EXC 2060 B3-48 - The role of social identities in interreligious arrangements: comparative perspectives on and from Sub-Saharan Africa

What factors influence how Muslims relate to religious others with whom they interact closely in many parts of Africa? The project aims at establishing a transcontinental research collaboration on the role of social identities and obligations in mediating Muslim-Christian relations in contemporary Africa that will bring into conversation colleagues from the University of Münster, the University of Birmingham, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and universities in Anglophone and Francophone West and East Africa.

The project is organized around four main research objectives:

1.  Advance knowledge co-production between intellectuals from African and European backgrounds and across the African continent, through dialogic research formats and by bridging the language divide between scholars from Francophone and Anglophone Africa and their respective work.

2. Compile and jointly review scholarly publications and other relevant material (“grey literature”); set up a project website with a data platform that offers all project partners access to the literature.  

3. Expand the intellectual exchange to include non-academic specialists from the Muslim religious field, i.e. Muslim religious authorities.

4. Develop a conceptual framework for a systematic, comparative and trans-regional assessment of how, from the vantage point of Muslims, social identities factor into religious community constructions and boundary drawing.