Transmission and Canonization: The Role of Swahili Scholars in the Canonization of Minhāj al-Ṭālibīn

1. INTRODUCTION

Scholars are the primary agents that enable knowledge transmission in their areas of influence. They play a central role in selecting and validating specific texts for study and as reference materials, creating boundaries—in the long run—for the canonization of selected texts over others. Without the mediation of scholars, texts remain inert. At the same time, scholars without texts result in an acute disconnection between the content of transmitted knowledge, uniformity of practice, and the aspiration for the preservation of knowledge. Thus, the importance of the intertwining relationship between texts and scholars requires scrutiny. In the Swahili littoral of the Western Indian Ocean, Minhāj al-ṭālibīn wa-ʿumdat al-muftīn¹ (hereafter referred to here as the Minhāj), an essential fiqh text authored by the Syrian Shāfiʿīte jurist Zakariyyā Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (1233–1277) has long been in use as teaching material in madrasas (lit. Islamic schools) and as reference material in the qāḍīs’ (lit. Muslim judge) courts in towns such as Barawa, Lamu, and Unguja. This article examines the role of Swahili scholars as agents of knowledge transmission with the aim of reflecting on a range of practices they have used to popularize the Minhāj. It will examine how Swahili scholars deliberately selected and validated the text for the purposes of teaching, circulating, and composing textual commentaries, enhancing its canonical status. In investigating these processes, this article will target questions of selection and validation of legal texts and examine the actors and participants involved in constructing boundaries of canonicity through knowledge transmission.

The Swahili coast stretches over one thousand miles, spanning Southern Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, and Northern Mozambique. In addition to the geographic expanse, an analytical assessment of the Swahili society in terms of Islamic legal practice within the framework of a single legal school (the Shāfiʿī) is complicated. This is because the Swahili society is a unique cocktail of world cultures—from African Bantus and Cushites to Arabs, Indians, and Persians. Notwithstanding, Swahilis have also had deep interactions with Europeans: First, 200 years of hard-hearted economic and political intercourse with Portuguese imperialists in the 16th and 17th centuries, and later, as subjects of Italian, British, German, and French colonial administrations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Within this far-ranging diversity, Swahili society may be divided into three primary layers of communities based on intellectual, cultural, and economic activities: The scholarly, cultural, and mercantile communities. While the term community is elastic depending on the context used, from a sociological standpoint, Lloyd Allen Cook and Elaine Forsuth Cook defined a community as ‘a configuration of land, people, and culture—a structured pattern of human relations within a geographic area’.² This understanding of the term ‘community’ helps conceive a practical framework through which the three community layers of Swahili society can be historically situated and analysed. Each of the three communities shares unique structured patterns of relations, such as curricula and texts for the scholarly community, norms, rites and rituals for the cultural community, and trade and commerce for the mercantile community. However, as much as each of the three communities possesses unique structures, scholars often operate simultaneously in two or all three layers. For instance, it was not unusual for a Swahili scholar to be a trader and an elder within the cultural formations.

Regarding the canonization of the Minhāj on the Swahili coast, all three communities have had significant roles in their structured patterns of relations. For instance, Swahili society has often identified its culture based on Islamic practices. Consequently, Swahilis’ social and moral worldview is largely anchored in normative Islam. Islamic legal practice being one of the critical drivers of the Islamic way of life, there are instances where social issues like marriage and divorce are resolved by referring to legal texts like the Minhāj via the medium of Swahili cultural poems. At the same time, the mercantile community’s participation in the canonization of the Minhāj through economic activities and the evolving technologies of the printing press, marine transportation, and mass media revolutionized the circulation of Islamic texts across the Indian Ocean. However, the leading participant in the canonization of the Minhāj was the scholarly community, which studied and taught the text, composed textual commentaries on it, and used it as a reference tool. This article examines the scholarly community’s agency in popularizing the Minhāj by deliberately selecting and validating the text for the purposes of teaching, circulating, and composing textual commentaries. Canonization in this study is viewed as both a product and a process entailing highly selective reading applied to material objects such as texts, leading to the formation of specific authoritative texts as canons—in this case, the canon is the Minhāj. From this perspective, the working definition of textual canonization is borrowed from Jonathan Brown. Brown conceptualized textual canonization as ‘a process that involves the community’s act of authorizing specific books (in his context ḥadīth books, ie, the Ṣaḥīḥayn) to meet certain needs—and entails the transformation of texts, through use, study, and appreciation, from nondescript tomes into potent symbols of divine, legal, or artistic authority for a particular audience’.³ Brown’s definition proposes three essential components of textual canonization: texts, community, and authority. Of these three components, the community of scholars from Swahili society forms the focal point of the study of the canonization process in this article.

Moreover, due to the heterogenic nature of Swahili society, as alluded to earlier, the scholarly community—identified as scholarly circles here—is confined within the Sunni-Shāfiʿīte tradition, oriented in the Sufi Islamic practices prevalent on the Swahili coast⁴ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article begins by briefly discussing the problem of the description of the roles of Muslim scholars and how these roles change over time and space in relation to societal expectations. It then addresses the issue of sources of the history of Swahili scholars and mechanisms through which Swahili society orchestrated scholars within its ranks based on expertise, chain of transmission, and piety. Following this, specific regions of the coast that have traditionally been centres of Islamic learning, culture, and politics are profiled to represent the expansive geographical space, simultaneously covering the historical period of the century between 1856 and 1960. Thus, the long and narrow littoral is divided into three regions: the Banadir coast represents the North, the Lamu archipelago represents the Centre, and Zanzibar represents the South. Moreover, these regions are situated in key modern nation-states where Swahili society is mainly domiciled: Banadir (Somalia), Lamu (Kenya), and Zanzibar (Tanzania). The discussion follows the north-to-centre-to-south direction, and although scholars and their regional circles are presented as separate entities for ease of reference and illustration, it is essential to understand their interconnectedness to each other over the wider East African region, especially with the Comoro Islands.

The article draws from previous research regarding various aspects of Swahili society and recognizes social stratification as an integral component of the community during the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the article critiques the narrative that social stratification, although relevant to economic and political contexts, also spread to learning spaces where there were restrictions on who was allowed to access knowledge and who was not. It further argues that analysing Swahili Islamic knowledge transmission through the lens of social stratification oversimplifies a deeply entangled society that has absorbed centuries of multicultural adaptations and overlooks the reality that social classes did not rigidly segregate relationships in spaces of Islamic learning. In addition, it seeks to problematize the notion that during the 19th century, scholarly connections between Swahili scholars and those from other centres of Islamic learning were exclusive to Ḥaḍramawt. As discussed later, historical records and biographies of some Swahili scholars show that direct links with other centres of Islamic learning, especially Mecca, were also created at the time (Figure 1).

2. THE CHANGING ROLES OF SCHOLARS

Scholars, or Wanavyuoni (in Swahili, sing. Mwanachuoni;ʿulamāʾ in Arabic, sing. ʿālim), are crucial in Swahili society. They are viewed not only as depositories of sacred knowledge but also as vehicles that ensure the continuity of culture and traditions. The ʿulamāʾ have been essential pillars of Swahili society since the Islamization of the region ‘by operating legal and educational systems and through their involvement in trade and political power’.⁵ Although historically, ‘ecological choices of the Swahili coast were determined by the trade needs of the towns, according to John Middleton’,⁶ ‘it was the Islamic civilization propagated by the ʿulamāʾ that gave the towns an identity and a unique character’.⁷ Nevertheless, there is a persistent conundrum in defining the term ‘scholar’, describing their roles and identifying how the process of becoming a scholar is organized in Muslim societies such as Swahili during pre-colonial and colonial periods. R. Stephen Humphreys highlighted this problem in his discussion on classical Muslim ʿulamāʾ, which described scholars as,

… neither of a socio-economic class, nor a clearly defined status group, nor a hereditary caste, nor a legal estate, nor a profession … They appear in our texts as semi-literate village imams and erudite qādīs, as rabble-rousers and privy counsellors to Kings, as spiritual directors, and as cynical politicians. Some are scions of wealthy and influential families, and others are impoverished immigrants from remote villages. Some are landowners, salaried professors, or bureaucrats; some are merchants or humble artisans. In short, they seem to cut across almost every possible classification of groups within Islamic society, playing a multiplicity of political, social, and cultural roles.⁸

Humphreys’ generic view of ʿulamāʾ is too broad to help ascribe specific roles to scholars as unique components of society endowed with distinct qualities that qualify them to perform those roles. That is why, based on Humphreys’ description, Scott Reese contends that it is easier to describe the ʿulamāʾ of pre-colonial Somali society (specifically Banadir, part of the Swahili East African society) ‘by saying what they are not’,⁹ implying the idea that the Somali—and by extension, Swahili ʿulamāʾ—characteristics are too fluid to warrant specific attributes and that it is, therefore, impractical to assign them identifiable roles.

Similarly, in his seminal work, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change, Muhammad Qasim Zaman addressed the problem of defining the ʿulamāʾ and pointed out that the problem is compounded by the debates that scrutinize Islamic intellectual history through the dichotomies of traditionalism and modernity. Situating Islam in Talal Asad’s conceptualization as ‘a discursive tradition’,¹⁰ Zaman argued that what makes the Muslim ʿulamāʾ worth studying is that ‘they have mobilized this tradition that has had to be constantly imagined, reconstructed, argued over, defended, and modified to define issues of religious identity and authority in the public sphere and articulate changing roles for themselves in contemporary Muslim politics’.¹¹ As part of the broader Muslim intellectual tradition, the Swahili ʿulamāʾ are not immune to the changing roles over space and time necessitated by socio-economic and political factors. However, as much as they had to adapt to the emerging social, political and intellectual realities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we see their constant attachment to the dominant Shāfiʿīte legal practice and particularly to the use of the Minhāj. Hence, the best way, suggested here, is to examine the roles of the Swahili ʿulamāʾ is through applying social anthropological methods rather than a purely historical approach to analyse how the Swahili organized and imagined their social constructions and established norms about intellectual and scholarly boundaries. Perhaps Ulemalogy is a noble science, as aptly put by Roy Mottahedeh, because ‘it is almost all the Islamic social history we will ever have’.¹²

3. SOURCES AND SWAHILI SCHOLARS

Reliance on orality and memorization has led to a lack of verifiable written sources for Swahili intellectual history, resulting in limited information about the lives of the ʿulamā during the pre-colonial period. It was not until 1944 that the first written hagiographical account of selected scholars on the Swahili coast appeared. This is the work of ʿAbdallāh Ṣaleḥ al-Farsī (d.1981), which was initially titled Tarehe ya Imam Shāfiʿī na Wanavyuoni Wakubwa wa Afrika Ya Mashariki.¹³ It provided brief descriptions of a limited number of scholars and was revised in 1972 with a new restrictive title: Baadhi ya Wanavyuoni wa KiShāfiʿī wa Afrika Mashariki.¹⁴ Some of the significant revisions include the exclusion of the biography of Imām al-Shāfiʿī and the editions of some narrations. One example is ʿAbdallāh Bā Kathīr’s (d.1925) dream of Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ (d.1925), the story of which is omitted in the 1972 version.¹⁵ Randall Pouwels translated, edited, and annotated the work of al-Farsī in English in 1989 with the title The Shāfiʿī Ulama of East Africa, ca 1830—1970: A Hagiographic Account.¹⁶

Since the 1970s, al-Farsī’s work has been invaluable to those researching the lives of Swahili scholars, but it also has multiple limitations. First, it starts with the hagiography of Muḥī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī, who died in 1869, and the plot of the whole work revolves around his personality as the fulcrum of the Shāfīʿī scholars in Swahili East Africa. Hence, it is not surprising to see that most scholars included in the work are students of al-Qaḥṭānī and those related to them from the Zanzibari circles. As we shall see in this article, al-Qaḥṭānī spent the better part of his later life in Zanzibar as the qāḍī and advisor in the courts of Sultans Sayyid Said (r.1812–1856) and Sayyid Majid (r.1856–1870). Second, al-Farsī does not expressly indicate his sources of information, thus hindering follow-up research on the lives of Swahili ʿulamāʾ before al-Qaḥṭānī and on the broader geographical area of the East African coast. But al-Farsī was also a scholar whose orientation passed through at least two major ideological phases. Reading from the first version (1944) of the work, al-Farsī identified himself as a student of scholars who were key proponents of the Shāfiʿī-Sufi tradition, such as Abū Bakr b. ʿAbdallāh Bā Kathīr (d.1942) and ʿUmar b. Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ (d.1975). He thereby positioned himself as an insider writing about the heritage of his own teachers. By the time of the second version (1972), al-Farsī, who was now an established Chief Qāḍī of Kenya, had distanced himself from all dimensions of Sufism and had turned into one of its most vocal opponents, which could be one of the reasons for the revisions appearing in the 1972 version of the work. Before al-Farsī, written information about the lives of the ʿulamāʾ was available through brief hagiographies (manāqib), mainly of the Sufi-oriented scholars by their disciples such as the manāqib of Nūrayn Aḥmad Ṣābir al-Ḥātimī,¹⁷  Jawhar al-nafīs fī khawwāṣ shaykh ʾUways,¹⁸  Jalāʾ al-ʿaynayn fī manāqib shaykhayn,¹⁹ and through introductions in their written works. Although these works are few and far between, they are useful in providing glimpses of the Swahili scholarly tradition of the time and help identify some of the texts that these scholars studied. However, in the last couple of decades, there has been a surge in the effort to document the biographies of Swahili scholars, and various compilations in Swahili, Arabic, and English have been produced.²⁰ This study uses these works, including al-Farsī, and a substantial amount of data solicited from local historians to investigate the roles of some prominent ʿulamāʾ in the popularization and eventual canonization of the Minhāj.

4. THE INFLUENCE OF PIETY ON THE MINHĀJ

In the Swahili scholarly tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were strong perceptions that the main objective of learning was not just to seek knowledge but to seek ‘blessed’ knowledge. The term ‘blessed’ is translated as baraka, borrowed from Arabic, and has solid spiritual connotations.²¹ Thus, the position of the ʿ ālim was grounded in their expertise, the strength of their chain of transmission, and piety—because blessed knowledge could only be acquired from a pious ʿālim. However, despite possessing some practical manifestations, the notion of piety is mainly abstract, for it also connotes unseen inward spiritual states. Sabah Mahmoud alluded to the idea that piety refers ‘primarily to inward spiritual states but that its use with the Arabic term taqwā²² suggests both an inward orientation or disposition and a manner of practical conduct’.²³ For Swahili, at the pre-colonial and colonial historical juncture, a pious ʿ ālim was recognized by outward behaviour (maweko) and social interactions (tangamano); more conspicuously, their traction to people was what they would see in them as a possessor of baraka.

While the personal outward conduct of an individual is visible, the problem lies in knowing their piousness through their inward disposition. That piety, which is confined within the heart, is supported by a Prophetic tradition,²⁴ complicating the possibility of empirically evaluating the level of piety of an ʿālim. Another problem concerning the issue of piety, or its physical manifestation, which may be referred to as akhlāq (moral disposition), is that it is not a constant concept. What may be righteous in one historical period may be immoral in another. However, Islamic morality is regulated by aspects of Sharīʿa known as al-ẓawābiṭ (the precepts), which dictate unchangeable types of values or principles that govern human behaviour and ethics. For example, being good to parents, relatives, orphans, people in need, neighbours, travellers, etc, is a universal, unchangeable value prescribed in the Qurʾān.²⁵ Khaled Abou El-Fadl has described this notion as ‘the righteous path or, in other words, basic moral precepts which are accessible to human beings through the act of diligent remembrance and reflection or even by an honest willingness to open one’s heart to the reprimands of a critical intuitive conscience’.²⁶ Muslim jurists argued that laws such as these, clearly mandated by God, are stated unambiguously in the text of the Qurʾān ‘in order to stress that the laws are in and of themselves ethical precepts that by their nature are not subject to contingency, context, or temporal variations’.²⁷ As a result of the expected moral norms based on Islamic injunctions and everyday personal conduct, the Swahili scholarly community recognized scholars within its ranks based on expertise, the chain of transmission, and piety. The above understanding of pious scholarship aligns with the Sufi practices prevalent in Swahili society in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is essential to know that were it not for the role of theʿulamāʾ, who were also perceived as highly pious, the Minhāj would not have attained its elevated status. Through these ulamāʾ and their wide-reaching circles, the Minhāj spread and became popular in educational and legal spaces.

5. THE BANADIR CIRCLE

In present-day Somalia, the historical Banadir coast, extending from Wār Shaykh to Ras Kiamboni, on the border with Kenya, is considered the earliest Swahili settlement on the East African coast (Figure 2).²⁸ During the 10th–13th centuries, Swahili settlements, such as Barawa, Merka, and Kismayu, developed, and became important centres for Islamic learning and culture. The earliest of the Swahili towns to develop unique Islamic scholarly characters stimulated by actions of the ʿulamāʾ were those along the Banadir coast, where a solid Islamic learning culture emerged. On account of an oral tradition,²⁹ the person responsible for revitalizing the culture of Islamic learning in Banadir was Shaykh Nūr Chande (nd). After studying in his hometown of Barawa, Nūr Chande had to travel out to seek more knowledge because local ʿulamāʾ were not qualified enough to teach him further. Thus, probably during the late 16th or early 17th centuries, he travelled to Ḥaḍramawt, where he studied under the renowned scholar ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād (d.1132/1720). Upon his return, he initiated Islamic learning circles based on the Ḥaḍrami tradition and became the spiritual father of succeeding generations of the ʿulamāʾ. The account of Nūr Chande suggests the presence of Islamic learning activities in Banadir and the tendency of the ʿulamāʾ to intervene in learning practices. Nonetheless, as ingrained into the imaginations of the people of Banadir as the person of Nūr Chande is, it is due to a lack of material evidence that historians like Scott Reese have cast doubt on account of his activities and noted that his entire existence is probably more legendary than historical.³⁰

What is irrefutable, however, is the reality that Banadir had a leading role in contributing to the spread of scholars and popular Sufi practices. For instance, the prominent scholar Muḥī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī (1794–1869) hailed from Barawa, including his student and prodigy ʿAbd al- ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Amawī (1834–1896),³¹ as well as Walī b. Abī Bakr al-Ḥātimī (nd).³² Others settled on the Lamu archipelago, especially at Pate, Siyu, and Faza villages such as ʿAlī b. ʿUmar (nd) and ʿUmar b. Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd, also known as Faqīh Uways (d 1898). They taught generations of students, including ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Saggaf (1844–1922)³³ the first Chief Qāḍī of the British East Africa Protectorate at Mombasa and the only scholar to be ordained the title of Shaykh al-Islam by the British imperial administration in East Africa.

More relevant to the course of the Minhāj amongst the Banadir scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries are Nūrayn Aḥmad Ṣābir al-Ḥātimī (1829–1909) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh al-Shāshī (1829–1904).³⁴ Nūrayn represents a generation of Banadir scholars who never practised commerce and never studied outside the borders of the coast, instead choosing to study Islamic sciences under the tutelage of the local ʿulamāʾ.³⁵ He excelled in the study of fiqh and was eventually appointed Chief Qāḍī of Barawa by the Sultan of Zanzibar, Sultan Barghāsh (r.1870–1888), who held nominal sovereignty over the town during much of his reign.³⁶ Nūrayn’s position as the Chief Qāḍī wielded tremendous influence in directing the practice of jurisprudence based on Shāfiʿīsm, of which he was an ardent adherent. But also, in his expansive teaching circle, students from all corners of the Banadir coast and beyond participated in learning, with fiqh featuring among the top subjects. He organized his curriculum according to the common Banadir tradition, which employed Kitāb al-irshād³⁷ and the Minhāj³⁸ as the advanced teaching manuals. As a mark of excellence, these texts were to be memorized.³⁹

At the same time, Nūrayn’s contemporary ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh al-Shāshī, based in Mogadishu during the second half of the 19th century, was also one of those who engaged in very limited travels outside Banadir. But as a student of the more prominent and renowned circle of Abū Bakr al-Miḥḍār (nd) and later as its leading teacher, he managed to exert a substantial impact on a vast cadre of students who spread across the East African coast.⁴⁰ Again, in the curriculum of al-Miḥḍār’s circle, fiqh played an essential role in knowledge transmission, with Kitāb al-irshād and the Minhāj forming the main instructional manuals for advanced students. From the careers of scholars like Nūrayn and al-Shāshī, we see their roles as critical participants and actors in the Banadiri-Swahili judiciary Islamic learning spaces by selecting and validating the use of specific texts such as the Minhāj leading to their canonical status.

The continued civil war in Somalia since the late 1980s has disrupted research activities, and a resulting state of insecurity has restricted access to primary sources of data and documents. Still, through earlier research records, we can get a glimpse of the type of texts used in circles such as Nūrayn’s and al-Shāshī’s, of which Kitāb al-irshād and the Minhāj appear prominently. Ḥassan Makī Aḥmad⁴¹ provides a list of manuscripts that were available during the period studied by him from 1887–1986. The list is categorized into seven sections: (i) Qurʾān, (ii) ʿAqīda, (iii) Fiqh, (iv) Ḥadīth, (v) Tafsīr, (vi) Taṣawwuf and Falsafa, (vii) Shiʿr and Lugha. It is interesting to note that the fiqh section contains only texts from the Shāfiʿī school, attesting to the dominance of the school and its texts that included the Minhāj. The texts are recorded in the following order:

1. Sharḥ al-irshād maʿa māfī sharḥayhi jawāhir al-nafāʾis wa-nafāʾis al-jawāhir.⁴²

2. The Minhāj.⁴³

3. Tanbīh mukhtṣar fī aḥkām al-nikāḥ.⁴⁴

4. Al-Irshād al-ghāwī ilā masālik al-ḥāwī.⁴⁵

5. Sharḥ Saʿīd ibn muʾallif qurrat al-ʿuyūn bi-muhimmāt al-dīn.⁴⁶

6. Kitāb al-kharāj.⁴⁷

7. Al-Sayf al-Battār fī ḥukm muʿāmalat al-kuffār.⁴⁸

8. Fī uṣūl madhhab al-Shāfiʿī.⁴⁹

9. Al-Fatāwā al-ḥadītha.⁵⁰

From this list, we can highlight that Kitāb al-irshād and the Minhāj were the only complete texts dealing with the general fiqh issues in the madhhab. In contrast, the other texts contain specific topics, fatāwā or partial commentaries. Furthermore, the fact that the manuscripts were found in Mogadishu, as mentioned by Makī, affirms the claim that the area was a bastion of the Shāfiʿī school during the 19th and early 20th centuries. At least two texts (1) and (3) were authored by local scholars, of which (1) is a partial commentary of the Kitāb al-irshād, with two other manuscripts⁵¹ not listed by Makī but also copied locally by ʿUthmān Muḥammad al-Shāshī al-Muqdishī (nd) titled Hāshiyat al-Shāshī and al-ʿItimād fī ḥall al-fāẓ al-minhāj. While it is important to note that Nūrayn, al-Shāshī and other scholars of their stature and prominence may not have purposely aimed to canonize these texts, their attachment to the tradition they were orientated to helped to enhance their continued authoritative status.

