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Christian-Muslim Relations A Bibliographical History
History of Christian-Muslim Relations Editorial Board Jon Hoover (University of Nottingham) Sandra Toenies Keating (Providence College) Tarif Khalidi (American University of Beirut) Suleiman Mourad (Smith College) Gabriel Said Reynolds (University of Notre Dame) Mark Swanson (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago) David Thomas (University of Birmingham)
Volume 47 Christians and Muslims have been involved in exchanges over matters of faith and morality since the founding of Islam. Attitudes between the faiths today are deeply coloured by the legacy of past encounters, and often preserve centuries-old condemnations. The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, Texts and Studies presents the surviving record of past encounters in a variety of forms: authoritative, text editions and annotated translations, studies of authors and their works and collections of essays on particular themes and historical periods. It illustrates the development in mutual perceptions as these are contained in surviving Christian and Muslim writings, and makes available the arguments and rhetorical strategies that, for good or ill, have left their mark on attitudes today. The series casts light on a history marked by intellectual creativity and occasional breakthroughs in communication, although, on the whole beset by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. By making this history better known, the series seeks to contribute to improved recognition between Christians and Muslims in the future. A number of volumes of the History of Christian-Muslim Relations series are published within the subseries Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History.
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hcmr
Christian-Muslim Relations A Bibliographical History Volume 19. Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (1800-1914) Edited by David Thomas and John Chesworth with Jaco Beyers, Martha Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Arely Medina, Diego Melo Carrasco, Douglas Pratt
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LEIDEN BOSTON 2022
Cover illustration: Detail from a postcard of the clock tower of Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, Tanzania, c. 1920-40. The cathedral was built on the site of the slave market. The sultan gave permission for the tower and donated the clock, specifying that the tower should not exceed the sultan’s palace in height. YDS/RG101/018/0000/0148; Missionary Postcard Collection, Yale Divinity Library Special Collections, digitised by University of Southern California Libraries. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov/2009029184
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/ brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-7350 ISBN 978-90-04-47167-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-50038-9 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
CONTENTS Foreword ......................................................................................................... ix List of Illustrations and Maps ................................................................... xv Abbreviations ................................................................................................ xvii Sub-Saharan Africa Jaco Beyers, Introduction: Christian-Muslim relations in 19th century sub-Saharan Africa ................................................................ 5 Shobana Shankar, British colonial policy towards Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914 ................................................................ 22 Bernard Salvaing, French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914 ............................................................................................. 33 Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914 .................................. 49 Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam Robert Percival Henry Brunton Shaykh Ali Gondar Thomas Bowdich Joseph Dupuis Nathaniel Pearce George Champion Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries William Cornwallis Harris David Boilat Frédéric-Jean Carrère and Eloi-Paul Holle David Livingstone
Jaco Beyers ............................. 51 Jaco Beyers ............................. 55 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 59 Ebrahim Damtew Alyou ..... 67 Makafui Tayviah .................... 71 David Owusu-Ansah ............ 77 Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner ......................... 86 Jaco Beyers ............................. 94 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 100 Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner ......................... 112 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 119 Leland C. Barrows ................ 127 Georgina Jardim .................... 144
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Contents European travellers to Ethiopia in the 19th century European travellers to Central-West Africa in the 19th century Ludwig Krapf Juan Maria Schuver Edward Blyden Samuel Crowther Louis Faidherbe Arthur Rimbaud ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī l-Mundhirī Lorenzo Antonio Massaia Karl Winqvist W.E. Taylor Charles August Blackburn Shaykh Hussein Jibril The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in the 19th century, the Gambia Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi M.S. Cole Karl Kumm CMS policy regarding Islam and Muslims in Africa The Holy Ghost Fathers Universities’ Mission to Central Africa The White Fathers German Protestant Mission in East Africa Ibrahim Njoya Nigerian Muslim responses to the British colonisation of Northern Nigeria Lord Lugard Godfrey Dale Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse Walter Miller
Jaco Beyers and John Chesworth .................... 167 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 179 John Chesworth .................... 195 Alexander Meckelburg ........ 205 Philip Zachernuk .................. 210 Alison FitchettClimenhaga ............................ 219 Leland C. Barrows ................ 229 Avishai Ben-Dror .................. 250 Valerie J. Hoffman ................. 256 Mauro Forno .......................... 265 Klas Lundström ..................... 273 John Chesworth .................... 278 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 290 Ebrahim Damtew Alyou ..... 294 Martha T. Frederiks .............. 300 Makafui Tayviah .................... 318 Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu ....................................... 325 Andrew E. Barnes ................. 332 Martha T. Frederiks and John Chesworth .................... 340 Paul Kollman ......................... 374 Michelle Liebst and John Chesworth .............................. 384 John Chesworth and Martha T. Frederiks ............................. 395 Michael Pesek ........................ 404 Ibrahim Mouiche .................. 418 Klaus Hock ............................. 424 Johnson A. Mbillah .............. 436 John Chesworth .................... 440 Solomon Gebreyes Beyene ..................................... 457 Musa Ahmadu Barnabas Gaiya ........................................ 462
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Latin America Arely Medina and Diego Melo Carrasco, Introduction: Islamophobia in Latin America in the 19th century ................................ 475 R. Kirtie Algoe, Christian-Muslim Relations in the Caribbean 1600-1900 ..................................................................................... 481 Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro, The ‘Islamic Orient’ in Latin American reading and writing culture. Mexico, Central America and Cuba (1808-1914) ..................................................................................... 492 Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914 .................................. 503 José María Guzmán Juan Bustamante José Maria Rufino Rafael Sabás Camacho y García ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī Leonardo Márquez Araujo Vicente Cuesta José Lopez Portillo y Rojas Luis Malanco Vargas Ignacio Martínez Elizondo Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux Francisco J. Herboso España Abbé Ignace Etienne Emin Arslan Antonio Letayf Habib Estefano Vicente Álamos Igualt
Lorenza Petit .......................... 505 José Eduardo Cornelio ........ 509 Habeeb Akande .................... 514 Carlos Enrique Torres Monroy .................................... 520 Jorge Armando Andrade García ....................................... 525 Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro ....................................... 530 Pablo Álvarez Cabello ......... 535 Carlos Martínez Assad ........ 538 Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro ....................................... 541 Sandra Rojo Flores ............... 546 Verónica Ramírez Errázuriz ................................. 550 Gonzalo Maire ....................... 555 Carina Sartori ........................ 560 Pablo Tornielli ....................... 566 Yolotl Valadez Betancourt .............................. 570 Juan José Vagni ...................... 574 Pablo Álvarez Cabello ......... 578
Contributors .................................................................................................. 581 Index of Names ............................................................................................. 589 Index of Titles ................................................................................................ 603
FOREWORD David Thomas The volumes of Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History published so far cover the histories of encounters between Christians and Muslims that continued through long centuries, many from near the beginning of Islam itself. This volume is different. It covers two parts of the world in which the history of the encounter between the two religious traditions is comparatively short, mainly from the early modern period onward. CMR 19 is concerned with the 19th-century history of eastern Africa, including Ethiopia, western Africa and southern Africa – those parts of the continent lying outside the Arab world – and also Latin America, including Mexico and the Caribbean. With the exception of Ethiopia and Nubia, where the presence of Christianity dates back to the early centuries of the faith, and indeed Muslim tradition relates that some followers of Muḥammad sought refuge with the Christian ruler of Axum as early as the very first years of Islam in Mecca, Christianity did not appear in sub-Saharan Africa until the early modern period. It is not unlikely that Islam was known in towns along the Indian Ocean littoral at an early date, brought south by traders from the Islamic heartlands. The ruins of mosques dating from the 10th century are known here, while in the 14th century Ibn Baṭṭūṭa notes several city states established on offshore islands such as Kilwa, Malindi and Lamu. From the 10th century onwards, Muslim traders and wandering mystics began to propagate their faith in central and western Africa through teaching and marvellous feats, gradually bringing local rulers and their people to accept Islam. When European explorers and merchants began to navigate the great rivers of western Africa from the late 15th century, they came across communities whose faith was undeniably Muslim with pronounced Sufi features. Christianity came to Africa south of the Sahara in the wake of exploration from Portugal and Spain, followed by other European nations. Embryonic forms of Protestant mission were implemented from the 17th century onwards, maturing in the 19th century into major missionary societies that were able to raise funds through churches at home, and were the bearers of religious beliefs and practices as well as social values that were distinctively northern European. Roman Catholic missions also active
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during the 19th century include the Holy Ghost Fathers, Missionaries of Africa (the White Fathers) and the Comboni Fathers and Sisters. In some areas, missionary societies and colonial governments worked together to give reassurance and privilege to Christianity, while in others, such as northern Ghana, northern Nigeria and parts of Cameroon, the colonial government saw dangers in allowing Christian mission in Muslim areas and forbade proselytisation. In such relations as they had, Christians and Muslims, while often co-existing harmoniously in day-to-day life, generally reproduced in what they wrote age-old patterns of polemical exchange and repeated arguments from standard interpretations of their scriptures and scholarly authorities that had first been employed more than a thousand years earlier. Dutch settlers first brought their distinct form of Christianity to southern Africa in the 17th century, where in Cape Colony it became a sort of established religion. Protestant missions predominated, though Catholic missions were permitted from 1818, including the Dominicans, Trappists and the Loreto Sisters. Islam came with enslaved workers and political prisoners shipped from Dutch possessions in the East Indies. It was tolerated at best, and the colonial authorities remained wary of it as a uniting force and potential source of trouble among labourers. With regard to Latin America, Roman Catholic Christianity was assertively imposed on the indigenous inhabitants by the Spanish and Portuguese from the 16th century onwards, so much so that few traces of ancestral faiths remained – though many forms of popular Christianity continued to absorb elements of these. The Catholic hierarchy was set up along European lines, and the Christian faithful looked to Rome for leadership and inspiration as they had always done everywhere. As with southern Africa, Islam came at first with enslaved workers from western Africa, some of whom had been teachers and religious leaders in their home communities. A form of the faith containing local African features continued to be practised in the New World, producing shock among more traditional Muslims from the Middle East when they arrived in the 19th century. Another route of arrival was the migrations that were forced by internal tensions in the Middle East from about 1885 onwards, towards the end of the period treated here. Escaping from Ottoman oppression, populations of Christians and young male Muslims, mainly Shīʿīs in the first wave before the First World War, from Syria, Lebanon and above all Palestine made their way to the countries of the southern cone of Latin America, particularly Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
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Few written records are to be found of any involvement between Christians and Muslims in Latin America until relatively recently. What is available is mostly travelogues written by rich pilgrims to the Holy Land, who remarked on the rundown and shabby conditions of the Christian religious sites because of Muslim Ottoman neglect. It was commonplace for Latin American pilgrims to judge the Muslims they encountered as inferior to their fellow Christians both religiously and socially. CMR 19 covers the written records, such as they are, that survive from these vast regions of the world in the century leading up to the First World War. These records frequently reflect attitudes inherited from earlier times, though at least on the Christian side there are a few signs of fresh interest in the other as beings who should be freed from their oppressive conditions and given the respect they rated as fellow human beings. The aim of the volumes in the CMR series is to provide full analytical accounts of the known works written by Christians and Muslims about and against the other throughout the world in the period 600-1914, and also of works that provide direct or indirect evidence of the attitudes that were conveyed. The aim is to be exhaustive, and here as much as in earlier volumes the editors have been generously helped by scholars both well-established and new. The work has been particularly taxing, not only because it has not been easy to find scholars interested in the particular concerns of CMR, but also because the restrictions and closures imposed by Covid 19 have made library research difficult. Nevertheless, this volume is presented as a full account of works from within each faith about the other that appeared in what can be called sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in the century leading up to 1914. Like its predecessors, CMR 19 starts with introductory essays that outline the historical and social background in the parts of the world to be covered. Following these come the entries that make up the bulk of the volume. The principle has been to choose works written about or against the other faith or containing significant information or judgements that cast light on reciprocal attitudes. By their nature, apologetic and polemical works are included, while letters, official reports and works of travel and history also frequently qualify. The reason for including a work may sometimes not seem obvious because its direct references to the other faith are few, though it repeatedly emerges that the work attests to distinct attitudes in the way it is structured or its information has been selected, or occasional comments about the other faith point to the bias of its author. Everything is included that has been judged to contribute in any significant way towards conveying the information about the religious other that
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was possessed by people in these two parts of the world in the 19th century, and towards constructing the impressions about the religious other that they generally held to be true. In most cases, this principle is easily applicable, though in some instances it proves difficult. The approach has therefore been inclusive (perhaps too inclusive), especially regarding works that contain only slight though insightful details or that appear to touch only obliquely on relations. Another principle is that inclusion of works within this volume, like its predecessors, has been decided according to the date of their author’s death, not the date when the works themselves appeared (the date of publication is used where no other information is available). The adoption of this approach has led to evident anomalies at the beginning, where authors may have died in the early 19th century but were mainly or almost entirely active in the 18th century. Other criteria could have been adopted, such as an author’s most active period, though, while this could have worked for some, it would not have helped at all for many others. When it comes to the end-date of the volume, the year 1914, this principle has been relaxed. There is no plan to continue the CMR series beyond the early 20th century, and so, for the sake of completeness, authors who died after 1914 have been included, provided their main period of activity occurred before this limit. Each entry is divided into two main parts. The first is concerned with the author: it contains essential biographical details, an account of their main intellectual activities and writings, the major primary sources of information about them, and scholarly studies on them from the mid-20th century onwards. A small number of entries are concerned with organisations or clusters of authors who were active at roughly the same time and wrote on the same theme, in which case they are situated in the sequence of entries as appropriate. Without aiming to be exhaustive in biographical detail or scholarly study, this section contains enough information to enable readers to pursue further points about the authors and their general activities. The second part of the entry is concerned with the works of the author that are particularly devoted to the other faith. Here the aim is completeness. A work is named and dated, and then in two important sections its contents are described, with emphasis on what it says about Islam or Christianity, and its significance in the history of Christian-Muslim relations is appraised, including any innovative features and influence on later works. The latter sections list publication details (manuscripts where known, and then editions and translations) and studies from roughly the
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middle of the 20th century onwards. Both these sections are intended to be fully up to date at the time of going to press. Like preceding volumes in the series, CMR 19 provides information that will enable a work to be identified, its importance appreciated, and editions and the latest studies located. Each work is also placed as far as possible in chronological order of completion or publication together with other works from the same region that were written at the same time, though this grouping should be regarded as more a matter of organisational expediency than anything else. Proximity between entries is not an indication of any direct relationship between the works on which they were written, let alone influence between them (though this may sometimes be stated by an author or be discernible in the work). In this period, as in any other, it is as likely that an author was influenced by a work written in another country or century as by a work from their immediate locality or time. The task of producing CMR 19 has involved numerous contributors, and it is pleasing to note how many have readily agreed to write entries and have sometimes produced contributions that will remain authoritative for many years to come. Under the direction of David Thomas, the work for this volume was led by John Chesworth (Research Officer), Charles Tieszen (essays), Martha T. Frederiks (western Africa), Jaco Beyers (eastern and southern Africa), and Arely Medina and Diego Melo Carrasco (Latin America), who are members of a much larger team that comprises 25 specialists in total, covering all parts of the world. Several other scholars gave assistance in identifying relevant material, finding contributors and generally lending their expertise. Without their help and interest, the task of assembling the material in this volume could not have been completed. Among many others, special gratitude goes to Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro, Leland Barrows, Ebrahim Damtew Alyou and Makafui Tayviah. In addition, Carol Rowe copy-edited the entire volume with her characteristic acuity, Phyllis Chesworth compiled the indexes and Louise Bouglass prepared the maps. We are deeply indebted to everyone who has contributed to bringing this volume into being, not least colleagues at Brill, Leiden, who at a time of lockdown produced it with their usual efficiency. Extensive efforts have been made to ensure the contents of the volume are both accurate and complete, though in a project that crosses as many boundaries of time, place, language and disciplines as this it would be unrealistic and rash to imagine there are no mistakes or omissions. Details must surely have escaped scrutiny, authors and works could have been
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ignored, unknown historical works may have come to light, new dates and interpretations may have been put forward, and new editions, translations and studies published. Therefore, corrections, additions and updates are cordially invited. They will be incorporated into the online version of CMR and into any further editions. Please send details of omissions and corrections to David Thomas at [email protected].
ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS 1
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Cartoon of the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, carving up the cake of Africa at the Berlin Conference, from L’illustration, journal universel, January 1885; IMGCDB82, CC BY-SA 4.0 ................................................................. 6 Engraving of ‘Pierce in his Abyssinian dress with a young Galla of high rank’ by [Robert] Pollard, from a drawing by Henry Salt, in G. Annesley Mountnorris, Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, London, 1809, vol. 3, facing p. 150 .............................................................................. 87 Coloured engraving of a Wolof man, ‘Mari de la reine du Wolo, Wolof’ (Husband of the queen of Wolo, Wolof), from a painting by D. Boilat, in Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Atlas, Paris, 1853, plate 4 .......................................... 121 Coloured engraving of a Dowiche woman with Fort Sénoudébou on the Falémé River, from a painting by D. Boilat, in Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Atlas, Paris, 1853, plate 16 .................................................................................................. 129 Engraving of ‘The captives’, from H.A. Stern, The captive missionary. Being an account of the country and people of Abyssinia, London, 1868, Frontispiece ..................................... 172 Engraving of the ‘Reception of the mission by the Sultan of Bornu’ by E. Finden, from a sketch by Dixon Denham, in D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 1826, facing p. 106 .................................... 181 Photograph of Samuel Ajayi Crowther by Edward Edwards, taken in London 1864. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London; NPG x132392 ....................................................... 220 Cover of W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, London: RTS for CMS, 1902 ............................................................................................. 281 Engraving of a ‘Mandingo chief’, in R.M. MacBrair, The Africans at home. Being a popular description of Africa and the Africans, London, 1861, p. 15 .............................................. 309 Cover and sūra 1 from M.S. Cole, Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba, Lagos, 1906, p. 3 ................................................................... 328
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ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS Photograph of CMS missionaries at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, 1894. Courtesy of Gladys Beecher Collection, National Museums of Kenya Archives ........................................................... 358 Postcard of Christ Church cathedral, Zanzibar, on the site of the Old Slave Market; YDS/RG101/018/0000/0148, Missionary Postcard Collection, Yale Divinity Library Special Collections, digitised by University of Southern California Libraries ............................................................................ 385 Photograph of the Seventh Caravan of the White Fathers to East Africa (1888). Courtesy of Archives générales des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, photothèque ............................ 398 Map ‘Ostafrika’, from R. Grundemann, Neuer Missions-Atlas mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Deutschen Missionen, Stuttgart, 1896, map 12 ...................................................................... 404 Photograph of ‘Konig Ndjoya aus Bamum’, taken by Anna Wuhrmann between 1911 and 1915. Basel Mission Archives, BMA E-30.29/052, courtesy of Mission 21 ................. 419 Photograph of ‘Casa de Maternidad 3, no 47, 5272’, in Puebla, Mexico, by Lorenzo Becerril (around 1905). Courtesy of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. CC BY-NC 4 .......................................................................................... 493 Illustration of The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, in Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux, Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente, Santiago, n.d., p. 108 .......................................................... 552 Photograph of Etienne Brasil, accompanying an interview in Gazeta de Noticias, Rio de Janeiro, 24 May 1912, p. 2 ............ 561
Map of West Africa ........................................................................... 2 Map of Eastern and Southern Africa ............................................ 3 Map of Latin America and the Caribbean .................................. 474
ABBREVIATIONS BNF ABCFM Berlin I Berlin III CMS DNB
Bibliotheque nationale de France American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Berliner Mission Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für Deutsch-Ostafrika, also known as EMS Church Missionary Society Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 1885-1996; https://www.oxforddnb.com/
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam THREE EMS Edinburgh Missionary Society ICMR Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations LMS London Missionary Society ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004-; http:// www.oxforddnb.com Q Qur’an SEM Swedish Evangelical Mission (Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen) SPCK Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge UMCA Universities’ Mission to Central Africa USPG United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
Sub-Saharan Africa
Map 1. West Africa
Map 2. Eastern and Southern Africa
Introduction: Christian-Muslim relations in 19th century sub-Saharan Africa Jaco Beyers This overview will attempt to identify the political, religious, literary and intellectual developments that influenced relations between Muslims and Christians in East, Western and Southern Africa during the period of colonialism before 1914.1 The 19th century in sub-Saharan Africa was characterised mainly by colonisation, the end of slavery, the rise of nationalism and religious expansion. This introduction will be structured under these headings. Colonisation In the early 19th century, Southern and East Africa were often perceived by Europeans as a vast, empty tract of land that was ready to be taken by those willing to venture into the interior. The ‘lazy and uneducated inhabitants’ were deemed unworthy or not deserving to possess it.2 Soon it was discovered that in fact Africa was not empty, but rich in humans to meet the need for labourers and resources that ranged from wood, minerals and ivory to livestock and fish. The interior of West Africa had been known to Europeans much earlier than other parts of the continent, as explorers had sailed along the coast since the 14th century. It had long been an arena of contestation and trade, which led to the development of merchant cities along the main rivers. Religious development in West Africa took place differently from the rest of Africa because of the exposure of African religion to Islam. From the 1 The following sources on this topic are fundamental: on Muslim expansion, N. Levtzion and R.L. Pouwels (eds), History of Islam in Africa, Athens OH, 2000; D. Robinson, Muslim societies in African history, Cambridge, 2004; R. Loimeier, Muslim societies in Africa. A historical anthropology, Bloomington IN, 2013; on Christian expansion, S. Paas, Christianity in Eurafrica. A history of the Church in Europe and Africa, Washington DC, 2017; E. Isichei, A history of Christianity in Africa, London, 1995; B. Sundkler and C. Steed, A history of the Church in Africa, Cambridge, 2000. 2 J. Barrow, Travels into the interior of southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798: including […] sketches of the physical and moral characters of the various tribes of the inhabitants surrounding the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 2, London, 1806, pp. 7, 46.
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17th century, numerous European explorers entered the interior, introducing Christianity to local communities.3 In many places, during the 18th century local tribal leaders entertained Muslim scholars while retaining ancient African traditions.4 Ongoing efforts by Europeans to access the riches of Africa led to attempts not only to legitimise colonisation but also to regulate it. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, Africa was divided between the dominant powers in the Berlin Act of 1885, resulting in a scramble for possession. The ill-considered boundaries that were drawn determined the national boundaries of many African nations until the late 20th century. Colonisation was deemed part of the process of civilising the continent, as Portuguese, German, British, Belgian, Italian and French settlements were established in all parts. One of the agreements set out in the Berlin
Illustration 1. The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, carves up the cake of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884-5, as William Gladstone and other European leaders look on
3 See D. Owusu-Ansah, ‘Joseph Dupuis’; M.T. Frederiks, ‘Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries’; M.T. Frederiks, ‘European travellers to Central-West Africa in the 19th century’; L. Barrows, ‘Louis Faidherbe’ in CMR 19, 77-85, 100-11, 179-94, 229-49. 4 N. Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan to 1800’, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam in Africa, 63-91, p. 75.
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Act was to end all trade in slaves by European and also Islamic powers. Alongside the decision to legitimise claims to the land came the decision to stop trading in the continent’s inhabitants and displacing them.5 Even though the Ottoman Empire was represented at Berlin by Mehmed Said Pasha (1838-1914),6 the empire was not regarded by Europeans as eligible to share in the division of Africa. Thus, no Muslim colonies in Africa were allocated by the conference. The result was that the largest numbers of Muslims in the world came under the rule not of the Ottoman sultan but of the British crown.7 French colonies in West Africa comprised mainly Muslims, but although they were granted self-determination, they were considered subject to French colonial rule. Even Egypt was only ruled temporarily and partially (from 1811) by the Ottoman Empire. Development of colonies Trade, slavery, wars and missionary work were the biggest factors in determining the spread of religions in Africa. Exploring the interior of the continent made Europeans aware of the possibilities of expansion. Missionary-explorers such as David Livingstone (1813-73) entered Africa with the aim of Christianising and civilising the inhabitants, but also of investigating new possibilities for trade routes. The two aims were rarely differentiated and enjoyed equal priority. As David Bosch describes the process: ‘Colonization and Christianization not only went hand in hand but were two sides of the same coin.’8 European businessmen such as Cecil John Rhodes (1857-1902) attempted to unite the African continent by way of connecting the Cape to Cairo by a railway. This would have emphasised the reach of the British Empire and enhanced trade. Rhodes saw his task as the ‘extension of the British Empire’.9
5 T. Pakenham, The scramble for Africa, London, 2010, pp. 201-18; S. Förster et al. (eds), Bismarck, Europe and Africa, The Berlin Africa conference 1884-1885 and the onset of partition, Oxford, 1988; S. Katzenellenbogen, ‘It didn’t happen at Berlin. Politics, economics and ignorance in the setting of Africa’s colonial boundaries’, in P. Nugent and A.I. Asiwaju (eds), African boundaries. Barriers, conduits and opportunities, London, 1996, 21-34. 6 Mehmed Said Pasha was the grand vizier of Turkey under Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909). 7 A.F. Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre of Christian engagement with Islam in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999) 155-74, p. 167. 8 D.J. Bosch, Transforming mission, New York, 1991, p. 275. 9 W.T. Stead, The last will and testament of Cecil John Rhodes, with elucidatory notes, London, 1902, p. 89.
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The Muslim presence in Africa started in Egypt in the early 7th century. Trade routes along the east coast and in West Africa gave Islam a foothold in these regions, followed by the establishment of places for worship along the coasts and in parts of the interior. In southern Africa, slavery and political prisoners were the beginning of Muslim communities in the region in the 17th century,10 while in West Africa jihads alongside trading led to its spread in the course of the 10th century.11 Islam was present along the east coasts of Africa at an early date. While he was still in Mecca, the Prophet Muḥammad is known12 to have sent some of his close followers to Aksum, the capital of Nubia, to seek the ruler’s protection from his enemies. Following the trade routes, Islam spread to the interior,13 leading to emerging Muslim states under local leaders. By the 16th century, one-third of the population of the inland highlands in the Horn of Africa was Muslim,14 although the Christian states in these parts remained dominant.15 Only later, with explorers and missionaries (at times the same persons), did Christianity make its presence felt in East Africa. In West Africa, Christianity had been introduced by Portuguese seafarers as early as the 15th century. Eventually, when Islam and Christianity met, it was not intellectual interest that caused individuals to write about the other, but rather curiosity and condemnation of them. Andrew Walls argues that Africa was ‘the theatre for Christian engagement with Islam’ during the 19th century.16 Accounts by missionaries and explorers of encounters between Christians and Muslims During the late 19th century, several Europeans made journeys through Africa. Their motivations were varied and included political interests (e.g. Walter Chichele Plowden [1820-60] and Captain Charles D. Cameron [182570]), investigating possible trade opportunities (e.g. George Annesley
10 Loimeier, Muslim societies, p. 15. 11 Robinson, Muslim societies, p. 28. 12 Robinson, Muslim societies, p. 111. 13 Loimeier, Muslim societies, pp. 12, 22. 14 Robinson, Muslim societies, p. 112. 15 Christianity was present in Egypt and northern Sudan (Robinson, Muslim societies, p. 109), and Ethiopia (O.U. Kalu [ed.], African Christianity. An African story, Pretoria, 2005, p. 77) from the first centuries. 16 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 155.
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[1770-1844], Henry Salt [1780-1827], Charles X. Rochet d’Hericourt [1801-54], Edmund Combes [1812-48] and Maurice Tamisier [1810-74]), military expeditions (e.g. Nikolay Stepanovich Leontiev [1862-1910], William McEntyre Dye [1831-99], Trevenen James Holland [1836-1910], and Henry Montague Hozier [1836-1907]), missionary and humanitarian activities (e.g. Henry Dufton [d. 1868], David Livingstone [1830-73], Henry Stern [1820-85] and Albert Schweitzer [1875-1965]), scientific expeditions (e.g. Thêophile Lefevbre [1811-60], Philipp Victor Paulitschke [1854-99], William Francis Prideaux [1840-1914], Eduard Rüppell [1794-1884] and Antoine Thomson d’Abbadie [1810-97]), or merely adventure (e.g. John Bell [d. 1860]). The accounts of meetings between such travellers and Muslim and African communities greatly enrich our understanding of Christian and Muslim relations.17 Various experiences were recorded. Livingstone’s many encounters with Muslims resulted in diverse evaluations of the Muslim character, from his comments about good friends and loyal companions, and on morality and spirituality, to remarks about ‘heartlessness’ and ‘falsehood’.18 Many of these must be read against typical Victorian stereotyping of non-Christians. As for the uneasy relationship between Christians and Muslims that Livingstone mentions, the German-born missionary Karl Kumm (18741930) – described as ‘the last Livingstone’ – makes the observation that the unwritten policy between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia and Sudan seems to have been ‘Leave us alone, and we will leave you alone’.19 This created distance and animosity between the two, as the presence of the other was considered ‘unwelcome’. Johan Ludwig Krapf (1810-81), explorer and missionary to Ethiopia and East Africa, also encountered Muslims on his journeys. His studies of local languages and geographical notes while he was engaged in evangelism, provide invaluable information about the presence of Islam in Africa. Krapf’s descriptions of Muslim food, clothing and customs should be seen as based on an anthropological perspective.20 17 See J. Beyers and J. Chesworth, ‘European travellers to Ethiopia in the 19th century’, in CMR 19, 167-78. 18 H. Waller, The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa from 1865 to his death. Continued in a narrative of his last moments and sufferings, obtained from his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, vol. 2, London, 1874, p. 74; see G. Jardim, ‘David Livingstone’, in CMR 19, 144-66. 19 H.K.W. Kumm, Khont-hon-Nofer. The lands of Ethiopia, London, 1910, p. 129; see A. Barnes, ‘Karl Kumm’, in CMR 19, 332-9. 20 See J. Chesworth, ‘CMS in East Africa’, in CMR 19, 355-73.
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The end of colonisation was marked by an emerging sense among Africans of the need for independence, starting from the early 20th century. This was only the beginning of a very long process which was strongly influenced by World War I (1914-18) and would be concluded during the 1960s, when most countries in Africa attained independence. By this time, many colonialists from Europe and their offspring born in Africa looked on Africa as their home. The result was many colonial wars,21 as indigenous people struggled to attain political and economic freedom, achieving a newly-gained identity. Part of this identity was religious affiliation. The role played by religion in the struggle for independence and the rise of nationalism in Africa is a topic worthy of full investigation. Slavery From the earliest times, Africans had been taken from their homeland and exported as slaves to many parts of the world. This was not only a Western practice, as many Arabs – as well as Africans – had long been dealing in slaves. Charles Robinson (1861-1925), a missionary to northern Nigeria, thought that slavery could be viewed as integral to Islam.22 In some places, slaves were not only taken from Africa, but were also brought there. This contributed to the emergence of Islam in southern Africa and the Indian Ocean plantation islands, where many slaves had been brought from Indonesia and India. At the end of the 18th century, Carl Thunberg and George Forster recorded acts of worship by Muslim slaves,23 and John Barrow, when he was living at the Cape, described how Muslims who had not been permitted to build a madrassa resorted to worshipping in a stone quarry.24 Robert Percival, a British soldier stationed at the Cape in the early 19th century, wrote an account of the ways in which Christians and Muslims interacted. He also noted that slaves were ill-treated under Dutch rule,25 21 Compare the Sudanese war (1881-99), the Anglo-Boer wars (1877-1902), the Frontier Zulu wars in southern Africa (1879), and the uprisings in south-western Africa (1915). Even the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya (1952-60) can be regarded as a continuation of the anticolonial struggle. 22 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 170. 23 See J. Beyers, ‘Georg Forster and Carl Peter Thunberg’, in CMR 12, 811-18. 24 John Barrow was the private secretary (1797-1802) to the first British governor to the Cape Colony, Lord Macartney; Barrow, Travels, p. 146. 25 R. Percival, An account of the Cape of Good Hope, containing an historical view of its original settlement by the Dutch, its capture by the British in 1795, and the
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and that the ‘Moor’, as he called Muslims,26 appeared to be humble and submissive and willing to do the work assigned to them. Due to the influence of Muslim leaders, relations in the community changed. Achmat Davids emphasises the influence of Tuan Guru (17121807), a prominent imam in Cape Town, on the social stratification of the emerging Muslim community.27 In his treatise Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān, he encouraged Muslim slave owners and slaves to co-exist harmoniously, stressing that differences between people are based on degrees of piety and not social or financial status.28 Under British rule, slaves in the Cape Colony were set free. In fact, colonists and slaves both experienced the arrival of the British in the Cape Colony in 1795 and again in 1806 as a deliverance from the strict trade policies and movement restrictions imposed upon them by the Dutch.29 British rule brought about not only the emancipation of slaves but also relaxation of taxes for colonists. Whereas under Dutch rule religious affiliation was restricted, British rule provided religious freedom for all Christian denominations and also all other religions. One consequence of this was the establishment for the first time of a mosque in Cape Town, generally thought to have been built by Tuan Guru in 1797. Thanks to the intellectual activities at the madrassa, Muslim communities in the Cape grew rapidly. The Dutch policy of transferring political prisoners from their various colonies to the Cape resulted in the accumulation of Muslim leaders and intellectuals there. Their presence and influence made the Cape a hub for the development of religious ideas, including reflection on how Muslims could remain true to their faith while living under their colonial masters. Muslims in the Cape, who came from different cultural backgrounds, found communication difficult. Attempts by Tuan Guru to create a new language (Arabic-Afrikaans) facilitated communication and the spread of Islam. Slaves in particular made ready converts, mainly because they were different policy pursued there by the Dutch and British Governments, London, 1804, p. 250; for fuller details, see J. Beyers, ‘Robert Percival’, in CMR 19, 55-8. 26 Percival, Account of the Cape of Good Hope, p. 297. 27 A. Davids, ‘Muslim-Christian relations in nineteenth century Cape Town’, Kronos. Journal of Cape History (1992) 80-101, p. 88. 28 Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam (Tuan Guru), Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān (‘Knowledge of Islam and faith’ [manuscript]), 1781; for fuller details, see J. Beyers, ‘Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam’, in CMR 19, 51-4. 29 The Cape Colony was first occupied by British forces in 1795, but soon afterwards (1802 with the signing of the Treaty of Amiens) it reverted to Dutch rule until the British occupied it from 1806.
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treated by the Dutch as ‘socially dead and non-persons’.30 Islam accepted converts irrespective of race, status or ancestry,31 so slaves were more likely to become Muslims than Christians. Under public pressure, the British parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in March 1807. This was the start of a long process that ended in July 1833 with the passing of the Slavery Emancipation Act, which guaranteed freedom to all slaves in British colonies.32 The impetus given by Christian mission work in Africa towards the abolition of slavery in Britain and other countries of Europe cannot be ignored. This dramatic change resulted in a new configuration of relations between free people and slaves and their descendants. It also brought a new perspective to relations between Muslims and Christians. Equality, irrespective of social status or religion, contributed to the rise of nationalism because, if colonists and indigenous people were equal, there was no reason why the colonist should still be considered to have exclusive political power. Religious expansion During the first half of the 19th century, Christianity and Islam were relatively small minority presences in sub-Saharan Africa, with indigenous religions overwhelmingly in the majority, though Christian (such as in Cape Verde and Ethiopia) and Muslim communities did exist in parts.33 From the second half of the 19th century, both Christianity and Islam spread dramatically throughout Africa as a result of missionary activities. In a 1975 article, William Arens attempted to indicate that Islam was more successful than Christianity because it was ‘more compatible’ with African cosmology, morals and customs.34 Much earlier, Edward Blyden had indicated that the success of Islam in Africa was the result 30 A. Cassiem, ‘Shayk Yusuf of Macassar; scholar, Sufi, national hero. Towards constructing identity and history at the Cape’, Kawalu. Journal of Local Culture 1 (2014) 168-80, p. 172. 31 Cassiem, ‘Shayk Yusuf of Macassar’, p. 172. 32 S. Drescher, ‘European antislavery. From empires of slavery to global prohibition’, in D. Eltis et al. (eds), The Cambridge world history of slavery, vol. 4, Cambridge, 2017, 373-98, pp. 375-7; P.E. Lovejoy, Transformations in slavery. A history of slavery in Africa, Cambridge, 2012, p. 290. 33 Pew Research Centre, ‘Tolerance and tension: Islam and Christianity in subSaharan Africa’, 2010; www.pewforum.org/2010/04/15/executive-summary-islam-and -christianity-in-sub-saharan-africa/. 34 W. Arens, ‘Islam and Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. Ethnographic reality or ideology?’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 15/59 (1975) 443-56, p. 444.
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of a ‘healthy amalgamation’ between the two,35 because Islam did not destroy local institutions but ‘superimposed Arab superstructure on a permanent indigenous substructure’; many Africans accepted Islam because of its ‘milder and conciliatory nature’.36 Christianity, on the other hand, approached Africans as slaves and as inferior in nature. Africans under Christianity were forced to conform to the views of the oppressor, whereas Muslim Africans were taught to read, particularly the Qur’an, and think for themselves.37 The expansion of religions in Africa did not always take place peacefully, as is attested by Muslim expansion through jihadist movements in West Africa during the 19th century. Under Shaykh Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817), a Fulani preacher from the Torodbe or Toronkowa clan,38 the ‘great jihad against infidels’39 erupted, leading to the removal of the rulers of the Hausa states and the establishment of Islam as the dominant religion. The Toronkowa clan had quickly accepted Islam since its arrival in the region in the 13th century and, as a result of their education, obtained influential positions in the courts of the Hausa kings.40 Dan Fodio frequently visited the court of the Hausa king of Gobir, where he questioned him on his treatment of Muslims and his imposition of taxes on them.41 He became known as a champion for social justice. When he fell into disfavour under Bawa’s successor, King Yunfa, in 1802, he had to flee for his life. He established a community on the border of Gobir and started to raise an army to start a jihad against the Hausa kings. He quickly deposed all of them in the region and established a united Islamic state, with himself as the first sultan, known as the Sokoto Caliphate, which stretched to the current borders of Cameroon, Niger and Chad. Sharīʿa law was enforced and the purity of Islam maintained. Dan Fodio’s more than one hundred works contributed to the formation of Islam as the dominant religion in the region.42
35 E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, Baltimore MD, 1994 [1888], p. 14; see P. Zachernuk, ‘Edward Blyden’, in CMR 19, 210-18. 36 Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, p. 14. 37 Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, pp. 14-16. 38 Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan’, p. 85. 39 Loimeier, Muslim societies, p. 108. 40 Loimeier, Muslim societies, p. 109. 41 V. Comolli, Boko Haram: Nigeria’s Islamist insurgency, London, 2015. 42 I.M. Lapidus, A history of Islamic societies, New York, 20143, pp. 469-72.
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There were several similar jihadist movements during the 19th century in West Africa.43 Besides Dan Fodio, the jihad of al-Hajj Umar Tal (17941864) is noteworthy. Umar Tal was born into the Torodbe tribe in presentday Senegal and became a member of the Tijāniyya, a newly introduced Sufi order to West Africa.44 He claimed that he received revelations from the Prophet Muḥammad and from God, and asserted the superiority of the Tijāniyya, which brought him into confrontation with local leaders. He also later based his military actions against non-Muslims on inspiration from the Tijāniyya.45 After performing the pilgrimage to Mecca (1828-30) and visiting the Hamdullahi and Sokoto caliphates, he was encouraged to spread Tijānī sufism in west Africa.46 His jihad from 1852 onwards was directed mainly at non-Muslims, particularly the Tamba and Bamana kingdoms. After acquiring weapons from the British and French, his jihad became more ambitious and was supported by Muslim leaders in the region. David Robinson comments that this jihad was different from others in the sense that Umar Tal did not intend to reform non-Muslim regimes but to destroy them.47 He had no intention of establishing mosques, schools or courts. After early successes, his jihad state included parts of Senegal, Mali and Guinea.48 During the military campaign of 1864, he was killed when local Muslim leaders revolted against his rule, and the remnants of the state were destroyed by the French retaliation of 1890 and 1893, leading to the establishment of colonial Sudan.49 The phenomenon of the jihadist movements in 19th-century West Africa can be regarded as resistance to European colonial rule.50 Their rise is interpreted by Nehemia Levtzion as a reaction by marginalised rural Muslim clerics against rulers in the cities51 and it should also be seen against the backdrop of imperialist pressures.52 43 Compare Samori, the leader of the Mandinka in upper Niger, on whom see D. Robinson, ‘Revolutions in the western Sudan’, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, 131-52, p. 143. 44 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 140. 45 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 141. 46 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 141. 47 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 142. 48 Also referred to as the Toucouleur Empire; D. Robinson, The holy war of Umar Tal, Oxford, 1985. 49 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 143. 50 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 143. 51 Levtzion, ‘Islam in the Bilad al-Sudan’, p. 85. 52 W.F.S. Miles, ‘Religious pluralisms in northern Nigeria’, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, 209-24, p. 210.
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The main focus of the jihad movements was not against Europeans, even though Umar Tal was actively engaged in an armed struggle with the French in the Senegal valley. Many Muslim leaders encouraged their followers to participate in a hijra (mass migration) to the east and north, to settle in Sudan, Mauritania and Morocco, contributing to the rapid spread of Islam there. Other Muslim leaders, however, encouraged their followers to remain in West Africa in spite of European colonial rule.53 One example of Christian expansion in West Africa is the mission work carried out by Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1809-91).54 He was from the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria, enslaved as a child and shipped across the Atlantic, rescued from the slave ship at sea, declared free in Freetown, educated by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Sierra Leone and sent back to Nigeria as a missionary. From 1857, he led the mission efforts in the Niger territories. According to Andrew Walls, he can be considered as one who successfully developed an African Christian approach to Islam in an African environment.55 Christianity also entered West Africa by violent means. Through the Royal Niger Company (in existence 1879-1900), the British established opportunities to claim the lower Niger river as a protectorate under the guise of trade and mercantile endeavours. This indirect way of establishing rule was an attempt to prevent German expansion in the region. The British gradually forced the communities surrounding the Sokoto Caliphate to accept their dominance, and by 1903 the majority of the emirates were in British hands. The Sokoto Caliphate finally fell in that year, when the Muslims surrendered to the armed forces of the British governor of the region, General Frederick Lugard.56 In 1914, the southern and northern Nigerian protectorates were united as one colony. In The dual mandate in British tropical Africa (1922) Lugard discusses British indirect rule over its colonies in Africa (p. 586). He suggests that the spread of Christianity would end pagan and barbaric customs, and recommends that the British government should support missionaries working in Africa. This plan was intended to ensure that Britain maintained its position as the foremost colonial power.
53 Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 144. 54 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, pp. 161, 170; see A. Fitchett-Climenhaga, ‘Samuel Crowther’, in CMR 19, 219-28. 55 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 163. 56 See J.A. Mbillah, ‘Lord Lugard’, in CMR 19, 436-9.
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As with Islam, Christian missionary endeavours were hampered not only by the other religion, but by internal divisions between Lutherans, Anglicans, Roman Catholics and smaller Protestant groups. One case in point is religious development in Uganda, where Muslims and Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries clashed.57 Islam first arrived in Buganda in 1840, and Christianity during the 1870s, following Henry Stanley’s letter to the Daily Telegraph calling for missionaries and claiming that ‘in one year you will have more converts to Christianity than all other missions united can muster’. The CMS and the White Fathers responded.58 In the late 1880s, the work of CMS missionaries was given support by the British government, which regarded the Muslim presence as ‘a potential threat to their interests’. British forces subdued Muslims in the area and Christianity was able to spread even faster through the colonial education system.59 Not all encounters between Christians and Muslims were characterised by enmity. Shaykh Ali Musa (date of birth unknown, d. 1853) of Gondar, the capital of Ethiopia, was a figure whom both Christians and Muslims respected for his endeavours to gather the Christian and Muslim leaders of the city for dialogue. In particular, in 1844 he arranged a meeting between the leaders of the Church and the local Muslims. He was also instrumental as a mediator between competing factions among Muslim communities and even within the royal household in Gondar and reflected in many of his poems on peaceful co-existence between Christians and Muslims.60 Relations between Muslims and Christians in Ethiopia were always stressful, especially during the 19th century. In the previous century, Muḥammad Shāfī ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭāhir (1743-1815), from the district of Wällo, had been one of the most renowned Ethiopian mystics (he belonged to the Qādiriyya order) and militant Muslim scholars of his time.61 He was zealous in reviving and propagating Islam, and promoted 57 A. Chande, ‘Radicalism and reform in East Africa’, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, 349-69, p. 354. 58 H.M. Stanley, ‘Letter’, Daily Telegraph, 15 November 1875; see Sundkler and Steed, History of the Church, pp. 567-8; also J. Chesworth and M.T. Frederiks, ‘The White Fathers’, in CMR 19, 395-403; J. Chesworth, ‘CMS in East Africa’. 59 Chande, ‘Radicalism and reform’, p. 354; see Sundkler and Steed, History of the Church, pp. 584-9. 60 See E. Damtew Alyou, ‘Sheikh Ali Gondar’, in CMR 19, 67-70. 61 H. Ahmed, art. ‘Muḥammad Šāfī’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Wiesbaden, 2007, vol. 3, pp. 1057a-8a; R.S. O’Fahey, The writings of the Muslim peoples of northeastern Africa [Arabic literature of Africa, vol. 3a], Leiden, 2003, pp. 55-7; H. Ahmed, Islam in nineteenth-century Wallo, Ethiopia, Leiden, 2001. Thanks to Avishai Ben-Dror for providing details about this figure.
