In the City of the Marabouts: Islamic Culture in West Africa

This inviting personal narrative of an anthropologist's long-term fieldwork in Djenné—for centuries a center of West African culture, scholarship, and architecture—is full of valuable methodological insights. Mommersteeg, with unassuming honesty, becomes absorbed in the knowledge of the Holy Word and slowly enters the closed world of religious practice in which marabouts serve as intermediaries between God and their clients. While marabouts do not claim to be all-knowing, they do know how God can be addressed most effectively, which amulets are the most powerful, and which alms are best for nudging the future in the right direction.