Dubai police identify 15 more suspects in Mabhouh murder

The Guardian speculates on the murder of a Hamas official in Dubai as likely the work of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization. This is a twisted story in more ways than one. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was a Hamas military commander living in exile in Damascus. It seems the plan to assassinate al-Mabhouh involved the use of fake British passports. Israel has refused to comment, probably because it views Mabhouh as a dangerous enemy and claims that Mabhouh played a key role in smuggling Iranian-supplied rockets into the Gaza Strip and was involved in the abduction and killing of two soldiers 20 years ago. It re-raises the question of the ethics of 'targeted assasinations'...how is this not a terrorist act?

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Political and Cultural Aspects of Qu'ranic Translation in East Africa Part Two: Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu

Part 2 in a special series for The Azanian Sea on Kiswahili Qu'ranic translation

Dale Godfrey’s Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu
In the early 1900s, when the British colonial administrators in Zanzibar embarked on a project of educational reform, they targeted those schools who taught their students to be huffāz. Canon Godfrey Dale, a UMCA Missionary and the earliest translator of the Qur’an into Swahili, wrote derisively of such a practice, comparing it to a long and wearisome journey in the Arabian desert, and emphasized what in his view was the “frequent, wearisome, and monotonous repetition of the same idea, the same moral truths.” In another instance Canon Dale, relates a visit he made to a Zanzibar madrassa in which students were learning the Qur’an, yet were unable to relate to him its meaning.

On the Swahili coast in the early twentieth century, young Muslim students still embarked on a course of Qur’an memorization, in order to become huffāz (sing. hafiz, an Arabic word which literally means guardian/caretaker), but only a few students, either from the elite or exceptionally gifted, received further instruction in methods of tafsir, fiqh, and other Islamic sciences.

Islam in the history of the Swahili coast was a social marker for the coastal elite, the dynamic that separated them from the “washenzi”. Yet despite their sense of controlling the set of mores and manners known as ustaarabu, most members of coastal society spoke only Kiswahili. Even prominent ‘ulama rarely used Arabic in their daily conversation. For the lower classes, knowledge of the Qur’an was limited to being able to recite its words, and this was important because the importance lay in the recitation as much as in the explained meaning.

The British colonial administration, as well as some members of the ‘ulama, called these methods of memorization “parrot talk,” and spurred Ibn Sumayt in 1925 to formulate a new set of texts for teaching Qur’anic verses, which reduced dramatically the amount of required suras and included explanations of key concepts in Kiswahili. However, in Zanzibar, education in Arabic was a political issue, linked with access to power and the ability to determine one’s cultural destiny. Thus the educational reform threatened the most sacred elements of the elite’s identity: language and religion. Amal Ghazal writes, “Arabs believed, the British (and their collaborators) were not only trying to damage their identity and that of the island, but also trying to sever Zanzibar’s relationship with the broader Arab-Muslim world.”

As long as cultural and linguistic links to the Arab world survived, a potential for social ferment and upheaval in Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast existed; a point echoed by many European writers about East Africa. This is not to say that resistance could only originate from an Arab source. But the colonial administrators as well as the missionaries recognized the potential of Islam to serve as a base for overturning the terms of European order. This belief led Godfrey Dale to allude to a global conspiracy by Muslims to enslave all of mankind: “Before we allow lower races to drift into Muhammadanism let us remember to whom these words, “which your right hand possess” might apply if there were a Jehad (sic) proclaimed in Europe, Africa, and Asia tomorrow…unless there is some Christian power at hand to take advantage of and enforce these mitigations, slavery will continue unchecked with all its horrible cruelties.”

Dale’s translation—the Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu —was received with much hostility. It represents how important the issue of a frame is in conceptualizing Islamic legitimacy. In fact the debate over Dale’s translation was a debate over who had the “right” to translate the Qur’an, as well as the right of Muslims to reject hostile interpreters. Godfrey Dale was an outsider who had learned Kiswahili (and for that matter Arabic) only to communicate Christianity through it. Furthermore, his translation of the Qur’an did not contain the original Arabic text. (Even now, translations of the Qur’an into English are typically presented with the Arabic text, and if they are not then they are titled “a translation of the Qur’an or “the message of the Qur’an.” )
Secondly, Dale used the Kiswahili word Mungu to mean God, which is unacceptable for many East African Muslim scholars as a translation for Allah, because Mungu can be pluralized as miungu. Later translators prefer Mwenyezi Mungu, (lit. Almighty God) for its inability to be pluralized.

