This volume examines the place of Islam in Ghanaian society, with particular attention to the role of the dominant orthodox' Tijyniyya tradition, and its relation to newer groups which have become increasingly prominent since 1950. These are characterized as part of a Muslim resurgence'. The two groups given particular attention are the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission (Amm) and the Ahlus Sunna wal-Jama'a. Nathan Samwini holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Birmingham (UK) and is ordained minister of the Methodist Church in Ghana.
This series of volumes on the manifold facets of Islamic culture is intended to acquaint a very wide public with the theological bases of its faith; the status of the individual and of society in the Islamic world; its expansion since the Revelation; its cultural manifestations in literature and the arts; and finally, Islam today between loyalty to its past and the new challenges of modernity. The last 100 years of Islamic history are examined in the final volume, although the approach is thematic rather than historical. The period considered has seen European colonialism in most of the Islamic world, and Islam has played a major role in the initiation and organization of resistance movements. We survey the groupings and forms of co-operation that have arisen since liberation from colonialism and investigate the political necessity and the moral stand that underlie the unity of the Islamic peoples. Social and economic progress is reviewed and space is devoted to such topics as the ongoing problem of Palestine, moves towards educational reform, and the status of women in Islam. As the Islamic world cannot be imagined in isolation, this volume examines the attitude of contemporary Islam towards other religions and cultures, and considers efforts aimed at achieving mutual understanding and coexistence in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries.
Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim. With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.
This book is the first ‘groundwork’ on Muslim NGOs in contemporary Ghana. It builds upon a database of more than 600 Muslim non-profit associations, foundations and grass-roots organisations whose activities are traced through extensive use of social media. The first part of the book scrutinises the varieties of their activities and operational spaces, their campaigns and target groups, alongside their local, regional, national and international connections. The second part analyses contemporary debates on infaq, sadaqa, waqf and zakat as well as Islamic banking and micro-finance schemes for promoting social welfare among Muslim communities in Ghana.
In March 2017, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufu announced his intention to build a national cathedral to the people of Ghana. The announcement elicited watertight counter arguments that morphed into two a priori re-litigated assumptions: First, Ghana is a secular country and second, religion and state formation are incompatible. Informed by a frustrating paradox of an overwhelming religious presence and concurrent pervasive corruption in the country, public conversation reached a cul-de-sac of “conviction without compromising.” In The Political Economy of Heaven and Earth in Ghana, Charles Prempeh deploys the national cathedral as an entry point to provide both interdisciplinary and autoethnographic understanding of religion and politics. The book shows the capacity of religion, when properly cultivated and curated as a worldview to answer the why questions of life, will foster personal, moral, collective and ontological responsibility. All this is needed to stem the tide against corruption, commodity fetishism, environmental degradation (illegal mining—galamsey), heritage destruction and religious exploitation. Prempeh recuperates a historical fact about the mutual inclusivity between religion and politics—politics helping to manage differences, while religion provides a transcendental reason for unity to be forged for human flourishing. Separating the two is, therefore, ahistorical and an obvious threat to the intangible virtues that answers, “why and how” questions for public governance.
Without question, inter-religious relations are crucial in the contemporary age. While most dialogue works on past and contemporary matters, this volume takes on the relations among the Abrahamic religions and looks forward, toward the possibility of real and lasting dialogue. The book centers upon inter-faith issues. It identifies problems that stand in the way of fostering healthy dialogues both within particular religious traditions and between faiths. The volume's contributors strive for a realization of already existing common ground between religions. They engagingly explore how inter-religious dialogue can be re-energized for a new century.
Philanthropy plays an essential role in Muslim practice around the world. Using a new framing, Philanthropy in the Muslim World contributes to the literature by adding Muslim-majority countries that have not been previously included in cross national philanthropy volumes as well as countries that have important Muslim minority communities.
The book offers an examination of issues, institutions and actors that have become central to Muslim life in the region. Focusing on leadership, authority, law, gender, media, aesthetics, radicalization and cooperation, it offers insights into processes that reshape power structures and the experience of being Muslim. It makes room for perspectives from the region in an academic world shaped by scholarship mostly from Europe and America.
Islam and Christianity are often presented as violent rivals facing each other across a gulf of insurmountable differences. Yet if Christians are to effectively engage Muslims with the gospel, they must learn to build bridges across this divide. This study explores the Muslim presence in Ghana, a nation once believed to be resistant to Islam, and analyses the missiological implications for Pentecostals, the fastest growing group of Christians in the country. Dr. Dieudonne Komla Nuekpe examines the shared spiritual heritage of Ghanaian Pentecostals and folk Muslims within the broader context of African traditional religion. He proposes that this shared heritage – with its emphasis on supernatural encounters and the spiritual realm – can provide common ground for Pentecostals seeking to peacefully and respectfully engage Muslims with the gospel. Identifying the existential, experiential, and theological needs at the heart of folk Islam, this book offers a practical guide for constructive Muslim-Christian engagement in Ghana and beyond. This study also challenges missiologists – both scholars and practitioners – to engage in critical contextualization that considers a culture’s indigenous religious practices when seeking to build bridges to the gospel.
Rahman Yakubu critiques the notion that Islam and Christianity in Africa have been benevolent to African Traditional Religion (ATR) in their interreligious encounter. Rather, he argues that ATR plays an active and central role in creating a peaceful interreligious space in Africa. Using an ethnographic study of rituals in the rites of passage among Dagomba Muslims, Christians and adherents of ATR of Ghana, the author concludes that Dagomba religio-culture has influenced not only the identity of adherents of the two faiths, but also the relations between them. This book proposes that, for a constructive negotiating of religious identity and peaceful interreligious existence, Traditional Religions should be considered an equal partner in interreligious dialogue.
