1 The Context of Ustadh’s Writing: The Island of Lamu and Its Challenges

Ustadh Mahmoud Ahmad Abdulkadir, more commonly known as Ustadh Mau, was born and grew up on the island of Lamu, around 250 kilometers north of Mombasa.¹ His life, works, and poetry are interwoven with the island, its grand intellectual history, and its complicated present in many ways, as this chapter is meant to show. Coming from one of the reputed ulama clans on Lamu, Ustadh ran a bakery there to earn his daily bread, but has also been an important teacher and preacher. He never left the island, as he proudly announces in the verse given above.² Born in February 1952,³ when Kenya was still a British crown colony, Ustadh Mau was not allowed to attend a secular school, as his father was suspicious of them. Like many other wanazuoni (Islamic scholars), his father considered colonial schools with a strong Christian affinity a perfidious strategy to estrange children from Islam, with the ultimate goal of making them convert to Christianity. As the stanza in the chapter epigraph above also alludes, Ustadh Mau received all his education at the madrassa, from renowned scholars.⁴ While he is conversant in Arabic and keeps many connections with scholars in the Arab world—in addition to reading Arabic books, which he collects in his library (see Annachiara Raia’s contribution “Seeking ʿilm on Lamu,” in this volume)—he proudly identifies as Swahili, and more specifically as mwamu, a Lamuan: he was the first to deliver the Friday sermon in Swahili in order to reach a wider audience on the island. Believing in the importance of intellectual progress, educating people on the island is his chief priority. This has also prompted him to explore poetry as a means of reaching his own people, who come from a culture of recitation, where the chanted word in rhymed form counts more than prose texts in printed journals and books. All truly important matters need to be expressed poetry (see also Jasmin Mahazi’s contribution in this volume).

In many ways, Ustadh Mau’s practices, ambition, and outlook conflict with the present world, in which Lamu, which used to be an important hub in the Indian Ocean, a center of scholarship and trade, is a remote place at the margins of the Kenyan nation-state. Since independence, people have become increasingly poor. Recently, even the daily means of subsistence, like fish, have become scarce, and drop-out rates in schools are high. There is a longer, complicated history of tension, resentment, and suspicion between bara, the mainland, and pwani, the coast, which permeates much discourse on Lamu, a phenomenon that surfaces most conspicuously and morphs into different forms whenever there is a crisis. On the one hand, domination and marginalization are recurring topics: the mainland is accused of discriminating against Muslims; of deliberately neglecting to invest in infrastructure on the coast, like schools or hospitals; stealing land; and of letting job-seekers overrun the coast, so that no jobs are left for those from pwani (see the poem Kiswahili, stz. 8 and 9). For instance, the new deep-sea port that was supposed to link Kenya with Uganda and South Sudan—in which so much hope for new jobs was initially vested, and which led to a real-estate boom and enormous speculation—has caused heated debate. The poem Bandari (“Port”) spells out these fears: it will not only destroy the environment, leave fishermen without subsistence, and disrupt local cultural habitats and traditions, but will also merely benefit the engineers and skilled workers from bara if islanders do not hasten to acquire the skills and diplomas necessary to compete.

Education has been in a crises. Many schoolteachers from bara come to teach on Lamu, not only because they are sent by the government, but also because not enough people on the island have a teaching diploma or have attended university. The nationalized curriculum has met with much disapproval; the schoolbooks are written by mainlanders, as Ustadh Mau complains in his poem Kiswahili.⁵ Nowadays, pupils on the island, which considers itself a cradle of Swahili and is proud of its poetic tradition, are corrected if they use forms of Kiamu, the dialect of Lamu, in class—much to the dismay of their parents. But mainland influence is not only imposed by educators on the island, but also comes in through social media, radio programs, and increased mobility. Parents often frown on their children’s use of Sheng, the urban vernacular of Nairobi, ubiquitous in popular music, as well as their habit of dressing in skirts, basketball shirts, and baseball caps and growing dreadlocks, which in their view is a sign of moral and cultural decay. Morality has become a matter of heated debate in the increasingly antagonistic culture of discourse.

The tension is not merely an intergenerational one; sometimes the older generation is even less dogmatic than the younger ones, who know exactly what falls under good Islamic practice and what does not. For instance, women of the younger generation on Lamu, whose education is of great concern for Ustadh, have not exchanged their veils for miniskirts; on the contrary, many younger women are encouraged or even pressured but are often also proud to wear the niqab, the face veil that leaves only the eyes exposed, as well as socks to cover their feet. They tend to shy away from handshakes and find that nonreligious music should not be played in public, increasingly not allowing for any other ideas or practices. This development is also fostered by the growing strict Islamic reformist influence on the island, often referred to as Wahhabi, which has introduced strict notions of purity and seclusion compared to previous decades.⁶ It is a global rhetoric that finds its application in a local context amid ever greater claims of superiority, seeking to silence other Islamic discourses. It has been challenging the notions of unity based on inner-Islamic diversity that have been celebrated as a hallmark of Swahili Islam, and which Ustadh Mau also promotes.⁷

It goes without saying that the tensions on Lamu are not unrelated to the phenomenon of a wider world caught between fierce dichotomies, also resulting in terrorism, on the one hand, and discrimination against Islam and any kind of minority, on the other. In Lamuan public discourse, such tensions are often projected onto the abovementioned Kenyan dichotomy of pwani and bara, such that coastal Muslims are discredited as fanatics from a bara perspective, while the mainland and foremost center of power, Nairobi, is portrayed as economically and morally corrupt from a pwani perspective. Furthermore, many Lamuans also find confirmation of the dichotomy between the decadent West and “real Islam” with an increasing emphasis on purity in last decades, in the kind of tourism they are confronted with. Despite continued terror warnings due to attacks in neighboring Mokowe and Garissa some years ago—which still make Lamu part of a red zone to which many foreign ministries caution against travel—big hotel complexes on Lamu as well as Manda, the island opposite Lamu, attract upscale tourists in search of extraordinary luxury and, to a lesser extent, backpacker tourists who celebrate the world as a colorful playground meant for one’s own self-experience. Both add to the fantasy of the rich and debauched West, which is constructed as antithetical to the downtrodden “rest.” On the one hand, the tourism industry makes jobs such as waiter, watchman, beachboy, tourist guide, ice-cream seller, and reggae musician concrete and viable options for the youth of the island, where school education has ceased to hold the key to the future. On the other hand, hotels exploiting the island’s natural resources while promoting drug abuse and promiscuity have been criticized by many, and have even stoked the hatred of some, who use a new vocabulary of disdain backed up with quotations from the Qurʾān.