Finally, Dale wrote in the newly standardized Roman script for Kiswahili. Carl Meinhof, the German who first suggested that Kiswahili be written in this manner, though that it might be useful in training African civil servants if it could be stripped of its Islamic character. Thus the transformation of Kiswahili orthography was directly related to anti-Islamic sentiment as well as pragmatic administrative concerns. Sheikh Al-Amin bin Mazrui, a prominent East African scholar who had also translated large portions of the Qur’an into Kiswahili, complained that the new orthography distorted the Kiswahili sound system. Most Zanzibari intellectuals—whose relationship to Kiswahili as a language of Islamic communication was already ambiguous—looked askance at written Kiswahili which had been deliberately stripped of its visual relationship to Arabic.

For Canon Dale, the translation was a way of training missionaries to counter Muslims on their own linguistic terms, a sort of religious guerilla warfare with the text as weapon. His goal remained to show uncivilized “Muhammadans” the true way: “It seems to me a mere matter of loyalty and common honesty not only to contend ourselves for the Faith once and for all delivered to the saints [Christianity], but to do all that in us lies to bring the same Faith within the reach of the most backward races of mankind.”

Nowhere is Dale’s disdain for Islam and its theology more apparent than in his commentary on the Swahili translation, where he constantly seeks to demonstrate its logical inconsistency. For example, in his commentary on Sura An-Nisa, verse 157 (Qu’ran 4:157), Dale writes, “We have already explained the Muslim idea of a crucificixtion in place of our Lord. But it is very useful to know this aya and to know it together with those of An-Nas and Aali-Imran. To him he ascended; meaning after death or before death like Elijah? They do not mutually agree.”

Lacunza-Balda concludes, “Dale’s translation has been greatly disliked and, historically speaking, it well be that it has accentuated both the Muslim-Christian controversy and the emergence of a collective Muslim front to answer the challenge coming from a non-Muslim.” But if this was the initial point of debate out of which conceptual repertoires were built, the next set of debates around a Swahili translation of the Qur’an translations framed a complex set of ideas at the intersection of race, African identity, and Islamic legitimacy, thus contributing to a a process by which slaves and lower-class people re-appropriated concepts of Arab exceptionalism (ustaarabu) in light of Islamic ideals of universalism and equality, a process, that as we have seen, played an important role in the social integration of East African coastal society. New ideas of African nationalism and the intensified migration of upcountry people to the coast opened up the field for socio-religious reinterpretation of those who the coastal elite had previously referred to as washenzi.

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British Policy in the Southern Sudan: A Brief Note on Language and Colonization

Just finished Robert Collins long and rather turgid Shadows in the Grass: Britian in the Southern Sudan, 1918-1956, with which, despite Collin's impressive list of sources, I was underimpressed. Perhaps its his lack of a theoretical framework, which leads him to be just a bit too enamored of the nostalgic recollections of British District Commissioners. However, he does offer, in full, this extremely interesting quote from Harold MacMichael, the Civil Secretary for the Sudan condominium from 1926-34, about British policy regarding Arabic in the Southern Sudan:

