Muslim Identity and Muslimness Nurtured by Madrasa and Families in Rural Tanzania

• In Event: Beyond the State: Non-State Actors, Educational Inclusion, and Social Cohesion

Proposal

Introduction
Under the umbrella of global education governance, policies and practices set at transnational organizations have permeated into educational spaces across borders, especially into formal schooling settings. This interconnectedness and interdependency between global and local have also extended into nonformal and informal educational spaces, including religious education at madrasa and at home.

For example, in Tanzania where this research took place, the Structural Adjustment Programs in 1980s gave impetus to weakening of government schools and in return to the expansion of private and nongovernmental schools, coinciding with the rise of religiously motivated primary and secondary schools. In addition, the global rise of learner-centred pedagogy has recently spread through madrasa-based early-childhood education in East Africa. Informed by Western pedagogical concepts of constructivism and active learning based on Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories of education, the Madrasa Resource Centres in the region have employed child-centred, play-based pedagogies, which Mwaura et al. (2018) claimed to have resulted in higher cognitive development.

Given this background, this study set out to examine religious embodiment and being Muslim in rural Tanzania, a setting which has not received much scholarly attention in exploring the intersection of globalization and local religious practices. Taking madrasas and families in rural Dar es Salaam and rural Kigoma as study cases, the research aimed to contribute to the growing literature on the global-local nexus within religious educational contexts, specifically in nurturing children’s religious identity. The research questions included:

• What pedagogy do madrasas in rural Dar es Salaam and Kigoma employ to nurture children’s Muslim identity and Muslimness, and why?
• How and to what extent the effect of globalization can be seen in madrasa education in rural Tanzania?
• What challenges and opportunities do rural madrasas face in everyday Islamic education?

Methodological Approach
The study qualitatively examined to what extent and how everyday teaching at madrasas and homes may embody effects of globalized education policies. The research used qualitative interviews as the main source of data collection. Two researchers conducted fieldwork in January and July in 2023 and November 2024 in three villages in the Dar es Salaam region and three villages in the Kigoma region selected through convenience sampling using the researchers’ network. In each region, three madrasas and 10 families were visited to carry out semi-structured interviews with 16 parents, 14 teachers and 6 madrasa managers, involving a total of 36 Muslim participants. The interviews asked what the participants hoped their children to attain through Islamic teaching at madrasas and homes and what kind of teaching they employed in order for their children to achieve these.

Findings and Discussion
Different from the urban religious schools (Dilger, 2013, 2017, 2020) or early-childhood education madrasa (Bartlett et al., 2008; Mwaura et al., 2008; Mwaura& Marfo, 2011), the influence of globalization at rural madrasas was rarely seen in this research. The accounts of the participants indicated their pursuit of Islamic teaching in their own way, with a substantial emphasis on everyday practices as Muslims such as praying, dressing, and singing over memorization or recitation. Although practical teaching and learning by doing represent one aspect of the globally spread LCP (Bremner, 2021), the participating families and madrasa teachers did not indicate the adherence to the global discourse in a way the Madrasa Resource Centre did (Bartlett et al., 2008; Mwaura et al., 2008; Mwaura & Marfo, 2011). Rather, the participants seemed to find the roots of practical teaching at home and madrasa, partially, within the educational grounding of Tanzania developed by the first post-independence president, Julius K. Nyerere. Existing research shows that people in Tanzania think highly of Nyerere’s educational policies and practices and regard them as still relevant and valuable (Sakata et al., 2021, 2024). Asked about pedagogies historically nurtured within Tanzania in this study, many participants referred to practical teaching and learning in connection with Nyerere. It can be said that rural madrasas in Tanzania rely more on the pedagogy historically fostered in the country and less on globally recommended pedagogy in informing their Islamic teaching and in nurturing children’s Muslim identity and Muslimness.

This research also revealed the profound difficulties these madrasas were undergoing in keeping their organization running, which is not brought to light by previous studies. Similar to formal schools, the lack of teaching materials and classroom facilities, as well as the absenteeism and drop-out of students, were common. As non-formal educational organizations that do not have regular incomes from the authority, rural madrasas suffered from severe shortage of funding. Almost no donor who regularly makes financial contribution existed, and little was paid by the parents as madrasa fees. Such a situation created some teachers committing to other jobs over teaching at madrasas, making the latter as their voluntary work instead of their profession. As some teachers and managers warned, unless Muslim families and communities appreciate the work of madrasas and their teachers and become more committed to running them, Muslim culture in these regions might fall into a danger of decline.

Author

• Nozomi Sakata, Hiroshima University