The
East Coast of Africa has had links with various cultures and
civilizations over the centuries. In the Valley of the Queens in
Upper Egypt, the tomb of the famous Egyptian queen Hatshepsut
reveals reliefs from 2,000 BC, showing the Egyptians trading with
the Land of Punt, which at that time included Eritrea, Somalia,
and Yemen, and acknowledged its high degree of civilization. The
Romans called it Azania.
The
Islamic period on the East African Coast (EAC) started from the
first hijrah to Ethiopia (Habasha) where An-Najashi (the Negus)
was ruling. The pagan Quraysh followed the Muslims in their tracks
and wanted An-Najashi to exile them, but once the king heard the
Muslims recite Surat Maryam, he cried and allowed the Muslims to
stay. When An-Najashi died, the Prophet (peace and blessings be
upon him) made the Funeral Prayer for him in Madinah, which
indicates that he must have entered Islam and had a gathering of
followers locally that more than likely went on to propagate in
Eritrea and northwestern Somalia.
Following
that, we see from the Lamu Chronicle that the Umayyad caliph
Abdullahi ibn Marwan sent emissaries to the EAC in 696 CE,
indicating some sort of relationship existing, possibly in trade
and Islamic education. The Kilwa Chronicle includes the story of
seven Muslim brothers who emigrated from Shiraz, Persia, and
established rule on the EAC around the eighth century. However, it
is debatable whether the ethnic “Afro-Shirazis” really existed
on the coast, or if Persian descent was an instrument for the
Swahilis to distinguish themselves later in the 12th century from
the Shaykh and Sharif Arab clans and the Indians who were starting
to arrive.
According
to the Muslim historian Al-Mas`udi, in the 10th century trade was
entering the EAC from Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, and China.
The Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi noted in 1154 the trade between
Zanzibar and Muscat, Oman. The Muslim Moroccan geographer and the
first epic traveler to date, Ibn Battuta, visited Mogadishu,
Mombassa, and Kilwa in the 14th century, where he found that the
learned people and `ulamaa’, who mostly practiced Shafi`i
fiqh, had correspondence with their counterparts in the Hijaz.
The
12th to the 14th centuries saw the emergence of urban settlements
such as Mombassa, Zanzibar, Kiwali, and Kilwa. The Swahili are
said to have had a very natural lifestyle that was completely
environmentally friendly. They used natural materials like coral
to make houses that still stand today, and their diet was mainly
made of local fruit, vegetables, and fish.
In
the 15th century, the Christian Portuguese reached the coast.
Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498 as representative of the king and
people to perform trade and a religious crusade, but ironically,
he would not have reached the coast without the maps of the
Muslims, and no Portuguese sailors dared go around the Cape of
Good Hope until the Muslim navigators trained them. Da Gama
described Kilwa as extremely beautiful, with exotic fruit,
organized streets, running water, strong structures, and literacy
with scholars to rival Europe.
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Despite
the trust of the Swahili people, the Portuguese attacked Mombassa
in 1505 and the people fled because of the heavy bombardment by
cannons. The Portuguese established Fort Jesus in Mombassa, and
other forts along the coast. The Portuguese continued to subjugate
predominantly Muslim cities all along the Indian Ocean, from the
Arabian Peninsula, Aden, India, Goa, Gujurat, to Calcutta, and
created a trade route from the EAC all the way to China. Having
had the experience in warfare and proselytizing with Muslims in
Andalusia, the Portuguese forced missionaries on all its
subjugated lands, and so it is reported that the Muslims, at least
on the Swahili coast, revolted, and preferred to be placed under
the protection of the Turkish caliphate rather than their
Portuguese Catholic colonizers.
The
Swahilis managed to drive out the Portuguese with the help of the
Omanis, but by 1812, there were clashes between Mombassa and Lamu,
and Sultan Sayyid Said intervened and conquered the Swahili coast.
By 1840, it was totally subdued, to the extent that Zanzibar was
made the capital of the Swahili coast and of Oman too, perhaps
because it has a natural harbor and was, and still is, exceedingly
beautiful. According to Askew (1999:90), “The brutal imposition
of Portuguese rule in the sixteenth century and their attempts to
consolidate their power and break the hold of the Swahili merchant
class over the lucrative gold and ivory trades, pushed coastal
economies into a spiral of decline.” By enforcing a tribute in
gold from every subdued city-state and implementing a pass system,
created to control sea traffic, the Portuguese, as Abdul Sheriff
(1987:16) states, “helped to kill the goose that had laid the
golden egg.”