"The problem is whether to encourage the spread of Arabic
in the South as a lingua franca and medium between the governing class and the
governed, or to resist it on political grounds. The former alternative appears
to be basically unsound, the latter to be demanded as the right aim and object
of our policy...The religion of the Arab is the fruit of thirteen centuries of
discipline and dogma, and it appears now to have reached a state of world-wide
stagnation periodically rippled by political restlessness. There has been no
freedom for the mind or conscience, no intellectual future for this race, except
by the path of heresy..By virtue of its age, its wide diffusion, its adoption of
the older monotheistic belief and a code of morals which is at least no worse
that that of the Old Testament, and because of the state of comparative
civilization in which many of its adherents have come to live, it is rightly
regarded as being relatively on a higher plane than are the undeveloped
religions of the negroes. But it is none the less terile; and we shall render
the poorest of services to these poiples, as we educate their minds and induce
an atmopshere favourable to peace and porgress, we simultaneously open to them
the easy path which leads nowhere.
Moreover, the path, though it is not worth taking, would
carry those that took it into grave dangers. The most serious of these is the
automatic extension of the zone in which Islamic fanaticism is endemic to an
equally large and far more populous area where at present it is not so. One may
vary the metaphor by saying that to encourage the spread of Arabic in the South
would be to sprinkle gunpowder in the neighborhood of a powder
magazine....
The resultant danger is double-endged; for not only would
the Arabs, in the event of a rising, be able to call upon the south in the anme
of a common religion, for assistance, but, if there were trouble between the
Governement and the negroes in the South, these same Arabs of the North and
intelligentsia of the towns would not fail to assume a pose sympathy and
interest which migt become a serious embarassment...
Surely it is wiser and better and safer to take the long
view and to encourage our officials by every possible means to acquire a fuller
and more intimate knowledge of all that pertains to the great negro tribes and
denote a whole-hearted enthusiasm to the "cultivation of their languages,
conservation and sublimation of all that is of value in their customs and
institutions, frank recognition of the measure of truth contained in their
religion."
In this way we shall show ourselves more truly to be their
friends than by tipping them over the brink of a dangerously easy slope; and in
time we shall reap our own advantage, for a series of self-contained racial
units will be developed with structure and organization based on the solid rock
of indigenous tradition and beliefs, the daily life of the family and the
individual will be regulated by customs which are natural to them, the sense of
tribal pride and independence will grow, and in the process a solid barrier will
be created against the insidious political intrigue which must in the ordinary
course of events increasingly best our path in the North."

I guess you can draw your own conclusions about how this statement of policy has impacted the independent Sudanese state. Ironically, MacMichael's statements sound a bit like some reactionary State Department briefing or a statement of Africom policy.

To me the following is clear: British policy in the Southern Sudan attempted to foster not merely a neutral course, but in actual fact a hostility towards the spread of Islam further South. Anyway, I post these insights about Sudan because they provide some guidelines for me on how to deal with similar issues of race, language, and culture within an Omani context, especially in the context of cultural issues with Omani migrants in Central Africa, where the majority of the population is non-Muslim.

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From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925

I wish I had read this book (From Slaves to Squatters) when I was in Professor Tutino's Comparative History class , writing papers on peasants and revolution. Fred Cooper takes a 'Barrington Moore' approach to the Zanzibar Revolution by framing his post-abolition history of land and labor on the Swahili coast with a final insight into how the colonial policies of the period may have contributed to the turmoil of 1964. In The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore seeks to explain the variegated routes of political modernization through the framework of lord and peasant relationships. Moore contends that the socio-political character of the landed upper classes and the producers of agricultural surplus are decisive factors in determining whether a nation adopts democracy, fascism, or communism.

Cooper's story is by no means so teleological, and I am oversimplfiying Moore's very subtle argument anyway. One of the virtues of Cooper's work is that it is the other side to the narrative that sees that revolution as a vengeful and capricious strike by a band of barbarians. (ala Ali Muhsin) Spontaneous though it was--poorly executed as well as wantonly violent--nevertheless the revolution was due to the fact that the masses of Zanzibaris correctly traced their problems to a planter class who had been artificially propped up by the British, and whose continuing viability rested on maintaining the paternalistic ties of slavery.

In Zanzibar society at the time of the revolution, most of the planters were still Omani Arabs, descended from those who came to Zanzibar in the 1830s with Said bin Sultan Al Bu Saidi. By the early 19th century, Sultan Said already had an extensive economic base in Zanzibar, founded on trade in ivory, spices, textiles, and slaves. Moving his political base to Zanzibar was Said’s attempt to establish a greater degree of dominance over the trade routes of the East African coast and capitalize on potential profits from this strategically important island. He attempted to make cloves the foundation of a profitable plantation economy. The Omanis expropriated the most fertile land for clove production, and amplified an existing and profitable trade in enslaved Africans. Said created an Omani Arab landholding aristocracy and effectively marginalized the old Swahili elite. The high mortality of the clove plantations led to a constant influx of enslaved Africans from the mainland. Many indigenous residents migrated to the eastern areas of Unguja, where they continued to grow land on the kiambo (kinship based holdings) and the uwanda (common village land). The relative autonomy of this group, including their strong associations of kinship and landholding, created a cohesive intra-group identity and excluded outsiders. The self-distinction they made in referring to themselves as Shirazis would complicate later attempts at political unity.

