February 23, 2013
Sultan Khalifa bin Harub
Sultan Khalifa bin Harub of Zanzibar. I am going to start posting pictures of the Sultans of Zanzibar as I collect them.
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February 17, 2013
Toward an Acoustemology of Muslim Citizenship in Kenya
this is a great great article that, while linking music and citizenship, also provides a cultural window into Swahili coastal society. You can find out more about Andrew by going to his website. This excerpt is part of a larger chapter from a book called Music Sound, and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience as published by Cambridge University Press.
Toward an Acoustemology of Muslim Citizenship in Kenya
by Dr. Andrew J Eisenberg (from the December 2010 issue of Anthropology News)
The problem of Muslim belonging in predominantly Christian Kenya has taken on added urgency for academics and policymakers in recent years, in light of attacks by global Islamist militants on Kenyan soil, a massive influx of Muslim migrants from Somalia, and struggles over the future of the country’s Islamic courts system, among other factors. In my sound-centered research on social identification on Kenya’s Muslim- dominated coastal strip, I explore the contemporary conditions of Muslim citizenship—in the broad sense of social belonging within the nation-state—by taking an ethnographic ear to contestations over public space that happen in relation to public sound. My method- ological approach is grounded in Steven Feld’s (1996) acoustemology of place, which he describes as an inves- tigation into sounding and listening as ways of experi- encing and knowing physical and social environments. Here I lay out some basic coordinates for an acouste- mology of spatial politics and Muslim belonging on the Kenyan coast.
Hearing Spatial Politics
I begin with a story that crystallizes how sonorous contestations over public space articulate with larger issues of Muslim citizenship on the Kenyan coast. In July 2006, the Kenyan coastal village of Kikambala played host to a dramatic dispute between a local imam and a member of the coast’s expatriate commu- nity (a woman of apparent East Asian extraction). The dispute began after the imam’s mosque was fitted with new rooftop loudspeakers, including one aimed at the expatriate’s nearby house. The expatriate made her way over to the mosque early one morning to register her consternation at being jolted out of bed each morning by the predawn adhan (call to prayer). She arrived outside the mosque while the elongated tones of the sacred recitation were still resounding and began to shout her complaints toward the edifice. The imam soon emerged to investigate the disturbance and, on finding an angry woman vocalizing a dissonant counterpoint to the adhan, offered what he would later calmly describe as the only appropriate response: he punched the woman squarely in the eye.
The imam’s violent response was received with general approval from Muslims in the local commu- nity and beyond. Leaders of Kenya’s national Muslim organizations were soon standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the imam in hastily organized press conferences, arguing that his violent action, however regrettable, was carried out in accordance with Islamic law as well as common sense. The local community of worship- pers offered a similar defense of the imam, only in a more performative manner: in the gaze of television news cameras, a group of men began constructing a stone wall to block the footpath that the expatriate had used to reach their mosque. Given that it was only wide
enough to block the footpath, the wall was clearly a message, meant to communicate that the expatriate’s actions were an attack of an equivalent brutality to what she herself had suffered at the hands of the imam.
The clash between the expatriate and the imam in Kikambala makes visible and audible the presence of competing logics of public space on the Kenyan coast. In both the formulation and delivery of her complaint, the expatriate situated herself within the “neutral” public space of a liberal democratic nation-state, a space in which any sound may be marked as noise and any subject may address any other subject without regard to minority norms of social intercourse. The imam’s response, meanwhile, was grounded in an Islamic- Swahili logic of public space, which bears its own rules of conduct and address. By investigating epistemic disjunctures such as these through bodily practices of producing and receiving sound, I seek an analysis that stays close to the subject, one that hopefully stands in tension with the accounts of Muslim intentions and desires that pervade Kenyan (and global) media narratives.
Islam, Sound and Space
Charles Hirschkind (2006) provides an invaluable starting point for an acoustemological approach to Islamic-Swahili conceptions of public space in his discussion of Muslim subject formation as a matter of engagement with the quotidian “pious soundscape” of calls to prayer, Quranic recitations, and religious sermons. Though focused on Muslims in Cairo, Egypt, Hirschkind’s work bears directly on Muslims of the Kenyan coast (and elsewhere) who engage with similar sounds in similar ways. Through “correct” listening, Muslims in coastal Kenya, as in Cairo, cultivate bodily comportments and doxic understandings that are key to what it means to be a good Muslim. The sounding and listening practices associated with the pious sound- scape thus comprise an acousteme, a system of knowing in and through sound, within which sites of worldly action are sonically transformed into sacred topoi for the act of submission that is Islam. This idea is put forward in a hadith passage, albeit in different terms. In this passage, the prophet Mohammed is reported to have said, “When the Imam comes outside, the angels present themselves to listen to the khutba [the Friday sermon]” (Al-Bukhari 1997:23). According to this image, angels literally “present” themselves (make themselves present) in the physical world, within the space and time of the pious soundscape. Heavenly beings, that is, hear the imam’s words not through some mystical mode of listening, but by temporarily joining with human beings in their worldly environment, effecting a sacralization of space.
