Quranic Schools in Northern Nigeria: Everyday Experiences of Youth, Faith, and Poverty

In a global context of widespread fears over Islamic radicalisation and militancy, poor Muslim youth, especially those socialised in religious seminaries, have attracted overwhelmingly negative attention. In northern Nigeria, male Qur'anic students have garnered a reputation of resorting to violence in order to claim their share of highly unequally distributed resources. Drawing on material from long-term ethnographic and participatory fieldwork among Qur'anic students and their communities, this book offers an alternative perspective on youth, faith, and poverty. Mobilising insights from scholarship on education, poverty research and childhood and youth studies, Hannah Hoechner describes how religious discourses can moderate feelings of inadequacy triggered by experiences of exclusion, and how Qur'anic school enrolment offers a way forward in constrained circumstances, even though it likely reproduces poverty in the long run. A pioneering study of religious school students conducted through participatory methods, this book presents vital insights into the concerns of this much-vilified group.

Author: Hannah Hoechner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/15/2018
Pages: 286
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.29lbs
Size: 9.27h x 6.37w x 0.72d
ISBN: 9781108425292

About the Author
Hoechner, Hannah: - "Hannah Hoechner is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and a research associate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford and has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Nigeria, Senegal, and the US. Her work has been published in Africa, Children's Geographies, Qualitative Research, the International Journal for Social Research Methodology, the European Journal of Development Research, and Afrique Contemporaine. As part of her work in Nigeria, she has produced the participatory docu-drama 'Duniya Juyi Juyi - How Life Goes', which won the AFRICAST 2012 Special Award 'Participatory Video for Development'."