title: Being a "Good Muslim": The Muslim Students' Society of Nigeria (MSSN), Islamic Reform and Religious Change in Yorubaland, 1954 - 2014
Creators: name: Balogun, Adeyemi
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Africa, Christian-Muslim encounter, discursive tradition, good Muslim, history, IIFSO
subject: Islamic education
subject: Islamic movement
subject: Islamic reform
subject: Islam, modernity
subject: MSS
subject: Muslim elite
subject: Muslim Students Society of Nigeria
subject: Olaju
subject: religion
subject: religious associations
subject: religious change
subject: religious diversity
subject: Salafi
subject: transnational Islamic movements
subject: WAMY
subject: Western education
subject: Yorubaland
subject: youth
subject: 290
subject: 960

description: This study focuses on the history of the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN) and its involvement in the processes of religious change among “Yoruba Muslims” in Southwest Nigeria from 1954 to 2014. It posits that the notion of being a “good Muslim” has changed significantly especially among Western educated Yoruba Muslims since the colonial period and that the MSSN not only play a key role in this change but also part of this change. The main questions that guide the study are thus, how has the MSSN contributed to religious change and the ways of being Muslim in Yorubaland and how is the MSSN itself subject to change? The study argues that central to this change is the fact that the MSSN developed from a religiously affiliated students’ club into an Islamic reform movement. This includes its own fragmentation caused by different discourses that shaped its reform as well as to the foundation of other Islamic movements which promoted ways of being Muslim that both intersect and differ from the position of MSSN. The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach largely situated in the fields of history, religious studies and anthropology of Islam. This approach is reflected in the type of sources and methods employed which include fieldwork, archival study, and analysis of literature. The conceptual framework of the study is based on the notion of Islam as a “discursive tradition” and its interlinkages with the concepts of “Islamic reform,” “religious change,” and “Christian-Muslim encounters.” These additional concepts not only help to understand discursive tradition as fragmented but also give voice to the different actors and dynamic positions involved. The study has four central results: firstly, it reveals that the reasons for the formation of the MSSN in 1954 are closely linked to the Yoruba Muslims’ encounter with Christianization and the social change that was facilitated by colonialization since the mid-nineteenth century. While the encounter motivated the formation of MSSN by students and the way its objectives were promoted in Nigeria, the students also aimed to promote a way of life that fits into their changing world. Secondly, the study explains that the reform in the MSSN was inspired by historical and epistemological developments that were connected to the Yoruba Muslim communities and the globalized Muslim world. These developments paved way for critical discourses on Islam and the MSSN practices as well as the revival of prophetic traditions called sunna. But while the discourses shaped new ways of being Muslim in the MSSN, they also inspired its factionalisation by the 1990s. Thirdly, the study points out that despite the quest for reform, the Islamic discursive tradition was neither uniform nor reducible to a fixed understanding of Islam among Muslim students. Rather different existential and social realities in Yorubaland and Nigeria forced the MSSN to construct its ideals of reform on interpretations of Islam that emphasised “moderation,” “tolerance,” “flexibility,” and a “gradual” embodiment of Islam. Fourthly, the study reveals how the MSSN is involved in the transmission of Islamic knowledge and posits that its involvement is one of the ways in which the ‘classical’ Islamic education has changed in Yoruba society and the Muslim world in Nigeria. New forms of learning were introduced by the MSSN that reveal its own contribution and an understanding of this change. In general, the study demonstrates the manifold contributions of MSSN to religious change and new ways of being Muslim, which include the formation of national and transnational Muslim organizations, revival of sunna, introduction of new forms of religious education and the production of new Muslim elite. Overall, the case study presented in this study helps to understand how the confluence of local contingencies and global entanglements contribute to processes of religious change.