“Settlements of foreign, predominantly Semitic, peoples”Strandes' gambit concerning ‘Muslim Civilization’ of the east coast of Africa is a familiar one to many Africanists. Persians and Arabs, so the stories go, settled coastal sites as part of the Islamic diaspora; they vanquished less virile African societies; they built cities which were reflections of Middle Eastern prototypes; they imposed their religion; and, they ‘founded’ coastal civilization, a civilization, therefore, which was characteristically Middle Eastern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians cannot be entirely blamed for holding such simplistic views. After all, the traditions themselves at least imply some of these things. And, given the literalist and diffusionist nature of past anthropological and historical theory, simple and biased interpretations of these traditions are not surprising.What is perhaps remarkable, given the developments in anthropological theory since the 1940s, is the persistence of such views in some quarters. Examples include portions of two recently published papers by Saad and Wilkinson. Both deal wholly or in part with the most intriguing of the coastal origin traditions, the stories which tell how many coastal towns were originally settled by immigrants who came from Shiraz or Persia (see appendix). Their interpretations are so literal as to link the Shirazi name not merely with a particular dynasty, but with a specific family or kin group which ruled in pre-fourteenth-century Kilwa.
In this first major historical study of Islam among the Swahili, Randall Pouwels shows how Islam and other aspects of coastal civilization have evolved since about AD 1000 as an organic whole. Coastal Africans, he argues, simply adopted Islam as the spiritual vehicle best suited to their expanding intellectual needs and to meeting the opportunities presented by their physical and cultural environment. The culture and religion that developed were strong, rich, supple, self-assured. yet capable of accommodating change where it was unavoidable or preferable. All these characteristics were put to the test in the nineteenth century, when coastal peoples were subjected to intense Arabizing and Westernizing influences. Pouwels demonstrates how local people went on asserting their own traditions while assimilating what they chose from both worlds. East African Muslims, therefore faced the twentieth century divided on issues of local cultural autonomy and the need to conform to external cultural pressures.
Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. By DEREK NURSE and THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH. Edited by THOMAS J. HINNEBUSCH, with a special addendum by GERARD PHILIPPSON. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 121). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993. Pp. xxxii+780. $80 (ISBN 0-520-09775-0).Shanga. The Archaeology of a Muslim Trading Community on the Coast of East Africa. By MARK HORTON. (Memoirs of the British Institute of East Africa, 14). London: The British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1996. Pp. xvi+458. £75 (ISBN 1-872-56609-x).Nurse's and Hinnebusch's Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History is the most comprehensive study yet done of Swahili history through linguistic analysis. It is an encyclopedic work representing many years of research by the authors and other scholars, and it focuses particularly on the emergence and evolution of the Swahili language. The massive and diverse evidence they marshal is, of course, almost entirely linguistic: as such they discuss four basal parameters of language relationship and change, namely lexis, morphology, phonology and tone. (The last two are treated together, and G. Philippson reviews the latter.)
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