9 Determine Central ldeas: How did Muslim Arabs change the cultural and religious landscape of early Africa?

In little more than a century, the religious landscape of sub-Saharan Africa has changed dramatically. As of 1900, both Muslims and Christians were relatively small minorities in the region. The vast majority of people practiced traditional African religions, while adherents of Christianity and Islam combined made up less than a quarter of the population, according to historical estimates from the World Religion Database.

Since then, however, the number of Muslims living between the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope has increased more than 20-fold, rising from an estimated 11 million in 1900 to approximately 234 million in 2010. The number of Christians has grown even faster, soaring almost 70-fold from about 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to about one-in-five of all the Christians in the world (21%) and more than one-in-seven of the world’s Muslims (15%).1

While sub-Saharan Africa has almost twice as many Christians as Muslims, on the African continent as a whole the two faiths are roughly balanced, with 400 million to 500 million followers each. Since northern Africa is heavily Muslim and southern Africa is heavily Christian, the great meeting place is in the middle, a 4,000-mile swath from Somalia in the east to Senegal in the west.

To some outside observers, this is a volatile religious fault line—the site, for example, of al-Qaeda’s first major terrorist strike, the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and more recently of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed in Nigeria, where hundreds of Muslims and Christians have been killed.

To others, religion is not so much a source of conflict as a source of hope in sub- Saharan Africa, where religious leaders and movements are a major force in civil society and a key provider of relief and development for the needy, particularly given the widespread reality of failed states and collapsing government services.

But how do sub-Saharan Africans themselves view the role of religion in their lives and societies? To address this question, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, with generous funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, conducted a major public opinion survey involving more than 25,000 face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages or dialects in 19 countries, representing 75% of the total population of sub-Saharan Africa. (View a PDF map of the 19 countries surveyed.)

Our survey asked people to describe their religious beliefs and practices. We sought to gauge their knowledge of, and attitudes toward, other faiths. We tried to assess their degree of political and economic satisfaction; their concerns about crime, corruption and extremism; their positions on issues such as abortion and polygamy; and their views of democracy, religious law and the place of women in society.

The resulting report offers a detailed and in some ways surprising portrait of religion and society in a wide variety of countries, some heavily Muslim, some heavily Christian and some mixed. Africans have long been seen as devout and morally conservative, and the survey largely confirms this. But insofar as the conventional wisdom has been that Africans are lacking in tolerance for people of other faiths, it may need rethinking.

The report also may pose some apparent paradoxes, at least to Western readers. The survey findings suggest that many Africans are deeply committed to Islam or Christianity and yet continue to practice elements of traditional African religions. Many support democracy and say it is a good thing that people from other religions are able to practice their faith freely. At the same time, they also favor making the Bible or sharia law the official law of the land. And while both Muslims and Christians recognize positive attributes in one another, tensions lie close to the surface.

It is our hope that the survey will contribute to a better understanding of the role religion plays in the private and public lives of the approximately 820 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa. This report is part of a larger effort – the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project – that aims to increase people’s knowledge of religion around the world.

answer: an oligarchy is a political system in which the government is run by a group of noble families, or the elite wealthy members of a society. a present day oligarchic government is iran.

explanation:

paul willis (born 1950) is a british social scientist known for his work in sociology and cultural studies. paul willis' work is widely read in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and education, his work emphasizing consumer culture, socialization, music, and popular culture. he was born in wolverhampton[1] and received his education at the university of cambridge and at the university of birmingham. he worked at centre for contemporary cultural studies and subsequently at the university of wolverhampton. he was a professor of social/cultural ethnography at keele university. in the autumn of 2010, he left keele university and is now a professor at princeton university.

paul willis’s work has focused mainly, but not exclusively, on the ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts. from highly structured to weakly structured ones, willis examines how practices of `informal cultural production` to produce and construct cultural worlds `from below`.[2]

trained in literary criticism at cambridge,[2] paul willis received his phd in 1972 from the centre for contemporary cultural studies at birmingham university where he remained as senior research fellow until 1981. he gave a paper at the 9th symposium of the natiohnal deviancy conference in january 1972 entitled 'a motor-bike subculture

during the 1980`s willis served as youth policy adviser to wolverhampton borough council in the english midlands. there he produced the youth review (published by the council and ashgate) which formed the basis for youth policy and for the formation of the democratically elected youth council, both still functioning. during the 1990s he served first as head of the division of media, communications and cultural studies, and then as a member of the professoriate at the university of wolverhampton. in 2000 willis co-founded the sage journal, ethnography. in 2003 willis was hired as a head professor of social and cultural ethnography at keele university.