Roots of Diversity in Mozambican Islam

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.

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 25, No.4,2015, pages 483-501, 2015

Sufi identity and rituals became widespread among local Muslims during the colonial era due to the expansion of the Shadhuliyya and the Qadiriyya orders. But the history of Sufism in Mozambique has been little explored. Portuguese colonial officials began paying closer attention to Islam in general and Sufism in particular only toward the end of the colonial period, especially in the late 1960s. This sudden interest was prompted by the independence war that took place mostly in northern Mozambique, where significant numbers of Muslims lived. The colonial Secret Service was mandated to find out how and why Muslims were involved in the independence struggle and in which ways they could be subverted. Otherwise there has been very limited research on Sufism, especially since Mozambique achieved independence. This article examines the historical context into which the orders arrived, and what prompted their significant expansion, as well as the reasons why they subsequently split up into eight autonomous branches. It is based on archival research in Mozambique and Portugal and fieldwork conducted at Mozambique Island, and in Angoche, Nampula, Pemba and Maputo cities.

History in Action, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2018, pages 15-25. https://journals.sta.uwi.edu/ojs/index.php/hia/article/view/6818, 2018

European colonialism was instrumental in transforming aspects of interpretations of the shari’a (Ar., the divine path) and fiqh (Ar., Islamic jurisprudence) into a modern concept of Islamic law. Dutch, British and French scholars and administrators, and associated with them colonized elites, were at the centre of this process. However, virtually nothing is known about the context of Portuguese colonialism. This article aims to examine Portuguese colonial perceptions of Islamic law through the analysis of legal and ethnographic documents about Muslims of northern Mozambique between the period of the ‘effective occupation’ (1896-1913) and the end of colonialism (1974). The central questions to be addressed are: did the Portuguese colonial regime adopt policies and legal reforms reflecting aspects of Islamic governance in a manner similar to other European powers? Did it grapple with such terms as shari’a, fiqh and “custom” the way other European colonial scholars and administrators did?

The Historical Journal 55 (4), pp. 1097-1116, 2012

Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies towards Islam, focusing on the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war that broke out in 1965, when Muslims were perceived as the main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to an approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in order to align them with the Portuguese. The article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures, and the contributions made by several of those who were involved.

Religion Compass, 2008

Among Muslims across the African continent, there is a noticeable turn towards greater compliance with globalizing norms of Islamic behaviour. Beginning from this widespread observation, this article interrogates the changes that lie concealed under the veil of homogeneity. It identifies a complex pattern of identity formation and power politics, cultural conservativism, marginalized syncretism and symbolic exchange. The emergence of a public sphere has propelled the production of Muslim identity formation in the service of established elites and youth searching for an authentic approach towards Islam. But a turn to Islam also takes a conservative and isolationist turn that thrives in the context of the failure of modern schooling and economy, and provides a haven of dignified marginalization around the great cultures of the past. A syncretist approach to Islam and African cultures is pushed to the background. But there is reason to believe that such an approach thrives on the margins of the society. A global politics of identity and globalization provide the context for a continued exchange of Islamic symbols among Africans in general. The politics of resistance is accompanied by the politics of identity and global conflicts.

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2000

Political commentators often cast religious con ict as the result of the numerical growth and political rise of a single faith. When Islam is involved, arguments about religious fundamentalism are quick to surface and often stand as an explanation in their own right. Yet, as useful as this type of explanation may be, it usually fails to address properly, if at all, two sets of important issues. It avoids, Ž rst, the question of the rise of other religions and their contribution to tensions and con icts. Second, it reduces the role of the State to a reactive one. The State becomes an object of contest or conquest, or it is simply ignored. Adopting a different approach, this article investigates a controversy that took place in Mozambique in 1996 around the ‘ofŽ cialisation’ of two Islamic holidays. It looks at the role played by religious competition and state mediation. The article shows that the State’s abandonment of religious regulation – the establishment of a free ‘religious market’ – fostered religious competition that created tensions between faiths. It suggests that strife ensued because deregulation was almost absolute: the State did not take a clear stand in religious matters and faith organisations started to believe that the State was becoming, or could become, confessional. The conclusion discusses theoretical implications for the understanding of religious strife as well as Church and State relations. It also draws some implications for the case of Mozambique more speciŽ cally, implications which should have relevance for countries such as Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe where problems of a similar nature have arisen.

Sociology Study, 2015

This paper studies the Islam's impact in relation to the violence of the colonial and post-colonial state at the centre and north of Mozambique in particularly at the Zambezia and Tete Provinces. Revisiting and cross-checking sources available in the archives, especially the Mozambique Historical Archive, it is possible to determine Islam's expansion by analysing the reports of the colonial administration, interviewing the social participants of this process, and understanding the complexity of the phenomenon before and after the independence, thus enabling the rethinking of the violence, reconstruction, and reconciliation within the Mozambican society. The confrontation of the material produced by the colonial authorities in reports of the civil administration, of the so-called native business between the army and the police and the independent movements, especially the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), suggests a clandestine operational network with initiatives of Mozambican identity affirmation under the designation of "subversive" in the colonial days. A fact worth noting: the "control" function of the Muslim communities, both in the colonial state apparatus and in the post-colonial times, as a phenomenon of continuity.

Since more than half a century, West Africa is witnessing the emergence of movements called, according to the places, “wahhabites”, “salafists” or “isalists”. These movements were formerly characterized by their literal reading of Islamic texts, their tendency to preach a return to the sources of the beginning of Islam, and by a purification of practices inscribed in the bodies through the wearing of the beard or specific dress codes (such as wearing black dress and integral veil for women) practices such as praying crossed arms. They are characterized as well by their refusal of ostentatious ceremonies and their critics of soufi’s islam influence. If their implantation in West Africa encountered some violents conflicts, fifty years later, their conception of Islam has been diffused within public discourses of the islamic elits. Through Burkina Faso case, we aim in this paper to describe how, despite its plurality, Islamic public sphere takes a language more and more “religiously correct”, tending to homogenize religious discourses and practices. This leads to a kind of consensus around discourses and markers which used to be reffered to wahhabiyya communities. This phenomenon, symptomatic of the city, tells us that reformism like the wahhabiyya one has been transformed gradually into a reformism which I propose to call “generic”.

Abibisem: Journal of African Culture and Civilization, 2015

This paper examines the interplay of Islam and traditional African ideas, institutions and cultural practices. It reviews some cultural aspects of Islam and African traditions aiming to find-out how African cultural, i.e. religious, political, social and even linguistic values have either been accommodated by or have accommodated Islam. The framework involves the theories of inculturation, acculturation and enculturation. The method used was a critical analysis of some values of Africans and Muslims. Islam has accommodated and has been accommodated by some African traditions. Although, the two traditions have had some frictions such as the Muslim jihad which took away political power from some of the indigenous people, yet, they have generally coexisted peacefully as some African chiefs either became Muslims or African Muslims have become chiefs and sometimes even made Islam a state religion. The paper, therefore, concludes that Islam and African traditions have been friends and not foes.

Islam was first introduced along Kenya's coast during the twelfth century AD, mainly through trade. Merchants from Persia and the Arabian Peninsula frequented the East African coast, opening up religious networks that facilitated the spread of Islam in the region. Yemeni cities such as Hadramawt exchanged religio-cultural values with the East African coast for many generations. Dissemination of religious knowledge was one of the characteristic features of these networks. However, the transfer of religious knowledge on Kenya's coast was marred with bias: nobility and class position were determinant factors in knowledge acquisition. This led to the emergence of alternative networks that disseminated religious knowledge. Some of the new players included individual mujadid (reformers) who competed for religious influence through the dissemination of religious teaching. One such reformer is Sheikh Harith Swaleh (b. 1937), who imparted religious knowledge to the people of Kizingitini, when they had been marginalised for a long period. Thereafter, the influence of Kizingitini reverberated along the East African coast and reached as far south as Mozambique. This article examines the struggle of a community in acquiring Islamic knowledge against many odds. It focuses on pedagogic methods employed in the village, competing teaching traditions of Islamic learning, and the creation of a new religious network in the region. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of conflict and class division in Islamic proselytising in a village context.

Islamic Africa , 2021

Although Islam has a long history in coastal northern Mozambique, the question of how Muslims manage family life there is little understood. Based on the analysis of historical, ethnographic and legal records, and a case study of a bairro (Port., ward) called Paquitequete in the contemporary coastal city of Pemba in Cabo Delgado province, this article focuses on Muslim family and gender relations in northern Mozambique. It argues that Muslims of this region maintain concurrent legal identities as Muslims, matrilineal Africans and citizens of the modern state. While women benefitted from matriliny by accessing the land and support from their maternal side, upon widowhood and divorce they lost access to their husband’s or common assets because the husbands’ matriclan claimed them. The perseverance of matriliny made local Muslims seem to abide less by Islamic norms, but historically they have combined the Shāfiʿī madhhab (Islamic legal school) with matrilineal custom. In contemporary Pemba, family and gender relations are regulated not only by Sharīʿa or by African ‘traditions’, but by a blend of elements from these two alongside modern legislations. Moreover, it could be said that this arrangement is endorsed by a kind of popular consensus, which is particularly salient in the Community Courts.

Contemporary Islam

2006

This article traces the processes by which Limamou Laye interpreted Islam. Working from the assumption that Islam is not a monolith, we assert that Islam, as do all of the portable religions, is interposed upon indigenous cosmological understanding thus allowing the convert and posterity to own it. Through this process, Islam ceases to be a foreign religion. In the case of the Layennes, Limamou Laye their founder does not succumb to syncretism. On the contrary he proclaims the superiority of Islam over the traditional Lebu religion. In doing so he encapsulates his message in the tools of Lebu public discourse thereby legitimizing and " Lebuizing " Islam. We also assert his assertion as a reincarnation of the prophet not only localizes Islam, but also answers the issue of Arab chauvinism in Islam. The processes that facilitated Islamic expansion in Africa has been traditionally characterized as primarily violent jihads or gradual diffusion led by merchant/ missionaries and clerical communities. The truth of the matter is much more varied and nuanced. Trends can be identified, but too much emphasis on one trend or another lends to oversimplification of a complicated set of processes. Understanding the complexity of Islamic expansion opens the door to a more detailed analysis of the evolution of Islam in Africa thereby providing tools for analytical inspection of the future of Islam and more pointedly Islamism in Africa.