Another vital contributor to the Minhāj from Banadir during the first half of the 20th century was ʿAlī b. Samantar b. Ḥassan al-Ṣūmālī (1894–1943). Ibn Samantar grew up in the Hubyah municipality,⁵² some 569 km north of Mogadishu along the Indian Ocean coast. After memorizing the Qurʾān at the age of 14 years and studying with the scholars of the town, he travelled to Banadir and settled in the town of Merka, where he took to learning from scholars such as Muḥī l-Dīn b. Muʿallim Mukrim (1857–1918) and at least 12 others, with particular emphasis on fiqh.⁵³ Later, on the advice of his teachers, Samantar returned to Hubyah to establish teaching and learning activities.⁵⁴ His brief commentary on the introduction of the Minhāj, Ghāyat al-marām fī ḥall al-fāẓ muqaddimat al-minhāj, is recognized as one of the most important works on the Minhāj on the coast (Figure 3).

6. THE LAMU CIRCLE

South of the Banadir coast lies the Lamu archipelago,⁵⁵ one of the key historical centres for culture and Islamic learning on the Swahili coast. The archipelago is about 250 km north of Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. Since the beginning of recorded history, the archipelago’s strategic geographical location and natural harbours positioned it as a conducive link to the Indian oceanic trade routes from the regions of the far east of Asia to the southeast of the African coast. Due to these old trade links, the earliest traces of Islam on the coast are also found in Lamu (Figure 4). For instance, Mark Horton concluded from his excavations of the abandoned medieval town of Shanga on the archipelago that ‘the site had been occupied continuously from the mid-8th century until the early 15th century and that the Swahili character of the town had also constantly developed, as had its ceramics and architecture consisting of stone houses, mosques, and tombs’.⁵⁶ However, the rise to cultural prominence and Islamic learning likely started in the 16th century. Anne Bang has linked the period from the 16th century until, at the latest, c.1800, to the ascendancy of the northern coastal towns like Lamu, Mombasa and Malindi over earlier southern settlements.⁵⁷ This view is echoed by Randall Pouwels, who linked the ascendancy to the Ḥaḍramis thus:

Lamu archipelago became the religious and cultural heartland of the coast between 1550 and 1800, and the influence of the Lamu region and the Pate shurafāʾ became widespread. After having settled in Pate and its immediate neighbours for several generations, sharīf families further migrated to other parts of the south, taking their spiritual charisma and scholarly traditions with them wherever they relocated.⁵⁸

More evidently, Lamu’s ascendancy is seen by the proliferation of the genre of epic poems produced in the archipelago in the three centuries between the sixteenth and the nineteenth.⁵⁹ According to Mugyabuso Mulokozi, ‘many of these works were inspired by Islam; their content, however, had broader implications and applications since they related to the realities and struggles of East Africa’.⁶⁰ Despite their popularity, these epic poems were transmitted orally and only written down in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Historical records do not account for written works (poetic or prose) in any subject of the Islamic sciences, especially in fiqh, by local scholars before and during Lamu’s period of ascendancy. While this anomaly is a matter that requires extensive research on its own, the reasons can be assumed that either because canonical teaching and learning texts (such as the Minhāj) were available, scholars may have found no need to compose new texts or the possibility that writing culture was not an essential component of the Swahili scholarly tradition. From the middle of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, however, historical sources are bounteous with hagiographies (and more recently biographies) of individual scholars and their contributions to the spread of Islamic learning. This discussion’s attention will now follow the careers of some of these scholars to trace their roles as actors and participants in the canonization process of the Minhāj.

7. THE FUQAHĀʾ OF LAMU

One of the pragmatic ways to understand Lamu’s Islamic learning tradition during the 19th century is by looking at the close intertwining relationships between individual scholars and their wider circles. Previously, researchers⁶¹ have pointed out how Lamu society was sharply stratified, leading to assumptions that the stratification also spread to learning processes where there were restrictions on who was allowed to access knowledge and who was not. For example, Abdul Hamid El Zein claimed that ‘scholars gave lessons openly during the day to laypeople, but at the same time, they secretly gave lessons to a selected elite under the cover of darkness’.⁶² These researchers suggested that society was primarily categorized into three social levels. At the top were the elite land-holding families, such as the al-Maʿāwī, who had been residents of Lamu for centuries but had initially arrived from Oman and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. They were followed by Ḥaḍrami families from Yemen that included the Shurafāʾ, and at the bottom of the stratum were people from the native African tribes and non-Arab immigrants, especially Comorians. This categorization was relevant in the period’s social, economic, and political context. Yet, it oversimplifies a deeply entangled society that has absorbed centuries of multicultural adaptations. Above all, the categorization overlooks the reality that relationships in spaces of Islamic learning were not as clear-cut and segregated as previously assumed, as is highlighted below.

The earliest of the fuqahāʾ we can get a glimpse of, through local literature, whose eventual network of students formed the core circle of Lamu scholars is Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad al-Maʿāwī, also commonly known as Inyekai Mkuu (b.1180/1766).⁶³ Inyekai’s role and contribution to Lamu’s scholarly heritage are more apparent in his son’s career, Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-Maʿāwī, Bwenyekai (d.1891), than his own. This is because sources do not offer much more about his life other than his date of birth and the fact that he was a teacher to many students in Lamu. However, his son, also his student, established himself as a vital transmitter of Islamic learning and possessed a solid circle of students who occupied prominent positions in Lamu and beyond. The mark of Bwenyekai’s juristic expertise was witnessed during one of his ḥajj visits to Mecca, where the then Muftī Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad Shaṭṭā (d.1893) offered him a place to teach in his wide circle. Bwenyekai took the opportunity and taught fiqh texts, of which the Muftī was the author of two of them:⁶⁴

A. Durar al-bahiyya fīmā yalzamu al-mukallif min al-ʿulūm al-sharīʿa

This is an introductory Shāfiʿī fiqh text. According to one famous narration on the Swahili coast, one ḥajj season around the late 1880s CE, a young scholar from Lamu-Kenya, ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad Bā Kathīr (d.1925) was in Mecca for the pilgrimage and to study from the city’s resident scholars, where he met the then-renowned Shāfiʿī jurist Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad Shaṭṭā (d.1893). Bā Kathīr requested Shaṭṭā to write an instructional manual on fiqh to fill the content gap between Matn safīnat al-najāʾ by Sālim al-Ḥaḍramī (d.1854) and Matn Abī Shujāʿ by Aḥmad al-Iṣfahānī (d.593/1197)—beginners and intermediaries fiqh instructional texts—that were taught in Lamu. Thereafter, Shaṭṭā wrote the Durar al-bahiyyat fīmā yalzamu al-muqallid min al-ʿulūm al-sharīʿa without hesitation and in a single sitting. On his return, the people of Lamu were overwhelmed with joy, and Bā Kathīr was invited to conduct a darsa (lecture) and teach the text in one of Lamu’s prominent mosques.

B. Ḥāshiyat iʿānat al-ṭālibīn

This is an annotation on the terminologies of Fatḥ al-muʿīn bi-sharḥ qurrat al-ʿayn bi-muhimmāt al-dīn by Zain al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Malībārī (d.986/1579). The annotation was composed by Muftī Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad Shaṭṭā.

C. Ḥāshiyat al-Dimyaṭī ʿalā al-waraqāt⁶⁵

By Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Dimyaṭī (d.1117/1705), an ancestor of Muftī Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad Shaṭṭā.

