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.
The Chadian Muslim states of Kanem, and later Bornu, have been linked throughout their history to North Africa by an important trade-route across the Sahara, from the Libyan coast to Lake Chad. The popularity and permanence of this route throughout the centuries have been detennined by the economic needs and specialities of the N. African littoral, as well as of the Western Sudan. This route, first controlled by Ibāḍī Muslim Berbers from Zawīla from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, then briefly by the Ayyubids of Cairo, came under the control of Kanem, which was expanding northwards in the thirteenth century. The Fazzān (and Zawīla) then came under the control of Kanem, which seems to have maintained friendly relations with the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis. After the thirteenth century, independent states arose in the Fazzān. Then, after the establishment of an Ottoman Turkish province in Libya, the Turks and the Mais of Bornu were soon in contact, probably from about 1555, and certainly in the time of Mai Idrīs of Bomu (on the throne in 1557–8), as some newly found correspondence from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul makes clear. There was certainly a friendly association between Bornu and the Turks at this period, if not an actual alliance, as Mai Idrīs hoped to obtain arms and perhaps Turkish troops as well to use against his enemies of the W. Sudan, principally the Hausa state of Kebbi. However, Idris's hopes were deceived, and the Ottoman Sultan Murād III did not provide what was wanted, causing Idrīs to turn to the Sa'dī Sharifian ruler of Fās, Aḥmad al-Manṣūr al-Dhahābī, with a similar request.
In the spring of 1884 shortly before his viceroyalty came to an end, Lord Ripon wrote in an urgent manner to Lord Kimberley, then Secretary of State for India, about one of the more critical questions of policy confronting the Government of India: “You may rely upon it that there are few Indian questions of greater importance in the present day than those which relate to the mode in which we are to deal with the growing body of Natives educated by ourselves in Western learning and Western ideas.” Ripon was pointing to the existence of a new class of English-educated Indians within British-Indian society and to the failure of the Government of India to acknowledge this class and to absorb its talents and influence within the structure of British-Indian administration. That this problem begged for a realistic solution by 1884 and that it would continue to do so in the years ahead, he had no doubts whatsoever; it had been left too long to fester in a mode both damaging to the class itself and dangerous to British rule. In short, the English-educated Indian class had become a question of policy.Simply stated, as the opportunities for Western collegiate education expanded and the avenues leading towards entry into the East India Company's service became available, the doors either failed to open or were placed out of the reach of the educated Indians seeking entry. By 1850, with the new class in existence in limited numbers in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi and with additional graduates appearing annually to swell its ranks, frustrations began to emerge as the graduates found themselves unable to secure the public employment which the Charter Act of 1833 had implied was to be their just right.
In the course of a visit to Libya in 1964, the writer was informed by the Archivist at the Libyan Government Archives in Tripoli, Sayyid Muhammad al-Usta, of the existence of Ottoman documents in Istanbul concerning a sixteenth-century embassy to Turkey from the West African state of Bornu.
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