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322 EPILOGUEpolitical elite had assembled to follow the events over the radio, since Bahangaand his men communicated over the RAC. At the end of the day one of themtold me: ‘sometimes we do certain things to show that, despite democracy, thereis always the possibility of “demokalashi” in Kidal’. The ironic mixture ofdemocracy and Kalashnikovs remains a reality in Northern Mali and clearlyunderlined the readiness to use violence to solve local political problems byturning them into national ones. 11Land-tenure questions were not the only ones that festered in the newdecentralised democratic politics. Religion came into it too. Since the end of therebellion, Northern Mali has been open to different global Islamic movements,starting with the arrival of the Tablighi Jamaat. During Ramadan 1419, December1998, four South Asian Tablighis arrived in Kidal on a da’wa mission. 12 ByMay 1999, the Ifoghas had wholeheartedly embraced the Tablighi teachings.Two of amenokal Intalla ag Attaher’s sons had completed a ten-day course inBamako after which they became active at the mission in Kidal. One of thesesons would later travel to a Tablighi Jamaat centre in Raiwind, Pakistan. Iyadag Ghali had also taken the Tablighi Jamaat courses. The arrival of the TablighiJamaat coincided with the preliminaries to the first Communal elections in Junethat year. In Kidal city, the Communal elections had become the new battlefieldfor the old rivalry between the Ifoghas, determined to keep the power they hadalmost lost and won back with so much difficulty during the rebellion, and theIdnan and their found-again imghad allies, who were gradually allowed back inthe city, from which they had been chased in 1994. The Ifoghas based thelegitimacy of their power largely on religious grounds. They claim shorfa status(the status of descendants of the prophet Muhammad), and in his late days inpower Intalla ag Attaher presented himself emphatically as ‘amir al-mu’minin:the commander of the believers. But, in the Communal elections, the Idnan hadthe most popular candidate for the position of mayor, a woman, affectionallycalled ‘Tenhert’, ‘Doe’, during the elections, as she is a member of the Idnanclan Inheren, ‘The Does’. As I described in Chapter 5, Tamasheq women enjoya great measure of freedom to involve themselves in public life and politics. Afreedom that is often viewed as exceptional in the Muslim world, an exceptionof which Kel Tamasheq women, having lived in the Arab world as migrants, arevery aware. They became even more aware of this with the coming of theTablighi Jamaat, a movement which preaches strongly antifeminist concepts,1112Similar conflicts like this one, for example between the Kounta federation and theAlmouchakarai Arabs of the Gao Région over pastures and political power in theTilemsi plain, or that between the Daoussahak and Foroforo Fulani over pastures inthe border area between Niger and Mali, remain rampant until present, with similarscenarios of entwined power relations being in play.Lecocq, B. & P. Schrijver 2007.