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jihad as an instrument for its consolidation, preaching a rigorous form of the faith to local Muslims, and also to Christians. He is known to have composed about 30 treatises, none of them so far published. While these do not appear to have attracted much scholarly attention, investigation may well show that they include arguments against Christianity. In 1878, Emperor Yohannes IV (r. 1872-89) declared that all Muslims in his empire must either convert to Christianity or leave. Documents such as the poems by Sheikh Hussein Jibril (1811-1916) reflect Muslim disappointment and grievance at this. Yohannes’s successor, Menelik II (r. 1889-1913), changed this and granted religious freedom to all in the empire.62 In the southern parts of Africa, Muslims met with mixed success in establishing communities in the interior. Islam was introduced into Botswana around 1882 by Muslim traders from southern Africa.63 The first traders brought families and friends to assist them in their businesses, forming the first Muslim communities in Botswana. As the communities grew, the need for schools and mosques increased.64 But as there were no intellectuals or political leaders (unlike in southern Africa) and no concentrated efforts to convert, Islam did not spread in Botswana.65 Furthermore, under British colonial policies, Muslim traders were not as privileged as European traders and often experienced animosity from Christian Europeans, leading to the marginalisation of Islam in Botswana.66 Islam in Madagascar has a long history. Apparently the first Muslims reached Madagascar from East Africa in the 7th century. Later more Muslims arrived from the Comoros Islands, as Arab traders came to Madagascar. When the Portuguese arrived in the 15th century Christianity prevented Muslim expansion on the island. Some evidence of early mosques built on the coast is evident. Protestant missionary societies arrived in the 19th century, the London Missionary Society in 1817 and the Norwegian Missionary Society in 1866. Both missions worked in the Merina Kingdom in central Madagascar helping to establish a system of government. The island was colonised by France in 1895.67 62 See Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, ‘Tārika nagaśt’, in CMR 19, 458-61. 63 J.N. Amanze, ‘Islam in Botswana during the colonial period, 1882-1966’, Botswana Notes and Records 30 (1998) 67-78, p. 69. 64 Amanze, ‘Islam in Botswana’, p. 74. 65 Amanze, ‘Islam in Botswana’, p. 76. 66 Amanze, ‘Islam in Botswana’, p. 77. 67 S. von Sicard, ‘Malagasy Islam. Tracing the history and cultural influences of Islam in Madagascar’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31 (2011) 101-12; P. Desplat, art. ‘Madagascar’, in EI3; K.H. Skeie, Building God’s kingdom. Norwegian missionaries in highland Madagascar
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Christian missionary work on the east coast of Africa started seriously in 1577, when the Dominican order established their first house on the island of Mozambique.68 The established Muslim communities on the coast and in the interior were gradually converted by Dominican and Jesuit missionaries in Portuguese territories, though adherence to Christianity did not continue after 1698 following the Portuguese withdrawal from areas that are now in Kenya and Tanzania. Christian mission only recommenced in 1844 with the arrival of Ludwig Krapf of the CMS.69 Ogbu Kalu points out that the hostility between Roman Catholics and Protestants that had originated during the Reformation continued and even damaged missionary work during the 19th century.70 The First Vatican Council (1869-70) emphasised the authority of the pope over worldly matters and invigorated mission work. The endeavours of the Comboni Fathers, the Holy Ghost Fathers and the Jesuits in East Africa serve as examples of this. Mission work exclusively among Muslims was conducted by the Missionaries of Africa, a Roman Catholic order established by Charles Lavigerie in 1868 and generally known as the White Fathers after their white robes, which resembled Arab clothing.71 The expansion of Islam on the east coast of Africa was influenced by the presence of the Omani Busaidi Arabs in Zanzibar.72 From the 1840s, their trade with the interior led to political and religious expansion. On their trips into the interior, Muslim traders from Zanzibar were generally accompanied by at least one mwalimu (ʿālim, ‘teacher’). It was in this way that Islam was introduced to the Yao at Kota Kota (Nkhotakhota) and Mlozi on the shores of Lake Nyasa, where it became established. In the 1870s, with the arrival of missionaries from the Church of Scotland Mission, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and the Cape Dutch Reformed Church Mission to Nyasaland, which began in 1889, individual Christians interacted with Islam amongst the Yao. When missionaries wrote their assessment of Islam in the tribe, James Stewart of the Livingstonia Mission (Free Church of Scotland) claimed that ‘the Arabs and Swahili were as full of all deceit and lying and hatred of Christianity 1866-1903, Leiden, 2013; S. Randrianja and S. Ellis, Madagascar, a short history, London, 2008. 68 Kalu, African Christianity, p. 183. 69 See Chesworth, ‘CMS in East Africa’. 70 Kalu (ed.), African Christianity, p. 224. 71 See D.S. Cucarella, ‘Charles Lavigerie’, in CMR 18, 934-58; Chesworth and Frederiks, ‘White Fathers’. 72 D.C. Sperling, ‘The coastal hinterland and interior of East Africa’, in Levtzion and Pouwels, History of Islam, 273-302, p. 277.
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as the very devil himself’.73 In 1910, A.L. Hofmeyr of the Cape Dutch Reformed Mission at Mvera wrote Islam in Nyasaland, describing the religion of the ‘False Prophet’ and saying what ‘a serious matter the struggle against it is for the Church of Christ’.74 In 1911, William Johnson of the UMCA wrote ‘Mohammedanism and the Yaos’, in which he made observations about challenges to effective Christian mission amongst the Muslim community.75 In The evangelization of slaves and Catholic origins in eastern Africa Paul Kollman describes the work carried out by the Holy Ghost Fathers among slaves during the 19th century, apparently among freed slave children on Zanzibar Island and later continuing the project on the mainland.76 Their intention was to isolate the children from the predominantly Muslim surroundings and provide them with a Christian education. Some successes are recorded, although the project was marred by subtle racism. Protestant mission work was carried out by various societies and churches, based on Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, Methodist and Presbyterian theology, and included the London Missionary Society (LMS),77 the Church Missionary Society (CMS)78 and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).79 The best known missionaries were probably David Livingstone of the LMS, working in Central Africa,80 from the CMS Samuel Ajayi Crowther in West Africa, Samuel Gobat and Christian Kugler81 in Ethiopia, and Ludwig Krapf
73 D.S. Bone, ‘The development of Islam in Malawi and the response of the Christian churches’, in D.S. Bone (ed.), Malawi’s Muslims. Historical perspectives, Blantyre, 2000, 11354, pp. 115-21; K.T. Moller, ‘Developing principles for mission in a Muslim context. The Yawo of Malawi’, Pretoria, 2015 (PhD Diss. University of Pretoria); see also D.S. Bone, Introduction to Islam in Malawi, Mzuzu, Malawi, 2021, pp. 115-32. 74 A.L. Hofmeyr, ‘Islam in Nyasaland’, in Bone, Malawi’s Muslims, 165-72, p. 165. 75 W.P. Johnson, ‘Mohammedanism and the Yaos’, Central Africa 27 (1911) 53-7, 101-5; see M. Liebst and J. Chesworth, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa’, in CMR 19, 384-94. 76 P.V. Kollman, The evangelization of slaves and Catholic origins in eastern Africa, New York, 2005; see P. Kollman, ‘The Holy Ghost Fathers’, in CMR 19, 374-83. 77 This originated in Britain in 1795 as an interdenominational evangelical missionary society, though mainly non-conformist and strongly Congregationalist, known as the LMS since 1818. 78 Founded in 1799, the Church Missionary Society originated in the Anglican community in Britain. 79 Created in 1810 in the USA by predominantly Presbyterian and Reformed churches. 80 See Jardim, ‘David Livingstone’. 81 The Swiss Lutheran Samuel Gobat (1799-1879) and the German Lutheran Christian Kugler (1801-30) were CMS missionaries in Ethiopia from 1827. Gobat’s Journal of three years’ residence in Ethiopia, London, 1834, describes their experiences. Later, in 1846, Gobat became the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem.
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and Alexander Mackay in East Africa,82 and from the ABCFM George Champion and Daniel Lindley in southern Africa.83 Missionary successes produced a vibrant and optimistic outlook for Christianity at the 1910 Edinburgh World Mission Conference. This was preceded by a missionary conference in Cairo in 1906, on the subject of mission to Muslim lands. The churches and mission societies viewed themselves as an exultant army that was about to conquer the world despite the challenges.84 This optimism is reflected in missionary accounts of this period. Temple Gairdner (1873-1928),85 a British CMS missionary to Cairo, gives an almost triumphant account on how Christianity had made huge inroads to Islam all over the world. He reflects how in Sudan Christianity seemed to have gained a foothold, although it was strongly opposed by Islam, and how the first inhabitants of ‘Hausaland’ were converted.86 He indicates that missionaries were not too long ago despondent but were now enthusiastic about inquiries from Muslims on the nature of Christianity. The struggle for souls is presented almost as a competition or war between the two faiths. Gairdner indicates that merchants seemed to be the main means of spreading Islam,87 though the missionary J.L. Macintyre suggests that in Nigeria the means was education.88 Macintyre proposes that literature as well as itinerant preachers should be employed as the ‘weapon’ against Islam. As for East Africa, Godfrey Dale of the UMCA89 reported that the small number of Christians in Uganda was an important beacon of light, with Zanzibar being the largest centre of Islam in East Africa.90 Gairdner’s language is frequently that of a religious conflict between Christianity and Islam, populated with terms such as ‘battle’, ‘weapon’, ‘battlefield’ and ‘struggle’. Adrian Walls notes that missionary sentiment on Africa in Europe during the 19th century was one of ‘competition’ between Islam and Christianity for the souls of the people.91 82 See Chesworth, ‘CMS in East Africa’. 83 See J. Beyers, ‘George Champion’, in CMR 19, 94-9. 84 J.J. Knoetze, ‘A long walk to obedience: Missiology under scrutiny (1910-2010)’, In die Skriflig 51 (2017) a2192, https://doi.org/10.4102/ids.v51i2.2192; Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 168. See S. Ince, ‘Early 20th-century missionary conferences’, in CMR 17, 459-67, pp. 459-60. 85 See M. Shelley, ‘Temple Gairdner’, in CMR 18, 702-33. 86 W.H.T. Gairdner, The reproach of Islam, London, 1909, pp. 211-14. 87 Gairdner, Reproach of Islam, p. 279. 88 Gairdner, Reproach of Islam, p. 284. 89 See J. Chesworth, ‘Godfrey Dale’, in CMR 19, 440-56. 90 Gairdner, Reproach of Islam, p. 286. 91 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 167.
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Conclusion The European exploration of Africa during the 19th century led to economic development. The various resources discovered and exported brought wealth to Christian Westerners as well as to Muslim traders. Colonialism also contributed to economic growth in the sense that taking resources from Africa, reworking the resources into consumables and selling them back to colonists and those colonised on the newly developed markets in the colonies, made spreading Christianity and Islam conducive to successful business. Through western explorations during the 19th century, the features of the interior of Africa became known by the names assigned by Westerners. Europeans also identified the languages, cultures, customs and people, which led to an upsurge in anthropological research. Krapf’s work exemplifies this. Africa was studied and analysed in an attempt to make it easier to govern and control. The 19th century engagement between cultures in Africa should be understood against the backdrop of the frame of thinking associated with the Enlightenment. Objectifying the surroundings, analysing everything (including humans), naming all objects in order to control them, exploiting resources and prescribing behaviour all took place in a context of superior meets inferior. In this regard colonialism can be seen as an extension of Enlightenment thought. The way in which Europeans viewed nature and cultures in Africa is evidence of the objectification and externalisation associated with the Enlightenment. When Andrew Walls summarises the relations between Christianity and Islam in the 19th-century African context, he judges that the period was characterised by lack of actual engagement between Christians and Muslims.92 There was more talk by Christians about Muslims than with Muslims.93 Christianity had internal debates about Islam, and did not regard conversation with Muslims as necessary. This made the 19th century different from earlier periods of encounter between followers of the two faiths.
92 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 170. 93 Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre’, p. 166.
British colonial policy towards Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914 Shobana Shankar The 19th century saw the British interfere regularly in African Muslim societies. From the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 to attempts to codify local laws in colonies from Freetown to Cape Town, British actions brought Islam and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims firmly into the ambit of British imperial policy. At the heart of these political considerations was Islamic influence in African political, economic and cultural institutions that the British sought increasingly to control. One set of important voices shaping the British outlook on Africa, particularly Islamic Africa, in this period came from biographies of freed slaves. ‘On an impressionistic count, maybe almost half of the Africanborn slaves and ex-slaves whose biographies were recorded were Muslims’, writes the historian Robin Law, though he notes that there is no obvious reason for this preponderance except that perhaps the slaves’ literary abilities caught the attention of slave masters or other whites.1 These narratives, which became popularly available from the late 18th century, gave descriptions of African societies, as well as war and captivity, that revealed the power of Muslim kings and merchants. Even freed slaves who were not Muslim by birth, such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who was born in Fanteland on the coast of present-day Ghana and enslaved at the age of about 13 around 1770, argued that Muslim involvement in the slave trade was an important justification for Protestants like the British to remove themselves from involvement in it. This anti-slavery argument echoed sentiments in parishes, where collections were made expressly to redeem people from Muslim slavery.2 But what was unique for men such as Cugoano was new attention to slavery in sub-Saharan Africa, in contrast to the earlier British Christian focus on North African or Ottoman slavery.
1 R. Law, ‘Individualising the Atlantic slave trade. The biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua of Djougou (1854)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002) 113-40, p. 120. 2 D. Killingray, ‘Britain, the slave trade and slavery. An African hermeneutic, 1787’, Anvil 24 (2007) 121-36.
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Some scholars have questioned the authenticity and motivation of freed slave narrators, noting that their conversion to Christianity and the imperative of abolitionism outweighed concerns for factual recounting of their experiences of enslavement. Yet this scrutiny does not detract from information in their accounts about Muslim involvement in the slave trade, which became a central point of British abolitionist politics. This entanglement of issues is illustrated by the case of the Sierra Leone colony, briefly known as Freetown, that was founded in 1787 by a private charity to resettle blacks freed in England and colonial territories, which then became a Crown Colony in 1808, a year after the British government abolished the slave trade. It became the location for the resettlement of freed slaves, mostly ‘liberated Africans’ rescued from slave ships. Whereas earlier travellers and settlers in the region had recognised the power of Muslim Mande traders to the north of Sierra Leone, the British government clearly understood that ‘Muslims played an important part in the economic viability’ of their new colony.3 Therefore, in order for the British to implement their plan to end the slave trade and replace it with ‘legitimate commerce’, they had to tread carefully with Muslim traders. In consequence, these merchants, along with Muslim warriors and teachers who performed a variety of functions from provision of education to ritual leadership, moved into Freetown to capitalise on new economic opportunities. The competition they set up worried Christian missionaries about their own prospects, but economic requirements prevailed over religious concerns for British authorities such as the governor of the colony Charles McCarthy, who was most interested in religion serving the goal of ‘civilizing’ freed Africans by making them good workers for their fledgling community.4 In the midst of rising tensions with Muslim communities in Sierra Leone, the British government and the Anglican Church, through the Church Missionary Society (CMS), made an agreement after 1807 to create a new post-slave African colony modelled on British culture.5 At Rio Mango, the first location of the CMS mission in the coastal Susu region, conflicts between missionaries and Muslim merchants were a factor that led to the CMS moving to Freetown and the West African region; 3 D.E. Skinner, ‘Mande settlement and the development of Islamic institutions in Sierra Leone’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 11 (1978) 32-62, p. 39. 4 P.X. Scanlan, ‘The colonial rebirth of British anti-slavery. The liberated African villages of Sierra Leone, 1815-1824’, American Historical Review 121 (2016) 1085-1113. 5 G. Cole, The Krio of West Africa. Islam, culture, creolization, and colonialism in the nineteenth century, Athens OH, 2013, esp. ch. 2.
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one conflict was over Christians’ reports to the British authorities of Muslims trading slaves.6 The exploitation of the new colonial policies was not restricted to British missionaries; the Crown Colony government in Freetown, faced with increasing numbers of Muslim settlers in enclaves such as Fula Town from the 1810s onwards, also used policies to ‘other’ Muslims and emphasise the civilisational differences and potential rivalries between Christians and Muslims, who shared common origins as followers of Abrahamic religions.7 The goal of policies prohibiting public performance of Muslim rituals and mixing of Christians and Muslims was to give the new African Christians, who came from marginal backgrounds, more power in Freetown politics and to contain that of Muslims without diminishing their economic activities. While British colonial policies were exacerbating religious differences in Sierra Leone, on the River Niger African Christian clergy, many of whom had been slaves and were liberated by the British, negotiated different kinds of relationships with Muslims. The Reverend Samuel Crowther, who was born in Yorubaland in the south-west of modern Nigeria in about 1807 and enslaved at about the age 13, was rescued aboard a Portuguese ship in 1822 and taken to Sierra Leone. He attended Anglican schools and, on account of his brilliance in language studies and other subjects, became a schoolmaster and eventually led the establishment of the Yoruba mission in Nigeria in the 1840s. His outreach to Muslim leaders in the Emirates of Nupe and Ilorin, under the Sokoto Caliphate with its base to the north, was surely inspired by his recognition of the paramount power of Muslims in the region (he had been captured by Muslims) and his understanding of the importance of scholarship in Islam, which he had witnessed in Sierra Leone. He did not antagonistically evangelise Muslims by preaching Christianity but instead debated with them about the Trinity and other elements of the Christian faith that Muslims rejected. He recognised their desire for Arabic Bibles, thereby acknowledging the shared MuslimChristian appreciation for the written word.8 6 B. Mouser, ‘Origins of Church Missionary Society accommodation to imperial policy. The Sierra Leone quagmire and the closing of the Susu Mission, 1804-17’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (2009) 375-402. 7 Cole, Krio, p. 68. 8 A.F. Walls, art. ‘Crowther, Samuel Ajayi’, Dictionary of African Christian biography; https://dacb.org/stories/nigeria/legacy-crowther/; A.F. Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre of Christian engagement with Islam in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1992) 155-74; A. Fitchett-Climenhaga, ‘Heathenism, delusion, and ignorance. Samuel Crowther’s approach to Islam and traditional religion’, Anglican Theological Review 96 (2014) 661-81. See A. Fitchett-Climenhaga, ‘Samuel Crowther’, in CMR 19, 219-28.
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Crowther’s attempts to indigenise Christianity, by embedding it into the epistemological fabric of multi-religious African communities instead of separating it into a sphere seemingly reserved for Europeans and select Africans, were the very reasons why white missionaries in the late 1880s began to challenge him and other African evangelists for their supposed tolerance of heathenism and immoral activities including slavery. While the intra-Christian conflicts in West Africa were many, the increasing hostility of white missionaries to what are by most accounts the successes of Crowther and other African evangelists was occasioned by the realisation that the European scramble for African colonies in the 1880s could tip the balance of religious power in favour of the whites. Crowther’s sense that African Christians were neither in conflict with nor subservient to Muslims stood in distinct contrast to the view of many European missionaries that Islam in Africa should be directly challenged and conquered in order for ‘civilisation’ to advance. This view was embodied by the Scottish explorer-missionary David Livingstone, who first went to southern Africa in 1840 and opened British eyes to the ongoing and extensive slave trade in Central and East Africa.9 However, he did not initially focus on Muslim slavery, concerned as he was about the continued use of slave labour by Afrikaners, despite the many steps taken by Britain and other countries to abolish the trading in slaves in 1807 and then the practice of keeping slaves in 1833. Rather, Livingstone’s multiple missions to the Zambezi River basin convinced him to call vigorously for British intervention in East Africa to end the Arab-Swahili slave trade, which involved the trafficking of people from the interior of Central Africa to the East African coast through Zanzibar and across to India. Livingstone’s writings in the years before his death in 1873 influenced the British public and government to use greater military and economic force in East Africa in order to combat slavery. But new analyses of his diaries enabled by digital technologies suggest that his real personal views were perhaps more complicated. While he cultivated public images of Arab slave traders as villains and of Africans as victims, his own words demonstrated the opposite: admiration for Arab traders and dependence on them and denigration of Africans while he was in Central Africa.10 9 N.C. Brockman, art. ‘Livingstone, David’, Dictionary of African Christian biography; https://dacb.org/stories/southafrica/livingstone1-david/. See G. Jardim, ‘David Livingstone’, in CMR 19, 144-66. 10 R. Nuwer, ‘Decoding the lost diary of David Livingstone’, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 November 2014; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/decoding-lost-diary-david -livingstone-180953385/.
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British colonial policy towards Islam
Added to this evidence of the politicisation of Islam by one of the foremost Britons in Africa at the time, all to justify more British intrusion into African affairs, is the fact that Christian missionaries in Central Africa did not necessarily agree with Livingstone’s apparent contention that it was Arabs who were responsible for violence in the region. During hearings before the 1871 British Committee on the East African Slave Trade, missionaries gave opposing views as to who were the main agents of depopulation in the region, with one citing Livingstone’s accounts to implicate Arabs, while another, based in Zanzibar, claimed that Ngoni invaders from the south were the main culprits.11 Despite this disagreement, the 1871 committee and its conclusion that Arab slavery had to be reined in had significant impacts on British policies and actions related to Muslim trade and politics in eastern Africa and to Christian-Muslim relations. After years of complicated politicking in the Indian Ocean between Zanzibar and Bombay, humanitarians in the British parliament brought greater pressure on the government to act more forcefully against the slave trade. A member of the 1871 committee and leading anti-slavery politician, Sir Bartle Frere, a former governor of Bombay, contacted the then defunct Anti-Slavery Society, which had been instrumental in British abolition in West Africa. As a result of bringing this pressure, Frere was invited to undertake a mission to Zanzibar in 1873 to negotiate for a more robust British consular presence as an anti-slavery measure and as a bulwark for the whole British Empire in the Indian Ocean region. His efforts led to new directions in British imperial policies: first, an increased flow of British capital to East Africa’s Muslim rulers to prop up the sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar against the rising threat of unification with other Muslims, notably the Ottoman Empire and Indian Muslims against the ‘Christian empire’, and, second, the decrease in traditional British support for the Ottoman Empire.12 The British imperial presence helped boost the limited progress so far made by Christian missions working in East Africa since the 1840s under the watch of the sultan of Zanzibar. After Frere had agreed on an anti-slavery campaign with the sultan during his mission in 1873, Frere approached the CMS, the Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) to open homes for freed slaves on the coast that would be financed by the British navy and consul; the authorities 11 G. Shepperson, ‘Islam in central Africa. A historiographical document’, Society of Malawi Journal 59 (2006) 1-5, p. 3. 12 R. Gavin, ‘The Bartle Frere mission to Zanzibar, 1873’, The Historical Journal 5 (1962) 122-48.
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would also entrust freed slaves directly to the missions. Problems emerged soon afterwards, particularly over the authority Muslim rulers had over Christian missionaries’ activities. The region’s Islamic laws and customs, especially relating to manumission, runaways and those who harboured fugitives, tended to favour or at least compensate slave masters and they prevailed, despite British abolition. The upholding of Islamic authority by the British authorities themselves produced political contradictions and led to many conflicts with Christian missionaries. Even after 1890, when the British declared a protectorate over Zanzibar and its dominions, policies towards slavery were designed with the goal of minimising the negative economic and political consequences of the abolition of slavery for Muslim elites, who were seen as a necessary stabilising force in East Africa in the turbulence of colonial occupation.13 While the British used the abolition of slavery as a pretext for intervention in Muslim societies in some cases, an added and growing fear about Islam among British imperialists was its unifying power, particularly after the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857 and ‘secondary revolts’ from the 1860s to the 1880s, which destabilised a vast territory from the Balkans to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.14 In the Sudan, in 1881, the Sufi mystic and general Muḥammad Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh attracted followers who believed he was the Mahdī, the redeemer sent to wage jihad against the Turco-Egyptian colonial government and to lead the faithful at the coming end of the world.15 The Mahdī’s siege of Khartoum lasted for almost a year in 1884-5. It ended in a terrifying defeat of Britain’s ally, Egypt, and led to the death of the former Governor-General of Sudan, Charles Gordon, who had returned on a mission to evacuate Britain’s Egyptian allies. Thus, the Mahdist theocracy was born, and slavery was expanded to support the new state. The British thirst to avenge Gordon’s death was increased by the Mahdī’s slave economy, which was an insult to Gordon’s nearly single-minded goal for British presence in Sudan. This clash of British and Sudanese civilisations
13 R.M. Githige, ‘The issue of slavery. Relations between the CMS and the state on the East African coast prior to 1895’, Journal of Religion in Africa 16 (1986) 209-25. See J. Chesworth, ‘CMS in East Africa’; P. Kollman, ‘The Holy Ghost Fathers’; M. Liebst and J. Chesworth, ‘Universities’ Mission to Central Africa’, in CMR 19, 355-73, 374-83, 384-94. 14 S. Alavi, Muslim cosmopolitanism in the age of empire, Cambridge MA, 2015. 15 See F. Krobb, ‘Framing Muslim fanaticism at the end of the 19th century. German accounts of the Mahdist uprising’, in CMR 18, 63-79, pp. 63-70.
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British colonial policy towards Islam
was religious, as Winston Churchill argued. He had served with British troops under Herbert Kitchener in the conquest of Sudan in 1898 and saw Gordon and the Mahdī as the same in many ways: Both were powerfully swayed by religious fervour. Both exerted great personal influence on all who came in contact with them. Both were reformers. The Arab was an African reproduction of the Englishman; the Englishman was a superior and civilised development of the Arab.16
Gordon’s will to dominate the Sudan was rooted in a sense of spiritual, political and cultural superiority to which many British imperialists, missionaries and humanitarian activists came to subscribe. Abolitionism had led the British into a deeply complicated relationship with Islam and Muslim African states, although Muslim rulers were not opposed to ending slavery, and they increasingly engaged with European ideologies. Thus, finding a European-African political symbiosis offered a more pragmatic possibility; Britain could scarcely afford to police the slave trade and the practice of slavery throughout its own dominions.17 Giving an ‘Islamic gloss’ to British abolition efforts was a serious undertaking, involving the study of Islamic theology and law, and these efforts at understanding produced British admiration, alongside existing animosity, for Islam. It is not difficult to imagine how this contradictory approach to Islam could be politically useful in implementing the rule of Britain and other European empires in the vast and diverse African colonies that were to be subjugated following the Berlin conference in 1885. Indeed, throughout the world, ‘governing the religious affairs of Muslims became a crucial aspect of imperial rule’.18 For the British, the articulation of specific policies for African Muslim subjects developed in many ways an earlier precedent from the Natal Colony, annexed in 1843, where indigenous chiefs seen as ‘loyal’ to the British retained powers over the military and other institutions. However, by the 1860s this policy needed revision in the light of growing Zulu opposition to the British. One area of major change was the transfer of legal power away from chiefs. After such experiments with indirect rule, by the early 20th century the British were in a good position to first crush the armies of indigenous states, such as the Mahdiyya in Sudan in 1898 and the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire in Northern 16 Quoted in A. Moore-Harell, Gordon and the Sudan. Prologue to the Mahdiyya 18771880, New York, 2013, p. 7. 17 W.G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the abolition of slavery, New York, 2006, p. 99. 18 D. Motadel, ‘Islam and the European empires’, The Historical Journal 55 (2012) 831-56, p. 831.
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Nigeria in 1903, and then issue policies conferring select powers on ‘indirect rulers’. Their authority was also propped up by British proclamations promising ‘religious tolerance’ and non-interference in indigenous Islamic institutions. Perhaps the most often-cited example is Muslim Northern Nigeria, where Frederick Lugard, the first High Commissioner of the Protectorate before its amalgamation with the Southern Nigerian Protectorate in 1914, implemented the paradigmatic system of Muslim indirect rule. While promoting Christianity’s superiority, Lugard conceded that Islam had fostered some level of civilisational advancement that benefitted Africans;19 he cited the prohibition of intoxicants, a clearly delineated justice system, and a basis for unity. At the same time, he argued, Muslims had congenital tendencies toward fanaticism, evidenced by Mahdism in Sudan and its latent but potentially explosive presence in Nigeria and elsewhere, which Britain as a civilising power was bound to contain. Thus, British officers had to rule ‘wisely’ with Muslim emirs and their bureaucracies in the hope of their eventual reform. Securing the participation of Muslim leaders and ‘sanitising’ their practices in areas such as criminal justice and taxation in line with British sensibilities took many years; the Satiru revolt in 1906, which nearly toppled the British, demonstrated that installing handpicked emirs and promising respect for Islam would not produce enough loyalty. It has been argued that the active construction of the system of indirect rule in Northern Nigeria lasted until independence from Britain in 1960, given all the practical efforts that were needed to scaffold it.20 Indeed, British policies to ‘preserve Islam’, such as the supposed ban on Christian proselytisation among Muslims, simply did not work, reinforcing the fact that colonial control over religion was near impossible.21 The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan saw similar British policies; the High Commissioner of Egypt, Lord Cromer, and Commander-in-Chief Herbert Kitchener, strove to minimise any provocation of Muslims that might cause them to revolt again. Added to colonial measures to support Islam by expanding formal qur’anic schools, Arabic language instruction and 19 J. Reynolds, ‘Good and bad Muslims. Islam and indirect rule in Northern Nigeria’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 34 (2001) 601-18. See also J.A. Mbillah, ‘Lord Lugard’, in CMR 19, 436-9. 20 Muhammad Sani Umar, Islam and colonialism. Intellectual responses of Muslims of Northern Nigeria to British colonial rule, Leiden, 2006, p. 28. See K. Hock, ‘Nigerian Muslim responses to the British colonisation of Northern Nigeria’, in CMR 19, 424-35. 21 S. Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Christian origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, ca. 1890-1975, Athens OH, 2014; A.E. Barnes, ‘“Evangelization where it is not wanted”. Colonial administrators and missionaries in Northern Nigeria during the first third of the twentieth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (1995) 412-41.
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training in sharīʿa, the British restricted Christian missionary work to nonMuslim areas.22 Yet it would be a mistake to over-generalise about British policies from Nigerian and Sudanese examples before World War I, which fundamentally altered politics in the Islamic world. Before then, in regions such as the north of the Gold Coast, where French, German and British imperial ambitions collided, representations of Muslims were more fluid, depending on European political agendas and abilities to make alliances with them.23 In the absence of a major Muslim state with which to broker trade and indirect rule arrangements, Christian missionary and other colonial-era representations of a weak and debased Islam took hold, leading to the prevailing and persistent view that northern Ghana was not a Muslim territory. Thus, the European stereotyping of Muslim political and economic power, with elements held over from the 19th century, fed into colonial-era disregard for Islam as an African religion. In East Africa, where the British offered a pretence of non-interference in the Zanzibari sultanate’s system of rule, as in Nigeria and Sudan, the creation of a dual legal system in which Muslim judges were allowed to oversee cases in coastal Muslim areas or advise British court officials in ‘native courts’ undermined the ultimate authority of Muslim judges.24 The British attempt to standardise Islamic law into one system, despite the existence of different schools of jurisprudence that had operated in the past, also weakened the traditions of diversity and debate in Islamic thought and practice. Other changes, such as the classification of Arabs as ‘nonnatives’ for taxation purposes and the curtailment of slavery, which had previously benefitted the Muslim elite, diminished their power to a great extent, contributing to a sense of Muslim victimisation at the hands of the British and the rise of religious nationalism, which emerged later in the colonial period. British policies tended to scrutinise, separate and oversimplify or stereotype African Muslims, whether they were considered privileged subjects in colonies like Nigeria and Sudan, or unassimilated and aberrant as in the Gold Coast. In southern Africa, where Muslims represented a minority of the overall population, unlike in West or Sudanic Africa, Muslims 22 H.J. Sharkey, ‘Christians among Muslims. The Church Missionary Society in the northern Sudan’, Journal of African History 43 (2002) 51-75; R. Wingate, Sudan under Wingate: Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899-1916, London, 1971. 23 H. Weiss, ‘European images of Islam in the northern hinterlands of the Gold Coast through the early colonial period’, Sudanic Africa 12 (2001) 83-110. 24 N. Matthews, ‘Imagining Arab communities. Colonialism, Islamic reform, and Arab identity in Mombasa, Kenya, 1897-1933’, Islamic Africa 4 (2013) 135-63.
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carried the additional burden of being labelled strangers in the way that Arabs and Swahilis were in East Africa. In British South Africa and surrounding territories, Muslims were of Asian descent (being largely former slaves from the Dutch East Indies or Indians) or of Zanzibari (or Swahili) coastal origins. In the 1870s, the British settled hundreds of freed slaves from the Indian Ocean trade with East Africa in Natal.25 These liberated Africans were called Zanzibaris and classified by the British colonial government as immigrants alongside Indians. This policy actually helped to make Islam a cohesive force, and in 1916 a mosque organisation, the Juma Musjid Trust, took the step of endowing lands for liberated slaves, thus solidifying the village base of this racially-mixed community. The British authorities were troubled by this racial integration, however, and, in subsequent years, by the ownership of land by these Africans. These agendas led the British to change the categorisation of the Zanzibaris to natives (black), as segregation deepened and economic inequality became more pronounced. Muslim identities, constructed across differences of origin, sect and language, challenged the racial logic of South Africa throughout the 20th century.26 British segregationist policies followed Muslim migrants to various parts of southern Africa. Shamshad Khan, a Muslim Indian trader, left South Africa to settle in Bechuanaland in 1882, and a decade later more Muslims arrived to establish a large trading centre at Ramotswa in the domain of Tswana chief Ikaneng, who was friendly to the newcomers.27 However, as waves of traders came into the Protectorate, declared by Britain in 1885, the colonial authorities welcomed the calls of some Twsana chiefs to forcibly restrict the numbers of Indian settlers and Indians were not allowed to live in European-designated areas. Segregation isolated Indians from blacks and whites but also forced Muslims to subsume their religious identity to a racial one, as defined by the colonial regime. African Muslims found means of resisting the hierarchical, isolating and ‘Orientalising’ policies that were introduced by British colonialism in the areas of law, education, missionary activity and social life. In Sierra Leone, for example, consolidated with the hinterland and declared 25 G.C. Oosthuizen, ‘Islam among the Zanzibaris of South Africa’, History of Religions 31 (1992) 305-20. 26 P. Kaarsholm, ‘Zanzibari or Amakhuwa? Sufi networks in South Africa, Mozambique, and the Indian Ocean’, Journal of African History 55 (2014) 191-210; A.J. Christopher, ‘“To define the indefinable”. Population classification and the census in South Africa’, Area 34 (2002) 401-8. 27 J.N. Amanze, ‘Islam in Botswana during the colonial period 1882-1966’, Botswana Notes and Records 30 (1998) 67-78.
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a British protectorate in 1896, the long-standing separation between Christians and Muslims led to unequal opportunities for education, which was mainly in the hands of missionaries, but Muslim communities sent their children across the Anglo-French border to Guinea to attend Islamic schools. Meanwhile, Muslim missionaries travelled in the other direction to preach in Sierra Leone.28 This defiance of European political authority maintained and reinvigorated religious and ethnic identities that predated foreign rule, thereby sowing seeds for new kinds of identity construction. Faced with opposition from French and British authorities who sought to differentiate between loyal and dangerous African Muslims, some Muslim dissenters in Northern Nigeria adapted to the colonial political regime by establishing independent religious communities under the auspices of Christian missionaries or by feigning conversion.29 Muslims also experimented with cultural forms, as in colonial Zanzibar, where the intermingling of Islamic Swahili dress with European and Indian clothing, which was becoming more readily and cheaply available, opened possibilities for newly freed slaves to assimilate into society as consumers.30 No longer did Christian mission homes offer the only possibility of social mobility for liberated Africans. Without denying the increasing ability of the British to represent and remake Islam in African societies over the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is important also to recognise that Africans continued to see Islam as a source of power and security in the midst of changes occasioned by the abolition of slavery, the European scramble for African colonies, and the colonial transformation of Islamic political institutions. Indeed, while British attempts to harness the power of Islam were inconsistent, fluid and often unsuccessful, their interventions solidified the moral authority of Islam from many African perspectives. The long 19th century was a painful yet formative era when ‘being Muslim in India, West Africa, Central Asia, or Southeast Asia had racial connotations’.31 For sub-Saharan Africa, slavery, violent subjugation and segregation crystallised the sense of a victimised but unified Muslim world. 28 D.E. Skinner, ‘Islam and education in the colony and hinterland of Sierra Leone (1750-1914)’, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 10 (1976) 499-520. 29 Shankar, Who shall enter Paradise?; S. Shankar, ‘A fifty-year Muslim conversion to Christianity. Religious ambiguities and colonial boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 19101963’, in B. Soares (ed.), Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, Leiden, 2006, 89-114. 30 L. Fair, Pastimes and politics. Culture, community, and identity in post-abolition Zanzibar, Athens OH, 2001. 31 Cemil Aydin, The idea of the Muslim world. A global intellectual history, Cambridge MA, 2017, p. 228.
French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914 Bernard Salvaing Introduction During the 18th century the French held a number of small enclaves on the west coast of Africa, including Saint-Louis at the mouth of the River Senegal, which they had first occupied in 1638, and the Island of Gorée, which they had occupied in 1677. In 1814, possession of these territories was confirmed in the Treaty of Paris. Together with Rufisque, annexed in 1859, and Dakar, developed from 1857, these possessions formed the ‘four communes’, which enjoyed a special status: from the time of the Second Republic (1848), inhabitants who paid tax and had lived there for more than five years could send a deputy to the National Assembly. Interrupted under the authoritarian regime of the Second Empire (1852-70), this was re-established by the Third Republic, which created a General Council in 1879 and in 1882 municipal councils elected by universal male suffrage. Thus a local political life developed, dominated in the 19th century by the influential minority of Europeans and people of mixed race linked to houses of commerce (essentially those of Bordeaux). In 1914, Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy, was elected and the black majority realised the significance of this victory, a portent of new times for black people in Senegal. This status of the four communes contrasts with that of the rest of Senegal, the interior of which was progressively conquered from 1854 onwards, and with that of other territories, conquered mainly in the second quarter of the 19th century, whose inhabitants were simple subjects of the empire, bound by the Code de l’indigénat, which gave the French administrator powers of summary justice over all African subjects, including the power to jail any African without trial for up to 14 days. During the 19th century, French possessions gradually expanded inland from the west coast. They were organised politically as Afrique occidentale française (AOF; French West Africa, created in 1895), an area that comprised the equivalent of the present-day states of Benin, Burkina Faso,
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Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal; Afrique équatoriale française (AEF; French Equatorial Africa), which comprised the present-day states of the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon; Madagascar and dependencies, French Somaliland (now Djibouti), and the possessions in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros Islands and Réunion. Each of these three groups was under the control of a governor general, based respectively in Dakar, Brazzaville and Antananarivo, who oversaw the governors of each colony. French West Africa was organised into eight divisions, with its headquarters in Dakar. It had a hierarchical administrative structure, the lowest level of which was the cercle (circle), administered by the commandant du cercle, who had responsibility for tax collection, forced labour, overseeing crop cultivation, implementing government policies and acting as president of the local court. Imperial rivalry between France and Britain reached a peak in 1898, when a French expeditionary force was sent to the White Nile in an attempt to take control of the Upper Nile and to prevent complete British control of the Sudan. They faced the British at Fashoda and there was a stand-off that was only resolved when it was agreed that the Nile basin was in the British sphere of influence and the Congo basin in the French sphere of influence. French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa during the 19th century is generally seen as the gradual development of accommodation policies with elite Muslims.1 This process involved much trial and error and saw many contradictory decisions and a persistent sense of profound mistrust. French policy on sub-Saharan Africa during the 19th century can also be read in relation to local geopolitical data: – During the first half of the 19th century, it concerned only the four Senegalese communes, and it had to take into account the heterogeneity of their populations: the minority of Europeans and people of mixed race was Christian. But a growing part of the population was Muslim and, especially in Saint-Louis, they played an indispensable role in trade with the people of the interior, particularly along the Senegal River. – Later, the development of peanut cultivation in the interior prompted the authorities to intervene in order to guarantee the security of plantations and supplies, and led to confrontation with Muslim areas, notably Mauritanian emirates such as Trarza. Then, the conquest in
1 D. Robinson, Paths of accommodation. Muslim societies and French colonial authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920, Athens OH, 2001.
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the direction of the interior came up against stubborn resistance from Muslim empires. Once this resistance was overcome, France wanted to arrive at a modus vivendi with Muslim leaders, as it had in Algeria. This was a necessary condition if France was to ‘hold the country’, given the power of Islam in the desert and savannah areas. It can be noted that the equation was different in the forest zone and on the coasts further south, where the influence of Islam was negligible and Christian missions could function effectively. Thus, in French Equatorial Africa, the Third Republic invested much less in public education than in West Africa, and missionary schools were much more developed there than in the rest of the empire. This essay begins with an analysis of attitudes on both sides of the process and the influences on these attitudes. Then it outlines the two main events that led to the formulation of French doctrine, and finally examines the great diversity of local situations that existed at the start of the First World War. French attitudes towards Islam The effects of long-standing antagonism between Christian and Muslim powers should not be underestimated. Tensions between France and Britain had been rekindled by the French expedition to Egypt in 1798, the colonisation of Algeria in 1830, and conflict surrounding the Arab slave trade. Charles Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers from 1867, thought that ‘all Blacks would become slaves if Islam was allowed to spread through Africa’.2 Elsewhere, the development of powerful Islamic states in West Africa in the 19th century seemed to bear witness to the advance of ‘fanatical’ Islam. However, alongside this a more favourable image of Islam also existed. Groups in Europe that were distanced from Christianity saw Islam as more suitable for people they considered primitive because its practices were less demanding than those of Christianity, and it allowed societies to become ‘semi-civilised’, a step up from pagan fetishism.3 When the French returned to Senegal in 1815, they did not at first become heavily involved in internal matters. The attempt by Governor 2 C. Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1880-1960, Cambridge, 1988, p. 16. 3 Similarly, in 1848, Louis Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, the founder of Libreville in Gabon, who took an active role in the fight against the illegal slave trade under the July Monarchy, credited the Qur’an with having introduced ‘a half civilization certainly superior to the barbarism and absurdities of fetishism’ (cited in W.B. Cohen, The French encounter with Africans. White responses to Black Africa, 1530-1880, Bloomington IN, 1981, p. 257).
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French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa
Jacques François Roger (1821-7) to introduce agriculture in Walo failed, while the Islamic emirate of Futa-Toro remained opposed to any enterprise of this kind. Confrontation developed in earnest under the Second Empire (1852-70) and, from this point on, Islam became a key concern for the French. Muslim attitudes towards Christianity Ancient Muslim societies such as the emirates of Trarza and Brakna of Mauritania and younger societies such as the Toucouleur people of FutaToro were viscerally hostile to Christian powers. Other groups reacted differently: the Dyula traders from the interior and the Muslims of SaintLouis were more open to negotiating with them. Moorish Muslim theologians very early questioned the legality of trading with Christians. In 1824, a counsellor of the emir of Trarza wrote in a fatwā about the agricultural colonisation of Walo: Yes, as has been publicly repeated, some Muslims are selling horses and gum to unbelievers, participating in the trade of free Muslims and the pillage of their possessions, arguing that they have been forced. Allāh the most high has already responded to them, He who says in His sacred text: ‘Was not the earth of Allāh wide enough for you to emigrate in it?’4
However, others ‘accepted trade with Europeans on the basis of necessity and need’,5 and acceptance was ‘the tendency of the majority of inhabitants, scholars at the forefront’.6 Such positions were radically revised following Louis Faidherbe’s attack on Trarza. Two foundational moments Louis Faidherbe (1818-89)7 was appointed governor of Senegal with a mandate to encourage free trade in the river zone and to protect peanut 4 Ahmad Wuld Muhammad Wuld al-Aqil, quoting Q 4:97, in Yahya Wuld al-Bara, ‘Les théologiens mauritaniens face au colonisateur français. Etude de fatwa-s de jurisprudence musulmane’, in D. Robinson and J.-L. Triaud (eds), Le temps des marabouts. Itinéraires et stratégies islamiques en Afrique occidentale française v. 1880-1960, Paris, 1997, 85-117, p. 95. 5 An allusion to maṣlaḥa, ‘public benefit’. 6 Yahya Wuld al-Bara, ‘Théologiens mauritaniens’, pp. 94-5. 7 For Faidherbe’s policies as governor, see L.C. Barrows, ‘Louis Léon César Faidherbe (1818-1889)’, in L.H. Gann and P. Duignan (eds), African proconsuls. European governors in Africa, New York, 1978, 51-79. See also L. Barrows, ‘Louis Faidherbe’, in CMR 19, 429-49.
