The Horn and East Africa

Turning now to the Horn of Africa and East Africa proper, it is clear that these areas had a very different historical experience of contact with Islam from West Africa or the Nile Valley.

Ethiopia in the early sixteenth century and proto-nationalist jihad of Muhammad Abd Allah Hasan against British encroachment on Somali ter­ritory in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The history of the spread of Islam in the Hom and in East Africa is very imperfectly known. There were trading contacts between south Arabia and the coastlands of the Horn from long before the rise of Islam and these continued on naturally into the Islamic era. The chief trading items were incense and aromatics from the northern coast of the Hom and ivory, slaves, leopard skins and other products from further south. In Islamic times, at any rate, gold was obtained from the Zimbabwe goldfields through the port of Sofala in Mozambique. There was population movement between Arabia and Africa also across the narrow straits of the Bab al-Mandab from very early times and this route and other short sea crossings, such as that from Aden to Zayla, continued as passages for trade and migration in Islamic times. A brisk trade in slaves from the Kenya-Tanzania coast is one indicator of a Muslim presence there from the mid-ninth century. These ‘Zanj’ were known to early Arab writers such as al-Jahiz (d. 868) and were the principal actors in a massive revolt against Abbasid rule, generally called the Zanj Revolt, in 868-83. By the mid-twelfth century al-Idrisi, the Moroccan geog­rapher, reported that the majority of the inhabitants of Zanzibar were Mus­lims. Kilwa too, was probably also a Muslim enclave from a similar period and by the early thirteenth century Mogadishu was also. In 1329-30 the great traveller of Tangier, Ibn Battuta, visited the Horn and East Africa and his account leaves us in no doubt that Zayla, Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa were well organised Muslim city-states at the time. While the people of Zayla were Shi‘a, those of Mombasa and Kilwa (and, by inference, those of Mogadishu too) were Sunnis belonging to the Shafi'i madhhab. The people of Kilwa were said to be zealous in pursuit of the jihad, but this may have been no more than an excuse for slave-raiding; it certainly does not seem to have led to the creation of any sizeable Islamic territory.

The history of Muslim settlement and influence on the East African coast and neighbouring islands is rich and complex and no justice can be done to it in a summary such as this. We must content ourselves here with noting that there are three main cultural influences: the so-called Shirazi culture whose origin can be traced to a variety of groups from the Gulf who gained political ascendancy first on the northern coast between Mogadishu and Lamu in the thirteenth century and in the following century on more southerly Muslim settlements down to Zanzibar and Kilwa. Sec­ondly, an Omani influence which became predominant after the period of Portuguese hegemony (c. 1500-1650) and was particularly marked in nineteenth-century Zanzibar under the rule of the Bu Sa'idi sultans. The Omanis were Kharijites of the Ibadi persuasion, but they seem to have had no doctrinal influence on local Muslims; rather, their particularism served to keep them aloof from their Sunni Shafi* i subjects. The third influence was that of the Arab families originating from the Hadramaut, many of whom claimed to be ashraf (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad). The ancestors of some of these clans arrived on the Swahili coast as early as the mid­sixteenth century. Families such as the Ba Alawi, the Al Jamal al-Layl and the Ba Faqih combined in them the hereditary baraka (blessedness) inherent in ashraf and the acquired respect due to men oflearning. They maintained close links with their brethren in south Arabia and returned there in pursuit of the higher study of the Islamic sciences.

Islam made little progress in the East African interior until the nineteenth century. Prior to this time the Arab merchants of the coast had been content to let the trade of the interior come to them and, unlike the West African Sahel where the Islamisation of rulers of large states encour­aged wider adoption of the religion, the immediate hinterland of the East African coast offered no centralised states which might become launching pads for proselytisation further inland.