Whether it was the Muftī’s suggestion to choose the selected fiqh texts or Bwenyekai’s idea is unclear; nonetheless, the choice strengthens the view of the importance of fiqh to the scholars from Lamu, even in lands as central to Islamic learning as Mecca. In addition to his father’s influence, Bwenyekai had also been a student of Muḥammad b. Faḍl al-Bakrī (d.1866) who had studied in the Ḥijāz (Mecca and Medina) for 33 years.⁶⁶ Through al-Bakrī and other Lamu scholars like ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad Bā Kathīr (1860–1925), it is clear that the Muftī was well acquainted with scholars from the archipelago.

Previous studies⁶⁷ have discussed how the Swahili scholarly tradition had been closely connected to the Ḥaḍrami tradition. In the final decades of the 19th century, however, sources also show an increasing participation of Swahili scholars directly in the Meccan circles rather than through Ḥaḍramawt. This change is observed in the learning trajectories of some Lamu scholars such as Bwenyekai, the aforementioned Muḥammad al-Bakrī, and Fayṣal b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh al-Lāmī (d.1918), among others, signifying that although scholarly connections between the Swahili coast and Ḥaḍramawt remained close at the time, new direct links with other prominent centres of Islamic learning, especially, Mecca, were also created by Swahili scholars. From the Meccan side, three scholars appear to have had significant interactions with their counterparts from Lamu, Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān (d.1886), Abū Bakr Shaṭṭā, and Muḥammad b. Saʿīd Bā Buṣayl (d.1912).⁶⁸ The three were Shāfiʿī jurists as well as Muftīs of Mecca and so held influential positions in the Ḥijāzi and the broader Indian Ocean practice of Islamic law and learning circles. Therefore, interactions with them meant the possibility of accessing wider dimensions of law and, at the very least, Shāfiʿī textual adaptations. The intensity of close interactions between Lamu and Mecca during this period was further seen when a Meccan scholar, Muḥammad al-Makkī (nd), settled in Lamu for some time and from whom Abū Bakr b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ḥussainī (d.1922), Ḥabib Ṣaleḥ Jamal al-Layl (d.1935) and others took to learning.⁶⁹ Sources do not offer detailed information about the itinerary of al-Makkī, such as who brought him and why, when he arrived, how extended his stay was, or what happened to him afterwards. Still, the visit tells a lot about the close contact between Lamu and Mecca. However, the connection did not affect much of what was the earlier established Ḥaḍramī-Shāfiʿī strand. Instead, the individuals involved in the Lamu–Meccan relationship strengthened existing Shāfiʿīte structures, including sustained orientation of the existent legal texts such as the Minhāj and Fatḥ al-muʿīn. This is not to be taken for granted, especially when scholars have been involved in a cosmopolitan intellectual environment as Mecca was at the time. The situation would often be that scholars would aim to impose new applications and approaches towards learning and religious practices. However, this was hardly the case in Lamu, especially because historical records indicate some scholars spent decades studying there, such as Muḥammad b. Faḍl al-Bakrī, and Fayṣal b. ʿAlī al-Lāmī, who lived in the Ḥijāz for close to 22 years.⁷⁰ There were others whose stay was so extended that they were nicknamed Mwenye wa Maka (lit. The Sharīf of Mecca), such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abū Bakr al-Ḥāmid (Mwenye wa Maka Mkuu—lit. the elder Sharīf of Mecca, d.1884) and Abū Bakr b. ʿAlawī al-Shāṭrī (Mwenye wa Maka Mtoto—lit. the younger Sharīf of Mecca, d.1922).⁷¹ These scholars returned to Lamu and established learning circles but continued to teach the same legal texts used long before their departure to Mecca and Medina. This pattern points to preferences for continuity more than ruptures or divergence when it came to legal practices for Swahili scholars during the decades of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Unlike Banadir and Zanzibar, where the ʿulamāʾ also penned several commentaries on the introduction section of the Minhāj, in Lamu, the focus was more on oral transmission. Thus, teaching the Minhāj was one of the two main ways of establishing its canonical status. The other was by owning, copying, and circulating the text. Notably, the only manuscript copies of the Minhāj and its commentaries that can be accessed from the major centres of the Swahili world so far are available in Lamu. This tells us a lot about the desire of Lamu scholars to own or access copies of the text. Currently, the Riyāḍ Mosque collection is the most extensive manuscript collection on the Swahili coast. The Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) has digitized the collection through the Endangered Archives Program (EAP), which is accessible online.⁷² These manuscripts are probably remnants of the copies used for teaching and as references. There are three manuscript copies of the Minhāj in the collection: two⁷³ in the Riyāḍ Mosque collection and another one⁷⁴ in a private collection (Figures 5 and 6).

Anne Bang has investigated the Riyāḍ Mosque collection and discovered that ‘most of the other texts (including the Minhāj) were either endowed (waqf) to the institution, donated as gifts from different parts of the Indian Ocean world, purchased or copied locally in Lamu by an intriguing clique of individual collectors’.⁷⁵ It is also possible that the Minhāj manuscripts were copied in Siyu, a once-important cultural, industrial centre on the archipelago, well known for its master artisans of material objects such as clothes, shoes, utensils, ornaments, arms of war, and manuscripts.⁷⁶ What is critical, however, is that we can discern from the pages of the manuscripts that some are loaded with annotations, descriptions, and explanations of issues discussed within the text, which helps us to confirm that they were used as instructional manuals and that the annotations were guiding notes to support either the teacher or the student to have a better understanding of some of the terms or concepts. From this observation, it is not far-fetched to imagine that these same texts were circulating and used in circles of prominent scholars in Lamu because there were few available (in this case, two complete copies) (Figure 7).

Based on the same rationale, it is also probable that these manuscripts were used to study the Minhāj in Bwenyekai’s circle. Overseeing one of Lamu’s most influential learning circles, Bwenyekai was surrounded by students who later played key roles in expanding the tradition of knowledge transmission in their unique ways. These students helped in cementing the authority of existing instructional legal texts. They also provided inventive circumstances ensuring the continuity of the prominence of legal texts vis-à-vis prevailing socio-economic and political realities, such as the emergence of the printing press and new colonial modes of governance and education. Some of the most prominent students of Bwenyekai included:

(i) Fayṣal b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh al-Lāmī (d.1918)

After studying in Lamu and spending an extended period in the Ḥijāz, al-Lamī later returned and started his teaching circle at Masjid Nūr, attracting many students, including Aḥmad Badawī (d.1938), the renowned son of Ḥabib Ṣaleḥ Jamal al-Layl.⁷⁷ Al-Lāmī’s scholarly standing in the community was so highly regarded that, according to a popular oral narrative, he was reputed to have had visions of the Prophet Muḥammad.⁷⁸ Apart from elevating his personality, this reputation also indirectly exalted the texts he taught, of which the Minhāj is known to have had a special place.

(ii) ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad al-Ahdal (Mwenye Abdalla Kadhi, d.1920)

Mwenye Abdalla Kadhi represents Bwenyekai’s students whose studies did not involve travelling out of Lamu. However, due to his knowledge, especially in matters of fiqh, he was appointed the Qāḍī of Lamu.⁷⁹ The name under which he became famous, Kadhi, is a Swahili rendition of the Arabic qāḍī. In the Lamu scholarly community, he was widely known among those who could cite the Minhāj from memory, indicating some scholars’ tendency to memorize the text.⁸⁰ Abdalla Kadhi’s memorization of the Minhāj shows the central role of the text to fuqahāʾ as an integral instructional manual and a reference tool that they could utilize to solve legal issues at their convenience. For Abdalla Kadhi, this ability served him well as a teacher and Muslim judge, and therefore, we can suppose that it was through it that his stature as an astute faqīh was grounded.