The
Omanis tried to revive the golden age of Swahili trade under the
reign of Sultan Sayyid Said, but could not recover its past glory.
Thus, the Swahili merchants increasingly turned to agriculture,
producing spices such as nutmeg and cloves for commerce.
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In
640 CE `Amr ibn Al-`Aas (may Allah be pleased with him) conquered
Egypt through Fustat, and assumed other lands of the Byzantine
Empire along the Mediterranean, where the peoples had been
exploited and non-Romans were second-class citizens. Ibn Abi Sarh
(may Allah be pleased with him) in 646–652 achieved this when he
continued the march across North Africa to Western Tunisia,
Northern Algeria, and the majority of the Sahara. ‘Uqbah ibn
Nafi’ followed that up by spreading Islam into Morocco, and the
march was supposed to have even reached the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Uqbah also moved south and the propagation of Islam continued
into the Sahara, up to the area surrounding Lake Chad. In the
beginning, the spread of Islam in North Africa had been military,
but at a later phase, it became peaceful and spread by trade and
intermarriage. Islam also spread through Islamic education,
knowledge, and Arabic all the way down to West Africa, mainly
through such peaceful means, especially the trans-Saharan trade
routes.
In
1039, Sheikh Abdullah ibn Yasin formed Al-Murabitun (Almoravids)
movement amongst the Sanhaja Berber community. Their basic tenets
were ordering good and forbidding evil, and fighting illegal forms
of taxation. They probably emerged in response to a decline in
Islamic standards in their Maghribi region. They also believed in
establishing rubut (fortresses) on the edge of Muslim
states, as the Muslims were perpetually fighting off Byzantine and
other enemy forces. At its height, Al-Murabitun Empire
included Morocco, Western Algeria, and Andalusia.
In
1051, Al-Murabitun had a new leader in the Maghrib, Yusuf ibn
Tashfin, under whose leadership the movement flourished and spread
south into West Africa, through Abdullah ibn Yasin, to set up rubut
as far as the Niger River. Around 1062, Ibn Tashfin established
the movement’s capital at Marrakesh, and soon after, led forces
into Seville (Sequiliyya) in Andalusia (Muslim southern Spain) to
help the Muslims fight against the encroaching Christian armies
because of a tax dispute. He came to their aid again in 1088,
against the Christian forces encroaching from the northern
provinces.
When
Al-Murabitun became successful in Andalusia, the Muslims weakened
in their Islamic practice, so the Al-Muwahhidun (Almohads)
succeeded them and entered Andalusia in 1146. The leader of
Al-Muwahhidun was Muhammad ibn Tumart, a Masmuda Berber from
southern Morocco, who had been to Hajj, studied in Makkah, and
been influenced by the writings of Al-Ghazali, which drove him to
try to revive Islam in the Maghrib (all of Northwest Africa except
Egypt). Under Ibn Tumart, Al-Muwahhidun, who preached the
importance of tawheed (Oneness of Allah), defeated
Al-Murabitun in Andalusia in 1146, and thereafter Islam was able
to bloom once again and produce brilliant thinkers and scholars
such as the philosopher and fiqh (Islamic law) scholar Ibn Rushd.
However, as the famous North African sociologist Ibn Khaldun (whom
many consider to be the founding father of sociology) has said,
whenever any society experiences success and prosperity, it is
only a matter of time before decadence sets in, and thereafter,
decay, decline, and then another rise. Andalusia is an excellent
example of his social theory, and it finally fell to the
Christians in 1492.
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Islam
entered West Africa around the 11th century, and according to the
oldest source concerning this, the Muslim geographer Al-Zuhri
writing in 1137, the people of Ghana converted in 1076, most
probably through a Murabitun presence among them, even though
their king was a non-Muslim.
The
years 1050–1250 saw the peak of the Malian Empire in the region.
In the 14th century, the Malian Emperor Mansa Musa established the
Maliki School of law in the empire, and performed Hajj. It is
reported that as many as 12,000–72,000 people went with him
across the Sahara desert to Egypt where he met the Mamluk rulers,
who were dumbstruck at his entourage. Musa and his followers
carried so much gold with them on their travels that they
literally affected the economy of every land they resided in, as
Mali was the center of the West African gold trade at that time.
The
well-known 14th century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited Mali
during 1352–53, under the reign of Mansa Musa’s brother, Mansa
Sulayman. He was amazed at the justice and peace that prevailed
there, and admired the Muslims’ love for building mosques and
performing the Jumu`ah (Friday) Prayer. Despite that, it is said
he noticed some reproachable pre-Islamic local practices still in
vogue in the king’s court, indicating the importance of social
stratification in the kingdom.
