It is because of their shared dilemmas that many young men support moral and political reform that allows them to gain respectability as a man and 'proper' Muslim. While living conditions in the urban south and north of the country grant young men unequal chances for economic success and political influence, they all face a situation in which education generates and reproduces structural inequality, granting uneven chances for employment, social maturity, and respectability. The article scrutinizes the double idiom of reform and conservation articulated by leading spokesmen of Islamic renewal in different parts of Mali and their varying ways of incorporating transnational Islamic intellectual influences.

Special attention is paid to competing constructions of Muslim masculinity that inform the project of Islamic moral and political reform that has gained currency in southern and northern Mali in recent decades. This article counters the 'female bias' of scholarship on Islam and gender in Africa by exploring competing understandings of ideal masculinity and what it means to be a respectable Muslim in urban Mali. The assumption that the Christian outlook of Salems was enough to blur ethnic, hierarchical, and gendered differences is questioned in this study because such a notion misleads and shifts scholarly enquiry away from understanding the nuances of the everyday experiences of families of servile ancestry in Abokobi and other BM religious centers. Abokobi is thus uniquely positioned for examining how intercultural exchanges shaped contested memories and for revealing the ways that African women of slave ancestry renegotiated identity and belonging. Abokobi, as an envisioned “Model Town,” is key because it was the only Salem established completely outside the sociopolitical ambit of an existing Accra polity.

Salems therefore became sites that epitomized Basel missionary encounters on the Gold Coast. By the mid-nineteenth century, Basel Mission (BM) evangelical activities on the Gold Coast had expanded beyond the Accra littoral and this significantly informed the establishment of many Pietist Christian urban enclaves or Salems for African converts.

Spirit of the north lisa geiger