Maldives documentary on al-Jazeera English
People and Power is a GREAT show on al-Jazeera English. Here they look at the Maldives.
September 25, 2009
Dr. Amin Alhassan: Giving Is An Act of Self Interest
Yes, yes and yes. Dr Alhassan lays it DOWN in this piece about the dangers and disadvantages of state dependence on foreign aid. Best of all, it is done in a way that is accessible and direct. The good doctor has given The Azanian Sea to reproduce a portion of her article, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, available in PDF format here. I hope this will help those of us in the West who are tempted to overcongratulate ourselves for the work we do in Africa. The point is not so much that your project, your spring break trip, or your 'mission' to Africa is 'bad.' The point is that its rarely as altruistic as you would like it to be. What makes it possible for so many 'well meaning Westerners' to go to Africa to teach, build wells, do the Peace Corps, etc. is the continuing dependence of African states on international aid.
excerpt from "Telescopic Philanthropy, Emancipation and Development Communication Theory" by Amin Alhassan
From Charles Dickens to Present
“Telescopic philanthropy”, as a phrase, was first used by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House some 150 years ago to poke fun at and critique what was then an English fascination and obsession with designing development projects to save Africa and Africans from poverty, and to usher them into a modern economy of production. In the Dickensian narrative, the story is told of a Mrs. Jellyby, a friend of John Jarndyce, who neglects her house and children and is obsessed with projects designed to save African in the Congo from poverty by teaching them how to grow coffee to enable them to earn an income. In retrospect, it is clear that what Dickens was describing was the genesis of what is now a global industry of state, non-governmental charities and celebrity acts of philanthropy to save Africa from itself. Dickens was noted for his journalism and the use of the novel as a means of social critique. His discussion of telescopic philanthropy is instructive because it allows us to understand the practice of international development as pre-dating the post-World War II Truman era. It also allows us to understand how international development framed as charitable interventions that northern developed countries do to global southern countries as acts that are tied to the domestic power politics of the so-called benefactor countries.
It is against this backdrop that I am motivated to argue that the problem with Africa is as much a problem of development as it is the troubling impact of international aid on the continent’s self-initiative. Evidently what I am aiming to argue is not about a global divide of technological haves and technological have-nots. The global divide that interests me is the global divide of benefactors and beneficiaries, that between donors and beggars, between philanthropist and objects of charity. The institution that is partly responsible for this global divide is the global media. As we have seen from Dickens, the attempt to save Africa is not new. Indeed, Susan Thorne’s (1999) provocative interpretation of 19th Century middle class formation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain makes the case that saving the heathens in Africa was always preferred to saving the heathens at home, and that this particular fascination with the distant other had a definite imperial logic. It is a logic that is still with us today....
If we remind ourselves that the original idea of international development assistance that the US invented was not about development of the Global South, but about developing a global instrument of soft power and containment (Samarajiwa 1987, Escobar 1995), then the epistemic commitment of development communication theory ought to question the language of help that characterizes international development. Much of the development communication literature of the past 60 years has been on how to become an effective handmaiden of this dubious re-invention of international diplomacy called international development (See Waisbord 2000 for a comprehensive statement of various theoretical, methodological and strategic commitments in the field).
Development communication theory as an area of inquiry needs to take into account the price the so-called poor pay when they get a clinic built, pipe-borne water provided or a school built through the altruism of the philanthropist, the gift giver, or the new missionary worker of international development. I want to use a recent EU decision to illustrate this point. In July 2008, the BBC reported that the European Commission had agreed to use one billion euros of unspent European farm subsidies to aid African farmers (BBC 2008). The BBC report, which showed a picture of an African farmer labouring a rice field, went on to quote European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso as saying “The impact of high food prices is particularly severe for the world’s poorest populations” and adds that without the EU’s assistance, the UN’s goal to reduce global poverty will fail. This European act of altruism, upon a second look, is not only a phantom one, but a Trojan Horse that is meant to purchase a highly needed strategic advantage for the EU in a growing global tide against EU and North American agricultural subsidies and how they negatively impact on farmers in the Global South. The price Africa will pay for getting the “spare change” of one billion euro dropped in its begging bowl is that it will lose a strong standing in making a case against the EU for subsidizing its farmers so that they can unfairly compete with Africans in a global food market. What the EU’s charitable gesture does against the discourse of fair trade and the fundamental illogicality of preaching free trade in Africa while maintaining farm subsidies in Europe is far more significant that any apparent altruism it might suppose. Here then is the point about giving being an act of self-interest.
