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5 Esoteric Knowledge and Exoteric Knowledge Based on a teaching model that started in Mamluk Egypt (Hiskett 1985:16-17), and spread throughout the Muslim world, a two-tier system of Islamic education was set up in Muslim Africa to promote the expansion of Islam. At the lower level, there are the Koranic schools (kuttab, plural katatib in Arabic) and at the higher level, the science schools (madrasa, plural madaris). The names of these schools in African languages vary, but their pedagogy and core curriculum tended to be identical throughout the Sudano-Sahelian region, if not in the Muslim world as a whole. At the Koranic schools, pupils are admitted very young, between four and seven years of age. They are taught how to read and write in the Arabic script before starting to memorize the Koran. Some pupils are able to memorize the whole Koran within three to four years. Others take longer, some never manage it. They are also taught the rudiments of religious practice (ablution, prayer, fasting, etc.). Because parents do not always pay for the tuition and maintenance of their children, and teaching is the main activity of Koranic masters, pupils contribute to the costs of their education either by working in the fields in a rural milieu, or by begging. These days, many urban citizens consider begging as degrading and they criticize the Koranic school teachers whom they hold responsible for an inhuman system of exploitation. However, in their original context, begging was not at all degrading. Those who give have once been those who held out the bowl when they were pupils. Those who receive consider this begging stage of their life as a natural, transitory period that all children have to experience and which prepares them for adult life. Pupils learn reading and writing at the same time. The learning tool is a wooden tablet. Once or twice a day they copied out on the tablet that part of the Koran they have been assigned to memorize, using black ink made from the charcoal they could scrape off their saucepans at home. After having memorized its contents, they washed their tablets and put them out in the sun to dry so that they Non-Europhone Intellectuals 28 could use them again. Wednesday afternoon, all Thursday and Friday morning are holidays for the youngest pupils, while the older ones use these days to go over their past lessons. After they have written and memorized the whole Koran bit by bit (between one and two dozen lines daily), they revise it by reciting larger blocks of texts (several pages at a time) until they are able to recite it all. They then recite the whole Koran in front of a jury made up of Huffaz (singular, hafiz), people who have memorized the whole book. A successful pupil is known as hafiz. Pupils can be asked to recopy a whole manuscript of the Koran in calligraphic characters to see if they can master both the memorizing and the writing. This level of Islamic education applies to a large part of the child population. Whether Muslims are town-dwellers or rural people, it is rare that they have not attended a Koranic school and memorized a certain number of verses, even if it is only to be able to say their daily prayers. The second level of traditional Islamic education takes place in the madaris, to which are admitted pupils who have memorized all or a large part of the Koran. While the children at the katatib only have to memorize what they are reading, without understanding it, at the madaris they follow advanced courses enabling them to understand Arabic, and to express themselves in that language. These schools are of unequal quality. Some, inherited from the medieval colleges, provide a complete course so that their graduates are recognized as ulama. Others offer a more restricted curriculum. Thus, the keener students spend a long time, going from one master to another so as to deepen their knowledge in a given discipline. Among the schools that give a complete training, the college of Pire Saniokhor in Senegal is a good example. Thanks to Thierno Kâ, we have a wealth of information on this college which was based on the town of Pire, halfway between Dakar and Saint Louis and which was attended by many scholars (Kâ 1982). The training was essentially oral. The teacher taught all the books, chapter by chapter, reading them first in Arabic and then...

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