On the Kenyan coast, the pious soundscape’s sonic demarcation of Muslim space sets the stage for large and small struggles over conceptions of Muslim communal autonomy, even, one might argue, struggles for Muslim communal autonomy. The dispute between the expa-triate and the imam in Kikambala, which involved the participation of leaders of national Muslim organi- zations, provides an example of a large struggle over Muslim communal autonomy. One Swahili friend in the port city of Mombasa opened my eyes to a far subtler struggle, the visible evidence of which can be observed weekly during the Friday khutba, in the Muslim-Swahili neighborhood of Old Town in Mombasa. Referring to a mosque that sits just across a narrow road from a police station staffed mostly by non-Muslim, upcountry Kenyans, my friend told me, “You know, those polisi hear every word of the khutba just sitting there in the station. But if just one of them would stand outside like this”— he crossed his arms and puffed up his chest, imitating a haughty police officer’s posture—“listening. ...” He completed the thought with a simple “eh-hee,” indi- cating that such a move would certainly be taken as a serious provocation.
Doing Acoustemology
My friend’s perceptive ethnomethodological observa- tion of the social choreography that accompanies the pious soundscape in Mombasa Old Town highlights both the necessity and the difficulty of doing acouste- mology in the contested spaces of the Kenyan coast. Acoustemological research ideally generates theoret- ical knowledge through an active process of listening in, involving a personal engagement with sounds and subjects in their spatiotemporal contexts. Even at its best, this form of research is fraught with method- ological, ethical and practical challenges, all of which are amplified when a researcher from the global North works among Muslim subjects in the global South, given that the latter may reasonably fear being listened in on by the former. What precipitated my Swahili friend’s lesson on the politics of listening to the khutba was a problem that had resulted from my own inattention to these challenges: A few days earlier, some worshippers at a mosque close to my apartment in Mombasa Old Town became concerned that I was making an audio recording of the khutba, concerned enough to hold a meeting on the matter after the fact. Though I was trying not to be conspicuous in making my recording, neither was I hiding what I was doing. I was naively comfortable in the knowledge that I was not doing anything in violation of professional ethics: Not only was I recording a public broadcast in public space, I was recording a broadcast of which I would have “[heard] every word ... just sitting there” in my apartment. I failed to understand, however, that as a white foreigner, my act of “[standing] outside like this,” recording, was not only inherently suspicious but also a symbolic perfor- mance within the context of an ongoing struggle over Muslim communal autonomy. Fortunately, good friends who were respected members of the local community quickly defused tensions and allayed fears in the wake of my faux pas. But the embarrassing episode stays with me as a visceral reminder that ethnographers also carry particular understandings of publicity, privacy, sound, and space, which may be subject to contestation.
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The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World
At the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City there is a great exhibit currently running on Africans in the Indian Ocean World. If you can't check out the exhibit, the accompanying website is a beautiful introduction, with stories, images, maps and multimedia. Over forty years after the publication of Joseph Harris's The African Presence in Asia, the study of Africans in the Indian Ocean world has grown in important ways. It has expanded beyond simple vindicationist studies, it has increasingly been driven by its own theoretical concerns, it is more and more grounded in knowledge of local languages and cultures. The African presence in the Indian Ocean can tell us a lot about cultural change and social hierarchy in societies of the Indian Ocean littoral, and has the potential to influence how we conceptualize and perpetuate the study of diaspora itself. If anyone has a bibliography they would like to contribute on the subject, I would love for you to post a link in the comments section. I am currently working on compiling a comprehensive bibliography. Thanks to Ishraq Ali for the link!
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February 5, 2013
Al-Alam Palace, Old Muscat
February 3, 2013
A Clear Victory (On Sultan Qaboos and National Pride)
The Arabic above Sultan Qaboos's photo is from the Quran, Sura al-Fath:
" إنا فتحنا لك فتحا مبينا "
(Verily we have won for you a clear victory)
The verse is Allah addressing the Prophet Muhammad, but in the context of the photo, the quote refers to Sultan Qaboos and the victory he won against the forces of backwardness and tyranny, as symbolized by the old regime. Has anyone else encountered this quote in reference to Muslim leaders?