The
Andalusian geographer Al-Bakri, in 1068, collected information on
three African kingdoms of his time: Gao, Takrur, and Ghana. In one
text, he presents the account of the conversion of a West African
king through an encounter with a Muslim merchant and propagator.
The Muslim was a guest of the king, whose country had suffered
continuous drought year after year. Therefore, the king pleaded
with his Muslim guest to pray for rain for his people; he agreed
to do so only if the king converted to Islam and prayed with him.
So they prayed throughout the night and rain fell at the first
light of dawn. Having seen this miracle, the king ordered the
idols to be broken and the sorcerers expelled from the country.
The king, his descendents, and nobles accepted Islam and were
sincerely attached to it; whereas the people remained polytheists.
After the building of Islamic schools and mosques in his country,
Islam spread so much that in Jenne in 1200, historians reported
over 42,000 scholars residing in the city of learning.
The
next empire to emerge in the region was the Songhay Empire in the
15th century, which was also famous for its development of Islamic
education. Timbuktu and Jenne were the most important centers of
this empire, and the Andalusian architect and poet Abu Ishaq
Al-Sahili, who met Mansa Musa en route from Hajj, built the well
known Timbuktu Friday Mosque. Sidi `Abdur-Rahman Al-Timimi
traveled from Arabia to Timbuktu to find that the scholars
excelled him in fiqh, so he stayed to learn from them!
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Islam
reached Kanem and Bornu most probably via ‘Uqbah ibn Nafi’,
who took it all the way to Lake Chad, as previously mentioned, and
perhaps even married there. Islam became the majority religion in
Kanem in the 13th century and later in Bornu in the 15th century
through the Sifawa Dynasty, which is the oldest one in human
history, claiming descent from the legendary Arab hero Sayf ibn
Dhi Yazan. The Bornu caliphate reached its peak under Mai (King)
Idris Alawma (1570–1603) when all the state dignitaries were
Muslim and the capital N’Gazargamu was an important center for
Islamic learning.
In
the late 17th century there was a development of scholarly clans
of whole extended families, who were itinerant merchants and
scholars. This peaked in the 18th century when these clans settled
in rural areas and formed their own religious communities, away
from the traditional urban Muslim centers that were becoming
increasingly corrupt and debauched. An example of these clans is
the Jahanke, who specialized in Maliki fiqh; another is the Kunta
of Sene-Gambia, who are said to have introduced the Qadiriyyah
Sufi tariqah (order) into West Africa.
These
mobile clans were around 500–1,000 in number, and wherever they
settled, they set up schools and intermarried with the locals.
They practiced the mulazamah system, where the students
lived with and sometimes worked for their teacher. The experience
was a lesson in developing not just “book knowledge,” but also
interpersonal relations and actually putting the Qur’an and
Sunnah into real life. From the rural areas, these scholarly clans
returned to the cities and established great educational
institutions. The Torodbe scholarly clan had a great role in the
dissemination of knowledge and waging jihad in the 17th and 18th
centuries. They were distinguished by wearing unique designs on
their garments. Probably the most famous of them was Sheikh
`Uthman ibn Fodi, who fought a revolutionary jihad against the lax
Muslim rulers of Hausaland (northern Nigeria) from 1804 to 1808.
He justified his jihad on moral grounds, through his famous
prolific treatises and poetry in Arabic, Fulfulde, and Hausa.
Thereafter, he established the Sokoto Caliphate that his son
Muhammad Bello and his descendents continued until the conquest of
the British in 1903.
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The
Cape of Good Hope was a refreshment station for the Dutch East
India Company (DEIC) and a place to send exiled and dethroned
rulers from its eastern provinces. Many of these political exiles
were some of the first Muslims in South Africa, an example being
Sheikh Yusuf of Mucassar (Indonesia), who arrived in the second
half of the 17th century with his family and entourage totaling 49
people. His dwellings on the False Bay Coast attracted fugitive
slaves and other easterners, and are the first evidence of the
establishment of Islam and its dissemination among slaves on the
Cape. Consequently, Sheikh Yusuf is considered the founder of
Islam on the Cape of Good Hope.
According
to historians, the earliest Cape Muslim leaders were freed
convicts from Dutch colonies such as Malaysia and the Indonesian
archipelago, but their crimes are not stated. I wonder if it was
their resistance, or their mere Islamic faith that enraged their
Dutch colonizers. These “freed convict” imams arrived at the
Cape in several migrations throughout the 18th century and made up
most of the ‘ulamaa’ there.
