What makes a good minority Muslim? Educational policy and the paradoxes of Muslim schooling in Uganda

Excerpt

In spring 2011, while conducting research on the situation of Muslims in Mbale, a town located in the Mount Elgon region in Eastern Uganda, I made an observation that attracted my curiosity. Muslims, men and women, whom I asked about their conditions and self-perceptions as Muslims in Uganda would initially assert that no discrimination on religious grounds existed in Uganda. However, as our conversation moved on, they singled out education as a field in which they felt most acutely that mainstream culture, inflected by Christian values and cultural conventions, exerted a heavy pressure toward conformity. At this point, my conversation partners unanimously referred—and this was the point that piqued my curiosity—to former president Yusuf Lule who, following his enrollment at King’s College Budo, an elite school shaped by its missionary legacy, converted to Christianity.¹ Lule’s conversion, it turned out, bears an emblematic significance for many Ugandan Muslims today. It captures their fears of, and actual tendency toward, Muslims’ conversion to Christianity, in a country in which various Protestant denominations have made great inroads in recent years in converting Ugandans (among them, President Museveni’s wife and daughter) to ‘the right way’. Simultaneously, however, Lule’s conversion was remembered by my conversation partners as a turning point in Muslim consciousness in Uganda; as an event that prompted Muslim parents across the socio-economic, regional and ethnic divides to “discover” the crucial importance of school education for Muslims; an education that would allow them to raise their children as both observant Muslims and as well-instructed citizens capable of moving ahead in the political hierarchy. Lule’s conversion, in other words, today stands at once for Muslims’ anxieties about the influences and pressures of a Christian-inflected education and for the specific remedy by which they seek to counter their fears. Rather than engaging in mobilization to publicly call for a political solution to their sense of marginality, the majority of Muslims in Uganda opt for individual, silent solutions to the problem. In so doing, Muslim parents frame the problem itself primarily as a moral, personal issue; as a matter of ensuring one’s children’s faith and moral rectitude, rather than as a matter of collective structural disadvantage that makes it more difficult for Muslims to enjoy full rights as citizens of the Ugandan nation-state. …