Political Sentiments And Social Movements by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-20T04:40:07+00:00

152

C. CASEY

SenSory PoliticS and religion

Similar to Pentecostal Christian evangelists, Salafi Muslim reformers in

Nigeria and Kuwait tend to hold individuals personally responsible for

locating “evil” within the self and exorcizing it. Moral aesthetics of dan-

ger, and the power of their typifications, were strengthened by the insep-

arability of what is seen from what is unseen, in human-spirit encounters.

While condemning sensoria that signified breaches in the demarcation

between the worlds of humans and spirits, Muslim reformers reinforced

the power of human-spirit relationships; they employed realist inter-

pretations of Qur’anic scripture as “truth,” to project spiritual- material

profiles of unacceptable sensory and emotive forms into popular

consciousness.

In Nigeria, Malam Aminu (pseudonym) who self-identified as a mem-

ber of a Salafi da’wah or missionary movement told me:

During the time of the Prophet, there was no computer and nowadays

everything is changing. People are going away from the way of life of the

Prophet. So that is why we are getting problems. If we are on the right

path, we will get whatever we like…Before there were certain areas that

were covered by spirits but now due to industries and civilization, human

beings are now occupying these places. Now, for example, you look at the

B.U.K. (Bayero University, Kano) new site. Before the place wasn’t like

that. Now, the place is completely taken over by the human beings, but in

the past, it was a place that was occupied by the spirits. If you went there

at that time, something would happen to you. So now, some industries are

built there and the industries use to pollute the air with some smells that

are not desirable for the spirits. So they move to another place. And even if

we don’t follow the way of Allah, but we don’t cheat ourselves and we are

keeping to our own business, Allah will build a demarcation between us

and the spirits. But nowadays, everything is changed. We cheat ourselves.

We interact with many problems that don’t concern us. That is why we

are destroying the demarcation Allah built between us and the spirits. We

disobeyed Allah so much that he took away all the demarcation between us

and the jinns.4

Qur’anic scholars in Nigeria and Kuwait referenced the scholarship of

Ibn Taymiyyah, a medieval Sunni theologian, jurist, and reformer, who

wrote about the importance of maintaining bodily boundaries between

humans and spirits. Ibn Taymiyyah is regarded as the source of the eight-

eenth century Wahhabiyyah movement within Islam, which has inspired

6 SENSORY POLITICS AND WAR: AFFECTIVE ANCHORING … 153

fundamentalist, reformist and jihadist movements across the globe. Led

by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi clerics, anti-sorcery campaigns in Kuwaiti

shopping malls similarly drew upon Ibn Taymiyyah to emphasize a pro-

tective bodily boundary, maintained by recitation of the Qur’an and vig-

ilant prayers. Religious media such as cassette tapes of “pure” Qur’anic

sura and Internet blog Qur’anic recitations became significant vehicles,

in Nigeria and Kuwait, through which to protect oneself from dangerous

others—humans, but also spirits, witches, and sorcerers. These mobile,

self-directing media forms facilitated choice, and ways to safeguard one-

self and one’s political-religious community through constant access to

Qur’anic recitations and education, but they also increased communal

expectations that young Muslims would attend to and select media that

was consonant with societal norms for political-spiritual development.

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