These are just some of the contradictory tendencies and tensions on the island, which sometimes seem to be insurmountable and which find their echo in Ustadh Mau’s writings and stances. The poet has been actively fighting against the decline of education. He is worried about Western media and consumer culture sweeping the island—a fear that is very pronounced in poems like Kilio hulia mwenye (“Change Begins at Home”), Kiswahili, and Haki za watoto (“Children’s Rights”). When, in an interview in July 2019, Annachiara Raia asked the poet about his biggest fears, he answered that his worry is that one day, the Swahili will be a minority on Lamu and their culture and traditions will be lost forever. His position is a criticism of all-engulfing capitalism and neocolonial structures that no longer allow for cultural specifics, a morally decent lifestyle, or the beauty of local craftmanship.⁸ Far from placing the blame solely on external influences, however, he also does not tire of blaming his own community for their lack of dedication to studying, vision for the future, and discipline. Relentlessly, he uses his sermons as well as his poetry to address all social ills, like HIV, drug abuse, child neglect, and teenage pregnancy, as well as the high rate of divorce on Lamu. His tone, however, is not one of moral superiority, anger, or punishment, but one of care, like a father worried about his children’s well-being.⁹ His voice is warm-hearted. His aim is not to establish a strict regime of morality, but rather to work toward a better future. It is his responsibility to try to do his best, as he says, since he has been privileged—not because he is rich, but because of his own skills and knowledge: “I feel that everybody has the right to be helped by me. For instance, through my knowledge, I can serve the community” (Mimi nahisi kwamba kila mtu ana haki ya kufaidika na mimi, kwa mfano kwa maarifa yangu, huduma naweza kutoa). His recognized social standing aids his efforts to intervene: “Lamu is a society where my voice can be heard and that it can reach” (Lamu ni jamii ambapo sauti yangu inaweza kusikiwa na kufika).

While Ustadh Mau’s own poetic agenda is modernist in a number of respects, some of his practices—writing Swahili mostly in Arabic script, as well as keeping manuscript copies and books of Swahili poetry composed in other eras, when the island took great pride in its poets and institutions of learning—also have a nostalgic ring. Not many people are able to read Swahili in Arabic script any longer; many Swahili manuscripts are kept at libraries in Europe and the US rather than Lamu,¹⁰ and, as Ustadh Mau laments in his poem Kiswahili, poetry is no longer undisputedly the most prestigious form of public speaking, in which the most respected members of society engage because they take pride in speaking eloquently. Ustadh Mau understands his poetic project, on the one hand, as an effort toward progress, but, on the other hand, also as a very conscious and deliberate “pursuit of an ongoing coherence”¹¹ with reference to discourse traditions and practices with a much longer history. I will consider some aspects of them in the following.

2 Ancestral Roots and Individual Routes: Situating Ustadh Mau’s Engagement in Lamu’s Intellectual History

Ustadh Mau’s works place themselves in and pursue continuity with an intellectual tradition of poetry writing that was not introduced in state schools, but reached its height in the nineteenth century, before and partly parallel to the colonial era.¹² Lamu, now at the edge of the state’s territory, used to be a thriving hub in the Indian Ocean, with flourishing scholarship, poetry, and trade. Assuming a predominant role in the region after defeating the neighboring city-state of Pate at the end of the eighteenth century, Lamu underwent a golden age. Growing under the tutelage of the Omani sultan, who had moved his throne to Zanzibar and with whom Lamu was allied, it proudly referred to itself as Kiwandeo, “The Island of Pride,” until the beginning of the twentieth century.¹³ It was renowned for its Islamic scholarship and its manuscript production, as well as for the beauty of its musical culture and the depth of its poetry.¹⁴

The eighteenth and nineteenth century was also the time of an Islamic movement which made Swahili-language poetry the most prominent vehicle for spreading Islam, using it to express their religious zeal and attract new believers: Lamu thus became the center of a new kind of Islamic poetry, which did not merely supplant but rather added to preexisting, chiefly oral poetry.¹⁵ Numerous new poems, many in utendi form, were committed to manuscripts, adapting a variety of Arabic hagiographic accounts for Swahili-speaking audiences.¹⁶ In the eighteenth century, for instance, the Utendi wa Tambuka (“Poem of Tabuk”), which is often cited as the first Swahili utendi, depicted the battle of Tabuk, a legendary battle between early Muslims and the Byzantines, in a new form of Swahili prosody based on Arabic stanzaic forms.¹⁷ At the end of the nineteenth century, the story of how the Prophet Yusuf was sold to the Egyptian pharaoh was adapted into Swahili, building on various Arabic sources,¹⁸ and Mwana Kupona wrote her legendary didactic utendi, the Utendi wa Mwana Kupona,¹⁹ to advise her daughter on married life—a poem Ustadh Mau frequently cites as a source of inspiration. It was in this context that on the proud island of Lamu, the most respected members of the ulama, well-versed in Arabic scholarship, also recited and wrote Swahili verse. Kiamu became a literary dialect used all along the coast, also by non-Kiamu speakers and as far south as Mozambique in an effort to buy into the glory and vividness of its poetic tradition.

