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Studying Islam and Christianity in Africa: Moving Beyond a Bifurcated Field
The world has no significant binary features ... it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves, continuously dissolving and emerging social states. (Asad 2003: 15)
During a sermon, Tela Tella - the founder of Nigeria's Chrislam movement Ifeoluwa - proclaimed: 'Moses is Jesus and Jesus is Muhammad; peace be upon all of them - we love them all.' One of his followers, who called himself a 'Chrislamist', told me after the sermon: 'You can't be a Christian without being a Muslim, and you can't be a Muslim without being a Christian.' These powerful statements reflect well the basis of Chrislam, a series of religious movements that emerged in Nigeria's former capital, Lagos, in the 1970s:1the mixing of Christian and Muslim beliefs and practices. In this article I focus on the two most prominent Chrislam movements in Lagos: Ifeoluwa was the first, and Oke Tude is the most popular. In addition to their Yoruba names, the founders and their followers use 'Chrislam' as a concept for self-designation. Despite their inclusive conception of religion, there is surprisingly little interaction between the Chrislam movements. Although Tella accepts both Christianity and Islam and preaches 'unity', he rejects other forms of Chrislam, such as Oke Tude, as 'inauthentic'. Oke Tude's founder, Saka, claims not to know Tella. Somewhat paradoxically, inclusion and exclusion thus work side by side.
Contrary to conventional understandings of Christianity and Islam as mutually exclusive entities, Chrislam considers them to be inclusive. That these movements originated in Nigeria is of course revealing because its inhabitants are strictly divided between Muslims and Christians along a predominantly north-south axis. Although Southern Nigeria is mostly Christian, the Yoruba ethnic group - the protagonists in this article - in the south-west is almost evenly divided between Christians and Muslims (Peel 2000). Christian-Muslim conflict has played a role in Nigerian politics since the centralization of the political system in the 1970s (Falola 1998), and it has become increasingly important since the political liberalization associated with the return to civilian rule in 1999, when Christians and Muslims competed for access to the state and its resources (Nolte 2013: 456). The typical image of Nigeria...