Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T19:43:10.088Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What's (not) in a leather pouch? Tracing Islamic amulets in Asante, Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2020

Benedikt Pontzen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Islamic charms and amulets (lāyā) are simultaneously fairly common, highly valued and ardently contested items among Muslims in Asante. Tracing their history and the relations in which Muslims in Asante manufacture, make sense of and debate them, this article places such amulets within relations and delineates the discourses surrounding them. For those who manufacture and request them, these amulets are part not only of the Islamic tradition but of the divine, which permeates them. For their critics, these are un-Islamic idols that contravene the religion of Islam as they ‘keep people away from God’. Such amulets and their usage – or their non-usage – are therefore central to people relating to the divine, and as amulets thus take part in various (re)makings of Islam, they matter and are part of larger processes that knit several elements together. If one considers such amulets as genuine sources, they provide a lot of information not only about how people conceive of, debate and live Islam, but of how Islamic lifeworlds come into being and of the various entities that participate in these processes.

Résumé

Résumé

Les talismans et amulettes islamiques (lāyā) sont des objets à la fois assez courants, hautement valorisés et ardemment contestés au sein de la population musulmane d'Ashanti. Cet article, en étudiant l'histoire de ces objets et la relation dans le cadre de laquelle les musulmans d'Ashanti les fabriquent, leur donnent un sens et en débattent, situe ces amulettes dans des relations et décrit les discours qui les accompagnent. Pour ceux qui fabriquent ces amulettes et les sollicitent, elles s'inscrivent non seulement dans la tradition islamique, mais aussi dans le divin dont elles sont imprégnées. Pour ceux qui les critiquent, ce sont des idoles contraires à l'islam qui « éloignent de Dieu ». Ces amulettes et leur usage (ou leur non-usage) sont par conséquent au cœur du rapport au divin, et ce faisant, elles participent à divers éléments (re)constitutifs de l'islam, elles importent et s'inscrivent dans des processus plus larges mêlant plusieurs éléments. Si l'on considère ces amulettes comme de véritables sources, elles fournissent nombre d'informations non seulement sur la manière dont l'islam est conçu, débattu et vécu, mais aussi sur la manière dont les mondes de la vie islamiques prennent naissance et sur les diverses entités qui participent à ces processus.

