Mauritania scales a state corps of certified women religious guides

Mauritania's Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Education, working with UNODC and the G5 Sahel's counter-radicalization unit, has built and continues to expand a state-certified corps of mourchidates — women trained in Qur'anic exegesis, hadith and fiqh who are deployed into prisons, schools, hospitals and mosques. Their method is theological rather than social-work: they meet extremist recruiting arguments with counter-arguments drawn from the same textual tradition, then follow up on the social and economic vulnerabilities that made the argument land in the first place. Officials and outside observers credit the programme with helping Mauritania stay comparatively stable while jihadist violence has spread through much of the wider Sahel. The institutional lesson travels beyond one country: deradicalization work succeeds when it is staffed by credentialed scholars, not general caseworkers, and when the state treats religious literacy as infrastructure worth funding for decades, not a one-off grant.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at Africa Defense Forum: https://adf-magazine.com/2026/08/female-guides-work-to-reverse-radicalization-in-mauritania/.