We have privileged European travellers, partly as their accounts give vivid impressions of life at sea when the ocean was a British lake, and partly as they have left so many quotable accounts behind them. Yet it will be remembered that between 1834 and 1937 around 30 million Indians left their homes to go overseas, and 24 million returned. The majority of travellers were still indigenous people, travelling as slaves and later as indentured labourers, or for trade, pleasure, or reasons of piety. We will look at the pious travellers first, but always remembering that piety and pelf were intricately connected: most pilgrims chaffered their way to the Holy Land. Similarly, there was a connection between worldly success and religious prestige.
We have written about the hajj earlier in this book (see pages 173–5). The passage to Jiddah was strongly facilitated by the introduction of steam ships, which led to a substantial rise in the number of hajjis from both India and Indonesia. In the later nineteenth century a total of at least 100,000 performed the pilgrimage each year, and some 30,000 of them came by sea. Isabel Burton was in Jiddah in 1876, and as this was a Hajj al Akbar (an especially auspicious hajj, as the time of the standing at Arafat was on a Friday) there was a larger crowd than usual: according to her 138,000. She left an extended account of what she saw. Her ship picked up 800 returning hajjis. They were packed in like sardines, and several died. They were 'Somalis, Hindis, Arabs from Bokhara, Kokand, Kashgar, Turcomans, Persians, Tashband, Russian subjects, Bengalee and etc etc.' and they all suffered greatly from lack of food combined with rough weather as the ship met the northeast monsoon.
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In 1817 Col. Johnson travelled in the Gulf on a small ship.
About thirty men and women were huddled together with their provisions, merchandise and part of the ship's cargo in the great cabin. These were Mahometans from the Carnatic travelling on a pilgrimage of Holy Tombs of Kurballa and Mecca.... The bustle and confusion of this crowded scene were augmented by a multitude of monkeys, paroquets, cats and other domestic animals.
The adventurous Mrs Elwood in the 1820s came down the Red Sea on a dhow. 'She was heavily laden with merchandise, and with Hjadjes, of which there were not fewer than 300 on board, it was deeply immersed in the water and as the deck was
too crowded to admit of my walking across it, I was positively compelled to enter my cabin by a ladder suspended from the window.' Other passengers, there were 300 in total, were Nubian women and girls taken prisoner by Mahomet Ali's soldiers, who were being sent for sale in the Jiddah slave market; their price was about two dollars a head. They were naked from the waist up, and much ornamented with glass beads, but 'seemed perfectly happy.' From Yambo her dhow was accompanied by many other ships, also laden with hajjis and grain.
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The rectification efforts of Muslim divines were described in an earlier chapter (see pages 175–7). This effort continued to the present. I have chosen to focus on the role of people from the small south Arabian coastal area known as the Hadhramaut, which has been much studied. The two main ports are al Mukalla and al Shihr. This is an important diasporic community, still active today, which has created important economic and religious links all around the ocean. They worked as mercenaries, merchants, religious authorities and humble labourers in Java, Hyderabad, the Gulf, and all of East Africa. They retain ties to their home, send their children home for their education, send back money, and try to retire there. One recent example is Osama bin Laden. His family became very rich in the construction industry in Saudi Arabia, though they retain their Hadhrami links, as indeed it appears does/did Osama. Osama thus should be seen as an extreme example of a Hadhrami bent on propagating a particular view of Islam.
My main interest is in sketching the continuing role of Hadhramis, and others from the heartland, in propagating and purifying Islam around the ocean world. Two examples of Islamic practice may be useful, at least heuristically, to make the point about what they were faced with. On the one hand, Alan Villiers left us a touching vignette of religious practice on board a large dhow in 1940. It was called, very appropriately, the
Triumph of Righteousness.
There was only one book on board, the Quran, and the master, Hamed, and others often read in it. 'When he came to a good part Hamed would sometimes call a small group together and read aloud, in a very pleasant and well-modulated voice, and they would discuss whatever they had read for hours. They seemed to find perfect content in this book, and never tired of reading it.'
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This then is a humble depiction of orthodox piety among ordinary Arab folk.
