7 - NRM Statecraft and Muslim Subjects

Summary

This chapter investigates the systematic murder of Muslim clerics beginning from 2012 to the end of 2016 as an entry point to understanding how the National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime re-articulated the Muslim conundrum. It argues that the murders fit within the attempt of the state to support Old Kampala-based Islam as a centre of Muslims’ representation vis-à-vis Kibuli and other emerging centres of Muslim leadership. It shows that historical Muslim ‘problems’, such as social-political-economic marginalization, which the NRM inherited, influenced the political status and role of Muslims within the NRM regime while in turn cultivating a special role for state agents within the Muslim publics. Following from the previous deliberations, this chapter demonstrates the consequences of the attempt of various Muslim elites to articulate a particular interpretation of Islam that imagined political jihad as the antidote to Muslim historical social-political-economic marginalization, which invited state responses that turned Muslim violence into an internal civil war.

By situating the questions, ‘who are the Muslims’ and ‘how do they express Islam?’ it demonstrates how the NRM transformed the Muslim question from representation to belonging – understood as allegiance to NRM patronage of Muslims, This was born within the 1986 revolution, but intensified in the 1990s when the regime sought to thwart Muslim militancy (ADF) from its political gains in Buganda. Intra-Muslim schisms therefore also contributed to state intervention. The theoretical contribution of this chapter is to question the assumption that violent state action against forms of ‘religious radicalism’ from social groups arises from the state’s desire to subdue political opposition, negating the internal agency and capacity for radical actions arising from particular forms of religious expression. Following Asad, my contribution fuses ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ explanations for violent action to demonstrate that the appeal to ‘religious’ expressions has consequences for ‘secular’ power. Unable to marshal a spirited force to thwart its ‘enemy’, ‘religious’ agency invites the intervention of secular power to inscribe and continue instances of domination. As Foucault emphasized, violence here becomes its own victim.

This chapter also speaks to some legacies of the colonial era that continued and intensified under NRM governance.