Page 41 - SoMJ Vol 74 - No 1, 2021

Malawi’s Muslims In The Era Of Multi-Party Democracy 31

general public that they should seek advice from qualified Muslims before making
pronouncements. It appealed to all in society to think of themselves as Malawians
first and then as members of their faith communities, and to Muslims at all times
to exercise restraint, endurance and self-control.
The second concerns the 1999 election campaign. Despite the plea in the
fatwa of the previous year, the election campaign politicised Islam once more
when opponents claimed that the President had used foreign money to further an
Islamist agenda. What was different from 1994 was that, in the aftermath of the
President’s re-election, there was in the Northern Region a series of attacks on
mosques and people from the Southern Region. Though this hostility was mainly
directed at the UDF it was Muslims who, fairly indiscriminately, bore the brunt
of it. The Muslim leadership successfully dampened down any danger of a violent
reaction. However, the fact that the violence had taken place, what they saw as a
lack of urgency in the response of the police and the lukewarm condemnation of
the attacks from the majority of Malawi’s Christian church leaders added to
Muslims’ perception of the hostility of other elements in society, and of their own
lack of security.
A third incident came from an attempt by the Government Department
of Education in 2000 to replace, at secondary school level, the study of Bible
Knowledge with that of Religious and Moral Studies, which included teaching
about Malawi’s three major religious traditions, Christianity, Islam and African
Traditional Religion. The process which led to this change had started in the
Banda era and the proposed syllabus, having been developed by educationists
from a variety of religious backgrounds, had gone through the regular channels.
However, as the President and the Minister of Education were both Muslims at
the time it was implemented, despite similar changes having been made at primary
level, without opposition, in President Banda’s time, this move was construed by
sections of the Christian churches as part of a plan to Islamise Malawi. They
managed to make the issue so controversial and lobbied so hard that the President
felt pressured into suspending the implementation of the new syllabus.
Muslims, on the other hand had generally welcomed the change as at last
giving their religion its rightful place within the secondary school system. When
the new syllabus was suspended, some groups were only dissuaded from taking
to the streets in protest by a combination of firm police action and the restraining
influence of the Muslims’ national leadership. Though a compromise was
arranged whereby schools could choose which syllabus to teach, this incident once
more confirmed the belief of many Muslims that what they saw as the Christian
establishment would lose no opportunity to use their influence to keep them
marginalised.
The fourth incident had a global dimension. In April 2000, as part of the
United States of America’s so called ‘War or Terror’, five Muslim foreign
nationals residing in the city of Blantyre were arrested at the behest of the United