Contrast this with the career of a new saint, St Expédit in Reunion, in the Mascarene group. One version of his origins (there are several conflicting accounts) holds that around 1931 a box of sacred relics were sent from the Vatican to Reunion. The label detailing the saint's name fell off in transit. All that was left was a stamp on the side of the box in Italian which said SPEDITO (expedited), whence came St Expédit. Maybe, on the other hand, he was a 'real' saint whose name had been changed. In any case, a cult developed and he has become the patron saint of the island. There are about 350 shrines to him, covered in bright red paint. They have many meanings, including a voodoo element, as these shrines can be used for bedevilment. The saint is invoked to cure sickness, pass exams, settle differences. He appeals to all the religions on the island. The Catholic hierarchy have accepted
him and merged him in with the early martyr St Elpiduce. Hindus see him as yet another incarnation of Vishnu, and pray to him if they want children, and Muslims tie cotton threads to his shrine, just as they would with a Sufi shrine. He is also important for the descendants of slaves who still worship spirits like their Malagasy ancestors. Some of the sorcerers on the island have decapitated some of the images in the shrines, either to neutralise his power, or to use the head in their own incantations.
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This sort of religious practice is much more characteristic of the beliefs and customs of most people around the ocean, as compared with the rigid orthodoxy of either ulama or priests. However, for our present purposes the point is that this is what the reformers from the Islamic heartland had to deal with.
These men from the heartland advocated what they considered to be a 'purer' Islam, one closer to the Quran and the customs of the Prophet. Most insidious, from their point of view, was the continuing influence of pre-Islamic practices all over the Indian Ocean Muslim world. There were also now new challenges in warding off irreligious elements of the influence of the west, such as the position of women, and the consumption of alcohol and forbidden food. Finally, it was a matter of warding off innovative un-Islamic practice, such as the veneration of St Expédit.
We can start in India, and look at the career of Sayyid Fadl, very influential in the Mappilah community of Malabar in the nineteenth century. Early in his career he spent four years visiting Mecca and the Hijaz. When he returned his political activities in Kerala annoyed the British rulers, who finally made him emigrate to Arabia in 1852. Subsequently he spent time in Istanbul, and became one of the most important theoreticians of the pan-Islamic movement, along with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. When he was resident in Mecca he influenced the some 2,000 hajjis from Kerala who each year made the hajj.
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Hadhramis had a particularly large role on the Swahili coast.
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The career of Sayyid Ahmad bin Sumeyt is typical. His father, Abubakr, was a Hadhrami sharif, born in Shiban, who was a trader and scholar. His son, Ahmad, grew up to be a trader and scholar too. He interrupted his trading to study religion in Grand Comoro under the supervision of his father, who had retired there, and another scholar. Then Ahmad studied in Zanzibar under an Iraqi scholar, and was made a qadi in the 1880s. Even so he visited the Hadhramaut three times later to study some more under famous scholars and get their
ijaza
, that is a certification, licence or permit. While away between 1883 and 1886 he spent time in Istanbul and studied with Sayyid Fadhi Basha bin Alwi bin Sahi, a famous Hadhrami scholar. Through his influence he received an Ottoman Order from sultan Abdul Hamid. In 1887 he studied in Al-Azhar, and Mecca, and in 1888 returned to Zanzibar. From then until his death in 1925 he was a very famous scholar and teacher. Students came from all over the coast. Indeed he had an international reputation, for he was asked by the mufti of Mecca himself to settle a quarrel between two Zanzibari
ulama
. Even prestigious scholars in Egypt sometimes sought his opinion, such was his reputation.
Just as these scholars and merchants, and their lineages, were cosmopolitan in the extreme, so also were the Sufi tariqas, arguably the most vibrant and important part of Islam in the nineteenth century, if only because it impacted much more on the common Swahili than did the esoteric work of the scholars. However, there is normally no gap between the scholars, the ulama, and those who belong to a particular tariqa: most scholars were also members. For example, Sayyid Fadl, the important Mapillah scholar, was a member of the Alawi tariqa. However, heuristically it is useful to separate out the two strands. We turn now to Sufis.
