Yahya Sseremba. America and the Production of Islamic Truth in Uganda. New York: Routledge, 2023. 216 pp. $136.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781032412085.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Postcolonial scholarship is undergoing a conceptual crisis on the discourse of colonialism, with a number of scholars emphasizing African agency in colonial modernity and others even suggesting that decolonization is a grandiose project.In attempting to rewrite the history of colonialism, an emerging scholarship further claims that premodern societies were also colonial.Colonialism is thus fashioned not only as modern and Western but also premodern and non-Western.This claim to a universal character of colonialism results from a translation of every form of power as colonial, and therefore misconstruing any form of social or political domination as colonialism.The universalization of colonial modernity is then recast as a question on the relevance of the contemporary decolonization project, conceiving it as yet another racializing consciousness.In fact, these postcolonial thinkers often invite us to shift our focus away from the legacy of the modern West because it shares no ideological difference from its non-Western other but to rather locate the problem of the postcolonial states in the African elite who have failed democracy.Yahya Sseremba's America and the Production of Islamic Truth is a writing back against the vindication of the modern West in the political crisis of the postcolony.He examines the postcolonial state in Africa and the world to emphasize Western modernity's remaking of the world we have inherited through fashioning both traditional and religious customs of the colonized world.Focusing on Uganda and the Muslim minority question, Sseremba observes how America is completing the work of the British colonial state in inventing Islam.He contends that the British colonial state corrupted the Shari'ah, created Mohammedan law and fashioned Muslim homelands but had failed to comprehensively reshape the Kabalaza (the "informal school") from where Islamic religious education was conducted and teachers and preachers of Islam also trained.The survival of the Kabalaza enabled Muslims to continue interpreting Islam according to their circumstances even in the postcolonial era.In postcolonial Uganda, the Kabalaza continued expanding into the Madrasa (the formal school) which also remained a target of state scrutiny.The modern state has always thought of Madrasas as sites of indoctrination with extremist, intolerant, and terrorist ideas.The aftermath of the 9/11 attack on America produced a more comprehensive anti-Islam agenda through the ideology of the war on terror.The US-led war on terror in which America imagines itself as exorcising Islam of violence amplified the fear of the Madrasa and thus activated a Madrasa education reform.
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.210
Author: Jacob Katumusiime
Institution: Makerere University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4405374734