Engendering Muslim Self-Assertiveness: Muslim Schooling and Female Elite Formation in Uganda

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700666-12341268

Journal of Religion in Africa 43 (2013) 396-425 brill.com/jra

(En)gendering Muslim Self-Assertiveness: Muslim Schooling and Female Elite Formation in Uganda

Dorothea E. SchulzDept. of Cultural & Social Anthropology

University of Cologne Albertus-Magnus-Platz

50923 Köln [email protected]

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 opportu-nities 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 facili-tated 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 popu-lation 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 Mulsims who may access institutions of higher education and hence articulate a new, education-based middle-class identity.

KeywordsIslam, Uganda, Muslim education, minority politics, gender

Introduction

The cover of a glossy 2008/2010 Prospectus brochure of the Islamic University in Uganda (IUIU) presents a large picture of five female graduates, elegantly clad in dark robes with a shiny sash across their torsos.1 The students wear their graduation caps on top of their headscarves wrapped stylishly around their faces and shoulders, and proudly smile at the camera. Superimposed

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onto the lower left corner of this photograph is another image: the large out-door pool of the Islamic University’s females’ campus, located in Kabojja on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital Kampala.

In the introductory address of the booklet, handed out gratuitously to par-ents of prospective students (and interested visitors such as myself ), the rector of the university stresses the ‘success story’ of this ‘cross-ethnic and religious academic institution in the African continent’, adding that the university’s ‘Females Campus . . . [is] a unique educational facility that will endeavor to provide great opportunities for female students to develop their full potential’ (IUIU 2008/2010, 1).

The booklet expresses a self-assertive identity of Muslims in Uganda that contrasts with how Islam in Uganda has often been portrayed in popular dis-course and press publications and by some scholars. These accounts tend to associate Islam in Uganda with an uneducated, low-class background and with the dark era of the regime of Idi Amin, a Muslim from Uganda’s north-west. Today, more than 30 years after Amin’s fall from power, Muslims’ minor-ity status and comparatively weak political position remain widely implicit in national discourse. It is rarely recognized that Muslims in Uganda have to adapt to a public life ordered according to standards inflected by the legacy of Christian missionary influence, nor is it publicly acknowledged that Muslims in Uganda today still suffer from the consequences of their systematic mar-ginalization in the educational system and economy established under Brit-ish colonial administration. Although a few Muslim public intellectuals have recently called for a greater consideration of Islamic religious prescriptions in policy making, for instance insisting on the need to introduce a banking sys-tem in line with the Islamic prohibition of taking usury (interest), the domi-nant trend in public discourse is to dismiss such claims as unfounded. Closely related to this trend is a tendency to portray Muslims’ outspoken criticism of policy making by the current NRM government as indicators of a conservative and dangerous political Islam. Associations of Islam with a backward-oriented and antidemocratic mind-set have gained new currency with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government’s participation in the global ‘war on terror’, and, again, with the media coverage of the 2010 bombings in Kampala by members of the Somali-based al-Shabaab that brought to public attention the reach of al-Qaeda-related terrorist networks into Ugandan territory.

In sharp contrast to this association of Islam in Uganda with archaic forms of violence, lack of education, and terrorism, the IUIU booklet hints at another Muslim presence in Uganda: Muslims whose educational careers make them confident members of the new Ugandan elite. Notably, the prospectus depicts the new Muslim presence through a distinctively feminized Muslim identity.


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Although the number of Christian students studying at IUIU has been rising, making it an institution analogous to other (Christian) faith-based universi-ties, it is Muslim female graduates who embody Muslim educational success on the booklet cover.

The booklet’s depiction of a new Muslim self-confidence and the fact that it is given a female face are highly significant. First, the figure of the highly educated Muslim stands out against scholarship on Muslims in Uganda that depicts the educational system as playing an instrumental role in their long-standing pariah status. Instead, the booklet’s cover photograph suggests that important transformations have taken place in the system of primary, second-ary, and higher education, transformations that enable Muslims, men and women, to present themselves as high achievers in the professional world. Sec-ond, the booklet’s featuring of the sophisticated Muslim woman as the emblem of Muslim educational success goes against the trend, still pervasive in popular press publications and in some scholarly circles, to view Muslim women as in need of development and liberation from patriarchal oppression and hence need to be spoken for, rather than those who can speak on their own behalf (Abu-Lughod 2002).

The purpose of this article is to retrace the structural transformations in the Ugandan educational field that have enabled Muslim women to conceive of themselves as intellectually accomplished and outspoken citizens of Uganda, and thus to stand for the new public self-assertiveness of Muslims. With this objective, the article speaks directly to a certain ‘blind spot’ in the comparative scholarship on Muslim institutions of schooling and practices of knowledge transmission. Several authors have illustrated the great diversity of Muslim schooling institutions within and outside the field of state-regulated educa-tion (Grandin and Gaborieau 1997; Hamès 1997; Eickelman 2007; Zaman 2007), and how state regulation affects relations among different Muslim groups (Brenner 2001; Hefner 2007; Metcalf 2007). While these studies stress that school institutions under supervision of the state may create and reproduce differences among Muslims, they pay relatively little attention to gender as an important mode of creating difference and thus to gender-specific repercus-sions of state-regulated Muslim schooling (but see Kiyimba 1987), nor do they fully address the relevance of state-orchestrated institutional changes in the Muslim educational field for gender-specific identity formations. To address this lacunae, this article foregrounds gender as a mode of social difference that constitutes and affects the very nature and political implications of Muslim schooling.

Focusing on the educational success of Muslim women who enrolled at officially recognized institutions such as IUIU is also significant insofar as


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it reveals a contrast to what scholars have identified as a recent upsurge of Muslim women’s educational activities outside of the realm of state control in other Muslim societies in Africa (Alidou 2005; Gomez-Perez 1998; LeBlanc 1999; Schulz 2008, 2010a). In these settings Muslim women’s self-organized learning circles are important because they offer an alternative to the limited formal schooling options available to women and girls. In Uganda, in contrast, Muslim women owe their educational success to their training at officially rec-ognized schools.

To assess the implications of these entirely different institutions of learning for Muslim women, the article proceeds in four steps. First, it briefly addresses the historically marginalized position of Muslims in Uganda by tracing the shift-ing relations between Muslim interest groups and the colonial and postcolonial state. Second, it reconstructs which institutions of learning have been histori-cally available to Muslims in Uganda. Against the backdrop of this historical legacy of Muslim education—and, more specifically, of the marginalization of Muslims in the field of education—the article will then trace the factors that have contributed to the emergence of a self-assertive Ugandan Muslim iden-tity. Fourth, the article examines which particular modernist understandings of Muslim womanhood are articulated by female Muslims who have benefited from the widening of educational opportunities since the 1990s. The article concludes by reflecting on the relevance of these female educational career options to scholarly debate on the transformation of Muslim institutions and forms of knowledge transmission.