The Standard | Online Edition: Fire on Faza Island in Lamu archipelago
September 24, 2009
Sudan's Colonized Judiciary (Book Review)
by Alex de Waal from Making Sense of Darfur
It’s an unfortunate reality that books on Sudan by Sudanese authors—even those who have a wonderful English writing style, and who deal with their subject matter in a way that combines insight with accessibility—rarely get the attention they deserve.
We should take a close look at Abdullahi Ibrahim’s recently-published history of the Sudanese judiciary: Manichaean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary and Islamic Renewal in the Sudan, 1898-1985. Abdullahi writes as an insider to Sudan’s Islamist intellectual and political tradition, and illuminates why not only the law, but the judiciary as well, was an arena of such significant political contest in colonial and post-colonial Sudan. He places contemporary Sudan within the wider post-colonial experience, using Frantz Fanon’s paradigms of the opposition between the European/canonical and the native/deviant, using the divided judiciary as his case.
British rule in Sudan, as elsewhere, was marked by a talent for divide and rule. This has been much-remarked in the context of the ‘native administration’ system, developed in the 1920s in order to marginalize the educated ‘detribalized’ elites whom, the British feared, would challenge their rule. The rural aristocracy was empowered—within very strictly defined limits—and became tarnished as ‘collaborators’ within the dominant nationalist political discourse. Sharia judges were also allocated their tightly-defined status within the system: low.
Abdullahi documents how the colonial subjects’ experience of British rule was hierarchically ordered, from matters of dress to education to urban geography. He poses a set of dualities. The colonizers and their carefully-chosen effendi clients wore suits and polished shoes (jazma), while the rest wore jellabiyas and markubs—and could be punished for violating the dress code. Khartoum was the modern city, laid out in a grid (with diagonals, said to resemble the Union Jack), while Omdurman the ‘native’ town retained its disorderly street plan. (To this day the executive is in Khartoum and the legislature on the other side of the river.) The administration used the Gregorian calendar and collected regular taxes and dues; the traditional system used the Islamic calendar and collected the Islamic Zakat. Students destined for prestigious posts attended the secular Gordon Memorial College close to the Governor-General’s Palace in Khartoum, those relegated to local affairs went to the Mahad al Ilmi (Islamic College) in Omdurman.
Abdullahi’s account is made particularly vivid by his gift for anecdote and personal observation. He recounts a story told by an old folklorist whose life story he compiled, describing how the schoolboys of Khartoum turned out for a parade in honor of a British colonial official. After long waiting in the sun, the officer arrived on his horse, inspected the schoolboys from the government schools but wheeled away at the very point where he came to the ranks of the boys from the khalwas (Quranic schools), who went away aggrieved, ‘staring into the void drilled by the refusal of that British official, the symbol of power and legitimacy, even to take notice of our presence.’
Abdullahi’s chief concern is how this duality translated into the legal sphere, relegating Islamic Law and its courts to second class status and a domestic sphere. Instead of being a nationally unifying factor, Sharia became a divisive issue. The qadis (judges) of the Sharia Division were junior to the ‘authoritative’ Civil Division. Qadis were required to wear a version of traditional garb including a turban (a dress code that some later adopted as a defiant gesture against western mores), were not entitled to receive salutes from policemen, and were widely ridiculed as ‘women’s judges.’ This refers to how the Sharia courts were visibly ‘women’s courts’, crowded with abandoned wives and their children and dispossessed widows hoping for the near-impossible to occur. Abdullahi notes that women preferred the Sharia courts to the tribal courts because Islamic law gives them more rights.
