8 - Conclusion

Summary

I began this book with the claim that the broader historical Muslim question, which concerns the role of Islam as ideology and Muslims’ quest for autonomy in their relationship with shifting configurations of power over time, explain the violence witnessed within the Muslim community in contemporary Uganda. To unpack that claim, I have argued and showed that successive regimes of political power in Uganda’s long history have witnessed violence either committed against Muslims or arising from within the Muslim community. These episodes of violence were the symptoms of larger issues that concerned Muslims’ internal relations with each other and their whole relationship, in turn, with the larger political regimes under which they subsisted. The preceding chapters have shown that patterns of political governance of Islam and Muslims constructed in one historical epoch were either discontinued or refined and continued in another era using different agents under new strategies and tactics of governmentality. The prevailing issues concerning Muslims’ relationship with political power and how that power envisioned its relationship with Islam, constituted the Muslim question under a particular regime. Every regime of power therefore framed its Muslim question.

I have also argued that Uganda has witnessed two moments in its history whereby Muslims acquired and lost political power. The first was under Kabaka Muteesa I (1854-84) when he chose Islam as a vehicle to achieve two major goals. On the one hand, proclaiming Islam as state religion would allow him to centralize power and reorganize Buganda, thus overcoming other powerful checks that balanced his power as Kabaka. This was the internal goal that Islam played for Muteesa I. On the other hand, it also fulfilled an external goal for the Kabaka. Islam would position Buganda as a Muslim state and thus thwart the attempts of the Khedive of Misr (Egypt) to colonize Buganda. Also, using Islam, Muteesa I sought to befriend the business minds of the Zanzibar coastal Arab traders who would bring wares of foreign trade, especially guns and ammunition that strengthened Buganda’s military to defeat domestic and foreign enemies.

The cost of Muteesa I’s attempt to Islamize Buganda was quite high for both Muslims and non-Muslims. Native Ganda who refused to Islamize met a wave of violence orchestrated by the Ganda state, thus tarnishing the image of Islam among Baganda.