Erik Meinema will discuss his new book, Regulating Religious Co-Existence: The Intricacies of Interfaith Cooperation in Coastal Kenay (Ohio University Press, 2026).
This is an online talk. Please register to receive the Zoom link.
"Timbuktu Talks" is an annual lecture series featuring new books and research on Islam in Africa co-organized by ISITA at Northwestern and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Talk description: Dr. Meinema's book explores how Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of indigenous African religions negotiate coexistence in Kenya’s coastal region. The book conceptualizes religious diversity as a dynamic field shaped by multiple partly intersecting and partly conflicting models of interaction. These include the political secularism promoted by the Kenyan state and civil society organizations focused on interfaith harmony, forms of competition between religious groups, and pluralistic practices in which individuals draw on multiple traditions to meet spiritual needs.
Through a close examination of civil society initiatives funded by Western donors to foster peacebuilding and to counter violent extremism, the book investigates how these models for coexistence are negotiated and contested and how they intersect with historical and contemporary patterns. It demonstrates that modes of religious coexistence in coastal Kenya have been shaped by colonial and postcolonial governance, transregional connections, and interactions between Christians, Muslims, and Traditionalists across time.
Dr. Erik Meinema is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Heritage in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His research focuses on religious diversity, youth culture, and political secularism in East Africa. He is a member of the research group ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ led by Birgit Meyer. He received a Research Talent Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to conduct his PhD research on the regulation of religious coexistence in coastal Kenya, in which he studied Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African religious traditions within one conceptual framework. His PhD thesis received the biennial Gerardus van der Leeuw PhD Dissertation Award from the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion in 2023. He has (co-)published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Religion, Africa, the Journal of Religion in Africa, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He is also interested in questions about materiality, religion, and (violent) conflict and has co-edited (with Lucien van Liere) several volumes on this topic. Since January 2025, he has been working on a NWO-funded Veni-project entitled "Art, Religion, or Heritage? Negotiating Indigenous African Traditions in the Religiously Diverse Context of Coastal Kenya."
Rebecca Shereikis
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