Muslims and the Post/Colonial State: A History of Shifting Alliances and Internal Fragmentation

The few scholarly studies that deal with the situation of Muslims in Uganda stress the role of colonial and postcolonial education in laying the foundations for the systematic, economic, social, and political marginalization of Muslims in Uganda (e.g., Byrne 1960; Rowe 1988; see Schulz 2010b).2 From the early years of the educational system established under the British Protectorate since 1894, Muslims have faced many impediments when enrolling at schools run by mis-sionaries. Christians, trained in missionary schools, were in a better position to access elite institutions of higher education and positions in the colonial and later postcolonial state administration (e.g., Kiyimba 1986, 1990; Twaddle 1988; Hansen 2003).3 Drawing on their own experiences, several Ugandan (Muslim) scholars have emphasized that the structurally weak position of Muslims under colonial rule was compounded by the legacy of missionary schools, curricula,



and teaching methods, and their often derogatory treatment in the state edu-cational system. For instance, after describing the hostile relations between Muslims and Christians that shaped his school experience at a Protestant insti-tution, Abasi Kiyimba concludes, ‘From this personal testimony, it can be seen that it is quite possible for one to be trapped in an unprincipled conflict for all one’s life. . . . In Uganda, many of the adults involved today in religious conflicts were trapped into them in their youth’ (1989, 29).

There are obvious reasons to present the situation of Muslims in Uganda as the outcome of a long-standing competition between different religious denominations, from which Protestants and, though to a lesser degree, Catho-lics emerged as winners. As I argue, the long-standing marginality of Muslims vis-à-vis the state was further compounded by historical divisions and socio-economic stratification among Muslims, which still undermine their chances of political representation today. This sketch allows us to appreciate why an improved access to primary, secondary, and higher education has been such a decisive step forward for Muslims’ position in the Ugandan body politic.

In the late nineteenth century Muslims, though firmly entrenched in local political life after the conversion of Kabaka (‘king’) Mutesa (1856-84) of Buganda (central region), gradually lost political influence with the establish-ment of the British colonial administration (King et al. 1973; Kasozi 1986; Rowe 1988). Because traditional Islamic education did not prepare Muslims for future employment in the colonial administrative apparatus and because of their low position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, at the time of independence (1962) and lasting well into the 1970s Muslims were exposed to widespread stereotyp-ing and denigration. Rowe tersely recalls the situation in the 1960s:

Ganda Muslims were looked down upon by everyone else, and their ‘strange’ manner of dress (turbans or tarbushes) and their discounted religion made them seem foreign. In 1962 I was told more than once that allegedly most of the thieves in Uganda were Muslims because they were not countrymen to the rest of the population and therefore had no moral prohibition about robbing non-Muslims. The expression ‘si Muganda—ye Musiramu’ (s/he’s not a Muganda—s/he’s a Muslim) was also familiar. (1988, 273; see also Kiyimba 1986)

Because of the history of military occupation through which Islam had spread in the region, Muslims in the northwest of Uganda were, from early on, doubly marginalized. Apart from employment in the colonial army, work as watch-men or drivers were the only career options available to these Muslims who were considered to have a separate ‘Nubi’ ethnic identity (Kokole 1985; Rowe 1988; Hansen 1991). They were looked down on by Christians and Muslims from the country’s southern regions. The divide between Nubi Muslims and


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the southern, mostly Ganda, Muslims was reinforced by an attitude of cultural superiority of southerners compared to northerners that originated in the priv-ileged integration of the southern kingdoms into the colonial administrative apparatus (Rowe 1988).4 These ethnic and regional differences among Mus-lims compounded the problem of forming an organizational structure capable of representing the interests of all Muslims of Uganda. This situation contin-ued after independence with the founding of the national Muslim organiza-tion (NAAM, National Association for the Advancement of Muslims). Over the years, this organization developed a close personal and programmatic affinity with UPC party directives, a development that undermined its credibility as the representational body of a unified Muslim community.5

After Obote’s fall from power at the hands of Field Marshall Idi Amin, a Muslim from the Kakwa ethnic group in the northwest, the ethnic, regional, linguistic, and socioeconomic divisions and leadership struggles among Mus-lims continued in spite of Amin’s replacement of NAAM with a new organiza-tion, the UMSC (Ugandan Muslim Supreme Council). President Amin’s regime had deeply ambivalent implications for Muslims. Many non-Muslims came to associate Islam with the atrocities committed by Amin and his cronies, and also with political opportunism and nepotism.6 Muslims who were not closely associated with Amin’s regime also had many reasons to feel insecure, and to question Amin’s claims about promoting Islam (Rowe 1988; see Kiyimba 1990).7 Nevertheless, as I argue below, Idi Amin’s regime did become a stepping-stone in the gradual improvement of Muslims’ access to higher education. As a con-sequence of the country’s alignment with the Arab-speaking world (mostly Saudi Arabia and Libya), exemplified by Uganda’s joining the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in 1974, opportunities for (male) Muslims to study at institutions of higher religious learning in Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Arab world were expanded and became more regular.8 The 1988 establish-ment by the OIC of the Islamic University in Uganda constituted a hallmark for Muslims across the region.9

These changes had equivocal implications for Muslims. In the long term, they provided a fertile ground for the formation of a new middle-class and even an education-based elite identity for Muslims—a key argument of this article. In a more immediate sense, however, the new opportunities for higher education generated under President Amin’s government gave rise to new divisions within the Muslim community. Starting in the mid-1990s, graduates from international universities such as the Islamic University of Medina (who referred to themselves as ‘Salafis’) challenged the older generation of Muslim authorities and their monopoly of religious interpretation and education by advocating a stricter practice of Islam (Chande 2000). A hardening of positions



occurred between more radically minded Salafi activists and the older gen-eration of Muslim leaders that undermined chances that the Muslim com-munity could speak with one voice (see Kiyimba 1990; Kayunga 1994; Chande 2000). Following a crackdown of security forces on this radical wing of Salafi activists in the mid-1990s, open political protest and a direct confrontation of governmental politics on the part of Muslim activist groups has been muted. Although some high-ranking Muslim politicians form part of the NRM gov-ernment, Muslim public intellectuals repeatedly call for a greater inclusion of Muslims in politics.

Uganda’s joining of the ‘global war on terror’ since 2001 and the 2009 Kam-pala bombings at the hands of Al-Shabaab militias have reinforced the govern-ment’s tendency to equate Muslim political activism with a radical, politically subversive Islam. Strife within the UMSC continues to weaken the organiza-tion’s political teeth.10 Muslims in Uganda thus find themselves in a dilemma that, according to Constantin (1995), characterizes the situation of Muslim minorities in East Africa. To gain a voice in the political process Muslim minor-ities need to organize themselves in structures recognized by the state. At the same time, mobilization through these structures of representation reproduces internal rifts and undermines chances to represent the interests of a unified Muslim community. Still, the fact that a number of Muslim public intellectuals in Uganda have called for recognition of Muslim interests in the political arena indicates the emergence in recent years of a vocal and self-confident Muslim middle class.