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By The Sea (Book Review)
Reading a Gurnah novel is like savoring a delicate dish of language--each sentence is a bite of beauty and subtle flavor that you don't want to end. By The Sea is a novel of exile, of what it means to be a refugee, but it unfolds as something much more: a generational family drama of love and betrayal, set against political events on the coast and in Zanzibar: slavery, colonialism, and the Zanzibar Revolution.
The book opens with the protagonist, an elderly Zanzibari named Saleh Omar, seeking asylum in the UK. Traveling under an assumed name while pretending not to speak any English, Saleh is treated to a self-righteous lecture by an immigration official who concludes his interview by stealing Saleh's only precious possession, a carved wooden box full of Cambodian oud.
The story paints a grim portrait of a man beaten down by life, alone with his memories as he moves through detainment to asylum, and is settled in a small town on the English seaside. But from a story about exile, the novel opens into a sprawling family drama as told through the faint remembrances of Saleh and another Zanzibari who he meets in England. The two men confront the bitterness and hidden wounds of the past, seeking solace from their loneliness in the hard truths they have to tell each other.
This book tangles you in a web of family discontents, and describes with incredible sympathy and clarity the situation of Omanis and other Arabs in Zanzibar through revolution, mass-killings, detention and escape. It manages to comment ever-so-subtly on post-colonial politics and the havoc they wreaked on the Arabs of Zanzibar. For instance: "The government...rounded up whole families of people of Omani descent, especially those who lived in the country or wore beards and turbans or were related to the ousted sultan and transported them to the small island some distance off shore. There they were detained under guard, until eventually, several months later, ships chartered by the Omani government took them away in their thousands. There were so many of them that it was weeks before the ships stopped coming." (221-222)
As one other reviewer noted, the sea frames Gurnah's metaphorical language of loss and change, of connection and exile, of remembrance and forgetting. The acts of heroism in this magnificent novel are small, perhaps dwarfed by the mighty events that sweep the characters along through their tangled lives, but perhaps even more meaningful in their ordinary profundity.
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African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Book Review)
The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam. JOHN HUNWICK and EVE TROUTT POWELL (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002), 282 pp. Price PB £17.50. ISBN 1–558–76275–2.
In 1993, a major newspaper debate erupted in Kenya between two of the nation’s most prominent intellectuals, Ali Mazrui and Bethwel Ogot. It concerned whether the Arab-Muslim world should be held accountable for its role in African enslavement to the same degree as the West, and whether there were differences of scale and culpability between the two that should strategically make the West the initial focus for the African campaign for reparations. What was particularly noticeable is that the only general sources on African slaves in Arab-Muslim lands that the two scholars invoked in support of their different positions were those of Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971). These two, in fact, continue to be among the tiny handful of book-length studies of the issue available in the English language. In a real sense, then, the study of African enslavement in the Arab-Muslim world is still virtually in its infancy, and the publication of Hunwick’s and Powell’s The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam is a very welcome contribution to the scholarship on this important subject.
This book distinguishes itself from the others, however, in its documentary approach, essentially being a compilation of primary sources. The only interpretive portions are the two introductions by the authors. Hunwick’s introduction, ‘The Same but Different’, is an excellent overview of some of the factors that may have led to the dearth of research in this area, the interplay between race and enslavement, the roles that slaves played in the Arab-Muslim world, and the quality of experience—a rather mixed record—that enslaved Africans encountered. If there is an Arab literature on the inferiority of ‘blackness’, there is also a literature that speaks of its virtues, leading Hunwick to conclude that ‘there is a lack of consistent literature that theorizes the inferiority of black people. Islam did not have its Gobineau’ (p. xx). Powell’s introduction, ‘The Silence of the Slaves’, on the other hand, discusses not the absence of scholarly works on the subject, but the absence of the voices of the enslaved themselves, whether in fictional or non-fictional format. Among the rare exceptions, discussed by Powell, is the slave narrative of Sister Josephine Bakhita, an enslaved southern Sudanese woman who finally converted to Catholicism.
The rest of the book is divided into fifteen sections, each containing extracts of documents on a specific theme. The first four sections provide a conceptual frame of reference about slavery in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean region. Section I looks at what the canonical Islamic texts, the Quran and the Hadith, say about the institution of slavery. It concludes with al-Ghazali’s reading of the texts, that that ‘the rights of the one possessed are that he should share in the owner’s food and clothing and should not be assigned work above his capacity. [Nor should the owner] look at him/her with arrogance or disdain’ (p. 9). Section II, ‘Some Muslim Views on Slavery’, is a small sample of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Muslim responses, mostly apologetic, to Western association of slavery with Islam. But how did the above doctrines of Islam combine with the prevailing medieval culture of Islam to translate into actual law dealing with slaves? This question is the subject of Section III, though all the documentary material included here is from the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence. Section IV amplifies the scope of Section II, looking at perceptions of Africans in some Arabic and Turkish texts, some equating blackness with slavery and others rejecting such an equation. Even more provocative, however, are the ‘theories’ on the origins of blackness, ranging from versions of the Hamitic myth to environmental explanations (articulated particularly forcefully by Ibn Khaldun.
