By Zakariya Wright

This article was originally written for a Northwestern University graduate seminar in Cultural History. Although concentrating on Muslim Africa, the significant tension over how exactly to transmit Islamic knowledge in the modern age is applicable to the Muslim world more broadly.

 In a recent study of Muslim schooling in Mali, Louis Brenner maintains that Muslims have experienced an epistemic shift in conceptualizing Islamic knowledge through the experience of colonialism. Drawing heavily on Foucault to discuss an episteme as an underlying "structure of thought" which dictates discourse or savoir, Brenner describes how West African Muslim discourses on knowledge were determined by an "esoteric" episteme in the pre-colonial context. Later, Islamic knowledge could only be acceptably used in the public arena through recourse to a new "rational" episteme.1 While numerous writers on the Muslim world have written about the decline of "traditional" Islamic understandings and the rise of "modern" or even "political" Islam, Brenner is noteworthy in his use of Foucault to describe the process of colonialism as having engendered an epistemic shift among Muslims. Brenner's claim of epistemic shift can be used to examine changes in understandings of Islam within Muslim Africa. Through such an expanded analysis, this article attempts to test the efficacy of Brenner's conception of an epistemic shift towards rationality.

 Although African Muslims did not simply reproduce European understandings of their own Islamic tradition, the experience of colonialism certainly provoked new understandings, particularly in the field of knowledge transmission. But such reconstructions were not totalizing enough to merit Brenner's conception of an "epistemic shift", as Western-influenced paradigms did not completely eclipse pre-colonial understandings, even if they may be seen as temporarily ascendant or hegemonic. Moreover, it is not exactly clear that "rational" is the best way to describe the breadth of the new dominant discourse on Islamic knowledge. A more precise way of describing the colonially-engendered hegemonic discourse on Islamic knowledge would be the disembodiment or de-personalization of knowledge transmission. The result among those who have been influenced by this process is an Islamic tradition consciously constructed on the basis of reified memorials, rather than a tradition that is "lived".

 Colonialism's effect on the culture and religion2 of the colonized has provoked substantial debate among scholars. With such easily identifiable developments as the bureaucratic state, the market economy, or urbanization; the political, economic or even social changes occasioned by colonialism are much easier to read than the cultural. Scholarly explanation of colonialism's effect on local cultures ranges from the creation of "alternative modernities" by African agents3 to the wholesale "colonization of the subconscious" of African subjects through such things as Western education, European dress and regulation of time.4 But the quest to (re)insert the obscured agency of African subjects should not detract from the cultural violence occasioned by colonialism. As Sandra Greene has remarked in her study of Akan speakers in Ghana, "colonialism generated more than simply a myriad set of alter(native) modernities. It also -- in some instances -- transformed the very terms by which many of the colonized understood themselves..." The colonial encounter thus "produced both myriad 'modernities' and more profound epistemological shifts."5

 In speaking of ways people in a particular culture and time organize knowledge according to a dominant "episteme", writers such as Brenner and Greene readily acknowledge the influence of French theorist Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, "The episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norm and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape6 The dominant "Modern" episteme from the European Enlightenment until the arrival of the post-Modern present has included, according to Alan Munslow's reading of Foucault, the idea of "Man as both an empirical and deductive animal."7

 According to Brenner, rationality was thus the dominant element of the West's Modern episteme that occasioned a shift in Muslim consciousness through the experience of colonialism. Foucault himself, it is interesting to note in his writings about the 1979 Iranian revolution, believed Islam to be an "irreducible force" beyond modern rationality that led Iranians to reject "modernization". Islamic society was thus for Foucault impervious to epistemic shift, as it remained enamored by "political spirituality" (as opposed to rationality) and dominated by "forms of life which have been immobile for a millennium."8 Brenner delocalizes Foucault's structure of epistemic shift, which apparently only provides for the movement of European societies through time, in order to interrogate changing notions of Islamic knowledge in modern Mali. Modernity of course does look the same in Muslim Africa as it does in Europe or America, nor should the West be ascribed the role of sole generator of the modern.9 However, Brenner cautions, Western institutions and educational practices brought to Muslim Africa within the context of the unequal power relations in colonial and post-colonial Africa "cannot fail to affect how religious knowledge is presented, transmitted and received."10

