Contesting Islam: "Homegrown Wahhabism," Education and Muslim Identity in Northern Ghana, 1920--2005

283 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.The study argues that Wahhabism, the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia, was and in many ways remains, a homegrown religious phenomenon that built primarily on preexisting tensions in the northern Ghanaian Muslim society and that Middle Eastern and North African contact through pilgrimage, but especially outreach programs and educational provision only provided the ideological justification, the grammar, for reinterpreting the "common good" and for contextualizing localized forms of Islam. The study concludes that the notion of a general Muslim threat supposedly spreading throughout the northern parts of West Africa, including northern Ghana based on the preponderance of the "returnee" ulama and their control over and improvement of the pedagogy of what has become the reformed makaranta is over generalized. For the "returnees," theirs is and continue to be the struggle for survival in the post colony, as they grapple with recognition, employment, and the reconfiguration of Muslim authority.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD