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Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau
Series:
Islam in Africa, Volume: 25
Author:
The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau
Series:
Islam in Africa, Volume: 25
Author:
The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
Author:
Abstract
The chapter “Born on the Island: Situating Ustadh Mau’s Poetry in the Context” by Clarissa Vierke characterizes the relation between Ustadh Mau and Lamu, in three ways: Firstly, it is the context his poetry reacts to: Ustadh Mau writes his poetry particularly to guide his community facing more and more social, political and economic challenges and tensions in the present. Secondly, it shows how Lamu’s intellectual tradition of writing poetry as a way to reach wider Muslim audiences, largely shaped by the Sufi brotherhood of the Alawiyya, has made an impact on him—as it had also done on his grandfather and father. His family history and his own biography are much entangled with the local Sufi tradition as well as wider Indian Ocean links, as the chapter shows. However, as the contribution underlines, his poetic practice does not merely emphasize continuity with a great poetic tradition, Ustadh Mau has also developed his own critical, modernist stance, significantly diverting from previous ideals. Thirdly, the chapter zooms in on Ustadh Mau’s poetics putting an emphasis on Lamu as a poetic locus, which does not only provide him with topics to write on and an audience to speak to, but also addresses his senses and gives him the imagery, characters, the rhythm and a sensitive language to write with. It is the figurative language, as the chapter argues drawing on Blumenberg’s exploration of metaphorical language as part of intellectual history, that is deeply linked with the poem’s capacity to captivate its audience, but also to produce its own kind of reflection.
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Abstract
Ustadh Mau’s poems are often concerned with teaching and guiding his community. Much of his poetry centres around basic ethical questions: What is good or bad? How ought one to live? Drawing on Michael Lambek’s notion of “ordinary ethics” and his emphasis on “doing ethics,” Clarissa Vierke takes this perspective as a way of entering into and listening to Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s poetic voice. She studies Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice not as promoting a list of well-defined and unchangeable rules, but rather as a continuous struggle toward the right path and a major site of “doing ethics”—finding a language for it, weighing arguments, and judging and criticizing in relation to life situations and occurrences. Taking the example of three very different poems, Clarissa Vierke shows how his poems make use of different references, means of depiction but also vary in the way they involve ethics: sometimes as part of proclamations, other times in less explicit modalities of doubt and uncertainty. Considering ethics as part of poetic practice accounts for a dynamic perspective that goes beyond a functional analysis of a literary text and demands a close reading. She shows how not only the ethical permeates the poems, but the poetic, its means of expression, its imagery, its dialogues and sentiment and its way of relating to the world, also shape the ethical.
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Abstract
This chapter seeks to situate the poem Wasiya wa mabanati (hereafter “Wasiya”), its genre, media, and content in relation to modern Swahili Muslim publics in a postcolonial era characterized by reforms and opposition toward Western customs. The focus on genre, media, and narrative reveals a plethora of aesthetic and performative experiences that help to explain the poem’s social resonance and public reflexivity. Based on latest works on al-Islam al-sawti (“voiced Islam”) and Muslim media in coastal Kenya, both the Wasiya and the Arabic prose pamphlet Yā-bintī by the Syrian ʿAlī al-Ṭanṭawi, which inspired Ustadh Mau’s work, provide instructive case studies for investigating the multimodal vehicles through which reform and didactic ideas may be spread and broadcast among Muslim communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries via texts and solo recordings. Michael Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony as applied to Dostoyevsky’s novels and characters, as well as Pirandello’s dramatic play Six Characters in Search of an Author, have inspired both a comparison with the content of the Wasiya and the title of this contribution. As it will be shown, it is within the Wasiya’s story, rooted in social drama, that the poem reveals its aesthetic power.