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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to new books in the Indian Ocean world, a podcast channel on the new books network. This podcast is for listeners who want to sail the waters of the expansive Indian Ocean I'll learn about spas and presents. Thank you for joining me today.
I'm your host, Ahmed Mazmi, a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Today I'm here to talk to Professor Anna Bank, the author of Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean, circa 1880 to 1940. Repels of Freeform published by Brell in 2014. Dr.
Anna Bank is a professor of history at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research interests are the Islamic history of the Western Indian Ocean in the 19th and the 20th centuries, including Yemen, Oman, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Her work has mainly focused on various forms of religious change, such as text and box circulation and reforms of ritual and teaching practices, but also social, legal, and political change. Professor Anna Bank conducted projects for the digitization and conservation of manuscripts and texts which are in private ownership and in danger of environmental degradation among other factors in East Africa, which we will be talking about later in this interview.
By discussing Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean, we will explore how, in the period from 1880 to 1940, organized Sufi Zoms spread rapidly in the Western Indian Ocean, new communities to turn to Islam and Muslim communities to turn to new text, practices, and religious leaders. On the East African Coast, the Sufi orders were both vehicles for conversion to Islam and reform of Islamic practices. Professor Anna Bank traced the impact of Sufi Zoms on local communities geographically as a rebel, reaching beyond the Swahili Cultural Zone, southwards to Mozambique, Madagascar, and Cape Town. Through an investigation of the text, ritual practices, and scholarly networks that went alongside Sufi expansion, this book places religious change in the Western Indian Ocean within the broader framework of Islamic reform.
Speaking from the North Sea, welcome Anna to new books in the Indian Ocean world. And thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your book today. Thank you so much, Ahmed. I'm glad to be with you.
I'm glad to look from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean. It's amazing how the last time we met was in 2019, summer, I believe, during a workshop that you organized with Professor Scott Rees on East Africa's Islamic manuscripts and you brought graduate students and researchers from Mozambique, Zanzibar, Lamu, and all the way to Ethiopia. And today we meet again during the elections day of Tanzania and Zanzibar. Yeah, that is.
I've been following it all day, actually. I sent my wishes yesterday for a peaceful and free and fair election. We'll have the results soon of that. The election since Zanzibar has always been contested.
So my main hope is that it will be peaceful, free, and fair. We will be following up. And I'm glad that we have this opportunity to share the book today. Before we start talking about the book, I would like you to say a few words about yourself.
That is, when he grew up, when he went to school, he became interested in your field of study about Islam and Indian Ocean and any information mentors that you had along the way. Okay, I grew up actually right where I'm sitting right now, because now we are in home offices due to the COVID epidemic, of course, which is a rural community, a little bit south of Bergen in Norway, or it used to be a rural community. Now it's increasingly becoming a suburb, as everywhere else. So there was nothing in particular to say that I should take an interest in the Indian Ocean at all.
I studied First in Stavanger, which is a city south of here, then in Bergen. And then I started to study history. And I remember it to this day, I walked into the hall, which at that time, it was simply a blackboard where you had the choices of this or supervisors or topics. And all the topics were like Viking Age or rural farm development in Norway and things like that.
And then there was one poster that said, Egypt under Nasser. And I thought, okay, that's probably interesting. And then I ticked off on that one and I walked into the office of my supervisor, who the person who was to become my supervisor. And that was Sean O'Fahhey, who was then the professor of African Islamic History at Bergen.
And it sort of just rolled from there. He first supervised me on my amathesis, which was on Yemen, the Idrisi State in Yemen. And I realized then, of course, that Yemen has a reach that goes far beyond its borders and into the Indian Ocean. And then gradually I came into the East African side.
Actually, my PhD proposal said I would study Hadramis in Indonesia. So these are the chances and the random events of life that just take you. Amazing. I remember reading an interview conducted with Professor Fai about his own research in Darfur.
And the fact that he also saved a number of manuscripts and documents from that region by photographing them, which they are lost to us, unfortunately. So it's really fascinating to see you following the footsteps of Fai, and also doing similar work in Africa. Let's start at the book, because the book is very rich and there's a lot of things I would like to ask you about. Let's start with how did the book idea develop?
What was the research process like and your writing experience of Islamic Sufi net towards the Indian Ocean? Well, to be honest, actually the book developed, I would say first and foremost from a funding proposal. It's as mundane as that because I worked almost 15 years in research institutes where you have to rely on external funding. So what you do is you sit down, you write these really ambitious project proposals.
And towards the end, you sort of realize, oh my god, I have to deliver all these promises. And the project at that time was called, I looked it up now before I would talk. It was entitled Linking Global Cities, Tracing Local Practices in the West Indian Ocean. And it included many researchers for Abdu Sharif, from San Sama professor Abdu Sharif, Alki Stockeriter, and others.
And the idea behind the project was actually quite simple. This was back in 2005 or 6, I think. And we wanted to look at selected sites on the East African coast and then ask questions like, what is the same? What's different in terms of Islamic practices?
And at that time, we were thinking very much in terms of the local global context, which was kind of current language back then. But along the way, I got much more interested in Islamic reform and reformism. If you do see this variation, which you do, then I started to ask, how do these leaders propose change? And how does that play out in the broader context of Islamic reform?
And in the very local context. So it sort of developed from there. It came out of a much more sort of mapping, like where we were looking at text and diffusion of text and so on. And for me, it merged or it grew into a study of reform, more than diffusion and local global issues.
So the impact of Sufism as such in East Africa is, or was, and still is very well documented. So it made sense to me at the time, at least to look at variation and both within the same scholarly systems and in the same Talika style, we had the chadilla, the cadre, the big ones and across locations. This question just sort of came up out of another research. And I think this book is the, at least an attempt to synthesize what we did in that project.
