Muslim discourses and reform: investigating the postcolonial experience ind coastal Kenya
Dr. Kai Kresse
This project investigates the internal discursive dynamics of urban Muslim communities along the Kenya Swahili coast, particularly in Mombasa. Thereby, it focuses on fields of social tension that are ranked around the presence of discourses of Islamic reform in everyday life. Two aspects are central to this investigation. Firstly, whether in how far (translocally triggered) shifts of meaning are detectable in ideology and the practice of everyday life; and secondly, to what extent discourses of Islamic reform are being adapted, reformulated, and thereby (re-)located for a specific regional context, due to translocal tensions.
The research will proceed ethnographically, and seeks to make use of case studies to carve out the internal perspectives and life-world of local social agents. Thereby, a historically sensitive approach to the discursive embeddedness and practical contexts of everyday life is used to assist in identifying and understanding any such shifts of meaning, and in analysing them as translocal phenomena.
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