Timbuktu Talks: Islam in Africa: Between Sufism, Salafism, and Indigenous Religious Authority

This lecture examines the case of Chérif Ousmane Madani Haïdara and the Ançar Dine movement in Mali as a window into the dynamics of contemporary African Islam. The main argument is that figures like Haïdara articulate a theology of resistance, one that pushes back simultaneously against radical Islamism and against ‘‘imported’’ forms of Islam, whether Wahhabi or Arab-centric in orientation. This lecture will engage broader questions of religious authority, the decolonization of Islamic knowledge, and the plurality of Muslim identities in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

This will be a hybrid event. 

Youssouf Sangaré is a George A. Miller Visiting Scholar. He is a scholar of Islamic studies specializing in modern and contemporary Muslim thought. He is currently Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) in Islamic Studies at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales - INALCO (Paris), where he also serves as Director of the Master's program in Arabic Studies and Co-Director of the Diploma in Islamic Studies. His work sits at the intersection of Islamic theology, hermeneutics, and the intellectual history of the Muslim world, with a particular focus on reformist thinkers and on the reinterpretation of Islamic sources by both classical and contemporary scholars.