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Abstract
This chapter investigates Ustadh Mau’s library as a “breathing home archive”, a storehouse of wisdom that nurtures his soul as well as his islander community. Situated against the backdrop of the discipline of the history of books, the study seeks to explain how Ustadh Mau’s own library reflects the making of a precise literary canon, the so-called “core curriculum”—which, Ustadh Mau has acquired over time. Similarly to Ahmad Bulʿarāf, the erudite scholar from Sus, Morocco who migrated to and settled down in Timbuktu, Mali (Jeppie 2015), Ustadh Mau can be regarded as a true bibliophile in search of and hungry for knowledge. The chapter considers both scholars in their role as bibliophiles: just as “Ahmad Bulʿarāf accumulated works from great distances away from Timbuktu”, Ustadh Mau’s own library houses books that were ordered and transported from Cairo and Mumbai. A tour of Ustadh Mau’s books will reveal a strong Cairene influence on Ustadh Mau’s library as well as a vibrant network of Islamic intellectual circulation of ideas, namely texts and thinkers, travelling on Lamu island, and more broadly, in the East Africa region. For a better understanding of Ustadh Mau’s educational services for his community, this chapter will also conclude with a closer reading of Ustadh Mau’s talk on the benefits of knowledge and language (“Faida ya elimu na lugha”) which will help to explain his view on Muslim education and reading culture in Kenya.
Author:
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.
Author:
Abstract
In this paper, I seek to investigate the manifold relationships between traditional and contemporary, oral and written Swahili poetry—in the utendi and mashairi forms—and its recitation in terms of the following considerations: how have advances in technology changed the production, transmission and reception of Swahili Islamic poetry? To what extent do writing and orality coexist in a recited text? What is the nature of performer identity formation within a “discourse network” of artists—the composer (mtungaji), reader (msomaji), and singer (mwimbaji)—who, in Goffman’s words, play “participation roles” and appropriate poetry belonging to other living poets or to their own (sometimes anonymous) ancestors? In an attempt to answer these questions, I provide examples of performers and their performative craft.
In:
Matatu
Author:
Abstract
At a time of sociocultural changes that started questioning established Islamic learning traditions (independence years, post-Cold War/book market liberalization), printing diasporas exerted influence on the circulation of Islamic texts in East Africa: published overseas (Cairo, Beirut, and the Indian subcontinent) and/or locally reprinted on the Swahili-speaking Islamic coast, they came to play a seminal role in negotiating Swahili Muslim literary culture. How have transoceanic religious and intellectual networks operating beyond national borders become intertwined? In this paper, the beginnings of Swahili Muslim book publishing—and the entities underpinning it, such as Nairobi’s Islamic Foundation Center, a Pakistani-oriented charitable foundation—will be outlined. I will then delve into the history of Indian-and-Swahili family-run publishers Adam Traders based in Mombasa in order to tackle hitherto neglected transoceanic connections and patterns of influence across the sea.
In:
Islamic 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.
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:
Page:12