Rapport final du projet ANR-07-PUBLISLAM-062-02 : Espaces publics religieux : États, sociétés civiles et islam en Afrique de l'ouest. 2012

Abstract

Through the notion of "religious public sphere", PUBLISLAM project aimed at identifying the political work of Islam in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Ivory Coast by adopting a new approach, in this particular case by the public sphere. In these five countries, where the political analysts rightly described a release of politics by societies, PUBLISLAM project identifies a phenomenon of re-politicization by transfer towards the religious sphere. Actually, if the notion of "religious public sphere" which we had required aimed initially at qualifying the new places of visibility of Islam and describing its social and cultural activity within the national public spheres, our results tend to show that it is the nature of the public sphere itself that is questioned by Islam, without ending in a political Islam or an Islamization of politics.The political work of Islam in West Africa depends on the social dynamics of the re-Islamization, civic engagement and new nationalism which is conjugated with a double perspective of reaffirmation par le bas of African values and contesting of the personal uses of the State. But at the same time, because it is based on a certain bankruptcy of the model of the Nation-State and a denial of the politics as a mode of action, the re-politicization by transfer is defined in terms of "populist reason". If the political class and a large part of the social elites still conceive this populism like a vote-catching or clientelist practises, for societies, it consists rather in (re)making of the people to rethink both the State and the Nation. It is this populist reason which puts all the political dimension of the work of the Islam in the West-African public spheres, a religious populism thus, which expects new approaches of politics in Africa and beyond.To obtain these results, we set up a device of research based on three prospective thematic axes: Senegal, towards a brotherhood nation?; Mali, Niger: the re-Islamization as a resource of the nation?; Citizen and religious stakes: ...