Liminal Entities and Identities
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While reading GhaneaBassiri, something I found interesting was the concept of liminality and its influence on enslaved African Muslims. GhaneaBassiri quotes anthropologist Victor Turner's definition of liminal entities as "neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (29). Liminality is a transitional stage, a step across a threshold. Anglo-Americans believed that African Muslims were liminal entities that could connect their home countries in Africa to America and its colonialist Christianization movement. After some enslaved African Muslims "converted" to Christianity, they would be sent back to Africa to spread the Gospel. These enslaved African Muslims' religious identities were seen as liminal, they could evolve at the will of the colonizer. It is especially important to note that many Anglo-Americans believed that African Muslims were "semi-civilized" meaning that they were not "lost causes" and the shift from Islam to Christianity, barbaric to civilized, would not be a large transition. At the hands of white people, enslaved African Muslims' identites were flexible and should be used to further "commercial and missionary purposes" (30).
To this point of liminal identities, Diouf discusses how a priest and some missionaries believed that "Mohammedan Africans... have been known to accommodate Christianity to Mohammedanism" (83). Anglo-Americans believed that their Muslim identity was easily moldable and would take the shape of Christianity. It is unlikely that Muslims (especially educated individuals) would have blended both religions. "What the missionaries took for syncretism was rather an attempt on the part of the Africans to evidence parallels between the two religions" (83). In an underestimation of these Black individuals' knowledge, they would be mislead into believing that the message of Christianity would be spread throughout Africa.