Sufis and Scholars of the Sea (book review)

by Rahma Bavelaar. Originally published in Islamica magazine, 2007. Used by permission of the author.

Anne Bang's objective in Sufis and Scholars of the Sea is to explore the history of Islam in the northwest Indian Ocean during the 19th and early 20th century, focusing on the scholarly exchange of ideas between Hadramawt, Yemen, and the East African Coast by looking at the life and works of Ahmed b. Abi Bakr b. Sumayt (1861-1925), the son of a Hadrami immigrant to the Swahili coast and respected scholar and Sufi in the Yemeni and East African intellectual traditions.
Through an empirical study of his travels to and from his ancestral Hadramawt, the family and scholarly links he fored and maintained and his work as a Shafi'i qadi in Zanzibar under the patronage of the British-Omani state, Bang seeks to elucidate several interrelated questions which have as yet received scarce attention in Western scholarship: why did members of the Hadrami tariqa 'Alawiyya become such important exponents of a new, more literate Islam in East Africa? What did they teach and what inspired their teachings? How did they maintain and expand their scholarly network across time and space? Did changes in these networks occur, and if so, why? How did the content of their teachings relate to simultaneous developments in the wider Islamic world? And what was their relationship to the British-Omani colonial authorities in Zanzibar?
The great strength of Scholars of the Sea lies in its convincing use of what are often considered purely "religious" documents, such as scholarly geneaologies (silsilas) and certificates (ijazas), as valuable historical sources that can help elucidate processes of religious change and revival.
Although the overall emphasis of the work is on change, Bang challenges the previously common perspective in Western academia that 19th-century 'neo-Sufism' represented a fundamental break with the classical, supposedly more quietist, mystical tradition of Islam. Her highly detailed description of the historical origins and teachings of the 'Alawiyya brotherhood--which closely follows the 'canonical' version taught within the tariqa itself--she emphasizes the continuity of its theological and spiritual tenets (vested in its members' dual geneaological and spiritual claim to descent from the Prophet), in spite of the far reaching institutionalization of its educational practices in the late 19th century. She also points out the continued centrality of classical mystical and legal writings to 'Alawi education in the Hadramawt and East Africa.
If institutional changes in educational practices were hardly revolutionary in Yemen, they certainly were in East Africa, Bang argues with reference to the 'Alawi scholarly class in Zanzibar, where the Hadrami's emphasis on scriptural Islam and Arabic literacy severely eroded the authority of the Swahili upper class (the Waungwana) and their monopoly, until then, on the primarily oral transmission of Islamic knowledge.
New religious practices, such as public dhikrs (rememembrance) and mawlids, (celebration of the Prophet's birth) which were introduced by the 'Alawis and other new Sufi brotherhoods, greatly widened the general population's opportunities for religious participation but seriously diminished the authority of the Waungwana who had previously monopolized popular religious practices. Bang persuasively argues that new ideas and practices may have radically divergent consequences according to the specific nature of the Muslim community in which they are introduced.
Along the same lines, Bang argues that the association of the 'orthodoxy' with 'Arabness' in the East African context needs to be reconsidered: what were considered highly 'orthodox' devotional practices by the 'Alawi scholars were obviously perceived as highly 'unorthodox' by the Waungwana, who had considered their own mawlid celebrations to be representative of 'proper' Islamic behavior.
Bang's argument for the relativity of such loaded concepts as tradition and reform is further elaborated in her exploration of the influence of modernist and Islamist thought on Hadramawt, and consequently East Africa. Ibn Sumayt's netowrk connected him with scholars in Hadramawt, its diasporas in Mecca, Indonesia and Istanbul, as well as prominent modernist thinkers such as Mohammed 'Abduh and Rashid Rida' in Egypt.
An analysis of the scholarly exchanges taking place through these contacts shows that although modernist thinkers and exponents of the tariqa 'Alawiyya shared a strong interest in social and educational activism (da'wah), their intellectual foundations were entirely different. The activism of the 'Alawiyya in Hadramawt and Zanzibar was primarily and internal development, deriving its inspiration from late 18th-century Hadrami revivalists. It was expressed in the institutionalization of religious education and an increased drive toward da'wah among non-'Alawis and in the countryside, but otherwise remained firmly within the parameters of 'Alawi Sufism. Modernist thought, on the other hand, as expounded by scholars like Mohammed 'Abduh and Rashid Rida--as embraced by a large group of 'Alawi scholars in Indonesia--had its roots in a much more thorough intellectual transformation, formulated in a context of colonial expansion and severely critical of the more esoteric aspects of Islam.
Pointing to examples of educational, agricultural and medical reforms proposed by Ibn Sumayt, challenges overtly static notions of reform, arguing that reform should not be understood as a mere theoretical ideal that is necessarily rooted in ideology (as with the Egyptian reformers) but is primarily about the will to change concrete aspects of society: action which may be rooted in social, political and personal circumstances without implying an intellectual shift. Ibn Sumayt may have shared certain reformist tendencies with modernist thinkers, but this does not mean that he shared their intellectual foundations.
Some critical footnotes may be placed here regarding the theoretical framework in which Bang places reform within the 'Alawiyya tradition which she defines, following previous scholarship, as a shift from the imposition of an external moral code to an internally motivated code for life conduct, i.e. a shift from doctrine to praxis, rather than a shift from apathy to activism. This change of emphasis may circumvent the problematic political implications of the term activism but does nothing to explain why this shift took place, apart from the tenuous implication that previous generations of Muslims did not 'internalize' or 'practice' Islam to the same extent. The well-traveled Hadrami sayyids were doubtlessly aware of the expanding influence of the Western world (an entire generation of Hadramis studied with Zayn ad-Din ad-Dahlan in Mecca, who taught subjects in European History and was a supporter of Ottoman pan-Islamism). Could it be, then, that the expansion of da'wah and popular education had more to do with external influences than Bang concedes to? Could the shift also reflect a new need for self-affirmation in the face of the rapid penetration of foreign and non-Islamic influences into the Muslim heartlands? The consolidation of Sufi tariqas was central to the spread of Islamic teachings among the 'masses' and in many places pursued highly political (often anti-colonial) objectives during the late 19th century, regardless of the non-political nature of their essential teachings.
Furthermore, Bang's conclusion that the shift that took place was not an intellectual one may be premature. The long-term effects of the expansion and institutionalization of education may not have been evident in the early 20th century, but they certainly are today. Unprecedented popular access to religious knowledge has today led to radical shifts in the distribution of religious authority and increasingly eclectic attitudes towards Islamic knowledge. Many other drastic changes on the local and global level have obviously played a role in the increasing 'democratization' of religious knowledge, but expanded access to Islamic education from the late 19th century, as exemplified by the ribats in Hadramawt, certainly formed part of the groundwork for future shifts of a more intellectual nature.
Nonetheless, Bang's research presents powerful illustrations of the complex and intricate dialectics of political social and intellectual developments.
The example of Ibn Sumayt, who was utterly steeped in Hadrami scholarly and Sufi tradition but did not hesitate to ask legal advice from Mohammed 'Abduh, promoted the translation of the Qur'an into Swahili and shared the judge's bench with Ibadhi scholars, shows the infinite complexity of the modes of intellectual evolution across space and time and poses a powerful rebuttal to those who would like to compartmentalize Islamic thought and practice according to sharply defined ideological categories.
Overall, the themes raised in Sufis and Scholars of the Sea offer many leads for future inquiry. In the 20th century the revolutionary expansion of modern communication technology and mass media have both empowered and fragmented religious discourse, generally undermining the traditional authority of scholarly classes such as the 'Alawis. Yet new technological tools also present entirely new avenues for the propagation of their 'brand' of Islam. In fact, the tariqa 'Alawiyya seems to have greatly expanded its global network since the early 20th c., growing branches into European and American Muslim communities as well as building a considerable presence in Islamic broadcasting and cyberspace. Many of the questions posed by Anne Bang can be newly asked about the continued role of the 'Alawiyya in the modern world: How have the networks described in Sufis and Scholars of the Sea evolved and changed since the early 20th century? What have been the effects of modern communication technology, mass media, and new global audiences on the content of 'Alawi teachings and the methods of its transmission (da'wah)? How is 'Alawi Sufism indigenized (as it once was in East Africa) in the Western world, where its discourse is now informing new Muslim identities, political opinions, and ideas about what constitutes normative Islamic 'tradition'?
To conclude, Sufis and Scholars of the Sea offers all that is expected from an historical study of intellectual history: profound knowledge of the classical canon of Islamic scholarship, highly relevant research questions, and thorough engagement with pertinent theoretical approaches to Sufism. It certainly deserves attention from scholars and laymen alike.