Imperial Sudan possessed neither a unified legal code nor a single judicial system. Among the majority, the sense of moral injury generated by the distinct second-class status of their own customary legal system, generated a rage for justice, unmet in the formal courts. Post-colonial Sudan was little different: the ruling secularized elites despised the Sharia courts, insensitive to their political plight and history. From the first days of independence, the search for a unified judiciary became a central theme of Sudanese politics. Abdullahi describes how this struggle translated into a ‘rage for masculinity’ and a preoccupation with sexual morality (including especially prostitution and homosexuality) in public discourse. It is not insignificant that Hassan al Turabi is the son of a qadi. Abdullahi breaks new ground in situating Turabi’s political philosophy in his family background.
In two provocative chapters, Abdullahi provides an Islamist perspective on the politics of Nimeiri’s Islamism. He is critical of the Republican Brothers’ leader Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, for repudiating the Islamic courts—rubbing in their faces the fact of their colonial origin and their inability to implement their ruling, made in 1968, that he was an apostate. Abdullahi describes the popular support for Sharia as stemming more from people’s hostility to the (secular) courts with their slow and expensive procedures, than enthusiasm for Islam. Nimeiri’s September Laws held out the promise of a unified judiciary, but disappointed. Abdullahi concludes by noting that Sudanese political society remains in a Manichean trap, and implies that a certain madness, a ‘logic of daring,’ will be needed to escape from it.
Read more...September 22, 2009
Top Tanzanian Bureaucrats Choose To Enroll Children At Successful Turkish Schools
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qu'ranic Translation in East Africa Part 4: Conclusion
The final part in our special series on the translation of The Holy Qu'ran into Kiswahili
Part 4: Qurani Takatifu and the work of Sheikh Abdullah Farsy
Following the publication of Kurani Tukufu, Sheikh Abdullah Farsy of Zanzibar had published a tract, "Upotufu was Tafsiri ya Makadiani", which denounced the Ahmadiyya translation. This was followed by his own effort to translate the Qu'ran into Swahili, called Qurani Takatifu. Painstakingly, Farsy built on the work of his teacher Sheikh Mazrui and published his translation in installments in the Zanzibar weekly newspaper Mwongozi (The Guide). Finally, he published the complete translation in 1967. The work was sponsored in part by the Islamic Foundation of Nairobi, a group sympathetic to the anti-Ahmadiyya stance of the Jamaat-e-Islaami in Pakistan; in fact the introduction to the second edition (1974) of Qurani Takatifu is a Kiswahili translation of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi’s introduction to his Urdu commentary on the Qu’ran. Maududi at that time was the head of Jamaat-e-Islaami.
Farsy took aim at what he believed to be the Ahmadiyya’s deliberate mistranslation of Quran 33:41 (In Farsy’s version it is actually verse 40). We have already discussed how Kurani Tukufu rendered "Khataman Nabiyyin" (seal of the prophets) as “Muhuri wa Manabii.” But Farsy is more explicit; he translates the phrase “Khataman Nabiyyin” as “Mwisho wa Mitume,” adding, “The inversion of these words is a lie of the Ahmadiyya who claim for themselves ‘Muhuri wa Manabii.’ And they mention piles of names of university students and their books and SLANDER [this is in all capital letters in the original Swahili] the matter in the way they translate it.” Farsy then devotes four and a half pages to discussing this issue, finally concluding on a somewhat humorous note: “We rest our pen a little that we may entertain those thoughts another time. This thing is exhausting and we don’t want you to be bored.”
