This chapter focuses on the colonial governance of Islam and Muslim practices in Uganda. It argues that the state’s supervision of Islam and its control over the Muslim masses reproduced colonial state power at various zones of interaction with Muslim society, leading to the emergence of elite authority to link Muslim society to the centre. I describe how colonial governance occurred in two phases: the formative and the transformative.

In the formative phase, the Muslim question was about securing the state from Muslim threats emanating from two sources. On the one hand, a resurgent Muslim quest for political power reflected in the experiences of the religious wars in the 1890s convinced the British of the need to contain Islam and the Muslims. On the other hand, the fear of Islam as an ideology was also part of the experiences of earlier British colonialism, outside Uganda. This formative phase informed the geographical positioning of Muslim groups between Protestants and Catholics so as to check Muslim practices, thereby making Muslims the neutral arbiters between the Christian groups. By playing a neutral role in balancing the Christian groups, colonial power also accommodated the Muslims.

In the second, transformative phase, the colonial state instituted tactics of administrative governance that would undergird a stable political structure. Having positioned the Muslims in that particular territory, the state limited the public role of Islam to the activities of Muslim elites that it propped up to represent the Muslim masses. In the formative phase, questions such as ‘who are the Muslims?’ ‘where are they located?’ and ‘who represents them?’ were subsets of the broader Muslim question. Since the colonial state governed society through what Mahmood Mamdani has called a bifurcation, the settler Muslim community was considered to be under civil law and Islam was accorded a public standing due to the international patronages of the Islamic communities involved. For the native Muslim, however, Islam was pushed to the domain of the larger customary native authority, which however allowed a special version of Muslim law to govern private matters like marriage, divorce, inheritance, et cetera.