This post is the third in a series on Muslim schooling in Northern Nigeria. The first post gave an overview of the series, and the second discussed Qur’anic schools.

by Alex Thurston

In Nigeria, advanced Islamic education–the step following one’s basic instruction in the Qur’an–takes various forms. Here, I’ll examine the traditional settings for advanced Islamic education. The term “traditional” is a problematic one, as “traditions” are sometimes much more recent – and more consciously invented – than outsiders might assume. But the term has some use for describing systems that have evolved over time and were not directly created by colonial or postcolonial governments or by postcolonial reformist movements. “Advanced Islamic education,” meanwhile, refers here to training beyond the memorization of the Qur’an and instruction in the basic ritual requirements of Islam.

This kind of training has occurred for centuries, and still occurs, in the homes and schools of individual teachers. Many Northern Muslims begin (as do their counterparts elsewhere in West Africa) by studying the Qur’an and basic religious instruction with their fathers or with other family members, but advanced training usually necessitates outside mentors. Religious seekers most often proceed from the Qur’an to introductory texts of Maliki fiqh (jurisprudence). The Maliki School, one of four main Sunni schools of legal thought, is the most widespread in North and West Africa. Introductory Maliki texts (some of which are available in Arabic and in translation here) treat similar issues, ranging from the requirements of prayer to the rules of inheritance. The curriculum proceeds not thematically, but in levels of complexity; each text deals with the same issues in greater depth, meaning that the student who advances to the level of mastering the Risala (Epistle) of Ibn Abi Zaid al Qayrawani or the Mukhtasar (Compendium) of Khalil ibn Ishaq has a deep grasp of fiqh. Sheikhs often teach by parsing Arabic texts line by line in local languages until students have mastered each lesson; even at this stage, memorization can play a large role in learning.

By Abhimanyu Das

Namir Abdel Messeeh’s highly entertaining documentary The Virgin, the Copts and Me is a curious beast, a bit like one of those clever New Yorker articles that start off making you think it’ll be about Batman but end up being about the tax obligations of the 1%. Only, in this case, it’s not entirely clear whether the thematic sleight-of-hand was artistic choice or just lucky accident. Either way, this narrative slipperiness is both what’s interesting and troublesome about this frustrating picture, easy to like but difficult to recommend.

The saga begins with the French-Egyptian filmmaker (the family emigrated to France in 1973), sitting down with his family to watch a fuzzy videotape of an alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary. Further discussion reveals that this is one of a spate of such sightings, experienced mostly by the oft-persecuted Christian Coptic community in Egypt. Interestingly, a few Muslims had claimed to experience these holy visions as well. This curious cultural hook is all Messeeh – a secular skeptic – needs to decide on making a documentary about the phenomenon.

The film’s tendency toward distracting self-referentialism is already front-and-center. Messeeh spends a chunk of time ‘documenting’ his attempts to find a financier and win his family over to the project’s cause. All this is done with great comic flair. We get an early introduction to the most memorable character in the film – his domineering mother Siham who continually expresses doubts about her son’s ability to pull this off. Unfortunately, much of this feels staged. It seems unlikely that Messeeh happened to have an HD camera running at a family gathering during which he is hit by a perfectly blocked creative epiphany. The film is full of what look to be staged scenes, contrived narrative setups and pre-arranged dialogue, raising the question (unintentionally, in my view) of whether this is a documentary at all. Messeeh is in every scene, an unapologetic puppet-master. At every turn, the developments feel arranged as opposed to observed.

by Janaki Challa

“Countless contradictory analyses have seen the light of day about the ensuing bloody events in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, on whose embarrassing convolutions there  is no need to dwell. Because it is clear that what is above all missing from all the explanations is the human being. Or — if we can put it that way — the poet. Because the poet doesn’t get lost here either, where death has become customary. More precisely: where death appears, there the poet must put up his tent.”– Balint Szombathy

Summer of 2010. The FIFA World Cup was underway, and it was the first time Serbia was represented as an autonomous nation in the tournament. Serbia finally won a victory against Germany, 1-0. I still remember the vivid image on the TV screen–the team flailing their arms and embracing in excitement [many boys sat around]. But at a Bosnian mosque in Connecticut that hot afternoon, the atmosphere wilted under an awning of grief.

