Dorothea E. Schulz

Politics of Religious Schooling: Christian and Muslim Engagements with Education in Africa

AbstractIn recent decades, religiously motivated schools have gained a new social and political presence and significance in many African countries. Although religious networks and organizations—Christian as well as Muslim—have played a central role in providing education in colonial and postcolonial settings, liberalization and privatization measures since the 1980s have opened up new opportunities for religious engagement at all educational levels. The contributions to this issue explore the implications of these recent transformations on Christian and Muslim investments in the educational domain. To do so, they examine these implications in view of reconfigurations of national and regional educational fields under the influence of colonial and postcolonial administrations. Furthermore, they address the multiple, often-contested meanings, practices, and institutional setups that have shaped and been constituted by, the field of ‘religious schooling’ in the context of both neoliberal reform measures and transnational religious renewal trends. Finally, they illustrate the need to adopt an increasingly comparative perspective in the analysis of religious education, and to understand how (internally differentiated) instances of Christian and Muslim education have developed historically in relation to each other.

Renewal and Enlightenment: Muslim Women's Biographic Narratives of Personal Reform in Mali

The article takes Muslim women’s biographic self-constructions as proper believers in urban Mali as a window to inquire into the kind of responsibility and moral agency that these women assume and make central to their search for ‘closeness to God’. Focusing on the moral agency the women claim for themselves, it is argued, brings insights into their particular conception of collective and personal renewal and, by implication, into the particular religious subjectivity they formulate. Women’s accounts of their learning activities highlight the virtues of personal enlightenment and individual self-improvement, thereby revealing how a longer-standing trend toward individuation comes to inform these believers’ articulation of eschatological concerns. Moral agency, defined by its capacity to scrutinize and choose between alternative normative viewpoints, assumes a central significance.Illustrating the great variety of motivations that prompt women to join a Muslim women’s group, the paper argues that these motivations need to more consistently studied with reference to Muslims’ everyday struggle and negotiation than has been often done in ethnographies of Islamic revival.

(En)gendering Muslim self-assertiveness: Muslim schooling and female elite formation in Uganda

AbstractThe article takes the role of school education in the historical marginalization of Muslims in Uganda to argue that recent transformations in the educational field have created new opportunities for Muslims to become professionally successful and to articulate a self-assertive identity as minority Muslims. In a second step the articles points to the particular significance that the recent shift in Muslims’ educational opportunities bears for Muslim girls and women. It argues that the structural transformations in the field of education since the late 1980s had paradoxical implications for female Muslims and for the situation of Muslims in Uganda more generally. The diversification of the field of primary, secondary, and higher education since the mid-1990s facilitated career options that had been unavailable to the majority of Muslims.Access to an education-based status is now possible for a wider segment of the Muslim population of Uganda. Yet in spite of long-standing efforts by representational bodies such as UMEA, educational reforms have not put an end to significant socioeconomic and regional differences among Muslims. There are still notable inequalities in access to high-quality education that have existed historically between Muslims from different regions of Uganda. These unequal schooling opportunities delimit the pool of those Muslims who may access institutions of higher education and hence articulate a new, education-based middle-class identity.

Mediating authority: media technologies and the generation of charismatic appeal in southern Mali

This article offers a close analysis of the media performances of a particularly successful preacher in Mali, Sheikh Chérif Haidara, to study how authority is generated in the interaction between a leader and his followers, and to examine the role of mass mediation in this process. Informed by Webers reflections on the nature of charismatic authority, the article takes charisma as a form of appeal that is mediated through aesthetic forms, and remediated and ‘channelled’ by virtue of particular media strategies and formats. By raising questions about the nature of charismatic attraction and by illustrating under what conditions it becomes effective, the article contributes to recent scholarship that addresses the role of the aesthetic in the validation or ‘authentication’ of religious experience.This article offers a close analysis of the media performances of a particularly successful preacher in Mali, Sheikh Cherif Haidara, to study how authority is generated in the interaction between a leader and his followers, and to examine the role of mass mediation in this process. Informed by Webers reflections on the nature of charismatic authority, the article takes charisma as a form of appeal that is mediated through aesthetic forms, and remediated and ‘channelled’ by virtue of particular media strategies and formats. By raising questions about the nature of charismatic attraction and by illustrating under what conditions it becomes effective, the article contributes to recent scholarship that addresses the role of the aesthetic in the validation or ‘authentication’ of religious experience.

Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa

This special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies grew out of a panel we organized at the European Conference on African Studies in Lisbon in June 2013. Our starting point was the obser...

Competing Assertions of Muslim Masculinity in Contemporary Mali

This article counters the ‘female bias’ of scholarship on Islam and gender in Africa by exploring competing understandings of ideal masculinity and what it means to be a respectable Muslim in urban Mali. Special attention is paid to competing constructions of Muslim masculinity that inform the project of Islamic moral and political reform that has gained currency in southern and northern Mali in recent decades. The article scrutinizes the double idiom of reform and conservation articulated by leading spokesmen of Islamic renewal in different parts of Mali and their varying ways of incorporating transnational Islamic intellectual influences. While living conditions in the urban south and north of the country grant young men unequal chances for economic success and political influence, they all face a situation in which education generates and reproduces structural inequality, granting uneven chances for employment, social maturity, and respectability. It is because of their shared dilemmas that many young men support moral and political reform that allows them to gain respectability as a man and ‘proper’ Muslim. By considering the political aspirations, social grievances, and constructions of masculinity articulated by different categories of young men, the article demonstrates the heterogeneity and entanglements of the visions and measures promoted under the heading of political and moral Islamic renewal in Mali.

Gender-Entwürfe und islamische Erneuerungsbewegungen im Kontext translokaler institutioneller Vernetzungen: Beispiele aus Afrika

Die zunehmend offentliche Rolle, die der Islam in gesellschaftspolitischen Auseinandersetzungen in vielen muslimischen Gesellschaften Afrikas ubernimmt, und die starke Beteiligung von Frauen an dieser Entwicklung stellt die ethnologische Genderforschung vor neue Herausforderungen. Seit den bahnbrechenden politischen Veranderungen der spaten 1980er Jahre, die in vielen Landern in Afrika sudlich der Sahara1 zu einem (wenn auch oft nur nominellen) Mehrparteiensystem und zur Gewahrung burgerlicher Rechte gefuhrt hat, werden offentliche Raume mit Zeichen und Ausdrucksformen einer islamischen Frommigkeit sowie von einer Infrastruktur muslimischer Missionierungsaktivitaten (Arabisch da’wa), in Form von Moscheen und reformierten islamischen Schulen schier uberflutet. Muslimische Aktivisten, Intellektuelle und religiose Wurdentrager bringen ihre Forderungen nach personlicher und gesellschaftlicher moralischer Erneuerung offentlich zum Ausdruck, indem sie beispielsweise in Debatten fordern, dass der Islam zur ethischen Grundlage der politischen Gemeinschaft erhoben werden solle. Diese Forderungen sowie ihre Aktivitaten und Ausdrucksformen sind von neueren transnationalen und regionalen Reformbestrebungen inspiriert, die seit den 1970er Jahren an Schlagkraft gewannen, und die zumeist eine Verankerung in den arabischsprachigen Zentren der muslimischen Welt fur sich in Anspruch nehmen.