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producers. He served two terms, 1854-61 and 1863-5. Like many former students of the École polytechnique in Paris, he had been influenced by the doctrine of Saint-Simonianism, which was also strong among the French in Algeria, where he had served earlier. Anxious for Senegal to be a ‘beautiful and compact colony’,8 Faidherbe’s attitude towards Islam and Muslim groups was antagonistic. He fought against the Moors from north of the Senegal River between 1854 and 1858 and engaged in merciless warfare against al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal, founder of the Toucouleur Empire. Nevertheless, he considered it only natural that Muslims would continue to follow the ‘religion of their fathers’ and he aimed to accommodate moderate Islam, which he hoped to ‘domesticate’. He stated and regretted that ‘of the 50,000 French subjects who make up the colony of Senegal, 2,000 Christians have religious schools but 48,000 Muslims have no means of learning our language, or of beginning to assimilate to us’.9 Schools were central to the participation of Muslims in French colonial society. In 1856, Faidherbe created the École des otages (‘School for hostages’), where the sons of chiefs who had been defeated would be educated in French ‘so that they respect us and love us’.10 And recognising the uncertainty among Muslims to send their children to Catholic schools, in 1857 he started a secular school in Saint-Louis. In 1857, in response to demand among Muslims, he established the Tribunal musulman of Saint-Louis with Bou el-Mogdad as the magistrate (cadi) in charge, and also formed an interpreter corps. David Robinson highlights the role of interpreters in the new Direction des affaires politiques, citing as examples Hamat Ndiaye Anne (1813-79) and Dudu Seck (1826-80), who proved invaluable assets because they demonstrated that Muslims could still observe their own religious practices under French rule.11 Convinced that the continuing expansion of Islam was inevitable,12 Faidherbe developed a classification system of Muslims. On one side 8 Quoted without reference by D. Bouche, Histoire de la colonisation française, vol. 2. Flux et reflux (1815-1962), Paris, 1991, p. 49. 9 Faidherbe à Ministre, no 156, Archives nationales, SOM, 11 avril 1856, Sénégal, X 11 a, cited in D. Bouche, ‘L’école française et les musulmans au Sénégal de 1850 à 1920’, OutreMers 223 (1987) 218-35, p. 222. 10 Gouverneur à Ministre no 23, 18 janvier 1856, Archives nationales, SOM, Sénégal, X 5 c, p. 339. 11 Robinson, Paths of accommodation, pp. 79-82. 12 About the population of the left bank of the river in Senegal, Faidherbe wrote: ‘The Muslim religion has spread there and that is progress for them but unfortunate for us. Whilst we recognise that we are powerless when it comes to making them adopt our religion, which is too morally strict for their nature, we should at least avoid working for the
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French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa
were the ‘Moors of the desert, an intelligent and energetic race without a doubt, but their interests are as rough as the dreadful regions they inhabit’, nomads with whom he associates the ‘backward’ religion of the Arabs. On the other side were the ‘Noirs of the Senegal Basin’, who loved ‘culture and trade’, ‘family, luxury clothing, games and dances’.13 He compared them to the French, who ‘love peace and order, are sedentary, producers, traders who love well-being, pleasure and luxury’. Development of political doctrine Under the Third Republic (inaugurated in 1870), French colonial policy was influenced by two factors. The first was an ideology that asserted that progress was guaranteed by reason and by trust in science. Influenced by positivist principles, ruling circles in France were suspicious of religion. Their preference for secularism resulted in the laws separating Church and State of 1905.14 The second was Muslim resistance to colonial conquest from such figures as Almami Samori Ture (c. 1828-1900) between 1882 and 1898, the sons of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal, who were defeated in Ségou in 1890 and again in Bandiagara in 1893, and Muslims from the desert (Timbuktu was captured in 1894). It was the same during the conquest of French Equatorial Africa (created in 1910), with the resistance of the Sanusiyya Brotherhood in what is today Chad.15 Theoretical works Studies by French experts on Islam who had surveyed the Muslim religious orders in Algeria were transposed to sub-Saharan Africa. Louis Rinn (18381905),16 head of the Département des affaires indigènes, emphasised the influence of the Sufi Brotherhoods, whose aim he identified as no more propagation of Islam, which creates enemies for us’, quoted in H. Deschamps (ed.), Histoire générale de l’Afrique noire, Paris, 1971, vol. 2, p. 67. 13 From a speech delivered at a prize-giving ceremony in Saint-Louis on 14 July 1860, reported in Moniteur du Sénégal, 17 July 1860. 14 It is often said that ‘anticlericalism was not exported’. Where Islam is concerned, it is worth recalling Harrison’s nuanced response that a large number of administrators ‘included both marabouts and [Muslim] priests in their detestation’ (Harrison, France and Islam, p. 65). This contradicts frequent complaints from missionaries that many administrators were too accommodating towards Islam. 15 We shall not cover French Equatorial Africa, since Islam was only a minor presence in most territories there. 16 See K. Chachoua, A. Messaoudi and J. Chesworth, ‘French officials in Algeria’, in CMR 18, 959-77.
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than ‘the exploitation of human stupidity’,17 and he thought that France should retaliate by establishing a salaried Muslim clergy. Octave Depont (1862-1955) and Xavier Coppolani (1866-1905)18 saw within the Sufi Brotherhoods ‘all the extreme exaltation of religious madness’ and ‘the very soul of the pan-Islamic movement’,19 but they nevertheless thought that it was necessary to work with the Brotherhoods in order to control them. According to Alfred le Châtelier (1855-1929), who launched the Revue du Monde Musulman in 1906, the Brotherhoods played only a minor role in French West Africa,20 although he thought that Islam would spread quickly there because of its superiority to local African religions.21 Robert Arnaud (1873-1950) treated Sufism as an entity separate from orthodox Islam, but wanted to pursue a deal with the Brotherhoods in order to ‘reduce them to simple and purely local associations that are not at the beck and call of outsiders’.22 He recommended a policy of active surveillance and the encouragement of separate and distinct Islamic identities within West Africa. He represents ‘an important link between the formal Algerian consensus on Islam and the development of a specifically West African perspective which came to be known as Islam noir’.23 The affirmation of a doctrine William Ponty (1866-1915) A new era began with the creation of French West Africa in 1895. Ernest Roume, Governor General 1902-8, established the Service des affaires musulmanes and gave responsibility for it to Robert Arnaud. In 1903, Roume refused to recognise any legal basis for slavery; then, in 1905, he abolished the sale of slaves. In reality, France was cautious, never officially announcing the complete abolition of the slave trade in order to avoid a
17 L. Rinn, Marabouts et Kouans, Algiers, 1884, quoted in Harrison, France and Islam, p. 19. 18 See Chachoua, Messaoudi and Chesworth, ‘French officials’. 19 O. Depont and X. Coppolani, Les confréries religieuses musulmanes, Algiers, 1897, quoted in Harrison, France and Islam, pp. 21-2. 20 Alfred Le Châtelier, L’islam dans l’Afrique occidentale, Paris, 1899. 21 Harrison, France and Islam, p. 31. 22 R. Arnaud, Précis de politique musulmane, Algiers, 1906, quoted in Harrison, France and Islam, p. 45. 23 Harrison, France and Islam, p. 45.
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French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa
confrontation with its local allies, but at the beginning of the century a portion of slaves were given permission to desert their masters.24 For William Ponty, Governor General 1908-15, Islam was linked to oppressive social organisations. Marabout propaganda was ‘the hypocritical façade behind which are sheltered the selfish hopes of the former privileged groups and the last obstacle in the way of the complete triumph of our civilising work based on respect for justice and human liberty’.25 Ponty’s perspective was shared by many, including Paul Marty, a Roman Catholic officer. At the time, anticlerical agents were plotting to undermine Catholic congregations in Metropolitan France, and this surely influenced Ponty’s belief that an Islamic conspiracy was underway in Senegal. His attempts to identify the Islamic activists behind it led to the development of a surveillance network that covered the whole of French West Africa. As dated as this suspicion was, it was not entirely at odds with the state of mind of leading Muslims. In 1937, the administrator Gilbert Vieillard wrote: ‘The indigenous people reproach us with equal bitterness for the emancipation of women and that of slaves,’26 citing a poem probably written in the 1920s, in which the author remarks that the French ‘lower respectable people and raise up people who are nothing.’27 At the same time, Ponty’s ‘racial policies’ led him to remove non-Muslims from Islamic influences and cut Muslims off from external sources of influence, such as the Arab press and Ottoman publications. Subsequently, he forbade the use of the Arabic language in administrative and judicial affairs.28 He wanted Islam to be open to modern ideas, which he aimed to introduce via secular education in French. This intention helps explain the later creation of medersas (French-Arab schools) in Saint-Louis in 1906, Djenné in 1907, and then Timbuktu and Boutilimit. However, French secular schools became a fundamental element of colonial policy, although this development was understandably controversial among Muslims. For a long time, Muslim families refused to send their children to the French schools – only a few boys, and no girls, 24 Harrison, France and Islam, p. 52. See further M. Klein, Slavery and colonial rule in West Africa, Cambridge, 1998. 25 ‘Memo of December 1911’, in Harrison, France and Islam, p. 55. 26 G. Vieillard, Bulletin du comité d’études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique occidentale française, Dakar, 1937, p. 268. 27 ‘Notre triste époque…’, in Vieillard, Bulletin du comité d’études historiques, verse 34, from the book of poetry in Pulaar and French, La Femme, la Vache, la Foi, ed. Alfa Ibrāhīma Sow, Paris, 1966, p. 115. 28 Harrison, France and Islam, p. 52.
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attended and, while pursuing their studies in the French schools, they also attended Qur’an schools.29 Paul Marty (1882-1938) Marty, a military man and an Arabist, was born in Algeria in 1882. He was appointed to posts in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco before being appointed Counsellor for Muslim Affairs in Dakar in 1912. From 1913 to 1921 he managed the Service des affaires musulmanes, where he supervised the collection of a vast amount of information.30 He considered Moorish Islam to be relatively orthodox in comparison with the so-called Islam noir, which he thought was influenced by the local African religious framework and was more disposed than Moorish Islam to cooperate with France. He preferred a policy of entente with Muslims and did not trust the activism of the petit commandants (‘little district officers’), who were often inclined to accuse peaceful marabouts of conspiracies that only existed in their imagination, which clearly shows to what extent an obsessive fear of Islam existed permanently in the colonial environment alongside the more realistic assessments of better informed people. The pacification of Mauritania Xavier Coppolani was appointed commissaire civil (civil commissioner) for Mauritania in 1902. He undertook peaceful expansion, which relied on treaties with local religious elements. Following his assassination in 1905, these treaties were replaced with systematic military conquest. His assassination revived old misgivings towards Islam.31 However, his cooperation with Saad Bouh (1848-1917), a leading Qādirī shaykh with authority far 29 Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Amkoullel, l’enfant peul. Mémoires (‘Memoirs of Amkoullel, the Fula boy’), Arles, 1991, relating how a member of an important family is forced to attend a French school because of the conniving schemes of a rival family, and showing the mistrust that Muslims felt towards the schools. 30 The large body of works on Islam he produced provides excellent material for research. They include Études sur l’islam maure, Paris, 1916; Études sur l’islam au Sénégal, Paris, 1917; Études sur l’islam et les tribus du Soudan, Paris, 1915-19; L’islam en Guinée. FoutaDjallon, Paris, 1921; L’islam en Côte d’Ivoire, Paris, 1922. See J. Schmitz, art. ‘Paul Marty’, in F. Pouillon (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, Paris, 2012, pp. 694-5; also P. Shinar, ‘A major link between France’s Berber policy in Morocco and its “policy of races” in French West Africa. Commandant Paul Marty (1882-1938)’, Islamic Law and Society 13 (2006) 33-62. 31 Faidherbe’s advice was to refrain from ‘excessive tolerance’ towards Islam, although he was criticised for allowing Saint-Louis to become a ‘Muslim city’ after he allowed a growing number of Muslims to settle there.
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beyond Mauritania, and Sidiya Baba (1862-1924), another Qādirī shaykh, foreshadowed future policies of accommodation. So, the Mauritanian situation provided a neat summation of the contradictions present in relations between France and Islam. These tensions are illustrated in the different approaches adopted by the two sons of Muḥammad Fāḍil (1797-1869), the founder of the Fāḍiliyya Sufi Brotherhood and leader of radical resistance to the French. One son, Māʾ al-ʿAynayn (1838-1910), was the leader of radical resistance to the French, but the other, Saad Bouh (c. 1850-1917), was prepared to assist Coppolani in developing his policies of peaceful rule,32 to the point that he was nick-named the marabout chrétien. Despite objecting to colonisation, he accepted that it was inevitable, quoting the proverb ‘The hand that you cannot sever, embrace it’. He was also motivated by the desire of marabout tribes such as his own to achieve security from other hostile tribes.33 A significant second partner of the French was Sidiya Baba, the ‘coarchitect of colonial Mauritania’.34 Here are two passages from his 1903 fatwā: ‘[Those who resist the French] ignore interests that are more important than the invasion of this nation, and they forget the damage we have seen in the past, which was more pernicious and more bitter’,35 referring to the greater importance of preserving local culture and traditions than of maintaining political independence, and ‘In their laws [the French] decided from a certain time not to interfere with other religions regardless of what they are’,36 pointing out that, although the French may come to govern them, they would not undermine their society. The transposition of the Senegalo-Mauritanian model to French West Africa Thus the French and Muslims gradually developed a policy of understanding (historians speak of a policy of accommodation) in Senegal and Mauritania that reconciled the interests of both. They then extended this to the whole of French West Africa. 32 This makes him one of the first architects of accommodation policies as defined by David Robinson, who devotes ch. 8 of Paths of accommodation to him. 33 Proceedings of the international conference Centenaire Cheikhna Saad Bouh (19172017), Dakar, 2017, p. 49. 34 The name given to him by David Robinson in Paths of accommodation, pp. 178-93. 35 Yahya Wuld al-Bara, ‘Théologiens mauritaniens’, p. 109. 36 Yahya Wuld al-Bara, ‘Théologiens mauritaniens’, p. 114.
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The accommodation model The French had used field research alongside their experience in Algeria to develop the doctrine of Islam noir. This led them to open the way to cooperation with the Qāḍiriyya Sufi Brotherhood, then with the Tijāniyya Brotherhood towards the end of the century. Thus, among the Muslim leaders they found go-betweens with the population. This was all the more indispensable to them after they had broken down the political elites who had opposed them during the colonial conquest. Such cooperation would not have been possible unless it met the requirements of a number of Muslim dignitaries. French military superiority meant that they were not obliged to fight a jihad, which would have been a lost cause (in Islamic law fighting against an unbelieving adversary should cease when the balance of power renders any resistance useless). They had noted the religious neutrality of the French state (here can be seen how the notion of secularism was initially completely incomprehensible to Muslims); they benefitted financially from their new roles as indispensable channels between the governors and the governed in the form of privately received subsidies and assistance in building new mosques; their charisma proved effective in strengthening their brotherhoods.37 Thus, Islam was able to strengthen its position in an unexpected way, using the facilities afforded by its cooperation with the coloniser while benefitting from its image as a religion fully established on African soil. A French version of indirect rule? The French relied heavily on local Muslim religious dignitaries to carry out certain functions, a French-styled version of indirect rule that continued in some regions until 1930. For instance, in Futa-Jallon in Guinea they used the skills of religious notables and even some representatives from the former political classes. In the town of Labé, indigenous justice was carried out according to the Islamic law of the Tribunal coutumier (customary court).38 Proceedings were recorded in Arabic and religious figures from the theocratic Ancien régime sat as judges, including the saintly and wise Tierno Aliyou Bouba Ndian (1850-1927).
37 C. Stewart, Islam and social order in Mauritania, Oxford, 1973, p. 57. 38 This paragraph uses information provided by Al-Hajji Mouhammadou Baldé and Bernard Salvaing, Une vie au Fouta-Djalon, Brinon-sur Sauldre, 2008, pp. 72-3.
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French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa The variety of local situations Senegal
El-Hadj Malik Sy (c. 1855-1922), who lived at Tivaouane in Cayor, played a large part in the consolidation of the Tijāniyya Brotherhood. In 1912, he defended his wish to cooperate with the French in a letter the French ensured was circulated widely in French West Africa. Notably, he writes: You must conform to the desires of the French State. […] Remember that before [the French] arrived among us, we killed one another and stole from one another, regardless of whether we were Muslim or unbeliever. And if they had not come here, we would still be in this condition, today more than ever. [...] If we used our brains, we would understand that the French are bringing help to our religion and to us.39
His attitude can be explained by his wish to distance himself from the jihad conducted by al-Ḥājj ʿUmar. His father had been killed by the ceddo40 during local wars, and he considered la paix française an alternative to this event. David Robinson writes that Amadou Bamba’s (c. 1853-1927) attitude was highly ambiguous. For a long time, he was considered resistant to the French, but he had also sought very early on to achieve a modus vivendi with them. His father had been linked to Lat Dior, the Damel41 of Cayor in Senegal, whose long-standing resistance to the colonialists lasted until his defeat in 1886. Bamba was the founder of the Mouride Brotherhood, whose disciples created a spiritual kingdom, dedicating their lives to cultivating groundnuts and following God, but without any particular show of resistance to the colonial powers. His growing reputation became a concern for France, and he was exiled to Gabon (1895-1902) and then Mauritania (1903-7). When he returned to Senegal, he was looked on with more respect than ever and he moved to the Mouride capital of Touba, where the French offered him surprising levels of special treatment, such as tax exemption. 39 Saïd Bousbina, ‘Al-Hadj Malik Sy. Sa chaîne spirituelle dans la Tidjaniyya et sa position à l’égard de la présence française au Sénégal’, in Robinson and Triaud (eds), Temps des marabouts, ch. 8, 181-98, p. 192. 40 Ceddo refers to former fighters of Senegal, particularly in Wolof territories. They were known for their hostility towards Islam. Hence the title of Sembéné Ousmane’s 1977 film, Ceddo. 41 Damel is the name given to the ruler of Cayor. Lat Dior (1842-86) was the last of these and today he is celebrated in Senegal as one of the heroes of the colonial resistance.
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Cerno Amadou Mukhtar Sakho,42 the president of the Native Tribunal in Boghe (1905-43) in the Futa-Toro region, is a good example of a Muslim teacher and intellectual who became a marabout fonctionnaire (civil servant). He was one of a significant number of Tijānī ʿUmarians who were repatriated from Mali by the French and engaged by them as judges. Although he is a much less important personality than those mentioned above, his case is representative: from a family in northern Senegal who had followed the jihadist conqueror al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal to Mali in the middle of the 19th century and then fought against the French, he served them with total loyalty. This attitude is explained as follows: after the defeat of his descendants, he needed to regain a position in his family’s home country. While fulfilling a paid and rewarding function in the service of a coloniser whose presence for the time being seemed inevitable, he occupied himself in revitalising Islamic teaching and strengthening the influence of the Tijānī Brotherhood. Baye al-Kuntī Similar patterns of mixed allegiance were found elsewhere, particularly in Mali, where the best known example of a religious man rallying to the French cause is Baye al-Kuntī,43 who was descended from a family of educated Qādirī Sufis but moved over to the Tijāniyya. His father had fought against France in Tilaya in the Ifoghas mountains, while Baye himself was a man of great culture and asceticism, despite his great personal wealth. He accepted French rule, unlike his brother Muḥammad al-Dahir or his cousin Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 1927). He wrote: In all our days, we have not known a land in which Muslims may accomplish the canonical exodus (hijra). [...] Hence, the status of Muslims today is comparable to that of a prisoner. [...] Necessity dictates [that this prisoner] may have respectful relations with his jailers, visiting their territory and trading with them, owing to the fact that doctors of law have reached the consensus that commerce with the infidels is legally acceptable.44
42 Ibrahima Abou Sall, ‘Cerno Amadou Mukhtar Sakho. Qadi Supérieur de Boghe (19051934) Futa Toro’, in Robinson and Triaud, Temps des marabouts, 221-45. 43 Houari Touati and Aïcha Belabib, ‘En islam malien. Shaykh Bây al-Kuntî (m. 1347/1929) et ses Nawâzil’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 56 (2016) 775-98. 44 Touati and Belabib, ‘En islam malien’, p. 790.
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French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa The Dyula of Korhogo
Muslim communities that were used to trading with non-Muslims and lived according to Suwarian45 tradition presented yet another different situation. The Dyula people of Korhogo,46 a town ruled by Sénoufo people who pledged allegiance to the French in 1906, established a modus vivendi with the colonisers. Maurice Delafosse, the commandant du cercle (French local administrator) built the first mosque in Korhogo. About this mutual understanding between the two partners that anything could have opposed, Paul Marty said: ‘The Muslims are used to submitting to the dominance of the animists […] and have no a priori aversion to our domination. […] However, we must admit that they do not like us.’47 Ongoing conflict Muslim hostility While resistance to colonisation was as strong in some non-Islamic kingdoms as in the Islamic states of West Africa, pacification was almost complete in the forest and savannah regions by the end of 1914. In the Sahara, however, which had been Muslim for longer, resistance lasted until after the First World War. Jean-Louis Triaud states: ‘For Muslims, European conquest is the act of infidels, and this is the fundamental reason for their general opposition. […] Entire parcels of dār al-islām [Islamic territory] being transferred to the authority of infidels constitutes an intolerable scandal.’48 In local writings the conquerors were referred to as Naṣārā (Christians), or kuffār (unbelievers). After their defeat, several leaders resorted to hijra, following the model of the Prophet Muḥammad’s migration. Amadou, one of the children of al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal, left Ségou in this way. He moved 45 The name given to followers of the teachings of al-Hajj Salim Suwari, explained in works by Ivor Wilks. They were characterised by avoidance of ‘lesser’ military jihad (as opposed to the ‘greater’ jihad of purification of the soul), refusal to become involved in political affairs, and trading with non-Muslims. 46 R. Launay, ‘Des infidèles d’un autre type. Les réponses au pouvoir colonial dans une communauté musulmane de Côte d’Ivoire’, in Robinson and Triaud, Temps des marabouts, 415-30. 47 P. Marty, L’islam en Côte d’Ivoire, Paris, 1922, pp. 453-4, quoted in Launay, ‘Infidèles d’un autre type’, p. 422. 48 J.-L. Triaud, ‘L’islam sous le régime colonial’, in C. Coquery-Vidrovitch and O. Goerg (eds), L’Afrique occidentale au temps des Français. Colonisateurs et colonisés (c 1860-1960), Paris, 1992, 141-55, pp. 143-4.
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to Bandiagara in Mali and then later to Sokoto, where he died in 1897. His cousin, Alfa Hāshimī, ended up in Medina.49 Several Arabic texts of the era underline the judicial necessity of migration to avoid living under an infidel power.50 Even after colonial rule was broadly established, some Muslims refused to accept the new situation, and chose instead to migrate internally. They withheld taxes and kept their children out of school, retreating to isolated villages. The case of Alfa Amadou Guidado, who migrated after Ségou in central Mali was conquered in 1890, is related in the autobiography of one of his students. He eventually moved to the remote village of Tambéni where, thanks to a spell from his master, no white person was able to enter before his death in 1953.51 Many Muslims resorted systemically to taqiyya.52 Ongoing colonial wariness Some colonial administrators who were living in isolation and a concomitant state of anxiety attempted to suppress conspiracies that in reality existed only inside their heads. One such instance was in Guinea, where an elderly holy man, the Wali of Goumba, was wrongly arrested for the murder of the administrator Bastié in 1907 and for anti-French agitation. Despite his age and his desire only to live on good terms with the French, he was condemned to death in 1911; his fate a foregone conclusion.53Also in 1911, another religious figure, Karamoko Sankoun of Touba, was arrested 49 Robinson, Paths of accommodation, pp. 149-50. 50 Cf. the very long text by Zulkifli Ag Mufleh, a Tuareg from Kel-Essuk in Kidal, Mali, ed. and trans. A. Saguer, Éradication des épines sur la voie de celui qui souhaite fuir le pays de la mécréance pour gagner la maison antique d’Allâh conformément à l’émigration du Prophète et de ses Compagnons, les meilleurs compagnons (‘Removal of thorns on the path of one who wishes to flee the land of disbelievers to reach the ancient house of Allāh, in accordance with the emigration of the Prophet and his Companions, the best companions’), to be published in the proceedings of the Nantes conference (25 and 26 June 2019), led by B. Hall (Berkeley) and B. Salvaing (Nantes), Le contact entre Européens et colonisés musulmans en Afrique de l’Ouest, étudié à partir des textes écrits en arabe et langues africaines (‘African responses to European colonial occupation in Western Africa through Arabic and ajami texts’) (forthcoming). 51 Le Blanc ne peut pas voir Alfa Amadou, Alfa Amadou ne peut pas voir le Blanc (‘The white man cannot see Alfa Amadou, Amadou Alfa cannot see the white man’), in A.M. Yattara and B. Salvaing, Mémoires, vol. 1. Une jeunesse sur les rives du fleuve Niger, Brinon-sur-Sauldre, pp. 18, 26. 52 ‘Dissimulation’, by Muslims who are allowed to conceal their true beliefs and adopt appropriate behaviour in order to avoid punishment. 53 Cf. Marty, L’islam en Guinée, pp. 77-85, 111-21. His account of these events shows his embarrassment at the punitive measures imposed by the French administration.
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and deported to Port-Etienne in Gabon, another innocent victim of the fear of a great conspiracy that had never existed. Conclusion This essay gives a short account of the game that was played out between France and Islamic groups in the period before the First World War. (It continued along much the same lines until independence in the 1960s.) The ground had already been prepared for the historic compromise that was embodied after 1914 in the figure of Seydou Nourou Tal (1880-1980), a great marabout of the Tijāniyya Brotherhood. However, it did not prevent continuing head-on conflict, complicated further from the 1940s by the rising power of fundamentalist forces such as the Wahhābiyya and Salafīs.
Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914
Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam Abdu Allah Qadi Abd al-Salaam, Abdullab ibn Qadi Abd al-Salam, Tuan Guru Date of Birth 1712 Place of Birth Tidore, Indonesia Date of Death 1807 Place of Death Cape Town, South Africa
Biography
Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam, popularly known as Tuan Guru, was born in 1712 on Tidore island in eastern Indonesia. He was the son of a qadi, one Abdussalaam, and his family traced their lineage to the Prophet Muḥammad. Not much is known about Tuan Guru’s early life. In 1780, he was brought as a prisoner to Cape Town, though little is known about the reason for his capture, except that he was accused of conspiring with the British against the Dutch in Indonesia. According to the document known as Tuan Guru’s will (MOOC 7/1/53, 66), he and three others arrived in Cape Town on 6 April 1780 and were imprisoned on Robben Island; he remained there until 1793. John Mason (‘“Faith for ourselves”’, p. 11) indicates that Tuan Guru was considered a well-educated Sufi scholar. On his release in 1793, he moved to Dorp Street in Cape Town and married Kaija van de Kaap, a free woman, with whom he had two sons, Abdol Rakiep and Abdol Rauf. He is known to have owned slaves (Mason, ‘“Faith for ourselves”’, p. 12). In Dorp Street, he established a madrasa in 1793, and after 1795, when the British replaced the Dutch as rulers in the Cape Colony, and the new governor, General Craig, gave permission for a masjid to be established in Cape Town, Tuan Guru extended the madrasa and converted a section into a masjid, known as Auwal Masjid, the first mosque in the city. Tuan Guru’s role as teacher contributed to the establishment of a successful madrasa education system for Muslims in the Cape Colony. The effect and influence of the education in the madrasa is attested to by the Earl of Caledon, governor of the Cape Colony, who said in 1807 he was convinced that, if the ignorance of the slaves was left unattended, they would fall victim to the Muslim faith through the educational zeal of the
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priest at the madrasa. It is within the madrasa that the formation of the language, Afrikaans, originated as a common language among slaves who came from diverse backgrounds. The high esteem in which Tuan Guru was held is epitomised in the name given to him, which means ‘Mister teacher’. He was also called walī Allāh, ‘friend of God’ (see Rafudeen, The ‘aqīdah, p. 4). When he died in 1807, he was buried in the Tana Baru cemetery in Cape Town, where a dome (kramat) now marks his grave. Tuan Guru wrote several treatises, of which Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān (‘Knowledge of Islam and faith’) is the most noteworthy. It came to play a huge role in the social life of Muslim communities as a reference on religious issues (da Costa and Davids, Pages from Cape Muslim history, p. 49). Other works by him include translations into the local Dutch dialect (later known as Afrikaans) of Arabic treatises on Islamic ritual practice.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Cape Town, National Library of South Africa – N.E. Rakiep Collection, MSB 683, Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān Archives Cape Town, Cape Archives – Master of the orphan chamber 7/1/53, 66 (Tuan Guru’s will) Secondary A. Rafudeen (trans.), The ‘Aqīdah of Tuan Guru, Cape Town, 2004 (a trans. of Tuan Guru’s trans. of the original statement of belief by al-Sanūsī) B. Marasabessy, ‘Tuan Guru. The Cape Muslim philosophy education system’, Makara. Sosial Humaniora 8 (2004) 126-32 J.E. Mason, ‘“Faith for ourselves”. Slavery, Sufism and conversion to Islam at the Cape’, South African Historical Journal 46 (2004) 3-24 S.E. Dangor, ‘The establishment and consolidation of Islam in South Africa. From the Dutch colonisation of the Cape to the present’, Historia 48 (2003) 203-20 Y. da Costa and A. Davids, Pages from Cape Muslim history, Pietermaritzburg, 1994 A. Davids, ‘Muslim-Christian relations in nineteenth century Cape Town (18251925)’, Kronos. Journal of Cape History 19 (1992) 80-101
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān ‘Knowledge of Islam and faith’ Date 1781 Original Language Arabic and Malay Description Tuan Guru worked on Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān while he was incarcerated on Robben Island. He completed it in 1781. The manuscript, which is written in Arabic, is 613 pages long, divided into three sections. The ʿAqīda, the first and most important of these, sets out the basic tenets of Islamic belief, and influenced Islam in the Cape for centuries. It is Tuan Guru’s transcription of a credal work by the 15th-century North African theologian Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 1490), very probably his ʿAqīdat al-ṣughrā (‘Short creed’). The second section, consisting of spiritual writings in the form of supplications and litanies, undergirded the ritual practices that gave expression to Muslim attitudes, and the third section consists of various sayings of the Prophet. In addition, there is a long section in Melayu on what appear to be topics in Islamic law. The teachings in Maʿrifat al-Islām give guidance for Muslims on correct behaviour in society. Tuan Guru argues for a system of social relations in which all, including owners and slaves, could live together without friction so that even a slave could be appointed to lead prayers as imam. Such harmonious attitudes were to be shown in relations with Christians as well, though the teaching in the first section about divine unity provided Muslim slaves with a clear understanding of the being of God that made it difficult for Christian missionaries to influence them with the message of the Trinity (Da Costa and Davids, Pages from Cape Muslim history, p. 55). Although Maʿrifat al-Islām does not contain any direct references to Christian-Muslim relations, it gives a clear indication of how Muslims should understand their status under colonial control, and suggests how they could establish and maintain a distinct identity in a predominantly Christian society. Significance The teachings of Maʿrifat al-Islām shaped the thoughts of the Cape Muslim community for decades after it was written, providing instruction in doctrinal belief and ritual practices that helped to consolidate the Muslim
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community in southern Africa. It gave the Muslim community a worldview that helped them to maintain distinctiveness within the surrounding Christian society. It was the custom as late as the 1950s for students to memorise Maʿrifat al-Islām and copy it down. It was taught mainly in the madrasa and mosque that Tuan Guru founded, and thus it contributed to its becoming the centre of Islamic intellectual activities. Publications MS Cape Town, National Library of South Africa – N.E. Rakiep Collection, MSB 683 (1781) Tuan Guru, Akiedatoel-Moesliem. ’n Kietaab oor Tougied, trans. M.A. Fakier, Cape Town, 1982, repr. 1996 (Afrikaans trans.) Tuan Guru, The ‘Aqīdah of Tuan Guru, trans. A. Rafudeen, Cape Town, 2004 (English trans.) Studies S. Morton, From the Spice Islands to Cape Town. The life and times of Tuan Guru, Cape Town, 2018 A. Cassiem, ‘Shayk Yusuf of Macassar, scholar, Sufi, national hero. Towards constructing identity and history at the Cape’, Kawalu. Journal of Local Culture 1 (2014) 168-80 S.E. Dangor, ‘Arabic-Afrikaans literature at the Cape’, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 45 (2008) 123-32 A. Rafudeen, ‘A parallel mode of being. The Sanusiyah and intellectual subversion in Cape Town, 1800-1840. Part one’, Journal for the Study of Religion 18 (2005) 77-95 A. Rafudeen, ‘A parallel mode of being. The Sanusiyah and intellectual subversion in Cape Town, 1800-1840. Part two’, Journal for the Study of Religion 18 (2005) 223-38 A. Rafudeen, ‘Ritual and political critique. Tuan Guru’s subversive pietism’, Journal for Islamic Studies 26 (2006) 92-112 Mason, ‘“Faith for ourselves”’ S.E. Dangor, ‘The establishment and consolidation of Islam in South Africa. From the Dutch colonisation of the Cape to the present, Historia 48 (2003) 203-20 Da Costa and Davids, Pages from Cape Muslim history Davids, ‘Muslim-Christian relations’ G. Lubbe, ‘Tuan Guru. Prince, prisoner, pioneer’, Religion in Southern Africa 7 (1986) 25-35 Jaco Beyers
Robert Percival Date of Birth 1765 Place of Birth Probably in England Date of Death 1826 Place of Death Probably in England
Biography
Born in 1765, Robert Percival became a professional soldier, reaching the rank of captain in the Eighteenth or Royal Irish Regiment. Little is known about his upbringing and private life, apart from the fact that his wife was named Antoinette and bore him a son in 1823. In 1795 his regiment was part of the British fleet that was tasked to take control of the Cape Colony, which until then had been under Dutch rule. This was an important strategic move, because it deprived the French, who were in keen competition with the British, of a base from which to control sea routes into the Indian Ocean. It also provided a convenient halfway post for replenishing food and fresh water for British merchantmen en route to the East. Percival and his troops were put ashore at Simon’s Bay just outside Cape Town, and given instructions to take the Dutch outposts at Muizenberg and Wyneberg, while the British fleet fended off attacks by the Dutch. Percival captured the Dutch outposts without much trouble, and was among the first of the British troops to enter Cape Town on 16 September 1795. He remained in Cape Town until 1797, when he was despatched to Ceylon. After returning to England from Ceylon, stopping at Cape Town on the return journey (1801-3), he published An account of the island of Ceylon (1803) followed by An account of the Cape of Good Hope (1804). In both works, which follow the same pattern, he comments on the local geography, culture, customs and religion.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION K. Schoeman, Portrait of a slave society. The Cape of Good Hope, 1717-1795, Pretoria, 2012 C.R. Beazley, revised D. Gates, art. ‘Percival, Robert’, in ODNB
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations An account of the Cape of Good Hope Date 1804 Original Language English Description An account of the Cape of Good Hope (in full, An account of the Cape of Good Hope and, containing an historical view of its original settlement by the Dutch, its capture by the British in 1795, and the different policy pursued there by the Dutch and British Governments. Also a sketch of its geography, productions, the manners and customs of its inhabitants, etc etc with a view of the political and commercial advantages which might be derived from its possession by Great Britain) starts with dedications to the Duke of York, requesting his ‘patronage and protection’. This gives the publication the character of reports about duties performed by a loyal servant who possesses something akin to a spiritual calling in his service of the British Empire. The work, which is 339 pages long, is a geographical and historical account of the Cape of Good Hope, describing its natural resources, farming and social conditions, particularly slavery. It details its recent history and its transference from British to Dutch rule in 1803, following the Treaty of Amiens, and explains the different policies followed by the two systems of government. Percival comments on the change in policy towards slaves and people from different religions, including Muslims. Under British rule, slaves were set free, something never considered by the Dutch rulers, and both colonists and slaves were relieved from the restrictions imposed upon them by the Dutch. Under the British, the Muslim community were permitted for the first time to build a mosque. Percival concludes by pointing out the advantages of returning the territory to the British Empire. In 1806, the British once again took control. Percival comments on the interactions of the Dutch colonists with slaves and local people, distinguishing slaves of colour, who are called ‘Mulattoes’ and seem to have a higher rank than the black slaves (p. 285). Confidence between the Dutch and the Malay slaves, of whom the majority were Muslim, was lost (p. 250) as a result of Dutch ill treatment and abuse of all slaves, even Muslim clerics (p. 274). On the other hand, the ‘Moors’ were humble, submissive and willing to do any work given to them (p. 297).
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The slightly earlier An account of the island of Ceylon (in full, An account of the island of Ceylon, containing its history, geography, natural history with the manners and customs of its various inhabitants, to which is added the journal of an embassy to the court of Candy, London, 1803) starts with the history of the island and descriptions of its geography and the customs and practices of the local inhabitants. In ch. 9, Percival includes an overview of the religion of the inhabitants, and ch. 18 is the journal of the embassy to the court of Candy. With regard to the local religions, Percival comments that while the Ceylonese may acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being, they still fear demons and devils and they worship lesser beings. All in all, he observes that religion in Ceylon consists of ‘confused and unintelligible superstitions which the natives have mingled with their obscure traditions’ (p. 207), an example being the belief that Adam crossed from India to Ceylon to live on a mountain. Roman Catholic priests exploited this fantasy by setting up a sanctuary dedicated to Adam on the mountain (p. 208). The Ceylonese are very generous and do not even deny charity to ‘the Moor’ (p. 212). Significance Percival’s works are relatively unknown, although An account of the Cape was translated into French soon after it was published. They have mostly been used by historians interested in the differences between Dutch and British colonial rule. Both An account of the Cape and An account of the island of Ceylon present Christianity as the religion at the top of a hierarchy, with Islam as the religion of the defeated and oppressed. The consequence is that Muslims are only allowed to practise their religion with the permission of Christians, and further that Christianity and Islam become more than religions; they are social markers that indicate status and privilege. Publications Robert Percival, An account of the island of Ceylon, London, 1803; 102838642 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Percival, Beschreibung von der Insel Ceylon: enthaltend Nachrichten von ihrer Geschichte, Geographie, Naturbeschreibung und von den Sitten und Gebräuchen ihrer verschiedenen Einwohner. Nebst dem Tagebuche einer Gesandtschaftsreise an den Hof des Königs von Candy, trans. J.A. Bergk, Leipzig, 1803 (German trans.); DOC-I3TZB2MY (digitised version available through Digitalna Knjižnica Slovenije)
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Robert Percival Robert Percival, Voyage à l’île de Ceylan, fait dans les années 1797-1800: contenant l’histoire, la géographie et la description des mœurs des habitans, ainsi que celle des productions naturelles du pays, trans. P.F. Henry, Paris, 1803 (French trans.); 102383983 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Percival, Beschreibung der Insel Ceylon und ihrer Bewohner: nebst einer Nachricht von einer Gesandtschafts-Reise an den Hof von Kandi, trans. T.F. Ehrmann, Weimar, 1804 (German trans.); 006530396 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Percival, An account of the island of Ceylon, London, 18052, repr. Farnborough, 1972, Dehiwala, Sri Lanka, 1975, New Delhi, 1990, Bremen, 2010; 100784654 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Percival, An account of the Cape of Good Hope, London, 1804, repr. New York, 1969; 007702468 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Robert Percival, Beschreibung des Vorgebirgs der guten Hoffnung nach seinem ehemaligen u. jetzigen Zustande, in histor., geograph., topograph., statist. u. kommerzieller Hinsicht, trans. T.F. Ehrmann, Weimar, 1805 (German trans.); PPN246238100 (digitised version available through Staats- und Universtätbibliothek Göttingen) Robert Percival, Voyage au Cap de Bonne-Espérance, fait pendant les années 1796 et 1801, trans. J.F. Henry, Paris, 1806 (French trans.); 100871493 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
Studies Schoeman, Portrait of a slave society Jaco Beyers
Henry Brunton Date of Birth About 1770 Place of Birth Selkirk, Scotland Date of Death 27 March 1813 Place of Death Karass or Georgievsk, Russia
Biography
Henry Brunton was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary to West Africa and the north Caucasus, best known for his skills as a linguist. Born in Selkirk around 1770, he enrolled at Burgher Divinity Hall in that town to train for the ministry. In 1797, Brunton volunteered for missionary service, and was sent to Sierra Leone by the Edinburgh Missionary Society (EMS). On arrival in Freetown, he and a fellow Scot, Peter Greig, were assigned to work among the partly Islamised Susu on the Rio Pongas (present-day Guinee Conakry). In 1800, Brunton had to return to Britain for health reasons, accompanied by some Susu youths in pursuit of education. These young men, as well as some Susu youngsters who were already being educated in Clapham, served as Brunton’s informants when, in 1801, the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East engaged him to work on Susu texts (Hair, ‘Henry Brunton’, pp. 97-8; Walls, ‘West African languages’, p. 390). Within two years, Brunton and his team produced A grammar and vocabulary of the Susoo language (1802) and a series of catechisms and tracts in Susu, among the latter a tract comparing Christianity and Islam, intended for mission among Muslims (Brunton, Grammar, pp. xxxvi-ix). In 1802, Brunton was re-assigned to the north Caucasus. Together with Alexander Paterson and Gillorum Harrison, one of the Susu young men who had accompanied Brunton to Scotland, he established a mission station in the town of Karass. The aim of Scottish Presbyterian work in ‘Tartary’ was the Christianisation of the partly Islamised Tatar population. The production and distribution of Christian texts in the vernacular was considered a crucial tool in this venture. The mission had its own printing press from 1806 onwards and was able to produce texts in both Latin and Arabic typesets. The mission enjoyed the patronage of Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-25), whose support of Christian missions (Orthodox as well as Protestant) was part of his colonisation and pacification strategy for the Caucasus; he hoped that (re)Christianisation of the Tatar population
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would appease the martial spirit of the local population and curb the influence of Islam (Haralampieva, ‘Scottish missionaries’, pp. 1-2). Brunton dedicated the remainder of his life to translation work in the Caucasus. He died in or near Karass in 1813, shortly after he had completed the Tatar-Turkish translation of the New Testament (O’Flynn, Western Christian presence, pp. 298-315).
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary H. Brunton, A grammar and vocabulary of the Susoo language. To which are added, the names of some of the Susoo towns ... a small catalogue of Arabic books, and a list of the names of some of the learned men of the Mandinga and Foulah countries, Edinburgh, 1802 T. Smith and J.O. Choules, The origin and history of missions. Compiled from authentic documents; forming a complete missionary repository; illustrated by numerous engravings, from original drawings made expressly for this work, Boston MA, 1832, vol. 2, pp. 211-21 C. Hole, The early history of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East to the end of AD 1814, London, 1896 Secondary T.S.R. O’Flynn, The Western Christian presence in the Russias and Qājār Persia, c. 1760-c. 1870, Leiden, 2017 T. Haralampieva, ‘Scottish missionaries in Karass and their role in the Russian colonization of the North Caucasus in the first quarter of the XIX century’, Almanach via Eurasia 2 (2013) 1-22 B. Mouser, ‘Origins of Church Missionary Society accommodation to imperial policy. The Sierra Leone quagmire and the closing of the Susu mission, 1804-17’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (2009) 375-402 A.F. Walls, ‘West African languages and Christian proclamation. The early years’, The Bible Translator 55 (2004) 389-400 H. Kirimli, ‘Crimean Tatars, Nogays, and Scottish missionaries. The story of Kattı Geray and other baptised descendants of the Crimean khans’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 45 (2004) 61-108 P.E.H. Hair, art. ‘Henry Brunton’, in G.H. Anderson (ed.), Biographical dictionary of Christian missions, Grand Rapids MI, 1998, 97-8 P.E.H. Hair, art. ‘Henry Brunton’, in D.M. Lewis (ed), Blackwell’s dictionary of Evangelical biography, Oxford, 1995, 157 P.E.H. Hair, ‘A Scottish missionary in the Caucasus. Henry Brunton’, Bulletin of the Scottish Institute of Missionary Studies 13 (1973) 28-30
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék ‘Sixth catechism for Susoo children’ Date 1802 Original Language Susu Description In his capacity as missionary linguist, Henry Brunton produced a total of nine texts in the Susu language. The tracts were commissioned by the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (later CMS) and were published in 1801 and 1802 by J. Ritchie in Edinburgh. Most of them are still extant and digitally accessible. They consist of a primer, a number of catechisms meant for religious instruction loosely based on a catechism written by Zachary Macaulay when he was in Sierra Leone, a ‘catechism’ to expound the advantages of literacy in the vernacular, a ‘catechism’ to explain ‘the absurdities’ of Susu religious beliefs, and a ‘catechism’ comparing Christianity and Islam, intended as a rebuttal of some of the recurring Muslim objections to the Christian faith. This last was Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék bè fe ra Masëha maninga fe ra nung ahha sèli fe, Mohámedu fkohera nung ahba sèli fe fokhera. Sixth catechism for the Susoo children, intended as a comparison between Christ and his religion, and Mohammed and his religion. At times it is referred to as ‘a dialogue on the comparative excellence of the Mahometan and Christian religion’, at times as ‘the eighth catechism’ and at other times ‘the sixth catechism’, the last title possibly indicating that, following Brunton’s own suggestions, the work may have been published together with the texts on literacy and on Susu religion in one volume. Brunton also composed A grammar and vocabulary of the Susoo language, which includes a list of the most important settlements on the Rio Pongas, a list of Arabic books used by Susu Muslim scholars, and a list of names of ‘learned men in the Mandinga and Fola countries, with whom a useful correspondence might be opened up in the Arabic language’ (Brunton, Grammar, p. xxxix). According to the Preface of his grammar, Brunton consciously opted to include Arabic terms (e.g. the words for blessing, judgement, miracle, God, etc.) in his description of the Susu language and in his translations in the hope that this would engender Muslim rapport with the texts and their content.
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Unfortunately, there seem to be no extant copies of Brunton’s Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék; perhaps the manuscript can be found in the archives of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East. However, its overall contents can be gathered from the summary Brunton gives in his Grammar. He writes: The eighth is somewhat larger than both the sixth and the seventh. It is intended to draw a comparison between the means employed by Christ and Mohammed to establish their religions in the world; their moral characters, and the evidences that they give of their being messengers of God; to answer some Mohammedan objections against the divinity of Christ, his being the Son of God, and his crucifixion in the flesh, &c. I have begun with giving an account of Mohammed’s relations, his occupation, marriage, announcing himself prophet, friends, opposition, assistance, &c.; and always, after stating as many facts as I thought the mind might take a distinct view of at once, I have compared the circumstances and conduct of Christ, to the circumstances and conduct of Mohammed. The facts concerning Mohammed, which I have stated, are mainly drawn from the Koran, and Abulfedas’ Annals [very probably Abū l-Fidāʾ’s Al-mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar, ‘A short history of humankind’, from which the biography of Muḥammad had been translated by Jean Gagnier into Latin and French in the 18th century], and are as such not likely to be disputed by the Mohammedans. Those concerning Christ, are drawn from the New Testament of course. Although I have not pleased myself with calling Mohammed bad names, yet I thought it might be necessary to declare, that I supposed his conduct to be wicked, even after I had stated arguments, which some may conceive to be strong enough to prove it, in order that none might think that I intended to reconcile the Bible and the Koran. What I have said concerning the progress of Mohammedanism in Africa, may point out the necessity of a catechism of this kind. (Brunton, Grammar, p. xxxviii)
From this, it is unquestionably clear that his intention in the catechism was to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over Islam. Brunton also seems to have composed an Arabic tract ‘addressed to Mahometans’, but there are no details about this publication (Hole, Early history, p. 597; O’Flynn, Western Christian presence, p. 258). Significance Brunton’s publications signal that, in the first decades of the 19th century, British Protestant missionary societies, such as the Edinburgh Missionary Society and the CMS, began to develop strategies for the effective evangelisation of Muslims. These strategies consisted of recruiting personnel
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with expertise in Arabic and Islam, whose acquaintance with the Qur’an and other authoritative Muslim sources would command respect among Muslim religious leaders; producing Christian materials in vernaculars prevalent among Muslims (e.g. Susu) in order to evangelise Muslims in their mother tongue; and developing texts in Arabic and the vernaculars that discussed and contested Muslim beliefs and practices. Brunton’s experiences in Sierra Leone, followed by his subsequent collaboration with the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, may have been instrumental in developing these strategies. While there are no indications that Brunton had detailed knowledge of Islam or Arabic prior to his missionary work in Sierra Leone, his tract Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék suggests that by 1802 he had become conversant with the Qur’an and other authoritative Muslim sources. The CMS minutes also show that his influence with the CMS board ensured that the next generation of missionaries to Sierra Leone, among them Peter Hartwig and Melchior Renner, were trained in Arabic and Susu before they departed for the field. While he was in West Africa, Brunton had observed the prevalence and popularity of books among Muslim leaders; he had also noticed that several of them possessed copies of the New Testament in Arabic. The awareness that Muslim religious leaders held books in high esteem and also showed an interest in Christian scripture led Brunton to the conviction that written materials could play a crucial role in the mission to Muslims. Thus, he convinced the CMS board that the production and dissemination of Christian texts and Bible passages was to be another important tool in evangelising Muslims. Aware that active knowledge of Arabic among Muslim religious leaders was at times limited, Brunton made a case for a two-tier strategy of publications in the relevant vernacular as well as in Arabic. However, because during his years in Sierra Leone he had come to realise that Muslims often had preconceived ideas about Christianity, he decided that it was not enough to give a mere explanation of Christianity by making Bible passages and Christian texts available in the vernacular. Therefore, producing materials that actively engaged and contested Muslim beliefs and practices, while using sources that were considered authoritative by Muslims, became another feature of the strategy of mission to Muslims. Brunton’s Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék seems to have made use of Muslim texts, including the Qur’an, in this manner.
