This book brings together poems by one of the most outstanding Muslim poets and intellectuals from Kenya, namely Mahmoud Ahmad Abdulkadir (commonly called Ustadh Mahmoud Mau). The volume is the first published anthology of poetry by Ustadh Mau, which strives toward filling an important gap in our current scholarship: the accessibility of African-language texts by individual poets and intellectuals in Africa, which are important sources for African intellectual and literary history. Ustadh Mau’s broader scholarly reception and recognition is still only in its early stages, and this volume intends to lay the groundwork for further research with and on local poets and intellectuals from the Swahili coast for a better understanding of intellectual discourse outside of Western frameworks. Our investigation into Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice and his active involvement in his own community—ranging from his daily social interactions, to his poetic works answering to local circumstances and struggles, to the Friday sermons he delivered in the oldest mosque in Lamu—also places emphasis on the Lamu archipelago as a yet-neglected Swahili Islamic hub. Thus far, poetry as a genre of debate and critical reflection in Islamic Africa has not received enough attention: on the so-called “Swahili coast,” however, it has been the most highly valued intellectual genre of critical Muslim discourse in Swahili for centuries. Moreover, for Ustadh Mau, poetry is the most important means of addressing topical political concerns and burning social issues. In his poetry, he re-explores poetic forms and tropes that one can trace back to Lamu’s nineteenth-century “golden age” of Muslim poetic and cultural production, which itself has even older roots.

Mahmoud Ahmad Abdulkadir was born on the island of Lamu in northern Kenya in 1952. Unlike his own children, he never attended a secular state school; he received all his education in Swahili and Arabic from very renowned Islamic teachers at the local madrassa and Islamic institutes. He became a baker to earn his living, but also an imam at the oldest mosque on Lamu, where he began teaching and preaching in the early 1980s. On Lamu, he was the first imam to give his Friday sermons in Swahili. For him, Swahili is linked with his struggle for change. Influenced by the writings of reformist scholars that he imbibed in his early twenties, he has been promoting an agenda of progress, of which one can find strong echoes in his own poems. The notion of reform Islam or even more his self-identification as Salafi may sound alarming in the present global and local context where Salafism has been increasinly associated with fundamentalism and a whole spectrum of groups opposing local Sufi practices and traditions but also suppressing and apply increasing violence against people considered leaving the ‘right path’. As our contributions show, although Ustadh Mau has read many classical reformist scholars, Ustadh Mau’s search for reform and change is too complex to be translated into a dichotomy of ‘traditional’ versus ‘reformist’ Islam. Far removed from the aggressive moral agendas of reformist currents of the last decades, his writings are characterized by tolerance and understanding toward people’s everyday struggles and diverse ways of living. He stands up for the weaker classes of his society and has, for instance, courageously championed the rights of women and children. Furthermore, he does take keen interest in local Swahili poetic traditions rooted in Sufi context, which also influenced his own poems.

In his early twenties, Ustadh Mau began composing his own Swahili poetry. In fact, the first poem he composed came into being almost on the spot, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Kenya’s independence, when one audience member enjoyed his performance so much that he paid him one shilling as a reward—a promising sign that encouraged him to continue composing poetry. While, on the one hand, the composition of political verses, like Kimwondo (“Shooting Star”) and the Wasiya wa mabanati (“Advice to Young Women”), earned him a reputation in the Lamu community as well as a broader coastal audience, scholarly contributions by Rayya Timammy¹ and Kai Kresse² have made important first steps toward situating his writing and thinking in the broader Swahili Muslim context of poetic debate. Furthermore, Ustadh Mau coedited the utendi poem Kiswahili with the late British scholar Peter J. Frankl, who was living in Mombasa at the time. Kiswahili was published by the journal Swahili Forum in 2013, which represents the first time that an original manuscript of one of Ustadh Mau’s poems—handwritten on lined paper in Arabic script—was included, together with its typed transliteration in Roman script and an English translation. The article also offers an appendix with a first inventory of Ustadh Mau’s poems.