The charismatic Sufi movement was spearheaded by the Alawiyya tariqa in Lamu and its networks, reaching from Southern Arabia, mostly the Hadhramawt, all throughout the Indian Ocean.²⁰ This widespread network connecting faraway communities on Indonesia, India, East Africa, and Arabia, which Ustadh Mau’s ancestors were also part of, was based on and kept alive through kinship relations, trade, and scholarly exchange. Highly learned scholars of the Alawiyya tariqa, whose heirs and their works would shape Ustadh Mau’s own education and intellectual position, did not arrive on Lamu only in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but earlier. However, it was at that time that migration from the Hadhramawt gained momentum and the most learned of them started an Islamic revival.²¹ Their aim was to pass on Islamic knowledge to a broader part of society that had previously not had access to religious knowledge, since it was taught and discussed almost exclusively in Arabic—such that only a restricted community of learned scholars, who had traveled widely in pursuit of knowledge, could engage in it. The adherents of the Alawiyya tariqa, who were well read in Arabic and belonged to a social elite, explored Swahili poetic adaptations as a new means of reaching out to those without Arabic proficiency²²—not unlike Ustadh Mau would later do.

Swahili had previously been used in teaching and commenting on Arabic texts, but from the eighteenth century onward, adapting Arabic texts into written Swahili poetry became an esteemed scholarly pursuit for sayyids of Hadhrami descent.²³ The first known translation is the Hamziyya, a translation of the Arabic poem Umm al-Qurā by the thirteenth-century Egyptian poet Muhammad ibn Saʿīd ul-Būsīrī into an archaic Swahili. The first manuscript of the Swahili translation is believed to have been written in 1749 by Sayyid ʿIdarusi bin Athman, a prominent theologian and scholar of Arabic from Pate, who made a line-by-line translation.²⁴ Other translations, like the Maulidi Barzanji²⁵ and the Tabaraka²⁶—produced in the nineteenth century by the renowned sharifu Mwenye Mansab Al-Seyyid Abu Bakr bin Abdul Rahman al-Husseiny (1828–1922), who had studied in Mecca and the Hadhramawt—became highly popular all along the East African coast.²⁷ Mwenye Mansab, whom Ustadh Mau’s grandfather most probably met, composed a number of popular Swahili poems adapted from Arabic sources, like the mythological Kishamia,²⁸ which Ustadh Mau still greatly admires. Mwenye Mansab was an authority on classical Swahili poetry, “unrivalled in his knowledge of archaic Swahili”;²⁹ he copied Swahili manuscripts and knew poems like the Al-Inkishafi, the masterful meditation on the downfall of Pate and the vanity of human life, by heart. The social prestige of figures like him bestowed further authority on the poems and made the composition of poetry a most virtuous activity. Poems from this era have become classics and common points of reference—a set of texts that are central to Swahili Muslim poetic practice and that Ustadh Mau looks to as a source of inspiration.³⁰

Mwenye Mansab became the teacher of another important member of the Ba Alawi clan, who was venerated all along the East African coast for his intellectual and spiritual abilities: Salih bin Alawi Jamalil-Lail (1844–1935), commonly known as Habib Saleh, a close friend of Ustadh Mau’s grandfather Abdulkadir Abdulatif. He was born on the Comoros, where intellectual, mercantile, and scholarly links to the Hadhramawt were strong. In his youth, he was sent to Lamu and began studying with Mwenye Mansab, who recognized his piety and intellect.³¹ The critical student soon started questioning Islamic education, which, according to his view, was still too disproportionately run by and targeted to a social elite. He began a new reform movement around an institution he established in 1901, the famous Riyadha Mosque, which trained future qadis, “Quranic commentators and prayer leaders,” just outside of town on Lamu.³² The movement placed emphasis on the scriptural tradition, for which knowledge of Arabic and Islamic scholarship was a precondition.³³ While not revolutionary in tenets, canon, or topics, it challenged the established elite by valuing knowledge and granting teaching certification (ʿijaza) even to those not belonging to a reputed clan, thereby promoting “social re-stratification.”³⁴ In a strongly hierarchical and partly feudal society, now even “slaves” (watumwa) and the underprivileged could become educated. Such a valuation of education and reading is also reflected in the figures of Ustadh Mau’s forefathers and himself.

Ustadh Mau’s grandfather, Abdulkadir Abdulatif—also of Yemeni ancestry, and whose life course largely followed Alawiyya networks of family links and scholarship—helped construct the Riyadha Mosque. He led a life that was shaped by and took its course along the lines of the far-reaching Yemeni connections described above: some of his forefathers “had probably gone to India on business and then married and settled there,” as Ustadh Mau explains in an account of his Indian roots that Salvadori published in one of her compendia on the Indian diaspora of East Africa.³⁵ Abdulkadir Abdul Latif was born as part of the Surti community of Gujarat and grew up in Mohammed-Nagar³⁶ near Pune, already an important trade city in West India by the time India came under British rule.³⁷ Even before the Portuguese incursions, Sunni Merchants from the southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula (Hadhramawt and Oman) had settled all over the Indian Ocean area—in East India, parts of Kerala, Indonesia, Malaysia, and East Africa, including the Comoros.³⁸ They preserved their economic and social and religious ties with relatives, business partners, and scholars back in their home regions.³⁹ Religious networks, mostly concentrated on the Alawiyya brotherhood, and kinship ties added to or provided the basis for far-reaching trade connections from the Hadhramawt to India and East Africa. These networks also shaped the life of Ustadh Mau’s grandfather: at the age of fourteen, he came to Zanzibar, the capital of the Omani Empire and the biggest trade hub in nineteenth-century East Africa. Following ties of kinship, he moved to Dar es Salaam, where he entered an arranged marriage with the daughter of a local Surti family. His new wife gave birth to a son named Abdurahman. After his wife passed away prematurely, he moved to Lamu, where he married his second wife, Hadija, Ustadh Mau’s mother, whose father was of Indian descent and her mother of Comorian and Yemeni origin—like Habib Saleh, the charismatic leader of the Riyadha Mosque, who became a close friend of his grandfather.