Slave
raiding in West Africa was prohibited in the 18th century to the
DEIC, so they turned to the Indian Sub-continent, which supplied
more than half of the formal slaves. The Indonesian archipelago
supplied just less than a quarter, a little more than half came
from Madagascar, the Mascarene Islands of the Indian Ocean, and
the East African coast. The mosques and Jumu`ah Prayers of these
groups were first noticed in 1770 by the English explorer George
Forster.
The
Dutch Reformed Church prohibited slaves from converting to
Christianity because they could not then be sold, so the slaves
turned to Islam. Achmat Davids noted that Muslim slave owners were
also slow in manumitting Muslim slaves at their death. Despite
that, the several hundred male slaves who bought their freedom, or
whose owners willingly freed them, still converted to Islam. The
Muslim free blacks not only freed their own slaves, but also
manumitted others, whatever their religion. The Christian
missionary John Philip in 1831 wrote admirably about this
incident.
I do not know whether there is a law among the Malays bidding them to make their slaves free, but it is known that they seldom retain in slavery those that embrace their religion. And to the honor of the Malays, it must be stated that many instances have occurred in which, at public sales, they have purchased aged and wretched creatures, irrespective of their religion, to make them free.
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It
was rare to find Christian slave owners displaying such
egalitarianism with their Christian slaves.
The
Merdeka Muslim slaves were those set free to take part in the wars
against the British and then the Xhosa. African slaves that the
British navy intercepted at sea were liberated and diverted to
Cape Town, where they converted to Islam in large numbers. Muslims
on the Cape traded with other Muslims such as Makkan ‘ulamaa’
who, having arrived at the Cape, sometimes married and settled
there. The 1830s are the earliest record of Hajjis going to Saudi
Arabia via Mauritius. The Cape ‘ulamaa’ were the first
Cape Muslims to go to Hajj and write religious and other books in
the new Arabic-Afrikaans. They established Islamic schools,
manumitted slaves, ran mosques, conducted marriages and funerals,
and generally successfully corresponded with the colonial
authorities. The Cape Muslims complained to Queen Victoria about
having no Muslim “missionary,” so she sent the Kurdish scholar
Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi to them in 1862.
The
second wave of immigration was the indentured Indians, who made up
80–90 percent of the second shipments to Natal. They were
brought over to work in the sugarcane fields and mines of the
newly colonized province of Natal on the east coast. These
indentured Indians were supplemented with others from the Zanzibar
and Pemba islands.
Correspondence
between Al-Hajj Mustafa Al-Transvaali and the Grand Mufti of Egypt
Muhammad ‘Abduh, on questions concerning Muslims living as a
minority in a non-Muslim land, indicated the development of Muslim
early 20th century thought in South Africa.
The
Muslims succeeded in founding the Jami`at Al-`Ulamaa’ in
Transvaal in 1923, the Muslim Judicial Council in Cape Town in
1945, and the Jami`at Al-`Ulamaa’ in Natal in 1952. However, it
seems that they were based upon ethnic and geographical lines that
were to be the basis, perhaps, for differentiating between them in
the apartheid system (1948–1994).
In
1990, delegates from Muslim organizations gathered to consider
their response to a post-apartheid South Africa. The outcome was
the formation of the Muslim Front that campaigned for the ANC in
1994. Some Muslims formed alternative parties, but these failed to
win seats in the new Assembly. However, the ANC appointed
`Abdullah Omar to the portfolio of justice in the government of
national unity.
Due
to the failure of government to create lasting law and order in
recent times, there has been a revival of Islamic education for
the youth, and the emergence of Muslim grassroots community
organizations such as PAGAD (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs)
in Capetown.
*
This essay is dedicated to my dear friend, Khalida Khatun (may
Allah be pleased with her), who was the driving force behind the book
in which this essay was meant to be published, if it weren’t for her
unexpectedly early return to Allah.
**
Zahrah Awalah holds a BA in Arabic language and an MA in
Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
in London. She resides in London with her husband and two children.
You can contact her at
z_awaleh@yahoo.com.
References
Sheikh
Abdullah Hakim Quick, Islam in the World: Highlights of the
History and Achievements of Muslims (Audio tapes produced
by International Book Services, South Africa)
N.
Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels, The History of Islam in Africa, James
Currey, Oxford, 2000
Chapter
3: Islam in the Bilad Al-Sudan to 1800, Nehemia Levtzion
Chapter
12: The East African coast, 780 to 1900 CE, Randall L.
Pouwels
Chapter
15: Islam in South Africa, 1652-1998, Robert C-H. Shell
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