical of other institutions
of Islamic moral reform in contemporary Mali.
13. These female leaders’ emphasis on women’s central position in societal renewal echoes the
agenda and ideology promoted by the Union Nationale des Femmes du Mali (UNFM) under
former President Traoré’s single-party rule (De Jorio 1997, chapter 6). A crucial difference

africa today 54(4)

between the agendas of contemporary Muslim activism and the party-orchestrated mobi-
lization of women is that Muslim women’s associations and their leaders mobilize followers
outside of formal party structures—a factor that, I suggest, greatly enhances their credibility.
Also, whereas it is safe to assume that the effects of the UNFM’s mobilizing activities remained
rather superficial, Muslim women’s activism is significant because it is supported by urban
women from different socioeconomic backgrounds (Schulz 2004, chapter 6).
14. The emphasis by some activists on ritual worship as a direct, unmediated communication

39
with God goes against not only the Sufi hierarchical conception, but also convictions of rep-
resentatives of the older generation of reformers, who, as I show below, similar to their former

Dorothea E. Schulz
opponents from the traditionalist camp, seek to keep control over interpretation. This situation
illustrates the heterogeneity of the landscape of current Muslim activism.
15. I argue elsewhere (Schulz 2004) that stress on women’s individual responsibility in cultivating
an ethically superior disposition suggests that prevalent conceptions of Muslim religiosity
are currently being reassessed, partly in response to broader societal transformations and to
transnational influences. Muslim identity is conceptualized no longer primarily as a marker
of family or ethnic identity, but as the result of personal conviction and daily practice (see
Launay 1992, chapters 3–5).
16. Oral historical accounts I collected, roughly covering the period between 1920 and 1950,
document the respect a few women earned for their piety and, occasionally, religious learning.
The accounts illustrate that to lead a life withdrawn from the pressures of public opinion and
worldly matters was an ideal many women aspired to, yet only the economically privileged
ones could realize.
17. Elsewhere (Schulz 2007a), I explain in detail why and how female leaders refrain from calling
their lessons “sermons” in the proper sense of the term.
18. Alasira is commonly translated into French as “religion.” Though the metaphor resonates
with the Sufi notion of path, I never witnessed a teacher or follower explicitly establishing
this connection.
19. For the different importance that teachers and followers attribute to a believer’s attitude, as
opposed to the application of rules of proper conduct, see Schulz (2004, chapter 7).
20. Mahmood, in a brilliant analysis of how participants of the Cairene mosque movement, a
prominent manifestation of female Islamic revivalism in contemporary Egypt, conceive of
the cultivation of religious virtues, shows that women cultivate a pious disposition through
repetitive practice. She argues that women who subscribe to this discursive tradition view
their submission to God’s will as an actively cultivated capacity, rather than as an expression
of passivity (Mahmood 2005, chapters 3 and 4).
21. With salat, I refer only to the regular act of worship that constitutes one of the five require-
ments of religious practice, as opposed to individual petitionary prayer (duwa, from Arabic,
du‘a).
 22. In southern Mali, where most people converted to Islam only in the colonial period, the prac-
tice of ritual worship allowed people (and colonial administrators) to establish a three-tiered
classification, distinguishing among those who belonged to families of religious specialists
and were instructed ones or scribes (kalimutigi, from kalimu “feather” and tigi, “owner”). This
group was contrasted to regular Muslims (minw bè seli kè “those who pray”) and to pagans.
Members of religious lineages expressed their affiliation with a particular Sufi order through
additional prayers and the recitation of special litanies and verses from the Qur‘an.
africa today 54(4)

23. Withdrawal from a domestic area in which most daily activities are performed suggests that
women’s ritual worship was considered an almost intimate act. Still today, the interior of the
house, which consists of bedrooms, is closely associated with acts that require secretiveness
and tact, such as sickness and sexual intercourse.
24. This does not preclude that many Malian Muslims seek the assistance of religious specialists to
enforce their petitionary prayer. The common acceptance of mediators who, by their special
spiritual powers (baraka), are best suited to increase the efficiency of petitionary prayer shows
40

traces of West African Sufi conceptions of spiritual authority.

25. For an instructive parallel to the modernist conception of proper Muslim practice formulated
(Re)Turning to Proper Muslim Practice

by Acehnese leaders in Indonesia, see Bowen (1989:600–604).

26. Stress on the significance of communal worship goes back to the 1940s, when Muslim intel-
lectuals influenced by modernist trends from Egypt highlighted the importance of communal
worship and its egalitarian and universalist moral aspirations (see Bowen 1989:601–602),
thereby countering the predominant hierarchical conception of spiritual leadership associated
with traditional lineages of religious specialists.
27. The celebration of the Mawlud in Timbuktu constitutes one of the major yearly attractions for
Muslims from all over Sahelian West Africa. Its carnivalesque character and liminality manifest
themselves in its temporary reversal of gender and rank distinctions.

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