CFP: Islamic Civilization in Eastern Africa

CALL FOR PAPERS:
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON THE HISTORY OF THE ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION IN EASTERN AFRICA

Zanzibar, Tanzania

3-6 September 2013


OIC
Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA), and the
National Records & Archives Authority of the Sultanate of Oman, are jointly
organizing, in cooperation with Zanzibar University, the International
Symposium on the “History of the Islamic Civilization in Eastern Africa”, in
Zanzibar, Tanzania, on 3-6 September 2013.

Africa was the destination of the first Muslim migrants from Mecca to
Abyssinia in Africa. From then on, Muslims immigrations extended to include
the eastern coast of Africa as a point of destination.
Moreover, Muslim Preachers and merchants along with the immigrants reached
to Central Africa.

Along with Northern Africa, Eastern Africa was one of the places which were
most largely influenced by Islamic civilization. The growth of Muslims
immigrations was due to certain reasons. One reason was the geographical
proximity of Eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Another one was the
environment of Africa with its fertile soil, abundant water, moderate
climate and considerable wealth and bounties.

Muslims settled in these regions of Africa and established Islamic dynasties
and states that played active roles in local and international policy due to
their strategic locations. Some of these dynasties and states are Bata,
Mogadishu, Sefalah, Zanzibar and Mombasa. In addition, these dynasties and
states played and still play a pioneering role in spreading Islam in that
part of the world.

Symposium Objectives

The conference is aimed at highlighting various aspects of Islamic civilization in Eastern Africa and promoting the exchange of views and findings of research on the impact of Islamic civilization in the region. This will be done around the following axes:

1 - Reviewing the historical and cultural dimensions of the Islamic civilization in South Asia and East
Africa.

2 - The role and influence of Arab and Muslim migrations on the convergence of the Islamic sects.

3 - The influence of Islamic civilization in the fields of architecture and traditional crafts.

4 – Acquainting with the history of Islamic civilization, in the past and present, and studying its social, economic and political consequences.

5 - Reviewing the geographical aspects that contributed to the spread of the Islamic civilization.

6 - Shedding light on various forms of the intellectual production in East Africa.

7 - The influence of the Islamic civilization on African social life (customs, traditions and daily life areas).

8 - The Arab and Islamic press, and its role in enriching cultural life in Eastern Africa.

9 - Acquainting with the reality of manuscripts, records, archives, and monuments, and identifying the means of
their development.

Conditions of participation:

The submitted research paper shall comply with the following conditions

-It should be authentic, innovative, and directly relevant to the symposium's themes.

-It should not be published or delivered on earlier occasions.

-The abstract of the research paper
should consist of about 250 words and be submitted in both Arabic and
English.

-The research paper should consist of
800 - 1100 words.

-The papers should be sent by email.

-The scientific committee has the right to reject any research paper that does not meet scientific standards.

-
The accepted research papers will be
published after editing in a special booklet for the symposium events. The
organizing body holds the copyrights. Before publication the papers will be
subject to the applicable Publication Law in the Ministry of Information of
the Sultanate of Oman.

Abstracts and research papers should be mailed to:

symposium@nraa.gov.om  

congress@ircica.org



-       Deadline for submitting the abstracts: 15 March 2013.

-       Informing of the acceptance of the abstracts: by 15 April 2013.

-       Deadline for the submission of full papers: 26 June 2013.



Conditions for citations:


The historical narrations should be cited chronologically.

The references should indicate the sources. 

The views and interpretations introduced by the researcher should be based on historical
events and evidences.

The researcher should indicate the sources or the website from which graphics, maps and records
were taken and used or whether they are his own work.

Sources and references must be cited in the footnotes (at the end of every page)
starting with number 1 in each page.

Sources and references must be cited in a list at the end of the paper under the title
"Sources and References" and ordered alphabetically as follow:

title, name, edition, part,
publisher, city of publishing, year of publishing; any further citation
information might be put in parenthesis.

