Guidance (Uwongozi) by Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui: Selections from the First Swahili Islamic Newspaper (original) (raw)

Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui's writings from the Uwongozi collection are a rich resource for students, researchers and anyone generally interested in social and historical aspects of Islam in East Africa. This bilingual edition seeks to make accessible the significant and unique commentaries by Sheikh al-Amin, who was a partial observer of, and an active participant in, the affairs of coastal Muslims. These texts have already fed into research projects in the past (particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, informing for instance the works of Margret Strobel, Ahmed Idha Salim, and Randal Pouwels). Still, much more can be taken up and commented upon-from historical, anthropological, linguistic, and religious studies perspectives; and in comparative perspective too, with a view to related Indian Ocean littorals, similar projects of Islamic reform, and more. There is a precedent sample of a bilingual edition of an important historical source for the study of Swahili society and especially Islam in East Africa, namely Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy's account of East Africa's Shafiʾi ulama at the turn of the twentieth century (Farsy 1972),2 translated and published by Randall Pouwels (Farsy and Pouwels 1989). This has been a rich and much used resource by researchers over the decades, opening up local Swahili Islamic texts-and regional intellectual history-to a wider Anglophone readership. It is our hope that our translation, similarly, will be useful to a broad range of readers within and outside East Africa, within and far beyond Swahili Studies, broadly conceived. Here, we present the first academic English translations of these texts, so that they can be accessible to a wider audience beyond Swahilophone readers. And even for them, one might add, reading Sheikh al-Amin's old texts based on 1 A note on spelling: we are following the common local Swahili spellings of Islamic scholars and people from the region, and of some Islamic terms that are used in the English text here (like e.g. sheikh, maulidi, bidaa, dhikri, etc.)-and not standardized Arabic versions of these terms. But standardized transcriptions have been used for the names of scholars and newspapers from the Middle East in the Introduction (following the guidelines by ijmes, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies). 2 Note that the spelling of his first name varies, even in his own publications. Here and in the Introduction, 'Abdallah' is used, following his spelling in this book that was also a main source for us here. xiv kresse and mwakimako Kimvita (Mombasan dialect) with a number of now antiquated terms, many typos and hardly any punctuation, is not always easy-as they can see in the Swahili original version provided here. In our translation efforts, we have been fortunate to be able to build on an earlier and relatively free translation by Muhammad bin Yusuf, a grandson of Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui. He is based in Canada and generously shared his translation with us (Yusuf 2006). This was published between March and June 2009, in chapter sequences in the weekly Friday Bulletin, the main bulletin for Kenyan Muslims, which is edited from Jamia Mosque in central Nairobi. His is a very readable translation, but at times a bit far from the original. It linked the critical modernizing spirit of Sheikh al-Amin's writings to the contemporary world, using idioms and expressions from current Anglophone Muslim discourse familiar to readers in and beyond Kenya. For us, however, from an academic perspective, it was important to provide a translation closer to the original texts (written between 1930 and 1932), so that a sense of the historical contexts and invocations would become an inherent part of the readings in translation. If we have succeeded in this to some extent, this is in no small measure due to the helpful and corrective eyes of our two wazee and distinguished senior Swahili scholars who also originate from Mombasa, Professor Alamin Mazrui (based in the usa, at Rutgers University) and Mkubwa wetu (our elder) Abdilatif Abdalla (based in Germany, retired from the University of Leipzig), both true mabingwa (champions) of Kiswahili. As well-known poets, scholars, and Kivita speakers with immense translational and editorial experiences, and as members of long-standing intellectual families in Mombasa (one, of course, even related to our author), they have the ideal qualifications for the project that we, with our more limited abilities, undertook. We are grateful that they supported our project from the beginning, and that they went over our drafts with careful eyes and a rich sense for the local meanings and connotations that matter. It is thanks to their involvement that a publishable version of this translation could emerge. We would also like to acknowledge the help of Sharif Abdulrahman Saggaf Alawy, who was readily available for many conversations and interviews, also about his former teacher and guardian (mlezi) Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui, over the years since 1998, for which we (Kai Kresse in particular) are especially grateful. Some related conversations were also held with Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir, and we are grateful for the opportunity such conversations gave us to gain understanding of the perspective of social insiders who were close to Sheikh al-Amin and his students. The efforts that have gone into the realization of this translation project have, after all, been collaborative efforts across continents, oceans, and time-preface and acknowledgments xv zones, which were at times challenging to cross. We are grateful to the Mazrui family, especially Professor Alamin Mazrui and Sheikh Hammad Muhammad Kasim Mazrui (in Mombasa) who granted us permission to work with the materials and supported us in going ahead with the publication, and who supplied such a thoughtful foreword. Without their readiness to make the sources accessible, this book would not have been possible. We thank Muhammad Yusuf for providing us with his translation and being supportive of the project (which took much longer than we all initially thought), and we thank our research assistants and language editors who were involved, during different stages of the process of production: Stephanie Zöllner (at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin) for fundamental editorial assistance to get the project on its way; Sara Weschler (at Columbia University) for inspired critical work and immensely helpful feedback on draft translations; Brianna Alston (also at Columbia) for reliable editorial and formatting work; Olly Akkerman (at the Berlin Graduate School for the Study of Muslim Cultures and Societies, Free University Berlin) for qualified Islamic Studies related editorial assistance and final editing work; Liese Hoffmann and Jasmin Mahazi, for their work on translation and transcription of the sample Sahifa text presented in the appendix, and last but not least, Joy Adapon for feedback and proofreading. Furthermore, for their feedback on the Introduction and/or parts of the translations, and for the discussions of specific aspects or the substance of this work, we wish to thank Muhammad bin Yusuf, Mahmoud A