Read more...

Writing Global History: Hadramawt and Its Diaspora (A Review of Graves of Tarim)

source
by Roger Owen

Few people in the world can deny that, since the 1990s at least, we have been living through a period of rapid globalization in which people's lives are more intensely interconnected than at any time up to now. But how to write the history of this period? And how to relate it with earlier periods, not just to the first great wave of modern globalization at the end of the nineteenth century, but also to previous centuries when smaller, but still extensive, networks of interconnectedness were created across the world's oceans by trading empires like the Portuguese, the British and the Dutch, as well as by influential diasporas communities emanating from outward-looking societies without powerful navies to protect their interests located in strategic places along a sea-coast like south China, south India, or, in the Arab world, Syria/Lebanon or parts of Yemen

This enormous challenge has been taken up with a considerable degree of success by Professor Enseng Ho, a Harvard social-anthropologist, whose new book, The Graves of Tarim (University of California Press, 2006), based on many years of research on Hadramawt and its Indian, South-East Asian and African Diaspora, contains a wonderfully sophisticated analysis, not just of the creation, and then the maintenance, of a system of networks which outlasted the great sea empires in which it was partially embedded, but also of the methodological problems connected with such a vast intellectual enterprise. Though not always an easy read, there is no doubt in my mind that, over the years, it will be seen as one of those few foreign books about the Arab world which richly deserve the name of classic.

