These songs were collected from Hameed Nasiru Akinlade of Akinlade Cultural Group after the group's performance at Ede Mapo Arogun Day (Ede annual festival held on 30 November 2013).

First song

As the earlier chapters of this book have illustrated, Islam was established in Ede at the town and compound level by individuals committed to contributing to the town, dramatically so in the figure of Buremo, the town's first Muslim, who helped the Tìmì save Ede by miraculously defeating the Ibadan army (see chapters 2 and 3). While the conversion to Islam of individuals created difficulties in many families and compounds, the creation of new and explicitly Muslim compounds helped to resolve these. And although the reign of the town's first Muslim Tìmì met with resistance, it nonetheless contributed to the acceptance of Islam as the dominant religion. While the later emergence of competing Muslim groups illustrates the tensions internal to the town's Muslim community, it is fair to say that by the early twentieth century Islam was firmly rooted in Ede both at the town and compound level.

In contrast, Christianity arrived in Ede through missionaries whose primary aim was to convert individuals, whom they offered often exclusive access to educational and spiritual resources. These resources were usually linked to the wider networks of their particular church, which provided the initial funds required to set them up. Understanding individual change as the basis for communal progress rather than vice versa, the overall wellbeing of the town, or even the formation of an ecumenical Christian community at town level, was a secondary concern for many Christian missionaries. But if the low degree of inclusion into local structures disadvantaged the development of a Christian community, it did not always disadvantage Christian individuals, who were drawn into networks beyond the town through their educational achievements. As a result, the early Christian groups in Ede experienced a strong tension between loyalty to the individual churches, which often provided the resources that made Christianity attractive, and the need to be embedded in the town's relevant forms of social and political organisation.

In towns like Ede, this perceived Christian emphasis on individual success rather than the public good thus challenged notions of town politics in which all sections contributed to communal progress.

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since September 2001, religion has been recognised as an increasingly important factor in personal and group identification and mobilisation. In a global environment increasingly dominated by economic neoliberalism, tensions between Islam and Christianity have become especially salient. However, a detailed understanding of the dynamics of religious conflict – and accommodation – is obscured by the overwhelming focus of analysts and commentators on the global North. In this context, attacks by Islamic groups and the perception and treatment of Muslim minorities in the culturally Christian societies in the US and Europe are often seen to confirm the existence of a ‘faultline’ between ‘Western civilisations’ and ‘Islamic civilisations’, which has been transposed somewhat uncritically to different African contexts. In this way, Africa is treated as little more than a ‘reservoir of raw fact’, which is made to fit the theories and truths produced on the basis of European and North American knowledge and praxis.

But although the social and political transformations following the end of the Cold War reflected the politics of the global North, the complexity of their implications reveals itself more fully in the societies in the South. While Africa has its share of Muslim–Christian conflicts, not all religious violence on the continent takes place across a religious divide. In Uganda and neighbouring countries, the Christian Lord's Resistance Army has terrorised communities for many decades irrespective of religion. In the Sudan, the self-consciously Muslim Janjaweed militia has committed large-scale violence against coreligionists. Similarly, Islamic insurgent groups in Mali and northern Nigeria have targeted fellow Muslims far more frequently than Christians and other non-Muslims.5 While the implications of this phenomenon cannot be explored in detail here, the high incidence of intra-Muslim violence certainly challenges the notion that conflict is necessarily associated with religious difference.

But the opposite also applies: even in highly religious societies, religious difference is not necessarily associated with conflict. Thus Africa is also home to several states and regions where Muslims and Christians coexist without large-scale conflict. In South Africa, the country's liberal post-Apartheid Constitution has enabled a diverse Muslim minority to pursue religiously distinctive rights.

Drawing on the case study of Ede and south-west Nigeria, this book offers an understanding of inter-religious relations that challenges the notion that Muslim–Christian difference is inherently conflictual. We suggest that the dominant role ascribed to conflict arises from the assumption that the experiences of the global North, where the increase of Muslim–Christian conflict has been an important feature of the religious encounters between clearly bounded groups, is paradigmatic for the rest of the world. As a result, interfaith debates and practices centre on the need for mutual toleration. However, in Africa, both the growth of intra-religious mobilisation in some contexts, and the close social relations between members of different religions in others, illustrate that conflict – and the need for toleration – is only one form of interreligious engagement.

In order to understand the full implications of the growing political importance of religion, we must recognise that in Africa and the global South, the social diversity and creativity subsumed under functioning forms of rationality in the global North are often ‘promiscuously visible’. Examples of the wide range of practices that shape Ede's mixed religious landscape certainly include practices of toleration and low-level conflict, particularly in the context of clearly bounded religious groups (chapters 5–7, 8). It is especially in these cases that religious boundaries are produced in relation to other forms of identity, such as descent and belonging, and in relation to social or institutional hierarchies. In other words, it appears that both potential conflict and the need for tolerance are of particular importance where religion is closely linked to social or institutional structures. In such contexts, practices of tolerance do not solely reflect explicitly normative values but also rely on practical strategies that reflect entrenched social interests. In other words, tolerance does not exist independently of relations of power, and is thus itself subject to criticism from different vantage points: as chapter 8 illustrates, even toleration on an equal level between two important groups may alienate those who do not feel included by the resulting compromises.

Oríkì Tìmì Munirudeen Adésọlá Lawal Láminísà (2007–)

Oríkì Tìmì Tìjání Ọládòkun Oyéwùsì (1976–2007)