Divisions, diversity and educational directives: IRE teachers’ didactic choices in Kisumu, Kenya

Abstract

The present article focuses on the choices teachers make when teaching Islamic religious education (IRE) in the town of Kisumu, Kenya. The data were collected through interviews with IRE teachers and participant observations in schools that offered IRE during several fieldwork sessions in the period 2003–2006. The fieldwork revealed that the choices teachers made were related to social and religious contexts both inside and outside the school setting and also the more immediate contexts of the teaching–learning situation. Most clearly, the choices were influenced by the fact that IRE is an examinable subject in a larger educational system. This article claims that an alternation between a confessional education into Islam and a more fact‐oriented education about Islam was a strategy used by some teachers balancing between competing demands posed by the educational system, students, parents and the surrounding local society.

Keywords:

• Islam
• education
• IRE
• Kisumu
• Kenya
• religious diversity
• teachers’ didactic choices

Notes

1. Other Muslims generally do not recognise the dominant Qadiyani branch of Ahmadiyyas as Muslims, due to their adherence to the founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908) as a prophet, hence challenging the notion of Muhammad as the ‘seal of prophethood’.

2. There is a problem with terminology here. Wahhabism, salafism and neo‐fundamentalism are all terms used in scholarly works. All three have positive or negative connotations. Therefore, I choose to use the more descriptive term ‘radical reformism’.

3. Controversies over mawlid are not limited to Kenya, nor are they particularly recent (see Kaptein 1993).

4. The five are the West African Usman dan Fodio (d. 1817), the Egyptians Sayyid Qutb (d. 1965) and Hassan al‐Banna (d. 1949) and the East Africans al‐Amin al‐Mazrui (d. 1947) and Abdallah Swaleh Farsy (d. 1982). The other three, representing the remainder of Islamic intellectual history, are Ibn Sina (Latin Avicenna) (d. 1037), Muhammad al‐Ghazali (d. 1111) and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), all three featuring prominently in contemporary Muslim modernist discourse as symbols of ‘golden age’ of Islamic science and culture.

5. The precise definition of the Waswahili is a matter of discussion in Kenya. In Kisumu, it appeared to be a generic self‐designation of several African ethnicities sharing Muslim affiliation and a ‘Swahili’ culture.