So the book, as you've said, gathered and synthesized the research that was ongoing. And you've written a number of works prior to this book, such as the recent state of Assir published in 1996, and then Sufism scholars of the Sea, found in the New York, in the 1960s, 1925 published by Rutledge in 2003, which is actually translated now into Arabic under the title, Sophie Uwe, Al-Bahar, Shabakat, U-Sariya, Fishelk Afritian published last year by M.E.P. and then Restless in 2005, and then Finally, Zanzibar Al-Sun in 2008. So do you find this book connects or departs from your previous works and if so, in what ways?
In different ways, actually. I mean, the ripples of reform, I think it's a, it's the most direct continuation of Sufism scholars of the sea. But with a much wider geographical lens, and that was my purpose, both with the project proposal and with the book, the Sufism scholars of the sea was really focused on the Hadramat, to Sansibar, access in a way. Although I did trace the main character, the Ahmadine Sumet, to Grankumur, to Egypt, to Istanbul, and there are also these extensions that go to Kerala, that go to Indonesia.
So it's mostly directly related to that book. About the other books you mentioned, I think maybe they are related in a little bit different way. The one on the Idrisi State of Assir, retrospectively, at least, I think it can be argued that it deals with somewhat similar topics that how ideas are used to claim authority. But in the case of the Idrisi State, I was talking about actual political authority.
But the work I did with that one introduced me to the Yemeni context and alerted me, like I said, to the much, much, much broader world that you have to acknowledge and be aware of when you work on Yemen, even if it was a very local small state that was profiled in that book. Regarding Sansibar, also, that was just a side project for me on Norwegian timber trade, which I wrote under another project. Everything here was so very much project related. And that project was called, in the wake of colonialism on Norwegian traders and generally Norwegian commercial activity in the period.
So I worked on a small timber trading company that was in Sansibar exactly in the same years as I'm writing about in the Sufisms' policy and also in the Ripple's book. So to me, it was just another small facet of the big picture, if you like. And it was one that I keep in mind sometimes when I write about Sansibar, because these people are present at the same time in a very small town, as you know, where people live very close to each other. Like Sansibar also, for example, he was almost next door neighbor to Ahmad bin Sumey, two is in the Sufisms' scholars book.
I actually looked them up on the maps, so there were three or four houses between them. And it also helps you think about what this society was like. And it was also for both of them, whether you look at it from the side of the Sufisms' or these Norwegian traders, or basically any other, one that is so deeply marked by the colonial presence. So it was from a very good way of understanding really the impact of the colonial presence.
The last book you mentioned, that is an essay that has to do with travel as such. So it's more a reflection on how travel changes you, how you are in the world, when you are not in your home, when you move around. So in that sense, I think you may say it prepared me for writing about scholars who appear in Ripple Soft. And in addition to your scholarly works, you've also accomplished novelists in Norwegian.
You've published three novels and translated them into English, but I'm not sure how truthful the translation is. The first is the article, published in 1997, Holden Reality published in 2003, and Time and Silence published in 2006. Correct me if these translations are right around. You wrote your knowledge of Arabic and Yemen for your second novel, Holden Reality.
Can you share with us your thoughts on the crossroads of writing fiction and historical narratives as you've alluded to? Do you see your creatives and scholarly works speaking to each other? And if so, in what ways historians can profitably engage in both genres of writing? Actually, I think it can work in quite different ways.
I can first say how it works for me and then try to reflect a bit more on the writing process. I mean, frankly, sometimes I get really fed up with academic work. That's a historical inquiry, which is what we do, which is what we do on a day-to-day basis. It is really interesting.
It's really important. I think I really do believe it leads to understanding somehow or a knowledge that is both useful and applicable. And at least, I think it leads at best, it leads to really fruitful debate. But as you know, I think many historians know that sometimes in the day-to-day work, it's incredibly dry.
You just sit there and you read and you look for something and you sit in the archives and you turn another dusty page and another dusty page. And it's frankly sometimes boring. At least that's how I experienced it. So, from fiction, fiction, both reading but also writing has always been a kind of escape, like a place where anything is possible.
If you want to say this, you just say it. You don't have to argue or reason or show in any other. You don't have to build your argument. You can structure it according to different rules if you like.
And it's only your own imagination that binds you. So, I guess my two worlds, they speak to each other in that sense. And the one that you mentioned, the hold on reality or grip on reality, that was actually deliberately set in partly in Yemen, in South Yemen, even in Hadramat. I think, if I remember correctly, that I even said it explicitly.
And I think it was more than anything. It was a stern one into myself because one of the main male protagonists there is an archaeologist and his life ends really badly because he quite literally turns to dust. In his dusty setting over his dusty old things, he just crumbles and becomes a pile of dust and ends there. So, I remember writing it as a warning to myself.
On the other hand, I do find that I find imagination to be an essential quality of being in historian. You will never have all the dots. If you work from, especially if you work from archival material, but even also from textual material, like the Islamic texts that I've been working on. However well trained you are, however knowledgeable, you will not have every single dot in the class.
So, you have to fill in the blanks simply with your imagination. The only difference being that in a historical study or a proper historical work, you would have to argue for the leaps of your imagination. And I do find also a lot of inspiration in history, I think. History is magic in so many ways.
It is like a country which, well, that's a cliche, that it's a foreign country, but it's a country which you have to imagine. You have no choice if you are curious about what life is like in, I don't know, let's say, the Maldives, which I am by the way, then you simply go there. But with the past, you can't. So, you can let it inspire your imagination in a whole different way.
And last point, I mean, in the course of my work, I've had to, I've had to, I've had a pleasure of working in different languages, English, which we are using now, Arabic, for example, French. And I sometimes find it really inspiring in itself, the way other languages will express the same concept. So, it means that I can make poetry in my own language, simply by rephrasing something that is a common statement in Arabic. Or English for that matter.
