New Book: Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation (Brill, Leiden 2019).

New book on Pentecostal Christians relationship to Islam and Nation in contemporary Zanzibar. Author Hans Olsson (Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen) and is published in the Studies of Religion in Africa series (Brill).

About the book:

In Jesus for Zanzibar: Narratives of Pentecostal (Non-)Belonging, Islam, and Nation Hans Olsson offers an ethnographic account of the lived experience and socio-political significance of newly arriving Pentecostal Christians in the Muslim majority setting of Zanzibar. This work analyzes how a disputed political partnership between Zanzibar and Mainland Tanzania intersects with the construction of religious identities.

Undertaken at a time of political tensions, the case study of Zanzibar’s largest Pentecostal church, the City Christian Center, outlines religious belonging as relationally filtered in-between experiences of social insecurity, altered minority / majority positions, and spiritual powers. Hans Olsson shows that Pentecostal Christianity, as a signifier of (un)wanted social change, exemplifies contested processes of becoming in Zanzibar that capitalizes on, and creates meaning out of, religious difference and ambient political tensions.

See more: https://brill.com/view/title/38921?lang=en