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Paper short abstract:

To integrate informal French Arabic Schools (FAS) into formal education, in 2017, Burkina Faso proposed to their Muslim students a formal bilingual curriculum initiated in 1991. This curriculum, however, is diversely applied by school owners to keep their connections to the Arab Muslim world.

Paper long abstract:

To be “modern” and “good” Muslims with future formal employment prospects, FAS students in Burkina overlap Islamic and secular curricula in different schools. However, not all students can overlap curricula and therefore most graduates need to resort to religious employments and trial-and-error entrepreneurialism. Based on findings of field research from a recently concluded PhD, this paper discusses engagements by the State and the school owners with Islam by analysing FAS’s complexities, tensions, dilemmas, and potential. About 10% of Burkinabe youth attend FAS, mostly sponsored by the Arab countries where they continue their secondary school education and graduate. However, failing socio-professional insertion there, these graduates return to Burkina where their certificates are unrecognised for various reasons. As a result of students and graduates’ demonstrations for recognition, the State proposed a bilingual curriculum in which Islamic studies are taught in Arabic and the rest in French. However, whereas the bilingual curriculum is apparently welcomed by learners, its implementation by schools’ owners remains largely ineffective, varying from school to school. Moreover, most school owners neglect or reject the French language and secular subjects, claiming that their priority is to provide an Islamic education in the Arabic language, and it is the State’s duty to provide secular education. To explain these entanglements, this paper argues that contrary to the common narrative in current literature, FASs are not being reactionary to Western advances in technology, but their dilemma is how to compete with it in controlling the minds of learners.