So, it's, there is the element of playing with languages, which I can only do in my native language. I would never be able to do it in English, or let alone any of the others. These are very useful insights. Thank you for sharing them.
Definitely imagination. In a way, the connective tissue, you would say, of history, right? We bring in these archival clues, and then we try to stitch them together in a narrative, most of which is, you know, based on that connective tissue that we call imagination. And this shows, actually, in some of the way you would write your title, the way you would describe certain concepts, comes across in the book.
So, in the chapters of Islamic Sufi networks, in the Western Indian Ocean, you travel with us across seven chapters with an introduction, and it concludes with a very useful or so, app index on the consulted collections and their source materials from around the Indian Ocean at the end of the book. And you've organized the book geographically and thematically to move along the coastal towns of East Africa, from Lamou of the Kenyan coast to Cape Town between the Atlantic Indian Ocean, as well as the trans-regional connections of these ports to Batavia and South East Asia, Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Beirut, and Zab in Algeria, Muscat in Oman, Terim and Shubam in Hadermottiamen. And in the introduction, you stated the aims of the book as first, I quote you, to length the locations of the Harameen, that is Mecca and Medina, and Hadermott Lamou, Zanzibar and Comoro Islands, northern Mozambique, Diego Sowarez, and Cape Town, with one general movement of Sufi-based Islamic Reformist activity. And the second aim is to place changes in this region within the wider Islamic Reformist discourse in the mid and late 19th century and early 20th century.
I would like to ask you, how can the method of following traveling texts and Sufis around the Indian Ocean can help us think about and write Indian Ocean histories? I think first of all, what we can talk more about the argument of the cosmopolitan and textual cosmopolitan on, but I think that just the very textual presence of a certain set of Islamic texts in itself is a way of time together and creating this textual space, if you like, for this particular part of the Indian Ocean, with unlimited time and resources. I know that you could easily tie in Southeast Asia as well. So to me it is helpful, but only to a point, you know, because, well, from the methodological point of view, I think the texts are there, they are around, and there's even more than we know and we think and we have mapped.
So as historians, this is what we've got to work with anyway, and a proper mapping of all the texts is yet to be done. So hopefully it will be done. This, the ripples of reform book is really just scratching the surface, I think. But from, if you make the argument, or if you have the starting point then that these texts are foundational in a sense to society, which are then Muslim societies, then you can make the argument that these texts form the basis of thinking around all kinds of issues, really, from the state, as was would be the argument then, for example, the Idrisi book, legitimacy, daily practice, like from the most formal and normative to the least normative to put it that way, morals, and just everyday life.
So an idea of what the Ulamah read and what they copied and what they made work from, what they decided to have in their libraries is a way to access this foundation. That's the argument I make in the book anyway. That's not to say that all these all these aspects are necessarily expressed or let alone implemented. The fact that you read something in a book doesn't mean that you are prone or even interested in actually implementing it.
Or of course it also doesn't mean that everybody can read it. That's a very vital qualification. And of those who read it, it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is fully familiar with the total discourse here. So there are limitations here.
I actually also think, and I tried to explore that a little bit in the report of reform, that these texts are in a kind of roundabout way. They are a way to access the more mundane daily life. And then I'm particularly thinking about the so-called small texts or little texts, you know, decor texts, what people copied in their notebooks, what the students wrote down when they sat in madras classes. In that way, you see, you can get a glimpse of the more sort of not the big tradition, not the thick books, not the big tracts of test of Sufism.
So what was going on on the day to day basis in the madrasas and in the communities? But again, I mean, I do think there are some serious limitations because when what I did there in the ripples book, I looked into one window in a way and there could be, there are many other windows. This is just one. So I get a certain view and the Islamic texts in Arabic of course, not the only texts that circulate, especially not in East Africa.
There is the whole range of texts in Swahili, the poetry tradition, which many others are working on, like in Germany and elsewhere, so Clarissa, here, others, just so this window, I don't see that through the window where I'm looking. And as we go into the more modern period, of course, and the colonial era, all kinds of texts appear, many of them from Egypt, some of them might race in the ripples book, others not some of European origin, some from India, from all over the world. Sometimes I ask myself, you know, what if we looked at completely different texts? When was the first copy of the Communist Manifesto or something circulated in East Africa?
How would that look like if you, if history is a kind of tower, then it has windows all around and it all depends on where you're looking? So I'm not entirely convinced of my own method here, but for when it comes to the movement of people, I think that's in a way much more straightforward because the tarojama literature, the biographical literature is so rich, so straightforward in a way. The scholar teachers and the biographies about them, they tend to say they did this, they did that, they traveled over there, they met so and so. So this is a source, it's a straightforward historical source, I think, subject to normal source criticism, but you get a lot of factual history out of this, and you also get the agency aspect, which I think is also, you can draw it quite easily from there.
Then there's limitations too, what you don't get is how did they think about their experiences, exactly when going settling in Mozambique, for example, as a dawa agent, how did they experience that you only get the the facts, you don't get the motivation other than tawa or spreading Islam or reforming Islam and so on. But in combination, I will argue that you do get a map of a certain Islamic space in the western Indian Ocean, yes. Definitely, and I like your emphasis on the ephemeral checks, the pamphlets, the small decor checks that you follow in addition to the manuscripts and the larger tracks, and of course these texts are not traveling in vacuum, they're embedded in institutions, they're embedded in larger history and networks, which you trace in this book, and that takes me to your second chapter, the luminescent sun and brilliant trays of light towards the geography of free form. Would you sketch for our listeners the examined religious geography in the book, and what contributes to its coherence and diversity, perhaps using the same metaphors of light and ripples as you did, especially in thinking about the monsoon winds, right, and what lays beyond that ecological space?
