QUOTE OF THE MONTH

'Three stages mark the process of conversion: germination, crisis, and gradual reorientation. Germinating in the deeper levels of individuals-in-society and in the collective consciousness, the seed eventually forces the shock of crisis. This results in a new attitude which in time profoundly modifies individual and social behaviour. These stages also help us to understand the different levels of participation which one finds in the Islam of Africa.

          First stage. Preparatory. Contact of some sort, visits and settlement of traders and clerics, leads to the breaking down of barriers and the adoption of certain aspects, chiefly material, of Islamic culture – the wearing of Islamic amulets and dress. The religious system is not upset.

          Second stage. Involves the assimilation of real elements of Islamic religious culture – ritual prayer and recognition of certain categories of permitted and prohibited. They are at this stage religious dualists, but these changes are accompanied by a weakening of the indigenous culture, until eventually the community reaches a point of crisis. This marks the beginning of the

          Third stage. The dividing point when the old religious authority is consciously rejected, the village ritual pattern is disrupted, priests of communal cults lose their power, and the clergy take their place as the guides for the religio-social life. Ancestor-worship must go because it is the core of the old religion, but a great deal of the old is retained. Offerings continue to be made to nature spirits, and medicinemen since they are individual practitioners still flourish but the dualism has changed to parallelism. Islam is now really influencing society.

          The three stages are often paralleled by change over three generations. In religious change the family rather than the individual is the natural and significant unit. The process takes more than one generation and is a reciprocal interaction between three generations. We may express it this way. A pagan family (generation 1) is subject to Islamic radiation. This affects their children (generation 2) who become Muslims in name, without discarding much of the old, but their children (generation 3), under the influence of clerics, learn to despise the old inheritance, and generation 1, in order to preserve its authority and maintain the unity of the family, now become Muslims. So the cycle is complete.'

– J. Spencer Trimingham writing in 1979 about the historical process of Islamization in Africa