Ustadh Mau’s grandfather was a devout Muslim, helping to construct the Riyadha Mosque, for which he built the windows and brought lamps from India. His technical expertise as an engineer, his main profession, proved to be very helpful. Likewise, Ustadh Mau’s father, Ahmad Abdulkadir Abdulatif (1915–1970), was not only a dedicated student of religion, but also became the local “engineer”:⁴⁰ he maintained the district commissioner’s boat and was the first to own a motorboat, which he used to transport people from the jetty in Mokowe, where the buses from Mombasa and Malindi stop nowadays, to the island of Lamu. Apart from that, he was a devout Muslim, who joined and supported Habib Saleh in teaching. Later on, Ustadh Mau’s father and uncles played an important role in the mosque,⁴¹ which also significantly influenced the poet’s own socialization until he took a critical distance from it.

Apart from following the family tradition of becoming a learned Muslim, Ustadh Mau would likely have also become an engineer himself had he grown up in the household of his mother, Barka Aboud Mbarak (about 1938–2002), and father together with his five younger siblings. Instead, a young uncle who ran the Asilia bakery on Lamu adopted him, and also passed his profession on to him. His uncle’s wife, Thinana bin Abdalla of Shela, had given birth to ten children, all of whom died at an early age. She took good care of the young Ustadh Mau at their house in the neighborhood of Mtamwini on Lamu. As in many Swahili houses, where the women are important teachers and pass on much essential knowledge, she taught him the Qurʾān before he even started attending madrassa. His uncle took him to the bakery as a child, giving him small tasks to do, like sweeping the floors or selling bread. Before inheriting Asilia bakery from his uncle, however, Ustadh Mau went to Dar es Salaam to work as a shopkeeper for two years, then spent time studying in up-country Kenya (see below) before finally returning to Lamu due to the untimely death of his father in the 1970s. He took over Asilia bakery at that time, which is still the only bakery on Lamu selling all kinds of pastry, bread, and cake. At the turn of the millennium, the bakery was no longer generating enough profit and almost went bankrupt—an economic crisis that he reflects on in the poem Mlango (“The Door”).⁴² In the poem, he is still wondering whether closing the bakery would be an option, while in real life, he ultimately opted to shut it down for some time. When his first son, Fatih, came back from studying in Sudan, he managed to pay off his debts and reopened it before two of Fatih’s brothers took it over. Nowadays, the bakery, which the whole family still depends on, is run by Ustadh Mau’s son Yasri.

Early on, Ustadh Mau also became one of the most important Muslim leaders on the island. In 1985, at the age of 33, he was appointed imam of Pwani Mosque, Lamu’s oldest mosque, dating back to the fourteenth century.⁴³ Ustadh Mau was the first to preach the Friday sermon in Swahili rather than in Arabic, as was common at that time, which not many people were able to understand. He still teaches at the madrassa and delivers lectures on Qurʾānic commentary and law (fiqh) during Ramadan. His engagement with the community has earned him much respect and recognition, and he has served on many boards and committees, like the Lamu District Education Board and the Lamu West Constituency AIDS Committee.⁴⁴

With regard to his own education, as explained in greater detail in the contributions of Annachiara Raia and of Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Ustadh Mau did not attend the state school, but Al-Najah, the Islamic primary school. He briefly studied in Mombasa and at another reformist institute (chuo) in Machakos, in Kamba land, close to Nairobi, where three scholars from Saudi Arabia and Egypt taught Islamic studies. His hope was ultimately to study in the Middle East, like his intellectual role models and teachers.⁴⁵ However, after his father passed away suddenly, he lacked the means to continue studying.

On Lamu, one of his first and most important teachers was the renowned Sayyid Hassan Badawy, a grandson of Habib Saleh, who began his own learning and teaching career at Riyadha before ultimately also turning away from it, and was a close friend of Ustadh Mau’s father.⁴⁶ Ustadh Mau is still a great admirer of his teacher, his humble character, and his manner of encouraging students as well as mediating conflicts. Thus, Ustadh Mau was also supposed to become part of the Riyadha tradition: “I was raised to become part of the tariqa of my teacher Sayyid Hassan” (mimi niliinukiya nikiwa ni mtu wa tariqa ya mwalimu wangu Sayyid Hassan). Ustadh Mau’s father highlighted the agenda of Habib Saleh and earlier scholars of the tariqa, namely to acquire and spread a classical canon of knowledge to the whole umma, in the poem Hapo zamani za yana (“Once upon a Time”), which he wrote for his son.⁴⁷ One may also consider Ustadh Mau’s own agenda—that of educating, reading, and teaching the Qurʾān and the established canon of scholarship, while at the same time making an effort to reach the whole community in a poetic language that speaks to it—to echo Habib Saleh’s values of integration and unity.