Hadramawt itself consists of a thin, well-watered wadi (valley), stretching some eighty miles from east to west between the arid wastes of Saudi Arabia's 'empty quarter' and the Arabian Sea, long settled by a people with an intimate connection with the rise of Islam in the land to its north. And yet, rich though it is in agricultural and commercial potential, for over eight centuries it has been exporting a significant part of its male population, first as (Sayyids) along paths of Islamic missionary enterprise, then as civic and religious figures at the various Indian courts, finally, as adventurers, sultans, merchants, diplomats and landlords further east into Malaysia and Indonesia.

Everywhere they went these individual Hadramis, without power or protection, had to elbow themselves into their host region's local social and political arrangements. Everywhere they did this in part by marrying local women to create families linked to their homeland by genealogical lines of descent, as well as by a culture and a learning based on notions of outward movement and return, of religious and moral education, to create a trans-oceanic society of people who understand themselves as linked by bonds of kinship maintained by singing, writing, reading and narration, or, in Professor Ho's arresting phrase, by the stories they shared about themselves.

All this is well known in its bare outlines. But how to tell its story, to
understand its particular dynamic, to indicate the emotional density of its largely familial inter-connections and to explain the changed relationships between Diaspora and homeland over long stretches of time? The key to Professor Ho's approach is the way he has combined a huge array of historical evidence - textual, historical, sociological and material based on his own personal experience - from sites across the world to create a larger picture based on notions of cycles of outward movement and return centred on the small wadi town of Tarim with its mosques, its graves, and, more recently its eastern-looking palaces, bungalows and villas, where, in his argument, the various flows which first pushed the Hadramis abroad came together in the early centuries of Islam in a burst of religiously-inspired, outward-looking activism.

To this he adds a wonderful analysis of the global context in which these cycles took place, produced first by the shift in maritime trading patterns west from the Gulf to the Red Sea after the land-routes to China were interrupted by the Mongol conquest, then by the various European sea empires which, in their last, British phase, created an Indian Ocean world dominated at sea by the various London ministries and departments which ran its maritime activities, and on land by the increasingly competitive and bureaucratically controlling territorial possessions of Britain and Holland. These latter, in his argument, while both encouraging and then restricting Hadrami movement abroad, also began to have more and more impact in Hadramawt itself as developments and divisions affecting the diasporas abroad increasingly found their way back to the homeland resulting, finally, in Britain's extraordinarily belated decision to incorporate it into its empire as part of its last imperial possession, the so-called East Aden Protectorate, just before World War Two.

But this is only the half of it. The methodology employed to write the story, while appearing deceptively simple, is, in fact, novel in the extreme in its largely successful attempt to find answers to the complex challenges which the writing of global history poses for conventional historical narrative, for the imposition of coherence, and for giving meaning to a pattern of interconnectedness based on a dense network of personal, social and ideological ties sustained over long distances by travel, written messages and shared histories, all subject to the opportunities provided and the demands imposed by such technical developments as the change from sail to steam, the imposition of the passport, the arrival of the postage stamp and the international telegraph cable.

To understand Professor Ho's response to such methodological challenges we have to note the following two points. First, he became a global person himself, with the good fortune, the languages, the academic confidence, not just to travel freely around the Indian Ocean but also, partly through his Hadrami connections, to feel at home wherever he went. This, in turn, allowed him to practice a type of imaginative historical sociology in which an intimate knowledge of the Hadrami homeland and its present diasporas informs and interacts with his analysis of related aspects of the Hadrami past. Hence an ability to present a self-contained world both from inside and outside, as well as to understand its own world view as a community of people who, in his own succinct phrase, were and are, at once deeply engaged in other worlds and yet deeply distrustful of them.

Finally, he is able to give meaning to the intensity of the rather arid notion of networks through his observation of the central significance of the ubiquitous family connections which give these global relationships their particular feel, their particular flexibility, and also their particular poignancy, as the individual stories, not just of personal success but also of difficulty and dislocation, begin to mount up, particularly in the modern world of nation states and tighter and tighter national jurisdictions.

