Muslim and Catholic Responses to HIV and AIDS in Kenya

In the capital city of Nairobi, Kenya, African Catholic and Sunni Muslim leaders addressing HIV and AIDS are faced with a unique challenge. On the one hand, they are called to attend to the spiritual wellbeing of the infected individual; on the other hand, they are increasingly charged with serving as the stewards of the physical bodies of those negatively affected by such a physiologically debilitating and social stigmatized disease through certain identifiable interreligious traditions common to both faiths. This book explores this development firsthand. While conducting fieldwork in Nairobi, Carey interviewed Muslim and Catholic leaders working in three areas—HIV and AIDS prevention, education, and destigmatization. These recorded observations and accounts help to illustrate that religious officials from within African Catholicism and Sunni Islam are attempting to provide the common inter-religious traditions of mercy, hospitality, and justice in a holistic manner for those living with the virus in the city.The research that produced this book involved six weeks of fieldwork during the summer of 2014 to help fill in the interstices between anthropological, sociological, and ethnographic accounts provided by other leading academics in their respective fields. It presumed that religious traditions in Kenya exhibit a susceptibility to culture and context and a practical openness to its social environment which then affords this particular work a unique theological perspective in its attempt to identify and analyze patterns of social behavior and religious organization.

In this careful study of the intersection of Islam and Roman Catholicism in Nairobi during the time of AIDS, Timothy James Carey expands considerably our understanding of the role of religion in public health in general and HIV/AIDS in particular. In light of his findings from each tradition, Carey brilliantly synthesizes their positions on prevention, education, and destigmatization through the language of virtue, an idiom commonly used in religious traditions.  Mining the virtues of mercy, hospitality, and justice, Carey advances the work of local religious leaders responding positively to the pandemic but leaves us and them with further questions regarding religion and sexuality and gender.  A work of great integrity and compassion., An insightful, carefully researched, and nuanced account of the complex responses to Kenya’s ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis among lay populations, religious leaders, and medical professionals from both Catholic and Muslim communities, often echoing familiar public reactions during the initial AIDS crisis in the United States. Dr. Carey’s work is particularly helpful in emphasizing the deeper human social, ethical, and spiritual ramifications and challenges of this epidemic, too often hidden behind the familiar journalistic rhetoric of public health and policy discussions.

Timothy James Carey received his doctorate in comparative theology from Boston College.