Thus, one can scarcely understand Ustadh Mau’s intellectual position, or his ideals for learning and teaching, not to mention the continuities and changes in his own poetic production and ideals, without taking the tariqa into perspective. Yet, tradition does not mean simply recapitulating previous beliefs, but rather offers a framework for constant reflection. Over the years, Ustadh Mau became more and more critical of the mystical Sufi tenets and practices, like saint cults and the visitation of graces, but also the elevation of a group of “holy men.” These men were believed to have more baraka (literally “blessings”), could perform miracles, and offered teachings and exhortations;⁴⁸ in this context, knowledge was not abstractable from the person of the teacher, but depended on his baraka and the direct, sensory transmission of it. Scholars like Habib Saleh not only imparted knowledge but, being a descendant of the Prophet himself, also materialized part of his spiritual essence, which the students sought to buy into. Placing an emphasis on individual religious experience, the praise of the Prophet became a central part of new practices of religious worship, in which Habib Saleh played a central role. He became widely known all along the East African coast mostly for his Maulidi celebration, i.e. the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, featuring processions of Muslims chanting qasida in the streets of Lamu and often expanding into ngoma dance performances.⁴⁹ By reciting and singing of the Prophet’s heroic life, the intention was not merely to teach about his life, but rather to immerse one’s soul into his glory and earn his blessings.

Despite growing pressure from reformist factions, Maulidi still continues, largely also taking the form of a cultural festival that attracts Muslims from all over East Africa every year. Yet, already in the 1960s, the reformist scholar Harith Swaleh, whose modernist agenda advocated breaking away from established practices and canons, started to preach against the Maulidi, causing a heated debate, as Ustadh Mau himself remembers.⁵⁰ In contrast to the later aggressive and dogmatic tone of so-called Wahhabi rhetoric—supported both financially and ideologically by Saudi Arabia—the reformist influences on Lamu in the 1950s and 1960s, which had a huge influence on Ustadh Mau, had a more intellectual modernist agenda, believing in progress and striving to overcome what they considered backward superstitions, like belief in magic or the visitation of graves.⁵¹ Although Ustadh Mau was heavily criticized by fellow Muslims on Lamu, he began to disapprove of the ostentatious Maulidi celebration, which by then had become a symbol of Swahili Sufi Islam. While the Maulidi celebrations started as part of a reform movement in the late 19th century in an effort to purify Islamic practice, they became criticized by many as unislamic and impure at that time, which also influenced Ustadh Mau.⁵² The colorful celebration of the miraji, the Prophet’s ascension to the heavens, which is only briefly mentioned in the Qurʾān, and the veneration of the graves of local theologians (wanazuoni), endowed with spiritual powers, were further elements that he came to consider bidʿa (“heresy”), i.e. inappropriate innovations, not grounded in the Qurʾān or the Sunna and, in a sense, “pollution of pure Islamic ideas.”

Still, the polarization of a local Swahili Islam grounded in local practices (mila) and concepts of religion (dini) and a reformist movement with an agenda of both modernization and strengthening Arabic orthodoxy—albeit one constructed as compatible with and even foreshadowed by the Qurʾān—only started later, as Kai Kresse carefully argues.⁵³ This is important for situating Ustadh Mau’s reformist, but tolerant intellectual position with its sensitivity to Swahili culture.⁵⁴ His position and attitude are reminiscent of Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui’s efforts toward a “Swahili enlightenment” in line with modern life, which had earlier also influenced Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui.⁵⁵ Kai Kresse shows how they prioritized Swahili-language education with a focus on current issues in modern life, but also on Islamic history, which in their view was not sufficiently taught. The Mombasan chief qadi Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui was “at the heart of the reformist movement at the Kenyan coast.”⁵⁶ Educated outside of East Africa in the Middle East, Sheikh Muhammad Kasim came back to East Africa with a critical attitude toward the veneration of Sufi leaders and other cultural practices that lacked any foundation in the Qurʾān and did not help society to progress. Instead, he and his followers emphasized rational principles in line with modern education and an agenda of modernization, which, as they argued, can already be found in the Qurʾān.⁵⁷ They strove for the unity of modern science and the holy book⁵⁸—a topic that also recurs in Ustadh Mau’s poetry.⁵⁹ Their agenda foreshadows Ustadh Mau’s emphasis on education of all kinds—given that it does not violate the moral framework—and his openness to modern technology. For Ustadh Mau, progress is essential, and ilimu, education, the sine qua non of a better future that, according to him, has been so long neglected on the coast: “We stopped making an effort to progress with regard to education” (Tumeacha kujiendeleza kwa ilimu). Coastal inhabitants need to make the effort to catch up in all kinds of fields (not only religion), as he repeatedly asserts.⁶⁰ In an almost eclectic way, he himself relies on a variety of sources for his khutbah and poetry, and does not reject any kind of knowledge categorically. In Haki za watoto, for instance, he draws on developmental psychology, the Qurʾān, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in addition to his own observations. However, he also finds it important to study a Swahili repertoire of “texts, procedures, arguments and practices,” as Haj summarizes key aspects of Islamic traditions.⁶¹

Ustadh Mau’s proud self-identification as Salafi, which nowadays conjures associations with dogmatism and aggression, needs to be considered against this background and also with regard to the very specific way it emerges from his intellectual biography and spells out in his own practices. He is a modernizer seeking progress for his own community, not wanting them to lag behind. He acknowledges the existence of globalization, modern technology, and the media, and he wants his community to make an effort to catch up by studying a broad range of subjects without leaving Islamic faith. Furthermore, he is critical of the “backward” local Sufi practice of venerating human beings as if they were godlike; he doubts all kinds of superstitions and, as a consequence, seeks to stick to what is mentioned in the Qurʾān, in approved historical accounts, and by science, which, similarly to Kassim Mazrui, for instance, is not a contradiction to him. Here one can see the influence of “classical” ideas of the 19th century Egyptian Salafiyya movement on him, seeking to create a bridge between modern education, progess as well as the Qurʾān and the Sunna.⁶² In opposition to the growing emphasis on dogma and on Arabic as the only language of theological engagement, however, Ustadh Mau is also proud of the local tradition of learning, debating, and composing in Swahili as well as of Swahili as a language of interpretation and scholarship. An easy dichotomy of traditional Swahili Islam, on the one ahnd, and reformist thougth, on the other, would hardly do justice to the complexities of Ustadh’s own intellectual practices and outlooks. As Rüdiger Seesemann highlights, the use of Swahili which might seem at odds with the reformist emphasis on Arabic as the only pure and sacred language is a wide-spread feature of reformist movements on the Swahili coast: Both Sheikh Alamin Mazrui and also Sheikh Abdallah Saleh al-Farsi, who even translated the Qurʾān into Swahili, considered Swahili as the most efficient way to educate a broader audience.⁶³ Ustadh Mau is of the same opinion and also cherishes his own dialect, Kiamu, which permeates his poems. Emphasis on a progressive agenda of education compatible with the Qurʾān does not prevent him from being proud of the long tradition of poetry, which he collects in his library; and he encourages others to do the same. In effect, he has become a representative of Swahili culture, invited to speak or to deliver an opening poem wherever there is a cultural festival or conference on the coast that focuses on Swahili.⁶⁴ He has also become an expert and reference person for Swahili scholars in the West—such as the various authors in this volume—and takes account of works written by Western academics, including classic ones. The first Swahili dictionary, published by the German Basel missionary, Johann Ludwig Krapf, in 1882 and which he found in a dump site on Lamu (what a telling sign!), is a constant reference point for him; likewise, he regularly refers to the still unrivaled Swahili-French dictionary, published in 1939, by the Holy Ghost missionary Charles Sacleux.