A Historical Sketch of Muslim Education in Uganda

In scholarly publications on the history of state education in Uganda, gender-specific patterns of school enrolment have not been fully addressed to date (e.g., Furley 1988; Ssekamwa 1997; see also Ministry of Education and Sports 2001). Even less consideration has been given to the schooling options and impediments of Muslim girls (but see Kiyimba 1987). The following discus-sion of Muslim education in Uganda pays particular attention to the question of how female schooling has featured historically in the politics of Muslim education.

When the British established control over the kingdoms of southern Uganda no well-developed infrastructure of Muslim religious education existed in the area. This situation gradually changed in the late 1920s when the first Ganda Muslims, returning from the hajj, sought to reform certain local religious practices in accordance with the teachings they had received during their


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stays abroad.11 Yet whereas in other African societies with a significant Mus-lim population Muslim activism prompted the reform of traditional Islamic education (e.g., Brenner 2001; Loimeier 2009), the schools founded in the 1930s by reform-minded Muslims in Buganda did not ensure Arabic literacy but remained limited to the memorization of the Qur’an and the learning of cer-tain suras necessary for worship. Thus, at approximately the same time when several high-prestige missionary schools were founded that served as starting points for a career in the colonial and later postcolonial state,12 Islamic educa-tion foreclosed rather than facilitated access to political influence.

The educational situation for Muslims was deeply paradoxical at that time. Muslims’ efforts to preserve their religious identity and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation were essential to their sense of community, but this effort also confronted Muslims with a dilemma. By insisting on the importance of traditional educational subjects and teaching their children proper Muslim rituals, they made it more difficult for their children to achieve political influence and power in the colonial and later postcolonial state. Faced with this difficult choice, quite a number of Muslim intellectuals and parents practiced a kind of ‘tactical retreat’ and preserved the traditional system of education.13

Still, personal reminiscences I collected in Mbale district in early 2011 suggest that even within the same region Muslim parents responded very unevenly to the situation. Whereas some enrolled their children in missionary schools that they recognized as the entry point for professional success, social status, and political influence, many others refrained from this option, fearing their chil-dren’s conversion to Christianity (Schulz 2013; see Kiyimba 1990). A common issue for most of them, however, was a reluctance to enroll their daughters at school. Whereas in rural areas this reluctance could to a certain extent be explained by mothers reliance on their daughters’ help with daily chores, in town reservations were more explicitly framed as a matter of protecting girls from exposure to immoral life habits, the threat of conversion, and, more generally, to any influence that would weaken family control over them. As a consequence, speaking of ‘Muslims’ enrolling at regular schools at that time essentially refers to boys’ school attendance. As an elderly Muslim from Mbale district, a farmer of about 70 years, stated in February 2011,

School attendance [at a Protestant institution] was not an easy feat for me. I am the second oldest of my siblings, but the firstborn boy, you know . . . and at first it was diffi-cult to convince my grandfather that I should go off and study with ‘these Christians’, as he used to refer to them. But my father insisted that education was the key to prosper-ity, so off I went. Alas, I had to quit school only after three years [to support the family].


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Still, my father was always proud of me. But in no way would he have agreed to send one of my sisters to school. My oldest sister, she was his favorite child. But sending her to school? Never ever! This was not even a matter worth discussing or arguing about. My sister, as much as she would have loved to come with me, she never dared even mention it. She was a very humble child, aware of her responsibilities in the family. That’s how my mother raised us.

This skewed schooling pattern, a pattern that also applied to the schooling decisions of many Christian parents, created a substantial imbalance between Muslim boys and girls. Although Muslim children were generally disadvan-taged by the existing educational system, the consequences of this system-atic pattern of marginalization were worse for girls than for boys. If girls were allowed to enroll at all, their attendance was often limited to one or two classes of primary school. As a consequence, Muslim illiteracy and lack of education, represented in the figure of the backward rural Muslim country bumpkin, was structured in gender-specific ways.

The uneven geographical distribution of missionary schools reinforced the gender-specific and regional inequalities among Muslims who were willing to put their children (boys) in a regular school (Kiyimba 1986, 1990; Hansen 1991). Muslim boys from the central region, who were mostly Ganda, were in a better position to access high-quality schools run by missionaries and hence to occupy high-ranking positions in the Muslim representational bodies cre-ated after independence. Muslim girls remained largely excluded from access to formal employment. To grow up as a Muslim woman, whether in town or the countryside, meant that one’s prospects in life were not guided by formal education and employment but by family responsibilities.

The founding of the Uganda Muslim Educational Association (UMEA) in 1940, under the leadership of a few (Ganda) influential Muslims, signaled the first changes in the educational situation of Muslims, even though these reforms initially affected mainly boys. In 1944 the UMEA launched a program to improve the educational situation for Muslims that, by 1963, resulted in 180 Muslim primary schools, eight junior secondary schools, one senior secondary school, and one teachers’ training college. With the financial support of the government, these ‘Muslim founded schools’, as they are commonly referred to, offered a standard secular education based on the school curriculum and teaching methods typical of missionary and governmental schools.14 Because of the dearth of adequately trained Muslims, these schools employed mostly non-Muslim teachers (Kiyimba 1990).15 The level of instruction at these schools tended to be lower than that of high-prestige Christian schools, but they appealed to Muslim parents because they offered a secular education with-out exposing Muslim children to the standard Christian-inflected education



or to the pressure of converting to Christianity. Considering the Sisyphus-like task the UMEA faced in overcoming the long-standing institutionalized mar-ginalization of Muslims in a political environment sometimes averse to long-term improvements in the educational sector (Furley 1988), the achievements of this organization are impressive. As we will see below, UMEA’s success in improving Muslim opportunities for employment in the state sector and their gender-specific implications became evident only in the 1980s. As an UMEA official pointed out, the immediate effects of the UMEA initiatives were not obvious:

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the plight of Muslim education continued. Most teach-ers [at Muslim schools] were Christians and government funds were given to Christian schools. Starting from a politically weaker position, Muslims were unable to rid them-selves of the nightmare of an education that went against their religious traditions and deepest convictions. . . . True, this affected girls even more than boys, but much would have been gained if boys would at least have been given an opportunity to learn with their brethren in faith, and to be raised in an environment conducive to making them observant Muslims.16

This comment is noteworthy because it describes the plight of Muslims with regard to their educational opportunities and because it considers the virtual exclusion of Muslim girls from school education to be of secondary impor-tance, that is, as a deplorable but unavoidable side-effect of male Muslim mar-ginalization. It suggests that even among Muslim activists and officials who struggled to expand educational opportunities for Muslims, the assumption prevailed that gender-specific inequalities in access to education were una-voidable and, ultimately, acceptable. What mattered most was that male Mus-lims were granted new possibilities to rise in the social and political hierarchy. Put in its historical context, this position is understandable, given that Muslim parents were reluctant to put their girls into school, and also in consideration of the serious organizational impediments faced by UMEA. Still, it confirms that for decades to come the majority of children enrolled at Muslim founded schools were boys.