Type
Debating religious practices and religiosity
Information
Africa , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , November 2020 , pp. 870 - 889
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, S. (2016) What Is Islam? The importance of being Islamic. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Arhin, K. (1979) West African Traders in Ghana in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Asad, T. (1986) ‘The idea of an anthropology of Islam’. Occasional Paper Series. Washington DC: Georgetown University.Google Scholar
Bowen, J. R. (1993) Muslims Through Discourse: religion and ritual in Gayo society. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, L. (2000) ‘Histories of religion in Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 30 (2): 143–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brenner, L. (2001) Controlling Knowledge: religion, power and schooling in a West African Muslim society. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Brenner, L. (2007) ‘Coran et talismans’ in Hamès, C. (ed.), Coran et Talismans. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, D. (2008 [2000]) Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, A. (1969) Custom and Politics in Urban West Africa: a study of Hausa migrants in Yoruba towns. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Jong, F. and Radtke, B. (eds) (1999) Islamic Mysticism Contested: thirteen centuries of controversies and polemics. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Diagne, S. B. (2018) Open to Reason: Muslim philosophers in conversation with the Western tradition. New York NY: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dilley, R. (1999) ‘The problem of context’ in Dilley, R. (ed.), The Problem of Context. New York NY: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Dumbe, Y. (2013) Islamic Revivalism in Contemporary Ghana. Huddinge: Södertörns Högskola.Google Scholar
Engmann, R. A. (2013) ‘Hidden palimpsests: unravelling nineteenth-century Islamic talismans in Asante’. PhD thesis, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object. New York NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, H. (1973) ‘Hassebu: Islamic healing in Black Africa’ in Brett, M. (ed.), Northern Africa. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Flueckiger, J. B. (2006) In Amma's Healing Room: gender and vernacular Islam in South India. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Goody, J. (1968) ‘Restricted literacy in northern Ghana’ in Goody, J. (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Graw, K. (2009) ‘Beyond expertise: reflections on specialist agency and the autonomy of the divinatory ritual process’, Africa 79 (1): 92–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gruber, C. (2016) ‘From prayer to protection: amulets and talismans in the Islamic world’ in Leonie, F. (ed.), Power and Protection. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.Google Scholar
Haaber Ihle, A. (2003) ‘“It's all about morals”: Islam and social mobility among young and committed Muslims in Tamale, northern Ghana’. PhD thesis, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Haj, S. (2009) Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: reform, rationality, and modernity. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hamès, C. (2001) ‘L'usage talismanique du coran’, Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 218 (1): 83–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamès, C. (ed.) (2007) Coran et Talismans: textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Handloff, R. E. (1982) ‘Prayers, amulets, and charms: health and social control’, African Studies Review 25 (2–3): 185–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hill, J. (2007) ‘Divine knowledge and Islamic authority: religious specialization among disciples of Baay Nas’. PhD thesis, Yale University.Google Scholar
Hirji, Z. (2010) ‘Debating Islam from within: Muslim constructions of the internal other’ in Hirji, Z. (ed.), Diversity and Pluralism in Islam. London: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Hiskett, M. (1980) ‘The “community of grace” and its opponents, the “rejecters”: a debate about theology and mysticism in Muslim West Africa’, African Language Studies 17: 99–140.Google Scholar
Jansen, J. (2009) ‘Framing divination: a Mande divination expert and the occult economy’, Africa 79 (1): 110–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kobo, O. (2012) Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-century West African Islamic Reforms. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kobo, O. (2015) ‘Shifting trajectories of Salafi/Ahl-Sunna reformism in Ghana’, Islamic Africa 6: 60–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambek, M. (1993) Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: local discourses of Islam, sorcery, and spirit possession. Toronto: Toronto University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Last, M. (1988) ‘Charisma and medicine in northern Nigeria’ in Cruise O'Brien, D. B. and Coulon, C. (eds), Charisma and Brotherhood in African Islam. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor–network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Levtzion, N. (1965) ‘Early nineteenth-century Arabic manuscripts from Kumase’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 8: 99–119.Google Scholar
Levtzion, N. (1968) Muslims and Chiefs in West Africa: a study of Islam in the Middle Volta Basin in the pre-colonial period. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Loimeier, R. (2016) Islamic Reform in Twentieth-century Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsden, M. (2005) Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan's north-west frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsh, W. H. (2015) ‘Dehistoricizing Islam in Africa’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (3): 656–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marty, P. (1914) ‘Les amulettes musulmanes au Sénégal’, Revue du Monde Musulman 27: 319–68.Google Scholar
Masquelier, A. (2001) Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: possession, power, and identity in an Islamic town of Niger. Durham NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCaskie, T. C. (1995) State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCaskie, T. C. (2015) Asante, Kingdom of Gold: essays in the history of an African culture. Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press.Google Scholar
McIntosh, J. (2009) The Edge of Islam: power, personhood, and ethnoreligious boundaries on the Kenya coast. Durham NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meijer, R. (2009) ‘Introduction’ in Meijer, R. (ed.), Global Salafism. London: Hurst and Co.Google Scholar
Meyer, B. and Houtman, D. (2012) ‘Material religion: how things matter’ in Houtman, D. and Meyer, B. (eds), Things. New York NY: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Mommersteeg, G. (1988) ‘“He has smitten her to the heart with love”: the fabrication of an Islamic love-amulet in West Africa’, Anthropos 83 (4–6): 501–10.Google Scholar
Niasse, I. (2011) Kāshif al-Ilbās: the removal of confusion concerning the flood of the saintly seal Ahmad al-Tijānī. Cairo: International Printing.Google Scholar
Orsi, R. (2005) Between Heaven and Earth: the religious worlds people make and the scholars who study them. Princeton NJ: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Østebø, T. (2015) ‘African Salafism: religious purity and the politicization of purity’, Islamic Africa 6: 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owusu-Ansah, D. (1991) Islamic Talismanic Tradition in Nineteenth-century Asante. Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen.Google Scholar
Owusu-Ansah, D. (2000) ‘Prayer, amulets, and healing’ in Levtzion, N. and Pouwels, R. L. (eds), The History of Islam in Africa. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Pellow, D. (2002) Landlords and Lodgers: socio-spatial organization in an Accra community. Westport CT: Praeger.Google Scholar
Pontzen, B. (2014) ‘Islam in the zongo: an ethnography of Islamic conceptions, practices, and imaginaries among Muslims in Asante (Ghana)’. PhD thesis, Freie Universität Berlin.Google Scholar
Pontzen, B. (2017) ‘“Speaking for Islam” and religious authority in zongos in Asante, Ghana’, Journal of Religion in Africa 47 (1): 42–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pontzen, B. (2021) Islam in a Zongo: Muslim lifeworlds in Asante, Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Radtke, B. (1994) ‘Erleuchtung und Aufklärung: islamische Mystik und europäischer Rationalismus’, Die Welt des Islams 34 (1): 48–66.Google Scholar
Rosenthal, F. (2007 [1970]) Knowledge Triumphant: the concept of knowledge in medieval Islam. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Salomon, N. (2013) ‘Evidence, secrets, truth: debating Islamic knowledge in contemporary Sudan’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (3): 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savage-Smith, E. (ed.) (2004) Magic and Divination in Early Islam. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Schildkrout, E. (1978) People of the Zongo: the transformation of ethnic identities in Ghana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seesemann, R. (2011) The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the roots of a twentieth-century Sufi revival. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soares, B. (2003) ‘A warning about imminent calamity in colonial French West Africa: the chain letter as historical source’, Sudanic Africa 14: 101–14.Google Scholar
Soares, B. (2005) Islam and the Prayer Economy: history and authority in a Malian town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
el-Tom, A. O. (1985) ‘Drinking the Koran: the meaning of Koranic verses in Berti erasure’, Africa 55 (4): 414–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
el-Tom, A. O. (1987) ‘Berti Qur'anic amulets’, Journal of Religion in Africa 17 (3): 224–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Triaud, J.-L. and Robinson, D. (eds) (2000) La Tijaniyya: une confrérie musulmane à la conquête de l'Afrique. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Wall, L. L. (1988) Hausa Medicine: illness and well-being in a West African culture. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ware, R. T. (2014) The Walking Qur'an: Islamic education, embodied knowledge, and history in West Africa. Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Wilks, I. (1966) ‘The position of Muslims in metropolitan Ashanti in the early nineteenth century’ in Lewis, I. M. (ed.), Islam in Tropical Africa. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilks, I. (1989 [1975]) Asante in the Nineteenth Century: the structure and evolution of a political order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wilks, I., Hunwick, J. O. and Sey, M. (2003) ‘Writers of the Greater Voltaic Region’ in Hunwick, J. O. (ed.), Arabic Literature of Africa. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Wilks, I., Levtzion, N. and Haight, B. M. (1986) Chronicles from Gonja: a tradition of West African Muslim historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Z. (2015) Living Knowledge in West African Islam: the Sufi community of Ibrahim Niasse. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar