Arabic Mozambique

Islamic Africa, Vol.1, No. 2, 2010, pages 253-257, 2010

Tydskrif vir letterkunde, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2008, pages 133-142, 2008

Northern Mozambican Muslim population has been using the Arabic script for writing in KiSwahili and local African languages for centuries. Even today, many people continue using this script in private correspondence. Despite the abundance of the documents in this script that are housed at the Mozambique Historical Archives as well as in private hands, these documents have never been addressed or researched either from linguistic, historical, cultural or religious vantage points. For the last seven years, the Archives have been trying to draw attention of the scholars and obtain funds for the preservation and research of the documents. In this article two short letters from the collection of the Mozambique Historical Archives are transcribed and translated with the help of a local shaykh who was educated within the regional historical Islamic literacy tradition. Then, the content and the protagonists of the letters were identified and analyzed with the reference to the historical context and the events of the time. Besides serving as the evidence for historical occurrences, the letters also provide a general public with a unique opportunity of “hearing the voices” of the authors and in their own words (in first person).

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.

Islamic Africa. Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016, pages 60-80, 2016

This article examines how the use of Arabic script came into play histori- cally in this region and how it evolved into African literacy before the estab- lishment of modern colonial rule at the beginning of the twentieth century. It argues that initially the preeminence of Muslims in world trade and the involvement of Mozambique in that trade were instrumental for the expan- sion of Islam and the adoption of Arabic as an important language of com- merce. In fact, trade was one of the important vehicles for Islamization as well as for the expansion of literacy, especially of the commercial literacy which is embedded in the Qur’an containing “instructions on how to draft, date and certify written contracts, directly or through the scribes.”󰀴 But while interna- tional trade continued to be central to these processes throughout centuries, the reach of this literacy was widened to a great extent by the adoption of the Arabic script for local languages, transmitted through institutionalized forms of teaching and learning in Qur’anic schools.

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.

The purpose of this short text is to refer the presence of a brotherhood or tariqa, little known in East Africa if we compare it to different frequently mentioned branches of the Quadiriyya or Shadilyya. It is not known from the first capital of Mozambique on the island of Moçambique 1 nor the modern capital, nor apparently from southern Tanzania where the Mozambican branches must have originated in about 1880 or found refuge after 1912. Yet when the question was asked in 2001 2 : "Who were the persons and tariqa who had introduced Islam in the state of Mataka (among the Yao) or in other specific places?", the answer was clear. There was a tradition that Islam and the muridiyya had been introduced in Mataka´s state by Cee Nyenje, the second Mataka and his sister. A similar answer was obtained near Sanga from the present representatives and successor to the Malinganile chiefdom. Malinganile had been in contact twice with Mataka around 1890 and 1910. According to Abdallah(1919: ) Cee Nyenye was distinguished the one "of the mosque" . He died after an attack by the Magwangwara and his successor Cee Bonomali had already a Muslim name.

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?

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.

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.