Well, the ocean really lends itself to metaphor in so many different ways, and it's easy to get carried away in your metaphor. So I don't want to push the metaphors here, on the other hand, I feel rather unsafe grounds with the metaphor of light, because that is it's used in religious discourse, I think everywhere, and to be enlightened and so on and Islam is certainly no exception to this. The Madin, Munawira, and the Sufi tradition, which is full of all these visions of light emanating from scholars and from texts and from the graves and so on and from lineages and what have you. And especially the idea of Daua of spreading, whether spreading Islam or spreading a kind of reformist idea of Islam is very explicitly formulated in that way.
So what I tried to do there in the second chapter of ripples was simply to use the same language and the same metaphors and place these different scholarly centers as a kind of what like beacons, that sounds very, sounds very Rashid-Rida-like, but places from which right light emanate, clear and illuminating light and so on. So I positioned these centers, especially in East Africa, the Hadramaut, and then the Hadamain as these sort of core centers of light. But then of course the key protagonists then are these teacher scholars, I use the word teacher scholar, but you could also call them our agents or just traveling scholars for that matter. They represent them the race in a way, how did this light emanate and it is represented as such by themselves in the way they write about each other and the reform in which they say to various degrees spread, then that represents these ripples, that emanates and flows across the sea and again you can endlessly metaphor this, but it can be a small ripple, it can be a big tsunami, it can be a flood, it can be all kinds of things.
I make the argument somewhere in there that most often it's neither, it's a kind of cross-current. It will split and spread and go in different direction and this will happen because it does not hit the same shore, it hits all kinds of different local communities where it comes and which then has a kind of agency in its own right, the the the buddhaawad, those who are encountered along the way, the societies where these teacher scholars worked. In the book that is Lamou, that's the komoros, I write mostly about the grand komor, and that's simply to do with the source situation, it's not to say or to my own field research, it's not to say that the other ones are not important. Then the egg of swaras in northern Madagascar, then parts of northern Mozambique and finally Cape Town.
And about when it comes to the metaphor I've sometimes thought retrospectively after writing the book that I should have used also the concept of modernity itself, to say maybe it's all submerged in the end, or maybe that's still ongoing, this big, not so much as absorb, that there is this mighty tide that absorbs everything. But the analysis in the ripples book stops there, it stops with the ripple and the reef basically. And in addition to the imagery of the text, I would argue also this comes from your professional career in swimming and your intimate relationship with the world. Yeah, exactly.
I never get enough of using water imagery. That's great, honestly. In reading the book and you draw a wide range of sources, whether they are produced in East Africa, but also elsewhere and colonial sources, and you've mentioned by graphical dictionaries, hegographic texts, Islamic legal treatises, that connects also to a very important intervention that you make in East African Islamic history, I would say. And you published an article on this from, was it from the literary history to African history, in which you argue for taking these, you know, textual sources seriously and writing Islam's history in the region.
Would you like to basically highlight why is it important to take into account all of these textual sources and thinking about Islam's history in East Africa? I can think of two reasons. Now I'm trying to reconstruct the arguments I made in the book, but I can think of two reasons. One is to do with the connectivity that it is obviously so, that texts that are foundational in the Muslim society would be so in East Africa, too.
I think we're a little bit past proving that, but it's still worth pointing out. Then it's also, well, I can go all the way back to my old supervisor, Sean O'Fays, arguments and the work that he did with Professor John Hunwick, that you would make a very wrong assumption if you posit societies without text, especially in this way, the context, but overall in the Islamic African context. Then secondly, the connectivity argument. And finally, I think it's maybe this is a perspective more than a methodology that we do assume that foundational texts really core texts to a society shape the society somehow in ways that we sometimes don't even think about or that are hard to prove.
But let's say a text like the Mihajat Alibin, mainly used legal manual. It's just there. The assumptions made there are what the legal structure is built on, also in the colonial era before and during. So knowing that tells you something about the society, that you want to study historically.
And I find in my reading of sub-Saharan African history, especially when it comes to the East African coast or the Sahel coast, the Mali coast, the Minimani region, that these sources are not taken into account in reconstructing the past, as if assuming that these past are void of textual archives. And I find this is very useful to bring these two together. I would like to. Yes.
Well, I was just going to say, I mean, for the Swahili context, that is not in a way an exception because there is a long tradition of studying Swahili as a literate language that's been around since, well, almost since the arrival of the Europeans there. I mean, the whole German tradition of studying Swahili poetry and so on. So, Swahili is in a little bit different setting. Nobody ever suggested that it was a textless society.
What I'm arguing is that this is also part of it. Yes, indeed. But also that people write Kenyan history or Tanzania history as well. You don't find these sources usually in these books.
So I would say it will be useful if you're studying Muslim societies on East Africa also to pick up Arabic. And the recent works that has been done by a number of historians, Thomas McDowell, had the Shahran others, have shown the potential of these sources. I would like to move to the conceptual framework of the book. How has the study of Islamic societies and the Indian Ocean influenced your framework by deploying concepts such as network, mobility, agency, accommodation, religious authority and translocality as analytical categories?
What are the purchase of these analytical categories that you use in the book? Well, I can tell you first about the network concept because when I started out, it was really meant as a network analysis in the sort of full sense. I studied all this literature, methodological literature on networks and density and extent and what have you and drawing up circles and representing it visually. But as I went along, I actually found that it made more sense on a simply on a descriptive level to lay it out as a narrative because it exists over time, not only space but time.
So and again back to the to the biographical and hagiographical literature that's it really lends itself to to the sort of network approach. That's why I suggested it to myself in the first place. So this one traveled there. He met so and so he had this and that teacher, you know, how it usually looks.
But then I thought, you know, what am I doing? What is this? You end up with somebody used in a kind of the Robituary way, said the way it's just still still a sociology. I thought, yeah, that's right, actually.
I took it a little bit too hard to say what does it really show unless you can embed it in a concrete social setting. So I left it a little bit and to me, the network then became simply something that I did use on a descriptive level in a context. I'm not saying that it can't be done and I think maybe even it could be useful in this particular book but it made more sense to me as a narrative device more than a methodological one. Yeah, you said mobility.
