2 - The Religious Setting

Summary

To provide a historical, political, and socio-economic context for the emergence of the religious assemblages described in this book, Chapter 2 outlines the pluriform religious setting in south-western Nigeria, an area known as Yorubaland with Lagos as its economic, financial, and cultural hub. It compares the religious situation in Yorubaland with a ‘religious marketplace’, where religious shoppers pick and choose from the religious traditions that are available to them. I argue that if we aim to understand Muslim–Christian encounters in Nigeria beyond the ingrained conflict–cooperation continuum, we must pay attention to how Muslims and Christians actually live their religion and how their ways of living religion relate to each other. By analyzing Yorubaland as a religious marketplace and the Yoruba as religious shoppers, I show the limits of existing approaches that understand religious difference as a ground for religious violence and open an avenue for a more nuanced analysis of interreligious encounters.