Symposium Languages

Arabic and
English

For complementary information send an
email to
symposium@nraa.gov.om 

congress@ircica.org

Phone: +968 246 16071,

+968 246 16086,

+90 259 1742

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Consciousness, Motivation and Violence: Review of War of Words, War of Stones

Jonathon Glassman. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

PART 2: Glassman shows in detail how newspaper debates between the two rival parties over Zanzibar's history, slavery, marriage, and land rights became increasingly polarized and racialized. The outcome these polemical exchanges was that any conflict, especially those with a hint of violence, could become politicized. As each side ramped up their violent rhetoric, it drew readers and listeners into an everyday drama where everyone was encouraged and even coerced to choose among racialized political identities. The personal nature of the island's social relationships made these dramas all the more bitter—gradually almost every aspect of everyday life became infused with the tension of potential racial drama. Everything from bus rides and public dances to traffic accidents and crime became an opportunity for transforming the "overlapping discursive circuits" of newspaper discourse and racial rumor into "what many came to imagine as actual lived experience."
The book draws on a wealth of original sources—the enormous number of published newspapers circulating in Zanzibar during the 1950s and 1960s (and even earlier) as well as archival material. Glassman's choice not to draw on oral interviews is a conscious attempt to steer away from the minefield of counter-interpretation generated (and being generated) around the meaning of the 1964 Revolution. Instead Glassman revises and offers fresh interpretations on theories of violence and ethnic conflict.
The arch-instrumentalists who view violence, especially "ethnic" violence, as an expression of class conflict or other material factors often stress that violence has to be "activated" by elites; violence is the outcome of planning and the hard work of social polarization. On the other hand, elites rarely control and direct the violence of crowds and mobs; the crowd's logic is not the product of external direction. Through a detailed examination of the character of mob violence in Zanzibar, Glassman argues that mob violence acts as an incentive for individuals to recast their experience along communal lines. In the context of a polarized political climate where people are encouraged to racialize their daily lives, transgressive violence can appear necessary. Violence in Zanzibar had to overcome the powerful affective bonds and neighborly relations; once it did (through the racialization of everyday experience in the "newspaper wars") criminality and rumor could work powerfully on people's everyday experience of themselves.
Rumor, argues Glassman, enables people to "replace the subjectivity of personal experience with false memories of victimhood." It "turns everyday patterns" and even sounds into "signs of impending violence." For those who actually experience acts of oppression, rumor further encourages them to think of these acts in the overall terms of a racialized narrative. For Zanzibar, Glassman documents how rival discourses of crime and criminality centered on both mainland immigrants from Mozambique and Tanzania and poor "Manga" Arabs from Oman; these discourses aided rival parties in giving concrete representation to their enemy.
Glassman rejects the distinction between acts that are expressions of the "real" consciousness of the crowd, and those they are "manipulated" into performing by elites. Working through the logic of writers like Robert Weinberg and Paul Brass, Glassman concludes that, based on their distinctions, one has to argue that violence in Zanzibar is a product of elite manipulation in the context of contests for political power.
Yet the nature of the violence itself, argues Glassman, contradicts this argument. The "stylized" and "expressive" nature of the killings in Zanzibar belies any notion that elite discourse sat as a form of false consciousness swaying the actions of an irrational mob. Propagandists in Zanzibar, notes Glassman, although they used inflammatory language, never called for violence. The violence instead was activated in the moment where racial discourse became "embodied" reality, often experienced as a fear of violence and domination from the "other." It was mostly a product of everyday experience and not directly shaped by elite direction.
Building on the work of Sudhir Kakar and Natalie Zemon Davis, Glassman argues that a mob focuses and sharpens a group's identity; participation is a kind of group ritual. Mobs are thus both spontaneous and premeditated. Participants' subjectivities and moral conscience are spontaneously re-shaped in the midst of the violent act itself, but their decision to "act spontaneously" is the product of a racialized discursive envirornment, which is then embodied and amplified through rumors and stories.
Glassman's evidence is vast and skillfully deployed, and his argument is subtle and well-stated. Yet while Glassman helpfully deconstructs the divide between spontaneous and induced violence, I wonder if he doesn't leave himself exposed to the criticism that his "false memories of victimhood" engendering "violent subjectivities" too closely resembles a form of false consciousness. In closing the gap between spontaneous and induced violence, I'm inclined to think that Glassman open up an unintended gap between "true" "personal" subjectivity (rational and moral), and "false" "collective" subjectivity. This may encourage readers to think of the "individual" as acting truly (as in heroic stories of individual rescue) as a counterpoint to the madness of the crowd. This thinking, if taken to its logical extreme, leads us back to our original problem, thus demonstrating that many crucial questions remain to be uncovered towards a better understanding of mob violence.