That is the Indian Ocean story, right? It's, I don't think there exists Indian Ocean book without the word in it. I like to link it also actually to social mobility or I'm trying to. You know, there is mobility, of course, that's a matter of course, but there is also the formation of authority at a certain place, at a certain time, that happens through certain processes.
In the book, I tried to view the two as kind of interconnected. Mobility is, or religious authority is constituted through mobility rather, not necessarily of people alone, but of knowledge, of textual knowledge, of religious knowledge, of ritual knowledge. But I think the basic outlook in this book as in many other Indian Ocean books is mobility. It's there.
Did you say also translucality? Because that's a concept that worries me a little bit. I remember it worried me when writing this book as well, because that's also been one of the sort of main perspectives. And I know I say in the introduction to the book that I see translucality both as an object of study and as a perspective.
And I use it all the time. And again, as a window, again, it makes a lot of sense. I think you can see a certain society or a certain group of people at a certain place. And clearly, if you look at many of these Indian Ocean sites, let's say, is answer translucality is there.
It's in the practices, just the very fact that the Swahili population is Muslim. It's an art, it's an architecture, it's in language and poetry and what have you. So the Indian Ocean is such a space where the history of so many elsewhere, so if you like, has to be taken into account, even if you want to write about one single small place. So it's an object of inquiry.
When I wrote Ripples, I had a kind of ambition to capture translucality as a process. And I think this is much more problematic. How do you, I mean retrospectively, how do you point to translucality in the making, being formed, being constituted? That I think is much more difficult to pinpoint.
You can show the result, you can show that societies and persons, people operate with all these spatial categories, they are clearly beyond the local. And so many have shown that before, and I hope I have shown it in this book, but I am a little bit more hesitant whether it's something you can capture as a process. So I didn't do it in this book. I remember having the ambition thinking that it's not really doable.
And that would take also a larger time frame to historicize, I guess, translucality. And one last thing, in the book, you have the notion of religious authority vis-a-vis local agency. How did you negotiate these two throughout the book? Yeah, that was also going back to the ripple and the wreath thing.
I mean, the embeddedness of these scholars or teachers or the embeddedness of Dawa, whether it's actually Islamization or reform was something that I thought first I will just do a show, don't tell. I'll just describe it and it will explain itself. But it doesn't really. And I think it's a perpetual, it's a perpetual problem because especially looking at reform, actually, because you reform, it doesn't have to be Islamic reform, but let's talk about Islamic reform once you propose to change something, to be more similar to somewhere else, typically under Islamic modernism perspective.
Then you also propose to change local structures. And that change can only go so far until it's not acceptable anymore. So that's how I tried to negotiate it in this book. And likewise, I mean, the agent of change also has to change and accommodate and adapt slightly.
I think I used the example somewhere in the book there that the Dawa agents in Madagascar, they were actually permitted to drink your run in some settings, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to integrate at all. And this would be the purpose or this would be an entry point exactly into the context where they operated. So it certainly works two ways. And I tried in the book to give agency to both in a sense.
Now let's move from the conceptual landscape of the book to the more concrete aspects of it. In chapter three, four and five, the first three title, the branches of Qadriya and the Shadriya in northern Mozambique sits in us to the south. Chapter four, the Shadriya in northern Madagascar, 1890 to 1940, the planting of a garden and the growing of Malagasi roots. And the fifth chapter, the Cape Town Muslim community and East African Sufi networks beyond the monsoon.
And these chapters, you've noted that the Muslim communities of Mozambique, Madagascar and southern Africa have received competitive scant attention. And these three chapters filled this lacuna by following two generations of Shadriya, Qadriya, and Adawi teachers as mobile agents, as you say, of a specific form of globalization, forming a network through which both Islamic civilization and Islamic reform could flow. Can you introduce these Sufi orders, how their history unfolded in these three chapters briefly and the rest of societies, their variations along the ideological lines that you've traced, transmission routes and assimilation that you alluded to earlier, perhaps illustrating your answer by the many actors that you've examined in these three chapters? I can certainly try.
It's in a way what I do in this book is I trace rather three Sufi orders. The first one is Thalawi, which is the Sufi order that originates in the Hadrami, the Hadrami side, the side stratum. This is a very sort of known to be very textual oriented, very much focused on education, text and so on. And also by the early 20th century, it was explicitly very dawa oriented.
So spreading knowledge, spreading light, the whole imagery again, spreading practices that they saw as beneficial to the community, but also on the individual level. But I do see the Alawiya together with the Qadriya and the Shandiliya. In a sense, I don't see a very big difference between them in the way they operate. And you also see a lot of open times of individuals who are active on behalf of whom, who gather to gather during the daycressions or the funerals or any ritual expression of practice.
So I do treat them together, although there are some sort of differences between them. The Shandiliya, for example, is very often associated with the Komarus and the Komaru Islands, and Komarians in general abroad, like typically in Zanzibar. Whereas the Qadriya originally was, I think first, very much associated with people from Brawa, from Somalia, and it has a very rich and strong history there. But as they branch out and spread out, my argument is more that they are doing the same.
They're operating on the same principle, spreading not exactly the same text, but text that have the same function and rituals that have the same function. So I'm showing some of the traveling scholars, for example, Muhammad al-Marrouf, who spread the Qadriya in the Komarus and Musambik. You see that he's doing exactly the same things. He's starting schools, collecting small funds to redistribute among population, thus creating a kind of community.
So in a sense, my argument is more that what they're all doing is going beyond whatever ethnic or linguistic or geographical background they might have had and create these new moral communities that are so typically typical for the period. You see the same in Madagascar, with one of the scholars there in Madagascar, Ahmad al-Kibir, who do the same thing, forming these communities around himself, and then gradually grounding it in the Malagasy community from being a sort of kamorian expat order to becoming a Malagasy order. And that's the Shaddiliya. And then you see the same in with the Alawiya.