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Henry Brunton
Publications H. Brunton, Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék bè fe ra Masëha maninga fe ra nung ahha sèli fe, Mohámedu fkohera nung ahba sèli fe fokhera. Sixth catechism for the Susoo children, intended as a comparison between Christ and his religion, and Mohammed and his religion, Edinburgh, 1802 [H. Brunton], A grammar and vocabulary of the Susoo language. To which are added, the names of some of the Susoo towns ... a small catalogue of Arabic books, and a list of the names of some of the learned men of the Mandinga and Foulah countries, Edinburgh, 1802; 008569164 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
Bir dostun Gelamy Mosslemaneh ‘The word of a friend to the Mussulmans’ Date 1806 Original Language Tatar-Turkish Description While he was in Karass, Brunton translated several tracts and Bible passages into Tatar-Turkish, including ‘The principles of the New Testament’ (1808), ‘Letters in defense of St. Paul’s apostleship’ (1808), ‘The Scottish shorter catechism’ (1808), ‘Saint Matthew’s Gospel’ (1808) and the complete New Testament (1813). According to a report dated 19 April 1808, the Karass missionaries were ‘persuaded that nothing would more effectively contribute to the overthrow of Mohammedanism and the establishment of Christianity than the circulation of the word of life in a language so generally understood’ (cited in O’Flynn, Western Christian presence, p. 299). In 1806, Brunton produced a tract entitled Bir dostun Gelamy Mosslemaneh, translated as The word of a friend to the Mussulmans and also An address to a Mussulman from a friend on the subject of religion. The sources are contradictory as to whether he merely translated the booklet or authored it himself. Described as ‘strongly polemical of Muhammad and the integrity of the Qur’an’ (O’Flynn, Western Christian presence, p. 301), it seems to have included Tatar translations of some verses of the Qur’an, and was said to have caused a great stir among the Tatar Muslim community. If it was indeed authored by Brunton, it could well have been a Tatar-Turkish translation or revision of his Susu Mawhoring fe shéni Susu
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dimédiék bè fe ra Masëha maninga fe ra nung ahha sèli fe, Mohámedu fkohera nung ahba sèli fe fokhera, which also seems to have been polemical and made use of the Qur’an. The year 1808 saw the printing of a Tatar-Turkish tract (52 pages long) entitled On the advice of a friend to a Mohammadan. Given the similarity in the titles, this was perhaps a reprint of the 1806 booklet. It is uncertain whether copies of either of the tracts are still extant and no details are available regarding their contents. Contemporary sources also mention a polemical tract in Arabic written by Brunton, copies of which were printed in London and brought to Karass by a missionary party arriving in 1805. Perhaps this was the same Arabic tract, ‘addressed to the Mahometans’, that was sent to Sierra Leone. The sources also mention ‘a small history of Mahomet and his companions’ produced by Brunton (Lord, A compendious history, pp. 269, 271), but no further details are known. Significance Bir dostun gelamy Mosslemaneh exemplifies one of the EMS strategies to convert Muslims. The tract was published in a vernacular spoken by Muslims, and engaged Muslim sources to argue the superiority of Christianity over Islam. By developing materials in both the vernacular and in Arabic, and by developing polemical materials alongside tracts that explained Christianity, Brunton and his fellow EMS missionaries aimed at engaging Muslims with the hope of converting them. While the use of qur’anic verses in the polemical tracts was said to have caused a stir within the Muslim community, the impact of the tracts in terms of conversions seems to have been distinctly limited. Publications Henry Brunton, Bir dostun Gelamy Mosslemaneh (trans. as ‘The word of a friend to the Mussulmans’), Karass, 1806 Henry Brunton, On the advice of a friend to a Mohammadan, Karass, 1808 Henry Brunton, ‘The principles of the New Testament’, Karass, 1808 Henry Brunton, ‘Letters in defense of St. Paul’s Apostleship’, 1808 Henry Brunton, ‘The Scottish shorter catechism’, 1808 Henry Brunton, İncil-i Mukaddes. Yani lisan-i Türkiye tercume olunan Bizim Rabbimiz İsa Mesihin Yeni Ahd ve Vasiyeti, Karass, 1813, 1816 (trans. of the New Testament) Henry Brunton, and E. Henderson, Sanctum Evangelium. Scilicet Novum Testamentum Jesu Christi, Astrakhan, 1818, 1825
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Studies O’Flynn, Western Christian presence, pp. 258-315 Hole, Early history of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East G. Grey et al., The library of his excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B. Philology, London, 1858, pp. 245-6 E. Lord, A compendious history of the principal Protestant missions to the heathen, Boston MA, 1813, vol. 2, pp. 247-322 J.C. Adelung, Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde, mit dem Vater-Unser als Sprachprobe in beynahe fünfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten, vol. 3, Berlin, 1812, pp. 171-9 Martha T. Frederiks
Shaykh Ali Gondar Shaykh Ali Musa Date of Birth Unknown Place of Birth Warra Himano, Wallo Date of Death 1858 Place of Death Gondar
Biography
There is scant information about the early life of Shaykh Ali Musa, known as Shaykh Ali Gondar. It is believed that he was born in the district of Warra Himano, Wallo, sometime in the early 19th century. He received his early education at Warra Himano and Qallu and later pursued further education in the Sudan and Bayt al-Zabid, Yemen. Later he travelled to Egypt to study mineralogy at al-Azhar University. Shaykh Ali was a member of the Mammadoch, a Muslim ruling family originally from Warra Babu (a district in Wallo), who by the beginning of the 18th century had become patrons of Muslim clerics and champions of Islamic religious propagation. He served as a judge in Warra Himano and Begemider and, as a diplomat and commercial agent of the Ethiopian state, he exercised considerable political influence in the Christian court. He was a follower of the Ḥanafī legal school and a member of the Qādiriyya Sufi order, which was based in the Addis Alem (Muslim quarter) in Gondar. He taught many students in the mosque in this quarter and was a main proponent of the propagation of Sufism in Ethiopia. The Qādiriyya was tolerant of Christianity, pre-Islamic belief systems, the veneration of the Prophet’s birthday, and local saints and their shrines. Shaykh Ali was called getaw (master) Shaykh Ali Gondar, ‘lord of Gondar’. It was in Gondar that he was recognised as a wali (‘holy man’), and his fame spread to other parts of the Islamic world. He travelled extensively in the Middle East and Europe for diplomatic and religious purposes. Highly influential in the political and social spheres in Gondar, he was often called on alongside the highest Christian ecclesiastical personalities to ensure peace and order at times of crisis. He enjoyed considerable respect from both Muslims and Christians both in his lifetime and after his death.
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Shaykh Ali’s birthday commemoration was for a long time the focus of a nation-wide pilgrimage to his grave at Addis Alem, the Muslim historical quarter in Gondar, by adherents of both Islam and Christianity. His shrine has traditionally been a place of offerings and sacrifices in his honour.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Gondar, in the personal possession of Shaykh Abdullah and Ato Kedir Taju – Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm, Sulaymān waqtī …wa-Mūsā gharāmī (‘Solomon is my time ... and Musa is my passion’), unpublished MS (n.d.; early 19th century; contains information about the life and times of Shaykh Ali) Secondary S. Rubenson, art. ‘Ali Musa or šeh Ali Musa al Gabarti’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, Wiesbaden, 2003, 222 Ahmed Hussein, Islam in nineteenth century Wallo, Ethiopia. Revival, reform and reaction, Leiden, 2000 Ali Asnake, ‘Some aspects of the political history of Wallo 1872-1916’, Addis Ababa, 1983 (MA Diss. Addis Ababa University)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Poetry Date Early 19th century Original Language Arabic Description Shaykh Ali’s books and poems include a biography of the Prophet Muḥammad and a prayer for him and wider humanity, works on the earth and its continents, and on the relationship of Islam to Christianity and also to Judaism. He reportedly composed 66 poems in Arabic on the spiritual and secular life of both Christians and Muslims. He had close friends among Christians, including clergy and politicians. Shaykh Ali wrote many 70-stanza poems based on the letters lam and mim, most of them kept today in Begemider, Wallo (Borana) and Gojjam. Following his death, some of the most substantial were moved by his two sons to Jimma in south-west Ethiopia. Most are not easily accessible since they are held in private collections and have not been published. Many are poorly housed and some are badly damaged.
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Of these 66 poems, most are on the teachings of Islam and humility, and obligations towards God and society. Shaykh Ali also repeatedly mentions the Prophet Muḥammad as his mentor and model, holding that the Prophet lived harmoniously with both Jews and Christians. Qaṣīda l-ʿayniyya (‘Poem rhyming in ʿayn’) is about the shaykh’s religious life and his relations with other religious communities, including Christians. Written early in the 19th century, it is more than 54 pages long. In it he mentions Christians and Muslims both in Ethiopia and elsewhere, among them people of Rome, Bulgaria, Burma, Java, Syria, Egypt and Algeria. He also refers to the character of ‘Layla’, who seems to be a personification of love: Indeed, Rome and Egypt are her folk, and all that is in them, And east and west, everything obeys (her). And I may bow down to the authority of love, And my mouth is filled with the sweetness of her saliva; She has cured me from love and my tears have abated. […] Does she in the villages of lovers sow a seed? And in between are gardens and crop land. Indeed, in between are the Nile, and a mile, and a league, And Moses and Jesus visited, paying homage. (Adem, ‘Philological and linguistic analysis’, pp. 149-50)
Jawāhir al-muṣaffā fī mawlid al-nabī l-muṣṭafā (‘Purified jewels, on the birth of the chosen Prophet’), written in 1843, is about Shaykh Ali’s prayers for the people of Gondar, both Christians and Muslims, moving out to all people of the world: O Allāh, the helper, forgive and protect the people of Gondar, Muslims and Christians, from misfortune. O Allāh, send blessings and give peace to the people of Gondar and all provinces of Ethiopia. […] God loves all human beings, Muḥammad the prophet also. As Muḥammad’s follower I love everyone regardless of religion, and I teach them as I can practically how to live together in respect. (unpublished MS, 1843, pp. 23-4)
Neither of the original versions of these poems has been published. Copies made by the Shaykh’s disciples are found either in full or in part in other works (particularly Abdullah, ‘Philological and linguistic analysis’, and Taju, Zamana tarik ka 1863-1881), with original copies held in various collections in Ethiopia.
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Significance Shaykh Ali’s works have been quoted widely by clerics, politicians and others. What they contain about Muslims and Christians has had a positive influence upon relations between the two faiths. Jawāhir al-muṣaffā, for example, is frequently quoted by Muslim clerics to emphasise that interreligious understanding in Gondar and Ethiopia has been an ongoing reality. Publications Shaykh Ali Musa, Qaṣīda l-ʿayniyya, unpublished poem available in MS form (copied in Abdullah, ‘Philological and linguistic analysis’, pp. 140-63, and Kedir Taju, Zamana tarik ka 1863-1881, pp. 310-19, and elsewhere) Shaykh Ali Musa, Jawāhir al-muṣaffā fī mawlid al-nabī l-muṣṭafā, unpublished poem, 1843 (copies are held in various private collections and extracts appear in Abdullah, ‘Philological and linguistic analysis’, pp. 121-39, and Kedir Taju, Zamana tarik ka 1863-1881, pp. 135-98) Studies Kedir Taju, Zamana tarik ka 1863-1881 (A.M.). Bahabesha damnew yefeneteku ya Etopiya Muslimoch liqaliqawunt antsebaraki mewaele hiwot, yarbegninet wulona yedirsan aberkito (‘History period 18701889. The patriotic lives and contributions of Ethiopian Muslim scholars’) Addis Ababa, 2020 Abdullah Muhammad Adem, ‘Philological and linguistic analysis with some annotations on manuscripts of Shaykh Ali Musa’, Addis Ababa, 2013 (MA Diss. Addis Ababa University) Ahmed Hussein, ‘Co-existence and/or confrontation? Towards reappraisal of a Christian- Muslim encounter in contemporary Ethiopia’, Journal of Religion in Africa 36 (2006) 4-22 Solomon Addis Getahun, ‘Addis Alam the nucleus of Gondar’, in K. Fukui, E. Kurimoto and M. Shigeta (eds), Ethiopia in broader perspective, Kyoto, 1997, vol. 2, pp. 3-17 Abdussamad H. Ahmad, ‘Trade and Islam in the towns of Bagemdir 1900-1935’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 29 (1996) 5-21 Ahmed Hussein, ‘Aksum in Muslim historical tradition’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 29 (1996) 47-66 Ebrahim Damtew Alyou
Thomas Bowdich Thomas Edward Bowdich, Bowdick, Bowditch Date of Birth 20 June 1791 Place of Birth Bristol Date of Death 10 January 1824 Place of Death Bathurst, Gambia
Biography
Thomas Edward Bowdich was born on 20 June 1791 (though 1790 and 1792 have also been suggested) at Clare Street, Bristol. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School, and in 1813 he married Sarah Wallis. Through his uncle, who was governor-in-chief of the settlements of the African Company of Merchants in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), in 1814 he obtained a writership in the company and went out to Cape Coast. In 1817, together with William Hutchison and Henry Tedlie, he took part in a mission to Kumase on behalf of the African Company of Merchants. Through his skilful diplomacy, they were able to secure British control over the coastal areas, which later aided the expansion of British influence and the annexation of the Gold Coast colony. Bowdich returned to England in 1818, and published his first book, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, in 1819. This was the earliest European account of Asante power and diplomacy, and it is still considered a classic. During his time in the Gold Coast Bodwich witnessed the corrupt practices of the management of the African Company. He wrote about this in The African Committee, by T. E. Bowdich, conductor of the mission to Ashantee, and as a result in 1821 the British government closed the company down and took over administration of the Gold Coast. Between 1820 and 1822, Bowdich was in Paris studying mathematics, physical science and natural history. On 10 January 1824, he and his wife arrived at Bathurst (now Banjul) in the Gambia, in order to conduct a trigonometric survey of the Gambia region. However, he died of malaria soon after arriving, leaving his widow with three children. His books include An essay on the geography of north-western Africa (1821) and An essay on the superstitions, customs and arts, common to the ancient Egyptians, Abyssinians, and Ashantees (1821).
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives Accra, Public records and archival administrative department (PRAAD) – ADM 5/3/1-1817 Miscellaneous reports of the diplomatic mission (T.E. Bowdich, Report of the Ashantee mission (1817-1818)) Anonymous, ‘The mission to Ashantee’, Edinburgh Review 64 (1819) 389-99 (book review) J. Barrow, ‘The mission to Ashantee’, Quarterly Review 22 (1820) 273-302 (book review) Archives London, The British Museum archive – fol. 1364, British Museum officers reports, vol. 6 (1820-1822) Archives London, The British Museum archive – British Museum standing committee report, April/May 1824 J. Dupuis, Journal of a residence in Ashantee, London, 1824 W. Huydecoper, Huydecoper’s diary. Journal from Elmina to Kumasi 28th April 1816-18th May 1817, trans. G. Irwin, Legon: University of Ghana Press, 1962 Secondary F. Sheales, ‘Sights/sites of spectacle. Anglo/Asante appropriations, diplomacy and displays of power 1816-1820’, Norwich, 2011 (PhD Diss. University of East Anglia) J. Westby-Gibson, rev. F. Driver, art. ‘J. Bowdich, Thomas Edward (1791-1824)’, in ODNB R.B. Edgerton, Fall of the Asante Empire. The hundred year war for Africa’s Gold Coast, New York, 1995 T.C. McCaskie, State and society in pre-colonial Asante, Cambridge, 1995 G.W. Irwin, ‘Precolonial African diplomacy. The example of Asante’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (1975) 81-96 I. Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century. The structure and evolution of a political power, Cambridge, 1975 N. Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali, London, 1973 T.C. McCaskie, ‘Innovational eclecticism. The Asante Empire and Europe in the nineteenth century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972) 30-45 W.E.F. Ward, ‘Introduction’, in Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee with a statistical account of that kingdom and geographical notices of other parts of the interior of Africa, London, 19663, 11-71 I. Wilks, ‘The position of Muslims in metropolitan Ashanti in the early nineteenth century’, in I.M. Lewis (ed.), Islam in tropical Africa, London, 1966, 318-41
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee Date 1819 Original Language English Description It was decided by the governing committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (the African Company) to establish formal relations with the Asantehene, the ruler of the Asante, and his people when it was recognised that he could assist the Europeans in limiting local conflicts and that, through him, routes to lucrative markets could be set up and maintained. (The Asante people were a powerful ethnic group located in the Gold Coast. The Asantehene had many diplomatic relations with other states and people, including Muslims and Europeans. It is one of these encounters with the Asante people that made Bowdich write his book on his journey and his experiences with the Asante king, his people and Muslims who lived in the kingdom.) Bowdich’s background as a scientific writer would equip him well to study and understand Asante society, so he was charged with collecting information on their history, geography, language, customs, music, art and architecture, and send a report to the Council of British and Dutch Governors as well as the African Committee. This is entitled Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee with a statistical account of that kingdom and geographical notices of other parts of the interior of Africa, a work of 512 pages which was published in 1819. It is divided into two parts. The first describes the preparations, the journey and the reception of the mission among the Asante, and then the events that led to the signing of a treaty between the British, the African Committee and the Asantehene, and the return of the mission to Cape Coast Castle. The second part documents the geography, history, constitution and laws, architecture, arts, climate and population, as well as some of their customs and superstitions, language and music. This part also describes trade activities between the Asante and other states, and between Muslim traders (Moors) and the British. The book ends with suggestions for future missions to Asante. The accuracy of its few direct references to Islam and Muslims in Asante (see pp. 37-70, 323-5 and 330-43 in the 1819 edition) has been confirmed by missionaries and ethnographers such as Thomas B. Freeman (in Journal of two visits to the Kingdom of Ashanti, London, 1843), Fritz Augustus Ramseyer and Johannes Kuhne (in Four years in
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Ashantee, London, 1875), and Robert S. Rattray (in Ashanti, London, 1923, and Religion and art in Ashanti, Oxford, 1927). Freeman was a missionary of the Wesleyan mission who visited Kumasi twice between 1839 and 1844. In his report he notes the presence of Muslims and how the Asante kings relate to them. He feared that this might affect the planting of Christianity in Asante as well as Christian-Muslim relations there. The Basel missionaries Ramseyer and Kuhne also observed the activities of Muslims in Asante when the two men spent four years in Kumasi between 1869 and 1874. The ethnographer Robert S. Rattray discusses the presence and influence of Muslims among the Akan in many parts of his books. For instance, in Religion and art in Ashanti he confirms the use of Islamic charms and amulets among the Asante. As is attested by the illustration of the annual Yam festival (p. 275), at which chiefs from northern Muslim states such as Hausa, Dagomba and Gonjaon were present in their regalia, Muslims held influential positions among the Asante. Bowdich relates that the members of the mission realised their ‘friendship will be highly necessary to gain good will’ (p. 79), and presented gifts of cloth to the ‘Moors of repute, the aristocracy, or four captains controlling the King, his four linguists, his brother and successor, our housemaster, and some other captains of superior influence’ (p. 85). He also observes that items of clothing, jewellery and amulets made in Muslim areas were popular among Asante nobles (pp. 32, 271-2), and that Muslims who lived among the Asante oversaw aspects of the long-distance trade between the kingdom and its northern neighbours. He was told they were Arabs, but most would have been Moshi, Fulani, Hausa or other Muslim people from the Niger valley. This trade later became the main means by which Christians and Muslims met in Asante areas. In writing his report, Bowdich made use of official correspondence and also observations and anecdotes taken from his own and his colleagues’ personal diaries and reports. He also refers to authors such as James Bruce (1730-94) and Mungo Park (1771-1806), and sometimes quotes passages from the 1788 travelogue of the German explorer Paul Isert (1756-89) and from Henry Meredith’s (c. 1777-1812) narrative of 1812. Significance Bowdich’s Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee is still recognised as an important ethnography. When R.S. Rattray made further ethnographical studies among the Asante in the 1920s, Bowdich’s was a work on which he relied. From Rattray onwards all studies on the Asante, especially with respect to the presence of Muslims and the attitude of the Asante king
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towards Muslims, by scholars such as Joseph Dupuis, Thomas McCaskie, Nehemiah Levtzion and Ivor Wilks refer to Bowdich’s work. It also served as a guide to future missionaries and ethnographers who studied the Asante state, its customs and people in preparation for their work there. Thus, when they first went to Asante they were already aware of the strong presence of Muslims and the role they played in the Asante royal court. The work continues to be important for understanding the history of Asante customs and practices as well as the complexities of interfaith relations among them. Publications Archives Accra, Public Records and Archival Administrative Department (PRAAD) – ADM 5/3/1-1817 Miscellaneous reports of diplomatic mission, T.E. Bowdich, Report of the Ashantee mission (1817-1818) Thomas Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee with a statistical account of that kingdom and geographical notices of other parts of the interior of Africa, London, 1819, repr. London, 2013, Cambridge, 2014; 186986 (digitised copy available through Biodiversity Heritage Library) T. Edward Bowdich, Geschichte der Brittischen Gesandtschaft an den König von Ashantee auf der Goldküste im Jahr 1817, Jena, 1819 (German trans. abridged) Thomas Edward Bowdich, Voyage dans les pays d’Aschantie ou Relation de l’ambassade envoyée dans ce royaume par les Anglais avec des détails sur les mœurs, les usages, les lois et le gouvernement de ce pays, des notices géographiques sur d’autres contrées situées dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, trans. C.-A. Def, Paris, 1819 (French trans.); 422431(digitised version available through bibliothèque numérique de Lyon [numelyo]) Thomas Edward Bowdich, Mission der Englisch-Afrikanischen Compagnie von Cape Coast Castle nach Ashantee, trans. C.Fl. Leidenfrost, Weimar, 1820, repr. Vienna 1826 (German trans.); 100882292 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T. Edward Bowdich, Geschiedenis van het Britsche Gezantschap: in het jaar 1817, aan den Koning van Ashantee, trans. J. de Quack, Amsterdam, 1820 (Dutch trans.); 119 J 9 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
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Thomas Bowdich Thomas Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee. With a descriptive account of that kingdom, London, 18732 (Foreword by his daughter T.H. Hale), repr. Memphis TN, 2010; 006535707 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Thomas Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, ed. W.E.F. Ward, London, 19663
Studies B.S. Miller, ‘Foodways and empire in 19th-century Asante diplomatic relations’, SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research 9 (2015-16) 34-46; https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/24092/1/miller-foodways-empire-19thcentury-asante-diplomatic-relations.pdf Westby-Gibson rev. Driver, art. ‘Bowdich, Thomas Edward’ Makafui Tayviah
Joseph Dupuis Date of Birth 1789 Place of Birth London Date of Death 1874 Place of Death London
Biography
Joseph Dupuis was born in London in November 1789 and baptised in Westminster in December that year. There is no information about his education or personal circumstances before he was appointed British vice-consul and later consul in Magodor, Morocco, in 1811 when he was just 22. During his assignment in Magodor (1811-14) Dupuis came to public attention through the role he played in 1814 in ransoming the BlackAmerican Christian sailor, Robert Adams, from Moorish captivity. Adams was a member of the crew of the Charles, which was wrecked on its way to Cape Blanco. He was taken by Moorish pirates and spent three years in captivity before Dupuis ransomed him. Interestingly, Dupuis’s vice-consul in Magodor, William Willshire, ransomed another American, Captain J. Riley, whose story of captivity is recorded in Sufferings in Africa. Captain Riley’s narrative (New York, 1817). While the Riley narrative provides detailed information about the harsh conditions for captives in the Barbary coastal interior, Robert Adams’s information as initially recorded in conversations with Dupuis had something extra. At a time when knowledge of the African interior was very limited, Adams’s claim to have been held in the historic city of Timbuktu intrigued Dupuis and later the African Committee in London. The narrative of Robert Adams includes information gathered from interviews with the sailor and published by the Committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. By making a comparison between Adams’s narrative and those of North African Arab merchants who were known to have visited Timbuktu, the Committee assessed Dupuis’s information to be credible in various aspects, especially regarding the description of that city and its environs. Despite the African Committee’s concern about inconsistencies in the narrative, Dupuis was reported to have assessed the accounts to be of value and, if they were accepted as true, Adams would
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have been the first non-Muslim Westerner to have safely completed a journey to Timbuktu. Dupuis did not leave any accounts of his Magodor experiences of freeing white Christian slaves. However, he became fluent in Arabic and, on his return to London, he was appointed in 1818 as the first British consul to Ashantee (Asante) on the Gold Coast. He arrived at Cape Coast on the Sarah in 1819 with his young wife, Evelina Danby (thought to be the illegitimate daughter of the artist J.M.W. Turner), whom he had married in 1817 and whose pregnancy was already well advanced. In the event, the couple’s first child died in infancy. They went on to have six more children. The appointment to Asante was a difficult one, because he was charged with negotiating good relations with the powerful west African kingdom and promoting Christianity where Muslim traders had already gained influence. As indicated later in his 1824 Journal of a residence in Ashantee, Dupuis’s greatest challenge turned out to be his personal relations with the governor and council of the merchants of the British forts on the Gold Coast, especially Governor Hope Smith of the Cape Coast Castle. The level of distrust and the magnitude of Dupuis’s disagreement with Hope Smith and his council deepened over the question of the rights of the king of Asante over the people of Cape Coast by virtue of conquest. In fact, following his visit to Kumasi and the content of a treaty, which the governor and his council refused to support, Dupuis paid his own way to depart the Gold Coast sooner than a direct trip to London would have been available. An entry in the Royal Gazette for 4 March 1823 (this publication was favourable to the British trading establishment on the Gold Coast) described Dupuis’s treaty with Asante in hostile terms, portraying him as having made ‘concessions so unjustified [to a] barbarian [king]’, and accusing him of disobeying the instructions he had received in England and those given him by the governor and council. Dupuis had not, however, lost favour by his actions. He returned to the Barbary Coast of North Africa as ‘his Majesty’s vice-consul at Tripoli’ in 1825, and served there until 1834, and later in Tunis from 1837 to 1841. In his new assignment to North Africa he was said to have ‘exert[ed] such efforts for the collection of valuable and almost unknown Arabic works’, including ‘the History of the Viziers, an exceedingly rare work, being only known by name in the Bibliothèque Orientale, of d’Herbelot’ (‘Proceedings of societies’, p. 326). Dupuis amassed a collection of valuable Arabic documents in Tripoli and Tunisia, though, despite some 30 years (1811-41) in government service, he did not leave any accounts of his Barbary Coast experiences,
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or any writings on Christian-Muslim relations other than the Journal of the residence in Ashantee. Furthermore, after a long and distinguished career, nothing is known about his life in retirement other than anecdotal statements indicating that he retired to England and settled in Lambeth after several unsuccessful applications for the position of curator of the J.M.W. Turner Gallery. The Foreign Service List of 1893 reports that he died of natural causes at the age of 85.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Robert Adams, The narrative of Robert Adams, a sailor, who was wrecked on the western coast of Africa, in the year 1810, was detained three years in slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and resided several months in the city of Tombuctoo, London, 1816 (republished, Boston MA, 1817) W. Hutton, A voyage to Africa. Including a narrative of an embassy to one of the kingdoms, in the year 1820, London, 1821 Joseph Dupuis, Journal of a residence in Ashantee, London, 1824 ‘Major Laing’s Papers’, Museum of Foreign Literature and Science 16 (January-June 1830) 489-94 (reprint from Quarterly Review) ‘Proceedings of societies’, The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australia 8 (1832) 318-30 Great Britain Foreign Service, The Foreign Service List, 1893. Forming a complete British diplomatic and consular handbook, London, 1893 Secondary J. Mori, The culture of diplomacy, Britain in Europe, c. 1750-1830, Manchester, 2010 C.H. Adams, The narratives of Robert Adams. A Barbary captive. A critical edition, Cambridge, 2005 J. Black, British diplomats and diplomacy, Exeter, 2001
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Journal of a residence in Ashantee Date 1824 Original Language English Description Journal of a residence in Ashantee (in full, Journal of a residence in Ashantee, comprising notes and researches relative to the Gold Coast, and the interior of Western Africa, chiefly collected from Arabic mss. and information communicated by the Moslems of Guinea), dedicated to King George IV (r.
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1820-30), is Dupuis’s record of and reflections on his assignment as the first British consul to Asante in the Gold Coast interior. It was published in 1824. Though his appointment was dated January 1818, Dupuis arrived at Cape Coast a year later on 24 January 1819 and, for various reasons, did not set out for Kumasi until late February 1820. He was officially welcomed by the king on 28 February, and stayed in Kumasi through the month of March, returning to Cape Coast on 5 April. His 264-page travel narrative is prefaced by a 38-page detailed description of the mission and its purpose, and an additional 135 pages of illustrations and collected documents regarding the geography of the Asante hinterland. In 1966, it was republished with notes and an introductory essay by W.E.F. Ward. This version comprises the introductory essay (64 pages); Part 1, Dupuis’s Introduction (pp. i-xxxviii) and the main text of the Journal, divided into seven chapters (pp. 1-264); Part 2, on the geography of western Africa, divided into two chapters; and an appendix containing various documents. This is the most accessible edition, and it is used here. Prior to Dupuis’s appointment, British interests on the Gold Coast were looked after by representatives of the Royal African Company. These were the governor of the largest British establishment at Cape Coast Castle and superintendents of the subordinate British forts that dotted the Gold Coast, who reported to the Company in London rather than directly to the Foreign Office or Treasury. Dupuis’s appointment to Kumasi signalled an important shift in policy, as he understood it: ‘To have full power and authority by all lawful ways and means, to aid and protect as well as our said merchants and other our subjects trading’ (Part 2, p. cxviii). He was reminded that although ‘he might be guided in the course of his duties by circumstances as they arise’, he still needed to ‘keep in mind as the general rule of his conduct, his duty and allegiance to his sovereign and country, the promotion of the Christian religion, and the interest of British commerce’ (Introduction, p. iv). Strategically, it would also be seen as desirable if Dupuis could negotiate with the king of Asante to secure ‘land, closer to the coast for rent, where educated children from the Castle Schools, could be settled to engage in employments that might eventually extend the cultivation and civilization of the whole coast’ (Introduction, pp. iv-v). He was also instructed that his prior acquaintance with Muslims during his long residency on the Barbary Coast should not prejudice him favourably towards Muslim residents of Kumasi. Thomas Bowdich, a slightly earlier visitor to Asante in 1817, reported in his Mission from Cape Coast to Ashantee of 1819 that those Muslims who had gained influence at the Kumasi palace made his own mission difficult. Dupuis was thus instructed
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not to place trust in these Muslims or to ‘use them as interpreters or otherwise’ as they may become obstacles to the promotion of British commercial interests. Contacts with Muslims in Kumasi occurred very early after Dupuis’s arrival in February 1820. At the welcome durbar on 28 February, he observed ‘a large Muslim presence of about three hundred, including people of the faith and their slaves, who were seated in the company of their Bashaw’ as part of the king’s party (pp. 71-2). The Muslims of Kumasi would become a valuable resource to his mission, and his friendship with them was formed as a result of his knowledge of the Arabic language and Islamic practices gained from his Moroccan years. As Dupuis tells the story, his first substantial contact took place on 2 March 1820: A deputation of the Moslems waited upon me to deliver a message of congratulations on the prospect of peace [based on Dupuis’ public statement during the welcome durbar with regard to the charge given him by King George]. The deputation consisted of Muhammad al Ghamba, or Baba as he was commonly called, Bashaw, or Caboceer of the Moslems, attended by Abdallah ben Gatta Shoumou, Ali ben Mohammed, Shellom ben Cantoma, Ibrahim al Yandy, Abou Becr Atolo, Jelelly ben Kadsy al Bouroumy, and Al Hadge Ambaric al Slaghy; and the principal traders, besides a proportionate number of the inferior classes, and slaves. Many of these people enjoyed rank at court, were invested with administrative powers, entitling them even a voice in the senate. Although Moslems, many of these people, in common with the heathen Africans, were addicted to the use of spirituous liquors, and it was frankly insinuated by some of the bystanders that a little rum would be acceptable. I took the opportunity to introduce a sort of satire used by the Arabs against drunkards. This astonishment, not to term it superstitious terror, with which these religious men were struck at the sound of the language exceeded any conjecture I could have formed. The sentence was well comprehended by the Bashaw, whose countenance betrayed a confusion that gave me pain to witness. (pp. 94-5)
This incident opened a conversation with the Muslims, who wanted to know if Dupuis was himself a Muslim and from which country he had truly come. Dupuis assured them that he had learned the language from his long residency among the Arabs. On a more serious note, later in the evening the Bashaw ‘returned, in the company with his friend Abou Becr only, [and] in the most serious and unaffected manner they enquired if I were not a “true believer”, and a Talb, or priest. To both these questions I thought proper to return evasive answers’ (p. 96). When the Muslims did not receive a satisfactory answer, they produced a copy of the Qur’an and asked Dupuis to read a certain ‘two or three passages relating to the unity
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of the Supreme Being, the resurrection of souls, the future state. Putting a favourable construction upon my compliance, the controversy ended.’ Thereafter, the Muslims assumed that Dupuis shared their faith or was at least knowledgeable and respectful of the teachings of Islam. They placed confidence in him and his mission, and became his confidants. The Muslims of Kumasi had had access to the palace for almost two decades prior to Dupuis’s arrival in Asante. Like Bowdich in 1817, he attributed their influential position to the talismanic charms they made and wore. ‘Some [of these charms] are accounted efficacious for the cure of gunshot wounds, others are esteemed to possess the virtue of rendering the wearer invulnerable in the field of battle, and hence are worn as preservative against the casualties of war, and some are calculated either to ward off any impending stroke of fortune, or raise the proprietor to wealth, happiness and distinction’ (Part 2, p. xi). The king had such deep trust in their charms that he did not engage in any warlike enterprise unless he was accompanied by the Muslims. Their friendship with Dupuis served the latter well, because they were able to inform and advise him about the nature of politics in Kumasi. He learnt from them that the king was in favour of improving trade and fostering peace with the British, unlike leading courtiers who had grave reservations about the activities of the British on the coast. When treaty negotiations reached a contentious stage, particularly because of the status of the Cape Coast, the Muslims reported to Dupuis on 18 March 1820: ‘We have just given our opinions to the king in private, that a war will ruin him in the land of the whites, and perhaps your Sultan [King George] will send a great army to conquer the country [Asante]’. On the basis of this advice, ‘the king threatened every opposer in the council, and insisted upon an unconditional submission to his plan of negotiation’ (pp. 147-8). Thanks to the quality of the information they gave him, Dupuis came to trust the Muslims. As he wrote later, ‘The fidelity and pointed attention of these Guinea Moors, during my stay amongst them, biased me with the conviction of their sincerity, and thereby established a mutual understanding and attachment’ (Part 2, p. vi). The Muslims were his daily companions, and they provided him information, including about the geography and knowledge about travel in the northern Asante hinterland. Continuing to think that Dupuis was a believer, the Muslims of Kumasi tried to assure him that they too had remained faithful to the teachings of the Prophet, even in among the unbelieving Asante, possibly an example, as Ivor Wilks says, of the Mande/Suwarian philosophy that opposed jihad and advocated an exemplary form of religious life among infidels in order
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to encourage conversion (‘Consul Dupuis and Wangara’). In this regard, Dupuis affirms that, while the majority of the Kumasi leaders were true heathens, the king’s belief in the power and efficacy of the Qur’an, the establishment of an Islamic school in Kumasi, and the clear Muslim disdain for human sacrifice had gained his sympathy. Dupuis describes his Muslim friends as ‘the only class of subjects belonging to the kingdom who are morally scrupulous in virtues such as we [Christians] prize ourselves’. He observes that the king is equally pleased with their sincerity, a characteristic attributed to the power and teachings of the Qur’an, so it was a great disappointment to the Muslims that Dupuis declined to swear an oath on the Qur’an during his last days in Kumasi, when he was asked by a delegation from the king to affirm his honesty in the negotiations over the new treaty. ‘The Bashaw placed the Koran upon the table. “By laying your right hand upon it, you will give pleasure to your friend the king”.’ But instead of complying, Dupuis asked for the oath to be administered in the European way: In lieu, I agreed to, and I swore to the covenant of good faith upon the Bible; but the bitterness of feeling overpowered me, as I noticed the desponding countenance of the Bashaw and his friends: the former retired pensively to a corner of the apartment, hugged the Koran to his breast with both arms; [exhibiting] an index of mortification. (p. 179)
Abu Becr would assess that Dupuis’s action was acceptable to the believers of Kumasi, but he also indicated that it would have been excellent if Dupuis had sworn the oath on the Qur’an, as that would have ‘satisfied every scruple of the court, and it would have conferred a great honour upon them and all the Moslems, and permanently have united their interests exclusively to those of the white men, which was what they wished above all things’ (p. 180). In other words, the Muslims of Kumasi were in support of peace and commerce in the same way as Dupuis proposed to the king. By the friendship he developed with the Muslims, Dupuis came to understand clearly Asante intentions with regard to coastal trade. It was from knowledge gained from his trip and the friendship that his relations with Muslims in Kumasi produced, that Dupuis would make his own prophetic assessment of future Asante-British relations: But, our relations on the Guinea Coast, I am inclined to think, have never been properly understood. If it is now the object of the legislature [in London] to establish a sovereign control on the Gold Coast, it would probably be adviseable in the first instance, to purchase the Dutch and Danish settlement; then, by a very different kind of alliance than that which was
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It would take another 50 years of war and diplomacy for the British to do precisely what Dupuis foresaw. Even though Muslims would continue to serve the palace in Kumasi, their intense engagement with the king and with European emissaries never matched that between Dupuis and his friends. There is no written evidence to support this assertion, but Dupuis’s Muslim friends in Kumasi must have been very disappointed by the non-ratification of the treaty. The death of Asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame shortly afterwards and war with the British on the coast under the new Asante king set the course of Asante-British relations, and for that matter Christian-Muslim interactions in the next decade, on an unsettled path. Significance The Journal of a residence in Ashantee was not intended to be widely circulated and Dupuis’s treaty with Asante was never ratified, as events took a whole different course. However, the work provides critical and valuable information about Asante at the apex of its power, the role of Muslims at the court, and how leaders of the Asante state perceived British intentions. While the contents of Dupuis’s Journal did not convince Governor Hope Smith and his council at Cape Coast of the usefulness of the mission, for scholars of Islam in Asante and those interested in the reconstruction of the thinking of Asante political leaders with regard to dealings with Europeans, Dupuis’s work is of great value. Ivor Wilks’ Asante in the nineteenth century (1975) is the best example of the impact of the Journal on the construction of the history of Asante and the Gold Coast. Publications Joseph Dupuis, Journal of a residence in Ashantee, comprising notes and researches relative to the Gold Coast, and the interior of Western Africa, chiefly collected from Arabic mss. And information communicated by the Moslems of Guinea; to which is prefixed an account of the origin and causes of the present war, London, 1824; journalofreside00dupu (digitised version available through Smithsonian Libraries) Joseph Dupuis, Journal of a residence in Ashantee, ed. and intro. W.E.F. Ward, London, 1966
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Studies G. Nagaishi, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. A reevaluation of AshantiBritish relations from Bowdich to Dupuis, 1817-1820’, 2018 (conference paper); https://www.academia.edu/12028793 I. Wilks, ‘Consul Dupuis and Wangara. A window on Islam in early nineteenth century Asante’, Sudanic Africa 6 (1995) 55-72 D. Owusu-Ansah, Islamic talismanic tradition in nineteenth-century Asante, Lewiston NY, 1991 L. Yarak, Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1873, Oxford, 1990 J. Adjei, Diplomacy and diplomats in nineteenth century Asante, Lanham MD, 1984 I. Wilks, Asante in the nineteenth century. The structure and evolution of a political order, Cambridge, 1975 J.D. Fage, ‘On the reproduction and editing of classics of African history’, Journal of African History 8 (1967) 157-61 (review of Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee by T. E. Bowdich, and Journal of a residence in Ashantee by J. Dupuis) K.A.B. Jones-Quartey, ‘“The Royal Gold Coast Gazette” and the Ashanti’, Research Review [Legon] 4 (1967) 19-29 C.W. Newbury, British policy towards West Africa, select documents, 1786-1874, London, 1965 G.E. Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana. Documents of Ghana history, 1807-1852, London, 1964 E.F. Collins, ‘The panic element in nineteenth-century British relations with Ashanti’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 2 (1962) 79-144 I. Wilks, The northern factor in Ashanti history, Legon: University of Ghana, 1961 M. Priestley and I. Wilks, ‘The Ashanti kings in the eighteenth century. Revised chronology’, Journal of African History 1 (1960) 83-96 David Owusu-Ansah
Nathaniel Pearce Nathaniel Clark Date of Birth 14 February 1779 Place of Birth East Acton, Middlesex (today west London) Date of Death 12 August 1820 Place of Death Alexandria
Biography
Nathaniel Pearce was a British adventurer and writer who travelled to the Red Sea and lived in Ethiopia for over 15 years. He had a brother named Joseph and also a sister, but otherwise little is known about his family and background. He attended two private schools. By the age of seven, he had learnt to read and write at Dr Hall’s academy in East Acton, and later he was sent to the Revd Adderson’s private school at Thirsk in Yorkshire, where he spent six years. He then went back to Dr Hall’s academy. His bad conduct at school led his father to remove him and send him as an apprentice to a carpenter and joiner (Pearce, Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 1). However, mistreatment and poor working conditions meant that Pearce did not last long there. His father again put him as an apprentice, this time to a wholesale and retail leather-seller but, following disagreements, Pearce soon left and enlisted on the Alert man-of-war (vol. 1, p. 6). On 10 May 1794, the Alert was chased by a French frigate and Pearce was taken prisoner, spending some months in various jails in Brittany. After many attempts, he managed to escape by sea (vol. 1, p. 17). Using his mother’s maiden name, Clark, he again enlisted aboard the Thames East Indiaman bound for China, but on the homeward journey he deserted once again and at the Cape of Good Hope joined HMS Sceptre (vol. 1, pp. 21-2). He travelled to India and back to the Cape of Good Hope, where, towards November 1798, the Sceptre was wrecked (vol. 1, pp. 28-9). Back in India, Pearce joined the Antelope, the cruiser that had been arranged to take George Annesley (2nd Earl of Mountnorris), styled Viscount Valentia, to the Red Sea. His aim was to explore the western shore of the Red Sea and establish contact with Christian Ethiopia on behalf of Great Britain and the East India Company (Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels, 1811, vol. 2, pp. 2-3), which by then was at the peak of its power.
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Illustration 2. Nathaniel Pearce dressed as an Abyssinian with a young Galla (Oromo)
In 1804, at the port of Mocha in the Yemen, Pearce deserted again and reportedly converted to Islam (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 37). A little later, however, tired of his new life, he asked British seamen from the Panther cruiser to rescue him, which they did, on 31 December 1804. The Panther’s mission was to convey Viscount Valentia to Christian Ethiopia. Pearce was thus transported to Massawa, where Viscount Valentia determined that the expedition to the Ethiopian highlands (‘Abyssinia’ in the sources) should be undertaken by his secretary, Henry Salt, accompanied by Captain Rudland, an agent of the East India Company, and Pearce himself (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 38; Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels, 1811, vol. 2, p. 447). On 20 July 1805, a group headed by Salt, Rudland and Pearce headed southwards to the highlands, by which time Pearce was described as speaking ‘a little Arabic’ (Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels, 1811, vol. 2, p. 447). Ultimately, Salt and Pearce were the only Europeans
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sent to Hentalo, then the capital of Tigray and the residence of its powerful lord, ras Welde Sillase (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 40). When Salt began the return journey in November 1805, Pearce stayed behind in the service of the ras and as Salt’s representative. One of his chief goals was to survey the country and spot potential market outlets for British and East India Company products and manufactures (Salt, Voyage to Abyssinia, p. 121). After some difficulties, Pearce managed to make his position in Tigray secure. In 1808, he married Issete Kidan (also known as Tiringo), the daughter of a Greek, and settled in the village of Cheleqot in southeastern Tigray. He was also in regular contact with agents of the East India Company active in the Red Sea. By 1810, he is said to have mastered the Tegreñña language and also acquired some notion of Amharic. After Welde Sillase, Pearce’s main sponsor in Ethiopia, died in 1815, his position in the country became compromised. During this time, Pearce received from Salt, who in 1815 had been appointed consul general in Egypt, printed Ethiopian Psalters from the British and Foreign Bible Society. These he distributed to monasteries and acquaintances. In November 1818, after years of wanderings, deprivation and without having recovered full health, he set out for Cairo, together with his wife and daughter, to meet Salt, with the ultimate goal of returning home. However, in early 1820, whilst he was waiting for a passage for England, he fell ill of severe fever. He died in Alexandria in August 1820 at the age of 41. From his own travel account, it can be surmised that Pearce was a rebel with a restless mind, and from an early age he lived an adventurous life. His editor, J.J. Halls, described him as ‘one of those remarkable and adventurous beings, whom Nature, in her sportive humour, seems to take delight in creating’ (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. iii). Clements Markham defined him as a ‘regular young scapegrace, who had passed his short life in running away from school and being flogged, deserting from his ship and getting two-dozen, knocking down sentries, and defying all authority’ (A history of the Abyssinian expedition, London, 1869, p. 48). Pearce did not write a travelogue proper. During his journeys and his years in Ethiopia he wrote several letters to his father and to Henry Salt, and he compiled scattered notes in a ‘journal’, apparently at the request of Salt (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 51). Reportedly, a large part of this was put together by Pearce himself during his short residence in Cairo in 1819-20 (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 52). In his testament, written a month before his death, he bequeathed all his ‘journals, papers, with the exception of none’ to Salt (Life and adventures, vol. 2, p. 347). This written material was edited posthumously by J.J. Halls and published in London in 1831.