Sheikh Farsy was in a unique position to do a Kiswahili translation. On the one hand, his education by scholars like Sheikh Ahmed Muhammed el-Mlomry, Abdullah Bakathir, and Sheikh Mazrui prepared him to relate the Islamic message to a new generation of believers. On the other hand, his position first as chief qadi of Zanzibar (until 1964) and then chief qadi of Kenya, gave him the prominence and connections to ensure his translation would be read by a wide audience.
We saw earlier how the Ahmadiyya made a direct challenge to the dominance of Islamic discourse by a coastal elite with strong ties to the Arab world. Many members of this elite had well-ingrained notions of their own superiority vis-à-vis other Africans. Sheikh al-Amin bin Aly, another Qur’anic translator and teacher of Sheikh Abdullah Farsy, warned against two dangers: European cultural imperialism, and the “khatari nyeusi” (black danger) of non-Muslim African migration to the coast, and his warning was indicative of the breakdown of the earlier discussed older mode of Swahili acculturation via ustaarabu. This dynamic was upended in the colonial era, partly as a result of the banning of slavery and the slave trade which undermined the economic basis of the coastal elite. The inability of the elite to control the cultural and demographic terms of this migration led to a great deal of social dislocation and the emergence of new sets of leaders who challenged the prerogatives of this elite; Sheikh Ramiya of Bagamoyo and Habib Saleh of Lamu are two prominent examples of this challenge. These challenges were not only predicated on breaking down barriers to the kinds of knowledge those of slave descent could have access to, but also on reforming corrupt practices within Islam. The origins of Habib Saleh, and his successful attempt to implant a renaissance of Alawiyya scholars in Lamu, show that the social impulse of Arabism had a progressive side as well, in which “a bond of ‘common Islamness’” transcended sectarian and racial differences.
Despite the cultural chauvinism of one of his teachers, Sheikh Farsy framed his translation in terms of Islamic universalism. “Uislamu hautaki istiimari (Ukoloni) wa dini. Si lazima lugha ya Kiarabu.” said Farsy,” His view was part of a changing attitude on the part of a generation of Islamic reformers who viewed the Qu’ran not merely as a devotional text, but as a practical guide to life possessing many of the solutions for the cultural humiliation and degeneracy Muslims had endured under imperialism. Bang explains, “The shift may attributed to a generally changed outlook among Islamic scholars, starting towards the end of the nineteenth century and spearheaded by such figures as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida.” Al-Mazrui, Farsy’s teacher, agreed that learning the Qu’ran without its meaning was not meritorious, but he like other Islamic reformers of the Salafi bent, advocated learning Arabic as early as possible. This shift can be mapped in attitudes toward the Quranic translation; it became of paramount importance to be able to read and understand the meaning of the text in order that the believers might apply it to their daily condition.
Framing was all important, and especially framing in light of the experience of Muslims recently coming out from underneath colonial rule. Kiswahili was the language of coastal religion and culture, but it was also, to the leaders of the nationalist movement in Tanzania, an ‘African’ language with the potential to unite the country. Islamic reformers like Farsy recognized that in light of these new circumstances, it was more imperative than ever to relate the Arabic meanings in the Qu’ran through a language relevant to the masses. The task was made easier in that Kiswahili, like Persian and Urdu, had a wealth of words of Arabic origin to begin with.
Overall “the popularity of Qurani Takatifu as a work of Swahili religious literature and the number of reprints it has undergone reflect how favorably it has been received by Kiswahili-speaking people.” Nevertheless, for Farsy and other Salafi reformers relating Islam as a total system to the changing conditions of modern life demanded wide dissemination of Islamic ideas. Translations such as Qur’ani Takatifu were meant to present Islam in a culturally relevant way, and were therefore only a first step towards preparing hearts and minds for the real obligation of every Muslim: to learn Arabic.
Farsy’s translation should also be seen in light of the tremendous transformation in access to education all over Africa. Mass literacy and mass education had placed new opportunities for the dissemination of Islamic education, and the tracts, books, and pamphlets of Islamic Africa until now are being presented in a variety of African languages, Swahili included.