And that's when I take the history to Cape Town with Muhammad Salih Andris and his setting up of teaching institution there. So although they are the different daughters with different historical traditions, different founders, and certainly different senseless, they act in the same way. And I have to say, I mean, I did write that they have received comparatively scant attention, which is only partly true, because many of these communities have received attention, for sure. And I'm thinking, I've taken a lot of time, a lot of inspiration from Michael Lumback under where he did in Madjuga, in Alaska, and also in kamoros, and how he was thinking around the wide range of views and understanding of text, you know, its matriality, its performance or performativity, its sound language, all these other things, what the meaning of text and so on.
And when it comes to Cape Town, of course, the Cape Town scholars themselves have produced extremely rich and detailed history of their own communities. And kamorian scholars have produced excellent PhDs on their own Islamic history. So in a sense, I've had a lot to draw and just stitch together what was already there. Again, by using exactly these Sufi orders as a thread to make it from a series, to produce a proper quilt out of what was a series of patches in a sense.
And the work of writing a connected history is not only, you know, the act of stitching together, but also with writing a connected history makes visible in the analysis, which the book does in a way that I would say others haven't done. In chapter six, traveling chicks, Arabic, literature, learning in Costa Rica, 1860 to 1930, chapter seven, ritual of reform, a reform of our ritual, ratable head died in southwestern Indian Ocean from 1880 to 1940. And chapter eight, consolidating the network, work for distribution and new organizations in Zanzibar, 1900s to 1930. In these three chapters, I would like to ask you, what defined Islamic reform within the Sufi epistem as you call it?
Why did it constitute a rupture from the past? How did that manifest in terms of theology, transmission of transmission mediums, writing genres, performance, and institutions? What are the major, I would say, contours of this of the structure? That I think is actually the question which many scholars have tried to answer, which I think this book is a small contribution of our discussion about reform.
I mean, when I'm teaching this and when I'm thinking about what constitutes Islamic reform, I still go back to the work by or the works rather by Yitzhak Kweisman back in the early 2000s, I think, on Salafi and Sufi reforming late Ottoman Syria or Damascus, I think, and some of his other works because he's saying, or his argument then was in the Syrian context that the so-called Sufis and the so-called Sufis, they are, in fact, saying exactly the same thing, but they are saying it from different worldviews. These are concrete, manifest suggestions of reform that come out of different basic views. And that's, I've wrestled for a long time with the ripples book of coming up with a useful working definition. And I'm still doing that.
I give credit here also, I think, to Uliche Freitag, who touched very much on this in her work on the Hadrami reformist activities coming out of Southeast Asia, and lately also works by the Gassessman and others on how this is, in fact, also cultural. It isn't only religious, it has to do with culture as well. But bottom line, I still like one of the suggestions put forward by Roman Loma where he simply said it's changed with the program, changed with the program and willingness to move or something, because that means that you don't have to label reform. And I think in the 20th century, and now looking back from the 21st, yes, you can find all kinds of reform activity going on in the 20th century, and the 19th century, and the 18th century.
But it doesn't really bring anything in particular to the table if you start labeling it and saying, oh, this is a Salafi reform proposal, or this is Wahhabi, and this is this and this is that there is no doubt that this reformist that I'm talking about here, they are Sufis in the full sense of the word. And if you should then start saying ideologically or socially in terms of ethnic or inside outside perspective or locations and so on, I'm afraid that we are running the risk of projecting backwards in a way, something that was not there, especially when it comes to the motivation, the theological motivation or the legal rationale. But so you asked about the break with the past, I think the main break with the past is urge a drive towards this more coherent, moral communities formulated one way or another, usually through theology, but also very much through the through the legal basic, and especially socially in ritual practice, what you don't see, and this is my point in the ripples book is that you don't see a break with the moral authority of the past. The shifts are still valued, the saints are still valued, the moral authority inherent in the silsulas are still upheld.
And this is the this is to me the only thing that is different from any other reform that you see at the same in the same period. Otherwise it comes out to say it really it depends really what you're looking at. You know, the many of the leading Sufis who might describe in the book and whose whose trajectories I follow, they there were also cardis and in their own fatwares and rulings, they would often make rulings that went directly against the so-called popular practices or what anthropology used to call popular practices in favor of what looks from the outside, like concrete reform directly in the Salafi stream. So if you look at theology and this text that we talked about, then I think that there is an underlying assumption there that is quite clear.
Outwardly theology, theology has meaning that you can understand by rational knowledge, by rationale. You can know it, you can read it, you can teach it, you can organize it in certain ways, you can print it that when the print culture comes in, you can circulate it widely, but you can also know it in the mystical sense and the two are not exclusive in this particular type of reform. So the revelation is in the way the basis for both, but it can be accessed in just in different ways. And now it sounds like I'm categorizing anyway, but the reformist aspect is in all the other things, outwardly suggestions of how a moral community should function.
This is very helpful to complicate the whole historical process rather than thinking of it as a need break from the past and a complete structure, but it's more healthy to think in the sense of changes and discontinuities and discontinuities depending on the aspects you are looking at. Yeah, exactly. And there are also just simply organizational changes that are almost technical. We used to organize the model in this way, now we will do it in this way, because it's more practical or rational, it makes more sense to have it on a Thursday.
That doesn't of course preclude the assumption that it was a static past, which did not change and was dynamic in its own terms over the centuries until the 19th century. Yeah, exactly. The book draws to a large extent on Arabic sources, and that made me think about what are the contours of the maybe we call it the Arabic cosmopolis in eastern and south eastern Africa? Or should Swahili be deposited as a cosmopolitan vernacular in the sense that Roni Trichy following Sheldon Pollack argues for Malay, Tamil and Japanese in southeast Asia?
