At a time of sociocultural changes that started questioning established Islamic learning traditions (independence years, post-Cold War/book market liberalization), printing diasporas exerted... Show moreAt a time of sociocultural changes that started questioning established Islamic learning traditions (independence years, post-Cold War/book market liberalization), printing diasporas exerted influence on the circulation of Islamic texts in East Africa: published overseas (Cairo, Beirut, and the Indian subcontinent) and/or locally reprinted on the Swahili-speaking Islamic coast, they came to play a seminal role in negotiating Swahili Muslim literary culture. How have transoceanic religious and intellectual networks operating beyond national borders become intertwined? In this paper, the beginnings of Swahili Muslim book publishing—and the entities underpinning it, such as Nairobi’s Islamic Foundation Center, a Pakistani-oriented charitable foundation—will be outlined. I will then delve into the history of Indian-and-Swahili family-run publishers Adam Traders based in Mombasa in order to tackle hitherto neglected transoceanic connections and patterns of influence across the sea. Show less
In Swahili poetry, praising God through blessings and salutations finds aesthetic expression in a plethora of genres, particularly mashairi, utendi and takhmis. In this article, I will draw... Show moreIn Swahili poetry, praising God through blessings and salutations finds aesthetic expression in a plethora of genres, particularly mashairi, utendi and takhmis. In this article, I will draw attention to a lesser-known rhymed poetic genre known as gungu “songs,” in shairi verse form, dating to the turn of the nineteenth century. Different from other well-known, fully devotional Swahili compositions such as Sayyid Aidarus’s Hamziyya or al-Būṣīrī’s Qasida Burda, the texts that will be analysed are a selected group of short devotional quatrains belonging to a vast manuscript that otherwise chiefly comprises war poetry as well as dance and wedding songs. While, on the one hand, the presence of devotional lyrics in this extensive poetry collection attests to the legitimacy of religious subject matter in popular lyric poems, the verses also offer an opportunity to reflect on literary prayer (dua) and its architecture, lyrical tone and imagery, in comparison with longer classical Swahili religious compositions, where dua is also interpolated. Is there a set of shared Swahili or Arabic formulas for naming, praying to and praising God that can be found in all of these genres? Can the Qur’an be considered as the sub-text the poets drew on in making their texts speak of the divine? A stylistic analysis, looking at patterns, formulaic dua and devotional speech acts of these yet-unedited short devotional lyrics, will provide the criteria by which I will compare excerpts from other Swahili poetic genres, inquiring how Islamic prayer is woven in between their lines. Show less
In this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of... Show moreIn this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of the following considerations: how have advances in technology changed the production, transmission and reception of Swahili Islamic poetry? To what extent do writing and orality coexist in a recited text? What is the nature of performer identity formation within a “discourse network” of artists—the composer (mtungaji), reader (msomaji), and singer (mwimbaji)—who, in Goffman’s words, play “participation roles” and appropriate poetry belonging to other living poets or to their own (sometimes anonymous) ancestors? In an attempt to answer these questions, I provide examples of performers and their performative craft. Show less
This article examines three Swahili books with the same title Fimbo ya Musa ('The Rod of Moses'), published between 1970 and 2010, each of which critically investigates Qur'an translations and... Show moreThis article examines three Swahili books with the same title Fimbo ya Musa ('The Rod of Moses'), published between 1970 and 2010, each of which critically investigates Qur'an translations and vernacular religious texts in Swahili. The first Fimbo was written by the Kenyan Ahmad Ahmad Badawy and criticises one of the earliest Swahili Qur'an translations, by Abdullah Saleh al-Farsy. In the second, Nurudin Hussein Shadhuly, head of the Shadhuly/Yashrutiyya ?ufi branch in Tanzania examines and condemns the translation efforts by Saidi Musa, a student of al-Farsy. The final Fimbo is a treatise by the Ibai scholar Juma al-Mazrui from Oman and digitally distributed in 2010 which deals with the doctrine of God's visibility in the hereafter and is an answer to the Salafiyya Tanzanian Kassim Mafuta's 2008 work on this topic. The example of these three polemics over the last four decades shows the shifting concerns in the reaction to the translated Qur'an in Swahili. The act of translation from Arabic to the vernacular is no longer attacked, but rather the theological implications of a deficient translation are at the heart of the more recent discussions. While authoritative knowledge is still associated with a high command of Arabic, affiliation to a particular school of law or intellectual genealogy is not. Religious learning is no longer primarily transmitted through well-established links of personal authorities, but can increasingly be derived from private study and reading. As a direct result of this opening up of a wide field of knowledge for a non-Arabic reading audience, the potential numbers of discussants increases: each new Swahili Qur'an translation reveals more of the enigmatic character of the Qur'an and fuels new debates. Show less