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary G. Annesley Mountnorris, Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, 3 vols, London, 1809 G. Annesley Mountnorris, Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt, in the years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805, and 1806, 4 vols, London, 1811 H. Salt, A voyage to Abyssinia, London, 1814 Nathaniel Pearce, The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce, ed. J.J. Halls, 2 vols, London, 1831 S. Rubenson (ed.), Correspondence and treaties, 1800-1854, Evanston Il, 1987 Secondary R. Pankhurst, art. ‘Pearce, Nathaniel’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 128-9 T.P. Ofcansky, art. ‘Salt, Henry’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 503-4 D. Crummey, art. ‘Wäldä Sellase’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 1008-10 P. Rée, art. ‘Pearce [alias Clark], Nathaniel’, in ODNB S. Rubenson, The survival of Ethiopian independence, London, 1976, see index B.B. Woodward, art. ‘Pearce, Nathaniel’, in DNB C. Markham, A history of the Abyssinian expedition, London, 1869
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce Date 1831 Original Language English Description The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce (in full, The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce: written by himself during a residence in Abyssinia from the years 1810 to 1819: together with Mr. Coffin’s account of his visit to Gondar) was edited posthumously by J.J. Halls and published in 1831, 11 years after Pearce’s death. It consists of a compilation of texts, chiefly Pearce’s journals, his correspondence with Henry Salt, and additional information provided by William Coffin and Henry Salt (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 37; all references below are to this edition, unless otherwise stated). Halls also
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included in the edition two chapters written by Coffin about a journey to Gondar sometime in the late 1800s or early 1810s (vol. 1, pp. 198-260). The book describes the journeys undertaken by Pearce during his short and adventurous life, with special reference to his 15-year sojourn in Ethiopia. It opens with an autobiographical introduction of 52 pages, and this is followed by 22 chapters, all of which, except for the last, are dedicated to Pearce’s Ethiopian experience. The text is completed by appendices recounting various anecdotes related to Ethiopia and by Pearce’s will. Using a plain, uncomplicated style, Pearce describes his life in Ethiopia as a mercenary in the service of the powerful ras Welde Sillase. Based in Cheleqot in southeastern Tigray, Pearce appears as an important broker between the ras and British agents such as Salt and Coffin, and also as a valuable soldier. Yet we also see him falling from grace when his master dies of old age. Ultimately, following Welde Sillase’s death and with civil unrest spreading throughout Tigray, Pearce is forced to leave his house and estate in Cheleqot and begin a period of wandering and deprivation that will conclude with his ‘escape’ to Egypt. The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce was the first European travelogue on Eritrea and Christian Ethiopia to be published after the monumental Travels to discover the source of the Nile, in the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773 written by James Bruce some 50 years earlier. The narrative is situated in a convoluted period in the highlands of the Horn of Africa at the heart of the so-called zemena mesafint (‘era of the princes’), when power was split between a number of regional lords. During this time, using their closeness to foreign markets and sea outlets, Tigrayan rulers such as Welde Sillase managed to amass considerable power and influence. Although the main subject matter of the book is the Christian Tigrayan society in which Pearce settled, Christian-Muslim relations frequently feature in the narrative, providing insightful descriptions about relations between Muslims and Christians in the highlands and in the lowlands bordering the Red Sea (in present-day Eritrea). Throughout the narrative, Pearce informs his readers about the various Muslim communities that inhabit areas where Christians are in the majority. Among such districts were Arwozen, near Waldibba, populated largely by Muslims and ruled by a Muslim chief (Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 205), and Eslam Ga, a Muslim village in Semien (p. 252). Pearce himself had friendships with Muslims living in the Ethio-Eritrean highlands. One such figure was Basha Abdallah, an influential official of Welde Sillase residing at Adwa and in charge of collecting duties from the caravans coming from the sea.
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Abdallah had looked after Salt’s 1805 expedition to Tigray and he helped Pearce on several occasions (Life and adventures, vol. 2, pp. 135, 150, 157; Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels, vol. 3, pp. 138, 203-4, 270). At the capital Gondar, which Coffin visited sometime in the late 1800s or early 1810s, the ‘Turkuoch mender’ (the ‘village of the Turks’) is described and its origin attributed to the troops from Sennar on the Blue Nile, being quartered there when they served King Iyasu I (r. 1682-1706). There are also hints of shared cultural values between the two communities, such as the belief in the buda (the evil eye, hyena people; Life and adventures, vol. 2, p. 289). The narrative further informs that coffee (nowadays a national tradition of, mostly Christian, Ethiopia) was apparently rejected by the Christians ‘because it is used so frequently by the Mahomedans’ (vol. 2, p. 13), and there was widespread mutual refusal to eat meat slaughtered by the other confession in the area (vol. 2, pp. 323, 332), as continues to be the case today. Pearce also describes episodes of conflict between Christian and Muslim communities. One was provoked by disputes over grassland boundaries, involving Christian ‘Zellans’ and Muslim ‘Taltal’ (also known as Tental, i.e. Herto Afar), which ultimately resulted in a deadly clash. When ras Welde Sillase decided to execute three Zellan Christians who had killed one of the Taltals, the Christian priests protested saying ‘it was too much to kill three Christians for one Mahometan’ (vol. 1, p. 119). On a different scale, the narrative tells of the attempt by the Sennar cavalry to plunder the border area of Ras-el-feel, which was also claimed by Christian highlanders. The crisis that ensued resulted in the death of ras Welde Sillase in 1815 (vol. 2, pp. 137-8). Perhaps the most interesting passages on Christian-Muslim relations are those dedicated to the numerous Muslim merchants who oversaw trade and communications between Gondar and Massawa, and who often acted as middlemen and interpreters on behalf of foreigners and local Christians. The chief official overseeing trade in the highlands held the title negade ras or negadras, who was always a Muslim merchant. The Gondar negadras, the most powerful of all, was said to pay an annual fee to the Christian negus in the Gondar area and another to the government in order to be able to carry on his trade almost as a monopoly (vol. 1, pp. 11-12). It also appears that Muslim traders managed the lucrative trade in ivory between the hunting areas in the highlands and the main export outlets on the Red Sea. Thus, some Muslim traders were observed by Pearce in Welkayt bartering elephant tusks with the Christian ruler of the district there in exchange for articles brought from the coast (vol. 1, p. 221),
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and also a Muslim merchant named Adelcardu (perhaps ʿAbd al-Qādir) bartering with the monks of a monastery in Waldibba 22 elephant tusks for four pieces of coloured silk, a small Persian carpet, frankincense and black pepper (vol. 2, p. 177). He also refers to Muslim merchants involved in the slave trade (vol. 2, p. 236), and Muslim traders acted as important middlemen at times when expeditions were sent to Egypt to request a new metropolitan for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (vol. 2, p. 51). Of interest are also the passages dedicated to the powerful governor of the coastal province, who oversaw trade and communications at the port of Massawa and thus also the caravans travelling between the coast and the Ethio-Eritrean highlands (vol. 2, p. 297). During a conflict between the governor and ras Welde Sillase, the latter is said to have removed from the governor the estates he possessed in Hamasen (vol. 2, p. 53). A final aspect of Christian-Muslim relations that Pearce sheds light on is the widespread phenomenon of conversion, whether forced, strategic or vocational. Among forced conversions was the instance of the Muslim Sardoc Abdalla, who was forced by his captor, Gebre Tesfa, the ruler of Semien (d. 1816), to convert to Christianity (vol. 2, p. 45). Strategic conversions were frequently employed by the Yejju dynasty from central Wello (who traditionally professed Islam), such as the Christian Gojje Aligaz, who, once he had married the daughter of the King of Shewa, reverted to his original Muslim faith (vol. 2, p. 50). Other conversions mentioned are of six Christians, two women and four boys, who decided to become Muslim around 1816, occasioning Pearce’s comment: ‘Such crimes would have been punished most barbarously but a few months before, not only in those who had turned to the religion, but also in those who had converted them’ (vol. 2, p. 149). Pearce’s own short-lived conversion to Islam at Mocha (vol. 1, p. 37) seems to have been part of a more than common pattern of renegades among European sailors (see Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels, vol. 2, p. 67). Finally, a strange ‘conversion exchange’ is reported in which ‘two grown people, Christians turned Mahomedans, and two young Mahomedan boys, in consequence of their masters beating them, ran to the Abuna’s premises, and turned Christians’ (vol. 2, p. 245). Significance Pearce’s travelogue inaugurated a period of fertile travel writing, largely written by European travellers and explorers, focusing on the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa and Christian Ethiopia. Like James Bruce’s earlier work, it was widely read in the 19th century and was used as a rich source of geographical, cultural and political information. The British geographer Clements Markham described it as ‘a most interesting little book’ (A history
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of the Abyssinian Expedition, London, 1869, p. 48 n. 3). Among explorers, travellers and adventurers who read and cited it were the missionaries Johann Ludwig Krapf and Carl Wilhelm Isenberg (Journals, pp. 17, 49-50 et passim) and the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell (Reise, vol. 1, pp. xv, 226, 263 et passim), who was nevertheless critical of the book and pointed to a few contradictions or factual errors (e.g. vol. 2, pp. 17, 31, 37). In the 20th century, with the constitution of modern Ethiopian studies, Pearce’s travelogue has been profusely exploited as a source of valuable ethnographic and historical data (e.g. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, p. 194). The first and only edition of Pearce’s narrative is the one from 1831 edited posthumously by J.J. Halls. However, passages from his writings, published or unpublished, were frequently used, verbatim or in paraphrase, by other authors or reproduced in compilation works. Thus, excerpts focusing on his Ethiopian experiences were conspicuously used by Henry Salt in his A voyage to Abyssinia (p. 267) and reproduced a few decades later in Henry James’s Routes in Abyssinia (pp. 45-7) and paraphrased in Henri Lebrun’s Voyages en Abyssinie et en Nubie (pp. 56, 129, 155). Further passages were paraphrased in Michael Russell’s Nubia and Abyssinia (p. 162) and also translated into French by the explorer Guillaume LeJean (cf. Life and adventures, vol. 1, p. 274, with LeJean, ‘Voyage en Abyssinie’, p. 244). Publications Nathaniel Pearce, The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce: written by himself during a residence in Abyssinia from the years 1810 to 1819: together with Mr. Coffin’s account of his visit to Gondar, ed. J.J. Halls, 2 vols, London, 1831, repr. Cambridge, 2014; 008639839 (digital version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A critical edition of Pearce’s complete writings is a desideratum. Studies J.S. Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia, London, 1965 H. James, Routes in Abyssinia, London, 1867 G. LeJean, ‘Voyage en Abyssinie: VIII’, Le Tour du Monde (1865) 243-47 H. Lebrun, Voyages en Abyssinie et en Nubie, Tours, 1851 J.L. Krapf, and C.W. Isenberg, Journals of the Rev. Messrs. Isenberg and Krapf, London, 1843 E. Rüppell, Reise in Abyssinien, 2 vols, Frankfurt am Main, 1838-40 M. Russell, Nubia and Abyssinia, Edinburgh, 1833 Salt, Voyage to Abyssinia Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner
George Champion Date of Birth 3 June 1810 Place of Birth Westchester, Connecticut Date of Death 17 December 1841 Place of Death Santa Cruz, USA
Biography
George Champion was born in the town of Westchester, Connecticut, on 3 June 1810. His mother, the daughter of a clergyman, exerted a strong spiritual influence on her children ( Journal, p. viii). His father died in 1823, leaving George and his family to the care of George’s grandfather, Henry Champion Sr, who was Commissary General under George Washington. His grandfather’s wealth and privileged position in society meant that the young George grew up very comfortably. George attended Yale University in 1828-31 and then entered Andover Theological Seminary, from where he graduated in 1834. He applied for a missionary position with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and was assigned to Zululand, South Africa. He married Susana Larned (known as Sarah) in November 1834, and the couple left Boston for Cape Town in December. Accompanying them were five other missionary families, those of Rev. Daniel Lindley, Dr Alexander Wilson, Mr Henry Venable, Mr Aldin Grout and Dr Newton Adams (Journal, p. ix). The party reached Cape Town on 6 February 1835 and divided into two groups of three families each. One group, under Lindley, immediately set out from Cape Town to their intended mission field among the Zulus in the interior. The second group, including Champion, was to work among Zulus living north of Port Natal (later Durban), although they remained in Cape Town as wars were raging between the British and the Zulus. During this period in Cape Town, Champion and his colleagues studied the Dutch and Zulu languages and engaged with the local inhabitants, and Champion’s diary records his encounters with Muslims in Cape Town. The missionaries in the interior started off well, but later had to abandon all efforts because of skirmishes during 1837 between the Zulus and pioneer settlers from Cape Town. Eventually, the two missionary parties joined forces north of Port Natal. Champion travelled to the capital of the Zulu king, Dingane, to seek permission to establish a mission station,
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which the king eventually granted, and a mission station named Nginani was established on the banks of the Umsunduzi River. In spite of hard work no Zulus were converted, although they showed interest in listening to Champion’s sermons and were eager to learn how to read and write. When Lindley’s inland mission station was destroyed by Boer settlers in 1838 and his group of missionaries joined forces with Champion’s, King Dingane became suspicious of their intentions. The presence of pioneer settlers also contributed to tension between him and the missionaries. In February 1838, Dingane orchestrated an ambush during which the pioneer settlers were massacred, and it became clear to the missionaries that they could no longer remain in the mission station. In March 1838, they abandoned the station and fled to Port Natal, where they boarded a ship for Cape Town. Early in 1839, George and his wife and their two sons left Cape Town for Boston. Champion always had the intention of returning to the Zulu mission field. Meanwhile, he acted as the pastor of a church in Dover, Massachusetts, but had to resign through illness in 1841. He travelled to Santa Cruz, hoping to recover, but died there on 17 December 1841 at the age of 31.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives Cambridge MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library – American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, African missions records, ABC 15.4: Southern Africa, 1834-1960, Zulu missions. Letters, 1834-1846. [179]. 1834-1846. Champion, Geo. 72-90 A.R. Booth (ed.), The journal of an American missionary in Cape Colony, 1835, Cape Town, 1968; 007337203 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.R. Booth (ed.), The journal of the Rev. George Champion. American missionary in Zululand 1835-9, Cape Town, 1967; 001414267 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Sarah Champion, Rev. George Champion, pioneer missionary to the Zulus. Sketch of his life and extracts from his journal, 1834-8, printed for private circulation, New Haven CT, 1896 Secondary M.E. Healy and E. Jackson, ‘Practices of naming and the possibilities of home on American Zulu mission stations in colonial Natal, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 29 (2011) 1-19
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A.R. Booth, ‘Americans in South Africa, 1784-1870’, Boston, 1964 (PhD diss. University of Boston) D.J. Kotze, ‘Die Eerste Amerikaanse Sendelinge Onder die Zoeloes (1835-1838)’, Archives Yearbook for South African History, 1958, 1-214 D.J. Kotze, ‘Die Eerste Amerikaanse Sendelinge Onder die Matabeles’, Archives Yearbook for South African History, 1950, 129-319 E.W. Smith, The life and times of Daniel Lindley, New York, 1942
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Journal of the Rev. George Champion, American missionary in Zululand 1835-9 Date 1835-9 Original Language English Description The complete original manuscript of Champion’s journal is still extant, albeit in a very delicate condition, preserved in the Library of Harvard University (abbreviated sections are also housed in the Natal Archives Depot, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa). It has not been published in its entirety, though three volumes of extracts do exist: selections made by Champion’s wife Sarah for private circulation, which were published in 1896, 50 years after her death, and two editions by Alan Booth in the 1960s. There are also references to earlier editions in 1888 and 1896, though no publisher is mentioned. References to Muslims occur in the section of the journal dated 5 February-20 December 1835, mostly the time Champion spent in Cape Town and surroundings. This section is covered in Sarah Champion’s selections from the journal, though they do not include, for example, Champion’s description of the ratiep ceremony (see below). The main source for his dealings with Muslims and his reflections on them is therefore the manuscript itself. While Champion and his companions were learning the Zulu and Dutch languages in Cape Town, from time to time they tried to gather people together to hear a sermon. During this period, he recorded a few encounters with Muslims, including a statement that some ‘Mohammedans’ attended the school that he had started (Booth [ed.], Rev. George Champion, p. 19 for 27 June 1835), and an observation that the ‘priests of the Mahomedans’ put unbearable pressure on their followers to support them, causing many
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Muslim slaves to steal in order to provide for the priests’ needs (Sarah Champion [ed.], Rev. George Champion, p. 20 for 10 July 1836). In ‘“A faith for ourselves”’, John Mason quotes a section of Champion’s journal in which he gives an extensive description of a Muslim ritual he witnessed ‘one evening in April 1835’ (Mason cites as his source Booth, but since Champion’s description of this ritual is not found in either Booth’s editions or Sarah Champion’s private edition, Mason must be quoting from the manuscript itself): Woe is me [...]! I was walking in the streets tonight, & hearing a confused noise of singing, beating of drums &c.[...] I directed my steps to a one-storey house whence it proceeded. It was a ceremony of some Mahomedans. I saw thro’ the window 12 or 15 men seated around a small room, drumming & singing in a state of great excitement, while one of the number half naked was performing a variety of eccentric movements, throwing himself int’ every possible position, & at the same time catching a chain which he threw into the air. At times the noise would wax louder & louder, & the dancer (or priest) would become so furious in his gestures & features that I could easily imagine him a demon incarnate. This religion of the false prophet is increasing in Cape Town the number of its votaries, in the opinion of all. (Mason, ‘A faith for ourselves’, p. 4)
The ritual that Champion witnessed is known as the ratiep. The first written account of it is in the Cape Town court papers for 1813, which record that a certain Griep, a free black from Mozambique, was brought before the court on charges of killing another man. During a ceremony at a private home in Cape Town, Griep was spinning a sword on the stomach of a man lying down, and the man died from the wound he caused. According to Mason, the ritual was then referred to as the Callifat (‘A faith to ourselves’, p. 20). As to the origin of the ratiep, Armien Cassiem indicates that it is a Sufi ritual that may have arrived in the Cape through slaves from Indonesia, and describes it as ‘syncretic and unrelated to Islam’ (‘Shayk Yusuf’, p. 171). As a unique mystical ritual of Cape Town Muslims, it was used to attract slaves to consider conversion to Islam (‘Shayk Yusuf’, p. 172) and it is still practised today among Cape Muslim communities. Champion’s was not the only 19th-century eye-witness account. Mason (‘“A faith to ourselves”’, p. 21) mentions Alfred Cole, who in 1852 also wrote an account of the ceremony in Cape Town (The Cape and the Kafirs. Notes of five years’ residence in South Africa, London, 1852, pp. 44-6). He describes a large group of men singing and dancing in a candle-lit room and chanting verses from the
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Qur’an. At a certain stage they started singing louder and faster, and taking off their shirts. A frenzied dance started when a young man entered the room screaming. The other participants stuck a metal pin through his tongue and plunged a kind of dagger into his thigh, while he paraded around the room seemingly unhurt. Hot chains were brought in and a man started taking them in his hands in front of all present, without any sign of fear or burning. Mason (‘“A faith to ourselves”’, p. 21) also refers to an unidentified reporter who wrote in an edition of the Cape Monthly Magazine for December 1861 (pp. 356-8) about a similar event of dancing men stabbing themselves with daggers in a frenzied ceremony. Significance As there are virtually no Islamic written materials about the formative period of Islam in South Africa, Christian testimonies such as Champion’s diary, however biased, constitute important sources for our knowledge of the early stages when the beliefs and practices of Muslim communities were still predominantly shaped by Indonesian immigrants. Champion’s accounts also provide some insight, however slight, into the attraction of Islam for the enslaved in the Cape Colony. Publications Archives Cambridge MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library – Archive of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, ABC 15.1: Missions to Western Africa, 1838-1929, West Africa, South Africa. Previous to 1838. [53]., 1838, Champion, G. 71-80 and ABC 15.4.1 (Champion’s original journal) S. Champion (ed.), Rev. George Champion, pioneer missionary to the Zulus. Sketch of his life and extracts from his journal 1834-8, printed for private circulation, New Haven CT, 1896; 008416150 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.R. Booth (ed.), The journal of the Rev. George Champion. American missionary in Zululand 1835-9, Cape Town, 1967 (edition); 001414267 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.R. Booth (ed.), The journal of an American missionary in Cape Colony, 1835, Cape Town, 1968 (edition); 007337203 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies A. Cassiem, ‘Shayk Yusuf of Macassar, scholar, Sufi, national hero. Towards constructing local identity, and history at the Cape’, Kawalu: Journal of Local Culture 1 (2014) 167-80
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J.E. Mason, ‘“A faith for ourselves”. Slavery, Sufism and conversion to Islam at the Cape’, South African Historical Journal 46 (2002) 3-24 A.R. Booth, ‘Americans in South Africa, 1784-1870’, Boston MA, 1964 (PhD Diss. Boston University) D.J. Kotze, ‘Die eerste Amerikaanse sendelinge onder die Zoeloes (18351838)’, Archives Yearbook for South African History (1958) 1-214 D.J. Kotze, ‘Die eerste Amerikaanse sendelinge onder die Matabeles’, Archives Yearbook for South African History (1950) 129-319 Jaco Beyers
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the governors of the colony of Freetown (present-day Sierra Leone) commissioned a number of exploratory journeys to the territory of the northern rivers, the area between the River Nuñez and the Scarcies estuary (present-day Guinee Conakry). Many of the reports of these expeditions are still extant, offering a window into the economic, political and religious dynamics of the region, and more particularly of the Susu Muslim state of Moria and the Fula Imamate of Futa Jallon. The background to the expeditions was the increasingly precarious viability of the recently established ‘Province of Freedom’ for Liberated Africans. In 1787, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in London had sponsored the establishment of a free settlement for the impoverished Black Poor in Britain on the coast of present-day Sierra Leone. Beset by disease, death and the hostility of the indigenous Africans, the colony failed; most of the settlers died and Granville Town was set ablaze by the neighbouring Temne. In 1792, the settlement was re-founded. A group of 1,131 Nova Scotians arrived on the coast in 1800, joined by some 600 maroons from Jamaica and, from 1807 onwards, by large numbers of ‘recaptives’, slaves liberated en route to the Americas when the slave-ship transporting them was captured (Walls, ‘West African languages’, p. 389). In England meanwhile, a group of philanthropists founded the St George’s Bay Company, later renamed the Sierra Leone Company, in order to make the settlement viable and profitable. The vision of its abolitionist initiators was ‘to spread Christianity from its post on the coast, to promote trade in African products and to oppose the slave trade’ (Mouser, ‘Editor’s introduction’, p. ix). However, the company’s unyielding denunciation of the slave trade alienated both indigenous Africans and resident traders, and thwarted attempts to establish any sustained form of legitimate trade with the hinterland. In 1793, the directors of the company decided to investigate the possibility of shifting its commercial interests to the region of the northern rivers. Two alternative strategies were explored. The first was the creation of a new trade route that connected Timbo, capital of the Imamate of Futa Jallon, with Freetown via Kukuna, Kambia and Port Loko. It would bypass
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 101 the Susu Muslim state of Moria, which had been established in the mid18th century and had since conducted a series of jihads in an attempt to Islamise neighbouring towns and kingdoms, leading to a volatile stalemate between Moria and its non-Muslim neighbouring state of Sumbuya (Mouser, ‘Amara, Alimamy of Moria’, p. 4). In 1794, James Watt (born possibly in Glasgow c. 1760, died Freetown, 1795) and Matthew Winterbottom (born South Shields, died Dix Cove on the Gold Coast, 1794) were requested to explore this route. The two men undertook a three-month journey that began in the estuary of the Pongo river, passed through Labé to Timbo, and returned via the Scarcies river route to the coast. Although, according to Watt’s journal, the Fula ruler Almami Sadu supported the venture and a number of Fula representatives joined Watt and Winterbottom on their return journey to Freetown, instability in the region and opposition to the plan by Susu rulers meant that it did not materialise. In 1814, Sergeant William Tuft conducted another expedition to Timbo in order to ‘assure Fula authorities of the Colony’s continued friendship and to obtain agreement for opening an “unrestrained communication”’ (Mouser, ‘Continuing British interest’, p. 772). Again, neither the Fula nor the British were able to implement their plans. A year later, in 1815, yet another expedition, led by Brevet Major John Peddie, Captain Thomas Campbell and Lt Stokoe, set out for Timbo but failed to reach the capital (Mouser, ‘Continuing British interest’, p. 772; Mouser, Forgotten Peddie/Campbell expedition, 2007). In 1821, a fresh attempt was made by assistant staff surgeon Brian O’Beirne, who travelled to Timbo via the Scarcies corridor, to negotiate a trade route between Freetown and Timbo. O’Beirne successfully reached Timbo in March 1821 and met with Almami Abdul Qadri (Mouser, Guinea journals, pp. v-vi, 229). However, despite the combined Fula-British interests in the route, the expedition once more did not yield tangible results due to repeated obstructions by the Moria ruler Almami Amara, who considered a direct trade route between Timbo and Freetown a threat to his economic and political ambitions. In 1822, Alexander Gordon Laing (born in Edinburgh 1794, died near Timbuktu 1826) was commissioned to attempt to appease the Susu rulers. He travelled twice to Moria and once to Sulima to negotiate the route, but failed to reach an agreement. The last British 19th-century expedition to Timbo (1841-3), only partly government-funded, was made by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) linguist William Cooper Thomson (born Balfron, Scotland, 1804, died in Timbo, 1843). He got as far as Timbo in June 1842,
102 Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries but became embroiled in a power struggle between Almami Abubakar and his challenger Omar. Sources suggest that Thomson was detained in Timbo against his will for 18 months; he died in Timbo in November 1843 after a brief illness. His 12-year-old son, who had accompanied his father to Timbo, eventually returned to Freetown with the news of his father’s death and with his papers (Mouser, ‘Continuing British interest’, pp. 2789; Stanley, ‘Narrative of Mr. William Cooper Thomson’, pp. 106-7). The Freetown-Timbo trade corridor never materialised. The second strategy considered by the St George’s Bay Company aimed at setting up factories in coastal towns where well-established trade routes reached the Atlantic, e.g. in the estuaries of the Pongo, Nunez, Dembia and Forekaria rivers. The rationale for engaging in this coastal trade was part of an indirect plan to obstruct the slave trade by bulk-buying rice and other comestibles brought to the coast by caravans from the hinterland, and by paying higher than normal prices for them. In this way, the company would not merely procure much-needed commodities for the colony and stimulate legitimate trade along the northern rivers, but would also frustrate slavers and slaver service depots at such points as Iles de Los by buying up foodstuffs required for the transatlantic journey, thus boosting food prices and creating scarcity. This strategy, they thought, would ultimately drive the slavers out of business (Mouser, Guinea journals, p. 10). In 1802, Richard Bright, councillor of the Sierra Leone Company, made an overland journey to the major coastal towns between the Conakry and Scarcies rivers, while later that year Alexander Smith, also employed by the Sierra Leone Company, undertook a similar voyage along the coast. Meanwhile, in 1798 missionaries of the Edinburgh Missionary Society, followed by the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (later renamed the Church Missionary Society) in 1804, had begun work in the Pongo river area (Mouser, ‘Origins of Church Missionary Society accommodation’, pp. 1-28). Although a factory was opened on the Pongo river as early as 1794, the Anglo-French wars and their aftermath had profoundly affected the trade on the coast, and the number of ships mooring at the coast had dwindled. When Britain abolished the slave-trade in 1807 and its ships began cruising the West African coastal regions to intercept slavers, most slavers began to avoid the northern rivers region altogether and the commercial significance of the region diminished even further. By that time, however, the company had already lost interest in the coastal region (Mouser, ‘Editor’s introduction’, pp. 10-12).
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 103
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J. Matthews, A voyage to the River Sierra Leone on the coast of Africa, London, 1788 T.M. Winterbottom, An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, to which is added an account of the present state of medicine among them, London, 1803, vol. 1 (parts of Matthew Winterbottom’s journal, which is no longer extant, have survived in his brother Thomas Winterbottom’s book) A.G. Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima countries in Western Africa, London, 1825 E.G. Stanley, ‘Narrative of Mr. William Cooper Thomson’s journey from Sierra Leone to Tímbo, capital of Fútah Jállo, in Western Africa’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 16 (1846) 106-38 B.L. Mouser (ed.), Guinea journals. Journeys into Guinea-Conakry during the Sierra Leone phase, 1800-1821, Washington DC, 1979 (Richard Bright’s journal, pp. 31-113; Alexander Smith’s journal, pp. 115-36; Brian O’Beirne’s journal, pp. 137-280) J. Watt, Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo, capital of the Fula Empire, in 1794, ed. B.L. Mouser, Madison WI, 1995 (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library – Africa S.22) B.L. Mouser, The forgotten Peddie/Campbell expedition into Fuuta Jaloo, West Africa, 1815-17. A record of elaborate planning and grand misfortune and misunderstanding, Madison WI, 2007 B.L. Mouser, The William Cooper Thomson expedition to Timbo and the cycle of regime change in Fuuta Jalon 1841-1843, Madison WI, 2014 Secondary B.L. Mouser, ‘The origins of Church Missionary Society accommodation to imperial policy. The Sierra Leone quagmire and the closing of the Susu Mission’, Journal of Religion in Africa 39/4 (2009) 1-28 C. Fyfe, art. ‘Laing, Alexander Gordon’, in ODNB B.L. Mouser, ‘Amara, Alimamy of Moria from 1802-1826’, unpublished text, 2008; http://www.tubmaninstitute.ca/sites/default/files/file/amara%2070s.pdf A.F. Walls, ‘West African languages and Christian proclamation. The early years’, The Bible Translator 55 (2004) 389-400 B.L. Mouser, ‘Continuing British interest in coastal Guinea Conakry and Fuuta Jaloo Highlands (1750-1850)’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 43 (2003) 761-90 S. Schwarz (ed.), Zachary Macaulay and the development of the Sierra Leone Company, 1793-94, 2 vols, Leipzig, 2000 and 2002 B.L. Mouser, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in J. Watt, Journal of James Watt, v-xxv
104 Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries B.L. Mouser, ‘Guinea-Conakry during the Sierra Leone phase, 1750-1850’, in Mouser, (ed.), Guinea journals, 1-30 G. Deveneaux, ‘Buxtonianism and Sierra Leone. The 1841 Timbo expedition’, Journal of African Studies 5 (1978) 35-54 G. Deveneaux, ‘The political and social impact of the colony in northern Sierra Leone’, Boston MA, 1973 (PhD Diss. Boston University) B. Mouser, ‘Trade and politics in the Nunez and Pongo rivers, 1790-1865’, Lacrosse WI, 1972 (PhD Diss. University of Wisconsin-Lacrosse)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations British exploration of the northern rivers territory (Guinee Conakry), 1794-1843 Date 1794-1843 Original Language English Description Most explorers engaged by the Sierra Leone Company and its successors to explore trade opportunities in the territory of the northern rivers recorded their observations in journals, many of which are still extant. Some of them (e.g. those of Matthews and Laing) were published shortly after the expeditions were completed. These have now been digitised and are accessible online. Other journals until recently only existed in manuscript form (e.g. those of Watt, Bright, Smith and O’Beirne), but in recent years they have been made available through the painstaking work of the Africanist Bruce Mouser. Matthew Winterbottom’s journal is no longer extant, but some of his observations have been preserved through his brother Thomas’s book, An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (1803), which repeatedly prefaces passages with ‘as observed by my brother’ or ‘my brother was present’. Similarly, Lord Stanley drew on the (still extant) notes and letters of William Cooper Thomson when he was composing the narrative of Thomson’s journey to Timbo that he published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society London (1846). The journals, supplemented by materials from missionary sources and sporadic Muslim sources (e.g. letters to the governors of Freetown), give an impression of daily life in the northern rivers territory and the Futa Jallon hills, detailing observations on food, customs, dress, trade, politics, law and religion, as well as recording oral narratives on the political and religious history of the region, such as the Islamisation of the Susus, as well
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 105 as on the origin of the Muslim states of Moria and Futa Jallon. It seems likely that more sources than those described here offer details about Islam and the relations between Christians and Muslims in the northern rivers region, among them the archives of the Sierra Leone Company and its successor institutions, personal archives of its employees and of colonial officers, correspondence by resident traders, maritime journals, and papers and letters by the Liberated African settlers in Freetown. Although they represent an exclusively European perspective, the exploration reports offer a wide range of details on Islam, its ritual and legal practices, its material culture, and its history in the area. Issues addressed include: 1. Observations and oral traditions on the history of Islamisation and the establishment of the imamates of Moria (Susu) and Futa Jallon (Fula), as well as on the short-lived but violent career of an itinerant mahdī among the Susu. Richard Bright, for example, observes that, by the early 19th century, most of the Susu elite had become Muslim (Bright, in Guinea journals, p. 73; page references are to the published editions of the journals by Mouser and others, rather than to the original manuscripts). Bright records traditions of eye-witnesses who narrated that the Islamisation of the Susu had taken place in the mid-18th century, when they were still children, as a joint venture of Mandinka and Fula Muslims (Guinea journals, pp. 88-9). He also records that some groups resisted embracing Islam but that there was continued pressure on non-Muslim groups to convert (Guinea journals, pp. 66-8). Bright, Winterbottom and O’Beirne all describe the upheaval in Susu country during the short and violent career of an itinerant charismatic mahdī called Fatta, who reportedly attracted a large number of followers, deposed a number of Susu chiefs and seems to have abused women on a rather large scale (Winterbottom, An account, pp. 246-50; Bright, in Guinea journals, pp. 96-7; O’Beirne, in Guinea journals, pp. 246-50). Bright (Guinea journals, pp. 47-8) records that this mahdī was a native from Mondugo, the capital of Conya, which is one moon’s journey from Fouricaria [Forekaria]. He came with an army of followers to this and the neighbouring rivers and beheaded some of the chiefs on the charge of heresy, saying that they did not pray and read upright. His learning and address, which appeared to these people surprising in so young a man, and a celebrated passage in the koran where a prophet to come is spoken of under the name of Mahadi [mahdī] conspired to delude the people. This imposter was killed by Brama Sayou [Brima Sayo] in the Benna country about 11 years ago.
106 Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 2. Observations of ritual practice, such as funerary rites (Watt, Journal, pp. 65-6; Winterbottom, An account, pp. 245-6), Ramaḍān (Winterbottom, An account, p. 231), ritual slaughter (O’Beirne, in Guinea journals, p. 165), prayers (Bright, in Guinea journals, p. 39; O’Beirne, in Guinea journals, p. 240) and charity. James Watt (Journal, p. 40) observes that elderly people in Timbo received a weekly ration of rice from the Almami to meet their needs, which he in turn had collected in the form of tax. All explorers comment on the rigour with which prayers were observed. Winterbottom (An account, p. 231) records about the Muslims in Timbo: ‘They attend to the ceremonial duties with such strictness as might well cause Christians to blush.’ O’Beirne (in Guinea journals, p. 164) also observes that prayer had become part of the official ceremonies and public exchanges in the Susu town of Kukuna, which was part of the Islamic state of Moria. 3. Material religion, such as Muslim architecture, dress-code (Winter bottom, An account, p. 232; O’Beirne, in Guinea journals, p. 224), and the use of amulets (O’Beirne, in Guinea journals, p. 146; Stanley, ‘Narrative’, p. 118). While nearly all reports mention the ubiquitous presence of mosques, Watt, Winterbottom and Thomson make more detailed observations. Watt describes (Journal, p. 96) the existence of mosques without walls, fashioned from pieces of wood to indicate the walls, with pebbles as carpeting. Winterbottom records (An account, p. 232) that women in Bereira prayed in a circular building adjacent to the mosque rather than the mosque itself, with a man standing in the corridor to transmit what was being said in the mosque (see also Bright in Guinea journals, p. 39). He adds that European men were prohibited from entering the mosque, though they were, curiously enough, permitted to visit the women’s premises. Thomson mentions mosques with separate sections for male and female worshippers (Stanley, ‘Narrative’, p. 116), and says that he was repeatedly allowed to conduct his personal (Christian) devotions in the mosque (Stanley, ‘Narrative’, pp. 114, 117). 4. Muslim literacy and education (e.g. Watt, Journal, pp. 22-3; Bright in Guinea journals, pp. 40, 48, 73; Winterbottom, An account, pp. 217-21). Most reports give detailed descriptions of qur’anic schools and comment on the profusion of books and literary skills of the ruling elite. When Watt was staying at Labé, he met the king and some elders engrossed in books under an orange tree, and exchanged views with them on the creation narrative and on prophets such as David and Solomon (Watt, Journal, pp. 22-9). Bright (in Guinea journals, p. 54) records that both Almami Amara of Moria and his brother Senasi [Senesi] were renowned among the Susu for their erudition and proficiency in Arabic. Both had been educated in Timbo, a
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 107 strategy that facilitated good education as well as networking opportunities to get acquainted with the future elite among the Fula. According to Bright, Senasi had also visited Mecca and had passed through Hausaland, Timbuktu, Segu and Timbo on his return journey (Bright, in Guinea journals, p. 56). Both the king of Labé, Ali You Malfi ma Labay, and Almami Sadu of Timbo indicated to Watt that they were interested in sending one of their sons to England to be educated (Journal, pp. 23, 57), demonstrating how education (both European and Islamic) was considered a means of acquiring knowledge as well as forging political ties. 5. Legal system. Several of the journals report that the legal system in the northern rivers territory and the Futa Jallon was based on the sharīʿa, with O’Beirne explicitly observing that ‘[i]n trying criminals, they are wholly guided by the Koran’ (Watt, Journal, pp. 39, 68-9; Bright in Guinea journals, pp. 40-1, 59; O’Beirne in Guinea journals, pp. 236, 242-3, 246). Bright’s journal offers a detailed description of the procedure at Mandingo tribunals, recording that witnesses were to take an oath on the Qur’an and that legal books were to be consulted before the sentence was pronounced (Bright in Guinea journals, pp. 39-40). Both Watt and Bright were fascinated by the penal law and Watt witnessed the punishment of an adulterer who received 102 lashes and had his hair shaved off, describing it in some detail (Watt, Journal, p. 69). Bright (in Guinea journals, p. 59) adds that, among the Mandingoes, free persons received a set number of lashes, but slaves were whipped to death for adultery and similar crimes. Free persons were never sold into slavery for such offences. In Timbo, O’Beirne and his crew were ordered to refrain from socialising with the local women on pain of having their throats cut, leading O’Beirne to give a detailed description of the execution of convicts and the observation that they were denied a Muslim funeral (O’Beirne in Guinea journals, p. 236). 6. The slave trade. Given the abolitionist ideology of the Sierra Leone Company, it is not surprising to find in the journals long expositions of the evils of the slave-trade and the benefits of legitimate trade (e.g. Watt, Journal, pp. 33, 44, 55, 62, 231; O’Beirne in Guinea journals, p. 168). Both Watt and O’Beirne perceived that slave labour and the slave trade were essential to the economies of Moria and Timbo. Watt (Journal, pp. 51-2) documents that slaves outnumbered the free people in Timbo by five to one, while O’Beirne (in Guinea journals, pp. 217, 220) observes that most of the agriculture depended on slaves, who lived in separate slave villages surrounding Timbo. Bright (in Guinea journals, p. 40) also notes that slaves were considered a form of currency, recording that the fee for a three-year cycle of qur’anic education consisted of a slave or the equivalent in cash.
108 Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries He also records that some Muslims exploited the local appeal of education and set up a qur’anic school as a lure get children into their clutches, subsequently selling them into slavery. Watt was told that religious wars were ordered by Muḥammad and that the Qur’an legitimised enslaving non-Muslims (Watt, Journal, pp. 44, 62), though another of his informants told him that religion was only a pretence for war and that slaving was the real objective (Watt, p. 70). Bright, in conversation with an ʿālim in Bereira, also notes that local traditions connected slavery to Noah’s curse on his son Ham (Genesis 9:20-7): My curiosity led me to ask Le Hai Booboo [Lahai Bubu], one of the most learned school masters of Fouricaria [Forekaria], what reason their books assigned for the difference of colour in the black and white people. He told me that, according to their books, that mark of distinction was the effect of Noah’s curse on Hama and his posterity for discovering their father’s nakedness, by which also they were doomed to sell each other to the White people. (Bright, in Guinea journals, p. 91)
Significance The journals offer a wealth of detail on the history as well as the daily practice of Islam in the northern rivers region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and provide a window into the political, economic and religious dynamics of the region on the eve of European colonisation, underscoring the dominance of the Fula imamate in the Futa Jallon and its complex relations with the Susu state of Moria. The journals also detail how representatives of trading companies and political authorities, though ideologically and religiously motivated, endeavoured to establish diplomatic relations with powerful Muslim empires in the region by foregrounding common interests of trade and knowledge acquisition. The representations of Islam and Muslims in the journals are, generally speaking, descriptive and respectful. The expeditions and the expedition reports, as well as the French and German translations of some of them, are indicative of the growing Western European interest in West Africa in terms of its political structures, its economic possibilities, and its religious landscape. Governments, chartered companies, private traders, and missionary societies alike relied on information from these and similar reports to develop their political, commercial and missionary strategies.
