Conservative Islam and Politics: Examining the Role of Arab Foreign Education

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Abstract

Over the last fifty years, Islamic fundamentalism, marked by scripturalism and an emphasis on purification of Islamic customs, has emerged in sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by this seismic transformation, this paper examines how and why Islamic fundamentalism emerged in African countries. I argue that Arab countries’ soft power strategies, specifically recruitment of Africans for study in Islamic educational institutions in Arab countries, has served as a key channel for the diffusion of conservative ideas from the Arab world into African countries. Using original measures of foreign training and fundamentalist Islam, I employ cross-sectional and event study analysis to find that foreign training increases the likelihood that fundamentalist social and political organizations emerge. Using the test case of Sudan, I also find evidence that foreign training is correlated with the success of fundamentalist political parties at the sub-national level.

Author

• Aala Abdelgadir, Stanford University