“Concerning Islam… it started dwindling little by little at the onset of colonialism in (East) Africa,” wrote Zanzibari-Omani historian Sa`id b. `Ali al-Mughayri. “Some of the Government Schools offered Qur’ānic instruction to the children for a short while, but this was merely a bait to lure them into a trap.” Al-Mughayri was referring to the education reforms instituted in Zanzibar by the British colonial government in the 1920s that introduced a minimal Arabic and Qur’ānic studies curriculum to colonial schools. In competition with the local Qur’ānic schools that had until then provided the primary education on the island, the Director of Education wrote in confidential missives that he included Arabic in the curriculum simply to increase attendance. Yet if Arabic and Qur’ānic instruction were indeed the bait, as al-Mughayri wrote, then what was the trap? This paper traces the question of morality within colonial and local Islamic discourses on education in Zanzibar by examining the Islamic curriculum introduced into colonial schools in the 1920s. This curriculum was hotly contested locally, and the educational system nearly collapsed over the question of teaching the Qur’ān. Yet these reforms nonetheless represent the juncture in which secular public education began to replace local Qur’ānic schools, and provides an historical example of how the paradigm of modernity as it emerged from Europe was strategically embedded in East Africa. Drawing upon Arabic, Swahili and English language sources from the Zanzibar National Archives, I explore Wael Hallaq’s discussion of the central domain of the moral within premodern Islam in the context of Islamic education. Moral questions and justifications remained at the forefront of colonial discourse, as the eradication of slavery was the primary justification for colonial incursion in Zanzibar, and “moral and physical degradation” the justification for compulsory colonial schooling. Yet nonetheless, I argue that the colonial educational reforms in fact relegated the moral to secondary status, valuing it only insofar as it served modernity’s central domain: economic and technical progress. Zanzibari parents sent their children to government schools in order to gain knowledge relevant to both “this world and the next,” only to find that they were being trained as “useful and loyal citizens” rather than pious and moral beings. The bait was Arabic and Qur’ānic education, assumed to be equivalent to that of the local Qur’ān schools. The trap was a paradigmatic worldview in which the moral became the handmaiden of economic progress.