The next three sections give us a glimpse of the experience of Africans in the intervening period from the moment of capture (Section V), to the perilous journey especially across the Sahara Desert (Section VI), to the slave markets in the Arab-Muslim world (Section VII). Here we see how slave merchants went well beyond the provisions of Islam by capturing and enslaving individuals who could not be classified as war captives, the horrific cruelty that accompanied the transport of the enslaved, and the humiliation and abuse suffered at the slave market.
The book then proceeds to look at the actual master–slave relationships and the functions that enslaved Africans played. In Section VIII, on eunuchs and concubines, the authors make a compelling observation in their introductory remarks that, ‘It is a curious irony [of slavery in Arab-Muslim lands] that the best path to an easier life for male slaves was to be deprived of their sexuality, whereas for female slaves it was to have their sexuality exploited’ (p. 99). The aberration of castration, of course, was part of the Mediterranean culture of the time, but it acquired new proportions of frequency and cruelty in African enslavement, the increased authority that eunuchs later enjoyed in the houses of their masters notwithstanding. As for the concubines, they were there for the sexual enjoyment of the master at his will. Nonetheless, the documents indicate that many virtually acquired the status of additional wives, especially if they bore children: ‘A woman who bore such children could not thereafter legally be sold, and was automatically free on her master’s death’ (p. 99).
In addition to eunuchs (who were used to guard the harem) and concubines, the majority of enslaved Africans—especially women who, we are told, constituted about two-thirds of those who crossed the Sahara desert in the nineteenth century—are said to have provided other types of domestic service (Section IX). With regard to their treatment by their owners, the documents in this section indicate that these domestic slaves were far less fortunate than eunuchs and concubines. In addition, male slaves provided agricultural labour in North African oases, sometimes forced to carry out dangerous work like cleaning wells and underground irrigation systems (Section X) and military service in North African armies of the royal state (Section XI). In performing these various roles as slaves, most Africans eventually converted to Islam: in the process, their Islam sometimes became hybridized, combining practices of the faith they encountered in the new society with the spiritual beliefs from their original homeland (Section XII).
Islam made the freeing of slaves an act both of piety and atonement. Section XIII looks at the life of Diaspora Africans after such emancipation. The three case studies of the section demonstrate how post-enslavement life varied according to personal circumstances, the fortunes of the masters, and the pre- existing relationship between slave and master. It was not until the mid-1800s that some Arab governments moved decisively to abolish slavery in their countries; Section XIV considers the legacy of abolition in Tunisia and Egypt, sometimes in response to British appeals. The book concludes with a lengthy excerpt of the slave narrative of a certain Fulani slave, Griga, recorded in French by a French commandant, detailing his life from the moment of bondage to freedom. This narrative raises one fundamental limitation that cuts across the larger portion of this book. All the documents from Section VII onward are, in fact, based on records of European observers of one shade or another. The authors themselves acknowledge this problem, claiming that their reliance on this documentation is due to the dearth of other sources. While this kind of evidence cannot be wholly discounted, its Euro-Christian origin and its construction at a time of intense Muslim resistance to European colonial rule raises questions about the extent of its reliability.
The documents in this book offer an excellent opportunity for a comparative study of slave systems between the Atlantic world and that of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. What was the place of race in the two slave systems and what kind of comparative space did they provide for the assimilation of subsequent generations of the enslaved? Can there be different scales of slavery, just as there are different scales of murder in law? If so, how do the two fare relative to each other? And should the campaign for reparations, therefore, begin with the first degree of African suffering? What was the balance between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation between the two paradigms of slavery? This landmark publication is likely to shed light on some of these burning questions in the history of African enslavement. In the meantime, however, readers should bear in mind Edward Alpers’ words of caution against imposing on the slavery system of the Arab- Muslim world ‘paradigms developed from the experience of Africans in the Diaspora of the Atlantic world, with its particular forms of Euro-American racism and concomitant black responses’ (‘Recollecting Africa: Diasporic Memory in the Indian Ocean World’, African Studies Review, 43.1 (2000), 83).
Alamin Mazrui
Ohio State Universtiy
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Ohio State Universtiy
Coverage of East Africa in the Omani Media (Oman Observer)
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