The poems presented in this volume are composed in Kiamu, the dialect of Lamu, which is considerably different from standard Swahili. In the nineteenth century, poetic production was so vibrant on Lamu that Kiamu became almost synonymous with “poetic language.” Poets from Lamu, including Ustadh Mau, take great pride in their dialect and its tradition. We also stick to Kiamu variants, including spelling conventions (often derived from Arabic script), in the rendition of the texts, but make reference to their equivalents in standard Swahili. In our presentation and readings of the texts, we make abundant use of the poet’s own commentaries and reflections on literature, religion, language, and education, about which we have had conversations with him at various times and places. All the contributors to this volume have cherished memories of time spent with Ustadh Mau, who hosted us at his place in Kenya or came to visit Germany and Italy.

The other contributors to this volume have known Ustadh Mau much longer than its editors: Rayya Timammy, professor of literature at the University of Nairobi, was not only among the first scholars to work on his poetry and biography, but was also born on Lamu; Jasmin Mahazi, who played an important role in translating his poetry, holds fond memories of Ustadh Mau from her childhood on Lamu; and since the late 1990s, Kai Kresse has been in dialogue with Ustadh Mau as part of his wider project on Swahili thinkers. His contribution to this volume emerged from a discussion with Kadara Swaleh, who, himself from Lamu, has known Ustadh Mau for many years.

Clarissa Vierke first became acquainted with Ustadh Mau at a conference on popular culture in East Africa organized by Andrew Eisenberg and Ann Biersteker in Mombasa in 2006, where she presented on an earlier important Muslim poet from Lamu, Muhamadi Kijuma (1855–1945), who had left behind a large number of Swahili poems in Arabic script. Always interested in and knowledgeable about Lamu’s poetic history, Ustadh Mau invited her to his house for further—and still ongoing—conversations about Swahili poetry. In 2009, Clarissa Vierke invited Ustadh Mau to contribute to the Jukwaani poetry festival in Nairobi, whose Swahili section—which brought together the most renowned coastal poets, including Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo, Abdilatif Abdalla, and Ahmed Sheikh Nabahany—she curated for the Goethe Institut. The Jukwaani festival was one the few public occasions where Ustadh Mau read his own poetry—in this case, Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”)—aloud, as he regards himself as a composer (mtungaji), but not a reciter or singer. Instead, important Swahili reciters and singers like Muhammad Kadara, el-Shatry, and Bi Ridhai have given voice to his compositions, ensuring their wide circulation along the coast.

Ustadh Mau is not only a poet, but has also become a scholar of and reference person for the Swahili poetic tradition. He has been a part of a working group translating early nineteenth-century dance poetry from Lamu, and also helped Annachiara Raia decipher manuscripts of the Utendi wa Yusuf (“The Poem of Joseph”) in Arabic script. Raia first met Ustadh Mau in August 2014, when she first came to Lamu. Later, in 2018, Annachiara Raia began research on the contents of Ustadh Mau’s home library on Lamu, and in 2019, she met him again in Mombasa, when they not only selected the photos for this volume, but also expanded the corpus of poems with Amu (“Lamu”), which now opens this anthology. It was among his first poems, composed in response to a shipwreck that shocked Lamu in 1979. They translated the poem in July 2019, exactly forty years after the calamity occurred. The other poem is Hapo zamani za yana (“Once upon a Time”), one of the oldest existing poems in his collection—composed by Ustadh Mau’s father, Ahmad Abdulkadir Abdulatif (1915–1970), around the time Ustadh Mahmoud Mau was born in 1952. His father wrote the poem with didactic intent, typical of the wasiya genre, to provide his son with guidelines on how to live, drawing from his own experience as well as the existing lore of instructional poetry, Islamic literature, and popular wisdom.