With an argument reminiscent of postcolonial criticism, which argues for conceptual decolonization,⁶⁵ Ustadh Mau urges his fellow Lamuans not to blindly venerate and merely imitate the canon of English literature and cultural production, forgetting about Swahili literary giants like Muyaka bin Haji (see, for instance, his poem Kiswahili). In his poetry, he repeatedly refers to Japan, which he considers a role model in sticking to its own traditions—which he sees as a precondition for developing one’s own intellectual position and thus avoiding becoming merely an easily manipulated puppet on a string—while at the same time being open to new technologies, skills, and ideas.⁶⁶ Like many scholars of the tariqa in earlier centuries, for Ustadh Mau, poetry composed and recited in local languages—in this case, Swahili—is the key to reaching a broader audience, and he believes in poetry’s ability to captivate listeners as well as to influence their behavior. He sees himself as part of a particular Swahili Muslim discursive tradition that, while not unchanging, also implies reference to previous modes of thought. His own poetic practice, through which he continues a long tradition of poetry writing as a practice of intellectual argumentation and exchange, is a strong example of his search for continuity in a discursive tradition, while at the same time advocating the need for modern education.

It is not only Ustadh Mau’s tolerance of and openness to bodies of knowledge of different origins, but also his sensitivity to and love for his language, the beauty of poetry, his care for his community, and his emphasis on progress and education also for women that make him differ so strongly from any puritan ideologist. Finding a moral stance is not a matter of sticking to dogma, but an inquiry guided by huruma (“compassion”) (see the contribution “How Ought We to Live” in this volume). Rather than taking the role of a preacher of one truth that is beyond doubt or reasoning, Ustadh Mau weighs the options and positions and understands human fallibility (see also Annachiara Raia’s contribution on the Wasiya in this volume). With a tone full of empathy, he is an introspective thinker, free in developing his own stance by not merely following previously established conventions, always weighing other possibilities, as is very much in accordance with the Swahili ideal of intellectual practice.⁶⁷

3 Writing Poetry

Ustadh Mau began composing poetry already in his early twenties. In 1974, he wrote the Wasiya wa mabanati (“Advice to Young Women”), a long utendi on a teenage pregnancy, which became highly successful (see Annachiara Raia’s contribution in this book). In 1975, he wrote the poem Kimwondo, in which he warns the Lamuans not to vote for a political candidate who did not have a proper political agenda, but, being rich, instead influenced people’s votes with his wealth.⁶⁸ In the appendix to the edition of the poem Kiswahili (republished in this volume), Mahmoud and Frankl list ten tendi, from the aforementioned Wasiya wa mabanati, to Ukimwi ni zimwi (“Aids Is a Monster”), a poem on HIV/AIDS composed in 1990; Haki za watoto, composed in 2000 (also in this volume); Mukharati (“Drugs”) a warning against drug abuse, composed in 2004; and a long poem, Ramani ya maisha ya ndowa (“The Map of Married Life,” composed in 2006), in two parts—one part for men, the other for women. Many of his shorter poems form part of this book: Tunda, composed in 1976 on the occasion of his son’s birth; Kipande cha ini (“Part of My Liver”), composed for his daughter Azra in 1989; Jahazi (“Dhow”), composed in 2002, reflecting on an economic crisis; and Mama msimlaumu (“Don’t Blame My Mother”), composed in 2006. Furthermore, besides these poems, Ustadh Mau also “serves the community” (kutumikia jamii), as he puts it, by writing mostly short prayer poems, dua, on commission, which are read or recited on special occasions such as weddings, embarking on a pilgrimage, or when a child is taking an exam, with the intention to invoke God’s blessings.

For Ustadh Mau, poetry has been part of his life as long as he can remember. Both of Ustadh Mau’s parents were poets (see also Mahmoud and Frankl 2013). Ustadh Mau himself attributes his own talent for and interest in poetry to his father, whose own poetry he used to read when he was a child. As mentioned above, upon his birth, his father composed a poem for him, a didactic poem (wasiya) called Hapo zamani za yana (included in this volume), with the same intention inherent in all wasiya poems—to become a lasting heritage by providing his son with advice on how to live. One can hear the warm tone his father adopts, making an effort to write a poem of enduring quality to serve his son well—as we also find in Ustadh Mau’s own poems, particularly the shorter wasiya for his children, like Tunda (“Fruit”) or Kipande cha ini (“Piece of My liver”).

