Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania, 1890–2000 by Felicitas Becker (review)

Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania focuses on south-east Tanzania – the area between the Indian Ocean, the Rufiji River to the north, and the Ruvuma River and the Mozambique border to the south. Of this region’s population 80 per cent are Muslim – with a Christian enclave around Masasi. Becker’s research explores the processes through which Islam became predominant, and asks what, from the late nineteenth century onwards, made Islam more attractive to local people than Christianity as a ‘modernist ideology’.

Becker argues that the success of Islam was the result primarily of internal mainland dynamics, unfolding in the public sphere of villages (p. 291). Local people and elites were aspiring to be ‘of the coast’, and to forge links with coastal towns and cosmopolitanism, but they were doing so of their own accord. While Christianity was associated closely with colonialism, Islam got its edge by allowing for autonomy and being more reconcilable with local understandings and social relations.

Two thirds of the book explores this in the context of the colonial era, follows the history of village mosques and madrasas, and compares Qur’anic education to the more instrumentalist kind offered by the mission schools. While Christian schools fostered ethnic distinctions, Islam helped to flatten social hierarchies, and to integrate ex-slaves and descendants of slaves. At the same time, Islam was capable of accommodating local spiritual beliefs, healing and initiation practices, which Christian missions aimed to eradicate.

Sufi brotherhoods – in particular the Qadiriyya and the Shadiliyya – played a major role in processes of ‘internal’ conversion. Becker shows that the progress of the tarika – the Swahili term for the brotherhoods – was effected through local mainland shehes rather than through the preachings of scholars from Zanzibar or the Comoros. The tarika accommodated local aspirations by giving ‘poor people with no first-hand experience of the wider world around the Indian Ocean a ritual stake in it’ (p. 207).

Struggles over ritual included debates over the appropriateness or not of maulidi performances. Becker gives special attention to controversies around the use of duffu drums inside or outside the mosques, which opposed patrician scriptural authority to the aspirations of villagers versed in ngoma dancing (p. 190).

The last third of the book discusses the era of nationalism and independence from 1954 to 1967, and the rise of new forms of Islamic radicalism from the 1990s. Becker shows that ‘many TANU campaigners were also members of tarika’ (p. 210). Using the vocabulary of James Ferguson, she argues that tensions subsequently emerged between localist and cosmopolitan ‘styles’, which gradually made nationalist ‘progress’ an alternative to Islamic aspiration in terms of claiming urbanity and inclusion.

Tensions escalated after the Zanzibar revolution of 1964, which brought down the island as ‘the hub of Muslim education in East Africa’, and reoriented nationalist loyalties from coast to mainland (p. 235 ff.). They were intensified during ‘villagization’ in the 1970s, which placed tarika and Islamic rural leaders, who had been allies of TANU and later the CCM, in an impossible position – able neither to protect villagers nor to promote nationalist modernization.

Agrarian crisis, liberalization and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s brought different types of modernist Islam to south-east Tanzania. The Ansar Sunna radical reform movement is used to illustrate this, aiming to purify Islam of ‘innovations’, and ‘return to the practices of the Prophet’s companions’ (p. 242). The movement was supported from Saudi Arabia and by parallel movements in Kenya, but was carried forward locally by a new class of what Becker calls ‘deracinated rural urbanites’ (p. 259). The cultural ‘style’ of this group combined blue jeans and baseball shirts with skullcaps and beards, and their attacks on innovation were directed not least against the Sufi tarika.

The effects of the Ansar movement eventually led to local compromises with maulidi performances becoming less frequent. But the movement also signalled the arrival of new forms of Islamic internationalism, and demonstrated that...