In April 2015, together with Ustadh Mau—who had come to Bayreuth—Annachiara Raia, Clarissa Vierke, and Jasmin Mahazi began working on the translation of his poetry. The more than fifty manuscripts of poems that he shared with us were neither bound nor organized in a single notebook, but rather constituted loose sheets of paper. For some poems, there was already a transliteration typed in Roman script and, for very few, a rough translation in English, thanks to previous editorial works done mainly by two people very close to Ustadh Mau: his daughter Azra and Mohamed Karama. The selection of twenty poems to be translated and included in this volume was made by the poet himself, who singled out the poems he considered his most important, because they either addressed critical issues in the community or commemorated pivotal events in his own life. With the help of student assistants (Janina Buck and later Duncan Tarrant and Melissa Deiß), we began scanning the material and typing the poems, which until then had only been handwritten. While we have been able to archive further poems digitally, Ustadh Mau has written and continues to write more poetry, which we also want to preserve. Annachiara Raia is currently working on a digital archive program in cooperation with the Lamu Museum and Ustadh Mau himself, which aims to include the increasing number of vocal renderings of his poems; this initiative is contributing to spreading his words more widely and in multimodal formats (i.e., printed and aural).³

The fragile state of the poetry manuscripts that Ustadh Mau brought to Bayreuth impressed on us the urgency to begin both digitizing the original manuscripts in Arabic script, but as well as translating them to make them more widely available. In a culture where orality and recitation and spontaneous, sharp-witted rhetorical intervention are so highly valued, the written and printed are often of little priority. As elaborated further in the contributions in this volume, Ustadh Mau has always considered his people more receptive and accustomed to listening rather than reading. This makes written manuscripts, which are such unique documents of Swahili intellectual history, precarious and highly endangered. Moreover, the practice of writing Swahili in Arabic script, as Ustadh Mau commonly does, is all but extinct on Lamu nowadays. Thus, this book not only intends to make his poetry more widely accessible, but also to offer an idea of the manuscripts’ beauty as a vanishing Swahili Muslim heritage. Lastly, besides reproducing some of the manuscripts, the book also presents rare and valuable photographs of from Ustadh Mau’s personal library, which adds to the portrayal of the poet. Ustadh Mau allowed us to digitize these photographs and to store the digital copies in the Africa Archive of Bayreuth University, which has been generous in its technical support (thank you to Benjamin Zorn!).

Besides offering a collection of Ustadh Mau’s poetry, the book’s foreword, by Rayya Timammy, and its first part, with contributions by Kai Kresse and K. Saleh, Jasmin Mahazi, and both editors, situate the poet and his poetics within the social and intellectual context of Lamu. As Ustadh Mau himself considers poetry so deeply grounded in social practice, all of the contributions in this volume illuminate facets of his modus vivendi.

Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh’s portrayal of Ustadh Mau highlights his emphasis on social responsibility and personal engagement in relation to the local concept of a mtu wa watu (“man of the people”). In an attempt to position Ustadh Mau within the wider social field of intellectual practice in Lamu and the intellectual history of the Swahili Muslim coast, Kresse and Swaleh draw parallels between Ustadh Mau and other Islamic intellectuals who have taken on key roles in society because of their respective agendas, speeches, and acts toward and within their own communities—viz., three renowned East African ulama: Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui (d. 1947), Sheikh Abdalla Saleh Farsy (d. 1982), and especially Sayyid Omar Abdalla (d. 1988).

Along the same lines, Raia, in her outline of books and thinkers that shaped Ustadh Mau’s personal education and knowledge, brings to the fore a Cairene network that the poet—despite being a lifelong resident of Lamu—has been in close contact with, as attested, for instance, by the books and scholars he knows well. For instance, the Egyptian Islamic theologian Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (1926–) used to address Ustadh as “al-ʿAqqād,” after the Egyptian writer ʿAbbās Mahmoud al-ʿAqqād from Cairo—whose writing and modus vivendi Ustadh Mau admired so much that, when he was just sixteen years old, he adopted “ʿAqqād” as his nickname (before becoming “Mau”).

Ustadh Mau’s close relationship with his hometown Lamu and the island’s longstanding poetic tradition are elements that Jasmin Mahazi and Clarissa Vierke both outline in their own contributions. The poet’s personal genealogy is inevitably entangled with the ancestral roots of poetic discourse on the island, but also related to more far-reaching Indian Ocean connections: Ustadh Mau’s grandfather came to East Africa from India.

