America and the production of Islamic truth in Uganda / Yahya Sseremba.

1. Introduction -- 2. Islam and the limits of centralization in late precolonial Buganda -- 3. Exclusion by inclusion: The Ugandan state and the Muslim subject -- 4. The madrasa as a site of the war on terror -- 5. The diminishing Muslim domain: America's prescriptions for Islamic education reform -- 6. Question formulators and data collectors: the production of knowledge about the madrasa -- 7. Salafism: the boogeyman of the war on terror -- 8. Africa as conceptual model: Ugandan thought and contemporary Islamic reform -- 9. Conclusion: Islam and decolonization.

"This book investigates American intervention in Islamic education in Uganda during the era of the war on terror. During this period, Muslim education moved from relative autonomy to direct state control and civil society scrutiny. During the colonial period, Muslims in Uganda were treated as lesser citizens within the Christian-dominated civil sphere. A local system of Islamic education developed with a degree of autonomy that reflected the limits of the colonial state in shaping the Muslim subject. In the subsequent postcolonial period, systems of patronage and clientalistic networks dominated, and Muslim leaders were co-opted by the state, but without much real interference in the day to day lives of Ugandan Muslims. However, during the war on terror, the US State Department sought to bring the mechanisms of Islamic truth production, especially the madrasa, under direct state control. This book argues that the separation of the Muslim domain has now come to an end as it is absorbed into civil society, unifying the state's domination of society in the postcolonial era. However, the book also analyses local Ugandan Muslim initiatives to modernise and contextualise their own education and religion and how these initiatives are shaped by and transcend the dominant power. A thorough exploration of US foreign policy and Islamic education, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Political Studies, African Studies and Religious Studies"-- Provided by publisher.