Abstract
This chapter explores the strategies sub-Saharan African Muslims adopted to promote socioeconomic development after independence from colonial rule. Focusing on the transformation of Islamic education from Qur’anic schooling to more modern madrasa system, the chapter demonstrates that African Muslims used madrasa education as an alternative infrastructure for pursuing social mobility and economic advancement. During the colonial period, Muslim parents resisted secular education offered by Christian missionaries because they feared the missionaries would convert their children to Christianity. Rather, Muslim educators focused on transforming and modernizing Muslim schooling, which they called “madrasa”. At the end of colonial rule, Muslims found themselves economically and socially marginalized due to their lack of secular education, which had become the main source of employment. By the second decade of independence, madrasa education had evolved to become Anglo-Arabic or Franco Arabic schools where impoverished Muslims obtained affordable religious and secular education. The popularity of these schools, along with high cost of university education since the early 1990s, inspired the founding of private Islamic universities throughout Africa. These universities offer courses in the humanities and the sciences within an Islamic environment, and admit qualified male and female students from impoverished households regardless of religious background. Madrasa schooling thus served as an indispensable path to progress for many sub-Saharan African Muslims during the independence era.
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Notes
- 1.
In Nigeria, which has had a much longer government policy on Islamic schooling, the transformation we are referring to reached a threshold during the late 1980s (Umar 2003). These changes occurred in Ghana and several French-speaking countries in the late 1980s as well. The 1980s is therefore an important landmark in the transformation of these schools. I provide some explanations in the appropriate section of this chapter.
- 2.
Muslims in Ghana contested the results of the 2000 census enumeration, which declared Muslims constituted 15 % of the population. Muslims estimate that their population in 2000 was between 18 and 25 %.
- 3.
There are at least 75 million Muslims in Nigeria alone.
- 4.
Although this conclusion is a bit embellished, the resurrection of this historical figure in contemporary time indicates Mansa Musa’s importance in world history even if we do not agree with the conclusion that he is the richest person ever to live on this planet.
- 5.
According to Mahmoud Saleh, the number of foreign students (Africans included) in Saudi universities increased dramatically between the 1970s and 1982. In 1970, they represented 18.6 % of the total student enrollment, and 23.9 % in 1982. That year number of foreign students in the kingdom reached 15,730 (only 3539 were females) (Saleh 1986).
- 6.
Immediately upon becoming independent, the government of Ghana offered free public education from primary to middle school. Although this system remained in place, different kinds of fees and cost of books made public education more expensive. Yet by the 1980s, the decline of the country’s economy led the government to further reduce support for public schools.
- 7.
The European Union, for example, has offered grants to a number of these schools throughout Ghana as part of their support for African educational initiatives. Evidently, the European Union recognized the value of madrasa institutions as places of education and socialization, and not incubators for training religious fanatics.
- 8.
Ibn Taymiyya, Minhaj as-Sunna an-Nabwiyyah (Beirut: MaktabatKhayyat, n.d.), vol. 1, 48.
- 9.
For example, I am familiar with a group of young Senegalese living in Europe and the United States who organized themselves to collect zakat from individuals, which allowed them to create funds to build and operate clinics and schools in rural areas of Senegal.
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Kobo, O.M. (2016). Paths to Progress: Madrasa Education and Sub-Saharan Muslims’ Pursuit of Socioeconomic Development. In: Tiliouine, H., Estes, R. (eds) The State of Social Progress of Islamic Societies. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24774-8_7
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