I mentioned earlier that in spite of the devastating effects of Idi Amin’s regime on the national system of education (Furley 1988), the 1970s brought some improvement to Muslims’ educational opportunities. Some of the funds generated by the country’s joining the OIC were used by the UMSC to invest in Muslim primary schools and in expanding a professional training center, the Kibuli Teacher Training College.17 Yet because these investments were not accompanied by broader educational reforms their effects, particularly with regard to female school attendance, remained limited in the short run.


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During the years of political instability that followed Amin’s ouster existing regional, religious, ethnic, and gender-specific hierarchies in the educational system remained largely intact. A few high-prestige boarding schools, many of them Christian institutions, remained the stepping-stone for professional success and political power.18 Schools designed by and for Muslims did expand schooling opportunities for girls because parents slowly but reluc-tantly became more willing to send their daughters to such schools. Also, the fact that a number of female Muslim students became active in the Makerere University Muslim Students Association (MUMSA) shows that the UMEA ini-tiatives aiming at the improvement of female education were gradually tak-ing effect (Kiyimba 2012). Still, Muslim-founded schools operated within and essentially reproduced the hierarchical field of education. Because many of them, whether boarding or day schools, catered to the interests (and often limited spending powers) of Muslim parents, their level of instruction was often lower than that offered at other schools. The few more-expensive board-ing schools for Muslims that emerged in these years reproduced regional and socioeconomic inequalities among Muslims (see Kiyimba 1990). As we will see, this process of class differentiation among Muslims affected girls as much as boys. The creation in the 1990s of boarding schools for an emergent Muslim middle class enabled broader school access for female students of more privi-leged family background. In comparison, the opportunity for rural Muslims to receive a high-quality education, especially those residing in the northern regions, remained limited.

Muslim Schooling Options Since the 1990s

The devastating consequences of the 1970s and 1980s for education in Uganda were felt particularly acutely by Muslims of lower socioeconomic origin. In 1990 low school enrollment, particularly of Muslim girls, was still a key prob-lem of Muslim education, implying that even fewer female pupils obtained secondary- and tertiary-level education. This situation changed gradually but unevenly19 over the course of the 1990s, along with a shift in awareness among many less-educated Muslims.20 The result of these transformations is reflected in the significant proportion of female staff at the Islamic University of Uganda. As Mariam N., a female faculty member of IUIU, put it to me in March 2011,

Whatever I am today, I owe it to my father. In the 1990s it was difficult for a Muslim girl to attain secondary education. My great luck in life was my father. He was a simple man of humble origins; but he insisted on putting me into primary school in spite of


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the opposition of my mother and of his own older brothers. I was his eldest daughter, you know, and his favorite one. . . . A few years later he decided to move me to a regular secondary school. This school . . . was a Protestant school. He did so against the explicit wish of my mother, who feared more than anything else that I would convert to Chris-tianity. For weeks and weeks, even for months, she did not talk to me, so angry was she about my going to secondary school. Things became better only when she and my father and my family decided on whom I was going to marry after leaving school. For me, this was fine because it opened doors for me. I could even move on to Makerere University and get a degree.

Mariam’s account illustrates that whereas the educational situation had not substantially improved for Muslims, there was a growing recognition, even among less-educated Muslims, of the key importance of schooling and, most notably, of female school enrollment. The shift in awareness among less-privileged Muslim parents was facilitated by significant transformations in the educational sector. New Muslim schools were founded at the primary and secondary levels.21 The 1997 governmental measure that provided free primary education triggered a mushrooming of private schools in urban and semi-urban areas. The guarantee of free-of-charge education at the primary level in 1997 and, in 2007, at the secondary level led to a lowering of educational standards and teaching conditions in state schools, a development that paradoxically fos-tered increasing class stratification through education. The lowering of general teaching standards led to a growing demand among the urban middle and upper-middle classes for educational institutions that delivered high-quality education and a degree that would allow employment in the state sector.22 The multiplication of primary- and secondary-level Muslim schools has meant that education of different quality and at highly discrepant costs is provided to Muslims, with the majority of high-quality Muslim boarding schools located in the central region of the country. Thus, ultimately, in spite of the transforma-tions in the field of education during the 1990s, divisions among Muslims along socioeconomic and regional differences continue to exist.23

The current state school system is based on seven classes of primary school (‘primary one’ to ‘primary seven’), concluded by the Primary Leaving Examina-tion (PLE). Muslim-founded schools at the primary and secondary levels have also adopted the Ministry of Education curriculum and register their students with the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) for purposes of exami-nation. Muslim-founded schools at the secondary school level (‘SS’) comprise a secular education section under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Education and the National Examinations Board, and a theological section with Arabic as one language of instruction and a curriculum that prepares pupils for further study in the Muslim world. Although this binary system



offers Muslims more options, it also confronts them with a difficult choice. Among the Muslim parents of secondary-school children to whom I spoke in early 2011, there was wide agreement that pupils who opt for the theological section have fewer chances for employment than those who opt for the regu-lar education stream. For this reason, many Muslim parents decide that their children should switch from the theological to the national curriculum section of the secondary school system.24 Another downside of the binary system of secondary education is that students who go through the theological curricu-lum receive a separate certificate that may not be recognized by the Ministry of Education.25 The Islamic University in Uganda plays an important role here because it recognizes these individual certificates and currently works on a national curriculum for secondary theological education.26

The diversification of the educational market since the mid-1990s has improved the educational situation for Muslims, especially those who can afford more expensive boarding schools. As Muslim parents pointed out to me, levels of instruction at Muslim-founded schools vary greatly from region to region. The variety and unevenness between schools reinforce long-standing regional inequalities, with a considerably lower quality of education offered in schools in northern regions. Developments in the educational sector over the past fifteen years thus reproduce socioeconomic divisions among Mus-lims and non-Muslims of a region, and also between Muslims from different regions. This observation applies to female students as well. Whereas school enrollment of girls at the primary and secondary levels has greatly improved in the central and eastern regions, female school attendance is still uneven in the northern regions. This regionally uneven distribution of female school attend-ance translates directly into a socioeconomic or ‘class’ differentiation of female students who enroll at the Islamic University. As a consequence, we see the fashioning of an education-based female Muslim middle class and incipient forms of female elite identity.

