Signs from Allah: History, Science and the Soul in Islam
36. Islam in Africa - Part 2
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The introduction of Islam into East Africa followed a somewhat different path from that in West Africa. East Africa includes a broad swath of territory embracing the modern nations of Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique. Of the 100 million people who live in that region today, approximately 40% are Muslim.
Since pre-Islamic times, East Africa was known to the Arabs as the land of the Zanj and was a part of the large and prosperous Indian Ocean trade zone that linked India, China, Persia, Arabia and the eastern shores of Africa. China exported porcelain. From India came fine cotton. The products from the Persian Gulf included silk and manufactured goods while Yemen exported incense and horses. African exports included ivory, gold, animal skins, ambergris and rice. Dotting the coastline of the Indian Ocean were large and small trading centers extending in an arc from the tip of Africa to the Straits of Malacca. Included among these were the East African cities of Mombasa, Pemba, Kilwa and Shofala.
Islam was introduced into East Africa as early as the 7th century by successive waves of refugees from Arabia. The first group arrived in the year 698 fleeing the persecution of the Omayyad governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. Shortly thereafter, a second group arrived, led by the KharijitesSulayman and Saeed, whose revolt against the Caliph Abdul Malik had failed. Sulayman established an Ibadi state at Lamu, just north of Mombasa, in modern Kenya. More migrations followed as the persecution of dissidents in the Omayyad Caliphate increased. In the year 729, after a particularly harsh crackdown on the Shi’a community, there was a substantial migration of Shi’as to Mombasa. After the Abbasid revolution of 750, as the Omayyads were hunted down and killed, it was the turn of the Omayyads to flee and seek refuge in Africa. In 908 several thousand Iraqis, fleeing the destruction caused by the Karamatians, arrived in Somalia and built for themselves the new towns of Barawah and Shakah.
Following the Seljuk invasions of the 11th century, there were substantial social dislocations in Persia. To escape the ravages of war, some Persians moved further west towards Anatolia but some migrated to East Africa. Most of those fleeing the political turmoil in Iraq and Persia were men. In East Africa they intermarried with the local Bantu ladies, creating a rich Arab-Persian-Bantu amalgam and a vibrant Swahili (meaning, coastal) culture. It was from this matrix that the powerful Swahili dynasties of the 13th and 14thcenturies arose.
Early in the 12th century, the Swahilis founded a state with its capital at Kilwa. By the turn of the century, this state had expanded to include the entire coastline from Zanzibar to Shofala. To the interior it extended its borders to the Zambezi River including the gold mines in Zimbabwe and Manika. Gold and trade brought prosperity to the land attracting immigrants both from Yemen and the African hinterland. New towns such as Titi and Sunnah grew up to cater to the gold trade.
In the 13th century, Oman emerged as a strong naval power in the western Indian Ocean. The Omanis captured the southern coastline of the Arabian Peninsula, including Yemen, and extended their influence to the Sahel. In 1303 the Omani Sultan Suleyman shifted his capital from Oman to Batah in Kenya. For the next 500 years, the history of the Sahel was inextricably linked with that of Oman and the Persian Gulf.
Among the refugees from Arabia and Persia were many ulema. The influx of scholars, merchants and refugees planted the seeds of the new Islamic community. The Shariah provided the basis for commercial transactions. The Shafi’ifiqh, practiced in southern Arabia, took hold in East Africa. The community grew as conversion of the Bantus gathered momentum through intermarriage. In the 13th century, as Islam spread on the wing of tasawwuf beyond its Arab-Persian heartland, Sufi zawiyas were also established in East Africa. The global network of zawiyas added stability to the newborn communities and facilitated the movement of merchant and scholar alike, furthering the growth of Islam. The melting of Arab, Persian and Bantu elements produced a new language, Swahili, which was written in the Arabic script and had a rich vocabulary of Arabic, Persian and Bantu words.
In 1329, the great world traveler Ibn Batuta visited Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa. He found Mogadishu to be a thriving market place “with paved streets and many large domed mosques”. The people were “law abiding and pious, wore plenty of gold and silver jewelry and ate off Chinese porcelain.” Further south, the city of Kilwa was the capital of a large kingdom ruled by Sultan Mawahid Hasan, the fourth in the line of the Mahdali dynasty founded by immigrants from Yemen. Ibn Batuta had an audience with the Sultan and found him to be “a man of great humility who sits with poor people, eats with them and respects the ulema and the sheriffs”.