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 109 Publications Publications are in chronological order of the expeditions: J. Matthews, A voyage to the river Sierra Leone on the coast of Africa, London, 1788; 009710868 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Matthews, A voyage to the river Sierra Leone on the coast of Africa, London, 1791; 008585460 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) MS Oxford, Bodleian Library – Africa S.22, J. Watt, Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo, capital of the Fula Empire in 1794 J. Watt, Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo, capital of the Fula Empire, in 1794, ed. B.L. Mouser, Madison WI, 1995 T.M. Winterbottom, An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, to which is added an account of the present state of medicine among them, London, 1803, vol. 1 (parts of Matthew Winterbottom’s journal, which is no longer extant, have survived in his brother Thomas Winterbottom’s book); 008727901 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T.M. Winterbottom, Nachrichten von der Sierra-Leona-Küste und ihren Bewohnern. Nebst einer Schilderung der dortigen brittischen Kolonie, trans. M.C. Sprengel, Weimar, 1805 (German trans.); 011921097 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T.M. Winterbottom, An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, to which is added an account of the present state of medicine among them, New York, 19692 T.M. Winterbottom, An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, to which is added an account of the present state of medicine among them, Cambridge, 2010 B.L. Mouser, The forgotten Peddie/Campbell expedition into Fuuta Jaloo, West Africa, 1815-17. A record of elaborate planning and grand misfortune and misunderstanding, Madison WI, 2007 B.L. Mouser (ed.), Guinea journals. Journeys into Guinea-Conakry during the Sierra Leone phase, 1800-1821, Washington DC, 1979 (Richard Bright’s journal, pp. 31-113; Alexander Smith’s journal, pp. 115-36; Brian O’Beirne’s journal, pp. 137-280) A.G. Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima countries in Western Africa, London, 1825; 009724870 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
110 Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries A.G. Laing, Voyage dans le Timanni, le Kouranko et le Soulimana, contrée de l’Afrique occidentale, fait en 1822, trans. J.-B.B. Eyriès and P.F. de La Renaudière, Paris, 1826 (French trans.); 10A34E35 (digitised version available through Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) A.G. Laing, Reise in das Gebiet der Timannis, Kurankos und Sulimas in West-Africa, Jena, 1826 (German trans.) A.G. Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima countries in Western Africa, London, 2011 E.G. Stanley, ‘Narrative of Mr. William Cooper Thomson’s journey from Sierra Leone to Tímbo, Capital of Fúta Jállo, in Western Africa’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 16 (1846) 106-38; 1798223 (digitised version available through JSTOR) Mouser, The William Cooper Thomson expedition to Timbo The letters written by William Cooper Thomson to CMS are digitised and can be found at: http://www.tubmaninstitute.ca/william_cooper_thomson _correspondence_and_reports Studies D.E. Skinner, ‘The influence of Islam in Sierra Leone history. Institutions, practices and leadership’, Journal of West African History 2 (2016) 27-72 B.L. Mouser, ‘“Walking caravans” of nineteenth century Fuuta Jaloo, western Africa’, Mande Studies 12 (2010) 19-104 Mouser, ‘Origins of Church Missionary Society accommodation’ B.L. Mouser, ‘Rebellion, marronage and “jihād”. Strategies of resistance to slavery on the Sierra Leone coast, c. 1783-1796’, Journal of African History 48 (2007) 27-44 Mouser, ‘Continuing British interest’ A.F. Walls, ‘Africa as theatre of Christian engagement with Islam in the nineteenth century’, in D. Maxwell and I. Lawrie (eds), Christianity and the African imagination. Essays in honour of Adrian Hastings, Leiden, 2002, 41-62 A. Jalloh and D.E. Skinner (eds), Islam and trade in Sierra Leone, Trenton NJ, 1997 D.E. Skinner, ‘Sierra Leone relations with the northern rivers and the influence of Islam in the colony’, International Journal of Sierra Leone Studies 1 (1988) 91-113 D.E. Skinner, ‘Mande settlements and the development of Islamic institutions in Sierra Leone’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 11 (1978) 32-62
Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries 111 Mouser, Guinea journals D.E. Skinner, ‘Islam and education in the colony and hinterland of Sierra Leone (1750-1914), Canadian Journal of African Studies 10 (1976) 499-520 B.L. Mouser, ‘Moria politics in 1814. Amara to Marwell, March 2’, Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, Series B Sciences humaines 35 (1973) 805-12 D.E. Skinner, ‘The Arabic letter books as a source for Sierra Leone history’, Africana Research Bulletin 4 (1972/3) 41-50 B.L. Mouser, ‘Trade, coasters and conflict in the Rio Pongo from 17901808, Journal of African History 14 (1973) 45-64 J. Hopewell, ‘Muslim penetration into French Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia before 1850’, New York, 1958 (PhD Diss. Columbia University) Martha T. Frederiks
William Cornwallis Harris Date of Birth March 1807 Place of Birth Wittersham, Oxney, Kent Date of Death 9 October 1848 Place of Death Surwur, India
Biography
William Harris was a British civil servant, military officer and traveller. He was son of James Harris of Wittersham. Another son, Robert Harris, was to become a Royal Navy captain. In 1821, William entered Addiscombe Military Seminary and, in 1823, he joined the army of the East India Company as a second lieutenant. One year later, he was promoted to lieutenant. He was posted to several places in India, including Khandesh and Sholapur, and was involved in tasks of maintenance and building military infrastructure (Keynes, ‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, pp. 19-20). In 1830, he was appointed executive engineer at Deesa and, in 1834, he was promoted to the rank of captain. In 1836, he went to southern Africa for medical recovery, returning to India in 1837. In early 1838, he was appointed executive engineer at Belgaum, south of Bombay. It was during this time that he completed his Narrative of an expedition in southern Africa, which was published in August 1838 (‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, p. 21). In 1840, this was followed by the publication of a book with illustrations from his Great Trek expedition, which was illustrated by artist Frank Howard on the basis of Harris’s watercolours. In 1839, Harris served as field engineer with the Sindh Force and, in December 1840, he was made superintending engineer to the southern provinces. In 1841, Harris was assigned to lead a diplomatic mission on behalf of his government to the Christian kingdom of Shewa, then ruled by Nǝguś Śahlä Śǝllase. The aim of the mission was to sign a treaty of commerce between the two countries. In the background was the interest of the British East India Company to consolidate its commercial route through the Red Sea, which had been secured with the takeover of Aden in 1839, and to curb French expansion in the area. For his part, Śahlä Śǝllase was eager to consolidate his power in the Ethiopian highlands. Moreover, a key shadow actor of the diplomatic mission was the German Protestant Johann Ludwig Krapf, who, since at least mid-1839, had been ‘deeply involved in
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promoting British interests’ at the court of Śahlä Śǝllase (Harris, Highlands of Aethiopia, vol. 1, p. xi; Rubenson, Correspondence and treaties, p. 44; see also Gräber and Smidt, ‘Krapf’, p. 436); for Krapf, the success of the mission could also mean securing the status of his Protestant religious mission in Ethiopia (Isenberg and Krapf, Journals, pp. 263-4). Harris’s embassy was made up of over 30 men. They reached the royal Shewan capital of Ankober in August 1841, and eventually spent 18 months in the Ethiopian highlands. They were successful inasmuch as they brought about an intense epistolary exchange between representatives of the two kingdoms (see Rubenson, Correspondence and treaties, docs 34, 35, 41, 42, 63, 64) as well as a bilingual ‘Treaty of friendship and commerce’ between Great Britain and Shewa on 18 November 1841 (preserved at the Public Record Office in London; reproduced in Rubenson, Correspondence and treaties, doc. 44). During the expedition, Harris collected extensive scientific data and wrote lengthy reports, which were duly sent to the Government in Bombay (see Keynes, ‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, p. 22 n. 23). At Ankober, he started writing a travelogue summarising his journey, which was published in 1844 under the title Highlands of Aethiopia, a narrative of a mission to the Kingdom of Shoa. Several other members of the expedition produced their own accounts, though to date they have only been partially published (see Keynes, ‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, pp. 22-3). Two volumes with lithographs authored by Harris and by the official artist of the embassy, Johann Martin Bernatz, were published in 1845 and 1852. The British delegation left Shewa in early February 1843 and reached India in August the same year. Besides several presents for Queen Victoria, Harris carried with him a letter beautifully illuminated by debtera Weide Zena Marqos; the letter, written in Amharic and dated 16 January 1843, was signed by Śahlä Śǝllase for the queen (reproduced in Rubenson, Correspondence and treaties, doc. 64). Ultimately, this valuable document was presented as a gift by the queen to the Gotha Library in Germany. On his return from Ethiopia to India, Harris was promoted to the rank of major. In mid-1843 he went to England, where he had the opportunity to hand the commercial treaty with Shewa to the queen. In mid-1844, he was knighted for his services. Early in 1846, he went once again to India where he was to serve as colonial engineer for three years, first as executive engineer at Dharwar Dion at Poona and then as superintending engineer of the northern provinces. He died of lingering fever at Surwur, near Poona. Harris’s life and journeys often moved across Muslim-dominated lands, both in the Indian subcontinent and in the Red Sea and Horn of Africa.
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As a British colonial officer, he was confident of the benefits British colonisation could bring to the regions of the Red Sea and he often made this explicit in his main travelogue, Highlands of Aethiopia. His chief interest thus went along with that of his country, that is, the development of regional trade and the consequent benefit it would bring to the local populations, Christian, Muslim or other. His views on Aden in that regard seem to be paradigmatic of his overall ideas on colonialism and empire. Accordingly, he proclaimed that Aden, emerging as it was rapidly from ruin and degradation, the tide of lucrative commerce, both from Africa and Arabia, may be confidently expected to revert to its former channel. Blessed by a mild but firm government, the decayed mart, rescued from Arab tyranny and misrule, will doubtless shortly attain a pinnacle far eclipsing even its ancient opulence and renown. (Harris, Highlands of Aethiopia, vol. 1, p. 29)
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W.C. Harris, Narrative of an expedition into southern Africa 1838, Bombay, 1838 C.W. Isenberg and J.L. Krapf, Journals of the Rev. Messrs. Isenberg and Krapf, missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1843 W.C. Harris, The highlands of Aethiopia, 3 vols, London, 1844 W.C. Harris, Illustrations of the highlands of Aethiopia, London, 1845 D.C. Graham, Glimpses of Abyssinia or extracts from letters written while on a mission from the government of India to the king of Abyssinia in the years 1841, 1842, and 1843, ed. Anna Lady Erskine, London, 1867 S. Rubenson (ed.), Correspondence and treaties, 1800-1854 (Acta Aethiopica 1), Evanston IL, 1987 Secondary D.H. Shinn and T.P. Ofcansky, Historical dictionary of Ethiopia, Lanham MD, 20132, pp. 208-9 H.M. Chichester, Revd J. Falkener, ‘Harris, William Cornwallis’, in ODNB G. Gräber and W. Smidt, ‘Krapf, Johann Ludwig’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 3, Wiesbaden, 2007, pp. 436-8 S. Keynes, ‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, in Ethiopian encounters. Sir William Cornwallis Harris and the British mission to the Kingdom of Shewa (1841-3), Cambridge, 2007, 19-34 R. Pankhurst, ‘Harris, William Cornwallis’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 2, Wiesbaden, 2005, pp. 1036-7
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The highlands of Æthiopia Date 1844 Original Language English Description The highlands of Æthiopia is a lengthy, detailed description of the British expedition to the Kingdom of Shewa led by Harris, and of the 18 months the expedition spent in the Ethiopian highlands. More than a travelogue, the book is also a detailed diary of Harris’s encounters and experiences in the region. It starts with the departure on 1 May 1841 of the members of the expedition headed by Harris from Bombay (Mumbai) for the Red Sea. They landed on 18 May 1841 at Tadjoura, in present-day Djibouti, and proceeded up the Awash valley to the foothills of the Ethiopian highlands. They passed Dinomali, in the land of the Argobba, in mid-July and arrived at Farri, the ‘frontier of his [the Christian king’s] dominions’. There, they were welcomed by Ayto Kalama Work, commander-in-chief of the imperial bodyguard, who was to escort them to the royal capital (Harris, Highlands, London, 1844, vol. 1, p. 332). After climbing the ‘Abyssinian Alps’ on 1 August, the party reached Machal Wenz, where they were granted an audience with the Christian king. Some days later, they were given permission to continue towards the royal capital of Ankober, some six miles away. It was there that the embassy would spend a large part of its 18 months in Ethiopia. In order to compile the bulk of the historical and ethnographical information in the book, it is plain that Harris must have made ample use of local informants, though they are rarely mentioned by name. A chief informant for the passages on the Awsa and Modayto must have been Ibrahim Shehem Abli, a Modayto leader (see Highlands, vol. 1, pp. 184, 186). The first edition of The highlands of Æthiopia was published in 1844 in three volumes and included a map of Abyssinia by James McQueen, a few engravings based on the work of the artist Martin Bernatz, and an illuminated dedication to Queen Victoria. The entire iconography of the dedication page was copied from the illuminations made by Weide Zena Marqos (who is not credited for the work) for the letter that Śahlä Śǝllase addressed to the queen (reproduced in Rubenson, Correspondence and treaties, doc. 64). The designs included such figures as the Archangels Michael and
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Gabriel, St George and St Theodore, and the only variation was the icon of King Solomon on his throne, which, in Harris’s book, replaced the image of the Trinity (‘Śǝllase’ in Amharic). Harris’s narrative is difficult to follow, largely due to the author’s convoluted prose. One scholar has justly remarked: ‘Harris’s most purple prose does indeed verge on the unreadable’ (Keynes, ‘Sir William Cornwallis Harris’, p. 29). The text is also punctuated by several factual errors, which can only partially be ascribed to mistaken informants or interpreters. Thus, the name of the 16th-century ruler Lebna Dengel is written as ‘Nebla Dengel’ and he is described as ‘the emperor of Gondar’, a city founded almost 100 years after he died (Highlands, vol. 3, p. 7), the royal Ethiopian drum negarit is called ‘nugareet’ (vol. 2, p. 285), and, last but not least, when Harris refers to the various native groups he encountered, he frequently adopts a patronising style that verges on the racist. For instance, the inhabitants of Tadjoura are referred to as ‘bigoted Mohammadans’ (vol. 1, p. 56) and his host, the ruler of Shewa, Śahlä Śǝllase, as a ‘half-civilised Christian savage’ (vol. 3, p. 27). Needless to say, the latter’s subjects do not fare any better in the narrative (e.g. vol. 1, p. 154). Yet, in spite of such flaws, the work provides plenty of historical, political and ethnographic data on the peoples and societies visited by Harris and his men. Thus, of particular interest are Harris’s descriptions of the Muslim Modayto, Adali and Somali tribes occupying the region of Awsa and the lower Awash, as well as other Islamicised highland tribes, such as the Argobba and several Oromo clans from south Wello (vol. 1). More ethnographic in character are the passages he dedicates to the ‘southern’ peoples, those who were to be progressively annexed by the Christian Shewa state. Harris labels the Oromo as the ‘African Tartars’ (vol. 3, p. 44) and provides insights into their ‘Wak’ religion. The narrative also gives information on the tribes and regions neighbouring the Oromo, including the Hinnaryo, Jenjero, Kaffa, Gurage and Kambaata, which presumably Harris was able to include with the help of local informants. The narrative abounds with hints about Muslim-Christian connections, particularly those between the Muslim principalities of the Afar lowlands and the lower Awash valley, and the Christian Shewan state. Until the final submission of these Muslim principalities to the Christian state in 1896, Christian-Muslim relations in the area were defined by open confrontation in the political sphere (Highlands, vol. 2, pp. 344-5) but intimate commercial ties and frequent interaction in the respective borderlands. Thus, while he was at Tadjoura, Harris observed that ‘extensive traffic is carried on with Aussa and Abyssinia, in which nearly all are engaged at
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some period of the year’ (vol. 1, p. 62). Tadjoura was chiefly one of the main handling stations for the lucrative regional slave trade, which was regularly supplied with slaves from the Ethiopian highlands by the local Christian lords. Other important centres of interaction between the two religions were the markets of Alio Amba. Noteworthy are also the remarks on the justice system (vol. 2, p. 94). The highlands of Æthiopia also features interesting disquisitions concerning the history of Christian-Muslim relations in the area. Among them are semi-legendary traditions concerning the Ethiopians blocking the Nile, and those related to the invasions of Ahmad Grañ during the 16th century (vol. 2). Significance Harris’s works on southern Africa and Christian Ethiopia, including the illustrated albums, were well received by the European public and, accordingly, were the object of several new editions. Moreover, being one of the earliest travelogues in the era of explorations, Highlands was avidly read throughout the 19th century by explorers, missionaries, travellers and diplomats intending to go to the Horn of Africa and Ethiopia. Thus, Harris’s diplomatic mission and the resulting text were widely commented on in several later travelogues, from Rochet d’Héricourt (Second voyage, p. 41) to Plowden (Travels in Abyssinia, p. 359), Markham (History of the Abyssinian expedition, p. 57), Andree (Abessinien, p. vii), and d’Abbadie (Géographie de l’Ethiopie, vol. 1, p. 255). Publications W.C. Harris, The highlands of Æthiopia, 3 vols, London, 1844; 007684296 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.C. Harris, The highlands of Æthiopia, London, 18442; 007684296 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W.C. Harris, Harris’ Gesandtschaftsreise nach Schoa und Aufenthalt in Südabyssinien: 1841-1843, trans. K von K, 2 vols, Stuttgart, 1845-6, repr. Saarbrücken, 2006 (German trans.); Gs 7791 -30 (digitised version available through DMZ) W.C. Harris, The highlands of Æthiopia, Farnborough, 1968 Studies Rubenson (ed.), Correspondence and treaties, 1800-1854 A. d’Abbadie, Géographie de l’Ethiopie. Ce que j’ai entendu, faisant suit à ce que j’ai vu, Paris, 1890
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David Boilat Date of Birth 23 April 1814 Place of Birth Saint-Louis, Senegal Date of Death 19 December 1901 Place of Death Nantouillet, France
Biography
David Boilat, at times also known as Paul David or Pierre David Boilat, was a Roman Catholic priest, best known for his literary work. He was born on 23 April 1814 in Saint-Louis in present-day Senegal, the son of a French father and a Senegalese mother named Marie Montel; both apparently died when he was still young. Aged 13, Boilat was among a group of teen agers sent to France by Sr Anne-Marie Javouhey, who founded the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny and whose vision for an indigenous church hinged on the crucial role envisaged for French-educated indigenous teachers, clergy and religious. Boilat was one of the few who eventually returned to West Africa; most of the children died in France. In 1840, Boilat and two of his countrymen (Arsène Fridoil and Jean Pierre Moussa) were ordained by the Bishop of Carcassonne. Soon after his return to West Africa in 1843, he was asked by the governor, Louis Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, to establish a French secondary school in Saint-Louis. Owing to tensions with the Brothers of Ploërmel, who regarded the school as a competitor to their own educational institutions, Boilat withdrew from this position in 1845 and spent the remainder of his years in the French colony, serving parishes in Saint-Louis and Gorée. During this period he travelled extensively, gathering ethnographic, linguistic and historical materials for the Société de Géographie and collecting material for his book on the peoples of present-day Senegal and on the history of Christianity in the colony. Some of these materials were published in his Esquisses sénégalaises (1853) and his Grammaire de la langue woloffe (Paris, 1858); others, such as ‘Notes du Fouta Toro’ (1843) and ‘Voyage à Joal’ (1846) are only available as archival sources. Most of Boilat’s materials are richly illustrated with his own drawings. In 1853, Boilat returned to France, where he served as a parish priest, first in Dampmart and later in Nantouillet, until his death on 19 December 1901.
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Paris, BNF - SG MS8-49 (1324), D.P. Boilat, ‘Notes du Fouta Toro. Lettres, mœurs, superstitions, dessins, chansons du Fouta’ (1843); https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530672939/f5.item MS Paris, BNF - SG Carton BO-BON (109), D. Boilat, ‘Voyage à Joal’ (1846); https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53067292v/f7.item D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes, Paris, 1853 Secondary H. Jones, art. ‘David Boilat’, in Dictionary of African biography, Oxford, 2012, vol. 1, 476-9 A. Pondopoulo, art. ‘Boilat, David, abbé’, in F. Pouillon (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, Paris, 20122, 124-5 J.-R. de Benoist, Histoire de l’Église catholique au Sénégal. Du milieu du XVe siècle à l’aube du troisième millénaire, Paris, 2008, pp. 111-22 Y. Bouquillon and R. Cornevin, David Boilat, 1814-1901. Le précurseur, Dakar, 1981 J. Delcourt, Histoire religieuse du Sénégal, Dakar, 1976, pp. 16-52
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Esquisses sénégalaises ‘Senegalese sketches’ Date 1853 Original Language French Description Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes (‘Senegalese sketches. Physiognomy of the country, people, commerce, religions, past and future, stories and legends’) is an ethnographic study of the indigenous peoples of presentday Senegal. First published in 1853 in Paris, the book was reprinted several times. The 1984 edition by Abdoulaye-Bara Diop, which is referenced in this entry, brings together the original 1853 edition of Esquisses sénégalaises and another 1853 publication that was meant to supplement it. Alternately called L’atlas or Illustrations des esquisses sénégalaises, the supplement features 24 full-colour illustrations painted by Boilat, which in ‘costume-book style’ depict the various social and ethnic groups described in the book. In the 1984 edition, Boilat’s text is xvi + 499 pages long; the
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Illustration 3. A man of the Wolof tribe
edition further includes the 24 illustrations and a 22-page introduction by Abdoulaye-Bara Diop. The greater part of Esquisses sénégalaises consists of ethnographic sketches of the peoples of present-day Senegal, such as the Nones, Serer, Wolof, Bambara, Fulani, Tukulor and Mandinka, and the Moors of Trarza, as well as the inhabitants of Gorée Island. Boilat’s descriptions typically include the characteristic appearance and clothing of each group, as well as observations on customs, diet, religion, cosmology, history, language, involvement in commerce and agriculture, and governance structure. Alongside the ethnographic materials, Boilat relates the region’s history of Christianity from the 15th century onwards, and reflects on the challenges encountered by Christian missionaries in a land dominated by Islam and traditional religions.
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Boilat’s choice of words and his intermittent evaluative comments betray his total allegiance to France and Roman Catholicism. Though at times lauded as a nationalist and father of Senegalese literature, his aspirations for the region testify to his colonial socialisation and mindset (Mouralis, Les ‘Esquisses sénégalaises’, pp. 819-37; Warner, Tonguetied imagination, pp. 33-50). The book’s main thrust is an entreaty for civilisation through French education and Christian mission, and, where required, French intervention (pp. 475-6). As Boilat sees it, local adherence to religions other than Christianity hinders the process of civilisation. Languages such as Wolof (his own mother tongue), he believes, are ill-equipped (and therefore unsuitable) to express Christian beliefs, and their prolonged circulation could potentially thwart both progress and Christian morality (p. 14; Boilat, Grammaire, p. vi). Boilat also considers Islam – and to a lesser extent traditional religion – to be a major obstacle to civilisation and progress. Esquisses sénégalaises is strongly deprecatory of qur’anic schools, which in Boilat’s opinion teach children little more than to read the Qur’an and beg for food, but fail to prepare them for a profession. He writes: ‘Accustomed to itinerancy, and no longer receiving alms, they will become thieves and indulge in all sorts of vices’ (p. 208). Therefore, he argues, it would be in the colony’s interest to close down the schools and compel parents to send their children to French schools. Anticipating the protests this would arouse, he proposes to placate Muslim sensibilities by including Arabic in the curriculum (p. 207). Whereas Boilat considers Islam an impediment to Africa’s civilisation, Christianity has already proven that it could advance Africa’s participation on the world stage. Indeed, Christian history knew eminent African personalities such as Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine. The advent of Islam, however, impeded this: It is Mahomet, it is his absurd and retrograde religion, that has destroyed everything [...]; a religion that has established itself by force, […] promises to its adherents carnal pleasures as rewards cannot but expand rapidly. The state of ignorance, stupidity, servitude, and corruption in which those who have submitted themselves to the law of Mahomet have been plunged is the obvious proof of this. (translation of p. 232)
Boilat was convinced that the re-introduction of Christianity would regenerate Africa. Robert July writes: His whole concept of African history was rooted in the view that there once had been great scholars in Africa who had added to the world’s knowledge
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and helped preserve it. Only with the destructive and barbarous force of Islam did Africa fall into long ages of darkness, but she was destined once again to rise through the agency of her initial strength – the Christian church. (July, Origins, p. 163)
His allegiance to Roman Catholicism and France notwithstanding, Boilat’s descriptions of Islam are not only negative and antagonistic. On the one hand, he does not mince his words in rejecting Muslim beliefs; at times he even ridicules them. His account of a young girl who, when she is possessed by demons, ‘amazes even the marabouts with her knowledge of the Qur’an and the purity of her Arabic which she had never studied, for she could neither read nor write’, is most likely intended as a jab at the prophethood of Muḥammad, suggesting that Boilat was familiar with theories that attributed Muḥammad’s prophesies to demon possession (pp. 453-5). Boilat also repeatedly broaches ‘the superstitions of Mahomedanism’ as well as its ‘fanaticism’, writing that the Tukulor people ‘all rigidly obey the Qur’an and are so fanatical, that it would be difficult to convert them without running the risk of making numerous martyrs, or even maybe evoking war against the French’ (p. 393). On the other hand, Esquisses sénégalaises also indicates that Boilat was aware of Islam’s appeal. He readily praises Muslim piety and respectfully portrays the simple and humble lifestyle of the grands marabouts. Unlike the thiédos (traditional healers) and village marabouts, they rarely dispense grisgris (amulets) and only pray for people, though ‘[i]t is unfortunate that these marabouts are in error’ (pp. 301, 480-2). The story behind the exceptional piety of an itinerant marabout, locally known as ‘Père jeûneur’, is related in great detail, including the man’s life story: after killing a neighbour in a bout of anger, the man could no longer find peace because of his remorse, until he was advised by a Muslim scholar in Futa Toro to sell all he had, fast constantly and live solely on alms. Boilat ends the story by concluding that the marabout’s life is ‘an edification for all Mahomedans in Senegal’ and the only thing this ‘kind-hearted penitent lacks is the grace of the sacrament of baptism’. He even goes as far as to acknowledge that the man’s exemplary piety and remorse raise theological issues. However, he subsequently seems to imply that this commendable behaviour could be the result of the indirect influence of Christianity: ‘It is not surprising that the Tukulor have certain ideas that echo the principles of the gospel’ because ‘the wise Thiernos have the gospel in Arabic, which they consult on certain occasions. They received copies from the Gambia, from Methodist ministers’ (pp. 405-7).
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Boilat also mentions his friendship with several marabouts. His notebook, ‘Notes du Fouta Toro’ (1843), features portraits of marabouts, with whom he interacted on a regular basis, as well as Arabic ‘lettres d’amitié’ written by them. It also includes several dozen sheets with geometrical drawings and Arabic and ʿajamī texts, probably intended for ritual purposes such as divination or the production of amulets, and most likely produced by an acquaintance of Boilat, the Tukulor marabout and nephew of the almami of Bundu, Amadi Golojo. All this suggests a relationship of trust. The exemplary sober way of life of the grands marabouts and the people’s deep reverence for these ‘men of God’, as well as the reputed Franciscan tradition of Christian witness in Muslim contexts, prompt Boilat in his conclusion to suggest that the area would be best evangelised by Franciscan missionaries. Boilat discerns striking parallels in the spirituality and lifestyle of the grands marabouts and Franciscan friars. Like the marabouts, Boilat observes, Franciscans are committed to a life of prayer, fasting and voluntary poverty, possessing little other than their coarse robes, sandals and rosary, and living on alms. He writes: The marabout travels from village to village, with nothing but a staff in his hand. He knocks on all the doors, and everywhere people open; people consider it an honour to feed him and offer him lodging. His presence alone will sanctify the hosts, and God will repay a hundredfold the services rendered to him. This esteem for the marabout is so deep-seated in the heart of the inhabitants of Senegal, that they will extend it to the priests of all religions. It is sufficient that they are men of God. (pp. 485-6)
To buttress his point, Boilat references the story of Saint Francis’s encounter with the Egyptian sultan in Damietta, and underscores that ‘[t]he sultan, though not willing to convert, conceived nevertheless such a deep reverence for the virtue of this holy man, that he wanted to pay his respects to him by the gifts he offered him’. Likewise, Boilat assures his readers, [w]hat Saint Francis achieved with the sultan of Egypt, his successors will also achieve, I say not merely with the brak of Walo or with the queen, but also with the demel of Cayor and even with the almami of the Tukulor. […] I think that the Franciscans, sent as missionaries to Walo, will soon convert the inhabitants of that land, and will expand, little by little, the faith in all the kingdoms of Senegal, even including Bambouk. (pp. 488-9)
Boilat does not envisage that only religious specialists should evangelise Senegal; he also sees a role for Christian liberated Africans in the
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evangelisation of Muslims. Perhaps inspired by his visit to the Sierra Leone colony in 1845, he suggests that the French government should invite groups of formerly enslaved Africans from the French Americas to settle as farmers and artisans in Walo, a kingdom in the north of present-day Senegal (pp. 475-7). The return to Africa would not only offer the formerly enslaved an opportunity to build a future for themselves in a new context and give France and Senegal the benefit of their expertise and labour, but also, being Christians, their presence and religious practice would constitute a permanent witness to the Christian faith. Significance Even a preliminary reading of Esquisses sénégalaises reveals Boilat as a firm protagonist of the French imperial project in which colonisation, civilisation and Christianisation are profoundly entangled. Within that project, Boilat perceives Islam to be an obstacle. His proposal to close qur’anic schools and compel parents to send their children to French schools serves as an example of this. A closer reading also brings to light Boilat’s perceptive suggestions on how to fashion Christian witness in the context of Islam. His observations on the parallel spirituality and lifestyle of grands marabouts and Franciscan missionaries, resulting in his proposal for a Franciscan mission, and his proposition for a resident Christian community of liberated Africans, hinge around notions of Christian witness via exemplary behaviour. These embryonic reflections about Christian witness as presence and exemplary conduct attest to Boilat as a precursor of better-known figures such as Charles Lavigerie and Charles de Foucauld, who several decades later theorised and practised ‘presence’ as a form of Christian witness in predominantly Muslim contexts. Publications MS Paris, BNF – SG MS8-49 (1324), D.P. Boilat, ‘Notes du Fouta Toro. Lettres, mœurs, superstitions, dessins, chansons du Fouta’ (1843); 12148/cb38795047d (digitised version available through BNF) D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes, Paris, 1853; 12148/ cb34580220m (digitised version available through BNF) D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Atlas, Paris, 1853 (repr. 1984, 1985); 106718 (digitised version available through bibliothèque numérique de Lyon) D. Boilat, Grammaire de la langue woloffe, Paris, 1858
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D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes, Paris, 1973 D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, ed. and intr. Abdoulaye-Bara Diop, Paris, 1984 D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes, Paris, 2005 D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises. Physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes, Paris, 2008 Studies T. Warner, The tongue-tied imagination. Decolonizing literary modernity in Senegal, New York, 2019, pp. 33-50 Jones, ‘David Boilat’ D. Murphy, ‘Birth of a nation? The origins of Senegalese literature in French’, Research in African Literatures 39 (2008) 48–69 L. McNee, Review of J. Riesz, Les débuts de la littérature sénégalaise de langue française. Relation d’un voyage du Sénégal à Soueira (Mogador) de Leopold Panet (1819-1859), Esquisses sénégalaises de David Boilat (1814-1901), International Journal of African Historical Studies 34 (2001) 198-9 J. Riesz, Les débuts de la littérature sénégalaise de langue française. Relation d’un voyage du Sénégal à Soueira (Mogador) de Leopold Panet (1819-1859), Esquisses sénégalaises de David Boilat (1814-1901), Talence, Bordeaux, 1998 B. Mouralis, ‘Les Esquisses sénégalaises de l’abbé Boilat, ou le nationalisme sans la négritude’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 35/140 (1995) 819-37 D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, ed. and intr. Abdoulaye-Bara Diop, Paris, 1984, ‘Introduction’ R.W. July, The origins of modern African thought. Its development in West Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, London, 1968, pp. 155-67 Martha T. Frederiks
Frédéric-Jean Carrère and Eloi-Paul Holle Date of Birth Carrère, 12 February 1814; Holle, 1807 Place of Birth Carrère, Toulon; Holle, Saint-Louis, Senegal Date of Death Carrère, 28 March 1888; Holle, 27 March 1862 Place of Death Carrère, Bordeaux; Holle, Médine, Upper Senegal (now Western Mali)
BIOGRAPHIES
Frédéric-Jean Carrère, holder of a doctorate in law awarded by the University of Paris, spent the greater part of his career (1840-66) attached to the judicial service of Senegal. Starting out as an assistant prosecutor, he had become Head of the judicial service by 1848 and Presiding Judge by 1852, thus gaining a permanent seat on the colony’s Executive Council. Of modest origins, Carrère’s father was a civilian employee of the French navy serving as a commandant (jour côme) of penal galleys. One can thus reasonably assume that his family link to both the French navy and the French penal system prompted Carrère to seek a career in law, preferably in the colonies, which were at the time administered by the Ministry of the Navy. Remuneration here would be higher than for similar employment in France. Completing his licence in law in 1837 and his doctorate in 1840, Carrère took up a position as an assistant prosecutor in Saint-Louis, Senegal. In 1848, he became president of the Saint-Louis court and head of the judicial service of Senegal. He retired in 1866, settling in Bordeaux. Given the relative autonomy of the judicial system in France and in the areas in French colonies where civil institutions prevailed, as well as the length of time that Carrère served in Saint-Louis, he was able to exercise some independence from the colonial authorities. Even Governor Louis Léon César Faidherbe, with whom Carrère initially clashed, recognised him as a very competent, hard-working jurist. Carrère developed close relations with certain officials in France, particularly Henri-Joseph Mestro, Director of the Colonial Office in the Ministry of the Navy between 1848 and 1858, and also in Senegal with the managers of the Maurel and Prom Company, particularly Marc Maurel, the nephew of Hilaire Maurel, one of the company founders. Thus, he became a supporter of the policies of pacification rather than conquest as favoured by Maurel and Prom and initially pursued by Faidherbe, and of the development of peanut cultivation
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to supersede reliance on the gum trade as the economic mainstay of French Senegal. Carrère also came to favour free trade, which would bring an end to the control of the terms of trade by the native producers as well as the privileged middlemen position that the habitant traders, both métis (people of mixed European and indigenous parentage) and African, had held in this trade. In common with many members of the Catholic population of Saint-Louis, particularly Europeans, he developed a dislike for Islam, the majority faith in Saint-Louis, viewing it as the principal barrier to the diffusion of French culture and the French language in Senegal. For Carrère, the jihad waged by al-Hajj Umar seemed particularly threatening. Born in Saint-Louis in 1807, Eloi-Paul Holle was the son of a French merchant and a Toucouleur woman. He acquired sufficient literacy in French and numeracy to be able to enter the colonial service in 1823 as an agricultural technician at the newly created experimental farm that had been established in the town of Richard Toll. Here he made a favourable impression on both the chief gardener, the botanist, Jean-Michel-Claude Richard, and the governor, Baron Jacques-François Roger, who wished to encourage bright young métis like Holle to undertake careers in the colonial service. From 1831 to 1833 he served as a government agent at Richard Toll, and then for the next seven years he worked as a gum trader. In 1838 he married Marianne Pellegrin, who came from a well-off Catholic métis family. In 1840, Holle returned to government service as commandant of the upriver post of Bakel, from 1840 to 1846 and from 1847 to 1849. Here, he came to the attention of Governor Louis Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, who, like Baron Roger, encouraged talented métis to enter the colonial service. Holle, who was fluent in Poular and Wolof, took part in the negotiations with Almamy Saada of Bundu that led to the construction in 1845 of the fortified post of Sénoudébou on the Falémé River that he would command from 1852 to 1855. In 1855, Governor Faidherbe appointed him to command the newly constructed fortified post at Médine. It was Holle who successfully resisted the attack launched against Médine by al-Hajj Umar’s army in April 1857 and succeeded in holding the besieged post until Faidherbe’s arrival with reinforcements in July. Subsequently, Holle commanded the newly constructed post at Matam opened in July 1858 and then the Saldé post from its construction in 1859. In 1861, Holle was again assigned to command Médine, where he died of pneumonia on 27 March 1862. The fact that Holle spent so much of his career in those parts of Senegal where Toucouleur and Fulbe people, both Poular-speaking, predominated and that his mother was a Toucouleur suggests that he was probably more tolerant of Toucouleur Islam than was Carrère, even if they might both
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Illustration 4. A Dowiche woman after her prayers, with the river Falémé and Fort Sénoudébou in the background
have agreed about the political and economic threat posed by al-Hajj Umar, also a Toucouleur. On the other hand, Holle’s link to the Pellegrin family no doubt exposed him to the point of view regarding Islam of the Catholic métis community of Saint-Louis. One cannot, however, assume that this community was as ardently anti-Muslim as were many members of the resident white French community, at least not in the 1850s. As Hillary Jones suggests, ‘The history of cooperation between Muslims and Christians and the nature of commercial relations mitigated religious conflict’ (Métis of Senegal, p. 81). There had long been a tradition of religious tolerance within the colonial government, a carry-over from the 18th-century enlightenment in France. Holle’s personnel dossier (EE 1112/26), housed at the Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) in Aix-en-Provence, gives no information about his
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collaboration with Carrère in the writing of De la Sénégambie française. Many of the documents in the dossier refer to Holle’s attempts, backed by Faidherbe, to obtain a retirement stipend that reflected his appointment to the Légion d’honneur in 1857, a reward for his defence of Médine, and the fact that as a post commandant he had been given military responsibilities even though he was a civilian. Holle died before Faidherbe and the Ministry of the Navy were able to obtain an exception to the usual rules.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives Aix-en-Provence, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) CAOM – Senegal II 4, Carrère, Carrère to the Director, 9 January 1854 [transmitting his Note sur le Sénégal of the same date that he had been asked to write] CAOM – Sénégal II 4 Carrère, Notice historique, géographique et administrative sur le Sénégal et dépendances [requested by the Minister of the Navy, March 1862] CAOM – Sénégal II 4 Carrère, Ministerial reply to a post-retirement note that Carrère addressed, from Bordeaux, to the Ministry on improvements to be made in Senegal; Carrère’s letter to the Minister dated 31 January 1869 suggesting that he volunteered this information, which was unsolicited CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to Monsieur [an official in the French Ministry of the Navy, possibly Blanquet du Chayla], 8 March 1855 [about al-Hajj Umar] CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to Mestro, 28 April 1855 CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to the Director [Mestro], 15 May 1855 CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, The Director to Carrère, 24 September 1855 [acknowledges the publication of a note on al-Hajj Umar that Carrère had transmitted earlier and had referred to in a letter of 15 May; also acknowledges receipt of the manuscript copy of the first chapter of De la Sénégambie française dated 28 April 1855] CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, The Director [Mestro] to Carrère, 28 September 1855 [draft] CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to Mestro, 16 November 1855 [mentions the publication of a chapter of De la Sénégambie française in the Revue Coloniale] CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to Mestro, 19 November 1855 CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to Mestro, 29 November 1855 CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Governor Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies 5 June 1856, no. 245 [also in CAOM: Sénégal Ia 41b] [complains about the negative effect in Saint-Louis of the publication of De la Sénégambie française] CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to the Director [Mestro] 14 June 1856
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CAOM – Sénégal II 7 Carrère, Carrère to the Minister of the Navy 11 December 1857 [transmits his book on the siege of Médine, calls attention to what he has written about Faidherbe] CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Carrère to the Director, 14 June 1856 CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Minister of the Navy and Colonies, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy 30 September 1856, no 527 CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Minister of Justice to the Minister of the Navy, 31 July 1857 CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Minister of the Navy to the Minister of Justice, 21 August 1857 CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Note individuelle (1862) filled out and signed by Governor Jean-Bernard Jauréguiberry, 19 and 23 August 1862 CAOM – EE399/2, Carrère Personnel File, Ministry of the Navy and Colonies, Note individuelle (1863) filled out and signed by Governor Faidherbe, 18 and 24 September 1863 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies 11 April 1855, no 154 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies 15 June 1855, no 244 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies 6 April 1856, no 141 CAOM – Sénégal Ia 41b Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies 5 June 1856, no 245 CAOM – Sénégal I 43a Faidherbe, Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal par le gouverneur Faidherbe, 5 August 1856 CAOM – EE 1112/26 Paul Holle’s Personnel File (yields no information about his contribution to the writing and publication of De la Sénégambie française) Archives Dakar, Archives nationales de la République de Sénégal 13G Series – Affaires politiques, administratives et musulmanes, Sénégal (information on Holle’s knowledge of local conditions in Senegal and opinions about the local rulers is best traced through his correspondence with the Governor of Senegal and the Director of External Affairs from the various fortified posts that he successively commanded: Bakel, Sénoudébou, Médine, and Matam, found in various files) P.-D. Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, Paris, 1853 F. Carrère, ‘De l’Alaguy Oumar,’ Revue Coloniale, 2nd series 14 (1855) 236-44 A. Raffenel, Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres suivi d’études sur la colonie du Sénégal, Paris, 1856 F. Carrère, Siège par Al-Aghi du fort de Médine au pays de Kasson, Saint-Louis, 1857 F. Carrère, ‘Siège par Al-Aghi du fort de Médine au pays de Kasson (Haute Sénégambie)’, Revue Coloniale 19 (January-June 1858) 40-66
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F. Carrère, Le Sénégal et son avenir, Bordeaux, 1870 L.L.C. Faidherbe, Le Sénégal. La France dans l’Afrique occidentale, Paris, 1889 Secondary H. Jones, The métis of Senegal. Urban life and politics French West Africa, Bloomington IN, 2013 L.C. Barrows, ‘Trois biographies sénégalaises [Hilaire Maurel (1808-84); HenriJoseph Mestro (1804-58); Jean-Bernard Jauréguiberry (1815-87)]’, Ufahamu. A Journal of African Studies 29 (2001-2) 67-90 Y.-J. Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le second empire. Naissance d’un empire colonial (1850-1871), Paris, 1989 R. Pasquier, ‘Le Sénégal au milieu du 19e siècle. La crise économique et sociale’, Paris, 1987 (PhD Diss. University of Paris IV) [Microfiche copy available from the Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses (ANRT) of the University of Lille III, 9 rue Auguste Angellier, 59046 Lille CEDEX France] D. Robinson, The holy war of Umar Tal. The Western Sudan in the mid-nineteenth century, Oxford, 1985 L.C. Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe, the Maurel and Prom Company, and French expansion in Senegal’, Los Angeles CA, 1974 (PhD Diss. University of California, Los Angeles) R.W. July, The origins of modern African thought. Its development in West Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York, 1967 (republished Trenton NJ, 2004)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations De la Sénégambie française ‘French Senegal’ Date 1855 Original Language French Description De la Sénégambie française (396 pages long) belongs to a genre very typical of the mid-19th-century European interest in tropical Africa. It is a descriptive study of Senegal, part geographical, part anthropological, part sociological and part historical. It was written at a time when the French authorities, based in Saint-Louis, were seeking to strengthen their economic and political hold over what were mostly independent African polities (though in European minds claimed by France) located on both sides of the Senegal River. The book criticises the apparent weakness of the French presence in Senegal at the start of the 1850s and the stagnation
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of the local economy, based as it had been on the gum trade. It expresses support for the will to strengthen the French military and commercial presence in the Senegal River valley that had been formulated by the Commission des Comptoirs (1850-1) and praises the efforts in this direction made by Major Faidherbe, who had been appointed to the governorship of Senegal in December 1854. Ch. 30 expresses strident opposition to al-Hajj Umar Tal’s jihad on the upper river that had begun in 1854, and ch. 38 expresses an almost equal amount of opposition to the preponderant Islamic presence in Saint-Louis that the colonial authorities appeared to be tolerating if not encouraging. Although the title of the volume refers to Senegambia, its scope is restricted to Saint-Louis, the colonial capital, and the African polities situated on either side of the Senegal River inland to the Félou Falls near Médine, more than 1000 km to the east-southeast. It excludes Gorée Island and its dependencies, the other pole of the French presence, no doubt because, at the time Carrère and Holle were writing, Senegal, meaning Saint-Louis and the Senegal River posts, and Gorée and its dependencies were administered separately. Most of the book consists of descriptions of the native societies living beside the Senegal River and also some of those located well beyond, such as Kaarta and Ségou plus Cayor, the large Wolof Kingdom linking Saint-Louis with Dakar. The authors estimate the agricultural and commercial possibilities of these societies. Ch. 30 describes the rise of al-Hajj Umar’s jihadist movement, presenting it as a threat to the French presence. Ch. 38, titled ‘The past, the present, and the future of our colony’, deplores the Islamisation of Saint-Louis and proposes various ways by which the French authorities and business interests might further develop Senegal, particularly by stimulating peanut cultivation and improving the navigability of the Senegal River. The work comments favourably on the policies formulated by the French government in the early 1850s, which the appointment of Faidherbe as governor was bringing to fruition. These policies called in particular for the suppression of the Mauritanian-dominated gum trading system, the forcible establishment of the Senegal River as the boundary south of which the Mauritanians would not be permitted to expand, and French military domination of the Senegal River region. The work also reflects the surprised and unfavourable French reaction to the unexpected eruption of al-Hajj Umar’s jihad in the upper reaches of the Senegal River in the last months of 1854. The anti-Islamic position expressed in ch. 38 is more negative than that adopted by Governor Faidherbe himself who, while taking forceful action against the military and economic threats posed by the
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Trarza Mauritanians and preparing for a conflict with al-Hajj Umar, was attempting to come to terms with the Muslim population of Saint-Louis, the majority of whom he believed could be both loyal to France and good practising Muslims. Faidherbe’s attitude towards Islam reflected both a tradition of tolerance that had existed in Saint-Louis and his own mixed feelings about Islam acquired through prior service in Algeria from 1844 to 1846 and from 1849 to 1852. The authors of De la Sénégambie française, no doubt Carrère more than Holle, held Islam in very low regard, arguing in the book that Islam was responsible for the fact that most of the Saint-Louis native population could not speak French and had no interest in French civilisation, and therefore did not progress. So long as Mohammedanism is officially recognised, so long as marabouts are honoured, so long as the [Saint-Louis] mosque continues to stand, it is only too evident that the progress of Christianity [equated with French civilisation itself] will be nil. If the authorities do not adopt intelligent procedures and implement them resolutely and systematically to halt the expansion of Islam, they will not bring about any moral progress in this land. (p. 356) Islam is encircling us! It is aimed at choking us! How could it be otherwise? Saint-Louis is an open city. [...] Apart from the marabouts who were born in Senegal [meaning in directly controlled French territory] and are linked to it by their interests, […] foreign marabouts [those from outside the French posts] are flocking into Saint-Louis; they settle here, and when they get hold of children whom they brainwash, they exploit the gullibility, ignorance and superstition of the parents. […] The most effective remedy […] would be to expel all the marabouts who have come from outside Saint-Louis and, in the future, to impose regulations on the Senegalese who wish to be professional marabouts. (p. 358)
The chapter goes on to propose that the colonial government should license and supervise approved marabouts, and require them to send their young charges to French language classes. It also proposes that the Muslim population should be required to register the births, deaths, marriages, divorces and inheritances of the members of their community with the French civil authorities. The Muslims, the chapter asserts, will initially resist, but if the French authorities persevere, their efforts will be successful, for: The Muslim […], particularly the black man, only respects force: we want it to be moderate, but it must be employed. No results here without pressure; that it be gentle, that is our wish, but it must be applied with consistency.
