5 - Compound Life and Religious Control in Ede's Muslim Community

Summary

As described in chapters 2 and 3, the traditions of Ede have it that the introduction of Islam to Ede is due to Tìmì Bamigbaye's patronage of Islam, even though he was a powerful Ṣàngó worshipper. The Muslim Buremo Owon-laa- rogo, or Owonlarogo, came to Ede in order to help Tìmì Bamigbaye to defeat his enemies, and he succeeded. After this event, Tìmì Bamigbaye allowed him to settle in Ede permanently so that he might continue to support Ede's military might. But even though the collaboration between the Tìmì and the Muslim ‘prayer warrior’ had achieved a shared victory for the town, both maintained their distance from each other.

While Tìmì Bamigbaye allowed his subjects to adopt the new faith, he did not embrace the new religion brought by Alfa Buremo. Equally, Alfa Buremo wanted to maintain distance from the town's non-Muslims even as he joined them. He settled in a separate compound near the Ọba's palace, where those he converted several indigenes lived with him and his following increased. By creating a compound, on the basis of religion, Buremo and his followers – and later other Muslims – adapted local forms of organisation normally based on kinship to produce the kernel of the town's Islamic community. The ability of Islam to engender an alternative form of kinship illustrates the ability of Muslims to create Islamic communities that existed independently within a non-Muslim environment. The implications of this practice on the existing debate on Yoruba kinship cannot be explored in this chapter, but as it illustrates the ability of Muslims to separate themselves from non-Muslims, it certainly suggests that the perception of Yoruba Islam as culturally compromised may be misleading (chapter 1).

Irrespective of the determination of the early Muslims, the path of the new religion was not smooth. After the death of Tìmì Bamigbaye and the emergence of his younger brother Ojo Arohanran as the new Tìmì in the 1840s,4 the relationship between the Tìmì and the Muslim community soured. Although Buremo had been his erstwhile friend, the new Tìmì became antagonistic towards the growing Muslim community and began to persecute them.