If you are considering attending the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), to be held in Cologne, Germany, May 31-June 3, 2023, please consider submitting a paper to our panel. Deadline for paper abstracts is January 23.

This panel centers around understanding Islam in Africa at the intersection of the local, the transregional, and the global. It focuses on African engagements with Islam at these different scales and how such engagements help to shape imagination of the past, present, and future. Such cultural and political imagination can have important implications for African Muslims’ writing of history, their modes of belonging, shifting affiliations, and aspirations for the future. To date, there has been considerable scholarship on how various ethnolinguistic groups (e.g., Swahili) and areas (e.g., the Indian Ocean) in Africa in which Islam and Islamic religious culture feature prominently have been implicated in regional, transregional, and global entanglements across space and time. There is also growing scholarship on Asia-Africa and Middle East-Africa, as well as on shifting geopolitics in a multipolar world. However, broader attempts to conceptualize such transregional and global entanglements beyond such case studies as they relate to Islam and Muslim societies have been rather limited. Given the broader objectives of analytical and comparative reflection about Islam in Africa in global context, presenters will cast new light on African engagements with Islam and some of the transregional and global connections African Muslims have forged, as well as the implications such connections have for understanding Islam in a globalizing world. The panel invites papers dealing with African engagements with Islam at the intersection of the local, the transregional, and the global in various contexts across space and time using historical methods, ethnography, visual culture, and/or media studies.