The spread of Islam further south towards the horn of Africa was arrested by the appearance of European gunboats early in the 16th century. In 1505 the Portuguese occupied Kilwa, razed all of its 300 mosques and slaughtered its population. In 1508 they occupied Mozambique and more slaughter followed. The Portuguese challenge was taken up by the Ottomans. The Omani Sultan, Saif ibn Sultan, working with the Ottoman navy, drove off the Portuguese, reclaimed most of the Sahel (meaning, the coast) for the Muslims and moved his capital from Oman to Kilwa. The struggle for control of East Africa continued through much of the 16th and 17th centuries with the Omani capital shifting between East Africa and the Persian Gulf. Successive Omani dynasties, like the Yarubis and Sayyedis participated in this struggle alongside the Ottomans. After the year 1600, a military equilibrium developed with the Muslims controlling the coastline north of Shofala and the Portuguese holding onto the areas south of it.
In the 17th century the Dutch displaced the Portuguese as the dominant naval power in the Indian Ocean. Many of the important Portuguese colonies, such as Cape Town in South Africa, Colombo in Sri Lanka and Malacca in Malaysia, fell to the Dutch. It was the Indonesian islands, however, that felt the full brunt of Dutch colonial designs. In their frequent wars with the sultans of the Archipelago, the Dutch captured Muslim prisoners and shipped them to Cape Town. Some among the prisoners were scholars and Sufi shaykhs. These scholars were the first to introduce Islam into the area around the Cape of Good Hope. Today, the tombs of many of these honored shaykhs dot the landscape of southern Africa. The venerated tomb of Syed Abdur Rahman who was brought in chains from Sumatra to Cape Town in 1652 illustrates this observation.
In 1805, the Omani Sultan, Saeed Ibn Sultan shifted his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. A ruler with foresight and wisdom, he built Oman into a prosperous empire. He encouraged agriculture and trade, introduced the cultivation of cloves into Zanzibar, facilitated Muslim immigration and invited the neighboring African rulers to embrace Islam. After his death, the Empire of Oman was divided into an Arab province and an East African province. Sultan Majid Ibn Saeed became the Sultan of the Sahel. It was this sultan who founded the city of Dar es Salaam and moved his capital from Zanzibar to that city.
The death of Sultan Majid in 1870 marked the end of Muslim rule in East Africa. It was the height of the colonial period. Britain, Germany, Portugal and Italy reached an understanding to carve up the East African territories. In 1883, the Germans occupied Zanzibar. The Portuguese moved into the area south of Cape Delgado and annexed it to Mozambique. The British moved into Kenya. In 1887 the Zanzibar Sultan Bargash ibn Saeed sold the cities of Dar es Salaam, Kilwa and Lindi to the Germans for a sum of four million Marks. In1889 he accepted a British protectorate over Pemba and Zanzibar. The following year he surrendered Mogadishu to the Italians for a sum of 160,000 Indian rupees. In 1894 he gave a perpetual lease on Mombasa to the British for an annual payment of 10,000 British pounds. In 1907 the British organized the territories near Lake Nyasa under the name of Nyasaland that later became the Republic of Malawi. The Germans organized their colonial holdings under the name of Tanganyika; after their defeat in the First World War (1918) they surrendered it to the British.
On the heels of colonization came an army of missionaries from Europe, well financed by private sources and encouraged by the colonial administrations. At stake was the very soul of Africa. The colonialists suppressed the study of Arabic and discouraged the use of Swahili. The missionaries established educational institutions whose agenda, in addition to preparing the students for jobs in the colonial administrations was to convert the Africans to Christianity. Afraid that their children would lose their faith, the Muslims avoided the missionary schools. They waged a valiant battle to survive by running an alternate educational system based on the madrasah and the shaykh. But resources were meager, Muslim societies were in a state of retrenchment, and the quality and comprehensiveness of madrasah-based education suffered. The graduates of the missionary schools found good jobs in the colonial administrations so that when colonialism receded after World War II and Africa became independent, it was the Christians who were in control of the civil administrations. The disparity in education introduced an element of tension between the Muslims and the Christians in some parts of East Africa that continues to this day.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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