Through the process of translation from Arabic to Swahili, the Qur’anic message took on a special cultural relevance as a point of contention for the Muslims of East Africa. The processes of Christian missionizing, British reform in Islamic education in Zanzibar, and the language policy of the British in East Africa spurred a reaction which created new opportunities for reform. The first Swahili translation was a hostile attempt by a Christian missionary with very negative views of Islam, as well as racist views of African capabilities and culture. In response to Godfrey Dale’s missionary translation, the Ahmadiyya saw an opening for spreading their unique vision of Islam. They saw it as their obligation to counter the Christian missionary presence, which they viewed as a cultural onslaught against Islam. But because of their insistence on several unique doctrinal points, their translation was also not widely accepted. In turn, the Ahmadiyyas provoked a response rooted in the same sort of motivation: to counter what was deemed as their assault on the true Islam. Qurani Takatifu gained wider acceptance, but generated its own dynamic of opposition as well as support, generating new debates about the nature and basis for establishing authority and legitimacy within the East African Islamic community.
This process of linguistic translation and religious dissemination through Kiswahili and other African languages will continue, and even accelerate as Africa increasingly enters the digital age. As long as there are believers, there will be efforts to bridge the gap between Islam as an ‘Arabic revelation’ and Islam as a ‘universal religion.’
Pensee #3: Reconceptualizing the "Regions" in "Area Studies"
I couldn't have said it better! As someone who has had the privilege to sit in Dr. Voll's class, his thoughts are on point and very welcome in light of the issues discussed in this blog.
by John Voll, Professor of Islamic History and Associate Director of the Prince al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.
Article originally appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies
“Area studies” as a way of trying to understand human experience is undergoing a major transition. Questioning the connection between Middle East and African studies highlights important dimensions of the changing nature of area studies at the beginning of the 21st century.
The question reminds us that the “regions” at the core of the concept of “area” studies were and are constructs for the convenience of analysts. During the 1950s and 1960s, policymakers and scholars divided the world conceptually into regions for study. In the United States, the definition of these regions crystallized around the list of non-Western “world regions” studied in centers supported by funding initially authorized by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Although world regions had been (and are still) defined in many different ways, this 1960s conceptual division of the world became widely accepted. It is in this context that the regions involved in “African” studies and “Middle East” studies came to be defined. African studies became primarily the study of sub-Saharan Africa rather than the continent as a whole. The emerging cadre of professional “Africanists” tended to exclude the countries of “North Africa”
from their subject matter.
The definition of the Middle East changed significantly from the early usage by military planners in the 1890s. However, virtually every definition excluded African areas beyond the Mediterranean coast. In one exception, the British War Office during World War II included the Horn of Africa, but by the 1960s, most people accepted the conclusion of one of the standard geography texts of the time that Sudan and the countries of the Horn were “more properly considered as parts of intertropical Africa.”
One important result of this division was that the two fields—African and Middle East studies—developed relatively separately, and the conceptual regions tended to become reified. People spoke of “culture continents” with distinctive identities,2 opening the way for a vision of the world made up of separate—and clashing—“civilizations.” Topics that did not fit into these two conceptual boxes tended to be marginalized in “mainstream” coverage of sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East in conferences and professional associations.
These conditions contributed to two difficulties in the area-studies approach that are now changing. The first is a regionalist primordialism, which endows regions with some essential identity. As a result, interactions among regions are viewed as “borrowing” or “foreign” influences. However, interactions between the Middle East and “Africa” have resulted in dynamic cultural syntheses that are distinctively local but no longer simply manifestations of some primordial essence that has “borrowed” some foreign elements. Studies of these developments require “area-studies” expertise but also require transcending regionalist primordialisms. An interesting example of this postprimordialist analysis is Donald Wright’s study of Islamization and globalization in “a very small place in Africa." A dual regional studies approach, combining African and Middle East studies, is an important part of going beyond the primordialist perspective.