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Let nobody come to Senegal and speak of tolerance, of freedom of religion; these principles may have value in places where the powers of human reason, having reached a stage of great development and self-discipline, will have led to the right to invoke freedom of conscience subject to the rule of law; but let us not forget that here [in Senegal] we are confronted with races imbued with base instincts which are nourished by a stultifying religion. (p. 360)
Faidherbe did not find these lines helpful because of the way they lumped together all the Muslims of Saint-Louis, not only those who supported the Mauritanians or who were attracted by the rise of al-Hajj Umar’s movement, but also the pro-French Muslim elite whose members were, for the most part, linked to the Qādiriyya, a major Sufi brotherhood, and the numerous native soldiers and the laptots, Senegalese boatmen and related workers employed by the French navy and French commercial establishments. Also, it should be understood that at its inception, the Umarian movement did not appear to be anti-French. Although chs 30 and 38 evoke the long-standing French disputes with the Mauritanian gum producers, particularly the Trarza emirate, over the organisation of the gum trade, they particularly concern themselves with what one or both authors view as the racial, ideological and economic threat posed by the Umarian movement, a manifestation of the Tijānī Brotherhood that the authors do not specifically identify, even though Umar was one of its leading khalīfas. The volume cites the racial pride engendered by al-Hajj Umar’s jihad: From Médine to Saint-Louis, the Blacks talked among themselves with pride and hope about the promises of Al-Aguy: ‘A Black was going to be dominant in Senegambia. God had given him the wisdom and the strength to make him the avenger of their race. With the triumph of his doctrine, his brothers [would] escape from the tyranny of chiefs, the oppressiveness of the Mauritanians. One must therefore flock to this man of God, to second him and to assist him in accomplishing his mission.’ (p. 198)
It is notable that this quotation reflects a Toucouleur point of view in that it includes Mauritanians, fellow Muslims, among the oppressors. It does not cite Europeans as targets of Umar’s jihad. Indeed, another passage describes the meeting that took place at Bakel in August 1847 involving the Governor of Senegal, Bourdon-Gramont, the Director of Exterior Affairs, Caille, and Paul Holle. Here al-Hajj Umar had purportedly spoken favourably of the French: I am the friend of the whites, […] I want peace; I hate injustice. When a Christian has paid the tax, he must be free to trade in security. When I have become the almamy of Fouta, you should build me a fort; I shall discipline
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Umar’s reason for declaring jihad against the French authorities and some of the Senegalese traders was that Faidherbe’s predecessor, Governor Auguste-Léopold Protet, while authorising the sale of weapons to the pagan Bambara of Kaarta, against whom al-Hajj Umar was directing his jihad, had imposed an arms embargo on his movement. According to David Robinson, Umar, who had apparently believed that he could count upon French support, viewed this shift in French policy as a betrayal (Holy war of Umar Tal, p. 164). Viewing the possible consequences for French trade of al-Hajj Umar’s jihad, the authors conclude that [If] he becomes the master from Cayor to Kaarta, he will, with one word, close the river to us; he is thus an enemy to be destroyed. No doubt the war with the Trarzas is […] important, but the ambition of al-Aguy poses a much greater threat to the [economic] future of the colony. (De la Sénégambie française, pp. 207-8)
Given that both Carrère and Holle were French government officials, that the book was dedicated to Joseph Mestro, the Director of the Colonial Office in the Ministry of the Navy, who had just recently been appointed to the French Council of State, and that the book’s publisher, Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, was not only quite prestigious but also, at the time, the designated printing house of the French Institute, it is understandable that the book might be viewed as an official endorsement of colonial policy. Moreover, the Ministry of the Navy had published a modified version of the chapter on al-Hajj Umar in the Revue coloniale and excerpts in French newspapers, including the Moniteur universel, prior to publication of the book. These previews acknowledged Holle’s contribution, for he had clearly brought his extensive knowledge of indigenous societies, particularly the Toucouleur, to the project. But following Faidherbe’s report to the Ministry of the Navy about the negative effect of the book with regard to the Muslim policy that he was pursuing, the Ministry retorted that the book had been authored and published on Carrère’s sole initiative. Nothing in De la Sénégambie française or in Holle’s personnel file gives any indication as to which of the two authors wrote which parts of the book. On the other hand, various archival sources and Carrère’s personnel file (CAOM: EE399/2), along with references to the book and to Carrère himself (CAOM: Senegal II Mémoires, publications et explorations, Sénégal II 4 Carrère 1854-1869, and Sénégal II 7 Mémoire et Histoire du
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siège de Médine, 1857), and in the correspondence between the Ministry of the Navy and Colonies and the Governor of Senegal (CAOM: Sénégal I Correspondance générale), indicate that it was Carrère who had the idea of writing the book and who defined its scope and themes. Carrère was not shy about claiming the work as his own, even though Holle was no doubt his principal informant. Responses to the book penned by officials in Paris and by Governor Faidherbe view Carrère as the sole author. A draft of the chapter on al-Hajj Umar dated 28 April 1855 that Carrère presented to Mestro acknowledges Holle’s role, but a follow-up letter, an obsequious request dated 15 May to dedicate the book to Mestro, does not. In this letter, Carrère describes the project as a whole, hinting at what seems to have been his principal reason for writing the book in the first place: I believed that this work would be useful because it is serious and truthful: the possibility of being increasingly worthy of your good will has reassured me; […] organisation will follow the war; [the task of organising Senegal] that will require patience will perhaps be assigned to a new man, who, having clear knowledge of the customs, interests, ideas and needs of those peoples with whom the French authorities are bound to be in contact, will call for new arrangements and suggest new solutions which might be neglected or compromised by an insufficient understanding of the situation. I have attempted to eliminate this risk; if I have not succeeded [in doing so] either in substance or in form, I have [at least] tried to make myself useful.
One detects a hint that Carrère hoped that one day he might become the governor of Senegal. Other letters he wrote to colleagues in France include similar hints but also requests for a transfer to another colony or to metropolitan France. In an obsequious letter, dated 29 November 1855, by which Carrère thanked Mestro for permission to dedicate the book to him, he acknowledged Holle’s participation, but more as an assistant than as a co-author. The letter also includes explanations as to why he (or they) wrote the book: I attempted to present some accurate and practical information about Senegal. My humble efforts were seconded by Mr Paul Holle, a highly recommended man who has served the state for more than twenty years. I thus hoped to associate myself with your views and with the efforts of the energetic, very distinguished, and very capable man [Faidherbe] who is currently heading the colony. When I witnessed the devotion with which our admirable soldiers and sailors and their worthy officers are confronting bullets, fatigue and the sun, I told myself that I must absolutely play my part in the common task in the only way possible for me. Have I achieved a minimal success? I do not know, and I have doubts. I am nevertheless aware
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Frédéric-Jean Carrère and Eloi-Paul Holle of one thing: of your indulgence; a man with your temperament is necessarily kind and indulgent regarding good intentions… thus I am not worried because I know that you will always perceive me as I really am … with a sincere heart in which sentiments of gratitude and devotion to your person are very much [present].
Although it was clearly in Carrère’s nature to be very obsequious towards superiors (a trait that Governor Jauréguiberry noted in Carrère’s 1862 inspection report), the tone of this letter suggests that he anticipated some problems, possibly because of the stance adopted in De la Sénégambie française towards the Muslim community in Saint-Louis, but also because he had published the book in France without first submitting it to Faidherbe for his approval, as had apparently been expected of him. The question of how the book got published is complicated. In the same letter of 15 May 1855 by which Carrère had asked for permission to dedicate the book to Mestro, he had complained about not being able to find a publisher: I had wanted [the book] to inaugurate, at my expense, the Senegalese press [that Faidherbe was in the process of setting up] but it is not installed, and my book, whatever I may think of it, […] should be of permanent utility as well as […] intended for the occasion. […] The Dakar mission [of the Spiritan Fathers] possesses a printing press but to make use of it would be fabulously expensive.
Shortly afterwards, Firmin Didot agreed to publish De la Sénégambie française. Did somebody in the Ministry of the Navy make discreet arrangements with this publishing house? One would think so, given that the Ministry had already taken steps to publish the advance copy of ch. 30 on al-Hajj Umar, with modifications, in the Revue coloniale of July 1855, and to place excerpts in other French publications, including the Moniteur universel. The advance copy and the version of it appearing in the Revue coloniale present a harsher view of al-Hajj Umar’s decision to order the pillaging of French traders on the upper Senegal in early 1855 – viewed as the casus belli by the French authorities – than the account in the book. Also, the Revue coloniale version, the advance draft of ch. 30 on which it is based, and an earlier warning dated 8 March 1855 about al-Hajj Umar that Carrère had penned for an official in the Ministry, possibly Blanquet du Chayla, reiterates the purported boast by al-Hajj Umar that, after his forces had invaded Saint-Louis, he would pray in the Saint-Louis church. The boast does not appear in De la Sénégambie française because one or both of the authors, or a reviewer of the manuscript, had realised that, if it had been uttered at all, the boast was that of Emir Mohammed el-Habib
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of the Trarza Moors and had been widely reported as such (Faidherbe, Le Sénégal, p. 121). The draft of a note addressed to Carrère by Mestro dated 24 September 1855 clearly indicates that he and other ministry officials approved of what Carrère had written about al-Hajj Umar in the advance copy of ch. 30. In a note scribbled in the margin of that draft, Mestro compared al-Hajj Umar to Abdel Kader, the principal leader of the Algerian resistance, and he ‘heartily accept[ed]’ Carrère’s wish to dedicate the book to him. The very short editorial preface to the version appearing in the July 1855 issue of the Revue coloniale describes al-Hajj Umar as an ‘imitator’ of another leader of the Algerian resistance, Bou Maza (p. 236), and gives Holle equal authorial credit along with Carrère. So, clearly the ministry at this time was in support of the effort to quell al-Hajj Umar’s movement and was aware that Paul Holle was a co-author of De la Sénégambie française. But the ministry was apparently not aware that the book, particularly ch. 38, would include Islam in Saint-Louis. It would subsequently lend support to Faidherbe’s critique of the anti-Muslim position taken by that chapter. Carrère, who had been writing reports about the legal and commercial affairs of Senegal for many years, began addressing reports to his contacts in the Ministry of the Navy about the rise of al-Hajj Umar as soon as Umar’s activities began to attract the attention of the Saint-Louis population, particularly its European component. Aside from the religious and cultural aspects of Islam, he was particularly concerned about the economic threat to French commercial activities arising from Umar’s racial and religious populism. In a letter addressed to a contact in the ministry, possibly Blanquet du Chayla, dated 8 March 1855, he quoted from a passage in a manifesto addressed by Umar to the Muslims of Saint-Louis: Up until now you have been enriching the whites by the produce of your sweat; they possess all the goods; you are simply their instrument; my mission is to destroy this state of affairs; I want to make you happy, to shower you with those goods of which you have been deprived; […] I want to take from the whites all that they have in such great abundance before your eyes, you who lack everything; what I have just taken from them is what I am keeping for you; that which I shall seize later on, I reserve for you: abandon those infidels; come to me; I shall make you masters of everything; follow me; if you do not come, I shall massacre you along with the whites.
Although this passage does not appear in De la Sénégambie française, other quotations by which al-Hajj Umar justifies the pillaging of the upriver posts by his followers are included. In the same letter, Carrère deplores the ‘unfortunate idea of building a mosque in Saint-Louis’ and states
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that the métis, ‘Christians like us’, are no longer able to serve as a ‘buffer between whites and blacks’ because the advent of free trade in gum, about which Carrère had initially had some doubts, and the decline in value of this trade had ruined them. Thus, as Carrère states here and in the book, the ‘Muslim spirit’ is invading Saint-Louis and is anti-Christian and antiFrench. The remedy, not stated as strongly in the book as in this letter, calls for the French authorities to ‘profit at the first occasion, like the present, to close the mosque and without engaging in exaggerated Christian proselytism, but without, however, neglecting it, oppose the expansion of the Islamic idea if not directly at least very energetically’. Carrère suffered no ill consequences as a direct result of the publication of De la Sénégambie française, and even Faidherbe agreed that ‘the work was conceived in the ideas of progress which are shared by all enlightened people’ (CAOM: Sénégal II 4 Carrère, Faidherbe to Monsieur le Ministre 5 June 1856). But its appearance without the prior approval of Faidherbe was criticised in part because of the unrelated problem that arose, accusations of malfeasance in office on the part of the Saint-Louis clerk of the court (greffier), Bréghot de Polignac. Carrère who was supposed to have been supervising this official very closely had apparently not been doing so. Thus he almost received a formal reprimand (blâme) for negligence and was denied a transfer with promotion to another French colony or to France, something that he had requested earlier. The Minister of the Navy concluded that although Carrère had failed to supervise Bréghot de Polignac properly, this failure was his only professional error in an otherwise exemplary career. Correspondence about the matter, particularly a letter from the Minister of the Navy to the Minister of Justice dated 21 August 1857, offers some insight as to what had appeared to certain officials in the Ministry of the Navy as a negative aspect of the publication of De la Sénégambie française. According to this letter, the Ministry of the Navy had authorised publication with the understanding that the manuscript would be printed in Saint-Louis by the government press ‘after necessarily being examined by the governor. Instead, […] Mr. Carrère had had it printed in France and distributed in Senegal without having had it examined by anybody’. The Minister of the Navy added that, because Faidherbe had complained about the anti-Muslim passages in the book, he had informed Carrère that in the future he should ‘restrict himself to his judicial functions’. Before Carrère could have been informed of this restriction on his activities, he had seized the opportunity of the siege and deliverance of Médine
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in April-July 1857 to publish another piece about al-Hajj Umar and Islam, Le siège par Alaghi du fort de Médine au pays de Kasson, this time having it printed by the government press in Saint-Louis which had just recently begun to function. Possibly Carrère hoped to redeem himself as far as criticism of the anti-Muslim passages in De la Sénégambie française was concerned and possibly also to head off criticism resulting from his perceived involvement in the simmering Bréghot de Polignac affair. Given that the publication is dated 12 August 1857, Carrère must have written and published the book immediately upon Holle’s return on leave to Saint-Louis. Although the introductory paragraph of this second book suggests that Carrère was the sole author of De la Sénégambie française, it is otherwise filled with praise for Paul Holle, the commandant of Médine, and for Diouka Samballa, the Khassonké ruler who resisted the taunts and threats of the Umarians and remained faithful to France. It also praises the daring of Governor Faidherbe who had come steaming up the river to the rescue. Carrère’s text includes the detail that at a crucial moment during the siege, Holle placed a large banner over the main entrance to the post upon which was written: ‘Long Live Jesus!!!! Long Live the Emperor. Win or Die for One’s God and One’s Emperor’ (p. 21). Although these words have been widely quoted, nobody seems to have asked what language they were written in. Probably none of the besiegers would have been able to read French. On sick leave in France several months after the publication of Le siège and probably knowing that Governor Faidherbe had suggested to the ministry that he should not return to Senegal, Carrère offered a copy of it to the Minister of the Navy, suggesting that he take note of the praiseworthy way in which he had described Faidherbe’s role in breaking the siege of Médine (CAOM: Sénégal II 7 Carrère to MMC, 11 December 1857). The Ministry must certainly have approved of this latest publication by Carrère because it took steps to re-publish it in the Revue Coloniale, 2nd series, 19 (January-June 1858) 40-66. Carrère continued to write about Senegal to promote both the economic and infrastructural development of the colony and his own expertise in Senegalese affairs, sending reports and recommendations to the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies even after 1866 when he had retired to Bordeaux. He barely mentions Islam in these later writings. He continued to advocate the expansion of peanut cultivation and peaceful French penetration into the interior, publishing a short book, Le Sénégal et son avenir, in 1870. This book and the unsolicited 1869 report to the Ministry of the Navy upon which it is based express some criticism of Colonel Emile
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Pinet-Laprade, the governor who succeeded Faidherbe in 1865, for being overly militaristic, Pinet-Laprade’s campaigns being a consequence of French opposition to the Islamic reformer, Maba Diakhou. Carrère continued to advocate peaceful penetration – pacification and domination without conquest – essentially what the Maurel and Prom Company had wanted and had believed that Faidherbe, for the most part, had accomplished, even though Faidherbe’s peaceful penetration was, at times, anything but peaceful. What references Carrère and others made to De la Sénégambie française in this later period cite him as the single author. Holle, who had died in 1862, seems to have been forgotten. Only one of Carrère’s annual inspection reports included in his personnel file at CAOM, that of 24 September 1863, indicates under the heading ‘scientific qualifications’, that he had authored De la Sénégambie française. The other reports refer only to his legal work, particularly his codification of the laws, legal decisions, and ordinances affecting Senegal, projects the successful completion of which earned him appointments as Knight (chevalier) and then as Officer (officier) of the Légion d’honneur. None of the reports credit Carrère with knowledge of any foreign language, any scientific or literary qualifications, or involvement in any extra-judiciary activities. Just as Carrère gave minimal recognition to Holle’s contribution to the writing of De la Sénégambie française – and Holle’s linguistic and ethnographic contributions must have been considerable – the colonial and naval officials to whom Carrère reported had little to say about his efforts to write about and to publicise Senegal, particularly after the death of Joseph Mestro at the end of August 1858. Significance From the moment that it was published, De la Sénégambie française acquired an important position among the writings about Senegal and the evolution of French rule in West Africa. Along with Esquisses sénégalaises (1853) by Pierre-David Boilat, and Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres (1856) by Anne Raffenel, it was read widely for what it indicated about Senegal and its northern and eastern borderlands in the years immediately preceding the colonial conquest. De la Sénégambie française, in particular, continues to appear in the bibliographies of books dealing with the 19th- and 20th-century history of Senegal and French West Africa, both as a source of information about the area just as Faidherbe’s period of administration was getting underway, and also as an example of what contemporaries thought about the beginnings of the conquest.
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Thanks to a seminal work on West African intellectual history, Robert W. July’s The origins of modern African thought (1967 and 1974), De la Sénégambie française along with Boilat’s Esquisses sénégalaises began to be perceived as founding contributions to a corpus of writings by francophone, Westernised, proto-nationalist African intellectuals. July views De la Sénégambie française as an assimilationist, anti-Islamic statement by Paul Holle, whom he describes as ‘one of Senegal’s early national heroes’. Although acknowledging that ‘Holle is not normally associated with the development of ideas in West Africa’ (p. 167), July attributes most of the ideas regarding the present and future of Senegal, viewed from the vantage point of 1855, to Holle, almost completely ignoring Carrère. Yet De la Sénégambie française seems to have been mostly the work of Carrère, including preliminary studies going back before 1855. The French officials who were aware of the project gave most of the credit to Carrère even if they might, in passing, have recognised Holle’s contribution. Thus, thanks to July’s misunderstanding of who did what in the writing of De la Sénégambie française, the ideas and prejudices of an ambitious and obsequious French judge are proposed to the Anglophone world as examples of the origins and the evolution of francophone African thought. Carrère, however, was probably not too much off the mark, given that Fr Boilat, the métis author of Esquisses sénégalaises, expresses similar views regarding education, economic development, the diffusion of the French language in Senegal and the backwardness purportedly engendered by Islam. Although he does not propose such a radical solution as the closing of the Saint-Louis mosque, he does suggest that its construction was very unwise (Esquisses sénégalaises, p. 207). July should have done a more thorough job of archival research before attempting to draw conclusions about the origins of francophone West African thought as based on De la Sénégambie française. Publications Frédéric-Jean Carrère and Paul Holle, De la Sénégambie française, Paris, 1855; bpt6k57810629 (digitised version available through BNF) Studies July, Origins of modern African thought Leland C. Barrows
David Livingstone Date of Birth 19 March 1813 Place of Birth Blantyre, Scotland Date of Death 30 April 1873 Place of Death Ilala, Chitambo (present-day Chipundu, Zambia)
Biography
David Livingstone was a medical missionary and abolitionist who became one of the best known 19th-century travellers in Africa. Born in Blantyre, Scotland, he overcame poverty by working in the cotton mills from the age of ten, saving enough money to enrol for medical training at the age of 19. In 1841, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society (LMS), he started his career as a missionary in South Africa, where he met and married Mary Moffat, daughter of the missionary couple Robert and Mary Moffat, in 1845. He ventured from their base in the northern Cape into the African interior initially accompanied by his family, which would grow to include Robert (b. 1846), Agnes (b. 1847), Thomas (b. 1848), Oswell (b. 1851) and Anna Mary (b. 1858). One of their daughters, Elizabeth, was born in 1850 during a trek to Lake Ngami but sadly did not survive beyond a few weeks. Mary and the Livingstone children would spend much of their time in Britain from 1851 onwards while David continued his exploration of central Africa. Mary died on a brief return to Africa in 1862. His Christianity combined later Scottish Enlightenment with a Calvinistic appreciation of scientific exploration and empirical science that resulted in his acquiring an extraordinary breadth of expertise, including in the treatment of tropical diseases, fauna and flora of southern Africa, geography and anthropology, his observations being framed by his missionary objectives. Livingstone became well-known in his native Britain for his travels and exploration; he received a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society on his return to Britain in 1856 and published his experiences as Missionary travels (1857), not with a missionary publishing house but with one that specialised in travel books. He broke relations with the LMS in favour of government funding for his further geographical exploration but
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he cannot be said to have ceased his missionary endeavours. Livingstone continued to explore with what has been termed the three-fold purpose of advancing Christianity, commerce and civilisation in Africa. Some may argue that it was not always in that order of priority. His encounter with the New York journalist Henry Morton Stanley in 1871, after a prolonged absence when Livingstone was thought to have died, spread Livingstone’s fame to American parts of the Englishspeaking world. The meeting has been immortalised in Stanley’s greeting, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Livingstone came into contact with Muslims as he travelled from the interior of Africa towards the east coast of central Africa on the Indian Ocean. He comments on activities there in his diaries and other writings from the late 1850s onwards. As his writing developed a more narrative style, and his publications for a popular audience increased, he included opinions about Islam and Muslim beliefs and practices, mostly formed in the context of his expeditions along the routes of the slave trade. Physical challenges and personal tragedies, combined with his ambivalent relationship to contending interests, altered Livingstone’s plans so that he did not accomplish one of the last major objectives he had set himself, namely to identify the source of the River Nile. His dejection is most vividly expressed in a fragment of his 1870 field diary, where he exclaims: ‘I am heart sore and sick of human blood.’ Livingstone’s life and career intersected with 19th-century views of Islam. Victorian attitudes were shaped variously by the rational disputation initiated by Henry Martyn, translator of the Bible into Arabic, Persian and Urdu between 1806 and 1812, and deist appreciation of Islamic republicanism in the English Enlightenment by such figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Burke and Mary Shelley. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 shifted the spectrum of opinions about Islam to become more exclusivist and hostile. At the same time, these ideas and events were held and took place in the context of Islamic empire, or ‘Mahometanism’, as a lived cultural reality of the Ottoman state, with varying expectations of a worldwide triumph of Islam. Andrew Porter surmises in Religion versus empire. British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 17001914 (Manchester, 2004) that Britain emerged ‘as the greatest of all rulers of Muslims’ in the 19th century, concluding, ‘These developments and those within Islam itself, intertwined with the growth of the missionary movement, aroused evangelical curiosity and optimism’ (p. 211). These
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intellectual and political movements form the backdrop against which Livingstone documents his encounters with all, whether friend or foe, in his field diaries. His experiences were collated, redacted and shaped as a narrative of his journeys by himself or his editors. For example, his friend and publisher, Horace Waller, added comment and narrated Livingstone’s death in the Last journals of Livingstone (1874). Livingstone is as much commemorated for his experiences in life as for his body’s presentation in death. He is said to have died while in prayer, found by his companions in a typical prayer posture, kneeling by his bedside. The extraordinary care taken by his attendants, James Chuma and Abdullah Susi, to return his remains to Britain ensured that he was given a virtual state funeral in Westminster Abbey, London, on 18 April 1873. Livingstone’s legacy extended beyond his native Britain to other parts of the Protestant Christian world. His memorials in the southern African regions he explored range from the life-sized statue overlooking the Mosiatunya Falls (renamed by Livingstone as the ‘Victoria Falls’) in Zimbabwe to the naming of one of the major cities of Malawi after his birth place, Blantyre. Livingstone’s legacy has undergone several manifestations, from Victorian hero to reviled imperialist. A review of publications on the centenary of his death in 1973 shows his reputation following the same trajectory of binary assessments in historical and missionary studies that followed the expansion and contraction of British imperialism in the century that followed his death. By the time of the 2013 bicentenary of his birth, the complexity, not only of the person Livingstone, but also of the epoch-making times that intersected with his career, have come to the fore. Livingstone has received a new appreciation for his eyewitness accounts of African life in various localities, and particularly for his scientific approach to recording ethnographic observation of Tswana cultural practices. However, his engagement with Islam has been understudied, despite his initiating role in the abolition of the slave trade on the east coast of Africa and extensive relations with Muslims during the latter part of his career. His expansive experiences and the documentary evidence he amassed within the formative period of European exploration and empire is such that a field of research termed ‘Livingstone Studies’ has been suggested to reflect the inherent breadth and interdisciplinary nature of his life and work.
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary D. Livingstone, Missionary travels and researches in South Africa, London, 1857 D. Livingstone and C. Livingstone, Narrative of an expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries, London, 1865 D. Livingstone, Unyanyembe journal. 28 Jan. 1866 - 5 Mar. 1872, Blantyre, Scotland, 1866-72 H.M. Stanley, How I found Livingstone. Travels, adventures, and discoveries in central Africa; including four months’ residence with Dr. Livingstone, London, 1872 S.W. Baker, Ismailïa. A narrative of the expedition to central Africa for the suppression of the slave trade, 2 vols, London, 1874 H. Waller, The last journals of David Livingstone from 1865 to his death, 2 vols, London, 1874 V.L. Cameron, ‘Lieut. Cameron’s letters detailing the journey of the Livingstone east coast expedition from Lake Tanganyika to the west coast of Africa’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 20 (1875-6) 117-34 Secondary A.S. Wisnicki and J.D. Livingstone, ‘David Livingstone. A bibliography’, in A.S. Wisnicki and M. Ward (eds), Livingstone online, University of Maryland, 2016 (for books by Livingstone, edited collections of his primary works, bibliographies, biographies and critical sources); http://www.living stoneonline.org/resources/david-livingstone-bibliography J.D. Livingstone, Livingstone’s ‘lives’. A metabiography of a Victorian icon, Manchester, 2014 T. Jeal, Livingstone (revised and expanded edition), New Haven CT, 2013 S. Tomkins, David Livingstone. The unexplored story, Oxford, 2013 A.D. Roberts, art. ‘Livingstone, David (1813-1873)’, in ODNB J.Davidson, Looking for Mrs Livingstone, Edinburgh, 2012 A. Ross, David Livingstone. Mission and empire, London, 2002 R. Mackenzie, David Livingstone. The truth behind the legend, Eastbourne, 1993 J.M. MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone. The construction of the myth’, in G. Walker and T. Gallagher (eds), Sermons and battle hymns, Edinburgh, 1990, 24–42 O. Ransford, David Livingstone. The dark interior, London, 1978 J. Listowel, The other Livingstone, New York, 1974 C. Northcott, David Livingstone. His triumph, decline and fall, Guildford, 1973 G. Seaver, David Livingstone. His life and letters, London, 1957
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa from 1865 to his death, and other writings Date 1859-72 Original Language English Description As one of the most prolific 19th-century travellers to Africa, Livingstone produced extensive reports, journals, letters and other items. On the centenary of his death in 1973, the need was identified to catalogue collections of his writings that were held across the world in libraries, archives and private collections. This resulted in the Livingstone Documentation Project, which produced David Livingstone. A catalogue of documents (1979) edited by Gary Clendennen and Ian Cunningham, and later supplemented by Cunningham in 1985. The project collected a significant portion of the documents together at the National Library of Scotland. In 2004, the Livingstone Online project was launched to digitise materials produced by Livingstone, creating digital copies and transcriptions of more than 2,000 letters, 11 journals, 39 field diaries, 18 notebooks and the 30 reports held at the National Library of Scotland, while identifying and eliciting even more items. The Livingstone Online Enrichment and Access Project, under the direction of Adrian S. Wisnicki, produced multispectral editions of Livingstone’s 1870 and 1871 field diaries. Livingstone had run short of supplies of paper and ink but continued his journals on sheets of newspaper with ink made from local materials. These had been all but lost due to the poor condition of the materials he used, though they were brought to light by multispectral imaging. The digitisation of Livingstone’s materials in the accessible and searchable format of the Livingstone Online project has enabled thematic research into his writings, including his references to day to day contacts and relations with Muslims, particularly in the two volumes The last journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa from 1865 to his death. Continued in a narrative of his last moments and sufferings, obtained from his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, edited by Horace Waller (1874). Livingstone made acquaintance with Muslims mainly in the course of charting southern Africa and opening routes for commercial and missionary enterprises from the late 1850s onwards, when he often encountered them as slave traders. His closest encounter with a Muslim was with
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Abdullah Susi, who together with the Christian James Chuma was his personal attendant. It was they who returned his remains from Africa to Britain after his death. Livingstone’s observations about Muslims are often incidental and couched in ethnographic terms such as ‘Arabs’, ‘Suaheli’ (Swahili), ‘Mahometans’, ‘Mohammedans’ and ‘Moslems’, which he uses interchangeably. He makes his comments in typical Victorian fashion, for example describing a certain Musa and his companions as ‘fair average specimens for heartlessness and falsehood of the lower classes of Mohamadans in East Africa’ (Last journals, 1874, vol. 2, p. 74). At the same time, he exhibits a measure of self-awareness and fair-minded assessment of different worldviews in A popular account of Dr. Livingstone’s expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries as follows: So far as we could learn, no efforts had been made to convert the natives [to Islam], though these two Arabs, and about a dozen half-castes, had been in the country for many years; and judging from our experience with a dozen Mohammedans in our employ at high wages for sixteen months, the Africans would be the better men in proportion as they retained their native faith. This may appear only a harsh judgment from a mind imbued with Christian prejudices; but without any pretention to that impartiality, which leaves it doubtful to which side the affections lean, the truth may be fairly stated by one who viewed all Mohammedans and Africans with the sincerest good will. (pp. 366-7)
Livingstone notes Muslim practices and beliefs, at times without comparative evaluation of their morality or spirituality. For example, he cites that it was ‘Ramadân, or fasting month’ in February 1866 when he sought assistance from the Sultan of Zanzibar for his journey. He describes his reception by the sultan in minimal terms: ‘All the Europeans went to pay visits of congratulations to his Highness the Sultan upon the conclusion of Ramadân, when sweetmeats were placed before us’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 5). On the etiquette of greeting, he records that ‘the general mode (introduced, probably by the Arabs) is to take hold of the right hand and say, “Marhaba” (welcome)’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 25), though he himself favoured greeting Muslims with the more pious Salaam (Field diary, vol. 5, p. 29). He observes on 24 June 1867 that when they needed to make a communal decision ‘the Arabs are all busy reading their Kurán, and in praying for direction; tomorrow they will call a meeting to deliberate as to what steps they will take’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 216). The belief by ‘some Arabs’ that there is a speaking serpent on an island, ‘the same that beguiled Eve’
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(Last journals, vol. 1, p. 281), is mentioned simply without further comment or comparison, as is the mention that ‘“Allah” is a very common exclamation among all the people west of Nsama’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 246). When a solar eclipse occurred in 1870, Livingstone notes that ‘the Moslems called loudly to Moses’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 48). His statement that ‘some of the Arabs believe that meteoric stones are thrown at Satan for his wickedness’ (Last journals, vol. 1 , p. 226; see Q 67:5) begs the question of biblical comparison on resisting temptations in the light of other comparative assessments. The relationship between moral behaviour and success is likewise reported with no comment on the syncretism between Islamic mores and native African practices: ‘The Suaheli think that adultery is an obstacle to success in killing [an elephant]: no harm can happen to him who is faithful to his wife, and has the proper charms inserted under the skin of his forearms’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 23). His comment on ḥalāl slaughter by an African chief is on the practice as distinct from Islamic belief: ‘Mtende invited me to go to eat at his house […] has imbibed some Arab manners and says he cuts all animal throats before he eats them’ (Field diary, vol. 4, p. 16). He also makes clinical observations on communal practices, recording anthropological detail while indicating the extent to which he has participated in the practices. On a burial he notes: An Arab who had been ill at Chitimba’s died yesterday, and was buried in the evening. No women were allowed to come near. A long silent prayer was uttered over the corpse when it was laid beside the grave, and then a cloth was held over as men within it deposited the remains beneath sticks placed slanting on the side of the bottom of the grave; this keeps the earth from coming directly into contact with the body. A feast was made by the friends of the departed, and portions sent to all who had attended the funeral: I received a good share. (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 236)
In a letter to his son, William Oswell Livingstone, dated 26 October 1862, his description of a Muslim woman, referred to as ‘the queen’, includes the comment: We went and called on her – but only saw a part of her face as she had on what is called the yasmak which covers the nose and cheeks. Her two children had patches of medicine on their faces I suppose from a superstitious fear of the evil eye. I asked […] them to put some on my face […] [but the queen’s] husband, an ugly old man, said laughing, ‘It is only for children’.
And at a Muslim celebration (most likely ʿĪd al-aḍḥā), Livingstone recounts:
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The Arabs made a sort of sacrifice of a goat which was cooked all at once; they sent a good dish of it to me. They read the Koran very industriously, and prayed for success or luck in leaving, and seem sincerely religious, according to the light that is in them. The use of incense and sacrifices brings back the old Jewish times to mind. (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 298)
At a later similar event, he again comments that, ‘the cookery is of their very best, and I always get a share’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 20). More often, Livingstone interjects a comparative assessment of beliefs and practices that reflect his missiological approach and assumptions about the origins of Islam. For example, his description of Muslim prayer and divination practices includes speculation on their origins. On 1 July 1867, his entry notes, New moon today. They are very particular as to the time of offering up prayers, and in making charms. One tonight was at 10 pm exactly. A number of cabalistic figures were drawn [...] they are probably remains of the secret arts which prevailed among Arabs before Mahomet appeared. (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 218)
At times, Livingstone expresses his misgivings to the Muslim participants, who react with apparent understanding. At a sacrifice in August 1869 (possibly another ʿĪd) Livingstone observes that the prayers are offered to ‘Hadrajee’, commenting to the party that he ‘likes the cookery, but not the prayers, and it is taken in good part’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 20). He reflects on differences in gender relations, although his attitude to women betrays Victorian assumptions of women as mostly being in relation to men, not as subjects in their own right: In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the Comoro islands lying off the north end of Madagascar, he took occasion to extol the wisdom of the Arabs in keeping strict watch over their wives. On suggesting that their extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends of their wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves to the level of the inferior animals, and each was like the bull of a herd and not like a reasonable man – ‘fuguswa’ – and that they gave themselves a vast deal of trouble for very small profit; he asserted that the jealousy was reasonable because all women were bad, they could not avoid going astray. And on remarking that this might be the case with Arab women, but certainly did not apply to English women, for though a number were untrustworthy, the majority deserved all the confidence their husbands could place in them, he reiterated that women were universally bad. He did not believe that women ever would be good; and the English allowing their wives to gad about with faces
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Livingstone notes differences within religion, comparing not only the distinctions between Islam and Christianity, but also sectarian differences within Islam. An old Monyiñko headman presented a goat and asked if the sepoys wished to cut its throat: the Johannees, being of a different sect of Mahometans, wanted to cut it in some other way than their Indian co-religionists: then ensued a fierce dispute as to who was of the right sort of Moslem! It was interesting to see that not Christians alone, but other nations feel keenly on religious subjects. (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 22)
Elsewhere, Livingstone describes Shīʿa practices, though without reference to the Arabo-Islamic name of the group, ‘The Persian Arabs are said to be gross idolators, and awfully impure. Earth from a grave at Kurbelow [presumably Karbalāʾ] is put in the turban and worshipped: some of the sects won’t say “Amen”’ (Last journals, vol. 2, pp. 97-8). It is not clear whether Livingstone obtained this knowledge from first-hand witnesses, or whether his opinion is based on hearsay from Sunnī sources. He seems to have engaged in regular comparative discussions with Muslims, documenting on 4 April 1871 what may be viewed as a summary of multiple conversations about Christianity and Islam or their scriptures as follows: ‘The Arabs ask many questions about the Bible, and want to know how many prophets have appeared, and probably say that they believe in them all; while we believe all but reject Mohamad’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 113). He claims that in response to detailed questioning by himself their knowledge is lacking: It is easy to drive them into a corner by questioning, as they don’t know whither the inquiries lead, and they are not offended when their knowledge is, as it were, admitted. When asked how many false prophets are known, they appeal to my knowledge, and evidently never heard of Balaam, the son of Beor, or of the 250 false prophets of Jezebel and Ahab, or of the many lying prophets referred to in the Bible. (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 113)
In an implicit application of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, he identifies a Muslim benefactor with the Samaritan. My property had been sold to Shereef’s friends at merely nominal prices. Syed bin Majid, a good man, proposed that they should be returned, and the ivory be taken from Shereef; but they would not restore stolen property, though they knew it to be stolen. Christians would have acted differently,
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even those of the lowest classes. I felt in my destitution as if I were the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves; but I could not hope for Priest, Levite, or good Samaritan to come by on either side, but one morning Syed bin Majid said to me, ‘Now this is the first time we have been alone together; I have no goods, but I have ivory; let me, I pray you, sell some ivory, and give the goods to you’. (Last journals, vol. 2, pp. 155-6)
At times, Livingstone shows a positive inclination towards Muslim spiritual practices, attempting an assessment according to his understanding of the belief system itself and not only in comparison with Christianity. After a fire destroyed the property of a certain Muslim trader, he reports: prayers were at once offered for him with incense; some goods will also be sent, as a little incense was. The prayer book was held in the smoke of the incense while the responses were made. These Arabs seem to be very religious in their way: the prayers were chiefly to Harasji, some relative of Mohamad. (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 233)
His entry for 7 July 1867 records rites at the start of a journey when ‘Syde put some incense on hot coals, and all the leaders of the party joined in a short prayer; they seem earnest and sincere in their incantations, according to their knowledge and belief’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 219). It is claimed that the relationship between Livingstone and his Arab companions was based on a combination of opportunism and ill-tempered relations with European agents (see Rijpma, David Livingstone, p. 199). On the whole, Livingstone’s reports reflect complex relationships with Muslims. He encounters them as traders and fellow travellers who assist him with supplies, translations and territorial knowledge, while at the same time he argues for the abolition of the slave trade in East Africa in which Muslims were implicated. His trading relations are evident, for example, from the request for alcohol from Arab traders: ‘The Moslems would certainly not abstain from trading in spirits were the trade profitable. They often asked for brandy from me in a sly way – as medicine; and when reminded that their religion forbade it, would say, “Oh, but we can drink it in secret”’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 25). Livingstone often comments on Muslim individuals, distinguishing between friends and helpers, and those he perceived as untrustworthy or idle. He refers to a certain Abdullah as ‘our old friend’ (Letter to William O. Livingstone, 26 October 1862). Regarding a certain Suleiman bin Juma’s powers of foresight, he expresses some admiration: ‘He frequently foretold the deaths of great
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men among Arabs and he was pre-eminently a good man upright and sincere “shirti” none like him now for goodness or skill’ (fragment of 1870 Field diary, 22 November-10 December 1870). In his entry on 1 March 1870, he simply writes, ‘Visited my Arab friends in their camp’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 43). Of another, named Rashid, he says, ‘he is a contrast to the Arabs who are nearly all liars – Musa and party are fair average openness of Moslem falsehood’ (fragment of 1870 Field diary, 21 February-22 March 1871). This Musa receives a mostly negative assessment from Livingstone for his apparent attempts to create division between him and his other Arab companions. He is described as a ‘genuine specimen of the ill-conditioned English-hating Arab’ who seeks to report him to the governor, Syde bin Salem Burashi (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 7). While navigating around Lake Nyasa in November 1861, Livingstone observes an Arab dhow that was built to transport slaves across the lake. He links the sighting with a reminder that a Colonel Rigby had mentioned Lake Nyasa as the most prolific source of slaves for the Zanzibar market, and reflects that ‘a small steamer on [the lake] would soon break the neck of the [slave] trade’ (Letter to George Grey, 15 November 1861). This would seem a naïve comment in the light of his later despair at the continuing misery caused by slavery in these parts. He makes no further comment about the nature of the trade or the extent of its propagation at this point. On his first encounter with the sultan at Zanzibar, it is not clear how far he argues the case for abolition as much as merely to suggest it by stating that others, such as the Governor of Bombay, are setting slaves free. In his journal entry of the day he remarks, ‘Surely he must see that some people in the world act from other than selfish motives’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 5), but he does not make clear whether these sentiments were shared with the sultan in their meeting. Livingstone had extensive contact with Arab traders, so much so that a news clipping reports ‘the Arabs there count him as a resident’ and ‘in the region no feeling is manifested toward him’ (clipping pasted in Field diary 15, 1871 n:[131]). Yet, his relationship with two individuals charts an apparently shifting attitude towards Islam from curiosity to animosity. Juma bin Saide (also known locally as Jumbe) is one of the two Arab traders Livingstone met when he first crossed Lake Nyasa in 1861 (this meeting is commemorated in the town of Nkhotakhota on a plaque attached to the fig tree under which they were said to have met). The establishment of the local mosque is also attributed to Jumbe. Livingstone negotiates with him to transport his crew across the lake or to gain access to canoes, and Jumbe extends hospitality to Livingstone on several occasions. At the time
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of meeting, Jumbe seemed a relatively innocuous figure, but by the time of their visit in 1863 Livingstone remarks that ‘tens of thousands had flocked to them for protection, and all their power and influence must be attributed to the possession of guns and gunpowder’ (Popular account, p. 365). Livingstone entreated Jumbe to end his part in the slave trade, but this caused Jumbe only to modify the brazenness with which he continued: As he did not know of our intention to visit him, we came upon several gangs of stout young men slaves, each secured by the neck to one common chain, waiting for exportation, and several more in slave sticks. These were all civilly removed before our interview was over, because Juma knew we did not relish the sight. (Popular account, p. 365)
Livingstone’s Popular account published posthumously in 1875 would place this relationship in the context of a greater missiological project, where Islam and Christianity are contrasted. In the retelling of Jumbe’s exploits, the Popular account termed Islam the ‘faith of the false prophet’ that would soon reduce the whole continent of Africa through conquest rather than propagation of faith, contrasting with Christianity in that ‘the followers of Christ alone are anxious to propagate their faith’ (Popular account, p. 366). The retelling in the Popular account edited by John Murray indicates a wider Victorian belief, imbibed ‘from boyhood upwards’, that Islam is a swiftly advancing force, and it is a question to what extent these are the sentiments of Livingstone or his editor. The most consistent Muslim travel companion in Livingstone’s accounts is Mohamad Bogharib (also Mohammed ibn Gharib, as in Last journals, vol. 1, pp. 288-96), an Arab trader who facilitated many of Livingstone’s journeys from their meeting on 21 November 1867 onwards (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 248). On several occasions Livingstone seems to rely on Bogharib’s negotiating skills and geographical knowledge to facilitate his explorations, and they seemed to have shared mutual interests, at least as Livingstone saw it. For example, Livingstone excuses a ruse invented by Bogharib to get out of difficulty with a local chieftain that cost Livingstone five months’ delay. Extraordinarily, he equates Christian and Muslim pragmatism in his remark that the deception ‘is not to be wondered at, and in a Mohamadan and in a Christian too it is thought clever’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 285). Livingstone would allow himself to be delayed several more times for Bogharib’s sake, once citing no particular reason, apart from Bogharib’s kindness: I prepared to start today, but Mohamad Bogharib has been very kind, and indeed cooked meals for me from my arrival […;] the food was coarse
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When some of Livingstone’s porters break out to join Bogharib, he once again takes what might be considered an unusually forgiving stance. I did not blame them very severely in my own mind for absconding: they were tired of tramping, and so verily am I, but Mohamad, in encouraging them to escape to him, and talking with a double tongue, cannot be exonerated from blame. Little else can be expected from him, he has lived some thirty-five years in the country, twenty-five being at Casembe’s, and there he had often to live by his wits. Consciousness of my own defects makes me lenient. (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 287)
When Bogharib’s slaves attack Livingstone’s porters in a dispute about meat on 24 February 1868, Livingstone notes that this is the first instance of ‘Muhamedan bigotry’, but he immediately adds that the attackers are hardly conversant with the tenets of Islam: ‘It is questionable if one of them can repeat the formula “Lā illā hā illā la hu Muhamad Rasuk-la salla lahu, a leihi oa salama”’ (Unyanyembe journal, p. 364). Bogharib apologises to Livingstone afterwards, and they agree not to punish the perpetrators. Mohamad Bogharib on his part is concerned about Livingstone when his health deteriorates. Livingstone’s entries on 7-9 January 1869 show the affectionate care given by Bogharib: ‘Mohamad Bogharib came up, and I have got a cupper, who cupped my chest. 8th and 9th January. Mohamad Bogharib offered to carry me’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 2). Livingstone appreciates the care, writing that Bogharib is ‘very kind to me in my extreme weakness’, supplying him with medicines (Last journals, vol. 3, p. 3). At Christmas that year, Bogharib presented Livingstone’s party with a goat (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 37). Nevertheless, Livingstone is aware of the violence and continued slave trading perpetrated by Bogharib and his party, and is himself implicated in some of the violence because of his association with Bogharib. In an entry on 20 November 1868, he leaves a remark that seems intended to deflect from the killings that would ensue the following day: ‘Mohamad Bogharib purposed to attack two villages near to this, from an idea that the people there concealed his runaway slaves; by remaining I think that I have put a stop to this, as he did not like to pillage while I was in company’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 348). Surrounded by this latest misery caused by the slave trade, Livingstone begins to express exasperation with religious rites observed by the perpetrators: ‘I don’t understand what effect his long
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prayers and prostrations towards the “Kibla” have on his own mind, they cannot affect the minds of his slaves favourably, nor do they mine, though I am as charitable as most people’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 348). Livingstone eventually holds Bogharib to account after hostilities had escalated to draw a variety of groups into the violence, placing the blame on Bogharib’s lieutenant, Bin Juma (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 351). Livingstone notes that the Qur’an forms part of deliberations to end the conflict when it is shown to the opposing side ‘as a sign of power’, and Livingstone’s entry on the following day reports that ‘the Koran is consulted at hours which are auspicious’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 352). Nevertheless, he adds in an angry tone, ‘It is too glaring hypocrisy to go to the Koran for guidance while the stolen women, girls and fish, are in Bin Juma’s hands’ (Last journals, vol. 1, p. 355). The final comment from the published Last journals on this aggression is that ‘there is no forgiveness with Moslems for bloodshed’ (vol. 1, p. 357). One event in particular, the Nyangwe massacre, also known as the Manyuema market massacre, seemed to colour Livingstone’s opinion about Islam, while his own conduct in the affair has been questioned. He is seen to make more generalised negative comments about Islam as a religion in the aftermath of the massacre. Further details of the event have recently become accessible thanks to the spectral imaging project that made his writing in his improvised field diary of 1871 readable. The text reveals fuller details of the violence that left approximately 400 people dead, of whom most were women and children. In a letter to John Kirk, dated 25 March 1871, Livingstone writes that his ‘spirits are beyond measure depressed in writing on such matters’. The event constitutes a turning point in his assessment of Islamic subjects. In his reflections on the killing and the justification that is offered in religious terms by the slave traders, he insists that ‘Women were never touched until now by these Muhamadans’ (Letter to John Kirk, 25 March 1871). He asserts that the sultan should let any slave from Manyema go free, for ‘they were not traded for but murdered for – in talking with [them] I always protest against shedding human blood – they think that rhyming over “God is great” and all sin is forgiven’. In a further letter to John Kirk, dated 14 May 1871, he concludes: ‘I never imagined that human or Muhammadan nature rather could be so atrociously vile.’ While Livingstone had not been unequivocably positive about Muslim conduct up to this point, his writings from 1871 onwards become more generalised reflections on the witness of faith in action, and emphasise differences between Islam and Christianity. His initial conception was of a Christian colony that would extinguish the slave trade and rival other
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European nations, such as the Portuguese, by ‘a bodily transplantation of all our peculiarities as a Christian people’ (Letter to unknown, undated between 1 September and 31 December 1859). Now Livingstone discourses more often about the virtues of Christianity in contrast to Islam. His field diary records an analogy between the Prophet Muḥammad and Moses, indicating local traditions about Muḥammad performing a miracle of water provision. The only difference between their religion and them is that Muhamad lied to force his countrymen to give up idolatry – The impudence of his lies is their chief feature – As a trader he went to Damascus and heard of St Paul’s translation to the third heaven [see 2 Corinthians 12:2] – Muhamad at once conceived the idea of a translation to the seventh heaven – He had no miracle to shew in evidence but without shame tried to appropriate Moses bringing water out of the rock [Numbers 20:11] but with the characteristic of all false miracles for no reason – did not take water as all others did on his camel and worked his miracle where it was not needed. (fragment of 1870 Field diary, 21 February-22 March 1871)
In an uncharacteristic outburst, Livingstone reflects on Muslims’ supposed propensity to theft, which is also recognised by their leaders, exclaiming: [The sultan] says if he trusted his customs income in the hands of his own Muhammadan subjects they would steal it all – purloin the whole. […] Falsehood seems ingrained in their constitutions. No wonder that in all this region they have never tried to propagate Islamism. The natives soon learn to hate them, and slaving as carried on by the Kilwans and the Ujijans is so bloody as to prove an effectual barrier against proselytism – The Muhammadans have in all their intercourse in East Africa propagated nothing but syphilis and the domestic bug.
