Radical Islam meets a buffer in West Africa

Ancient society changes

Timbuktu, a small city where nomadic herders mix with traders and blue-turbaned Tuaregs, prides itself on its history as an ancient hub of Islamic scholarship, and the mention of religious warfare draws baffled looks here. But some leaders worry that poverty and modernization are mixing in unpredictable ways and that extremists' money could hold sway even if their ideology does not.

GPS and satellite phones have made it easier for outsiders to navigate the terrain. The cigarettes long smuggled through the dunes are being displaced by cocaine. Drought has made herding harder. And AQIM rebels are marrying into nomad families, said Col. Mamadou Mangara, governor of the vast area from Timbuktu to the northern border with Algeria.

On Friday, U.S. prosecutors filed charges against three Malians, all men in their 30s who were accused of plotting to ferry cocaine through Islamist-controlled sections of the desert in connection with AQIM associates.

"Working with animals -- young people don't want to do this," said Assarid Ag Imbarcaoune, a vice president of Mali's National Assembly who is from the northern desert. "Young people want villas, AC and big cars."

Resistance to radicals

The shifting social currents inevitably affect faith in the region, scholars say.

"All you have to do is walk . . . anywhere in Mali to see that there is in fact a great diversity of Islam," said Mike McGovern, a Yale University assistant professor and former director of the International Crisis Group's West Africa office. "It's something that's constantly in evolution. To say West African Islam is this -- no, it's not."

That is clear in sun-scorched Bamako. The city's bustle and mostly black African population make it seem a galaxy away from the northern desert. But its urban density, experts say, might make its youths more vulnerable to radicalism, as has been the pattern in Mauritania.

Men filing in to pray at the Grand Mosque pass vendors selling animal skulls and claws believed to have medicinal or magical powers, though Muslim leaders shun them as un-Islamic. Many of the Chinese motorbikes clogging the streets are driven by women wearing everything from tank tops to vibrant but more traditional dress.

"I've got respect for my religion, but I act according to my thoughts," Fily N'Faly Bagayoko, 17, one motorbike rider, said about her decision not to wear a veil.

But this summer, Islamic leaders rallied 50,000 people to demonstrate against a proposed family code that would have, among other things, scrapped a law requiring a woman to obey her husband -- a show of force that underscored the conservatism of Malian Islam and that rattled democracy activists.

Across town at one madrassa, or Islamic school, female teenagers and teachers wore burqas -- a rare sight in Bamako. The school's imam, Mohammed Toure, complained that Western pressure was leading Mali's government to try to suppress Islam. But he said he had no desire for Mali to emulate Saudi Arabia, a nation where he studied and whose government funded his school.

"People have breathing space here," Toure, 39, said in his sunny office. "In Saudi, people are really in prison."

On a recent afternoon in Bamako, Mahmadou Haidara, a pudgy imam in billowy robes, shook his head at the thought of Islamist radicalism taking hold. But as he sat on his breezy roof preparing for a sermon, he pointed into the distance and said he was sure some foreign preachers were teaching "wrong" ideas.

"Real religion would never tell anyone to burn anything or kill others," he said of Islamist extremists. "We condemn them. And we fear them."