Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience, Kai Kresse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience by Kai Kresse Nathaniel Mathews BOOK REVIEW of Kresse, Kai. 2018. Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 237 pp. Philosopher Kai Kresse has long established himself as a skillful interpreter of Swahili intellectual discourse on the East African coast. With his latest book, he draws on and expands his earlier work to take us inside the discursive worlds of Swahiliphone Muslim intellectuals in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Kenya. He shows Swahili-speaking Kenyan Muslims wrestling with colonial and postcolonial political dynamics within multiple overlapping frameworks: a localized Swahili discursive tradition of Islamic reform with a genealogy going back to Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui, a transregional Islamic discourse of enjoining right and forbidding wrong, and the widespread political marginalization of coastal Muslims in postcolonial Kenya. He reads and analyzes a variety of texts, including transcripts of radio broadcasts, to show how their authors tried to carve out a pious, modern public space for Muslims in Kenya, and how their sharing of Islamic knowledge aimed to shape a moral community in a context of political marginalization. This analysis highlights the division between various Muslim groups about the proper boundaries of ritual interpretation. The book is divided into two parts: "Conceptualizations" and "Readings." The latter encompasses the three-chapter heart of the book's close readings and translations and will be the focus of the remainder of this review. On the whole, Kresse is successful at showing discursive continuities in Muslim reformist discourse between the colonial and postcolonial eras. Chapter three is about the intellectual production of Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui in 1930s Mombasa. Through a close reading of Mazrui's Sahifa newspaper, Kresse argues for understanding Al-Amin as a "colonial thinker," ambivalently placed as kadhi of Mombasa and later the whole Kenya coastal strip (a position appointed by the British) and preoccupied with internal critique of the community. Mazrui's writings in Sahifa and later al-Islah emphasize the decadence, ignorance, and complacency of coastal Muslims, ominously warning of the long-term consequences of neglect of education and the acquisition of knowledge in general. [End Page 149] Chapter four skips ahead to 1972 and examines the decade-long publication run of Sauti ya Haki, a newspaper published and edited by two of Al-Amin's students: Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui and Sheikh Abdullah Saleh Farsy. The newspaper was an intellectual heir to Al-Amin's reformist and purist ideas. The virtue of Kresse's analysis is that it reveals how the editors of Sauti ya Haki, even though writing from a postcolonial location, were still deeply implicated in the double bind of colonial modernity: on the one hand, they were at pains to show that the Quran was compatible with modern Western science (113); on the other hand, they critiqued a variety of popular healing and worship practices associated with Islam (126). Yet like Al-Amin, the editors of Sauti ya Haki saw such practices, which included amulet making and spirit possession, not as locally rooted expressions of a powerful Islamicate culture that crossed religious lines, but as a mortal threat to the integrity of Islam itself. Earlier chapters deal with print media, but chapter five analyzes Sauti ya Ruhuma, a Muslim radio program that ran from 2005 to 2007, facilitated by two figures who integrated the intellectual legacy of Islamic reform and purism with the new medium of radio: Abubakar and Stambuli openly and frankly discussed topics like terrorism and coastal political history and the marginalization of Muslims in Kenya, yet they were criticized as Salafis or Wahhabis for their reformist intellectual lineage (154). It is clear from Kresse's analysis that Muslim purist reformism continues to have significant effects locally, though it has failed to bring about the desired unity of East African Muslims. It is also clear that in the context of a global war on terror that demonizes Muslims, the intellectual lineage of purist thought is increasingly linked by others to the tacit acceptance, or even encouragement, of violence. Kresse is aware of this, and I applaud his decision to frame Stambuli's discussion of terrorism as taking seriously "the difficulty … of the internal...