New religions take hold through conquest, missionary effort and forced conversion but most effective is conversion through love and respect. The Marabout is about a young man, Dawud, who is determined to fully convert to Islam the king of the 13th Century Mandinkan empire of Mali. Abandoning his family’s tradition of service to Islam as marabouts in his home town of Audaghost, Dawud leaves his home and family to journey to Niani, the capital city of the Mandinkan Empire. The clash of the empire’s traditional religions and Islam leads to murder and attempted murder thrusting Dawud into a precarious existence in Niani until he meets a princess who follows the traditional religion. And as is often said, the rest is history.

From the opening pages, amidst the throes of Ramadan during the hottest and driest season in Mali, Dutch ethnographer Geert Mommersteeg welcomes readers into the religious culture of a historic city uniquely filled with Islamic scholars known as marabouts. This finely crafted English-language translation provides a remarkable contribution to the study of Islamic practices and beliefs observed in local contexts in sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on the interrelationship between public and secret knowledge of maraboutage in everyday reality. This inviting personal narrative of an anthropologist's long-term fieldwork in Djennfor centuries a center of West African culture, scholarship, and architectureis full of valuable methodological insights. Mommersteeg, with unassuming honesty, becomes absorbed in the knowledge of the Holy Word and slowly enters the closed world of religious practice in which marabouts serve as intermediaries between God and their clients. While marabouts do not claim to be all-knowing, they do know how God can be addressed most effectively, which amulets are the most powerful, and which alms are best for nudging the future in the right direction.

This volume analyses the vitality of certain African literary traditions that have a common sense of belonging to the world of Islam.

This rich ethnographic study explores the life and work of successful marabout women in Dakar. It is set against the background of their private family lives, of developments in Senegalese society, and of global changes. While including female experts in spirit possession and plant-based healing, it also gives a rare insight in the work of women who offer Islamic knowledge such as Arabic astrology, numerology, divination and prayer sessions. With the analysis of marabout women's work this study sheds light on the ways in which women's authority in esoteric knowledge is negotiated, legitimated, and publicly recognised in Dakar. The study focuses especially upon marabout women's strategies to gain their clients' trust. Reference to rural areas is a significant element in this process. This study thus contributes to an understanding of the gendered way in which trust and scepticism are related to marabouts' work and of the role of a connection between Dakar and the rural areas therein.

This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence, their belief systems and ritual practices. The book offers new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers and media practitioners alike.

A selection of articles published in the journal "Anthropology today" between 1972 and 2000.