The production of Islamic identities through knowledge claims in Bouake, Cote d'Ivoire

In the past 30 years, in Cote d'Ivoire, Islamic institutions have significantly changed in scope and magnitude, leading to the emergence of new practices and definitions of Islam. In the context of these transformations, young Muslims have acquired a growing public voice in the definition of hluslimhood through the growth of neighbourhood-based Islamic youth associations and Franco-Arabic schools (madersas). In the city of Bouake, Islamic practices are divided between Wahhabiyya and non-Wahhabiyya, as well as between 'syncretic' and 'Arabized' notions. In a context of competing sources and notions of Islamic knowledge, young Muslim men and women's claims of legitimacy are made through modalities of schooling. These young people assert an Arabized version of Islam based on the formal acquisition of the Arabic language, allowing for the reading and understanding of the Qur'an in Arabic. This article argues that knowledge claims made by young Muslims allow them to reckon with local power relations embedded in gerontocracy, as well as the social divisions brought about by ancestral ties and ethnicity. This argument needs to be connected with the history of Qur'anic and Western-style schooling in Cote d'Ivoire, highlighting the differing locales of knowledge acquisition as well as the competing forms of knowledge, ranging from mnemonic knowledge to Western-style classroom teaching. The empirical data presented here were gathered in neighbourhood-based Islamic youth associations and madersas between 1992 and 1995, and in 1998.