A second difficulty is a monolithic view of the dimensions of human activities in the region under study. Classical area studies tended to see geographicphysical, economic, cultural, and religious boundaries as being roughly the same. However, looking at the Middle East and Africa together reminds us that important regions or networks of interaction cross borders. The networks of Muslim pilgrimage that run from the Atlantic coast of Africa to western Arabia are an integrated region rather than two regions interacting. The networks of economic interaction have little relationship to the boundaries assumed by area-studies definitions of the Middle East and Africa. The classic study of the trans-Saharan trade from antiquity by E. W. Bovill presents an important example of how economic enterprise does not conform to the regions of area
studies. Studies of religious and economic relations between South Arabia and East Africa by scholars like Anne Bang illustrate that there was no clear “regional” boundary between the Middle East and Africa in this broad swath of territory.
Within the framework of these thoughts, why and how should Middle East and African studies be connected? They need to be connected through scholarship that transcends the primordialism and monolithic definitions of old-style area studies because these two regions are not separate “areas” or discrete “civilizations.” Instead, they are interacting and diverse sets of human experiences that historically have influenced and shaped each other. Understanding this will help scholars build a perspective and a methodology that avoids the dangers of old-style cultural essentialism that can lead not only to the conception but also to the reality of a clash of civilizations.
September 20, 2009
Political and Cultural Aspects of Qur'anic translation in East Africa Part Three: Ahmadiyya in East Africa
Part 3 in a special series on Kiswahili Qu'ranic translation for The Azanian Sea
Part 3: Ahmadiyya in East Africa and Kurani Tukufu
In a lecture in Dakar, Senegal in 1996, Tigiti Cengo expressed the questions of Islam’s cultural relevance to African culture and religion in a discussion about the Arabic origins of Swahili: “How many realize the direct descendance of the Swahili language, spoken all over East and Central Africa, from the Arabic. (Ebrahim Doda), a question which nobody can answer because it is baseless, unfounded, and even unnecessary. The same is true with the fundamental mistake of dating the birth of Islam as 7th century. How can one justify the non-existence of Allah(SW) and all His Creation which submitted to him before the 7th Century? Muslim scholars should consult deeper sources than those from the exploitative, oppressive, and sentimental generalizations that “Africa has had no culture, language, civilization, nothing; that “Islam is nothing but Arabism,” and the like from euro-western schools.”
Cengo’s assertion is extremely interesting; on the one hand, like the Ahmadiyya missionary Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi in the introduction to the Ahmadiyya translation Kurani Tukufu, he seeks to give Africa its place in the world history of religion, inverting the argument used by Arabism to subtly argue that Africans possessed concepts of Allah well before Arabs or any other civilization. On the other hand, he posits that most of the negative ideas about Africa and the conflation of Islam with being Arab and speaking Arabic are western ideologies.
The latter statement is partly true, but not completely. British educational policy in Zanzibar was predicated on an absolute separation of races, with each “race” to be taught according to their perceived abilities. Africans figured at the bottom of his hierarchy, and the British went so far as to refuse requests by Arab parents to have the Africans join their children in the classroom. The British believed they were upholding the “natural” social order; in reality they were freezing their conception of “lower races.” Nowhere is this more starkly revealed than in the overall European view of the Waswahili as some kind of morally and racially degenerate mixture between Arab and African, chained to Islam and incapable of renewal, change, or innovation.
Yet this view of African degeneracy was shared by many members of the 'Arab' elite during the early twentieth century, but not for the same reasons. Their concept of civilization was not scientific racialism but cultural chauvinism. In Al-Falaq, one of a group of Arabic newspapers published in Zanzibar, one writer warned that stripping Arabic from the educational curriculum would result in Arabs becoming like the “zanji” in their manners and cultural. This Arab variety of racism relied on the threat of cultural degeneracy through loss of linguistic and religious identity. Without Arabic, Arabs in Africa would become like the heathen Africans, the washenzi.