 The context of Islamic schooling in Mali provides a window to view the spread and effect of a new way of approaching Islamic knowledge. Muslim reformists -- often "young men dislodged from local social and religious contexts"11 -- rejected more traditional "esoteric" forms of knowledge transmission found in Qur'an schools (kutab), mosque-learning circles (majlis) and the Sufi orders (tariqa). Instead they adopted a system of Arabic-based education called the medersa, thereby replicating and adapting previous models instituted in the early twentieth century by the French to co-opt and direct the course of Islamic education. In both the French and reformist cases, the medersa system circumscribed specifically religious subjects by putting such learning in dialogue with an increasingly crowded class schedule dominated by secular subjects such as math, science, (Western) philosophy, history or economics.12

 Traditionally, knowledge was "intimately related to devotional praxis" and was acquired through personal transmission from a teacher who simultaneously embodied or personified both knowledge and devotion. But the medersa movement de-sacrilized the teacher and promoted a more rational and egalitarian approach to Islamic knowledge "conceptually compatible with other forms of non-religious knowledge."13 Those who continued to be educated within the traditional "esoteric" system were relegated from positions of power both during and after colonialism.14 The end result was the increasing inability to claim religious authority with recourse to "esoteric" validation (having studied with such and such a teacher or having received initiation through visionary experience), and the framing of all Islamic agendas within a dominant discourse of secular ideals such as progress, development, democracy, freedom or individual autonomy.15 The medersa schools were thus reflective and constitutive of the new rational episteme that was instrumental in creating a new kind of Muslim subject.16  

 Brenner never claims his findings apply elsewhere outside of Mali, and indeed, the medersa movement was apparently stronger in Mali than elsewhere in West Africa. But other Africanist scholars have likewise spoken of a sort of epistemic shift through colonialism and modernity in terms that foreground rationality. Ousmane Kane's study of an influential Muslim reform movement in Nigeria is more nuanced than Brenner's work in specifically questioning the applicability of Stuart Hall's description of modernity as including the "decline of the religious world-view typical of traditional societies and the rise of secular and materialist culture" to Muslim societies in Africa. But Kane nonetheless traces the reformists' "egalitarian" emphasis on the individual's direct access to religious texts, an expansion of democratic space and a marginalization of esoteric or Sufi approaches to Islamic knowledge often mediated by elites claiming direct access to the unseen world.17 Saba Mahmood observes that radical Egyptian Islamist reconstruction of Islamic knowledge -- and criticism of the West and the secular state -- take place "within discourses that are indebted to the extension of the secular-liberal project itself."18 Likewise, Salafi reformers in Egypt were inspired by Western notions of progress and stressed a new "practical" Islamic epistemology in order to construct "subjects who would transform themselves in conformity with progressive notions of historicity and autonomous agency."19 Other scholars of non-Muslim Africa likewise speak of a new distinctively "Western", "secular" or "linear epistemology" in African societies as a result of the colonial encounter.20

 What emerges is a somewhat uneven but nonetheless visible picture of epistemic change through the colonial and post-colonial period. To name but the few examples mentioned above, this new episteme has been variously described as rational (Brenner), egalitarian (Kane), secular (Mahmood), progressive (Gasper) or linear (Jewsiewick and Mudimbe). Obviously it is difficult to generalize on the basis of such diverse contexts of Islamic and African experiences with colonialism. But rationality is clearly an element in all the epistemological changes observed in the studies mentioned above. Moreover, Brenner has done important work in locating a shifting epistemology in specific institutions and explaining how the new approach to Islamic knowledge permeated larger Malian Islamic discourses through medersa graduates' privileged access to state and economic resources and control over public media through literacy. But is "rational" the best way to describe this new epistemology? Or, for that matter, are descriptions such as "secular", "egalitarian" or "linear" any better?

