‘Chicken-blood,’ said Iisaa, smiling. ‘I sacrifice a chicken every six months, and pour the blood into my guitar. Tomorrow we sacrifice for your guitar, too.’

Iisaa is Muslim, but perhaps not as we know it. Like the vast majority of the Fulani people, he practises what is best described as ‘folk Islam', an expression of Islam which is seldom orthodox, often superstitious and always distinctly practical. Bill Musk, author of The Unseen Face of Islam, estimates that 70% of Muslims worldwide are ‘folk Muslims' , largely (but not exclusively) in Africa and Indonesia. These countless men and women profess that Allah is one, practise Muslim prayer and sometimes fast during Ramadan, but they hold their faith in creative tension with innumerable magical practices and beliefs, as evidenced by Iisaa’s trade-off of chicken blood for musical prowess.

I shifted uncomfortably on the mat. ‘I don’t think I want to do that,’ I said lamely. Iisaa ignored me; he reached into a pocket of his robe, and with a flourish withdrew a small phial of green liquid, labelled in Arabic.

‘This is uurngol,’ he said, ‘and it attracts djinns. Whenever you play your guitar in public, the djinns will come and they will make people get up and dance. We will mix this with the chicken-blood tomorrow.’

As any folk Muslim knows, djinns do not reside exclusively in lamps, nor are they all large, blue and benevolent. They are the spirits of the desert and the air, with access to the outskirts of heaven. They eavesdrop on the secrets of the upper world, and here on earth they have power for working both good and evil, to make men dance or to make them die.

Although Iisaa conducts his own sacrifices, the professional practitioners of religion amongst the Fulani are the maribouts. There are several maribouts in every village and they are held in awe on account of their association with the djinns. Their Qur’anic learning is in most cases very limited but it is married with the skillful practice of magic and divination.

Aliu Bolli is a Fulani maribout in a village called Boukouma. When a sick person comes to him for healing, Aliu Bolli writes a healing verse of the Qur’an on a wooden board, washes the ink off into a beaker of water and gives it to the invalid to drink. When a mother comes with her baby, Aliu writes a protective verse, puts it in a tiny leather pouch and ties that to the baby’s wrist or ankle. Dealing in charms, divination and sacrifice, the maribout is a doorman to the spirit world and to Allah himself. For each task, the maribout accepts payment in cash, and for the right price he is equally prepared to write a blessing or a curse.

Fear is often the impulse to (and also the result of) the practice of folk Islam. Here in West Africa, life is fragile, poverty is crippling, sickness and death are unfathomable mysteries. The intangible forces which control and threaten people’s lives (be they djinns or ‘powers’ or socio-economic forces), are the focus of fear, and therefore the domain of religion.

The message "For God so loved the world..." is by definition trans-cultural, and yet there remain many cultures in the world where it has made little or no impact. In mission jargon, these cultures are unreached, and the Fulani are but one example. Yet the news of Jesus’s coming, his participation in all the perplexity and distress of human existence, has to be good news for the Fulani. It might release them from their bondage to fear and enable a mind-set in which real, sustainable development is possible.

It is for this reason that I am learning the jurkel. The Fulani have an ancient but ongoing tradition of griots, a troubadour caste who sing and tell stories. They eulogise Fulani warriors, local dignitaries, and prophets such as Abraham and Moses. They are communicators of truth through story, and they represent a potential model of how to communicate the gospel in this region.

In homes and market-places I regularly tell the stories of Jesus’ life, his death and resurrection, but I long to be able to do so in a way which is more appropriate to our context. Under the expert guidance of Iisaa (but without the assistance of his djinns or chickens) I have begun to put to music the Beatitudes and Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus - so that songs of forgiveness and liberation might be heard in this fantastic and terrifying place.