ABSTRACT
Simple demography helps explain certain patterns, as well as account for the diversity of Muslim politics in the region. Muslim politics in Africa are nothing more than a variant of politics more broadly and must be understood in the context of other political dynamics, to which religion is in fact often marginal. The evolution of Izala illustrates two notable dynamics in the Sufi-Reformist tensions in the region: the importance of local context, and the potential for religious change and influences across ideological divides. The liberalization of social life that accompanied the efforts at democratization across the region in the early 1990s was to open up new possibilities for religious movements, and led to a proliferation of new voices. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 provoked intense debates about religion across the Muslim world, and in many ways much soul-searching about the place of Islam in the modern state system and about the relations between Muslims and the West.
