Saudi Propagation in Africa: Education and Islamic Reform among Zanzibar’s Sufi-Salafis

The head teacher of Zanzibar’s largest Islamic school described his experience at the Islamic University of Medina: “We swallow the sweet and spit out the bitter,” Founded within an Indian Ocean Sufi order, his school mirrored East African cultural customs such as communal prayer and ancestor reverence. However, in Medina, he was taught that these practices were polytheistic and apostate in Islam. He returned home with conservative Salafi textbooks authored specifically for Africans which derided amulets, divination, and magic, considered stereotypical practices within “African Islam.” This paper analyzes the Arabic curriculum of Saudi’s program of Islamic propagation in Africa, alongside the Swahili teacher-talk that transforms it in the classroom. In contrast to narratives of “blanket radicalization” from study in Saudi Arabia that present African Muslims as passive recipients of the new orthodoxy, East African teachers engage in creative adaptations that “sweetens” Salafism for integration within communal Sufi ethical formations.