Description

Journal article from Africa Today published by Indiana University press. Volume 46, Number 3/4. You can purchase this journal on IU Press's website: http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/aft.

This article explores the paradoxical popularity of “non-Islamic”
healing practices and spirit mediumship in the Muslim
heartland of Saudi Arabia by examining the role of
the hajj in the lives of contemporary bori practitioners in
northern Nigeria. While bori adepts participate in the public
acquisition of consumer goods and symbolic capital that
makes the hajj such a marker of prestige throughout the
Muslim world, their unconventional activities also point
to a largely covert form of circulation in which specialized
goods, services, and knowledge are carried from Nigeria for
consumption by an eager Saudi clientele. Their stories belie
dominant interpretations of the hajj as a globalizing force
which serves to unify Islamic beliefs and practice and ensure
progressive conformity to a “modern” center by a less
developed and less Islamically orthodox periphery. In the
case of northern Nigeria, access to the hajj for a broader segment
of the population has created, on the contrary, the opportunity
for some pilgrims to reinforce and strengthen very
local Hausa conceptions of Islam in both material and symbolic
ways. In so doing, ‘‘‘yan bori transform their own identities
and status in subtle but empowering ways, and sustain
the dynamic subcultural networks of bori back in
Nigeria.” The paper thus demonstrates how the modern hajj
has multiplied the available symbolic resources with which
Muslims throughout the globe fashion Islamic identities
and mold communities of faith.