Page 47 - 2020 SoMJ Vol 73 No 2_Neat

38 The Society of Malaŵi Journal

they dispersed around the country and in this way promoted the spread of Islam
beyond its regions of origin.
While the policy of the Colonial Government was to try to remain neutral
in matters of religion, the establishment of Islam that has been described was
accomplished in the face of determined competition from the Christian missionary
churches. Although the efforts and activities of the missionaries, especially their
control of education, did much to inhibit the spread of Islam, even among the Yao,
beyond the areas where Islam had already been established, the churches proved
relatively powerless to win over people who had chosen to be Muslims. The 1931
Nyasaland Government Census reckoned that Muslims constituted 8.4% of the
country’s population, though this may well have been an underestimation. By that
time Muslim communities with their distinctive Islamic way of life and identity
had become firmly established.
One very significant choice that the overwhelming majority of Muslims
made during the colonial era concerned education. During this period, if they
wished their children to have schooling, two avenues were open to Muslim parents
or guardians. The first was the Islamic education available from the Shaykhs and
amwalimu at the madrassas that they supervised, where their children would be
taught mainly to transliterate Arabic and recite the Qur’an. The second was that
of western education, which along with teaching about Christianity, offered
literacy, numeracy and technical skills. This sort of schooling could give access
to positions of influence, prestige and relative prosperity as teachers, clerks,
technicians and minor government officials in the wage-earning sector of the
colonial economy.
The Muslim communities almost unanimously rejected the option of
western education because, in the colonial era, it was offered almost exclusively
by the Christian missions, who used the education they offered to promote the
Christianity of their own denomination. Muslims, with justification, regarded the
teaching, and the whole environment of the Christian schools as being hostile to
their faith and as something which could take their children away from their
families, their culture and their religion. That Muslims did not reject western
education for itself is made clear by representations by Muslim chiefs in 1916 and
1928 to have the Government provide schools for Muslim children, by attempts
by individual Muslims to provide western education in the 1940s and the setting
up of the Central Body for Muslim Education in the mid-1950s to control and look
after Muslim education free of Christian influence. However, in spite of these
efforts very few Muslims in the colonial period took advantage of western
education, and those who did sometimes gave up their Islamic faith.
Malawi’s Muslim communities paid a significant social and economic
cost for their virtual boycott of Christian controlled western schooling. As the
wage earning sector of the colonial economy expanded and new opportunities
opened for those who possessed western education, Muslims found themselves at