5 - Marginality and Religious Difference in Islamic Seminaries

Summary

Muslim schools have a specific status in Dar es Salaam’s educational landscape. While many activist organisations have worked to overcome the historical marginalisation of Muslims in Tanzania, Islamic schools remain largely hidden in the public discourse on education. Chapter 5 provides insight into the histories and practices of two gender-segregated Islamic seminaries in Dar es Salaam. It argues that educational practices and experiences in these schools have been shaped by networks of revivalist Islamic thought within and beyond the city of Dar es Salaam, as well as by perceptions of marginality, especially in the boys’ school. In particular, the students and staff of the boys’ seminary share a discourse on religious difference that is closely tied to their experiences of underprivileged educational and living situations and their perceptions of poor future prospects overall. At the same time, the sensation of being religiously different gives rise to practices of Islamic self-cultivation that extend, in both seminaries, to gender-specific notions of gender, dress, and the body and, in the girls’ school, to the sense of belonging to an aspiring urban Muslim middle class. In contrast, in the boys’ seminary the striving to become ‘good Muslim men’ was tied to a rigid discipline for meeting the challenges of an ‘unclean’ and ‘depriving’ world.