The Shirazi Civilisation and its Impact on the East African Coast

Utafiti ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-256
Author(s):  
Newton Kahumbi Maina
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
Gulf Region ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
Persian Architecture ◽  
Nation States ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Persian Gulf ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The relations between Iran and East Africa are captured well by depicting the impact of the Shirazi (Persian) civilisation on the East African coast. But some influential scholars claim that historians tend to dismiss or trivialise the role played by the Shirazis in East Africa. The demonstrable impact of Shirazi civilisation in East Africa is evident in the expansion of trade between the East African coast and the Persian Gulf region with the expansion of Islam. The Persian language has bequeathed to the Kiswahili language many lexicons that are presently still accessible in the region. Persian poets influenced Kiswahili literature through their classic works. The influence of Persian architecture is seen in Shirazi building styles throughout cities including Zanzibar, Kilwa and Manda. Thus Shirazis brought Persian traditions and customs to East Africa, and some Shirazis intermarried with the Arabs and local communities. As compiled here from other sources, there is enough enduring historical evidence to demonstrate incontrovertibly the impact of the Shirazis in social, economic and political aspects of East African life. This legacy arguably justifies greater contemporary cooperation between East African nation states and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

scholarly journals The Relationship of the Cotton Crop to Plague, and its Role as a Vehicle for Rats and Fleas in East Africa

1935 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Isgaer Roberts
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Export Trade ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Cotton Crop ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Belgian Congo

Mombasa is the main port for the East African coast, handling all exports and imports for the two territories, Kenya and Uganda, which are incidentally the worst plague centres in the area. A fair amount of the Tanganyika and Belgian Congo produce also reaches this port. As Mombasa is the receiving centre for all the export trade of Kenya and Uganda, it might be expected that plague, if conveyable in any form or by any means, would appear regularly with the arrival of some of the main crops which are usually considered to be associated with the disease in the interior. Maize and cotton are generally supposed to be connected with the incidence of plague, and it is of particular interest to contrast briefly the figures for the incidence of the disease at the port within recent years and the periods of export of these crops.

Muslim Politics and Resistance to Colonial Rule: Shaykh Uways B. Muḥammad Al-Barāwī and the Qādirīya Brotherhood in East Africa

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. G. Martin
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Coastal Region ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Muslim Politics

Shaykh Uways b. Muḥammad al-Barāwī (1847–1909) was an important leader of the Qādirīya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar, and along the East African coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and founded his own branch of Qādirīya, the Uwaysīya. Before his death in 1909 when he was assassinated by representatives of the rival Sālihīya brotherhood (under the leadership of Muḥammȧd 'Ȧbdallah Hasan, the ‘Mad Mullah’), Uways missionary activities were very considerable.Uways' branch of the Qādiriya was probably behind certain episodes of Muslim resistance to European penetration into Buganda in the late 1880's, at the behest of Sayyid Barghash of Zanzibar. Indeed the relations between Shaykh Uways and successive rulers of Zanzibar, Barghash, Khalīfa, and Ḥamid b. Thuwaynī were very close. In 90's, certain Muslim elements in Tanganyika, in conjunction with theṭarīqa, made trouble for the Germans in SE Tanganyika during the ‘Mecca Letters affair’ at Lindi in 1908. This episode revealed a division in the Tanganyika Muslim community.The Uwaysīya was responsible for massive conversions to Islam in the coastal region, in inner Tanganyika, and on the Eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning decades of the 20th centuries.

Bibliography of Primary Sources of the Pre-Nineteenth Century East African Coast

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 393-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall L. Pouwels
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Supplementary List

The following bibliography is intended to supplement the excellent one (largely) of secondary sources compiled by Thomas Spear and published inHistory in Africa27(2000). Research for a forthcoming monograph on the East African coast in the ‘middle’ period has taken me in recent years into a number of libraries and archives in India, East Africa, and Europe. There I have been able to build an extensive listing of source material and oral informants interviewed in East Africa. While this compilation includes many of the titles in Spear's list, study carried out in Goa and Lisbon afforded me the opportunity of viewing primary sources not included in Spear's collection. Despite the fact that this is still a work in progress, I submit this supplementary list hoping it might prove useful to other scholars interested in East Africa and the western Indian in the pre- and early-modern period.Readers also will note that I have included some secondary listings not included in Spear's bibliography. This is due to the fact that my ideas concerning what is relevant to coastal history appear to be somewhat broader than Spear's. Consequently, this list includes some titles on southern and central Africa, as well as of coastal literature, which I have found to be useful and apposite to coastal studies. Naturally, I have tried not to duplicate titles found in Spear's list.

Work and Discipline on the East African Coast

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 95-99
Author(s):  
Luise White
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
African Coast

Abstract:Frederick Cooper’s first three books, published between 1977 and 1987, were written during African historians’ first sustained critical engagement with African archives and African voices. Cooper’s books were literally in the weeds with slave and free labor in East Africa, yet their importance went beyond the region. Read in sequence, we see how Cooper’s work was shifting toward studies of the metropole by the mid-1980s. Taken together we see how practices in the workplace shaped policies in Whitehall, that conditions on plantations and on docks caused a rethinking of how colonialists might most successfully exert control.

The Arabs and Swahili Culture

Africa ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 224-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon Harries
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
East African ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
African Coast ◽  
Opening Paragraph

Opening ParagraphSwahili culture can be roughly defined as the culture of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the East African coast whose activities show features of Perso-Arabian origin, features that are foreign to the culture of other Bantu peoples of East Africa. It cannot be described simply as Bantu culture plus Perso-Arabian elements, for some Swahilis have excluded from their way of life anything that can be labelled as Bantu; they may have Bantu blood, but their whole way of life is Muslim-Arabic.

‘Indian’ metalwork in East Africa: the bronze lion statuette from Shanga

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (234) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.C. Horton ◽  
T.R. Blurton
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
East Africa ◽  
East African ◽  
The West ◽  
East African Coast ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
African Coast ◽  
The Indian Ocean

There are few frontiers from later periods whose archaeology is more beguiling than the east African coast. To the east are the sea-routes of the Indian Ocean, to the Islamic world, to India, to Indonesia, to China. To the west are the distinctive cultures of medieval Africa. And on the coast are the settlements where the east and the west touch. This paper works towards the wider issue of circum-maritime cultures from a single find from the new excavations at Shanga which have revealed mosques of a remarkably early date.

scholarly journals What’s New About Muslim Ismaili Transnationalism? Comparing Business Practices in British East Africa, Colonial Mozambique and Contemporary Angola

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Salvaterra Trovão ◽  
Filomena Batoréu
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
East African ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The way in which the history of colonialism might link up with the formation of postcolonial migrant identities remains insufficiently examined. Through a comparison between transnational business practices of Khoja Ismaili Muslim settled in the British and Portuguese colonial territories of East Africa and in contemporary Angola, the present paper aims to discuss the impact of colonial experiences in the configuration of postcolonial business cultures. Articulating several guiding empirical questions, we will attempt to show that the continuing centrality of the nation-states in which Ismaili transnational economic activities are embedded, the notion of a disadvantageous network closure, concomitant with the importance of face-to-face contacts, the mutual trust and understanding sustained through personal relations, and the tendency for national loyalty to prevail over religious belonging (whenever any potential conflict between the two exists) constitute crucial dimensions of an accumulated colonial knowledge which is significant in the analysis of the Ismaili competitive advantage in postcolonial Africa. This argument will be developed on the basis of a multi-sited ethnographic research. The U.K. and Portugal emerged as a strategic passage for our encounters with East African Ismailis from former British and Portuguese colonial territories. The current Angolan context, absent from the available literature, was selected as a postcolonial term of comparison.

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