‘Some people are so afraid to develop children spiritually’, explained a teacher trainer at the Aga Khan Foundation's Madrasa Pre-School programme in Zanzibar. ‘It means to be kind, not rude, not to take others’ things, to respect others,’ she continued. ‘They think maybe we are teaching them to be terrorists, but it is not true.’ The Madrasa Pre-School programme is one initiative among many by Islamic organizations in Zanzibar that seek to redraw the boundaries of religious and secular educational structures, recasting ‘secular’ subjects as part of Islamic knowledge and the madrasa as a site of knowledge and learning more broadly. These programmes are in direct contrast to British colonial education reforms that introduced public government schooling in the hope of displacing local Qur’ānic schools, which they deemed as antiquated, unhygienic, and ‘deadening’ to the intellect. As with petitioning parent associations in the 1920s, contemporary religious educators are put in a position where they must push back against dominant portrayals that homogenize their schools and present them as purveyors of ‘backwardness’, instead emphasizing the relevance of Islamic education to personal and societal progress.

‘Madrasas’ enter contemporary Euro-American media and political discourse as a space of the past, of entombed tradition antagonistic to modernity, and at its most extreme, as ‘breeding grounds for terrorists’. This portrayal of Islamic schools has a lengthy history. British colonial officials in Zanzibar in the early twentieth century, for example, regarded Islamic schools as a ‘block to progress’, and made every effort to close them down in favour of their own schools. Yet despite this representation as having ‘existed for centuries’ just as they are, Islamic knowledge transmission in Zanzibar has taken many forms, shifted over time, and been indelibly affected by dominant ideologies of imperial and global processes. Reflecting this, and quite the opposite of these prevalent portrayals, the work of some contemporary madrasas in Zanzibar is embedded within a global discourse of ‘development/progress’ (maendeleo) – even if reworking the concept by rejecting a sacred/secular divide, expanding it to include ‘development for the afterlife’, and understanding social and economic progress within the ‘complete system’ (mfumo mzima) of Islam. Examining the shifting forms of a site identified with ‘tradition’, even by many Muslims, questions popular understandings of a concept often associated with rigidity and the past, while locating the madrasa as a site that is fluid, historically contextualized, and embedded within popular ideologies and concepts.