For Ustadh Mau, poetry is a primary vehicle for reaching the people, including marginalized groups like women and children. Their education has been a special concern to him, which, according to him, has become increasingly important in his life since his first marriage and the birth of his own children. In 1975, Ustadh Mau married his first wife, Aisha Ali Waleedi, whose ancestry hails partly from Siyu, partly from Lamu. Mama Fatih, as she is called, after her first son, gave birth to eight children: five girls and three boys. According to him, watching his children grow up made him understand how important education at an early age is. In 1985, Ustadh Mau married his second wife, Sauda Kasim Bwanamaka, although he had previously not planned to take a second wife. Mama Azra, as she is also called, had come from Faza on the neighboring island of Pate to attend Lamu Girls’ School, a secondary school on Lamu. To go to school everyday, she rented a place at Ustadh Mau’s mother’s house; thus they became neighbors. Helping her out with school fees from time to time, he got to know her better, and liked her for her ambition to study. Because his first wife, who had severe arguments with the much younger “schoolgirl,” did not approve of his marrying her, they got married in Faza after she finished school. For some time, Ustadh Mau went to Faza every Saturday to see her, while living on Lamu, where he worked and taught, for the rest of the week. Only in 1990 did she move to Lamu and become a teacher at the local school. Mama Azra was ambitious, and Ustadh Mau supported her: she studied education and graduated from Moi University, Eldoret, where she lived for two years. Her three children, one son and two daughters, grew up largely in other households: while her daughter Hannan was raised on Lamu by Fatuma, who had escaped from Somalia and earned some money as a babysitter, her son, Aboud, grew up mostly in the house of Ustadh Mau’s first wife. Azra, his beloved daughter, was raised on Pate, and only came to Lamu from time to time, for instance during the Maulidi. The poem Kipande cha ini (“Piece of My Liver”), which Ustadh Mau composed in 1989, speaks of how much he missed his daughter. Her studies were a source of great pride for her father: she studied to become a medical doctor, first in Kenya and later in Sudan. She too takes an interest in his father’s poetry.

To reach all the people on Lamu, both the khutbah and poetry need to make use of plain language, a “light language” (lugha nyepesi) that is comprehensible and flows well, as Ustadh Mau tends to underline. The khutbah, however, is easier to compose, since it does not need to stick to prosodic rules, but can argue and help people understand; the poem, meanwhile, is a form that people enjoy listening to much more. As he underlines in personal communication, poetry has more masharti (“rules”), in that it needs to have a musical and rhythmic form that pleases the ear; he believes in audio recordings as a more effective means of reaching people on Lamu, “who do not read” (watu hawasomi). Furthermore, poets, even more than preachers, have and need to have the capacity to touch people emotionally. Ustadh Mau feels for the characters he depicts in his poems, such as the desperate girl in the Wasiya wa mabanati (see the contribution by Annachiara Raia in this volume). He emphasizes that the poet has to touch people emotionally to make them think: “to (effectively) think about the situation of girls in the Wasiya, you have to feel it” (Wasiya kufikiria hali ya wasichana ni jambo ambalo lazima uhisi). It is the audience that is made to feel what would otherwise escape its attention. Thus, emotions stir reflection, and reflection depends on emotional involvement. Poetry is rooted in reality and people’s experiences, but also exceeds or transcends them by creating a heightened emotionality, and thus opens up new perspectives.

Poetry can also change one’s view of a reality that previously seemed to be without any alternatives. In this sense, many of Ustadh Mau’s poems even have utopian potential: not only because they all believe in the power of making a change, but also because they do so through the very act of narrating a different reality and making people think more consciously about alternative ways of living. They spell out alternatives, for example where women are not merely punished for becoming prematurely pregnant (see Mama msimlaumu, “Don’t Blame My Mother”), children are nurtured according to their nature (see Haki za watoto, “Children’s Rights”), and a younger generation rediscovers the rich intellectual tradition “at home” (see Kiswahili). As T.S. Eliot underlines in his essay on the social function of poetry, poems, which come closer to people’s sentiments than any prose ever could, not only allow people to experience something new, but also make them more conscious of something they already feel, but cannot express: “In expressing what other people feel [the poet] is changing the feeling by making it more conscious; he is making people more aware of what they feel already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves.”⁶⁹ The thought-provoking quality is linked to the ability to bestow a concrete poetic form on experience.⁷⁰

It is the concrete narrative of the mother in Mama msimlaumu, who felt compelled to abandon her child, and the baby defending her through which Ustadh Mau makes the audience feel for her and engage in reflecting on alternatives. The personification in the poem Kiswahili, where the language takes on the role of a mother, renders the relationship to language an intimate one. In Jahazi (“Dhow”), the dhow that does not move on a windless day “translates” the common atmosphere of crisis and stagnation into an image that people on Lamu can relate to and in which they can recognize themselves and their tiring efforts to “make the dhow move.” By making use of concrete imagery, poetry speaks to the audience in an immediate way, makes them understand or rather feel their position, gives sense to their emotions, and provokes acts of reflection. For the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, whose aim it was to explore the knowledge-producing effect of metaphor (and not merely of argument) in intellectual history, figurative language comes with concrete imagery that gives form to something that cannot (yet) be adequately grasped in other terms. In this sense, the poem and its metaphorical language circumscribe a kind of understanding before there is understanding. In Blumenberg’s words, the poetic depiction—in his estimation, the metaphor—gives form to complex experience while we are still grappling with it: “The further we move from the short distance of fulfillable intentionality and refer to total horizons that our experience can no longer grasp or delimit, the more pervasive becomes the use of metaphors.”⁷¹ Jahazi depicts the emerging crisis like a huge wave about to crash into individual existences, and thus makes both the present and future sensorially palpable. The metaphor does not illustrate, but rather opens a view onto a complex totality that typically gives form not to a long-past event that can be judged and evaluated, but to the incandescent and emergent concerns of the lifeworld. The metaphor “gives a structure to the world and represents the unfathomable, unobservable totality of reality”; it gives an “imaginative orientation”⁷² as it offers specificity, but not unequivocal certainty.