(iii) Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ Jamal al-Layl (d.1935)

Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ is arguably the most famous of the Lamu scholars. Although he was born on the southern end of the Swahili coast in the village of Singani in Grande Comore, his rise to popularity took place in Lamu. Anne Bang and others have briefly documented the biography of Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ and his achievement as the founder of the Riyāḍ mosque college, the first of its kind in Swahili East Africa.⁸¹ The college helped provide Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ with a platform to initiate educational reforms that brought far-reaching changes to the Swahili Islamic learning scene. Here, it suffices to note that the college offered an opportunity to people from all social levels to access knowledge in a semi-structured environment on equal footing—semi-structured in the sense that while the study system continued to follow the traditional pedagogy, students were given boarding facilities free of charge and attended lessons in an organized manner at the Riyāḍ mosque. Furthermore, the college became a central space in Lamu for accumulating learning material such as books. Hence, we find the manuscript copies of the Minhāj in the college’s library. Initially, these copies were located within the mosque’s premises in locked cupboards, indicating their use for teaching and learning. Probably, upon the availability of printed copies, the manuscripts were moved to Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ’s house, which is preserved as a historical monument. However, after the completion of the construction of a new separate college building in 1981 close to the mosque, the manuscripts were stored in the archive section of the college’s library.

What is essential to the Minhāj manuscripts in our discussion is that they represent a continued presence and movement between physical and intellectual spaces; they lived and moved from hand to hand and passed orally from heart to heart, from scholar to colleague to student. The manuscripts copies of the Minhāj located at the Riyāḍ mosque college (mentioned above) probably found their way there after circulating within several circles in Lamu, including in the circles of Bwenyekai because Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ was his student. In Lamu, the ʿulamāʾ availed a conducive environment that enhanced the use and movement of the Minhāj within its varied circles, bringing into question the earlier claims of a rigidly stratified social structure that led to an exclusive scholarly class. Probing the question of the opposition from the elites of Lamu to Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ’s open-for-all policy access to learning at the Riyāḍ mosque college, Anne Bang commented that:

It should be noted here that the opposition to Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ seems to have been somewhat over-emphasised in previous studies. Although many turned against him out of fear and jealousy, there were also many who supported him. Notable here is the Āl Ḥussainī, represented by Sayyid Manṣab b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, another was Fayṣal al-Makhzūmī⁸², a scholar who had studied together with Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ under Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-Bakrī⁸³. When Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ antagonists asked al-Makhzūmī to issue a fatwā against him, al-Makhzūmī simply replied that the opinions of scholars diverge and Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ was a scholar entitled to his opinions.⁸⁴

While Lamu’s scholarly tradition is not renowned for composing textual additions to the text of the Minhāj during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the collegial relationship of Lamu scholars aided in the canonization process of the text through extensive use in learning circles and circulation as seen by the presence of manuscript copies of the annotated text. Interestingly, some of these notes are Swahili words in Arabic script, indicating local use for learning purposes. Although more comprehensive research is required to explore the notes and comments in these manuscripts to disentangle their content and context, their appearance arguably shows that the Minhāj was a vital component of the Shāfiʿī textual canon in Lamu and, by extension, in the Swahili coast. Figure 8 provides a glimpse of part of the intertwining multigenerational teacher–student relationship of Lamu scholars during the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. The intertwining connections of Lamu scholars show that despite the stratified social structure in the political and economic spheres of Lamu’s society at the time, scholarly relations were desegregated, as seen by the presence of names of people from almost all social classes in the figure.

8. THE UNGUJA CIRCLE

Unguja is one of the Zanzibar archipelago’s two major islands in the modern-day Federal Republic of Tanzania (Figure 9). The other island is Pemba, located north of Unguja. Zanzibar has a long history which, according to William Harold Ingrams, ‘is a result of its insularity, its convenience as a jumping-off place for the east coast of Africa, its proximity to Asia, and to the trade winds or monsoon, which account to a large extent for its close political and commercial connection from the earliest times with India, the countries bordering on the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea’.⁸⁵ The history of Islam in Zanzibar and the Bū Saʿīdī Sultanate has already been dealt with in depth by researchers in the past decades and will not be recounted here at length.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, to help us understand the role of Unguja ʿulamāʾ in the canonization of the Minhāj, it is necessary to briefly historicize the context in which these ʿulamāʾ emerged vis-à-vis the general history of Islam on the Swahili coast.

In the milieu of the Swahili coast, the Zanzibar archipelago is as prominent as Banadir and Lamu as a centre for history, culture, and scholarship, with an Islamic heritage that goes back for more than ten centuries. Like in other parts of the coast, it is estimated that the influx of Muslim contingents came in from Arabia during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph, ʿAbd al-Mālik b. Marwān (r.65/685–85/705). The long history of Islam in Zanzibar is seen by the presence of a mosque at Kizimkazi in Unguja dated 397/1007, the oldest intact functioning building in eastern Africa.⁸⁷ Roman Loimeier observed that ‘Zanzibar’s development to become the paramount political and commercial centre on the East African coast started under Sultan Saʿīd b. Sulṭān (r.1217/1804–1271/1856) and was reinforced by the shift of Oman’s seat of government from Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840’.⁸⁸ However, Zanzibar’s hegemony as an African trading empire was established after Sultan Saʿīd split the Bū Saʿīdī dynasty into two realms, one based at Muscat and the other in Zanzibar to be ruled by his sons Thuwayn and Mājid, respectively.⁸⁹ These shifts facilitated the cementing of Zanzibar as the fulcrum of changes in politics, commerce and education that were developing across the Swahili coast. Sultan Mājid (r.1856–1870) continued implementing his father’s modernization programmes. By the time of the rule of Sultan Barghāsh (r.1870–1888), Zanzibar was enjoying a golden age despite deep intrusions of the European imperialistic colonial structures that set out to destabilize the nascent Sultanate. This was a period of significant progress for the Sultanate, which was able to establish its long arms from Unguja, the seat of government, to Banadir on the north, the great lake regions of Africa on the west, Comoros Islands, and parts of northern Mozambique further south.

As a consequence of Unguja becoming the seat of government for the Sultanate, it attracted the migration of several ʿulamāʾ, who were drawn from other coastal areas by resources and opportunities. This development accelerated the shift of intellectual importance from earlier prominent cultural centres of Banadir and Lamu. Eventually, Unguja became the hub of academic exchanges on the Swahili coast, resulting in the reinvigoration of Islamic learning and culture through various modes such as writing, teaching and book production. One of the most consequential implications of the arrival of the new ʿulamāʾ to Zanzibar, as noted by Amal N Ghazal, was that they:

Institutionalised the long presence of Islam on the Island and resulted in an unprecedented spread of Islamic institutions and of a literate Islamic tradition that was Arabic in character; they also brought ideas, ties and connections, and along with rulers, they changed the intellectual and political landscape of Zanzibar.⁹⁰

Interestingly, the institutionalization of Islam and the introduction of new ideas and connections in Zanzibar had hardly any significant impact in reshaping the use of legal texts that continued to be dominated by the Shāfiʿī school, especially since the official school of the ruling class and elites was the Ibāḍī school. If anything, the interaction between the powerful minority Ibāḍī rule over the Shāfiʿī majority had unexpected repercussions for some of the prominent Ibāḍī scholars who were converted to Shāfiʿīsm, such as ʿAlī b. Khamīs al-Barwānī (1852–1885) and ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh b. Nāfiʿ al-Mazrūʿī (1825–1894), leading to their imprisonment by Sultan Barghāsh.⁹¹ Due to his broader political ambitions in Oman, Barghāsh is known to have shown close adherence to Ibāḍīsm and had patronized programmes to help popularize the school, such as establishing a printing press which endeavoured ‘to print Ibāḍī texts exclusively to disseminate the school’s views as a countermeasure to growing Sunni beliefs among his Omani subjects in Zanzibar’.⁹²