Two further contributions, by Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke, zero in on Ustadh Mau’s poetry and poetics. Ustadh Mau’s poetry covers a wide-ranging spectrum of topics, from political issues to social, didactic, and religious ones, not to mention his shorter compositions composed on behalf of others on the occasion of a graduation ceremony, wedding, funeral, or pilgrimage. With her interest in the relationship between morality and poetry in Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice, Vierke offers a close reading of his oeuvre as a major site of “doing ethics.” Annachiara Raia draws on the Wasiya wa mabanati (“Advice to Young Women”) to explore how narratives and their related media frame and shape social and religious discourse in coastal Kenya. According to her reading of the poem, the Wasiya—besides being an outstanding example of Ustadh Mau’s experiments with the didactic genre and its media—hosts a polyphonic community whose familiar drama, as told in its stanzas, mirrors Lamu’s own societal drama at a time when customs were considered in danger of being corrupted. Rather than treating poetry purely as the vessel for a social message, Vierke and Raia highlight the specific Swahili poetic forces that can affect audiences through the use of prosodic patterns, sharp, sermon-like language in some parts, or veiled, metaphoric language (mafumbo) in others. Ustadh Mau’s poetry provides unique viewpoints, mostly on issues troubling the community, by enacting highly mimetic plots that unfurl daily dramas that no one would dare speak publicly about, if not the poet—who, through an almost Dostoyevskian realism, morphs into and voices his characters, imparting to his poetry a prophecy-like character and making scenes palpable to listeners. If there is one talent that the authors in this work are committed to highlighting in various ways, it is certainly the poet’s ability to plumb the depths of human frailty.

Many individuals and various institutions have assisted us in the course of researching and writing this book, and it is our pleasure to offer our sincere and heartfelt thanks first of all to Ustadh Mau, who never tired of and was ever at our disposal in answering our numerous questions and sharing portions of his life and island with us. Furthermore, we are very grateful to all the contributors to this book—Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Jasmin Mahazi, and Rayya Timammy—whose contributions have vastly enriched and expanded the scope of the current study.

We also owe much gratitude to Mohamed Karama and Azra Mahmoud Ahmad, who allowed us to amend and publish in this volume their poetic translations of Mwalimu, Za Washirazi Athari, and Yasome na Kukumbuka (Karama) and Mchezo wa Kuigiza and Mola Zidisha Baraka (Ahmad). While Jasmin Mahazi worked on most of the translations with us, Azra Mahmoud Ahmad helped us enormously to improve some of the translations presented in this volume, like the Wasiya wa mabanati and others. Kristen de Joseph accompanied us from the beginning. She put an enormous effort into this book and proofread the English translations.

Furthermore, we are grateful to several institutions: first and foremost, the University of Bayreuth, but also the African Studies Centre Leiden, without which trips to Kenya as well as Germany and Italy would have been difficult.

Speaking in the name of all contributors to this book, we are grateful to all close colleagues and friends—too numerous to mention by name—who helped us in improving our contributions. Thank you to all the children who accompanied us: Freya, Giulia, Martina, Giada, Ivan and Nicoló.

We wonder whether or not to consider it a coincidence that we’ve found ourselves completing the last stages of this book, titled In This Fragile World, at a time where human connections and frailty have indeed been put to the test. Besides the global challenges of war and corona pandemic, we, all of us editors and authors here, also as friends and fellow human beings, particularly feel with Ustadh Mau, whose son Yasir, an ambulance-driver, was abducted in mid 2021 by policemen and imprisoned without trial. As in other parts of the world more broadly, in Kenya specifically, the ideology of a ‘war on terror’ has been used to cast Islam as a whole as associated with terrorism. Under these circumstances, in such a fragile world, being a Muslim from the coast is enough to raise suspicion; and basic human rights become suspended. We are glad that, despite everything, Ustadh Mau has always been with us. Mola akubariki, Ustadh.