The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethno-Religious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (review)

In this methodologically innovative, provocative, and timely study, Janet McIntosh effectively challenges common assumptions made by scholars who have assessed Islam as a factor that shapes African social relations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Giriama and Swahili residents of the Kenyan coastal town of Malindi, she shows how these groups “systematically valorize and enact different, often oppositional kinds of personhood” (p. 4), which “reinforce the widespread . . . idea that Swahili and Giriama are essentially distinct categories, and that Islam somehow belongs more to Swahili than to Giriama” (p. 5).

Recent scholarship has sought to undo colonial-era notions that ethnic groups are “intrinsically stable, bounded social groupings” (p. 5), emphasizing instead fluidity, permeability, and movement across ethnic and religious boundaries. However, McIntosh cautions against any easy assumptions that this kind of fluidity and boundary crossing is always true. Furthermore, she points out: “It seems that for many, boundaries—however fictive, politically motivated, and pernicious they may be—are importantly and perhaps increasingly constitutive of social worlds and group identities and often become embedded in the social landscape as taken-for-granted premises about the way the world is” (p. 7). Thus, even though some Swahili discourse suggests that Giriama can become Swahili if they convert to Islam and behave according to Muslim tenets and Swahili mores, Giriama nonetheless have a strong sense that they cannot ever fully achieve Swahili-ness. For their part, Swahili in Malindi tend not to recognize Giriama as being capable of achieving true Swahili-ness, because they perceive Giriama as incapable of meaningful Islamic piety. Intertwined with McIntosh’s criticism of the notion of fluidity among ethnic groups is her critique of past scholarship, which has tended to represent Islam as “an often fluidly imagined religion that continually incorporates local traditions” (p. 6). McIntosh’s research shows coastal Swahili versions of Islam to be far more rigid and exclusionary than these paradigms would suggest.

McIntosh develops her argument over six chapters (including an introduction), with each one drawing on a rich—and extensively quoted—base of field interviews with Giriama and Swahili residents of Malindi. In the introduction, she lays out her methodological and theoretical framework, and clearly situates her work within the wider field of scholarship on ethnic boundaries and identities. The introduction provides McIntosh’s definitions for the concepts personhood and hegemony, both of which play key roles in the book’s argument. For McIntosh, “the term personhood . . . [is] a way of indexing culturally specific expectations and ideologies about people’s relative independence or interdependence, the qualities of their agency, and the extent to which they are expected (or not) to cultivate introspective, internalist modes of being-in-the-world” (p. 16). Hegemony describes “popular premises, often taken for granted, that circulate between two ethnoreligious groups and operate in the service of the hierarchical status quo” (p. 25). According to McIntosh, “customary Giriama models of personhood undergird religious practices that reaffirm both the potency of Islam and the distinction between Giriama and Swahili ethnoreligious groups, whereas prevailing Swahili models of personhood tend to undergird negative judgments of Giriama that reaffirm the high status of Islam and the same ethnoreligious distinctions” (p. 25).

Chapter One traces the historical relationship between Giriama and Swahili from the tenth century through the present, demonstrating that these groups’ ethnic identities and sociocultural relationships have had different meanings at different times. Before the 1920s, McIntosh argues, identities were indeed more fluid than they became under colonial and independence-era governments. Historically, Giriama often occupied subordinate socioeconomic positions (including enslavement) to the Swahili, but until the twentieth century, they could move into higher-status categories through intermarriage or conversion. After the 1920s, however, they increasingly came to understand themselves to be in a fixed subordinate relationship to wealthier Swahili patrons. This position was reinforced by their sense that the prestige of Muslim belonging was beyond their reach, owing to...