9. THE ROLE OF UNGUJA ʿULAMĀʾ

The main reasons for the prominence of Shāfiʿīsm were earlier ʿulamāʾ, who traditionally had entrenched the madhhab in the fabric of Swahili society. Therefore, the appearance of the new Shāfiʿī ʿulamāʾ in the 19th century from the wider regions of the Swahili coast and the Indian Ocean world helped solidify the practice of the madhhab during a period of Ibāḍī political hegemony. Examining Shāfiʿī-Sunni Islamic reformist impulses in the coastal regions of the southwestern Indian Ocean in the period c.1860–1940 through the lens of Sufi orders, Anne Bang identified two generations of Shāfiʿī scholars that emerged under Bū Saʿīdī auspices in East Africa.⁹³ The first generation included such men as Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī (1790–1869), ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Amawī (1838–1896), ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh b. Nāfiʿ al-Mazrūʿī and ʿAlī b. Khamīs al-Barwānī. The second generation included the influential Qāḍī of Zanzibar, Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr b. Sumayṭ (1861–1925), ʿAbdallāh Bā Kathīr (1860–1925), and Manṣab b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1829–1922). This list provides a valuable platform for analysing the role of Zanzibari scholars in the canonization of the Minhāj; however, it is not comprehensive. There were many others whose contributions to the canonization of the Minhāj were significant. In this section, the discussion revolves around the general Unguja scholarly community, with a particular focus on Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī and Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr b. Sumayṭ. Also included is Ḥassan b. Amīr al-Shirāzī (1880–1979), whose contributions are vital, particularly during the later decades of the first half of the 20th century. The three ʿulamāʾ had similar distinguished career trajectories: They all taught the Minhāj, wrote commentaries on its khuṭbat al-kitāb, and presumably referred to it extensively in their official capacities as qāḍīs of Zanzibar (al-Qaḥṭānī and Ibn Sumayṭ), and as muftī of Tanzania (al-Shirāzī). The fact that their time frame spans the century of the Bū Saʿīdī sultanate in Zanzibar is an essential element in this discussion.

A. Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī (d.1869)

The documented history of Zanzibar ʿulamāʾ primarily commences with al-Farsī’s (1944 and 1972) hagiographies. In these works, the original and the revised edition (mentioned earlier), Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī is placed as the cornerstone of the scholarly community. His biography is the starting point in both works regarding the history of Swahili coast scholars. While it can be argued that al-Farsī’s approach is lacking in terms of representation of the coast’s scholarly community in both the periodization and the geographical coverage, in the context of the canonization of the Minhāj in the 19th century, the person of al-Qaḥṭānī provides a valid image of how scholars and the text interconnected across the coast. Al-Qaḥṭānī was born ca.1790 and grew up in Barawa (on the Banadir coast), spent a considerable amount of time in Lamu and Mombasa and later lived, worked, and died in Unguja (1869).⁹⁴ Al-Qaḥṭānī’s life and career are thus almost precisely congruent with the time and spatial focus that this study is working on, and the fact that he was present before and at the very beginning of the establishment of the Bū Saʿīdī sultanate makes his personality as an appropriate starting point. However, what is more relevant to the discussion was al-Qaḥṭānī’s interaction with the Minhāj through his textual contributions and teaching.

Documents collected from private collections show two lists with the names of scholars who taught the Minhāj in Zanzibar from the years 1286/1868 to 1347/1929. Attached below are copies of the two lists. List A is from the collection of Abū l-Ḥassan b. Aḥmad Jamal al-Layl (d.1958) includes a record of the scholars who taught the Minhāj from 1286/1868 to 1305/1888 (Figure 10), and List B is probably an extended version of List A up to the year 1347/1929, stemming from the same collection (Figure 11).

The lists have a combined total of 33 names, 14 in the first and 19 in the second, but the first two names are repeated in both lists; therefore, the lists provide 31 different scholars who taught the Minhāj within the 61-year period between 1868 and 1929. In both lists, the first name that appears is that of Muḥyī l-Dīn al-Qaḥṭānī. Furthermore, five scholars from the lists are recorded by al-Farsī to have been students of al-Qaḥṭānī⁹⁵:

1. Aḥmad b. Sālim b. Abū Bakr b. Sālim (d.1870)

2. Sulaymān b. Ḥayat al-Hindī (d.1874)

3. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Moronī (d.1890)

4. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Amawī (d.1896)

5. Aḥmad b. Salmīn al-Sabaḥī (d.1906)

Considering that other scholars taught the Minhāj but were not notable enough to be included in the lists, it becomes clear how widespread the text was in Zanzibar at the time. However, together with his teaching responsibilities, al-Qaḥṭānī, according to al-Farsī, was also an ardent writer who composed seven treatises in Arabic and Swahili prose and poetry.⁹⁶ Of these texts, the only one that deals with fiqh is a commentary on the khuṭbat al-kitāb (introduction) of the Minhāj. This places al-Qaḥṭānī as the first known Swahili scholar to write anything about the Minhāj, and it is also a solid indication of the importance of the text to him and the general Swahili scholarly community to the extent that it required his textual input; unfortunately, the commentary did not survive, and it is only known through its mention by al-Farsī.

B. Aḥmad b. Abī Bakr b. Sumayṭ (1860–1925)

Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ was born in Moroni, Grande Comore, to a father who had immigrated from Ḥaḍramawt, in southern Yemen, and a Comorian mother. He is typical of the cosmopolitan scholars who travelled widely to study, including in places such as Ḥaḍramawt, Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul. Anne Bang has provided a well-documented biography of Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ, with an in-depth analysis of his family, spiritual and scholarly lineages, and connections.⁹⁷ Reading from this biography and others, it is clear that Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ is one of the most important and authoritative Zanzibari scholars after al-Qaḥṭānī. Like the latter, his career is centrally situated within the Zanzibar intellectual and judiciary power circles, where he commanded considerable influence as a teacher, spiritual leader and qāḍī.

As for teaching, al-Farsī reported that Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ had two main sessions in his home daily.⁹⁸ The first one was a morning session which took place from 8.30 and was attended exclusively by already established scholars, such as:

• ʿAbdallāh Bā Kathīr

• Saʿīd b. Muḥammad b. Daḥmān (d.1926)

• ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Maḥmūd al-Washilī (d.1936)

• Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh Waziri Mtsujini (d.1936)

• Muḥammad Hirji (d.1915)

• ʿAbdallāh Jumʿān al-ʿAmmarī (d.1919)

After the afternoon prayers, the second session was meant for the general public—Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ also lectured at the Malindi Friday Mosque during the month of Ramaḍān,⁹⁹ in addition to his teaching activities, Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ was among the key representatives of the ʿAlawī Sufi brotherhood leadership in East Africa. Anne Bang has pointed out that the ʿAlawī ṭarīqa coupled mysticism with a strong emphasis on Sharīʿa, both as the science of jurisprudence (fiqh) and as a way of life. Bang further observed that:

Over time, fiqh came to be considered the basis of all knowledge, including mystical insight. For the ʿAlawī sāda this meant Shāfiʿī fiqh, and particularly Minhāj al-ṭālibīn by Muḥyī l-Dīn Abū Zakariyyā al-Nawawī (d.1277).¹⁰⁰