2010 was also the year Serbia offered an “official apology” for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre—what many call genocide—an institutionalized ethnic cleansing of over 8000 Bosnian Muslims. If one Googles Srebrenica, most pictures that appear are graphic photographs of charred and disfigured corpses, and defunct buildings that were used as sites for concentration camps. There, journalists and civilians documented thousands of makeshift graves, which appear as squares of land tessellated and separated by wooden beams. Over 30,000 Bosnian women and children were forcefully removed from the area, legal proof that this military action by the Serbian government was “of genocidal intent.” In 2004, Theodor Meron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said in an address at Potocari Memorial Cemetery that “by seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.” Secretary General Kofi Annan called this massacre “the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War.”

What does Rowan Williams’s resignation mean for American Anglicans?

By Daniel Schultz

Word reached us lately that the eyebrows of the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, had decided to step down at the age of 61, apparently taking the attached primate with them into an early retirement, or at least a return to the academic life as Master of Magdalene College. Perhaps not coincidentally, a little while later it came out that the Church of England was set to reject the Anglican Covenant, Williams’ pet project to bind together the far-flung theologies of the Anglican Communion in some way or another. Nobody was ever quite sure how. In any case, a defeat like this must have been hard to bear, even for Williams’ ordinarily indefatigable—not to mention gravity-defying—eyebrows. Little wonder he (and they) decided to light out for Oxford (update: Cambridge per the comments) while the getting was good.

What does Williams’ departure and the arrival of his successor mean for the average Christian in the United States? As with so much in the world of the church, the answer is: it depends.

At the moment, the bookmakers favor John Sentamu, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York, to replace Williams. But it’s not by much: Sentamu averages about a 50-50 shot from the houses willing to accept a wager on his ascension.

by Ashley Baxstrom

NYU Local reported last week that city students have a lot more to worry about than midterms and the rising price of lattes: dangerous CULTS want to steal your soul, body and money!

According to the post–less an article than a humorous piece, the author admitted to me–the Campus Safety website “warns that cult members may ‘[share] with you the answers they have found to life’s questions, they may seek to enlist your time, energy, and resources in endeavors they believe to be worthwhile.’” This comes from a section entitled “Tips for Identifying a Cult” (right under a section on “How to Avoid Common Swindles and Con Games”). Other tips include: to beware approaching strangers in Greenwich Village (um, how else am I supposed to get a date?) and to call the Center for Spiritual Life for assistance.

by Alex Thurston

In 1999, Nigeria made global headlines when Northern states began re-implementing “full shari’a,” i.e. Islamic law codes that included criminal penalties for acts like theft, adultery, and drinking alcohol. The shari’a project in Northern Nigeria caused further controversy when shari’a courts sentenced two accused adulteresses to death by stoning – sentences that higher courts, under domestic and international pressure, later overturned.

As the rebel movement Boko Haram again puts Nigeria back in the headlines, the country’s relationship with shari’a is attracting new attention. Boko Haram’s overall platform remains vague. One of its few stated demands, however, is for broader and stronger shari’a not just in Northern states, but across all of Nigeria. What does this mean? And what historical factors have made shari’a loom so large in Northern Nigerian politics?

By Fred Folmer

Should religious groups be allowed to worship in New York City public schools? This question is at the heart of an ongoing issue involving church leaders, congregants and public officials, who are challenging a decision by the Bloomberg administration and Department of Education to evict churches that use school buildings for their worship services. Although the churches have now been evicted from their spaces, questions about the wisdom and fairness of doing so certainly remain, and legislation to overturn the evictions is still pending.

The issue may on the surface appear to be a standard church-and-state dispute, and indeed some of the questions it raises–Should so-called religious groups be allowed to worship on public facilities as paying tenants? Does such a use violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause? What constitutes a “worship service,” anyway, and why does it entail special forms of legislative restriction?–are quite familiar to anyone who has followed such cases. But the issue also suggests something that receives far less attention from media, and is much harder to map easily onto boilerplate rhetoric about “separation of church and state”  This is so because it affects certain kinds of churches and populations, but also because the decision to evict the churches—whatever its stated intentions—could have a marked effect on the kind of religion that gets practiced in New York City.  And where it’s practiced, given that it drastically reduces the space available to nondenominational and evangelical congregations in a city in which real estate is famously hard to come by.

