Entangled Religions: Response to J. D. Y. Peel

When Meyer and I (Larkin and Meyer 2006) wrote our article on the shared similarities between Islam and Christianity, it was intended to interrupt what seemed to us then, and still seems to me now, the tendency for studies of Christian movements to be written as if Muslims did not exist in the same polity and vice versa. Difference has been the normative grounds upon which the scholarly literature on religion in Africa has been based, usually organized around a set of binary distinctions: animist movements are opposed to mission Christianity; traditional (often Sufi) Muslims are opposed to Salafis; mainline churches to the Born-Again movement; Islam to Christianity; both of them to animism; and, finally, religion to secularism. While the particular content changes, the structural ordering does not. It is undoubtedly important, as Peel argues, to understand the theological traditions that orient the attitudes and regulate the practice of adherents, but there are other dynamics that are also important and which the emphasis on difference occludes.