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Consciousness, Motivation and Violence: Review of War of Words, War of Stones

Jonathon Glassman. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

PART 1: Scholars of mass violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide frequently debate the precise nature of the links between popular violence and an elite propaganda. Mass violence, they increasingly argue, is not the product of primordial hatred activated in a Hobbesian environment of weak social inhibitions. Yet this thesis has come to have something of the air of a cliché; provoking an enormous literature that is essentially a reaction against the "uncontrollable passions" thesis. Such literature argues that such violence was really about "something else", such as control over resources or political power.
In his new ambitious new book on racial violence in colonial Zanzibar, Jonathon Glassman argues that neither approach adequately captures the complexity of violence in the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and the events leading up to it. In 1964, a group of armed Africans overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and purged his supporters in the rival political party. They then embarked on the massacre and intimidation of Arabs; some figures cite as many as 5,000 Arabs were killed in the months following. As in other cases, reports of violence were immediately contested—revolutionaries naturally denied the massacres, while exiles painted a gruesome picture of anti-Arab (and anti-Indian) pogroms.
In Zanzibar, Glassman argues, violence was the product of dueling discourses of civilization and barbarism from groups of "Africans" and "Arabs." Each group shaped competing approaches to the island's history and identity. In his introduction, Glassman traces the development of these identities through the history of Zanzibar, beginning with the founding of the Zanzibar Sultanate in the mid-nineteenth century, when it fell under the rule of the Busaidi family from Muscat, Oman. The Busaidi sultans expanded Zanzibar's wealth through usage of Indian merchant credit and an intense plantation slavery system built around clove production. British-imposed abolition soon destroyed the productivity of this system, and slaves and masters had to re-negotiate relationships of labor through tenancy and squatting. British colonial administrators sought to control and rationalize these relations, and they steadily increased their influence in Zanzibar until the establishment of a formal protectorate in 1890. British administrators had seen Zanzibar as an "Arab state" before the protectorate, and afterwards they continued to rule with (and often for) the Arab sultan as if Arabs were the natural ruling elite of the island.
In the half-century leading up to Zanzibar's first common roll election in 1957, British administrators nurtured a secular intelligentsia of (mostly) elite Arabs, who they inculcated thoroughly with British notions of civilizational nationalism. These Arabs served important roles as middlemen in the colonial bureaucracy. Yet they were no parrots of their would-be teachers; these elites also drew on Islamic modernism and pan-Arabism to advocate (initially) for the Arabs as the natural rulers of Zanzibar, and to mobilize Arabs (and eventually all Zanzibari citizens) against colonialism. Their vision of Zanzibari nationalism was broad and inclusive, but rested on specific values (like allegiance to the sultan) and particular exclusions. All "true" citizens were welcome under the inclusive umbrella of ustaarabu, (a Kiswahili word meaning "civilization") but such logic often criminalized mainlanders and encouraged Arab cultural chauvinism. Politically, the National Party of the Sultan's Subjects (Hizbu or ZNP) represented this ideological position.
In N'gambo, the African neighborhood east of the elite streets of Zanzibar's Stone Town, a vibrant post-bellum African culture nurtured its own intellectual vision of Zanzibar's future. This nationalist vision relied heavily on metaphors of blood and race. Africans, it argued, had been victims of Arab imperialism, and it was only by uniting with each other on the basis of skin color and shared oppression that Africans could overcome Arab hegemony. This vision came to be represented by the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), an outgrowth of a fusion of member of the town's African and Shirazi associations. The ASP was a complex mixture of former slaves, mainland migrants, and the indigenous Shirazi who resented Arab political dominance. Despite their links, those self-identified as Shirazi often faced criticism from the "Africans" that they were futilely trying to be "Asiatic." Instead of adopting an Arabocentric identity, the ASP argued, Africans ought to rediscover and reclaim their "tribal" ancestry. The Arabs were just as colonial as the British, the ASP claimed, but at least the British had abolished slavery. The ASP in effect, "racialized" the memory of slavery. Where the ZNP saw a shifting relationship between patron and client, the ASP saw evidence of pernicious racial oppression. This issue between the two proved to be one of the most contentious points dividing the two parties in the period known as the "Time of Politics", 1957-1963.

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Habib Saleh and His Influence on Islam in East Africa (Spiders and Pigeons)

The excellent blog Spiders and Pigeons has an amazing post on the Comorian/Kenyan Sufi teacher Habib Saleh.

The article asks: To what extent does the Maulidi Festival of Lamu represent the wider culture of the region? It goes on to explore the relationship between Yemen and East Africa, the dawah of Habib Saleh in Lamu among the enslaved and lower classes, and the controversial practices of maulid (Sw. maulidi). I learned a lot from reading and I highly recommend checking out the site.

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Good Collection of Web Resources on Islam in East Africa

The brother over at Baytul-Hikma has collected a number of helpful internet resources, videos, e-books, and links on Islam in East Africa. Check it out here.

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