Abstract
This book portrays and analyzes Islamic education in Africa from a social science perspective. The past, present, and future of Islamic education in Africa are presented in this edited book, which consists of an introduction and 14 articles. The starting point for the emergence of the book was three panels held at the African Studies Association meeting in 2009. Scholars who came together in panels at that meeting are at the core of this book. The chapters in the book present various cases covering different parts of Africa in terms of Islamic education experiences. The book provides comparative data and different perspectives over the subject matter, which enables the reader to reconsider Islamic education in Africa.
Writing Boards and Blackboards is the subtitle of the book. The subtitle points to a central theme of the book. Boards and blackboards are two distinct components of a system that symbolizes different educational experience in Africa. Boards are used in classical Islamic education. Boards are ‘rectangular wooden planks on which a teacher or student writes a text, usually a passage from the Qur’an, in homemade black ink’ (p. 1). The text on the board is used, in general, for recitation or memorization. On the other hand, blackboards started to be used by ‘modern’ educational institutions in the 19th century. They represent ‘colonial institutions of education: state secular schools, of course, but also mission schools that proliferated in British, but also in Belgian and Portuguese, colonies’ (p. 1). The book identifies a controversial relationship between the classical Islamic education system and the modern education one, symbolized and compared between boards and blackboards. Chapters in the book can be seen as studies gathered around this symbolic dichotomy. In other words, chapters in the book try to identify this dichotomy and analyze the struggle between two different educational systems. It should also be noted that the subtitle does not stand for a deterministic relationship, it is not Writing Boards to Blackboards. The editor of the book is sensitive to not fall into an essentialist trap that prioritizes a certain worldview. He points out that forming a linear relationship of boards to blackboards is not wrong: historically blackboards came to Africa later than boards. Such a linear relationship has the potential to label education with boards as ‘primitive’ and education with blackboards as ‘advanced.’ In contrast to such a classification, the book considers Islamic education in Africa a complex issue that should be considered beyond simple chronological categorizations.
The chapters in this book are organized in four sections. In the first section, three articles identify the classical system of Islamic education by presenting cases from Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Mauritania, and Nigeria. Different levels of Islamic education are examined in terms of their curriculum, pedagogical techniques, daily life, teacher–pupil relationships, and school administration. In this section, writers discuss classical Islamic education and modern school systems as different systems of education that correspond to different conceptualizations of the world. Chapters in this section help readers understand ‘the episteme of classical Islamic education on its own terms’ (p. 2).
The second and third sections focus on the transformation of Islamic education in Africa. Four articles portray this issue mainly on the institutional level. In these four articles, transformations of classical Islamic education during its relationship with colonial and postcolonial education systems are discussed through the cases of Mozambique, Nigeria, Zanzibar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It can be inferred that different colonial education systems have different relationships with Islamic education. Although Islamic education is the part of the formal educational system in some countries, there are other countries that exclude Islamic education. These chapters provide ethnographic data to help readers understand the position of Islamic education in different countries and compare it to the colonial experiences. The chapters present the colonial (British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese) administrations’ position on mission schools as one of the key determinants of Islamic education in those countries. In the third section, transformations of classical Islamic education are portrayed mainly on the individual level. Four articles in this section consider the issue with different cases. Individuals or groups of individuals are seen as executors of the transformation. For instance, people educated at the al-Azhar school have had an important impact in Senegal in terms of the modernization of Islamic education. In another example, Bi Swafiya, a Swahili women and primary school teacher, was responsible for involving women in the Islamic educational system in Kenya.
In the fourth section, three chapters discuss new hybrid forms of Islamic education with cases from Senegal, Mali, and Niger. Benjamin Soares’s chapter discusses three recent Muslim public figures to show how preachers of Islam are changing. Noah Butler, in his chapter, presents a case from Nigeria to show how parents try to combine different forms of education for their children. In the case study Butler discusses, such students go to one type of school during the day and another kind of school at night.
This book is a worthwhile read for those interested in the literature on Islamic education in Africa. The book is significant for two reasons. First, the chapters do not just descriptively present cases, but discuss their cases as a part of broader theoretical considerations. Second, they present a rich diversity of cases. Thus, the book provides the reader comparative field data with which to comprehend the complexity of the issues. It should also be noted that chapters in this book are not equal in terms of their presentation of the cases: some chapters present detailed field notes, others do not.