1st Edition
Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa Secular Erasure, School Preference and Social Inequality
This book examines perceptions and experiences of Qur’anic schools in West Africa, outlining a much-needed postcolonial approach which considers the place of Islamic education within African decolonial debates about educational pluralism.
To overcome the challenges of problematic Eurocentric and colonialist stereotypes about religious actors and faith-based schools (which persist within comparative and international education scholarship and global policy agendas), the author harnesses decolonial theory and uncovers through fine-grained ethnography how parents and young people today engage with classical Qur’anic schools, Islamic schools, and French-medium secular education. Chapters thereby expose the fault lines around gender, descent-based or caste identities, and socioeconomic inequality, and their influence on individuals’ pursuit of knowledge. Drawing on an impressive body of supporting literature from history, anthropology, linguistics, African studies and Islamic studies, the book unpacks the characteristics of the Islamic West African context of Senegal, rendering its population’s Sufi Muslim worldview accessible to researchers concerned about achieving the Education for All agenda.
Advocating for a need to embrace greater plurality of African and Islamic perspectives, the book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of development and African studies, the sociology of education, international education, anthropology and religious education. Policy-makers and practitioners involved in postcolonial and decolonial debates will also benefit from this volume more broadly.
Chapter 1: Rethinking development, religion and education: A challenging nexus
Stereotypes, silences and secular bias in policy and academic scholarship
Coloniality and the development-education-religion nexus
About us without us: Studying the ‘religious Other’
Structure of the book
Chapter 2: A postsecular decolonial approach: Breaking the binaries
Introducing decolonial theory
Ontology and epistemology: ‘With these threads, we weave the world’
Decolonial perspectives on the study of religion
A postsecular approach to educational engagement in Islamic West Africa
Conclusion
PART 1: SECULAR BIAS IN EDUCATION POLICIES: FROM COLONISATION TO EDUCATIONAL FOR ALL
Chapter 3: The evolution of Islam and education in West Africa
Content and pedagogy of Qur’anic schools
Race, religion, capitalist extraction: Colonial schools and education policy
Islamic modernities and education reform
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Coloniality of secularity and Education For All
The ‘talibé problem’: Development critiques of child begging
Assumptions about Qur’anic schools and ‘quality education’
Instrumentalisation of Islamic education under EFA
Conclusion
PART 2: PATTERNS OF EDUCATIONAL ENGAGEMENT IN NORTHERN SENEGAL
Chapter 5: Understanding Qur’anic school preference
Coloniality of secularity in frameworks for understanding educational decision-making
Researching education in Medina Diallobé village
Explaining Qur’anic school preference
Choosing the Qur’anic school: An increasingly contested decision
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Racial hierarchies and Islamic education: From exclusion to resistance
Understanding descent-based inequalities in Islamic West Africa
Knowledge-power, education and social mobility: An evolving relationship
Islamic education in the Futa Tooro region: The ‘final frontier’
Using Islamic knowledge to resist racialised exclusion
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Islamic knowledge and women’s agency
Coloniality in discussions about African Muslim women’s agency
Situating female Islamic education in northern Senegal
Women mobilising Islamic knowledge in Medina Diallobé
Islamic education and women’s empowerment: Implications for policy
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Pursuing Islamic and state school knowledges: ‘You need both’
Social inequalities, onto-epistemologies and temporalities in youth trajectories
‘Hierarchical complementarity’: Islamic and state school knowledges
Mixed trajectories: Common concerns, diverse strategies
Barriers to educational pluralism in Senegal
Conclusion
PART 3: DECOLONISING EDUCATION IN ISLAMIC WEST AFRICA: FROM RESEARCH TO POLICY
Chapter 9: Embracing African Islamic knowledge traditions: From critique to ‘border praxis’
Overcoming coloniality in education and development scholarship
A postsecular framework for understanding educational decision-making
Decolonial research methodologies in Comparative and International Education
Towards pluralistic education policy and programming
Biography
Anneke Newman is an anthropologist of development and Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, University of Ghent, Belgium.
"Anneke Newman’s Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa offers a fascinating critique of the dominance of secular perspectives in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). She shows how other-than-secular cosmologies and knowledges are systematically excluded from academic and policy literature in education, and how stereotypes, silences and secular biases are steeped in assertions of colonial and racial hierarchies. In response, Newman develops an analysis of the ‘development-education-religion’ nexus in Senegal, to offer counter-narratives of Qur’anic schools from parents’ and students’ own cosmological perspectives. In doing so, Newman brilliantly shows what expanding, pluralising and challenging the epistemic frame of CIE scholarship can achieve, arguing this is essential to decolonial struggles in education."
Arathi Sriprakash, Professor of Sociology and Education, University of Oxford, UK
