PhD defence by Siga Maguiraga
Contemporary narratives often locate the origins of global student mobility in colonial modernity. This dissertation challenges that assumption by tracing a much older Islamic practice of the quest for knowledge (talab al-‘ilm), pursued by Central Sahelian Muslims in Cairo, particularly at al-Azhar mosque, which stood as Egypt’s major center of Islamic learning from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.
Drawing on transregional archives spanning Egypt, West Africa, France, Britain and North Africa, including administrative records, consular documents, correspondence, biographical materials, and Al-Azhar institutional sources, the study examines how the quest for Islamic knowledge was reorganised during the era of Ottoman reforms and colonial empires from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. It addresses how Central Sahelian seekers of knowledge (tullāb al-‘ilm) navigated overlapping forms of authority and control based on age, gender, imperial governance, or social background. Rather than treating Sahelian Muslims as passive objects of colonial governance or simply recipients of Middle Eastern Islamic influence, the dissertation foregrounds them as mobile actors who negotiated, adapted, and strategically engaged with institutions. In doing so, the study challenges the narratives that portray Sub-Saharan Africa as isolated or peripheral to the wider Muslim world.
Using a global microhistorical approach, the study recovers actors often marginalised in the history of Islamic scholarly mobility. Alongside prominent scholars, it foregrounds women, enslaved persons, social juniors, and children, whose labour and social networks sustained scholarly mobility.
By shifting attention from reformist elites to ordinary seekers of knowledge and their everyday experiences of institutional change, the dissertation also rethinks the history of al-Azhar itself. Far from being only the objects of debates among prominent scholars, Al-Azhar’s modernisation impacted those on the margins, shaping bureaucratic classification, welfare provision, residence, and nationality of outsider seekers, including those from the Central Sahel.