Linking global cities; tracing local practices

East Africa - Graves.jpg

The religion of Islam is the paramount unifying feature of the port cities of the western Indian Ocean. In the past decade, a series of studies have viewed the Indian Ocean rim as a global world linked through persistent cultural contact, the religion of Islam and, later, the emergence of European colonialism. These studies have applied the concept of translocality, both as overarching research perspective and as reference to empirical realities. Furthermore, they have analyzed movements of people, goods and ideas between the port cities of the Indian Ocean, specifically with a view to the inter-civilizational encounters and ensuing cultural change. The result is the emerging field of Indian Ocean studies, which in turn address the ongoing debate on globalization.

Through detailed study of new sources deriving from northern Mozambique and coastal South Africa, this new project will fill lacunae in the empirical knowledge about Swahili regional identity and the spread of Islam through networks of learning. The project, funded by the Research Council of Norway, will produce fresh knowledge about Islamic literature and learning in South-Eastern Africa and link the missing cities in a string of ports and work towards a completion of a chain.

Linking the missing cities in a string of ports around the Indian Ocean; towards the completion of the chain:

Within the field of Indian Ocean studies, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the Swahili coastal cities of Kenya and Tanzania, particularly the cities of Zanzibar, Mombasa and Lamu. These studies have linked the coastal cities to the wider Indian Ocean context through analyses of religious development, family links, material culture, legal structures, consumer patterns etc. The northern tier of the Swahili cultural belt (the Somali ports of Brawa and Mogadishu) is also gradually becoming the object of study from the point of view of translocality and trans-oceanic inter-connections.

However, the southern part of the East African coast remains very much understudied from this perspective. This is especially so for northern coastal Mozambique, historically and presently an integral part of the Swahili – and Muslim – cultural world.

The interconnections between the coastal mainland of Mozambique and other centres of learning in the Indian Ocean (in particular the Comoro Islands), have yet to be studied, as was pointed out in a recent article by Prof. E.A. Alpers: “[…] Although there has been some work done on the Islamic learned networks of northern East Africa, with extensions down to the Comoros, nothing of this sort has yet been attempted for the networks of the Mozambique Channel. It should be.”

This is even more true for the South African cities of Durban and Cape Town. In both cities, Muslim communities have long-standing historical ties to the Islamic societies of the East African coast as well as to the ports of South Arabia. The so-called “Zanzibaris” of Durban are one example, while the Cape Town Alawi tariqa (Sufi brotherhood) sees Zanzibar and Hadramawt as its origin and point of spiritual reference. However, no studies have been undertaken which focus on the regional and trans-oceanic networks of these communities.

As a consequence of these rather significant lacunae, variations in local practices in relation to wider social, cultural and political influences have not been studied in a translocal, comparative perspective.

The overall objective of this project is to provide the lacking components that will make such perspectives possible. Concretely, the project will locate and publish new sources deriving from areas where no such preliminary work has been done (i.e. Northern Mozambique and, to a lesser extent, South Africa). An important goal of this project is to enable future studies whereby Islamic societies and Islamic ideological developments in present day South-Eastern Africa may be analyzed in a wider historical and geographical context.



The Southern Tier of the Da’wa. Sufi reformism in South-Eastern Africa in the Indian Ocean context, 1880-1980:

The southern cities of Durban and Cape Town have both significant Muslim populations. The Islamic presence dates back 300 years, and is closely connected to the shipment of slaves from Dutch East India (Indonesia) to the Cape Colony and labour immigration to Durban. However, by the late 1800, the Muslim communities of both cities were closely tied in with the network of Sufi brotherhoods (Alawiyya, Shadhiliyya and Qadiriyya), a network that extended to Mozambique and the Comoro islands, through to Zanzibar and onwards to the Arabian Peninsula. By that time, this was a network with a missionary outlook (da’wa; call, summons to the word of God), very much concerned with issues of reform, and in particular educational reform.

The question remains as to how the South African communities came to be incorporated into this network. By investigating the travel-patterns of itinerant preachers, their writings and their contact with other networks, a picture can be constructed of this southernmost extension of the Sufi reform movement sweeping the Indian Ocean. These patterns can be re-constructed by a combination of sources: immigration and hajj (pilgrimage) records from the National Archives of South Africa, travel accounts in Arabic/Swahili in private ownership in South Africa, Mozambique, Zanzibar and Hadramawt, studies of the certificates of learning delivered by teachers, colonial records from the British administration of Zanzibar, Mombasa, Lamu, Cape Town, Durban and Aden, all in the India Office, London.

The coastal belt – including Cape Town and Durban - will thus be viewed as a part of a complex network extending to the centres of Islamic learning in Arabia and fluctuating with the impact of colonialism, nationalism and – in the South African context – apartheid. These processes will be analyzed in relation to similar processes taking place in other regions of the Indian Ocean.

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