Conservative Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa: Examining the role of Arab Education

Over the last fifty years, Islam in sub-Saharan Africa underwent a doctrinal transformation, marked by an emphasis on purification of Islamic customs. This emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, an ideology seeking a “return to the scripturalist foundations of the Muslim community... for application to the present-day social and political world” (Euben and Zaman 2009), is apparent in the shifts of Islamic practice and beliefs throughout the continent (Loimeier 2016). From Nigeria to Sudan, Islamic fundamentalism has restructured different facets of politics and society in African countries (Thurston 2020; Sounaye 2017; Bonate 2007). Motivated by these seismic transformations, this paper examines how and why Islamic fundamentalism emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Building on a rich case study literature, I root the emergence of conservative Islam in Arab countries’ missionary initiatives. In particular, Arab states supplied opportunities for foreign Muslims to study in Islamic educational institutions in Arab countries. Study in Islamic universities in Arab states, I contend, exposed foreigners to conservative Islamic ideas especially prevalent in the Arab world during the second half of the twentieth century.

To varying degrees, study at al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Medina likely exposed foreign Muslims to conservative Islamic ideas. Though al-Azhar provided some ideological pluralism through their curriculum and faculty, conservative ideas were prevalent among faculty and on the university campus during the second half of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1970s, scholars who espoused Islamist ideology were in the ascendancy at al-Azhar. Their ideas influenced campus curriculum and discussions (Zeghal 1999; Brown 2011; Hatina 2008) as well as the public role of al-Azhar. Studies of the Saudi IUM highlight the dominance of conservative Islamic thought throughout the university’s history. The curriculum, personnel, and campus environment constitute a unified ideological orientation dominated by conservative ideas. From the 1960s, the faculty comprised Islamic reformers, drawn predominantly from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and local Wahhabi religious elites. Al-Azhar was permeable to the religious environment in Egypt, which featured Islamist movements starting in the 1920s with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood. These movements had a meaningful presence on campus through two active associations: the Society of Young Muslims (Jamiyat al-Subban al-Muslimin) and the Society of the Muslim Brothers (Jamiyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) (Kaba 1976).

I argue that exposure to this reformist Islam through the curriculum and campus environment introduced foreign students to conservative Islamic ideas. Through repeated exposure, foreign students were more likely to develop a commitment to reforming Islam and expanding its societal role in their home countries. Finally, upon their return, I argue these foreign-trained graduates served as the vanguard of conservatism in their home countries by establishing conservative organizations that become local producers of conservative ideas.

To test the foreign training hypothesis, this paper systematically quantifies two difficult to study social phenomena – foreign training and Islamic fundamentalism – that have eluded measurement. I construct a measure of foreign training using graduation records and historical documents from Arab Islamic institutions where Africans studied: al-Azhar University in Egypt and the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. To construct a dataset of international students trained at al-Azhar, I used university graduation records. Al-Azhar University maintains records, from 1930 to 2016, for all international students who received formal certificates from any of its faculties and campus branches. I aggregate total foreign trained graduates from multiple issues of the Islamic University of Medina Magazine (Majallat al-Jami’a al-Islamiyya bi-l-Madina al-Munawwara). Based on a section entitled “University News” (“Min Akhbar al-Jami’a”) published in some issues of the magazine, I compiled a measure for foreign study at IUM: total scholarships awarded to foreign students to study at IUM for 1962-2002.

Additionally, to proxy for the emergence of fundamentalism, I construct an original dataset of fundamentalist groups from the secondary literature. Following the logic of conducting expert surveys to characterize hard-to-measure phenomena, I chose to leverage academic scholarship on Islam in Africa, especially the rich case studies conducted by anthropologists and historians. From this scholarship, I extracted information about the emergence and presence of reformist organizations.

Drawing on original panel dataset spanning 43 sub-Saharan African countries from 1930 to 2016, this article documents a link between the supply of Arab-training and the emergence of fundamentalism in sub-Saharan Africa. A generalized difference-in-differences approach shows that more Arab-trained graduates increases the likelihood that a local fundamentalist movement emerges in African countries. To better assess the effect of the supply of Arab-trained graduates and the mechanisms by which they lead to the expansion of fundamentalism, I study the post-independence period in Sudan. Exploiting subnational variation in the supply of foreign-training, I find that counties with a greater concentration of Egyptian-trained graduates (1930-1961) is associated with greater success for the first Islamist party, an umbrella group of fundamentalist organizations, in the 1968 election.