Promoting a New Self-understanding as Muslims: The Islamic University in Uganda

My historical sketch of impediments to Muslim education in Uganda illustrates the gender-specific and partly paradoxical implications of the recent privatiza-tion of primary and secondary education for Muslims. The Islamic University in Uganda, created by the OIC in 1988 yet also drawing on the initiative and experiences of an older generation of female Muslim graduates from Makerere University,27 offers a novel and rather unique path toward higher education for



male and female students. As an institution whose organizational set-up and orientation were importantly shaped by the efforts of some of these earlier Mus-lim graduates from Makerere University who labored for the improvement of educational opportunities of Muslims, IUIU fills important voids in the current landscape of educational and career options. By recognizing educational cer-tificates not acknowledged by the Ministry of Education, the Islamic University responds to the difficulties of reproducing religiously relevant knowledge in an educational system shaped by a legacy of favoring, and indeed creating, the standard Christian citizen. Providing internationally competitive higher edu-cation in English, IUIU broadens opportunities for high-skilled employment in the state and private sectors. It consolidates paths to influence, wealth, and elite status for Muslims that have been gradually opening up in Uganda and throughout East Africa over the last thirty years. These career options are par-ticularly momentous for Muslim girls and women, many of whom were his-torically excluded from school education. Beyond these avenues to Muslim educational and professional success institutionalized by IUIU, this institution has initiated more profound transformations in the self-understandings and religious subjectivities of Muslims who enjoy the privilege of studying there. Two dimensions of this development merit our special attention.

A look at the list of educational degrees offered by the Islamic University shows the strong professional and explicitly secularist self-understanding of the university and an organizational structure that is analogous to that of other private universities.28 My conversations with high-ranking administra-tive officers at IUIU’s different campus locations in Mbale, Kampala, and Kabo-jja confirm this impression. All officers presented the university’s orientation and course offerings in pragmatic terms by describing programs and course structures in terms of student demand for a solid professional training. The conversations highlighted two further points. First, this growing number of enrollment by Christian students, a trend mentioned to prove the high com-petitiveness of the university. The second point is the highly international pro-file of the students, especially of female students.29 In a context of increasing privatization of primary, secondary and tertiary education, the Islamic Univer-sity emphasizes the many career options provided by its professional nonreli-gious training. The university thereby caters to the educational preferences of students from relatively privileged Muslim and non-Muslim families.

That parents appreciate the highly professional character of the Islamic University and its competitiveness compared to other private universities became evident during conversations with Abbas, a former business admin-istration student from the IUIU Mbale campus. Abbas had hoped to study at Makerere University in Kampala, but his father had made him enroll at IUIU,



arguing that, as Abbas put it, ‘chances for employment are just so much bet-ter if you have a degree from a private and internationally oriented institu-tion’. When I asked him whether religious considerations had also played a role in his father’s decision, Abbas’s facial expression shifted from hesitation to embarrassment. He then told me, somewhat flustered, that only his mother was a Muslim whereas his father was a Christian. Abbas’s mixed religious fam-ily background is not representative of the majority of students at IUIU, but his enrollment at IUIU shows that the institution successfully fashions itself as one offering professional education rather than focusing on transmitting religiously relevant knowledge. The university promises to train students to become secularist-minded citizens who remain faithful to their religious iden-tity. It thereby appeals to Muslims who want their children to be observant Muslims and to become professionals who will enjoy full political participa-tion and citizenship rights. By straddling these various parental demands and expectations, the Islamic University has laid the foundation for an education-based female middle-class identity.30

Toward a New Female Muslim Identity

My analysis so far suggests that the Islamic University has played a forma-tive though not unprecedented role in the articulation of a secularist Muslim position and, more particularly, of a self-assertive identity as a Muslim in a minority context.31 My argument here is that this formative role has a particu-lar significance in the case of female students. I first realized that the new pro-fessional Muslim identity fostered at IUIU has very specific implications for women when I talked to Ayesha B., a recent graduate from IUIU in Kampala, in early 2011.

Ayesha, the third daughter of a successful businessman from the Kenyan coast, enrolled at IUIU in 2008 to earn a bachelor degree in education. Her mother, worried about her departure from home, had insisted that she study at the IUIU female students’ campus at Kabojja. After her graduation Ayesha searched in vain for employment, all the while fending off her family’s attempts to bring her back to Kenya. Ayesha wanted to stay in Kampala for a few more years because ‘job opportunities for well-educated Muslim women and the possibility of moving around freely are much better in Kampala [than in Nai-robi]’. When I met Ayesha in early 2011 she had just found a job through her father’s personal business ties as a secretary with higher managerial functions in a private enterprise. Asked whether she regretted that she could not use her academic qualifications at her current post, Ayesha replied in the negative. After a moment of hesitation, she added,


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Why should I be regretful? After all, I complied with my father’s wish to get a good education, and also with my mother’s wish that I make a good future Muslim spouse. It was my own desire to become a professional woman and hence a Muslim woman who can be proud of herself; and this, too, worked out.

Ayesha’s portrayal of her parents’ and her own visions of professional success and of accomplishment as a Muslim student forcefully impressed on me the gender-specific connotations of educational success. Male Muslim graduates center their efforts on gaining a good educational degree and secure (and lucrative) employment, thereby contravening stereotypical assumptions about uneducated Muslims who remain steeped in a conservative mindset. The stakes for female Muslim students are more complicated, mainly because they operate within a more ambiguous context of (partly conflicting) moral expec-tations. What matters in their case is not only a good degree and the future professional success anticipated by this degree; they also need to prove their compliance with the conduct and religiosity expected from a good Muslim girl. Therefore, for female students who conform to these double normative expec-tations, the simultaneously intellectual and religious Muslim identity they for-mulate is essential to their self-presentation as educated Muslim women. No wonder, then, that Ayesha’s expression of pride in her educated-cum-religious identity was echoed by female graduates who come from the central, western, and eastern regions of Uganda.

These accounts by female students highlight that IUIU education supports young Muslim women in articulating a professional Muslim identity, a self-understanding that is defined through both professional and educational suc-cess and a religious orientation.32 Also relevant in this respect is the markedly cosmopolitan outlook and international family background of some female IUIU students.33 In conversations with me, a number of students stressed that, in their position as minority Muslims, they felt like ‘citizens of the world’, and that their education at IUIU helped them articulate this cosmopolitan (minor-ity) identity as something to feel proud about. The interaction of Ugandan stu-dents with female students from other countries who often practiced different forms of rituals and religious conventions back home fosters in these students a readiness to stress a universalist Muslim identity, that is, to highlight com-monalities rather than locally specific religious practices and understandings. A similarly universalist understanding of Muslimhood is conveyed in manda-tory courses that IUIU students are required to take upon entry into the univer-sity. It is also fostered in extracurricular outreach activities in which students are encouraged, or in some cases required, to participate (see below).

