Mali - Microcosm of Muslim Misunderstanding

About a month ago, the phone in my classroom rang at the end of a busy day.  Harried as usual, I stood up from my flooded inbox and answered.  I hoped it wasn’t a reminder of a meeting I’d forgotten or some otherwise disgruntled person.  To my immense satisfaction, it turned out to be the Gifted Program coordinator inviting me to attend a guest speaker the following day.  Peter Chilson, an award winning journalist and expert on the current crisis in Mali would share some of his work with the Pulitzer Foundation here in St. Louis.  As the French teacher, I was aware of the importance of this topic in France’s current events.  However, my limited investigation had left me far more confused than enlightened.  Hoping for some clarity, I gladly accepted the invitation.

At 9:45 the next morning, I filed down to the Auditorium with my class of 7^th Grade French 1 students.  The Gifted classes had been researching the topic of child soldiers, which Mr. Chilson had encountered as a specialist on the Borders between African countries.  Many of the students assembled were not in the Gifted Program and therefore, had not been prepared for the talk.  I  wondered how the 12 year old audience could possibly stay attentive during a two hour presentation on a subject I myself found overwhelming.  But then, Mr. Chilson started to tell some stories.  He told of an encounter with child soldiers at the Border Control between Mali and the Ivory Coast.   And with the aplomb of a seasoned middle school teacher, he didn’t just tell the students how it was frightening and why it was upsetting.  Rather, he asked them what they thought.  I was amazed and impressed by the comments that followed.

One girl remarked, “If I saw an adult with a gun, I’d be worried, but if I saw a kid with a gun, I’d run!”  Free of even a hint of condescension, Mr. Chilson agreed, and pointed out to the students that they are the same age as the boys in his story were.  This being said, he unflinchingly asked why it would be especially scary to encounter a  twelve year old, like them, with a gun.  I’m proud to say that one of my students offered that a kid might not think as carefully before deciding to shoot, or might carelessly handle the gun, causing it to go off accidentally.  A little later, the conversation veered on to the topic of recruitment.  Why would children be attractive recruits for these militant rebel groups?  Again, the students impressed me with their insights:  children are easily manipulated, they are considered more expendable, their parents need the money, the kids may be orphans and have no where else to go.  After a number of very good comments, Mr. Chilson brought back the point of manipulation.  Why would these kids be persuaded into such risky and violent behavior?  My same student again raised his hand, this time saying, “Maybe they don’t understand that Death is final.”

Our time passed so quickly, filled with the enthusiastic outpourings of  young minds, that finally the Gifted teacher had to ask about France’s role in the current Mali crisis.  I think she felt compelled to deliver what she had promised in her personal invitation to my French class.  Mr. Chilson obligingly proceeded to outline the colonial history of Mali.  Conquered in 1892, France developed a number of economic interests in the country, such as gold and cotton.  Even though Mali won its independence in 1960, France still has a vested interest in Mali, particularly the access it provides to the oil and uranium markets in Niger, which neighbors Mali to the Northeast ( the part taken over by the rebels.)  I was a little disappointed, but not shocked, to discover the far from purely humanitarian nature of France’s motives.

At this point, we had 5 minutes remaining.  So at the final appeal for questions, I put my hand up and when called on, qualified my question, “We have taken just a cursory glance at the crisis in Mali by watching a couple of short news segments on TV 5 Monde, “ then I proceeded to ask, “If Mali is already a Muslim country, what in particular were the also Muslim rebels disputing?”  I knew this would be a tall order for a few minutes.  The pleasantly bewildered look that swept across Mr. Chilson’s face confirmed I was about to get a vastly oversimplified answer, but after all, I came wanting a simple explanation.  Mr. Chilson conceded that it was a good question and that many of the people in Southern Mali ask the same thing.  In basic terms,  the rebel groups who overtook  Northern Mali are Salafi Muslims, whereas the Southern part of Mali is populated by Sufi Muslims.  The bell rang and my students dispersed, more than a little relieved to be liberated from their sitting positions.

I hurried up to Mr. Chilson, eager to glean understanding from my fragmentary view of the situation. I could see he was in a hurry, so I quickly told him that one of the news segments we had watched was about the imperiled cultural identity of Malians, who expressed themselves largely through poetry and music.  The fundamentalists wanted to outlaw both of these.  Apparently, a number of musicians had formed a movement to raise global awareness about what was at stake culturally for the country.  He nodded to a member of his waving entourage and hastily suggested that I look into a band called Tinariwen.  Composed of former Toureg rebels, their album Tassili won best World Music Album in 2012.

