AASR Bulletin 35 - The African Association for the Study of Religions

56
AASR Bulletin 35 (November 2011)
www.a-asr.org
Morier-Genoud, Eric, 2007, ‘A Prospect of Secularization: Muslims and Political Power in Mozambique
Today’, in Journal for Islamic Studies 27: 240-275
[This article looks at Islam and politics in Mozambique. Islam has experienced there an exemplary
turnabout since the late 1980s. It has been transformed from a marginalised, and at time
oppressed, religion into a socially and publicly important faith. What have been the consequences
of this transformation How did Muslims make use of their progress And what was
the reaction of those in political power Did Muslims integrate into the elite in power, and can
one consequently identify a reconfiguration of the national hegemonic bloc The article
demonstrates that while Muslims were integrated in various political institutions after 1994,
the party in power evicted all militant religious men from its party and from political positions
after the year 2000. It only retained secular Muslims in its ranks. The text evaluates the impact
of this change and raises the hypothesis of a consequent secularization of politics.]
Morier-Genoud, Eric & Wendy Urban-Mead (eds.) 2009, Marxism and Missions, special issue of
Social Sciences & Missions 22, 2.
Morier-Genoud, Eric & Wendy Urban-Mead 2009, ‘Introduction’, in Morier-Genoud & Urban-
Mead 2009: 127-130
Murphy, Tim, 2007, ‘Religionswissenschaft as Colonialist Discourse: The Case of Rudolf Otto’, in
Temenos 43, 1; full text at http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/temenos/index
[The dominant approach to the study of religion known as the phenomenology of religion’s
core assumption was that underlying the multiplicity of historical and geographically dispersed
religions was an ultimately metaphysical, trans-historical substratum, called ‘man’, Geist,
or ‘consciousness’. This transhistorical substratum is an expressive agent with a uniform, essential
nature. By reading the data of religion as its ‘expressions’, it is possible to sympathetically
understand their meaning. Geist, or ‘man’, then, is both a philosophy of history and a
hermeneutical theory. It also forms a systematic set of representations, which replicate the
structure of the asymmetrical relations between Europeans and those colonized by Europeans.
The metanarrative of Geist is a narrative of the supremacy - their term, not mine - of white,
Christian Europe over black, ‘primitive’ Africa and ‘despotic’ Asia. Spirit moves from the
South to the North; away from the East to the West. This paper locates Rudolf Otto’s work
within the structure and history of phenomenological discourse and argues that the science of
religion as described there conforms nearly perfectly to the structures of colonial discourse as
this has been discussed and analyzed by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Edward Said.]
Mwesigwa, Fred Sheldon, 2009, ‘Historical Context of Religious Conflict and Religious Education
Curriculum’, in Alternation: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities
in Southern Africa 16, 3: 55-67; full text at:
http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/Alternation%20Spec%20Ed%203%20Pdfs/03%20Mwesigw
a%20FIN%5B1%5D.pdf
[The main intention of this paper is to examine the multi-religious nature of Ugandan society,
the un-healthy relationship between members of the different religions, the limitations of the
current religious education (RE) curriculum to promote unity and harmony, Uganda’s
cherished educational and political goal and finally the requisite need for curriculum review.
The paper traces the failure to have a multi-religious ‘conscious’ RE education curriculum to
the historical-political and religious conflicts that gave birth to a denominational and ‘divisive’
educational system. The paper probes the religious landscape of Uganda and identifies
and discusses key theoretical concepts that underpin the RE debate in Uganda. It establishes
that Uganda is a multi-religious country that is dogged by religious discrimination and intolerance.
Against this background, it criticises the promotion of a confessional CRE and IRE
curriculum in religiously founded public schools by illustrating the limitation of CRE and IRE
text-books in promoting unity and harmony. Finally, it recommends that curriculum review is
the way to go. The main objective of a new curriculum should be to promote respect and
tolerance and/ or understanding of other people’s religious traditions.]