11 - Everyday Inter-Religious Encounters and Attitudes

Summary

Expanding on the theme of personal relationships across religious boundaries, this chapter offers an overview of attitudes and experiences that reflect and shape relations between Muslims, Christians and traditionalists in Ede. Its main source is an ethnographic survey carried out in Ede between April and June 2012, which focused on the role of religion and religious difference in the private and professional lives of our respondents, and which explored their attitudes towards religious difference. The survey included both qualitative and quantitative questions, and it was accompanied by the production of field notes and diaries in order to allow for later questioning. The aim of this survey was to offer an insight into the relative importance of a range of features of Yoruba life that have been associated with the peaceful coexistence of religions, and survey work was also accompanied by a significant number of qualitative interviews focusing on people's everyday experience and engagement with religious difference.

Based on an evaluation of just under 300 survey responses, this chapter offers an overview of Ede's religious landscape. Confirming Ede's strong Muslim majority, the chapter also points to the different social bases associated with Islam and Christianity. As we discuss, our survey data shows that Muslims in Ede are more likely than Christians to be indigenes of the town, and they tend to have a lower degree of education than Christians. This confirms the widely held impression, discussed in several previous chapters, that while Islam is the town's established majority religion, it is subject to challenges associated with immigration and the dominance of Christianity in the education sector. Exploring the incidence and direction of conversion in Ede, we also look at the fact that our survey indicated a higher number of converts to Christianity than to Islam. We explore converts’ reasons for changing their religion as well as their thoughts on the conversion of others. However, despite the recent growth of Christianity in Ede associated with immigration and educational expansion, the town nonetheless maintains its very large Muslim majority.