In his portrayal of Muslim doctrinal positions in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, John Bowen distinguishes between those who articulate views of proper ritual



that follow long-standing local conventions on the one hand, and on the other hand those who, often under the influence of transnational reformist trends, articulate their ‘modernist intention’ to purify local religious practices (Bowen 1997, 1993, 2004; see also Launay 1992). Bowen insists that this modernist and reformist endeavor is not defined through substantive content. Still, he con-siders certain elements to be characteristic of the ‘modernist’ aspirations of Muslim reformists in contemporary Banda Aceh, such as their emphasis on individual responsibility for salvation and an effort to purify local religious practices. Following but also further expanding on Bowen’s argument, I sug-gest that the understandings formulated and passed on at IUIU are modernist in intention and outlook. Students are forged as modernist subjects with regard to the definition of proper religious practice that they are expected to prom-ulgate among villagers and other fellow believers.34 They are also modernist in the sense that they fashion themselves as educated subjects and aspire to become members of a cosmopolitan Muslim elite.

In the case of female IUIU students, a modernist Muslim identity is incul-cated and articulated through particular norms and forms of bodily conduct. Most conspicuous are the sartorial practices by which the students perform their self-understandings. Upon entry on campus they must follow a fixed dress code that, in its strict application, conveys a very specific model of Mus-lim womanhood, namely that of a young, educated woman who acts modestly and thus in compliance with Islamic norms of female decency.

If we follow Mauss’s seminal reflections on the ways in which embodied practices partake in projecting and indeed making ‘the self ’ vis-à-vis its social surroundings, we can understand the dress practices by female IUIU students as ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1973 [1935]) that offer insight into the par-ticular modernist subjectivity these students articulate and perform in regard to both peers and a broader, ‘religiously mixed’ public (see Schulz 2007, 2008, forthc.b; Masquelier 2009).35

Visiting the Kabojja campus for the first time, I got a keen sense of how dress serves as a technology of the body to live the ideal of Muslim woman-hood forged at this academic institution. As the head of the registrar’s office, a lady in her fifties who demanded respect, courteously showed me around, we passed a large information poster. The poster, covered by glass, depicted different forms of female dress, divided into a ‘do’ and a ‘do not’ section (see photograph 1). Taking a thorough look at the different kinds of dress, I—half smilingly—remarked to the chief officer that my own apparel (an ankle-long robe, covered by a loosely cut blouse covering my torso and arms up to the hands, and a head scarf tied around my head) fell into the ‘do not’ rubric because my head scarf, though wrapped tightly around my face, did not cover



Figure 1



neck and shoulders. I found this discovery to be something to smile at, but the officer was clearly not amused. She gave me a stern look, turned half-away, and said with a disapproving sigh, ‘No, your apparel would definitely not be acceptable on this campus. We teach our students that to become modern, educated, and professional women, the first thing is to dress respectfully’. She then pointed to different elements of the ‘do not’ dress examples to explain what the university administration stipulated to be immodest and hence inac-ceptable female dress. Among these were several dress combinations such as large and ample skirts combined with shirts covering the torso down to the hips that I had frequently seen in the streets of Kampala. On campus, however, even if these garments are worn together with a tightly wrapped headscarf, they clearly do not meet the standards of decency laid down by the university administration.

To appreciate the significance of the outfit adopted by female IUIU students in daily settings and also during their sports activities (see photograph 2), we should consider how their embodiment of a sophisticated woman contrasts with the long-standing, widely held stereotypes about uneducated and uncivi-lized Muslims in Uganda. By complying with the IUIU dress standards female IUIU students embody an emergent, education-based Muslim middle class. The class specificity of their self-understanding as modernist Muslims comes out clearly whenever they interact with Muslim women of less-privileged background. To illustrate this point, let me briefly turn to occasions on which female IUIU students interact with villagers during their outreach activities.

Promoting Proper Muslimhood: The Da‘wah Outreach Program

On one of my early visits to the IUIU campus in Mbale I was introduced to the female officer of the da‘wah office,36 a bureau in charge of the IUIU outreach program and of extracurricular activities on campus. The outreach initiatives entail various activities, such as regular (Friday) visits to villages in the district; male students lead the congregational prayer whereas female IUIU students give lectures on selected topics such as child education and proper conduct.37 Students are also invited to participate in teaching sessions aimed at village imams and other religious functionaries from the surrounding rural areas. As the female da’wah officer explained, these activities acquaint students with the life situation of fellow Muslims in the countryside, and prepare them for the task of ‘educating villagers who never learned to pray properly’ about ‘correct religious observance’. Participation in the da‘wah outreach program forms part of the mandatory extracurricular activities required for certain degrees, such as social work and education. The da‘wah office also organizes annual



Figure 2



conferences for students and outside visitors that provide a forum for in-depth reflection on questions relating to religious doctrine and Muslim everyday life. In recent years the da‘wah office has launched several capacity building pro-grams that are specifically designed for students who seek to obtain a degree in social work and education.

Female students play a central role in all these IUIU- orchestrated activities. By engaging in da‘wah educational activities in the countryside and in pub-lic social service institutions, female students promote views of correct ritual observance that are in line with the religious interpretations delivered at IUIU. These religious interpretations show a close alignment with reformist thought and prescriptions for proper everyday conduct and practice that are currently taught at institutions of higher learning in Saudi Arabia.38 Simultaneously, as exemplified by the weekly village visits coordinated by the IUIU da‘wah office, the outreach activities allow students, male and female, to perform their (intel-lectualist) understandings of what it means to be a Muslim—and to partici-pate as a Muslim in contemporary Ugandan social and political life.

Whereas villagers, men and women, listen to students’ teachings about proper ritual, their responses to the type of Muslim woman embodied by female students are more equivocal, partly because the model of a modern, educated woman is at variance with the lived realities of villagers, particularly with the demands put on a Muslim woman in the countryside. The incongru-ence between these different life worlds was brought home to me a few weeks after I had started my research on higher Muslim education in Mbale. In Febru-ary 2011 I accompanied two former female students of IUIU to the Mbale open market. As we entered the long and crowded alleys in search of a particular market stand that specialized in cotton fabric, we bumped into two elderly ladies. In a reversal of the respect that their age status usually commands, the two ladies saluted my friends in a deferential manner. As I realized, they knew each other from the time when my friends had been participating in the IUIU da‘wah visits to the surrounding rural areas. The female students politely yet restrainedly asked about individual family members, but otherwise said very little. Indeed, what I found most striking in the exchange between the students and the elderly ladies were the protracted periods of silence during which the two students kept rearranging their robes and headscarves. Finally, one of the two villagers, having assiduously studied my friends’ apparel, said with a sigh,

Oh, you two, you really have become accomplished ladies. You always looked so well dressed whenever you came to the village and told us how to raise our children and how to pray. Are you aware how intimidating such dress is? Just the way you look and move, it makes us villagers feel as if we were never going to make it, as if all your efforts to turn us into proper Muslims will be doomed to failure.



This spontaneous comment aptly sums up the gap in life experience and out-look that separates IUIU female students from Muslim women in Mbale’s per-iurban zones. The elderly lady maintained that the discrepancies were already evident in their respective apparel. As a correlate to these distinct sartorial choices, my two friends, as well as other female students of IUIU, formulate ideals of motherhood and womanhood whose urban, intellectual basis render them incompatible with rural realities. By wearing particular apparel and lec-turing village women on how to raise their children as responsible Muslim children, IUIU female students promote and enact views of female religiosity and religious subjectivity that have been substantially shaped by their student experience at IUIU. Ultimately, these female students propagate a relatively recent self-consciousness (and self-confidence) of a new generation of Muslim intellectuals who view themselves as modern, female citizens of the Ugandan nation-state.

