Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa: Secular Erasure, School Preference and Social Inequality

I will present my first monograph 'Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa' (Routledge 2025). The book began with my doctorate in anthropology at the University of Sussex (defended in 2015) which provided an account of educational decision-making in northern Senegal based on long-term ethnography (2010-2012). I documented how Muslim families navigated between secular state schools and a variety of unaccredited Islamic schools in an educational landscape permeated by the legacies of French colonisation and secularism. However, my thesis did not include all the elements of the story that I wanted to tell. I spent the next ten years grappling with personal experiences and observations of the ways in which other-than-secular ontological perspectives are marginalised within elite sites of knowledge production in academia and international development. The book represents the culmination of this process of reflection and grounded theorising by presenting a framework based on the concept of coloniality of secularity (coined by philospher of religion Rafael Vizcaíno) which captures how the ignoring or silencing of faith-based perspectives intersects with other modernist/colonialist inequalities. This results in the reproduction of secular biases and racist and Orientalist tropes within discussions concerning Islamic education in West Africa that are manifest in academic theorising, international education debates and national education policies. I reveal how Senegalese Muslims strive to access an Islamic education that they value to overcome legacies of colonisation but also local hierarchies based on gender, descent/caste/race and socioeconomic inequalities. Finally, I suggest how decolonial principles could be applied to research, policy-making and programme design in order to fully embrace African and Islamic knowledges and the individuals versed in these intellectual traditions. I will also provide concrete insights for prospective book authors on finding an appropriate publisher, bridging the descriptive/prescriptive divide in social science disciplines, and finding your authentic voice to resist (self-)censorship.