The most influential brotherhood on the coast was the Alawi order, a very austere one whose main shrine was at Inat. Late in the nineteenth century a branch of the main Alawi order, the Shadhiliya, won much support on the coast, even as far south as Mozambique. The founder of this branch, Sheikh Ma'ruf, was from the Comoro islands. He did the hajj, and was a sharif. Again showing widespread connections, one of the areas where he was most influential was southern Somalia. He died in 1905 and his tomb in the Comoros is a place of pilgrimage for all the Shadhilis of East Africa.
The Qadiri brotherhood, followers of Abdul Qadir Gilani, were at least as farflung across the ocean as were the Alawi. The legends of the founder have been translated into Swahili as well as Malay and Javanese. During the colonial period the Qadiri network reached from Mecca and southern Arabia along the Somali coast past Brava, Kisimaiu and Lamu to Mombasa, and then via Voi, Nairobi and Kampala into the Belgian Congo. Other lines went to German East Africa, others west through the Sudan to Nigeria and Mali. Their teachings spread from the Hadhramaut ports to Indonesia. Not surprisingly then, some textbooks found in the Belgian Congo were identical to those in use in Indonesia. This was a very rich and important network.
Pan Islam, promoted by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II after 1880, had a wide impact on the Muslim world, and frequently was tied in with anti-colonial movements. Notions of Islamic unity, and the centrality of the khalif in Istanbul, were widely dispersed in our area. These ideas were given greater currency by the rulers of Zanzibar. Sultan Barghash had the
khutba
said in the name of Abdul Hamid. Sultan Ali (1902–11) himself visited Istanbul, and also named the Ottoman sultan as khalif in the Friday prayers in Zanzibar, and even on the mainland after the Germans took it over. Zanzibar also had a pan-Islamic newspaper.
This was a reciprocal matter, for some East African scholars spent time in, and were influential in, Istanbul itself. The important Zanzibar scholar, Ibn Sumayt (or Bin Sumeyt), spent a year in Istanbul and studied with his fellow Hadhrami scholar Fadl b. Alawi, who was one of the theoreticians of the pan-Islam movement. Yet when World War I broke out the flimsiness of the ties to Turkey were revealed, as indeed they were also in India and in the Hijaz. In the former the khilafat movement met with little success, while in the latter the sharifian dynasty in Mecca and Medina opted for the Arab Revolt and the Allies rather than the Ottomans and their German allies. Once the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Germans and Austrians, they called it a jihad, but very few in East Africa were impressed. Many contrasted harsh German rule in the area with the more lenient British rule in Kenya. The Sultan of Zanzibar issued a declaration hostile to Germany and also to Turkey. This is hardly surprising, given that he was essentially a pensioner of the British.
Colonial rule from the late nineteenth century interacted with these various tendencies and influences from outside. It involved speedier communications, and the widespread dissemination of ideas via the printing press. Textbooks for prayer sessions printed in Egypt, Mumbai, Singapore and Penang have been found in Jakarta, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam: an important link all around the ocean. Texts for Shafi'i law were published in Swahili, Malay, Javanese and Amharic.
Possibly the main response of Islam to the colonial challenge was an increasing emphasis on the life of the Prophet (sometimes indeed he was presented as an African, and the leader of resistance to the westerners) and especially of his birthday, that is the Mawlidi festival. Celebrations to mark the birthday of the Prophet take place in most of the Swahili stone towns. The most famous of these celebrations takes place in Lamu, and its popularity there demonstrates yet again the widespread connections of the Islamic world in our century.
The end of colonialism, and the Islamic revival, have produced new trends in East African Islam. In Kenya, and to an extent Tanzania, the Swahili are now marginalised, considered to be collaborators with the slave trading Omanis and then with the western colonial rulers. In the face of this, some lineages 'are now picking up on their Yamani or Umani patrilines where they can and going to Jeddah, Mecca, Muscat, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.'
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Others, no doubt the less prestigious with no kin ties to the outside, have turned to Islam as a positive force and reaffirmation of a Swahili identity. Some have even converted to shi'i Islam, this being considered to be more militant. In Zanzibar the anti-Arab revolution of 1964 led to a period of downplaying of any foreign influences, but more recently, in 1985, an Omani consulate was set up, significantly not in the capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, but rather in Zanzibar. Around the same time discontent with what was perceived to be an anti-Islamic mainland regime led the island to join the Organisation of Islamic Countries. Following a great outcry from mainland Christian politicians, this decision was reversed in 1993.