Events

This paper explores a force of change within Islamic educational practices in Africa that has received very little scholarly attention to date: the ‘diaspora’. While the role that ‘returnees’ from the Arab countries have played for educational change on the continent has received due attention in the literature, little is known about the role of ‘returnees’ from Western countries, and on the ways in which African Muslim ‘diasporas’ influence Islamic educational practices in their homelands more widely. Drawing on data collected among Senegalese migrants in New York and New Jersey, and in Islamic schools receiving migrants’ children in Dakar in Senegal, this paper seeks to step into this gap. It explores why many Senegalese migrants decide to send their children ‘back’ to Senegal for their education, and it describes how this ‘diaspora’ demand has contributed to the emergence of a new type of school there that is both Islamic and international in outlook. Lite lunch provided.