Islam in Burkina Faso and order and by stimulating trade. They also tended to regard Muslims as culturally and educationally more advanced than non-Muslim Africans, and appointed Muslim chiefs and clerks as administrators in non-Muslim areas. In Upper Volta at the end of the 19th century there were only some 30,000 Muslims, but by 1959 there were 800,000, approximately 20 percent of the population. In 1984, Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso. After a succession of military coups, a constitutional republic was established in 1991. In Burkina Faso the Arabist and Islamist movement is viewed a counter-culture to the European style of modernity, and
Two Men Contemplating the Moon the rear, serve as representatives of the observer, who is left to contemplate what they are seeing and supply a meaning. In addition to the Romantic mysticism of the tension between the palpable world and the unending cosmos, three additional contrasting interpretations have been presented, in terms of religion, politics and biography. The German art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan interprets the evergreen spruce and the dead oak as symbols of the Christian worldview and defeated paganism, respectively, the path as the path of life and the waxing moon as Christ. The oak has traditionally represented history and transience, the evergreen fir-tree,