Abstract
Pentecostalism, with around 100 million followers, accounts for 12% of Africa’s population. Fundamentalist Islam has been increasing in influence across Africa, and there are growing social tensions between Muslims and Christians in parts of Africa where Pentecostalism and Islamic fundamentalism operate alongside each other. In this chapter, Iwuchukwu offers some theological, ideological, and moral points against the exclusivist stances of fundamentalist Muslims and Pentecostal Christians. He advocates for the traditional African values of religious diversity and respect for the religious other, and for the application of religious pluralism mindset to a serious interreligious dialogue.
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- 1.
See “Global Christianity—A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population,” in Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life. http://www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/.
- 2.
See “Overview: Pentecostalism in Africa,” in Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life. http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/overview-pentecostalism-in-africa/.
- 3.
Allan Anderson approves Walter J. Hollenweger’s three types of Pentecostals. See Anderson, “Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions,” in Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, edited by Anderson Allan, Bergunder Michael, Droogers André, and Van Der Laan Cornelis (University of California Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppt8r), 16.
- 4.
Anderson, “Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions,” 19.
- 5.
Classical Pentecostal has become a popular typology used in reference to those Pentecostal churches that replicate the Pentecostal spirituality that originated in the USA in 1906 and spread across the world, with an appreciation of speaking in tongues, baptism of the Holy Spirit, and independent ecclesial authority. See Todd M. Johnson, “Counting Pentecostals Worldwide,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Vol. 36, no. 2 (2014): 274–275.
- 6.
Sourced from Pew Research Center, “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa,” April 15, 2010 (http://www.pewforum.org/2010/04/15/executive-summary-islam-and-christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa/). Accessed June 4, 2016.
- 7.
See Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4–5.
- 8.
Some scholars of the history of Pentecostalism have rejected the theory that the Azusa Street revival mission marked the first global, or even American, beginning of Pentecostalism. There are those, like Allan Anderson, who uphold the theory of an African American origin of Pentecostalism in the USA and there are others who postulate that Pentecostalism emerged in Korea, India, and Chile with no direct link to the USA or that even predated the latter. Many scholars are in favor of multiple origins. See Michael Burgunder, “The Cultural Turn,” in Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, edited by Anderson Allan, Michael Bergunder, Droogers André, and Van Der Laan Cornelis (University of California Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppt8r.7), 56f; Anderson, “Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions,” 22f; and Amos Yong and Estrelda Y. Alexander (eds.), Afro-Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
- 9.
See Anderson Allan, Bergunder Michael, Droogers André, and Van Der Laan Cornelis (eds.), “Introduction,” in Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (University of California Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppt8r), 1–10.
- 10.
Pew Research Center, “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Kenya,” August 5, 2010 (http://www.pewforum.org/2010/08/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-kenya/); “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Nigeria,” August 5, 2010 (http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-nigeria/); and “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in South Africa,” August 5, 2010 (http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/historical-overview-of-pentecostalism-in-south-africa/). Accessed June 4, 2016.
- 11.
Nimi Wariboko argues that Pentecostalism in Nigeria has three stages of historical development with the pre-1980s as the first stage. See Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 1ff and 20ff.
- 12.
See Marinus Iwuchukwu, Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria: The Challenges of Inclusive Cultural and Religious Pluralism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 13.
The full name of this movement is Izalatul Bidi’a Wa Ikamatul Sunnah . For details on post-independent Islamic fundamentalism see Iwuchukwu (2013), Post colonial Northern Nigeria.
- 14.
See Steve Kroft, “28 Pages” in 60 Minutes CBS News (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-911-classified-report-steve-kroft/). Retrieved April 10, 2016, par. 66.
- 15.
Ibid., par. 50.
- 16.
Choksy and Choksy, “The Saudi Connection—Wahhabism and Global Jihad” (Cover story),” World Affairs, Vol. 178, no. 1 (May 2015): 27–28. Academic Search Elite, EBSCOhost (Accessed June 5, 2016).
- 17.
For more on this see Marinus Iwuchukwu, Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria: The Challenges of Inclusive Cultural and Religious Pluralism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 74–77 and 133–135.
- 18.
Choksy and Choksy, “The Saudi Connection,” 23–34.
- 19.
Although some scholars accept the multiple origins of Pentecostalism across the world (See Robert W. Hefner, Global Pentecostalism in the 21st Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), 13f), it is phenomenologically true that the current pervasive kind of Pentecostalism in most parts of Africa has very direct and substantial roots in the early twentieth-century Pentecostalism originating from the USA.
- 20.
Steven Sotlof (January 18, 2012). In Libya a Fundamentalist War Against Moderate Islam Takes Place. Time. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2104578,00.html, par. 6. Accessed July 20, 2016.
- 21.
It should be noted that this data is based on a taxonomy that includes all the different categories of Pentecostalism, including those that belong to the Protestant and Catholic denominations. See Todd Johnson, “Counting Pentecostals Worldwide,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Vol. 36, no. 2 (2014): 18.
- 22.
See Ebenezer Obadare (December 16, 2015). Electoral Theologies: Pentecostal Pastors and the 2015 Presidential Election in Nigeria. Africa at LSE: LSE’s Engagement in Africa. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2015/12/16/electoral-theologies-pentecostal-pastors-and-the-2015-presidential-election-in-nigeria/. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
- 23.
See Mkotama Katenga-Kaunda (June 27, 2015). Pentecostalism as a Political Movement in Africa. International Association for Political Science Students. http://www.iapss.org/2015/06/27/pentecostalism-as-a-political-movement-in-africa/. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
- 24.
See Elias Munshya (October 15, 2015). After We Have Said “Amen”: Towards a Pentecostal Theology of Politics in Zambia. Pentecostalism. https://eliasmunshya.org/tag/pentecostalism/. Retrieved July 20, 2016.
- 25.
See Vincent J. Cornell, “Islam—Epistemological Crisis, Theological Hostility, and the Problem of Difference,” in The Religious Other: Hostility, Hospitality, and the Hope of Human Flourishing, edited by Alon Goshen-Gottstein (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2014), 72.
- 26.
See Allan Anderson, et al, “Introduction,” in Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods (University of California Press, 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppt8r), 3f.
- 27.
See Pew Research Center, “Overview: African Pentecostalism.” http://www.pewforum.org/2006/10/05/overview-pentecostalism-in-africa/.
- 28.
See Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 225.
- 29.
Ibid., 246.
- 30.
See also Qur’an 5:44–46; 5:69; and 29:46.
- 31.
For more on this see Marinus Iwuchukwu, Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria: The Challenges of Inclusive Cultural and Religious Pluralism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 163.
- 32.
Gerald O’Collins, Salvation for All: God’s Other People (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 148.
- 33.
O’Collins, Salvation for All, 149.
- 34.
For more on this see Iwuchukwu, Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria, 161–162. I apologize to my readers that in that previous publication there is a typographical error, that repeatedly quotes John 14:16 instead of John 14:6.
- 35.
Anderson, “Varieties, Taxonomies, and Definitions,” 20.
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Iwuchukwu, M.C. (2018). Pentecostalism, Islam, and Religious Fundamentalism in Africa. In: Afolayan, A., Yacob-Haliso, O., Falola, T. (eds) Pentecostalism and Politics in Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74911-2_3
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