Contesting Islam: 'Homegrown Wahhabism,' education and Muslim identity in northern Ghana, 1920--2005

This dissertation interrogates religious conflict in one West African country---Ghana--- between 1920 and 2005, by examining the educational initiatives of the "returnee" ulama and their role in the configuration of Muslim identity in northern Ghana. The "returnees" ulama benefited from the offer of scholarships and outreach programs from the Saudi and Egyptian governments' with the rationale to producing a university caliber cadre for da'wa activities and as the vehicle for integrating West African Muslims fully into the wider world of Islam. Throughout West Africa, the "returnee" ulama have emerged as a coveted class of elites with the full potential for the use of Arabic and improved Islamic education, established Islamic NGOs, and built Mosques. Yet, their discourse on aspects of religious practice and insistence on the proper processes for constructing Muslim identity, especially with regard to the complexity of locally derived answers to what it means to be Muslim and answers inspired by their network of relationships within the Muslim umma have been blamed for the long history of tension in the Muslim community.;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.