By Alex Thurston

Violence by Boko Haram, a rebel sect in Northern Nigeria that claims to be waging an Islamic jihad against the Nigerian state, has killed over 900 people since 2009, including over 250 in 2012 alone. Domestic and international analysts warn that pervasive insecurity in the country’s Northeast, and periodic strikes by Boko Haram in the capital Abuja and major cities like Kano, are weakening the legitimacy of President Goodluck Jonathan, who like many of his fellow Southern Nigerians is Christian (the North is primarily Muslim). Near-daily commentary speculates that Nigeria is “on the brink” – of civil war, of state failure, or of just plain being a mess. And yet in the South, where much of the country’s economic activity is located, business is going on more or less as usual. Oil is flowing at around two billion barrels per day. Citibank plans to double its investments in Nigeria, to $2 billion, in 2012. Growth, though down slightly from last year’s 7.7%, is projected at 7.2% for the year. The South has its own problems, but the different trajectories of North and South do raise a question about Boko Haram – is the movement just a Northern problem, or is it a national one?

The answer to this question will depend on the movement’s military and organizational capacity, but it will also depend on how the movement’s violence affects existing ethnic, religious, and regional fault lines in Nigeria. These fault lines exist both within the country’s two halves and between them.

By David Halperin

You are David Halperin.

It’s 1960, and you’re twelve going on thirteen, and although you’ve noticed for a while now that there are exciting differences between girls and boys, it’s only recently you’ve begun to grasp that this fact might have some relevance to you.  Your mother is sick with heart disease—slowly dying, though no one in your little suburban home dares to talk about that.

You and a friend are doing a project about flying saucers for science class.  You go to your local library and check out a book you’ve never heard of, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by a man named Gray Barker.  It looks like any book you might find in your school library.  It’s got an index, and even a bibliography, the entries composed the way you’ve been taught bibliography entries ought to be.  You take it home and begin reading.

Soon you’re riveted with fear.

You read about a seven-foot monster “worse than Frankenstein,” with glowing green face and red eyes, that landed on a West Virginia hilltop in 1952.  You read about a Connecticut man named Albert Bender, who in 1953 solved the flying saucer mystery and was visited by three men in black, who terrified him so he never would reveal the awful secret he’d discovered.  You pray God to protect you from all these horrors, seen and unseen; and it never crosses your mind to doubt what you’ve read, partly because it’s written in a LIBRARY BOOK and you trust library books, but also because you know first-hand that life has secrets and shadows so dreadful no one will speak of them.  You see them every day, as your mother withers away.

The past week has witnessed an escalating political crisis within the New York Police Department, sparked by the revelation that over a thousand officers viewed an Islamophobic film as part of a training exercise.  The Third Jihad (view trailer here) was produced by the Clarion Fund, a New York-based non-profit that first gained notoriety during the 2008 election season when it mailed thousands of unsolicited DVD copies of an earlier, similar film, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (view trailer here), to voters in swing states, presumably in the hope of influencing electoral college votes.  New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had denied earlier rumors concerning the widespread screening of the Third Jihad; more shockingly, Kelly himself makes a cameo as a talking head in the film, although he claims that he was not apprised that footage of the interview would be used in the film.   In the wake of the report concerning the screening of the film—Tom Robbins of the Village Voice first broke the story on January 19^th—Kelly issued an unprecedented public apology; while Mayor Bloomberg rushed to the commissioner’s defense, a variety of groups, including several Muslim organizations, continue to call for Kelly’s resignation.  Meanwhile, the film’s producers have vigorously redoubled their advocacy of The Third Jihad’s message, claiming that it only presents “the facts.”
The NYPD’s Third Jihad controversy presents many questions for those who track the politics of and about Islam in the contemporary United States.  For instance, one wonders what the airing of such a film in a “training”—presumably a context for teaching tactics and strategies in preventing crime—says about the institutional cultures of American police forces more generally.