A new Muslim group calling themselves Ahmadiyya would seek to transform the Arab cultural paradigm through which coastal Islam had traditionally been viewed, seeking to retain the importance of Arabic, while freely translating the Qu’ran into other African languages and employing a discourse of African contributions to Islam.
Founded in the town of Qadian, India (hence its alternate name of Qadianiyat) in 1889 by Hazraut Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), Ahmadiyyism was a prophetic movement that proclaimed Mirza Ahmad as mujadid, mahdi, and Messiah of Islam. Ahmad came from a family whose forbears fought in the British army in India. Educated in the Qur’an (he knew Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), Ahmad came of age as the subcontinent was wracked by competing ideas of religious legitimacy from all sides. Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians debated each other and themselves in their attempts to win converts. This policy was partly spurred by the British colonial policy of awarding political representation based on communal religious confession, but it was also a result of the rich texture of religious discourse, a climate that encouraged people to take theological matters seriously.
From 1872, Ahmad emerged as spokesperson for Islam against Christians and various Hindu sects like Arya Samaj. Yet he also proved quite ready to define his vision of Islamic legitimacy; in the early years of his ministry he debated Maulvi Muhammed Husain about the differences between the Hanafi madhab and the ahl al-Hadith Ahmad established a degree of fame before his claims to prophethood by his flamboyant debating tactics: in one instance offering money to the person who would refute his book on Islamic apologetics, in another instance, before a debate with a Christian missionary, issuing an invitation for a mubahala. According to the Ahmadiyya histories, Ahmad received a type of divine illumination through fasting; soon after he proclaimed himself the mahdi. His assertion led even close friends to disassociate themselves from him.
Most authors working on Ahmadiyya focus on the person of Ahmad, the theological debates his claims of prophethood raised, and the religious context of the Indian subcontinent. More work along the lines of Humphrey Fisher’s work is needed to understand the role of Ahmadiyya in the development of Islam in East Africa. It is known that the movement began its work with Mubarak Ahmad’s arrival in Mombasa in 1934. Branches of the organization soon sprang up in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, while the headquarters were initially located in Tabora.
Much of the controversy between Ahmadiyya and other Muslims had to do with Ahmad’s view of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood. In an 1899 book, Jesus in India, Ahmad claimed Jesus had not died on the cross at all, but had sent a proxy, and had instead migrated to Kashmir and died in Srinagar at the age of 120. The controversy about Muhammad’s prophethood hinged on Ahmad’s unique explanation of the Qur’an 33:41. In Kurani Tukufu, the Arabic Khatataman Nabiyyina is translated as “Muhuri wa Manabii” According to Ahmad, the seal was not a literal finality. To counter the established wisdom, Ahmad related a hadith from Ayesha, “Say by all means that is the Seal of the Prophets, but do not say that there will be no Prophet after him.”
All of these theological issues in turn related to Ahmad’s overarching goal: countering Christian missionizing in its imperial aspect through a reform of key doctrinal vulnerabilities within Islam. One of those “vulnerabilities” was the relationship of Jesus and Muslim belief in his resurrection. The crux of much of this debate was Qur’an 4:157 “The Women” (which, you will recall, was one of the verses Godfrey singled out for criticism in his Qur'anic commentary) :
“That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";- but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them [or it appeared so unto them], and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not: Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise.”
The verse itself, because of the ambiguity and indirectness of its phrasing, invited multiple interpretations. The “orthodox” view prevalent in Ahmad’s time was either that God had rescued Jesus from the cross and raised his physical body to heaven, or that it was not really Jesus on the cross to begin with. Christian missionaries like Godfrey seized on this fact to prove the power of Jesus and Christianity over the power of Muhammed and Islam in debates. Ahmad’s mission has arisen because “Islam was in a situation of one who is encircled by bitter enemies and is assaulted continuously from every direction.”
