Conclusions

As we have seen, each type of ritual stresses an individual's commitment to a specific kind of moral community, and consequently to a specific set of values. At stake are three different ways of defining the individual: as a member of a specific kin group within a specific village or quarter, as male or female, elder or junior, free or slave; as a "Muslim," more or less pious depending on the rigor with which he or she ob-

serves the ritual and moral code of the sunna ; and, finally, in terms of type of occupation, amount of wealth, degree of Western education, and political clout—in other words, for want of a better word, "class."

The first system of definition, in terms of village and kin-group affiliation, generation, gender, and so on, only retains its salience within the "microcosm," the close-knit community where everyone knows everyone else, where any given individual's position in the local hierarchy depends on a combination of ascribed characteristics and "reputation" together determining the weight his or her voice will carry in local affairs. The third system, in terms of the attributes of "class," transects not only the local but also the global "Muslim" community. An individual's position is expressed in terms of signs that have no place in religious ritual, either particularistic or universalistic; such signs include the amount and nature of goods they own and consume, the way they speak French, and ultimately the various means by which other individuals with established positions in the hierarchy mark them as peers, superiors, or inferiors. In other words, both the close-knit local community and the national system of "class" are essentially hierarchical. Grosso modo, to the extent that individuals are in a position to choose the system of values by which they wish to evaluate themselves and be evaluated by others, their stake in either system depends in large measure on the rank they can plausibly claim or, at least, reasonably aspire to. These two systems cannot, however, be placed on an equal footing. As we have seen, a high position in the national arena can be translated and transferred into a local idiom. The reverse is obviously not the case.

This leaves the second system of definition, in terms of a global "Muslim" identity. To the extent that one can meaningfully speak of a principle of hierarchy here, it is a hierarchy of piety, apparently divorced from such criteria as birth or class. The great in this world will not necessarily find favor in the eyes of God in the next. But this is not to say that the last shall be first—the Sermon on the Mount is not part of

Islam's debt to Christianity—or even that the global moral community of Islam is in some deep sense egalitarian. The moral hierarchy of piety may supersede one's rank in this world, however reckoned; it does not deny it. It is significant that the categories of individuals most readily attracted to varieties of reformism occupy positions that are, in certain respects, anomalous in terms of the local hierarchy of influence and the national hierarchy of class: those whose wealth or Western education places them "above" their station in the local hierarchy without justifying their inclusion in the upper echelons in the national hierarchy. This applies to the Wahhabi merchants, who may be wealthy but lack Western education, and who are often (but not inevitably) members of low-ranking hereditary categories in the "traditional" local scheme of values. But it applies equally well to younger secondary school and university students and graduates, who are educated but whose current prospects of achieving considerable wealth or political influence are severely limited, and whose very youth, in the absence of real wealth or clout, places them for the time being toward the bottom of the local hierarchy of respect and influence. By observing the sunna , as they interpret it, more rigorously than anyone else, they assert their moral superiority both over traditional elders, guilty in their eyes of mingling Islam with particularistic ritual, and the Westernized elite, suspected of a tepid commitment to Islamic strictures. In this respect, reformists do not so much deny as relativize the modern national values of "class." Wealth or education are not denigrated as such, but must be combined with the "proper" observance of Islam in order to determine the individual's ultimate worth.

Among neotraditionalists, the relationship between standards of piety and the locally defined hierarchy are expressed in somewhat different terms. Elders are expected to be more pious than juniors; men more pious than women; scholars more pious than ordinary believers. The universalistic values of Islam thus, in a way, legitimate the position of individuals in the local hierarchy of influence, while at the same time serving as a bridge between the purely local realm and the

wider community of Islam with which individuals are at any rate involved on a day-to-day basis.

In short, the notion of a global moral community of Islam defines a social arena in Côte d'Ivoire that lies in some respects between and in other respects apart from the close-knit local community, where an individual's position is determined in terms of age, gender, generation, free or slave status, and so on, as well as personal reputation; and the national arena, where wealth, education, and political influence reign supreme, and where symbols of identity are universally recognized. Each kind of identity—local, Muslim, and "class"—has its own quasi-autonomous system of symbolic articulation. At another level, these systems can be combined in various ways to give rise to different varieties of Islamic ideology, expressed in ritual terms. From this point of view, religious change cannot simply be reduced to shifts along a continuum from particularism to universalism. Instead, we are faced with a multiplicity of schemas, each purporting to define the identity of individuals but also the nature of the larger social entity within which this identity is situated, expressed in symbols embodied not only in religious ritual but also in everyday life. By the values they place on these different kinds of symbols, individuals indicate the terms in which they choose or refuse to identify themselves, to evaluate and be evaluated by others around them.