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- Title
A Missing Link: African Christian Resonances in the Rise of Indian Muslim and Hindu Missions.
- Authors
Shankar, Shobana
- Abstract
This essay explores how West Africa became a landscape of religious exchange, creativity and synthesis connecting Africa and South Asia. It follows the lead of Afe Adogame and Jim Spickard, who argue that 'Africa is not merely a passive recipient of global pressures. It is also a site of religious creativity that has had considerable effect on the outside world. The growth and global influence of the three religious heritages of sub-Saharan Africa – indigenous religions, Christianity and Islam – needs to be understood against the backdrop of mutual influence and exchange at various historical epochs' (Adogame and Spickhard 2010: 2—3). To explore such transformations, I draw on the cases of the Ahmadiyya Muslim missionary movement in Ghana and Nigeria and Hinduism in Ghana. The Ahmadiyya began as a mission to correct Christianity's influence on West Africans, but was transformed by African influence on South Asians into a pluralistic knowledge-seeking movement. In a similar vein, Africans reshaped Hinduism away from cultural isolationism and worldly attachments of the Indian-diaspora Africa towards a spiritual ethic of racial integration and devotionalism that Africans and Indians now share. I conclude by reflecting on how African modes of religious interrelationality – influenced by the historical trajectories of Christianity on the African continent – have been crucial in the polycentrism that world Christianity scholars have revealed.
- Subjects
RELIGIOUS influence; ISLAMIC missions; CHRISTIANITY; CULTURAL isolation; RELIGIOUS movements; CULTURAL pluralism; INDIAN Muslims
- Publication
Studies in World Christianity, 2022, Vol 28, Issue 2, p169
- ISSN
1354-9901
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3366/swc.2022.0388