A Kiswahili translation of the Qur’an was thus entirely consistent with Ahmad’s vigorous defense against those who attack Islam; the battle with Christianity became the context for justifying what many scholars viewed as “bida” or unlawful innovation. Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad prepared a new translation, beginning in 1936, as a counter to the “Upinzani unaoletwa na wasiokuwa Waislamu, hasa Wakristo.” (The opposition which has been brought to Islam by non-Muslims, especially Christians). The work was also an explicit response to Dale’s work:
“Zamani Padre Godfrey Dale aliandika tafsiri ya Kurani. Lakini kwa sababu yeye hakuwa na maarifa ya Kiarabu alishindwa mahali pengi kuandika tafsiri iliyo sawa. Mara nyingi hakufahamu neno la Kiarabu, na alichukua toka tafsiri ya Kiingereza baadhi ya maneno na kuyageuza Kiswahili bili kupeleza maneno ya asili. Hivyo tafsiri ya Padre Dale ina uharibifu mwingi unaokutana na kutojua kwake, na kadhalika unaotokana na uadui wake uliopitiliza mpaka. Kadhalika katika tafsiri yake, Padre Dale, hakuandika maneno ya asili ya Kiarabu ili watu wangepata kujua amekosa wapi, na amekosa nini, au amezidisha nini na kupunguza nini."
The work was begun on the first day of Ramadan in the month of November by Sheikh Mubarak Ahmad Ahmadi, the head of the Ahmadiyya mission in East Africa. With the publication of Kurani Tukufu in 1953, the Ahmadiyya made a significant contribution to Islamic renaissance on the East African coast. Copies of the new translation were sent to Mau Mau detainees in Kenya and plans were made for further translations into East African languages like Kikuyu. Whatever their theological differences with other Muslims, the Ahmadiyya, through their translation, addressed themselves to Dale’s denigrations of Islam in Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu and also contributed to a debate evolving about the origins of Islamic legitimacy on the East African coast. The Kurani Tukufu linked many Muslims in East Africa with a different part of the Islamic world, Pakistan. Furthermore, the Ahmadiyya were very explicit about the egalitarian and non-racial nature of Islam, mainly in an attempt to contrast it with Christianity. Perhaps this message may have also been effective against chauvinism and nepotism of certain members of the Arab elite, who blocked access to the highest levels of the ‘ulama for African Muslims.
By framing the introduction to Kurani Tukufu in terms of African contributions to Islamic history, the Ahmadi drew on rising nationalist sentiments and offered an alternative to the Arab civilizational motif prevalent in much of the Arab elite resistance to colonial rule. The introduction to Kurani Tukufu can be read as a subtle parable on the arrogance with which the Ahmadiyya itself was treated by the established Islamic authorities, an arrogance equivalent to the early messengers from Mecca who underestimated the Ethiopian king. The Meccan messengers who persecuted the early Muslims are of the same type who persecuted the Ahmadis. In fact now, the Qur’an itself is oppressed, and the Ahmadi translation would help to liberate it:
“To the people of Africa and especially the Eastern part, having studied the language placed before you with this translation, I am proud and happy because in the first days of this book you all’s continent protected those who hoped in this book and completely rejected oppression, injustice. Moreover, you were strengthened to erect justice and ethics. Today the teaching of your Qur’an is in a condition of oppression like those believers who were oppressed.”
Notwithstanding their unique theology, the Ahmadiyya are quite conservative on the issue of ijtihad, and their actual practice of Islam is quite orthodox. Yet they were attacked and heavily criticized both inside and outside of Pakistan. One frequent point of contention was Ghulam Ahmad’s collaboration with the British, which extended to frequent praise for the British role in cultural advancement on the Indian subcontinent. Such statements were used as evidence by anti-Ahmadi groups that the Ahmadiyya were little more than an imperialist front group seeking to undermine Islam. Out of this critique came the impetus for a third translation. Read more...
September 19, 2009
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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