Adopting this self-assertive identity in public has a special significance in Uganda, where Muslims are numerically and politically a minority. For them, expressing their self-confidence as Muslims—and insisting that both men and women can become well-educated Muslims—is an important political state-ment because it calls for full inclusion in the Ugandan body politic. Still, as illustrated by this encounter, the modernist Muslim identity articulated by these Muslim intellectuals generates new debates about what it means to be a proper Muslim (woman) and how one can achieve this ideal. The modernist aspirations of IUIU and its students thus do not result in a more coherent com-munity of believers.

It is far from clear what the long-term consequences of the IUIU-led out-reach program, with its agenda to promote a certain vision of proper Muslim-hood, will be. Considering similar processes in other African societies with a significant Muslim population (e.g., Brenner 2001; Loimeier 2003, 2009), one might anticipate that the transformations in the field of education that helped Muslims articulate a self-assertive identity as Muslims in Uganda lend force to existing divisions. Ultimately, these measures might foster centrifugal tenden-cies among Muslims and weaken their possibilities of speaking with one voice in the national political arena.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article is twofold. Starting with the role of school education in the historical marginalization of Muslims in Uganda, it argued that recent transformations in the educational field have created new opportunities for Muslims to become professionally successful and to articulate a self-assertive


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identity as minority Muslims. The second objective was to point to the par-ticular significance that the recent shift in Muslims’ educational opportunities bears for Muslim girls and women. I argued 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 determine the pool of potential stu-dents at IUIU, and hence which Muslims may articulate a new, education-based middle-class identity.

Muslims who are in a position to articulate a self-assertive identity (very often because of a privileged family background) stress the congruence between Muslim religious affiliation and a self-understanding as a modern, secular-minded Muslim. The IUIU da‘wah outreach activities illustrate this self-assertiveness of a new generation of younger, highly educated Muslims. The da‘wah activities also exemplify the gender-specific profile of this Mus-lim identity because they open up new opportunities for female students to disseminate their visions of what it means to be a modern, educated Muslim woman. As such, the activities of IUIU students who participate in the da‘wah outreach program reflect an expansion of the credentials for producing and transmitting authoritative knowledge.

Similar processes already occurred in the 1980s, when the return of male graduates from the Islamic University in Madina prompted new controversies over religious practice. By pitting against each other representatives of differ-ent readings of proper Muslim practice but also different types and generations of ‘learned men’, these controversies illustrated the diversification of creden-tials of religious knowledge transmission. Compared to these earlier graduates from Saudi Arabia whose specialized religious training limited their chances for employment in the state sector, the situation of graduates from the Islamic University are entirely different. They are literate in English and receive profes-sional training in disciplines that qualify them for employment in the public and private sectors. For them, receiving an education that takes into consid-eration their Muslim religious affiliation no longer means limiting themselves



to occupations directly related to their Muslim identity. Students of the Islamic University in Uganda are in a position in which their Muslim identity becomes a resource in claiming a future as a modern citizen who fully partakes in the Ugandan body politic.

This shift resembles the development posited by Jon Anderson (1999) for the ‘new interpreters of Islam’ who capitalize on new educational career options and on the possibilities generated by Internet communication tech-nologies to articulate a self-understanding as Muslims in a diasporic minor-ity context. Similar to this Muslim professional elite discussed by Anderson, many students at IUIU derive their understandings of what it means to be a Muslim in Uganda from their markedly transnational orientation. The spe-cific contribution of this article was to highlight that in the case of Uganda, many of the new interpreters of Islam are women. The educational opportu-nities offered by the Islamic University in Uganda allow women to articulate an identity that, in its self-assertiveness and universalist outlook, appears as a new option for minority Muslims in East Africa. Their self-understandings also bring to mind the visions presently formulated by younger women (and sometimes men) in other areas in Muslim Africa. Throughout West Africa, for instance, girls and younger women spearhead religious movements that push for moral and personal reform based on Islamic prescriptions and values (Kleiner-Bosaller and Loimeier 1994; Gomez-Perez 1999; LeBlanc 1999; Augis 2002; Alidou 2005; Schulz 2008, 2012a; Masquelier 2009; see Navaro-Yashin 2001; Deeb 2006).

Still, some aspects of the self-understanding of female students of the Islamic University seem to be specific and comparatively novel. IUIU students capitalize on the institutional backing of an Islamic institution of higher learn-ing. They thus differ from students in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, whose only option of higher learning is to enroll in governmental institutions that, in the legacy of the French principle of laïcité, are explicitly nondenominational and secularist. By earning internationally competitive educational degrees, IUIU students also differ from Muslim women activists who acquire their knowledge about proper religious practice either through personal informal study (e.g., Schulz 2010a, 2012a; Gomez- Perez 2011) or by enrolling in classes at reformed institutions of secondary Islamic learning (e.g., Miran 1998; LeBlanc 1999; Brenner 2001, 2007). IUIU female graduates are in a comparatively strong position to combine their Muslim identity with a pro-fessional career. Future developments will show how these Ugandan women will contribute to debates about the changing relevance of Islam to everyday life, debates that, following Eickelman and Anderson’s argument (1999), would indicate a radical shift in the sources of religious interpretive authority.



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Notes

1. The article is based on field research conducted in Mbale, Kampala, Yumbe and Mbarara in 2011 and 2012. I thank one anonymous reviewer for her critical comments and suggestions, and Professor Abasi Kiyimba for his forbearance and intellectual generosity. His input was crucial to my efforts to amend shortcomings in my earlier analysis.

2. Their—and my—discussion focusses on African Muslims as opposed to Muslims who are part of the Asian community. Expelled by Amin 1971, the latter have been gradually making their way back to Uganda over the past ten years.

3. Catholic and Protestant identities played an important role in defining people’s party affiliation and in garnering support for a party. Catholics figured strongly in the Democratic Party, whereas the ranks of the Ugandan People’s Congress were filled with Protestants (e.g., Rowe 1988). For a similar argument developed with regard to other Muslim minorities in East Africa, see for example Constantin (1995), Hansen and Twaddle (1995), Chande (2000), and Seesemann (2007).

4. Differences also exist with respect to the different legal schools followed by Muslims in the West Nile region (Maliki legal school), as opposed to those in the central, eastern and western regions (Shaafi legal school).

5. The organization effectively established a divide in the Muslim community that until then had been dominated by Ganda Muslims. The divide opposed Ganda Muslims loyal to the royal court, including Prince Badru Kakungulu, and its Kabaka Yeka party with Muslims with close ties to NAAM represented by Abdu Kamulegeya and Obote’s UPC party, many of whom were not Ganda.

