When I first met Ayub Mohamud, he was preparing a lesson for the next period at Eastleigh High School, a boys’ secondary school in Nairobi, Kenya. The school is in Eastleigh, a working-class residential and commercial district nicknamed Little Mogadishu because of the mostly Somali immigrant population there; a good number of the school’s students are Somali or Somali-Kenyan, and many are Muslim. Mohamud, who teaches Islamic studies and business, jogged up a flight of stairs in the school’s courtyard and entered a classroom, where students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one had already assembled for an Islamic-studies class. “As salaam alaikum,” he greeted them. “Wa alaikum salaam!” they said in return.
“Who can define for us ‘radicalization’?” he asked the students.
“It’s a process by which youth are being brainwashed by the bad groups,” one student, dressed in the school’s uniform—a navy-blue sweater, white shirt, and gray slacks—said.
[For more of this story, written by Alexis Okeowo, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...i-extremism-in-kenya]
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