The Graves of Tarim promises to be one of those great books best read, thought about, and then read again. Let us hope that it can soon reach an Arabic-speaking audience as well. It is a remarkable achievement. (Al Hayat Newspaper).

Read more...

Habib Saleh, Sheikh of Lamu Town

Wow...what can I say about Lamu that hasn't already been said. While I was here I was determined to track down the history of Habib Saleh, another Sufi who had an enormous impact on the history of coastal Islam, and much like Sheikh Ramiya of Bagamoyo, was well-loved and revered by his students, other scholars, and especially Africans. Habib Saleh is perhaps best known for the way he introduced a more egalitarian and open form of worship into the five daily prayers, as well as for his dissemination of a new maulid recitation on the occasion of the prophet Muhammed's birthday. He was notable for the way in which he explicitly spoke out against Arab anti-black racism (all the more so, since he himself was an Arab) and the arrogance of power. The mosque he helped to build still stands in Lamu today; it is called the Riyadha mosque and it is currently undergoing renovations. It is surrounded by a secondary school and a college both funded, according to my guidebook, by money from Saudi Arabia. However, when I asked my informant, the great-great grandson of Habib Saleh, about this, he explicitly stated that no Saudi Arabian money comes to Riyadha mosque. Rather the word riyadh refers to 'Riyadha al-Jana' or the 'Meadows of Paradise.' The Prophet related an allegory to impress on the early Muslims the value of knowledge. He emphasized that if you pass through these gardens of paradise, don't rush through. Instead stay and eat of the fruit (knowledge).
Anyway, H.S.'s great-great grandson Hussein Badawi took pains to establish Lamu's opposition to the ideas emanating from the branch of Islam currently in power in Saudi Arabia. "The Wahabbis," he said, "believe in the conditional acceptance of gifts. If you receive something from them, you must also accept their ideology."

But back to Habib Saleh, or Swaleh Ibn Alwy Jamaliliel. Born in 1269 A.H. in the Comoros, he moved to Lamu at 15 or 18 (depending on the source you consult) to live with his uncle Sharif Seyyid Ali. (you can see part of his uncle's grave to the left of Habib Saleh's (big and black) in the picture. His mother's name was Maryam and his father's name Alawi. He began teaching soon after arriving, and eventually Sheikh Abu Bakr Manswab al-Hussein, no doubt impressed with the young man's erudition and piety, gave him a piece of land to build the Riyadha mosque on.
Habib Saleh's family were Comorian Arabs originally from Yemen. They also laid claim to descent from Ali, the grandson of the prophet Muhammed. The geneaology goes something like this, with apologies if I get it wrong: I was writing notes in English from a Swahili interview. It seems that Habib Saleh's 6th grandfather Haroon came from Yemen to Pate in the 10th century in one of the many migrations that Arabs from the Hadramat made to East Africa. His fourth grandfather, Abdullah bin Ahmed, then migrated from Pate to the Comoros, for reasons I don't know. He died at sea and the story goes, that his grandson, with him on the boat, wrapped his body in a white sheet to be thrown in the sea. As the men heaved the body overboard, they were amazed to see two large birds grab it and fly away with it.
Stories like these also proliferated around Habib Saleh. There were three related to me, all symbolically involving jahazis (a type of dhow). I say symbolically because the dhow represents one of the things that gave Islam in East Africa its unique flavor...by bringing scholars from all over the Indian Ocean. In one of the stories, Habib Saleh brings a jahazi safely back to port during a storm, by praying for it from land. In another, he sends his sons to meet a jahazi docking at Lamu, telling them it will bring a visitor for them. The visitor, another scholar from Yemen, is amazed, because he gave no notice to Habib Saleh of his coming. And in yet another story, Habib Saleh prays during the maulid because there is no food for the many visitors to eat. That day, a jahazi is forced to dock at Lamu because they are overloaded with food.
Now the skeptical mind will not read too much into these stories, and would be likely to dismiss them as circumstance. But their importance lies in how they position Saleh as a man of immense piety and learning, whose humility gave him power. For instance, I was fortunate enough to tour Habib Saleh's house (its normally only open during the maulid) and see the very simple way he lived, despite being quite affluent. It made me understand something again of the power of Sufism as an organizing principle in East Africa. Habib Saleh's children continued his legacy--his grandson Said Ali Badawi even became the chief qadi of Kenya for a time.
All in all, I felt extremely fortunate to probe deeper into the life of this remarkable scholar. I am wondering if perhaps some sort of comparative perspective of these Sufi personalities might fruitfully illuminate not only the common threads that made them so popular, but also whether or not they had any knowledge of each other. This is one question that I was going to put to Hussein Badawi's brother, author of the book, Ariyadh baina madhihi wa hadhirihi. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to meet him before I had to leave Lamu.

Read more...