"Modern" Medersas in Mali: Transforming Islamic Education

• In Event: 35.037 - Contesting and Embodying Modernity/Islam: Education and Development Paradigms in Nigeria, Pakistan, Mali, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
The study presents an overview of medersas (Islamic schools) in the educational sector in Mali, describing their mission, expanding role and hybrid pedagogy as they attempt to marry “modern” secular and traditional religious education in one institution.

Conceptual Framework:
This research uses a framework of “integration”, to examine how medersas reconcile the “truths” about education and how it should support national and economic productivity with more traditional “truths” about education as a path to spiritual development and devotional praxis.

Methods and Data Sources:
Data come from a study undertaken by the Mali USAID/PHARE Program and the Ministry of Education and National Languages (MEALN), funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) . Sources include medersa directors/proprietors, teachers, Arabic supervisors, parents, students, ‘ulema (Muslim intellectuals), National Malian Medersa Union representatives, and officials from the Ministry’s Arabic section.

Data were collected from a national sample of medersas across Mali’s 15 regions. Within the regions, districts were selected according to: number of medersas in the district; safe accessibility for the researchers; proportional geographic representation; and proportional linguistic group representation (MEALN, 2010, p. 13). Across the selected districts, 101 medersas were randomly chosen for participation in the study with 98 participating. Data collection instruments included: oral questionnaires, a resource checklist, a classroom observation protocol, a parental focus group protocol, and individual interview protocols for a variety of respondents attached to the medersas.

Results:
The paper presents descriptive data on the medersas and discusses these data relative to emergent themes of educational access (including girls’ education), educational quality, language of instruction and devotional praxis. Findings suggest that medersas offer the government a way to increase pupil enrolment at the primary level, as the country struggles to meet its millennium goals; they offer pupils the opportunity to study global subjects like science and foreign languages, as they would in public school; and, through their religious environment and use of Arabic language, they reassure parents that children are strongly anchored to traditional Muslim values and practices. Indeed, an increasing numbers of parents send their children to medersas, even as the schools themselves are transforming the nature of an Islamic education in Mali.

Significance:
Understanding the medersa sector in Mali is important because: 1) “modern” medersas are playing an increasingly visible, influential role in the provision of education to growing numbers of Malian children, and 2) Malian medersas are forging a new model of Islamic schooling that unites a focus on economic development/social mobility (among students and families) with a traditional focus on devotional praxis. This research informs the work of development practitioners and the Malian Ministry of Education and presents an evidence-based, alternative image of an Islamic school to the scholarly community.

Author

• Helen N Boyle, Florida State University