That could be the reason why we see a strong emphasis on studying the Minhāj during Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ’s stay in Ḥaḍramawt, from which he studied its khuṭba with no less than twelve scholars.¹⁰¹ Anne Bang attributed 13 printed, unprinted and unlocated works to Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ,¹⁰² while al-Farsī mentioned nine of which three were on fiqh, a ḥāshiya of Fatḥ al-jawwād ʿalā sharḥ al-irshād, which was not completed; a brief commentary on Ṣalat al-jāmiʿa by ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabshī (d.1915); and a full commentary on the khuṭba of the Minhāj titled al-Ibtihāj fī bayān iṣṭilāḥ al-minhāj.¹⁰³ In the commentary, Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ concisely simplified the terms that al-Nawawī described in the khuṭba of the Minhāj, which helps readers access and understand better the content of the main text. Moreover, the brevity of the commentary (17 pages in the old typewriting format) makes it readily portable and easy to memorize. For these reasons and because of the prominent position of Ibn Sumayṭ as scholar, qāḍī, and leader of the ʿAlawī ṭarīqa, the commentary became popular and has been a mainstay in the Swahili learning circles and continues to be taught at various learning centres in Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar (Figure 12).¹⁰⁴

C. Ḥassan b. ʿAmīr al-Shirāzī (1880–1979)

Ḥassan b. Amīr was a native of Zanzibar, born and raised in Makunduchi, Unguja, in 1880. Al-Shirāzī lived to see 10 of the 11 Sultans of Zanzibar from Barghāsh, the second Sultan (1870–1888) to Jamshīd b. ʿAbdallāh (r.1 July 1963–12 January 1964), the last Sultan. He, therefore, also witnessed the violent revolution of 1964 and the subsequent amalgamation of Zanzibar and Tanganyika to form the modern state of Tanzania. Al-Farsī listed several scholars from whom al-Shirāzī studied, and interestingly, they include both Ibāḍī scholars such as ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAmūr al-Azrī (nd) and ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Manḍrī (1865–1925), as well as Shāfiʿī scholars such as Saʿīd b. Daḥmān, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Maḥmūd al-Washilī, Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh Waziri Mtsujini, and their teacher Aḥmad b. Sumayṭ.¹⁰⁵ Similarly, Roman Loimeier has produced a list of al-Shirāzī’s 15 teachers consisting of Ibāḍī and Shāfiʿī scholars.¹⁰⁶ This mixture of scholarly interactions would have given him a solid grounding within Zanzibar’s contemporary legal learning and practices in its two major dimensions. Furthermore, al-Shirāzī had the opportunity to join the first government school between 1907 and 1908, where he was exposed to and studied under several foreign teachers such as the Egyptian ʿAbd al-Bārī al-Ajīzī, the Omani ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Muḥammad al-Kindī, the Javanese Shaykh Makhlūf and a European, Mr Lyne.¹⁰⁷ ‘After getting his government school certificate, al-Shirāzī started to work in 1909–1910 as a teacher of Kiswahili in government schools in Makunduchi, Muyuni, Kiembe Samaki and Chake Chake’.¹⁰⁸ Although in 1920, he stopped teaching in government schools and joined the office of the Chief Qāḍī as a clerk, he established an evening madrasa in Misufini that he called al-Shirāzīyya, where he taught fiqh, taṣawwuf and other disciplines.¹⁰⁹ From his cohorts of students, various would later become Chief Qāḍīs and Muftīs like himself; these are:

• Fatawi Issa (Chief Qāḍī, 1964–1974)

• Habib Ali Kombo (Chief Qāḍī, 1974–1985)

• Tajo Mkubwa (Chief Qāḍī, 1985–1992)

• Musa Makungu (Chief Qāḍī, 1992–2006)

• Harith b. Khelef al-Ghaythi (current Muftī of Zanzibar)

• Sayyid Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (former Muftī of Grande Comore)

As for the Minhāj, al-Shirāzī is recognized as one of the few known textual contributors on the Swahili coast. According to Issa Ziddy, al-Shirāzī became known not only for his work as a teacher but also for his scholarly works that have so far remained unknown in academic circles. However, some of his followers have maintained that ‘many of his texts are being used as a part of the teaching curriculum at al-Azhar in Cairo as well as in other Islamic countries such as Malaysia’.¹¹⁰ As much as the claim that al-Shirāzī’s works are part of the curriculum at al-Azhar University and other parts of the Indian Ocean world is unlikely, these works remain popular and still widely used in the Swahili scholarly circles. Ziddy listed six works¹¹¹ of al-Shirāzī, of which three are on fiqh: Waṣīlat al-rajāʿ ʿalā safīnat al-najāʾ,¹¹²  Fatḥ al-kabīrʿalā sharḥ mukhtaṣar al-ṣaghīr¹¹³ and his most known work Maslak al-muḥtāj ilā bayān iṣṭilāḥ al-minhāj, a commentary on the khuṭba of the Minhāj (Figure 13). With these three fiqh texts, al-Shirāzī is distinguished to have completed commenting on one text at each of the three learning levels of fiqh, from the foundational to the intermediate and the advanced. Al-Shirāzī pointed out that the main reasons for composing these commentaries were the persistent requests from his students along with the importance of the texts in the Shāfiʿī tradition. Al-Shirāzī’s decision, therefore, to work on the Minhāj is suggestive of its elevated position in the scholarly community he was operating in, further aiding its canonical status through selection and validation.

10. CONCLUSION

This article discussed the role of scholars as agents, actors, and participants in the canonization of the Minhāj by examining how Swahili scholars deliberately selected and validated the text for teaching, circulating, and composing textual commentaries, enhancing its canonical status in the century between 1856 and 1960. While the Swahili scholarly tradition is not renowned for textual contributions to the corpus of Islamic learning in the Muslim world at any historical period, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the collegial relationship of Swahili scholars aided the canonization process of the Minhāj through extensive use in learning circles and circulation. The intertwining scholarly relationships of people from various social classes puts into question the narrative that social stratification had a significant impact on learning spaces, where there were restrictions on who was allowed to access knowledge and who was not, and argued that analysing Swahili Islamic knowledge transmission through lenses of social stratification oversimplifies a deeply entangled society that has absorbed centuries of multicultural adaptations. In addition, we have seen how the Minhāj received close attention from scholars across the Swahili littoral in composing commentaries to its khuṭbat al-kitāb, arguably the only fiqh text to receive such wide traction. The main argument expounded in this article is contextualized within the framework of textual canonization through knowledge transmission, profiling the role of scholars as the leading participants in the canonization process of the Minhāj. Moreover, this specific scholarly community is confined within the Sunni-Shāfiʿīte tradition, oriented in Sufi Islamic practices prevalent on the Swahili coast during the 19th and 20th centuries that had deep connections with the Ḥaḍrami tradition. However, the discussion pointed out that historical records and biographies of some Swahili scholars also show that direct links with other centres of Islamic learning, especially Mecca, were also created at the time. Based on this framework, three centres of Islamic learning and culture, the Banadir coast, Lamu archipelago and Zanzibar, were presented as focal points representing the more expansive Swahili coast. Scholars from these centres played critical roles by deliberately selecting and validating the Minhāj for teaching, circulating, and composing textual commentaries, enhancing its popularity and canonical status. This involved a milieu of scholars that includes ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbdallāh al-Shāshī (d.1904) from Banadir; Ḥabīb Ṣaleḥ Jamal al-Layl (d.1935) from Lamu; and Ḥassan b. Amīr al-Shirāzī (d.1979) from Zanzibar is part of scholarly circles that the article highlights as key agents in the canonization of the Minhāj during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The discussion also tackles the problematic questions of sources of the history of Swahili scholars, the description of the roles of Muslim scholars and how these roles should be defined in line with their scholarly dispositions and societal expectations. While there are no straightforward answers to these questions, the discussion suggests that the best way to examine the roles of the Swahili ʿulamāʾ is to analyse how the Swahili organized and imagined their social constructions and established norms about intellectual and scholarly boundaries. This approach helps to identify expected moral norms based on Islamic injunctions and everyday personal conduct with which the Swahili society orchestrated scholars within its ranks based on expertise, chain of transmission, and piety.

Funding

Funding support for this article was provided by the Trond Mohn Research Foundation TMS2020STG01.

Footnotes

Author notes