6. Kiyimba (1990) offers a nuanced assessment of the allegation that Muslims in politi-cally influential positions were beneficiaries of political nepotism. He lists individual Mus-lims whose appointment to high-ranking posts could not be explained by merit, but he also argues that several Muslims stayed in office after Amin’s departure because of their competence.

7. Their fears became true after the collapse of Idi Amin‘s regime when, in a broad move of revenge, Muslims were massacred in different regions of the country.

8. Prior to the 1970s Muslims from Uganda had already earned degrees from the Islamic University of Madina and from universities in Egypt and Pakistan. I thank Professor Abasi Kiyimba for providing me with this valuable information.

9. Technically speaking, IUIU is not a Ugandan institution but an institution of the OIC. As the first and only Islamic university in East Africa (the only other is in Niger for French-speaking African Muslims), it constitutes the most important institution of higher educa-tion for Muslims in Uganda and elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa.

10. At present a conflict opposes the supporters of the Mufti of Uganda, Sheikh Shaban Mubajje, with a faction of the UMSC that contests his legitimacy, charging him with selling UMSC property for his own personal gain.

11. Their activism spurred new controversies, for instance over the rightful nature of an additional (zuhr) prayer during the Friday congregational worship (Oded 1974; Kayunga 1994).

12. Among these schools were King’s College Budo, Busoga College, St. Mary’s College Kisubi, Gayaza High School, and Trinity College Nabbingo.

13. I owe this term to Professor Abasi Kiyimba.14. By that time all former missionary schools had been incorporated into the state

educational system.



15. Kiyimba (1990) mentions that a significant number of pupils enrolled at these schools were non-Muslims.

16. Kibuli UMEA office, March 2011. The UMEA officer agreed to be quoted under the condition that his anonymity was preserved.

17. The Training College was opened in Kasawo Kigayaza (central region) in 1935; it was later relocated to Kibuli hill (Kampala).

18. Starting in 1982 a governmental educational reform increased the number of second-ary schools, in particular day schools, at the expense of secondary boarding schools (Furley 1988). This trend was reversed in the 1990s following the mushrooming of private secondary boarding schools (see below).

19. Kiyimba (1990) estimates the number of enrollments at 50 percent but does not dif-ferentiate between Muslim school enrollment in the northern and southern regions of the country. Because of a historically weak educational infrastructure in the West Nile Region school enrollment of Muslim children, particularly of girls, has remained lower than in other regions of Uganda.

20. Until 1990 only one secondary school, Nabisunsa Secondary School, existed for Muslim girls, a school that, because of the small number of girls who finished primary school, was attended mostly by non-Muslims. Because of the low enrollment of Muslim girls, in 1990 only 30 of the 200 Muslim students at Makerere University were female (Kiyimba 1990).

21. Many of them were initially private initiatives but soon sought governmental support.

22. Another result of the privatization of education has been the emergence of numer-ous private universities since the late 1990s.

23. Among other effects, the size of classes quadrupled in numerous state primary schools after 1997. In many private schools as well, teaching standards were lowered consid-erably beginning in the late 1990s. This argument is based on interviews with officers work-ing in UMCS structures in Uganda’s northwestern and northern regions. As examples, they cited the uneven quality of primary and secondary schools in the country’s northern and central regions and the fact that, partly as a result of the stark quality discrepancies between schools, almost all recipients of stipends for study in the Arab-speaking Muslim world come from the central region.

24. After SS3 students can switch from the theological to the secular section of the SS system.

25. Beginning in 2010 the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council created a new administra-tive structure, the Islamic Primary School Board, to oversee examinations nationally and to establish a uniform standard for the theological education curriculum.

26. The entry requirement of every student at IUIU is to take a course in Arabic and Islamic heritage. This serves to ensure equal levels of knowledge among incoming students of IUIU, many of whom had little or no training in Arabic or religious matters.

27. I owe the information about the pioneering contributions of male and female Muslim graduates from Makerere University to the establishment of the IUIU to Profes-sor Abasi Kiyimba. A number of Muslim female graduates from Makerere were already well-established professionals in 1988, the time when the IUIU was created. Female higher education thus did not start with IUIU, though this institution broadened women’s oppor-tunities for access to highly skilled employment.

28. The IUIU 2008-2010 Prospectus (2008-2010) presents the university as a cross-ethnic and cross-religious institution in which, in 2007-2008, 5000 students were enrolled in over 60 different academic programs offered by the following academic divisions: Faculty of Arts


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and Sciences, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Islamic Studies and Arabic Language, Faculty of Science, Faculty of Management Studies, Faculty of Law, and a Center for Postgraduate Studies.

29. The international profile is in line with the OIC’s original rationale for funding the OIC. The protected learning environment provided at the IUIU campus of Mbale and Kabo-jja is particularly attractive for female students whose families reside abroad. In early 2011 about 10 percent of the women studying at the Kabojja campus came from Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Malawi, and Kenya.

30. Recognizing the variety of definitions of ‘elite’, in the following analysis I understand (female) ‘educational elite’ to refer to a numerically relatively small group of people who owe their economically and socially privileged status to an advanced educational degree that grants them high-ranking employment in the private and public sectors, and hence access to positions of political influence.

31. This self-understanding as a minority Muslim also applies to foreign students who come from countries in which Muslims are a minority.

32. To be sure, female IUIU students do not express a uniform strict observance of Islamic ritual obligations. Rather, given the minority position of Muslims in Uganda and in neighboring countries, being a Muslim automatically bears a religious dimension, regard-less of one’s personal attitude and everyday behavior.

33. For similar visions of a Muslim cosmopolitan identity see Leichtman and Schulz (2012).

34. These views are evident in their denouncement of certain funeral rituals historically practiced in this area.

35. My analysis of the dress practices by which female Muslim students articulate a specific religious subjectivity draws inspiration from recent studies thathave addressed the personal and intersubjective meanings of religious practices that allow individuals to make themselves into ethical subjects (e.g., Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Schulz 2012).

36. From da‘wa, the Arabic term for ‘mission’ or ‘call’, referring to the duty of the Muslim believer to promulgate the message of Islam.

37. The IUIU da’wah outreach program draws on activities initiated by the Makerere University Muslim Students Association (MUMSA) in the early 1980s (Abasi Kiyimba, per-sonal communication).

38. One obvious explanation for this alignment is that IUIU, understood as a private Muslim institution of higher learning, is owned by the OIC and funded by the Islamic Devel-opment Bank, institutions in which Saudi Arabia occupies a dominant position. Another factor in the close affinity to intellectual trends in Saudi Arabia is that a number of teachers employed at the IUIU Faculty of Islamic Studies and Arabic—teachers who are responsi-ble for teaching the mandatory introductory course on Islamic Civilization—are graduates from universities in Saudi Arabia.


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Engendering Muslim Self-Assertiveness: Muslim Schooling and Female Elite Formation in Uganda

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