Why or why not do you think that? Are there other languages we may consider besides Swahili and Arabic as well? Well, yeah, let me do the last question first, because definitely I think Swahili has is one of these cosmopolitan vernaculars. Absolutely.
And I think you should ask a linguist, and not me, but I mean Swahili is also a continuum. It's a continuum towards the languages spoken in the kimonos and not the Mozambique and so on. But here linguists may disagree with me completely, but if you add, if you see Swahili as a broad linguistic continuum, then you can argue that it can include all of these, the whole sort of range of speakers and writers of the neighboring languages. When it comes to the Arabic cosmopolitan of eastern and south eastern Africa, when I read Roni Trichy's book, I thought, you know, yeah, this is it.
This is exactly it. And when I read the works of or both the works, but also the sort of lists, textual lists from Indonesia, especially like the ones that von Brandeis did in the early early on. And yeah, it's it's definitely part of it. It's the same.
It is in fact the same with, of course, with variation and of course with adaptation. So whether or not you cost it some kind of origin or not, I liked very much the cosmopolitan of text approach that Richard applied. And I think it applies completely in the East African context. It's the Indian Ocean context.
Yes, I think this is helpful to think about further and trying to find maybe other cosmocollus as well in the Indian Ocean, which, you know, facilitated the movement of ideas and knowledge as well. The last chapter, especially when you when you go into coming to the 20th century, when you see more and more and more of a nuclear publication. That's true. And especially that you've touched on Algazi and I was thinking about thinking about thinking about Algazi as well in this context.
Yeah, I would know, I mean, the sadly late Pierre Larson wrote a really good book about it and I it may very well be so absolutely. I don't even know a word of Mala say so I wouldn't be able to tell you, but it's certainly something that's useful to think about. Drawing on your study of Zenze-Bari works, can you shed light on the religious or moral economy of Sufi orders, their associations, relationships with the colonial administration and selfism, perhaps why talking about the cover of the book, which is which is really encompasses why a range of actors that were middling in these different, you know, structures and associations and dealings with the colonial administration. Yeah, the cover of the book is something that's just an intriguing piece or there's a set of intriguing pieces of paper that are in the sensible Institute of Archives and Research that archives and records, sorry, that shows the receipts given upon the work transfers because there were some big wafts in in Zenze-Bari that were destined for or set a certain proportion was set aside for the poor of Mecca and Medina and then over the decades the scholars transferred this funded to Mecca and each individual would have to sign sometimes with the fingerprints and sometimes with the signature and sometimes with the seal, most often with the seal that they had received this money.
So it's for me it was one of the few places where you actually had access to see how people were interconnected also in financial terms because in the unlike Fajad Bisharra's book for example in the mosques usually don't keep their books, the bookkeeping is not available in a sense who unless accepted in the work setting. So what I was interested in there was basically the organization how in which the traditional form of financial transactions which is the work was made or done and then actually this is something I want to delve more into in a coming work but now I'm not sure if I'm talking about the ripples book or the another one but there's also the colonial context here that comes in very clearly because the work commission Zenze-Bari had ultimately had it. It's clear ambition was to have no work but of course they couldn't leave it all together they wanted to create a real estate market but the individuals in this network the people who actually did all this money transfer they knew each other well they had no each other for generations it operated on a basis of trust which eluded the British and their efforts to regulate if you like the work for markets but what we do see what what I deal with in this book is this increasing drive towards organization from being this kind of network where people knew each other and operated on trust and so on they became organizations they became jammy at they became associations they were tariqas they were scholarly networks and they became associations so moving from a kind of traditional framework of Islamic institutions then consisting of the mosque first of all and the madrasa and the wokf it becomes a transfer from between associations so this model is quite these two models are quite different actually when it comes to the organizational form and I do argue in the book somewhere that the drive towards organization is inherent in the kind of change with the program reformist idea that it was formulated explicitly and from the outset to be to have certain a certain agenda like the hour like isla which is often used to jammy at the and it's shared like the one in Indonesia but it's also organizational it also happens with the financial transfers like the wokf which I explore in this book later what I didn't go into there but you see the same with the pooling funds for schools for example for building new mosques for supporting jammy members then for further schooling but they are the same people they come out of the same lineage yes it's really important to highlight the institutional and legal underpinning of these orders and how you know what lubricated basically this mobility it wasn't just you know p at and and and these ideas but also there was an economy facilitating all of these activities there certainly there is an economy there and the problem I had with this particular book was that you can't really see it if you if you come from the biographical literature or you come from the Islamic texts or you back to what I said about windows you know this is what you don't see you do see it in the work transfer so I was I was happy to have that in sense I definitely agree with you the last summer I spent the entire summer just reading with the work files and support archives and exactly um lastly in the book um what are some of the impacts of islamic sufi reform in eastern and southeastern africa and and the impacts of these regions on islamic reformist ideas in terms of pan-islamism during the late ottoman period islamic modernism uh salism and lastly africanity I know these are big concepts conversation but you touch upon this in the book and if you can briefly just connect these with the sufi orders yeah I I overall if I if I can try to draw one overall argument out of the out of that book is that I I do argue and I do think actually that there is a kind of sufi based modernity growing out of of this movement which is still there as well but this is this is a sense of identity I argue at the very end of the book I think that it's grounded not so much in the actual theology because that's kind of given but in the teaching styles for example in the ritual practices and again the local perpetuation of this you see this in so many locations not only is africa you see it even more explicitly I think in in south east asia but and another main argument in the book is what we have already touched upon how these dawa agents inevitably must deal with the hierarchies of power or the social structures or the cultural practices where they operate and this is a constant tension with the well both with the pan-islamist or pan-islamism ideal and with Islamic modernism and with self-ism and with africanity which I have not actually discussed that much in this work because if you if you reform something to bring it in line with let's say a pan-islamism ideal it also means that you eradicate difference and in in the local context this is problematic because you do interfere with local hierarchies and in the colonial context is even more because