For Ustadh, poetry has the capacity to render something palpable, so that a scene is placed before the listener’s eyes. The enlightening, prophecy-like character often leaves the audience surprised. Each poem is akin to a miracle, a feature that Ustadh Mau points to as characteristic of poetry. According to him, people on Lamu wonder, “Why can a poet say things we are not able to say?” (Kwa nini mshairi anaweza kusema mambo ambayo hatuwezi kuyasema).⁷³ Similarly, for Blumenberg,⁷⁴ what he calls “aesthetic evidence” is based is on the idea that “everybody has seen it without being able to express it.” It is the sudden apparition of an image or a story that hits the nail on the head, but cannot be distilled to any clear-cut argument, that seems to be the miracle.

As Ustadh Mau underlines in a conversation we had, on Lamu, it is “a common belief that spirits give a poet his ideas of what to say” (Watu wana iktadi kwamba mshairi anapewa mawazo ya kusema kutoka sheitani). This notion of the poet who does not control his words, but whose words rather find him in a miraculous way, is reminiscent of Eliot’s notions of the obscure, untraceable roots of poetry.⁷⁵ The question of why a poet composes in a certain way is, for him, ultimately a question that cannot fully be answered. Before there is understanding, there is an obscure impulse that lacks any clear reason that can be rationally grasped—an idea expressed with the reference to sheitani, “spirits,” on Lamu. There is a hollow “creative germ” (ein dumpfer schöpferischer Kaum), as Eliot points out, drawing on the concept of the German poet Gottfried Benn: “There is something germinating in him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words.”⁷⁶ The poem only gradually acquires its form as the poet struggles to find the words for the “thing” growing in him. In a similar way, for Ustadh Mau, it is “the poet, who has a talent to imagine and to choose words [for his imagination]” (Mshari ana kipawa cha ubunifu, pia uhodari wa kutegua maneno). It is the word kipawa (“talent”), literally “the thing given,” “the gift,” that encapsulates the uncontrolled and unlearnable foundation of poetry, namely the capacity to imagine, which precedes and transcends intention.

Thus, in listening closely to Ustadh Mau’s observations on poetry, one finds elements of a kind of poetics that seem to extend his more commonly voiced understanding of poetry as being born out of a concrete concern to teach and reach an audience with respect to a previously defined subject: the idea of the poem functioning as a vehicle for the message. In poems such as the Haki za watoto, it is an argument rather than a “hollow germ” that seems to lie at its base (for a more detailed consideration, see “How Ought We to Live,” this volume). Yet for Ustadh Mau, the relation of a poem to its words and scenes is also often one of wonder and serendipity. The shairi poem Jahazi, for instance, reflecting on the economic crisis in terms of a dhow that does not move, developed out of words he overheard on the streets. Passing by, he heard a man selling mishkaki, grilled meat skewers, saying tanga aliembete na mongoti (“The sail is tied to the mast”), referring to that fact that he did not sell much on that day. It was this one sentence, giving form to a sentiment but uttered in a rather incidental way on the street, that caught Ustadh Mau’s attention, stirred his imagination, and inspired him to compose a whole poem out of one line. In a similar way, the newspaper article about a stray dog saving an abandoned baby and people’s harsh reactions to the story prompted him to explore the narrative further in his poem Mama msimlaumu. It is the poet to whom these surroundings, experiences, and the language speak, that follow him and urge him to create in poetic form—and the poet, in turn, answers through poetry. And this is also why the repertoire of texts, the existing poems and tradition of narratives and motifs are so important, as they invite to breathe new life into them, allowing them to present concerns and feelings: “The persistence of literary creativeness in any people, accordingly, consists in the maintenance of an unconscious balance between tradition in the larger sense—the collective personality, so to speak, realised in the literature of the past—and the originality of the living generation.”⁷⁷ Thus, there is a part of his poetry—the question of why and how it takes a particular form, and what speaks to him and has the power to transform into a line, imagery, musical lines, and metaphors—that he does not choose, but which rather seem to choose him. Here we observe his close connection with his surroundings—not only in the sense that its problems and worries concern him, but also that its narratives, characters, words, and poetic forms speak to his imagination and urge him to find words for it.

Thus, to conclude, to approach the question of what Ustadh Mau does when he writes his poetry, one both has to and does not have to consider his own life and context, the island of Lamu and his family’s history. What does this seemingly contradictory statement mean? There is a paraphrasable and an unparaphrasable relationship between the poet, his life, and his context. As for the former, as Ustadh Mau himself continually reiterates, serving his community with the aim of improving it is a major motivation for his composing poetry.⁷⁸ Poetry is a means to teach and to make people aware. However, this also implies an unparaphrasable relationship between the poet and his context as well as the language, which stirs his imagination to paint a concrete picture and to make characters speak, act, cry, and argue. Hence, his often dramatic poetry transforms the intention or message into an “example” (mfano) that touches the audience much more than any law (sharia). One cannot merely paraphrase his poetry like one can summarize a sermon, and have the same effect. Furthermore, poetry—its rhymes, meters, lines, and imagery—grows out of a verbal tradition so firmly entangled in Indian Ocean influences, yet also deeply rooted on Lamu, as well as out of the dialect of Kiamu, a literary language, which has shaped poetry but has also been reshaped by it for centuries. In composing, Ustadh Mau does not merely find a form for his thoughts, but the form, for instance the pattern and tone of the didactic wasiya genre, also shapes his thinking and imagination. Thus, not only as a social context to react to, but also as a place with an intellectual and poetic history, as well as a place that speaks to the senses through its words, phrases, sounds, and the everyday experiences of people, Lamu is an essential part of Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice and his understanding of what poetry is and can do.