The British were keen to develop their interests in export crops while maintaining existing relationships of ‘indirect rule’ through the Sultanate. Abdul Sheriff, describing Zanzibar, accurately sums up the dominant impulse behind abolition: “the ultimate reason for the abolition of slavery was rooted in the knowledge that free labour would be more efficient than slave labour.” The overriding interest of British authorities in Zanzibar was to guarantee a supply of cheap labor for the agricultural economy.

These new colonial labor needs eroded the relatively autonomous position many indigenes enjoyed in the eastern parts of Unguja. Many indigenes were pushed off their land and forced to work in a clove economy characterized by instability and depression for much of the early 20th century. As an instrument of coercion, the British imposed a hut tax, forcing the indigenes to work for wages to pay it. Many moved to the urban centers, or commuted on a regular basis to find wage labor. Others squatted in various arrangements of tenancy or sharecropping. The dislocation caused by colonial labor arrangements created a transistional class, or a ‘semi-proletariat’, with a foot in both subsistence agriculture and wage labor, as well as urban and rural contexts. Squatters combined wage labor with subsistence farming and tenancy, utilizing these strategies to simultaneously up their cash flow in a money economy, and position themselves outside of the vagaries of changes in the price of export crops which the British were encouraging them to grow. (On the Kenya coast, a similar situation prevailed, but with white settlement being encouraged in the highlands, increasing numbers of Kikuyu and Luo migrants came to Mombasa--at this time the center of coastal labor demand-- seeking cash to meet their subsistence needs. However, I felt that Cooper's section on Zanzibar made a more forceful point than the section on coastal Kenya, perhaps due to the more homogenous nature of Zanzibar's economy.)

It is obvious that a substantial degree of responsibility for the 1964 violence rests on the shoulders of the British. They remained largely unaware of the growing ethnic tensions of Zanzibar and generally contempous of African peasants in general. Of this obliviousness Moore writes, “The upper classes have to display a substantial degree of blindness, mainly the product of historical circumstances…before a revolutionary breakthrough becomes feasible.” The Arab plantation owners also bear responsibility—their racial arrogance and brutality are not debatable. The arrogance by which they pursued their policies toward the peasantry made the uprising of 1964, led by John Okello, seem more extemporaneous than it actually was. Like Nat Turner, Okello claimed to see visions which he interpreted as his appointment as an instrument of God for the liberation of Africa. He was of Ugandan origin, but had moved around East Africa and eventually settled in Zanzibar, beginning work on a Pemba plantation in the late 1950s. His anti-Arab, pro-African statements called for the overthrow of imperialism, but he insisted on the peaceful treatment of British citizens. His takeover of the radio station and broadcast during the early hours of the revolution proved crucial to winning the masses over to the idea of a fundamental social transformation, while his rhetoric helped stoke an outbreak of violence against Arabs and Asians. The Zanzibar revolution reinforces Moore’s observation that “in any violent conflict the social composition of the victims will not by itself reveal much about the social and political character of the struggle.” The violence was not about ethnic cleansing per se. It was the culmination of a building frustration with the power structure and its most visible element: the planter class, made up largely of Arabs.

Cooper writes, "Yet ideologies that underplay the importance of power and overplay the importance of the force of law or the legitimacy of authority can deceive the rulers far more than the ruled. Ex-slaves proved to be unawed by planters or the state and quite unwilling to regard the amelioration of the conditions of slavery as the limits of their aspirations. Mobility and flexibility were precisely what the ex-slaves wanted..." This statement perhaps sums up the aspirations of peasants worldwide--the right to organize life on their own terms, without interference of any kind. It put me in the mind of Leon Litwack's classic Been In the Storm So Long, which talked about the choices and ideologies of the freedmen in the immediate postbellum South. Litwack shows us the ordinary but moving aspirations of a formerly subject people and their attempts at reclaiming economic and social dignity. It also ought to remind us as would-be revolutionaries that the masses are motivated not by any pet ideology, liberalism communism, nationalism, anarchism, anti-(or is it pro?) syndicalist Maoism, etc. but by the need for dignified work and the ability to feed one's family.

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