How tomorrow precedes yesterday: Visions of time and locations of authority for Muslims in the Fouta Djallon, Guinea.

Abstract

This dissertation proposes an explanation for how Islamic senses of divinity, prophets, and the afterlife influence perceptions of the legitimacy of various political and religious leaders and male heads of families in the rural northern part of the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea, a former theocratic state where most people affiliated with the Tijaniyya Sufi brotherhood. In ritual and everyday talk, relationships of inequality that supported these leadership positions (based on differences in age, gender, lineal status, and wealth) could be justified or inverted using representations of religiously-inspired visions of time, pertaining to the general substance of time or the delimitation of various temporal periods. These visions were shaped by Islamic texts and their interpretations, regionally-specific narratives and cultural practices, and observations of everyday social, environmental, and political conditions. I identify three Islamic temporalities that were especially prominent in talk among clerics, Quranic students, and laypeople and call them scriptural, conduit, and millennial time. Each of these suggested different kinds of relationships and channels of communication between divine or supernatural beings and ordinary ones, and therefore facilitated different orientations to social politics and the everyday location of legitimate power, or authority. This project demonstrates what attention to the variable ways in which people with the same religious affiliation represent time can contribute to understanding how religion influences politics and social relations beyond the confines of religious institutions. It is through temporal representations that the distant or intangible otherworlds that practitioners of religion are engaged with become relevant in everyday social and linguistic interactions. An argument is also made for returning to a more critical and heterogeneous concept of religion and religious authority than is common in the current anthropological literature, one that recognizes tensions and paradoxes at any religion's core. Finally, using temporality to describe Islamic practices outside of the Middle East provides an alternative to the models of syncretism or the simplistic juxtaposition of Sufi Islam to Sunni reformism that better fits with the particularities of the Fouta Djallon context and facilitates more meaningful comparisons with other Islamic traditions and with the other Abrahamic religions of the book.