Sufi, Salafi, Toureg, Tinariwen, Tassili, all of these were new words to me.  Thus, I began researching the missing pieces needed to assemble this puzzling  information.  First of all, I scoured the chapter entitled, Unity: The God of Islam, in one of the books I’ve been reading, “A History of God,” by Karen Armstrong.  I learned that Muhammad  worried that unless the pre-Islamic Arabian society learned to unite around a common spiritual belief system, they would tear each other apart.  Ironically, it seems that today this is a reality and the perpetrators justify the warring by invoking the religion intended to deliver them from this type of strife.  Armstrong writes, “In practical terms, Islam meant that Muslims have a duty to create a just, equitable society.”  Muhammad had hoped that to focus all worship around a single God the tribal society would integrate and that the individual would similarly find peace.

Next, I looked into the difference between Sufism and Salafism.  Shortly after Muhammad died in 632, Islam experienced its first political division into two groups, the Shi’a and the Sunni Muslims.  Basically, the Shiites believed that that the Religion’s supreme leader, or caliph, should be directly descended from Muhammad’s bloodline, whereas the Sunnis supported a system of an elected caliphate.  Salafists are, in turn, an extreme group or sect of militant Sunnis, who believe themselves to be the only correct interpreters of the Koran.  Sufism, on the other hand, is not a sect of Islam, but rather an aspect or dimension of the Religion.  It is a form of mysticism and has a distinctive culture of poetry and music, through which the Sufis aim to discover the inner meaning of Islam.

Next, I researched the role of France in the Mali crisis and found that the borders of Modern day African Nations were largely determined by the former colonial powers.  As a result, many of the people living in this part of the world form their identities based on their religious or ethnic affiliations, not their nationality.  For example, the Touregs are an ethnic minority in Northern Mali and they have been rebelling for decades against the Malian government based in the far away, southern capital of Bamako.  In this current crisis, the Salafi rebel groups originally joined forces with the Toureg rebellion.  Once they had secured the major Northern cities, such as Timbuktu and Gao, the five main Salafist groups in Mali, 1) Ansar Dine 2) Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao) 3) al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) 4) the Signed-in-Blood Battalion, and 5) the Islamic Movement for Azawad (IMA) broke ranks with the Touregs, began disagreeing with one another, and even disputed within their own organizations.  France’s intervention has been largely successful in liberating the Northern part of Mali from the strict sharia, or Muslim law imposed on them by the rebels.  Unfortunately, society is fractured into so many opposing groups that long term stability in the country seems almost impossible.  

Around the same time the Touregs joined forces with the militant Salafist rebels, the group Tinariwen won Best World Music album at the 2012 Grammies.  In the 1980s, Ibrahim, Abdallah, Hassan, ‘Japonais’ and Kheddou formed the band Tinariwen playing at weddings and baptisms in Algeria.  All former Touregs who trained together in a Libyan military camp, “their music would help broadcast the message of a rebel movement and promote the rights of their nomadic people suffering under the arbitrary policies of repressive and distant central governments.” Thirty years after forming the band, their Grammy winning album Tassili urges the individual “to find hope in the simple pleasures of daily life, blending pure contemplation of man’s surroundings with profound inner meditation.”  http://www.tinariwen.com/biography/   Similarly, according to Armstrong, “an early Islamic tradition (hadith) has God say to Muhammad: ‘I was a hidden treasure; I wanted to be known.  Hence, I created the world so that I might be known.” 

Everything we see and experience in the World around us is evidence of God’s existence.  Depending on our culture, our upbringing, or a myriad of other factors we may see or experience the wonders of God’s world differently.  Yet the source is the same.  We can not know everything about how God works, because we are confined to our human consciousness.  The closest we can come to God is through meditation or prayer.  In the end, these disciplines almost perfectly resemble each other in most religions.  We must learn about one another, because understanding leads to acceptance, and acceptance leads to love.  When I see my twelve year old students make compassionate and insightful comments about children across the globe, it gives me hope.  My hope is that those children too, may have access to an education and that together we can all be part of the same family, God’s family.