Book Review: America and the Production of Islamic Truth in Uganda by Yahya Sseremba (ISBN 9781032412085), 2023; London and New York, Routledge, 216 pp.
How should we read Yahya Sseremba’s America and the Production of Islamic Truth in Uganda? Sseremba’s book is a critical reminder of the legacies of colonialism that are still shaping the world we have inherited. It is a book on power and subjection. Whereas Sseremba’s focus might be on Islamic thought, Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic education in Uganda, the lessons to be learned are intended for the rest of Africa, and the rest of the world. Most striking in Sseremba’s illumination is that the work which the British started in the attempt to colonize Islamic thought, the Americans are completing. America’s ‘War on Terror’ can be imagined as the new claim to a Civilizing mission. What form of civilization are the Americans exporting to their ‘inherited’ colonies? It is one in which the predominant feature of hegemony is not only coercion but also consent. Consent is sought through conscripting the colonized in projects of fashioning and refashioning truths about their traditions – in this case, religious traditions. Sseremba exposes how apart from the violence of the war on terror, the production of truths about Islam is a complementary and pervasive logic of governing the masses. In its evolution, the war on terror has often come off as a war on Islam. If the violence of the state has concentrated on the Muslim subjects, the truth-making machine of the state aims at Islamic scriptures.
How does the contemporary Islamic truth-making machine operate? Sseremba points us to the US Department of State, which is attempting to institute a state body that seeks to regulate all Madrassas in Uganda. It desires to have one curriculum for all Madrassas. Why is focus on the Madrassa? The Americans claim that it is in these schools that Muslims learn intolerance, extremism and terrorism. In viewing the Madrassa as sites of indoctrination, America’s suggested solution is therefore to reform Islamic education through the state itself superintending the production of Islamic truth, from the scriptures to curriculum. While Islam was always a praxis of diversity and contradictions, the American empire views the diversity of Islamic thought as dangerous and thus desires to size it down. Sseremba emphasizes that, ‘the logic of the modern state which requires a uniform interpretation of the law, could not harmonize with Islamic law, which can accommodate multiple interpretations of the law on a single issue.’ (2023: 178)
The American assault on the Islamic tradition is in line with a long tradition of the modern colonial state, in which it sought to dominate society through centralizing and monopolizing every authority. Institutions within society were thus often turned into institutions of the state. Islam is one of the institutions within society which the colonial regime has sought to turn into an institution of the state through centralizing it and monopolizing it. Sseremba views even institutions such as the Muslim Center for Justice and Law which seek to place all Madrassas under the authority of the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council as serving the monopoly desire of the modern colonial state. With America’s invention of a new Islamic tradition, the modern state manages to shape governable and self-governing subjects.
Sseremba observes how even the most sophisticated and most critical traditional-leaning of Islamic thinkers, such as Mohammed Ahmed Kisuule, remain conscripted in a modern colonial episteme, in their re-imagination of the future of Islam in Uganda. When Kisuule proposes to reform Islam through the creation of a central authority to determine who preaches and teaches Islam, an authority which would define who becomes a Sheikh, Sseremba reminds us that it is modern colonial state that often seeks to monopolize the authority to make, interpret, and enforce the law. Kisuule critiques knowledge and fails to critique the institution with which he seeks to entrust the knowledge. Whereas the book is a critique of modern colonial power, it is also a critique of native agency’s uncritical reception of European modernity. Can we think of a modernity beyond Europe? In what context is the possibility of a contemporary Muslim thinker, most often produced and shaped by colonial institutions, able to overcome the logic of thinking with colonial modernity? Whereas Sseremba’s book remains an illustration of how hard it is to imagine identity beyond colonial modernity, he offers insights in the decolonization of the state and society. In an era where the decolonization discourse is divided over which method should come first between epistemic and political decolonization, Sseremba reminds us that since knowledge and political institutions have a dialectical relationship, decolonization has to be simultaneously epistemic and political. In reflecting on a global question of contemporary Islamic thought and reform, Sseremba further opens a conversation on the possibility of an African-rooted universal – a concept whose theorization would be a timely manifesto for the decolonization movement.