 In an otherwise laudatory review of Brenner's work, Robert Launay offered the insightful critique that "Rationalism is arguably a misleading concept", since it does not speak directly to the most crucial shift in educational techniques: "the precolonial system of transmission was intrinsically personalized, as opposed to the depersonalized and disembodied paradigm of knowledge shared by the merdersas and the state schools."21 Although Brenner does attempt to subsume the aspect of knowledge transmission within his conception of esoteric versus rational, as mentioned above, the shift from embodied to disembodied Islamic knowledge seems to have little to do with an esoteric versus rational episteme. Indeed, "rational" forms of Islamic knowledge (such as jurisprudence, grammar and theology) were transmitted long before the arrival of colonial modernity in the Muslim world, as Brenner himself admits.22 This did not prevent teachers from transmitting such "rational" sciences through forms of initiation indicating the teacher's profound personification or embodiment of the science in question.23

 The individual's ability to have unmediated access to a disembodied text -- which largely only becomes possible with the arrival of colonial modernity -- deserves closer scrutiny. Such a shift is observable in structural terms in the eclipse of the system of isnad (attribution), silsilah (chain), and ijaza (license) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Muslim world. Isnad and silsilah refer to the chain of scholars through which knowledge was transmitted, a chain which in many cases goes back to the author of a text or to the Prophet Muhammad himself. Ijaza is a form of license indicating that a student has not only mastered the meaning of a text or practice, but has implemented it in his or her own life.

 The medersa system prevalent in Mali and similarly evidenced throughout the Muslim world (the famous Azhar Islamic university in Egypt adopted a similar curriculum) is clearly the primary institutional form responsible for undermining traditional methods of knowledge transmission. Muslims could now make interpretations and claim religious authority on the basis of institutional affiliation rather than personal connections. In effect, Islamic leaders could emerge who did not possess any claims to personal religious piety or spiritual authority. It is no accident that many of the world's most notorious Muslim leaders claiming Islam to justify radical political and social action themselves possess little in the way of traditional Islamic education, or even more than a very rudimentary understanding of the nuances of Islamic bodies of knowledge.24

 In a precolonial context, Islamic knowledge from and of the past might be best described as a lived memory embodied or constantly reenacted in the present. Such a concept of knowledge is quite consciously "ahistorical" (though no less adaptive or changing), implicitly rejecting the modern reification of the past in "sites of memory". According to Pierre Nora, entry into the modern entailed the "end of societies assuming transmission of collectively remembered values." Premodern communities thus live their memories, drawn from a "milieu de mémoire" (medium of memory), whereas modern societies look to history -- "the reconstitution of what no longer exists" -- encapsulated in objectified "lieux de mémoire" (sites of memory).25

 Giorgio Agamben referred to this phenomenon simply as the loss of the ability to transmit a tradition into the present: "Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to enter into a relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on."26 In the context of Muslim Africa, one might conclude that as long as memory or tradition is lived or embodied in people it remains a matrix or milieu and can be transferred more or less intact to successive generations. But when knowledge becomes depersonalized and disembodied in institutions, texts, and ideologies, it becomes more of a site of memory. Islamic knowledge in such a context must be reconstituted or recreated for each new generation.

 It is thus possible that colonialism in Muslim Africa did indeed engender an epistemic shift in understanding the Islamic tradition; not from esoteric to rational, but from medium to site, memory to history; or from embodied to disembodied knowledge. It is here, rather than in the dividing line between esoteric and rational, hierarchal and egalitarian, sacred and secular, cyclical and linear, or regressive and progressive, that the contours of a new structure of thought can be more easily traced. To different degrees in different areas of Muslim Africa, the silsilah or ijaza system and the phenomenon of embodied knowledge no longer dominates discourses on Islamic knowledge.