there is a I mean there is all these different communities that were already pitted against each other or hierarchically placed vis-à-vis each other then who who are you going to who are you reforming actually or is it your own community only like then you could say yeah the chadilla reforms the kamoyan community the alawiya deals with the hands but it doesn't really work like that you are forming new moral communities you could also say that the one thing that you didn't mention is nationhood and wataliya you know building towards some kind of unity that has a notion of statehood which I discussed a little bit in the written book I do think if we speak about Islamic reform this is something I've actually formulated later and it's not in the book but it means reform is really where local hierarchies go go way to die in a sense they they dissolve ideally they dissolve and and that's just the much of that idea behind Islamic modernism that's much of the trajectory of Salafism as well but at the same time there is also a straightforward modernity that grows inherently that is not leaving behind of the old daughter modernization of or not modern that's the one word the gradual reform towards accessing in modernity that these two fielders do and continue to do to this though yes this is very useful and and in addition to your book you've also been involved in a number of digitization preservation projects of is Africa's Islamic heritage and the projects such as the Myelamidry collection in Zanzibar with Scottries and the other mosque in Lamu are notable examples would you share some field work insights from your projects to trace all our linear towards preserve and digitize is Africa's Islamic textual traditions in landscapes and print do you have tips for graduate students and scholars who want to embark on similar projects if you can share some of their successes and challenges perhaps that would be helpful yeah actually these are the projects that I have found really really really great to work with I do think it's now I'm into a whole lot of discourse but you know East Africa has all these cultural heritage sites and UNESCO involvement and so on and so forth but there's actually very little attention to the textual heritage of so everybody's looking at the houses I always when I pitch this I always say everybody looks at the beautiful buildings and the lovely mosques but nobody asks what's inside of them so it's really important first of all I mean it's important that this is done the experience from the two projects has basically been that it's relatively easy and straightforward procedure and that it's very very important to work with local partners that who can both do the actual technical work but also sort of alert and explain what are these things that we are digitizing here what are the what's their meaning what not not sort of in a in a in a in a catalog kind of way this is work so and so by scholar so and so but saying this is how we used it this is what it meant to us or if it didn't mean anything to the living now it might have meant something to our fathers or grandfathers and also to work with local or in the case of San Sebastian can you to work with with the with the really good institutions that are there like the San Sebastian Institute for Archives and Records or the National Museum of of of Kenya who are excellent expertise in their own right for those who want to try something like this I really recommend the endangered archive program of the British Library it's a simple application procedure not too complicated it's not a lot of money you don't get funding for cataloging for example so that's something that you need to set aside either funding or your own work time to do but the procedure is so simple and easy so nobody should be afraid that they couldn't handle the technicality of it you know it's a camera it's a laptop it's a photo stand and you need a relatively relatively unused space but you can basically do it anywhere and anybody can apply you don't need to have a PhD or a professor or something to to apply so I recommend that I have to say one of the I was approached quite recently by Jody Patoweth who is the coordinator and and the What did you get out of it isn't it just technical work on the sides I know it's not at all what you really get out of it in addition to something that for historian is extremely important to make sources available for historians everywhere not just those who have access to expensive online resources in Europe and North America you also you while you are working with the material you get the history of the material so it goes to it's because you reflect on it you look at it sometimes you can think is this something known is it something unknown do you think it sounds the worry no why not and so on these are not answers these are reflections on how texts are posited in the community and what's their meaning you know to me that made a lot of sense and it even changed my outlook and sort of drew my attention to the fact that even if the text is unfamiliar today it still has had a history that people might be aware of if they're not aware of it then that's also interesting you know how how the trajectory of a certain I hesitate to say the word discourse but how a textual community has a history so I highly recommend it I would say it's not not at all as important it's not at all as difficult or complicated as you might think it's something that you can learn so quickly this is very helpful and I really like the idea of documenting the social life of these digitized and preserved texts as well in addition to the active preservation and your relationship with one of the interlocutors my other medrys you've mentioned actually in the book as as an aspect of you know in this project because it also gave you an access to how these texts were embedded in the society understood and circulated so this is really valuable thank you so much I know you've taken I will take a lot of your time you've been very generous with your time but also you're one of the most generous colors that I've encountered in my field work and finally I would like to ask you what are you working on now can you tell us about your current or future projects that you hope to work on I can try I can try I'm actually trying to find Lisa a new book I'm just working on it and I I regret what I have done because I started out saying okay now I've been skating the issue for so long let's now talk about modernity and the interwar years in Zanzibar in particular and it's such a hard topic to deal with because so many historians have had an opinion and so many others have touched on it and it also touches on so many debates on our time like everything from decolonizing academia to trying to look beyond all this what I'm really trying to do is look beyond the narrative of progress and development as it's called and then you get into the whole literature of the conscripts of modernity and who are the conscripts and who are the mercenaries and what sort of agency does the conscript have and blah blah so I'm struggling but hopefully it will be finished someday also we hopefully have a new project in the pipeline and that's together with justi Larsen who you might know who worked on spirit possession cults in Zanzibar and iSafka and scotries and others where we try to look at the manuscript to print transition again but here based in a thesis that there is a continuity through performance because I'm really getting more and more interested in the actual performativity of text and the hypothesis would then be that even if there is the manuscript to print transition performativity in itself is a factor for continuity but that's not in my hands that's in the hands of the Norwegian research council so we'll have to see well anyone who listens please contact if you have any connection in use it now yes these are really exciting projects and i'll be looking forward to them thank you so much for your time and thank you for listening to today's episode in which we explored Islamic Sufi networks in the western Indian Ocean 1880 to 1940 ripples of free form published by Breland 2014 this is your host Ahmadimansmi stay tuned for the next episode of Nick new box in the Indian Ocean world