Paper short abstract:

Based on three cases over the last century, this paper utilizes the concept of "religious engineering" to analyze Ahmadi Muslims' efforts to provide education for Muslims in Nigeria and argues for the importance of historical perspective in religious engineering.

Paper long abstract:

Based on archival and ethnographical research, this paper utilizes the concept of "religious engineering" to analyze Ahmadi Muslims' active and conscious attempts to provide education for Muslims throughout their over-100-years presence in Nigeria. Since the introduction of Ahmadiyya into Nigeria in 1916, Ahmadi Muslims have engaged in the education sector in various ways, but their contributions and implications have not attracted much academic attention. This paper focuses on three cases of religious engineering in education: Ahmadi Muslims in Lagos invited South Asian missionary Abdul Rahim Nayyar to establish the "first Muslim school" in 1921; Hazrat Mirza Nasir Ahmad, the third Khalifat of the global Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, initiated the "Nusrat Jehan Project" (Service to Humanity) in 1970 to establish Ahmadiyya schools and hospitals in West Africa; in recent decades, Ahmadi entrepreneurs established private schools in local communities. These engineering projects by the individual or communal agents exploited different religious resources according to contingent social and economic conditions. Similarly, they challenge the boundaries between secular and Muslim education and aim to cultivate generations of ethnical and knowledgeable Ahmadi and non-Ahmadi Muslims who can contribute to Nigerian society and sustain the Ahmadiyya community in the future. Adopting a historical perspective, this paper reminds us of the interconnectedness between the past, present, and future: these "engineered" schools in the past had shaped the present of Ahmadiyya and Islam more generally in Nigeria; present projects also learn from past experience to better engineer an envisioned future.