 But as such outlines emerge with greater distinction, it is also clear that this new "episteme" is far from totalizing. There appears to be a persistence and even increasing influence of Sufi orders and other "institutions" of traditional learning (such as schools for Qur'an memorization or majlis settings with scholars possessing an ijaza) around the Muslim world, especially in places like Senegal and Morocco. But even if the changes in conceptualizing Islamic knowledge cannot be described as "epistemic", at least the tension between two distinct and competing forms of education and knowledge transmission identifies perhaps the most important point of tension in Muslim Africa, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, since the colonial period. As a point of tension or field of struggle, perhaps a more useful model of changing discourses through the process of colonialism would be Gramsci's idea of hegemony as a locus of conflict or crisis, rather than the Foucaldian notion of epistemic shift.27

 The struggle to resist a new epistemology stressing a disembodied form of Islamic knowledge was not lost on African Muslims themselves. When the Senegalese Sufi leader and Islamic scholar, al-Hajj Abdoulaye Niasse (d. 1922) reentered Senegal after participating in the late nineteenth-century jihads and subsequent exile in Gambia to escape French intrigue, the colonial authorities inquired from him whether or not he would start trouble with the French. Al-Hajj Abdoulaye replied, "I am not fighting the French, for there is nothing they possess that I want, and I am not interested in their positions and their money. But what I want is that they do not take my children to the French schools. My children must learn what I know, and when I am gone, they must be able to continue teaching Islam."28

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1. Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge: religion, power and schooling in a West African Muslim society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2001), p. 6-7.

2. Following Brenner's argument for a "religious-cultural system", I am taking religion and culture to be mutually constitutive to the degree that distinction between the two in an Islamic or African context seems redundant.

3. See, among others, Ousmane Kane, Muslim Modernity in Postcolonial Nigeria: a study of the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 5-6. For more theoretical background to the concept of alternative modernities, see Dilip Goankar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999).

4. Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 15, 314.

5. Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: a history of meaning and memory in Ghana (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2002), p. 6, 13.

6. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge; cited in Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 6.

7. Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 133.

8. Michel Foucault; cited in Ian Almond, "'The Madness of Islam': Foucault's Occident and the Revolution in Iran," in Radical Philosophy, vol. 128 (November/December, 2004), p. 18-20.

9. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000), p. 4.

10. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 12.

11. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 84.

12. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 15-16.

13. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 7, 12, 20.

14. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 17.

15. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 297.

16. Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, p. 11.

17. Ousmane Kane, Muslim modernity in postcolonial Nigeria: a study of the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Reinstatement of Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 238-246.

18. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005), p. 191.

19. Michael Gasper, "Abdallah al-Nadim, Islamic Reform, and 'Ignorant' Peasants: State-Building in Egypt?" in Armando Salvatore (ed.), Muslim Traditions and Modern Techniques of Power (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2001), p. 85.

20. B. Jewsiewick and V.Y. Mudimbe, "Africans' memories and contemporary history of Africa," in History and Theory (Massachusetts: Wesleyan University, 1993), p. 5-6.

21. Robert Launay, review of Louis Brenner, Controlling Knowledge, in Africa Today, vol. 50, no. 1 (2003), p. 123.

22. Brenner, Controlling KNowledge, p. 20.

23. For a discussion of how Islamic jurisprudence was embodied in teachers and transmitted through initiation and imitation rather than texts, see Marion Holmes Katz, Body of Text: the emergence of the Sunni law of ritual purity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 98; or for similar processes in regards to theology, see an earlier work by Brenner, Reflexions sur la savoir islamique en Afrique de l'Ouest (Talence, France: Centre d'etude d'Afrique noire, Institut d'etudes politiques, 1985), p. 55-77.

24. This is obvious enough with Osama Ben Laden, whose justification for declaring war on America is simply that America has declared war on Islam. But it is also true for nearly every Islamist or Salafi leader in the twentieth century. See Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 81.

25. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire," in Representations, 26 (Spring, 1989), p. 7-9.

26. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (1994); cited in Michael Lambek, The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 256.

27. For a discussion of Gramscis notion of hegemony in relation to African cultural history, see Jonathan Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), p. 17-19.

28. Author's Interview with Shaykh Hassan Cisse, Medina-Baye Kaolack, Senegal, August, 1997.