Muslims and the Liberation Struggle in Northern Mozambique

Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures, Brill Online Reference Works, 2018

Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2009, pages 280-294, 2009

Despite the fact that the liberation war occurred in northern Mozambique, where a considerable number of Muslims lived, their contribution to the independence struggle has been little studied. This paper focusses on their participation in two nationalist liberation movements, Mozambican African National Union (MANU) and Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO), and demonstrates that the prevailing idea in scholarship about Muslims’ aloofness from the liberation struggle is unjustified. It argues that Muslim support and participation in the liberation movements stemmed primarily from grassroots African nationalism. Like most Africans, Muslims wished to end colonialism and recover their land from the Portuguese. African Muslims of northern Mozambique were well suited to support these movements, because Islam and chieftainship were linked to each other. Chiefs were believed to be the ‘owners’ and ‘stewards’ of the land, and a majority of Muslim leaders, whether traditional chiefs (régulos, in Portuguese) or Sufi leaders (tariqa khulafa’, in Arabic), were from the chiefly clans. Most importantly, Muslims of northern Mozambique had close historical and cultural ties to Tanganyika and Zanzibar, especially through Islamic and kinship networks. The involvement of Muslims in the liberation movements of those regions, in particular in Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), inspired and encouraged the Muslims of northern Mozambique to support MANU and FRELIMO, especially since these two movements were launched in Tanganyika and Zanzibar with TANU backing and the participation of Muslim immigrants from northern Mozambique.

History Compass, Vol. 8, No. 7, 2010, pages 573-593, 2010

This article is a historical overview of two issues: first, that of the dynamics of Islamic religious transformations from pre-Portuguese era up until the 2000s among Muslims of the contemporary Cabo Delgado, Nampula, and to a certain extent, Niassa provinces. The article argues that historical and geographical proximity of these regions to East African coast, the Comoros and northern Madagascar meant that all these regions shared a common Islamic religious tradition. Accordingly, shifts with regard to religious discourses and practices went in parallel. This situation began changing in the last decade of the colonial era and has continued well into the 2000s, when the so-called Wahhabis, Sunni Muslims educated in the Islamic universities of the Arab world brought religious outlook that differed significantly from the historical local and regional conceptions of Islam. The second question addressed in this article is about relationships between northern Mozambican Muslims and the state. The article argues that after initial confrontations with Muslims in the sixteenth century and up until the last decade of the colonial era, the Portuguese rule pursued no concerted effort in interfering in the internal Muslim religious affairs. Besides, although they occupied and destroyed some of the Swahili settlements, in particular in southern and central Mozambique, other Swahili continued to thrive in northern Mozambique and maintained certain independence from the Portuguese up until the twentieth century. Islam there remained under the control of the ruling Shirazi clans with close political, economic, kinship and religious ties to the Swahili world. By establishing kinship and politico-economic ties with the ruling elites of the mainland in the nineteenth century, these families were also instrumental in expanding Islam into the hinterland. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese rule took full control of the region as a result of military conquests of the ‘effective occupation’, and imposed new legal and administrative colonial system, called Indigenato, impacting Muslims of northern Mozambique to a great extent. After the independence in 1975, and especially since 1977, the post-independence Frelimo government adopted militant atheism and socialist Marxism, which was short-lived and was abolished in 1983 owing to popular resistance and especially, because of government’s perception that its religious policies were fuelling the opposition groups to take arms and join the civil war. The 1980s and 1990s were marked by an acute rivalry and conflicts between the two emerging national umbrella Islamic organizations, the Islamic Council and the Islamic Congress, each representing largely pro-Sufi and anti-Sufi positions. In the 2000s, these organizations became overshadowed by new and more dynamic organizations, such as Ahl Al-Sunna.

South African Historical Journal, Vol. 60, No. 4 (2008): 637-654, 2008

Based on archival and fieldwork research, this paper outlines in its first part the history of the formation of various types of Muslim religious leaderships during pre-colonial and colonial periods. Islam in Mozambique, especially in the northern part of the country, existed among Africans long before the arrival of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was linked to the World of Swahili, i.e. the East African coast and the Comoros, from the time of its formation. However, European colonial expansion drove the immigration of Indian Muslims from the Portuguese territories of Gujarat, India and later from British East Africa. How the resulting social, ideological, and racial differences among this leadership have been reflected and played out in relation to the state, the competing Muslim religious groups, and the international Islamic organisations in the post-colonial Mozambique, is the focus of the second part of this article

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2003

This article discusses Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui, an influential yet largely ignored figure within East African Islamic reformism, which shifted from internal to external domination in the second half of the 20th century. His educational booklet 'Hukumu za sharia', written in Kiswahili, is analysed and contextualised. Advising local Muslims, by way of clear argument and reference to authoritative texts, on how to deal with controversial local practices from an Islamic point of view, it pushed for the development of self-reliance, and criticised dependence on Islamic clerics and dignitaries. The text itself displays the rational principles that the reformist movement relied on and propagated, while it also contains hints of a more dogmatic tone that was yet to dominate reformist discourse. Overall, the article establishes a wider comparison in discussing this African Islamic reformism as an 'enlightenment' movement. The focus hereby is on structure rather than subs...