1 - Thinking about Lived Islam: The View from West Africa and South India

Drawing on contemporary ethnographic and historical research in South India and West Africa, which are characterized by significant religious diversity, the paper reflects on how everyday religiosity among contemporary Muslims is constituted through difference and contestation. The main cases are from two ostensibly secular states – India and Nigeria – both former British colonies where secularism has been interrogated over the past few decades. In the focus on “lived” Islam, the paper focuses not only on intra‐Muslim differences but also to how religiosity is formed and experienced through engagement and encounters with Others, whether religious, ethnic or political, both locally and globally. Everyday religiosity emerges at the interstices of such encounters where Muslims often seek to draw boundaries while they fashion themselves – in lifestyle, sociality, aesthetics – in relation to various Others. Such cases with their comparative angle underscore the importance of studying religiosity in heterogeneous settings in order to counter the idealized sense of wholeness in some of the literature in the anthropology of one religious tradition or another with such traditions often represented as deriving from self‐contained theologies and teleologies. The paper also highlights the importance of thinking comparatively about religiosity in Africa and Asia.