His entry on 20 March explains his state of mind as a traumatised state: ‘I am sore and sick of human blood.’ Livingstone’s Last journals, vol. 2, reflect his changed sentiments more often, pronouncing the Swahili as ‘the most cruel and bloodthirsty missionaries in existence’ (p. 92). He attributes disease to the heartland of Islam when he declares that the cholera epidemic along the east coast came from ‘Mecca filth, for nothing was done to prevent the place being made a perfect cesspool of animals’ guts and ordure of men’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 96). A subsection is devoted to ‘Moslem morals’ in which Livingstone’s experiences of treachery by Muslims are ascribed to the origins of Islam:
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[…] they are followers of the Prince of lies – Mohamad, whose cool appropriation of the knowledge gained at Damascus, and from the Jews, is perfectly disgusting. All his deeds were done when unseen by any witnesses. It is worth noticing that all admit the decadence of Moslem power, and they ask how is it so fallen? They seem sincere in their devotion and in teaching the Koran, but its meaning is comparatively hid from most Suaheli. (Last journals, vol. 2, pp. 97-8)
Elsewhere he states unequivocally: ‘Mohamadans are certainly famous as liars, and the falsehood of Mohamad has been transmitted to his followers in a measure unknown in other religions’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 130). Livingstone betrays a sense of guilt over the massacre as he describes the aftermath: Several market people came to salute, who knew that we had no hand in the massacre, as we are different people from the Arabs. […] They speak of us as ‘good’: the anthropologists think that to be spoken of as wicked is better. Ezekiel says that the Most High put his comeliness upon Jerusalem [Ezekiel 16:8-14]: if He does not impart of His goodness to me I shall never be good: if He does not put of His comeliness on me I shall never be comely in soul, but be like these Arabs in who Satan has full sway – the god of this world having blinded their eyes. (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 142)
Nevertheless, he includes some representatives of Islam, namely the Turks, as potential allies in abolishing the slave trade: ‘All I can add in my loneliness is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on everyone, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal the open sore of the world’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 182). The evaluation of Islamic mores is presented within Livingstone’s overriding perspective of Christian mission, and intermittently with Islam as competitor in mind. The final chapters of The last journals, vol 2, engage in longer discourses about Islam and challenges to Christian mission in territories shared by Muslims. The obstacles to Christian mission are attributed to a sense of confidence among Muslims: There seems but little prospect of Christianity spreading by ordinary means among Mohamadans. Their pride is a great obstacle, and is very industriously nurtured by its votaries. No new invention or increase of power on the part of Christians seems to disturb the self-complacent belief that ultimately all power and dominion in this world will fall into the hands of Moslems. Mohamad will appear at last in glory, with all his followers saved by him. When Mr. Stanley’s Arab boy from Jerusalem told the Arab bin Saleh that he was a Christian, he was asked, ‘Why so, don’t you know that all the
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The development of Christian mission is contextualised in terms of relationships with subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Livingstone notes that the expansion of missionary enterprise might be permitted under the sway of the Sultan of Zanzibar in a typical example of British colonial practice: No great difficulty would be encountered in establishing a Christian Mission a hundred miles or so from the East Coast. The permission of the Sultan of Zanzibar would be necessary, because all the tribes of any intelligence claim relationship, or have relations with him; the Banyamwezi even call themselves his subjects, and so do others. His permission would be readily granted, if respectfully applied for through the English Consul. (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 210)
Elsewhere, Livingstone distinguishes the potential for missionary persuasion among the ethnographic group of ‘Suaheli’ and others. Demonstrating a diversity of missiological methods, the description favours a pragmatic approach above theological debate that is worth quoting in full. The Suaheli, with their present apathy on religious matters, would be no obstacle. Care to speak politely, and to show kindness to them, would not be lost labour in the general effect of the Mission on the country, but all discussion on the belief of the Moslems should be avoided; they know little about it. Emigrants from Muscat, Persia, and India, who at present possess neither influence nor wealth, would eagerly seize any formal or offensive denial of the authority of their Prophet to fan their own bigotry, and arouse that of the Suaheli. A few now assume an air of superiority in matters of worship, and would fain take the place of Mullams or doctors of the law, by giving authoritative dicta as to the times of prayer; positions to be observed; lucky and unlucky days; using cabalistic signs; telling fortunes; finding from the Koran when an attack may be made on any enemy, &c.; but this is done only in the field with trading parties. At Zanzibar, the regular Mullams supersede them. No objection would be made to teaching the natives of the country to read their own languages in the Roman character. No Arab has ever attempted to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish. One only of all the native chiefs, Monyumgo, has sent his children to Zanzibar to be taught to read and write the Koran; and he is said to possess an unusual admiration of such civilization as he has seen
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among the Arabs. To the natives, the chief attention of the Mission should be directed. It would not be desirable, or advisable, to refuse explanation to others; but I have avoided giving offence to intelligent Arabs, who have pressed me, asking if I believed in Mohamad by saying, ‘No I do not: I am a child of Jesus bin Miriam’, avoiding anything offensive in my tone, and often adding that Mohamad found their forefathers bowing down to trees and stones, and did good to them by forbidding idolatry, and teaching the worship of the only One God. This, they all know, and it pleases them to have it recognised. (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 210)
At the outset of his travels towards the East Coast of Africa, Livingstone remarked sociologically on the benefit of Christianity compared to other belief systems. In an entry in his Field diary he remarks: The Roman Emperors looked on Christianity as politically subversive and morally abominable As (sic) many of ourselves do Mormonism & our rulers do the Jesuits. Christianity is still looked on as a new spirit likely to act as a dissolvent of Eastern systems. It produces an instinctive shrinking, and repugnance – Asiatic rulers have an instinctive prescience of the result and naturally shrink from closer contact with Western commerce & Christianity which combined will inevitably modify the whole structure of society. (Field diary, vol. 1, 4 August-31 March 1866)
He thus suggests in a letter to James G. Bennett in February 1872: For the sake of lawful commerce it would be politic to insist that the sultan’s Revenue by the Custom house should be placed in the hands of an English or American merchant. […] By this arrangement the sultan would be largely benefitted – Legal commerce would be exalted to a position – it has never held since Banians and Moslems emigrated into Eastern Africa – and Christianity to which the slave trade is an insurmountable barrier would [e]nd an open door.
In the Popular account sincere Muslims are favourably compared with Christians, while the assertion that Islam has a lower moral standard than Christianity, or animist African morality, is still maintained. In contrast to the apocalyptic view of some of his contemporaries, the Islamic expression that Livingstone encountered on the African continent has, according to his assessment, lost its way as a proselytising religion. Many Mohammedans might contrast favourably with indifferent Christians; but, so far as our experience in East Africa goes, the moral tone of the follower of Mahomed is pitched at a lower key than that of the untutored African. The ancient zeal for propagating the tenets of the Koran has evaporated, and been replaced by the most intense selfishness and grossest
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David Livingstone sensuality. The only known efforts made by Mohammedans, namely, those in the North-West and North of the continent, are so linked with the acquisition of power and plunder, as not to deserve the name of religious propagandism; and the only religion that now makes proselytes is that of Jesus Christ. To those who are capable of taking a comprehensive view of this subject, nothing can be adduced of more telling significance than the wellattested fact, that while the Mohammedans, Fulahs, and others towards Central Africa, make a few proselytes by a process which gratifies their own covetousness, three small sections of the Christian converts, the Africans in the South, in the West Indies, and on the West Coast of Africa actually contribute for the support and spread of their religion upwards of 15,000 pounds annually. That religion which so far overcomes the selfishness of the human heart must be Divine. (Popular account, p. 369)
By the end of his life, Livingstone’s expanded view of faith and missions draws the Last journal to a sharper focus on the founder of the Christian faith: ‘The spirit of Missions is the spirit of our Master: the very genius of His religion. A diffusive philanthropy is Christianity itself. It requires perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 246). Significance Livingstone’s comments on Islam and contacts with Muslims have not received concerted attention, apart from identification of references to the category of ‘Arabs’ in his writings (see Rijpma, David Livingstone, pp. 358-62). He is also named and included by implication in Andrew Porter’s Religion versus empire? (pp. 191-224) in the discussion of missionary approaches to other faiths in the context of British expansion. Livingstone’s remarks on Islam and Muslims certainly reflect the attitudes of his Victorian audience and the terminology and language of the missionary and geo-political environment of the 19th century. However, he differs in nuance from other writers of his time in his appreciation of Islam as a monotheistic faith and of certain Muslims as worthy individuals. The discrepancies in Field diary entries and synthesised accounts published after his death in the Last journals and Popular accounts may indicate the extent to which he presented his first-hand experiences for European audiences. His writings seem keenly aware of European expectations of Islamic expansionist tendencies in Africa, but do not conclude that Islam will inevitably outstrip Christianity. There is a question as to how far every word may be attributed to Livingstone, and how much his views were redacted by editors Horace Waller and J. Murray in line with abolitionist and imperial discourses immediately after his death. For instance, Sjoerd Rijpma assesses the Last journals as ‘a mutilated version of his notebooks
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(not even his “field diaries”) and other material’ (David Livingstone, p. 43). Similarly, he does not feature as a subject in Clinton Bennett’s, Victorian images of Islam, though there his work is shown to be appropriated by others in abolitionist and imperialist projects (p. 95). For the student of comparative religion, Livingstone’s observations do not show any particular depth of knowledge of Islam, its fundamental tenets or even the names of sects, indicating that, when he prepared for missionary work, he did not necessarily have Islam in mind. He demonstrates a familiarity with the Islamic creed and some aspects of the Qur’an, mostly as it relates to biblical themes and terminology, for example identifying himself as a follower of Jesus son of Mary to some Muslims, while calling the untranslated Qur’an ‘meaningless gibberish’ (Last journals, vol. 2, p. 210). He is familiar to some extent with Islamic history, expressing appreciation that Muḥammad ended idolatry in Arabia. More often, his ethnographic documents record aspects of Islamic life and his relationships with Islamic subjects that reflect missiological interest and preconceptions. However, his reflections on practices and beliefs are those of a participant observer, not always followed by comparative comment or theological evaluation. He reveals a scientific curiosity in all aspects of the religious, social and medical life of those around him. He expresses no hesitation in sharing food and partaking in meals prepared according to ḥalāl principles, though he does not name them as such. Rather, he almost always shows appreciation for being invited to meals. Extraordinarily, Livingstone’s proto-phenomenological approach includes self-reflection, when occasionally he favourably compares the dedicated approach of certain Muslims with practices of Christians, and expresses understanding of the failings of others in the light of his own frailties. While his comments are often contradictory, he makes allowances for sectarian differences in all systems of belief, and does not always view such differences within Islam as a sign of its inferiority. His record of Islamic practices and the use of the Qur’an may also be of interest to scholars of Islam, recording local expressions and traditions that may be peculiar to the region and time or indicate diverse Islamic influences. He displays varying missiological approaches, depending on the level of education and understanding in his Muslim audience. Most importantly, he distinguishes individuals from each other in terms of character and does not inevitably associate individual Muslims with generalisations about Islam. His views about Islam seem to develop along with his relationship with certain individuals such as Mohamad Bogharib, and a
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link can be made between Bogharib and others in their association with violence and Livingstone’s increasingly negative commentary on Islam as a religion. The fear of Islam that permeates others’ thinking and writing in the 1860s (e.g. Richard Burton’s anticipation of an Islamic conquest of Africa) is not the overriding sentiment in Livingstone’s reporting, while it is certainly evident in the posthumously published volumes. Livingstone’s observations do not engage as much in eschatological speculation about Islam’s role as a ‘sign of the time’ as those of fellow countrymen writing in the early 19th century. Instead, Livingstone assesses the advance of Islam in terms of its association with the slave trade in regions bordering the Indian Ocean. He shows familiarity with eschatological and pre-millennial anxiety about Islam, yet concludes that the cruelty of the Arab slave trade has made many resistant to the teachings of the religion. His close relationship with Muslim traders allows him a more pragmatic evaluation than the judgements of ‘arm-chair’ anthropologists. Both practical and evangelistic, Livingstone does not conclude that Islam was spreading itself ‘by giant strides’. While he never seems to let an opportunity for theological conversation with Muslims go by, his missionary focus is more intently directed on ‘pagan’ Africans than ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muhametans’. Publications Archives Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland – David Livingstone’s letters and diaries have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. These can be accessed through Livingstone online; http:// www.livingstoneonline.org/in-his-own-words/catalogue. Letter to Unknown, between 1 September and 31 December 1859; A001524 Letter to George Grey, 15 November 1861; A001692 Letter to William O. Livingstone, 26 October 1862; A001839 Letter to Roderick I. Murchison, 4 December 1863; A001969 Field diary vol. 1, 4 August 1865 – 31 March 1866; A000001 Field diary vol. 4, 1 July – 5 September 1866; A000004 Field diary vol. 5, 5 September – 23 October 1866; A000005 Fragment of 1870 Field diary, 21 February – 2 March; A000210 Letter to John Kirk, 25 March 1871; A002569 Letter to John Kirk, 14 May 1871; A002571 Letter to James G. Bennett, February 1872; A002603 Unyanyembe journal, 28 January 1866-5 March 1872; A000019
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Clipping posted in Field diary 15, 14 November 1871-14 September 1872; field-diary-xiv-overview D. Livingstone, The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa from 1865 to his death. Continued in a narrative of his last moments and sufferings, obtained from his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, ed. H. Waller, 2 vols, London, 1874, repr. 1880; Westport CT, 1970; m7d842up (digitised version available through the Wellcome Collection) D. Livingstone and H. Waller, The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa from 1865 to his death. Continued in a narrative of his last moments and sufferings, obtained from his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, 2 vols, New York, 1875; 001259746 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) D. Livingstone and C.R.E. Livingstone, A popular account of Dr. Livingstone’s expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries: and of the discovery of the lakes Shirwa and Nyassa (1858 -1864), London, John Murray, 1875, repr. 1887, 1894; popularaccounto00livi (digitised version available through Smithsonian Libraries) D. Livingstone and H. Waller, Letzte Reise von David Livingstone in Centralafrika von 1865 bis zu seinem Tode 1873: vervollständigt durch einen Bericht über seine Leiden und letzten Augenblicke nach Erzählungen seiner treuen Diener Chuma und Susi vervollständigt, trans. J.M. Boyes, 2 vols, Hamburg, 1875 (German trans.); It.sing. 1401 z-1/2 (digitised version available through MDZ) D. Livingstone and H. Waller, Dernier journal du docteur David Livingstone, relatant ses explorations et découvertes de 1866 a 1873, trans. H. Loreau, 2 vols, Paris, 1876 (French trans.); cb30825073k (digitised version available through BNF) D. Livingstone, Poslednee puteshestvie v tstentralʹnuiu Afriku: dnevniki, kotorye on vel v tsentral’noĭ Afrike s 1865 goda po denʹ smerti, trans. V.K. Zhitomirsiĭ, Moscow, 1968 (Russian trans.) D. Livingstone and H. Waller, El último diario del Doctor Livingstone, Madrid, 1985 (Spanish trans.) D. Livingstone and H. Waller, The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa from 1865 to his death, 2 vols, Cambridge, 2011 Studies A.S. Wisnicki and M. Ward (eds), Livingstone’s 1870 field diary; http:// livingstoneonline.org/uuid/node/8903fa5b-7919-4f98-96ad-9b147 e7f16d2
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S. Rijpma, David Livingstone and the myth of African poverty and disease. A close examination of his writing on the pre-colonial era, Leiden, 2015 A. Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914, Manchester, 2004 C. Bennett, Victorian images of Islam, London, 1992 Georgina Jardim
European travellers to Ethiopia in the 19th century Date 1809-80 Original Language English, French, German Description During the 19th century, a succession of European travellers embarked on journeys through East Africa, providing an insight (often biased) into day-to-day interreligious relations. The reasons for these journeys varied. Some, such as Walter Chichele Plowden (1820-60) and Captain Charles D. Cameron (1825-70), travelled for political reasons. Others, such as George Annesley (1770-1844), Henry Salt (1780-1827), Charles X. Rochet d’Hericourt (1801-54), Edmund Combes (1812-48) and Maurice Tamisier (1810-74), were investigating possible trading opportunities. Others again, such as Nikolay Stepanovich Leontiev (1862-1910), William McEntyre Dye (1831-99), Trevenen James Holland (1836-1910) and Henry Montague Hozier (1836-1907), were part of military expeditions. Some travelled for missionary purposes, such as Henry Dufton (d. 1868) and Henry Aaron Stern (1820-85), or went on scientific expeditions, as did Théophile Lefevbre (1811-60), Philipp Victor Paulitschke (1854-99), Eduard Rüppell (1794-1884) and Antoine Thomson d’Abbadie (1810-97). Again, others, like John Bell (d. 1860), simply travelled for adventure. Many of these travellers visited Ethiopia (Abyssinia), where the Orthodox Christian rulers tended to treat European visitors ambivalently: they were desirous of support against Muslim incursions while remaining suspicious of Christian missions. A prime example was the Emperor Tewodros (r. 1855-68). For Europeans, Ethiopia was still seen as the ‘Land of Prester John’, as well as the source of the Blue Nile (see, for example, A. Martínez, ‘Ho Preste Joam das Indias’, in CMR 7, 785-90; L. Cohen, ‘Pedro Páez’, in CMR 11, 508-16, A. Martínez, ‘Hiob Ludolf’, in CMR 12, 739-44). Zanzibar was another destination and was also the gateway for explorers searching for the source of the White Nile, such as Richard Burton (see A. Dingle, ‘Richard F. Burton’, in CMR 17, 368-83, pp. 376-8), James Grant and John Speke, as well as missionaries such as Ludwig Krapf, Alexander Mackay and Siméon Lourdel (see J. Chesworth, ‘Ludwig Krapf’, ‘CMS in East Africa’, and M.T. Frederiks and J. Chesworth, ‘White Fathers’, in CMR 19, 195-204, 355-73, 395-403).
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Many of these journeys reflect the new interest of European countries, among them especially France and Britain, in exploiting and controlling the trade routes to the Middle East and Africa and the consequent military, cultural and political confrontation that ensued from such efforts at colonisation. On their journeys, travellers encountered and wrote about local Christian and Muslim communities, and also Muslim Arabs crossing the region. From their accounts, much can be learnt about such interreligious encounters in East Africa. They also provide a variety of first-hand observations on Muslim beliefs and practices and, importantly, they reveal the attitudes of the authors to Islam and Muslims. In his Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt (1809), George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, comments on day-today living while travelling through Egypt and Ethiopia. On several occasions he is concerned that seamen, when in port, are being enticed to convert and become ‘Mussulmaun’. Some, indeed, did convert to Islam (vol. 2, pp. 76-80). In his A voyage to Abyssinia and travels into the interior of that country (1814), Henry Salt remarks of the people of Zanzibar that they are ‘Mohammedans’ of ‘Arab extraction’ ruled by a shaykh appointed by the ‘Imaum of Muscat’ (p. 91). As for local Muslim communities, he remarks that some foreigners experience the ‘insolence’ of Muslim children, whom he calls ‘wild urchins’, though once the children grow accustomed to the travellers they want to entertain the visitors with their tricks, gifts and games (pp. 107-8). Salt also records how some travellers deliberately affront Muslim sensibilities. In one incident when a group of sailors went ashore, one of them grabbed a piece of fatty pork and started rubbing it on the head of one of the native slaves, a Muslim, who responded with disgust. Affront had been given, and the matter could only be resolved by the payment of a sum of money to the chief who owned the man (p. 174). The sailors must have been familiar with the Muslim rejection of pork and so set out deliberately to offend the Muslims, possibly thinking this was a joke. In Ethiopia, Salt discovered that some tribes or ethnic groups who were said to believe in the Prophet Muḥammad in fact knew little more about him or his faith than his name; they had no mosque or ‘priests’ (p. 177). On some occasions, however, he saw that ‘higher classes of Mohammedans [were] more observant of religious rites than Europeans’ (p. 214). When he presented gifts from the king of England to the ras in Abyssinia, Salt noticed that ‘the purity of our religion ceased to be questioned’ (p. 267). Edmund Combes (1812-48) and Maurice Tamisier (1810-74) published the findings of their three-year journey (1835-7) as Voyage en Abyssinie,
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dans le pays des Gallas de Choa and d’Ifat (4 vols). They make many references to ‘musulmans’, writing about Émin-Bey, for instance, that he maintained, as a faithful musulman, that the Koran was the most perfect code with which God would have endowed mankind; that women were not treated there with as much injustice as we seemed to believe it; […] it was appropriate, however, that European women deserved more respect than Muslim women, who were, said he, without soul and without passion. (vol. 1, p. 76)
Coombes also notes that at Easter there was a particular problem concerning the need for two butchers, one Christian and one Muslim, to slaughter two sheep for the feast. As the slaughter took place, the Muslim faced Mecca and the Christian faced Jerusalem, and both uttered a short prayer before the animals were killed and roasted (vol. 1, pp. 141-2). This slaughter issue was also remarked on by J.G. Bell (d. 1860) in his ‘Extract from a journal of travels in Abyssinia 1842’. Although he makes very few references to Islam, he describes in one section how he tried to persuade his Muslim servant Abdallah to eat meat slaughtered by a Christian. Bell explains that ‘it was considered a great crime for a Mahomedan to eat of meat killed by any but a true believer, as it is for a Christian to partake of that slaughtered by a Mussleman, indeed so particular are they that they will not even use a knife or cooking pot that has been used by the other’ (pp. 18-19). Naturalists, who produced multi-volume accounts of their discoveries of the flora and fauna of Ethiopia, usually made only passing references to the presence of Muslims and Islam. An example is Eduard Rüppell (17941884), who travelled in Ethiopia in 1830-3. In Reise in Abyssinien, he comments on botany, geography, topography and archaeology, but has little to say on religion other than noting that Samuel Gobat had fully described Christianity in the region and that ‘people who confess the Muslim faith are raised high above the Christians with regard to moral attitudes’ (vol. 2, ch. 12, quoted in Friis, ‘Travelling among fellow Christians’, p. 187). He also concludes that European missionary activity in either the Christian or Muslim parts of Abyssinia would do no good. The D’Abbadie brothers were fascinated by the history of Ethiopia, and contributed greatly to European knowledge of the country. In a letter to Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, ‘Voyage en Abyssinie’ (1839), Antoine D’Abbadie notes that the advance of Islam into Africa is a threat to Christianity in Ethiopia as long as it is torn by the ravages of civil war (pp. 213-14).
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Théophile Lefevbre (1811-60) was part of a French scientific expedition established by royal decree to report on the natural history of Ethiopia. ‘Introduction à la relation d’un voyage en Abyssinie’, a 71-page preface to the six-volume report, refers to the presence of Muslims but says little more than that. However, Lefevbre does state that both Christian and Muslim wedding ceremonies have civil and religious dimensions, with the civil marriage taking place before parents and the local chief followed by the religious marriage before the priest or cadi (p. 37). One of the most informative sources on Christian-Muslim relations in the country was written by Mansfield Parkyns (1823-94), a British travellerexplorer of aristocratic descent. He was best known for Life in Abyssinia: being notes collected during three years’ residence and travels in that country, which provides much information on a variety of topics. He lived as a local (‘went native’) and had a great interest in Islam, so that the community trusted and accepted him. His Life in Abyssinia was first published in two volumes (33 chapters in 850 pages) in 1853, with a second edition following in 1868. In the first edition, he refers extensively to James Bruce, who travelled in Ethiopia between 1768 and 1773 (see J.A. Reeve, ‘James Bruce’, in CMR 13, 369-78). Parkyns added a substantial section to the second edition (1868), in which he describes the political changes in Ethiopia after his departure, giving an impression of changed relations between Muslims and Christians in the region. The first volume covers his journey and the encounters he had, while the second contains illustrated accounts of local customs and history, including descriptions of religious events such as marriage, death and funeral rituals. As Parkyns states, the purpose of the book was to provide an honest eye-witness account of ‘a rough life’, and in particular to present readers with a picture of the ‘customs of the people’ (vol. 1, p. 3). Parkyns’s attitude towards Islam becomes evident right from the opening pages, when he entered Constantinople on the first part of his journey. He describes Islam as full of ‘superstition and bigotry’ (pp. 19-20) and records how the local Egyptian boys, acting as guides for travellers on donkeys, would make fun of the riders. The Arabic songs the boys sang referred in a derogatory way to Christians as infidels riding on donkeys (p. 27). This shows that Christians and Muslims entertained mutually negative and scornful views of each other, even if they did not express them explicitly. Parkyns refers to several Muslim versions of the Old Testament narratives as told to him by Muslim friends, including the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Joseph (pp. 58-60). In an account of hunting, he relates (p. 107) that Ethiopian Muslims will not eat anything a Christian has killed unless the animal was slaughtered in the
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proper Muslim way. He also gives a detailed account of a Muslim funeral he witnessed (p. 108). In Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla country Walter Plowden, the British consul in Massawa (1848-60), refers several times to the division of the country between its Christian and Muslim inhabitants (pp. 15-16, 28). He gives an account of Christian missionary activities, which led to some tribes becoming Christian, whereas contact with Arab traders led many Ethiopians to become Muslim (p. 16). In ch. 5, he deals with the complexity of relations between religions, indicating that, according to tradition, the origin of Christianity is based on the Jewish influence on Axum through King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (p. 84), which has resulted in there being many Jews still living in Ethiopia. Christianity itself started through the missionary activities of an Egyptian monk, and since his time Christianity has taken on many sectarian forms (pp. 86-7). Plowden goes on to describe in detail the hierarchy of Christian leaders in the church, emphasising the demand that they observe purity, which includes abstention from eating with ‘Mohamedans’ (p. 93). Following Plowden’s murder in 1860, the British consul in Ethiopia was Captain Charles D. Cameron, whose letters show a militant attitude towards Muslims. In a letter to a Mr Hammond dated 27 May 1862, Cameron states that only ‘gunpowder will stop the Muslim advance’ (in den Bosch, ‘Anglo-Ethiopian relations’, p. 77). In a letter to Earl Russell on 26 April 1862, he states that the British influence in Ethiopia would eventually bring about civilisation (in den Bosch, ‘Anglo-Ethiopian relations’, p. 78), reflecting the notion that Africa was in need of being civilised. Henry Stern (1820-85), born in Germany, converted in 1840 from Judaism to Christianity in London and became a missionary with the London Society for the Conversion of Jews. From 1844 to 1859, he worked in Palestine, Iraq and Istanbul, before moving to Ethiopia, where he worked with the Falashas, a group claiming descent from the Jews of the time of Solomon. His 1862 Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia records his work and observations. It includes few references to Islam, though his attitude is indicated clearly in the Preface, where he refers to Ethiopia being situated in ‘the centre of hordes of untutored pagans and degraded Mohammedans’ (p. iii). Distrust of European motives during the final years of Tewodros’s rule led to his incarceration (1863-8), with others, including the consul, Captain Cameron, joining him. Stern’s The captive missionary (1868) relates the situation caused by Tewodros’s actions and the consequences of the uprising of the Galla. Stern writes in positive terms about the Muslim queen-regent of the Galla, Woizero Worket, and
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Illustration 5. Henry Stern, William Prideaux, Charles Cameron and others held captive by King Tewodros
her son Imam Ahmadee (both also imprisoned by the tyrant Tewodros; pp. 213-18), but he says little about Islam. In Record of the expedition to Abyssinia (1870), Trevenen Holland and Henry Hozier give an account of a military expedition (December 1867May 1868) planned to secure the release of the British prisoners held by Emperor Tewodros, including Cameron and Henry Stern. Their work includes a brief historical account of the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia (vol. 1, pp. 1-2), commenting dismissively that Ethiopian Christianity is ‘tainted by superstition and Judaism’ (vol. 1, p. 2), and explaining that the good relations between the British and the Ethiopian rulers in recent times are due to their mutual dislike of the ‘Mohamedans’ (vol. 1, p. 7). Though very little is known about Henry Dufton, his views align him with men such as David Livingstone who considered the twin forces of Christianisation and civilisation vital for the future of Africa. About the purpose of his book, Narrative of a journey through Abyssinia in 1862-3 (1867), he explains: ‘My object in undertaking the journey into Africa, a portion of which is described in the following narrative, was to reach the Galla countries to the south of Abyssinia, and explore, as a field for Christianisation and future colonisation’ (p. v). It is clear that Dufton
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looked down on Africa as a place in need of religious conversion and material assistance. During his travels he had multiple encounters with Muslims, who attempted to persuade him to convert: They wished me to repeat the Mohammedan creed, La illah ila Allah wa Mohammed er – rasool Allah. ‘There is no god but God, said I, and then stopped. ‘And Mohammed is the prophet of God,’ continued they. ‘That I cannot say,’ I replied, ’for I don’t believe Mohammed was the prophet of God.’ They were greatly shocked at this infidel sentiment, and commenced to argue the question in a manner pretty similar to that in which most persons at home would argue for the truths of Christianity – namely, by heaping assertion on assertion. (p. 5)
And on a different occasion he remarks, I said, ‘You know nothing about the Holy Book of the Christians, and yet you condemn me as a kafer and Nazarene dog for believing in it; what you’ve to do is to compare the Kitab el Makudus (Bible) with the Koran, and seek for the truth; this I have done for myself, and believe the Christian to be the superior religion’. (p. 6)
It is clear Dufton regarded Muslims with an insulting bias, just as he was regarded by them as an ‘infidel’, ‘kafer’ and ‘dog’. He nevertheless still appreciated some elements in their conduct: ‘Really I had for the moment a sensation of shame in thinking of the liberal, unfailing hospitality of the Moslem’ (p. 55). And not only did he reflect on his own experiences with Muslims but also commented on relations between local Christians and Muslim communities, though his travelogues show that he was critical of Ethiopian Orthodoxy as well as of Islam. The Abyssinians are orthodox in their belief, the grand truths of our religion being received alike by them as by us; but being void of that charity which edifieth, their knowledge has only tended to puff them up, and the intolerance with which they look upon their Mohammedan and Jewish neighbours is even greater than that of those people themselves towards Christians. (p. 90)
Commenting on the inhospitality of local Christians, Dufton remarks: ‘[The town of] Arkeeko is fortified and garrisoned by the Turks; and, strange though it may appear, I seemed to welcome Mohammedanism again as a pleasant exchange for the worse Christianity of Habesh’ (p. 222). Regarding the Christian emperor’s attitude towards Muslims, Dufton remarked:
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Dufton also cites a letter from the emperor to Queen Victoria, requesting her to provide safe passage for all his ambassadors. The emperor invokes her assistance , appealing to their both being Christians and threatened by the hand of Muslims: ‘See how the Muslims oppress the Christian’ (p. 157). In the ‘Preface’ to Moslem Egypt and Christian Abyssinia (1880), William Dye reveals his bias for Christianity and against Islam, as he refers to Christianity as ‘that religion which is today the synonym of civilisation’ (vol. 3, ‘Preface’, p. i). He describes Christianity in Africa as ‘the rock that scattered the tidal wave of Mohammedanism’ (vol. 3, ‘Preface’, p. i). Significance Some of these authors are sure that Islam in East Africa hampers the advance of civilisation, but exactly what they mean by this is not clear. Do they mean that Islam opposes European attempts to colonise Africa, or is Islam perceived as a threat to potential European financial gains? Islam is competing for slaves in Africa, and this may be perceived as against European interests. Certainly, the desire to know more about the ‘dark continent’ and a Christian kingdom surrounded by ‘hordes of untutored pagans and degraded Mohammedans’ (Stern, Wanderings, p. iii) led to a surge of European and Christian interest in East Africa. Action against the slave trade led to increased contact with Muslim rulers and interest in effective evangelism of Muslims. The imprisonment of British citizens by the Ethiopian ruler, which led to a rescue mission, and the interest of the European public in this can be seen as a precursor to events in Khartoum and the imprisonment of Charles Gordon and Rudolph Slatin in 1883. Whereas missionaries to Ethiopia wanted to convert the local inhabitants before Islam was allowed to gain a foothold, efforts by French and British politicians to establish treaties with the Emperor Tewodros illustrate the exploitative activities of Europeans trying to ensure access to trade monopolies. In return for trade treaties, European powers promised military support for the emperor in his resistance to his Muslim enemies. Europeans justified this action as a battle against Muslim enslavement of Ethiopian Christians and the overwhelming by Islam of a Christian kingdom in Africa.
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The prohibition against eating meat prepared by the ‘other’ is one that is still strongly adhered to in Ethiopia, perhaps reflecting an antagonism that rose from a long period of co-habitation, whereas elsewhere in East Africa this taboo is not generally found (see E. Fiquet, ‘Flesh soaked in faith’, in B. Soares [ed.], Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, Leiden, 2006, 39-56, pp. 44-7). What is clear is that Europeans had an entrenched idea of Africa being an uncivilised, barbarous and violent continent in need of civilisation and redemption. According to many travellers, Islam as a religion on the African continent was viewed as a challenge and a stain from which Africa had to be purified by establishing and maintaining Christianity. Europeans regarded Christianity as a superior religion to Islam and, furthermore, many travellers observed that local Muslim communities actually knew little of Islam, thus reinforcing this bias and the perception that Islam was only superficially present in Africa. According to some accounts, however, Muslims held the same view about Christians. The contribution of travelogue narratives and comment is significant for what is revealed of Christians’ and Muslims’ attitudes to and perceptions of each other, and of the nature of interactions and relations between them, such as they were. Publications G. Annesley, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt, in the years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, 3 vols, London, 1809; 100702327 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Annesley, Viscount Valentia, Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia and Egypt, in the years 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, 4 vols, London, 18112, repr. New Delhi, 1994, 2019; 008586255 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Annesley Mountnorris, Georg Viscount Valentia’s und Heinrich Salt’s Reisen nach Indien, Ceylon, dem rothen Meere, Abyssinien und Aegypten, in den Jahren 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806, trans. F. Rühs, 2 vols, Weimar, 1811 (German trans.); bsb10465740 (digitised version available through MDZ) G. Annesley Mountnorris, Voyages dans l’Hindoustan, à Ceylan, sur les deux côtes de la Mer-Rouge, en Abyssinie et en Égypte, durant les années 1802, 1803, 1804, 1805 et 1806, trans. P.-F. Henry, Paris, 1813 (French trans.); bsb10468405 (digitised version available through MDZ)
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H. Salt, A voyage to Abyssinia and travels into the interior of that country, executed under the orders of the British government in the years 1809 & 1810 in which are included an account of the Portuguese settlements on the East coast of Africa visited in the course of the voyage, a concise narrative of events in Arabia Felix and some particulars respecting the Aboriginal African tribes extending from Mosambique to the borders of Egypt, together with vocabularies of their respective languages illustrated with a map of Abyssinia, numerous engravings and charts, London, 1814, repr. 1967, n.p., 2014; 001609642 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Salt, Heinrich Salt’s neue Reise nach Abyssinien: in den Jahren 1809 und 1810, trans. F. Rühs, 2 vols, Weimar, 1815 (German trans.); 1045211 (digitised version available through Austrian Literature Online) H. Salt, A voyage to Abyssinia and travels into the interior of that country, executed under the orders of the British government in the years 1809 & 1810, Philadelphia PA, 1816; 009709116 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Salt, Voyage en Abyssinie entrepris par ordre du gouvernement britannique, exécuté dans les années 1809 et 1810, trans. P.-F. Henry, Paris, 1816 (French trans.); bpt6k6209272n (digitised version available through BNF) E. Combes and M. Tamisier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans le pays des Gallas de Choa and d’Ifat, 4 vols, Paris, 1838; bpt6k63445712 (digitised version available through BNF) E. Combes and M. Tamisier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans le pays des Gallas de Choa and d’Ifat, 4 vols, Paris, 18392 E. Combes and M. Tamisier, Voyage en Abyssinie, dans le pays des Gallas de Choa and d’Ifat, 4 vols, Paris, 18393 A. d’Abbadie, ‘Voyage en Abyssinie’, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 2/11 (1839) 200-17; 12148/cb34424377d/ (digitised version available through BNF) E. Rüppell, Reise in Abyssinien, 2 vols, Frankfurt am Main, 1838-40, repr. Hildesheim, 2002, Saarbrücken, 2011; bsb10468009 (digitised version available through MDZ) E. Rüppell, Reise in Abyssinien, trans. F. Schaldemose, 2 vols, Copenhagen, 1840-1, (Danish trans.) J.G. Bell, ‘Extract from a journal of travels in Abyssinia 1842’, in Miscellanea Aegyptiaca, Alexandria, 1842, 9-25; 303319944 (digitised version available through Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)
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T. Lefevbre, Introduction à la relation d’un voyage en Abyssinie exécuté pendant les années 1839-1840, 1841, 1842, 1843, Paris, 1845 (published as a separate book of 71 pages); bpt6k6208494m (digitised version available through BNF) T. Lefevbre et al., Voyage en Abyssinie exécuté pendant les années 18391840, 1841, 1842, 1843, 6 vols, Paris, 1845-51; 001983656 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library); for the ‘Introduction’, see bpt6k6208494m (digitised version available through BNF) M. Parkyns, Life in Abyssinia. Being notes collected during three years’ residence and travels in that country, 2 vols, London, 1853, repr. 1854, repr. New York, 1856; 009319159 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Parkyns, Life in Abyssinia. Being notes collected during three years’ residence and travels in that country, 2 vols, New York, 1856 (identical with the London, 1853 edition); 006110284 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) M. Parkyns, Life in Abyssinia. Being notes collected during three years’ residence and travels in that country, 2 vols, London, 18682, repr. 1966; 011534198 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H.A. Stern, Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia, London, 1862, repr. 1968, 2013; 008585047 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H.A. Stern, The captive missionary. Being an account of the country and people of Abyssinia, London, 1868, repr. 1869, Norderstedt, 2017; 007703593 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Dufton, Narrative of a journey through Abyssinia in 1862-3, with an appendix on the ‘Abyssinian captives question’, London, 1867, repr. Westport CT, 1970, Boston MA, 2004, Norderstedt, 2017; 006110350 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T.C. Plowden (ed.), Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla Country with an account of a mission to Ras Ali I 1848 from the mss of the late Walter Chichele Plowden her Britannic Majesty’s consul in Abyssinia, London, 1868, repr. Farnborough, 1972, Cambridge, 2011; 011619002 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) T.J. Holland and H. Hozier, Record of the expedition to Abyssinia, compiled by order of the secretary of state for war, by major Trevenen J. Holland, C.B., Bombay Staff Corps; and captain Henry Hozier, 3rd Dragoon Guards, 2 vols, London, 1870, repr. Norderstedt, 2020; 129082 (digitised version available through Indian Culture)
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Studies I. Friis, ‘Travelling among fellow Christians (1768-1833). James Bruce, Henry Salt and Eduard Rüppell in Abyssinia’, in J.B. Simonsen et al. (eds), Early scientific expeditions and local encounters, Copenhagen, 2013, 161-93 S.N. Chernetsov, ‘Ethiopian diary of a Russian physician (1898-1899)’, in W. Raunig and Asfa-Wossen Asserate (eds), Äthiopie zwischen Orient und Okzident: Wissenschaftliche Tagung der Gesellschaft, Münster, 2004, 173-205 S. Rubenson, Acta Aethiopica. Internal rivalries and foreign threats, 1869-1879, Addis Ababa, 2000 N.I. Kirey, Poyezdki yesaula Kubanskogo Kazach’yego voyska N.S. Leont’yeva v Efiopiyu v kontse XIXv. Iz dorevolyutsionnogo proshlogo kubanskogo kazachestva (‘The trips of the esaul of the Kuban Cossack army N.S. Leontyev to Ethiopia at the end of the 19th century. From the pre-revolutionary past of the Kuban Cossacks’), Krasnodar, 1993 M.F. Taylor, ‘Scientific expeditions during the July monarchy: the French in Abyssinia’, Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 13/14 (1990) 103-18 D. Cumming, The gentleman savage. The life of Mansfield Parkyns, 18231894, London, 1987 B. in den Bosch, ‘Anglo-Ethiopian relations. 1840-1868’, Omaha NE, 1979 (MA Diss. University of Nebraska at Omaha) J. Czesław, The Russians in Ethiopia. An essay in futility, London, 1958 [1975] C.E. Bosworth, ‘Henry Salt, consul in Egypt, 1816-1827 and pioneer Egyptologist’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 57 (1974) 69-91 J. Halls, Life and correspondence of Henry Salt, London, 1834 Jaco Beyers and John Chesworth
European travellers to Central-West Africa in the 19th century Original Language English, French, German Description As a result of European-West African encounters from the 15th century onwards, European traders in the early modern period were knowledgeable about West African coastal areas, though details about the interior and trade there were jealously guarded by African merchants. Interlopers were obstructed – and at times assassinated – in their attempts to explore inland routes and the African hinterland (Spittler, ‘European explorers’, p. 402). Hence, knowledge about large parts of (West) Africa was for a long time vague and largely inaccurate. From the late 18th century onwards, however, European explorers set out to fill in the blanks on the African map. Men like James Watt (c. 1760-95), Mungo Park (1771-1806), Friedrich Hornemann (1755-c. 1801), Dixon Denham (1786-1828), Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827), Gordon Laing (1794-1826), René Caillié (1799-1838), Richard Lander (1804-34), Heinrich Barth (1821-65), Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (183196) and Gustav Nachtigal (1834-85) all undertook expeditions to the West African interior to explore the sources and courses of its main rivers and visit its empires. The exploration of Africa received a boost with the establishment of learned societies in the late 18th and first half of 19th century (e.g. the African Association, 1788; the Société de Géographie, 1821; the Royal Geographical Society, 1830). These societies stimulated and funded expeditions and published their findings. The resultant travelogues had a wide readership across Europe and were cited in contemporary popular and academic publications, as well as missionary periodicals, such as the Church Missionary Gleaner and the Methodist Review. The Church Missionary Atlas summarised their significance for mission work as follows: ‘The continent of Africa has been of late years wonderfully opened up to Europeans. Recent travellers have been active and successful in geographical researches. […] A highway is thus being prepared for the entrance of the Gospel amongst its millions of fetish-worshippers and ignorant Muslims’ (CMS and Lake, Church Missionary Atlas, p. 11).
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European knowledge of the West African interior before the 19th century was limited and imprecise. Ever since the accounts of Leo Africanus in the 16th century, the town of Timbuktu and tales of its reputed wealth had captured the imagination of the European public, but no European set foot in the city till the 19th century. Gordon Laing, the first European to get to Timbuktu in 1826, was killed shortly after he left the city and his papers were never retrieved. The report of the first European who lived to tell about his stay there shattered Europe’s romantic image of the town. In 1828, the French explorer René Caillié ‘found the mysterious city [...] to be a rather squalid, middle-sized Sudanic town with no sign of the great splendours described by Leo Africanus.’ Heinrich Barth, who visited Timbuktu in 1853, was also disenchanted. He estimated the total number of inhabitants at around 13,000 and considered ‘the only remarkable public buildings in the town’ to be ‘the three large mosques’ (Collins, Western African history, pp. 82, 92). Meanwhile, another West African city had begun to capture the European imagination: the Hausa polity of Katsina. Prosperous and cosmopolitan, by the early 18th century Katsina had become the principal entrepôt of the interior trade and replaced Timbuktu as the main centre of Islamic scholarship in West Africa. Many of the 19th-century explorers therefore sought to reach Katsina and its neighbouring states, but the European exploration of Central West Africa took place at a time of profound political change. In 1804, the Fulani shehu (‘religious leader’, used as a title) Usman dan Fodio (1754-1803), launched a jihad against the Hausa states, an event that brought about the establishment of the Caliphate of Sokoto (1803-1903). During the first decade of the 19th century, all the Hausa states were conquered and incorporated into the caliphate, and its continued expansion both westwards and into Yorubaland, as well as the rise and fall of other Muslim states in West and Central Africa, destabilised the region for most of the first half of the century. The first European traveller thought to have arrived in the Hausa states was Friedrich Hornemann, a German explorer engaged by the [British] Royal African Society. Fluent in Arabic and Turkish, Hornemann and his travelling companion Joseph Frendenburgh, a German convert to Islam, joined a caravan of merchants and pilgrims travelling from Fez to Central Africa (Bornu and Katsina) in 1798. A letter written in Marzuk on 6 April 1800, indicating that he was about to join a caravan to Bornu from where he hoped to reach Katsina, is Hornemann’s last extant written message. Evidence suggests that he arrived in Kano (Northern Nigeria) later that year, and from there joined a caravan to the commercial hub Rabba in
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Illustration 6. Hugh Clapperton and his party received by the Sultan of Bornu, Shehu Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi
Nupe. He is thought to have died en route to Rabba in 1801. His journals documenting his stay in Katsina are lost. Some two decades later, in 1822, the Scottish naval officer and explorer Hugh Clapperton and the Scottish physician Walter Oudney (1790-1824) set out to chart the course of the Niger. Joined by the soldier explorer Dixon Denhem in Marzuk, the men reached Kukawa, the capital of the Bornu Empire, in February 1823, where they were hospitably received by Shehu Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi (1776-1836). Bornu had successfully resisted Fulani expansion, though the incessant wars with the Sokoto Empire had resulted in the revitalisation of Muslim practice in Bornu. Clapperton experienced the strained relations between Bornu and Sokoto first-hand. His plan to reach the Niger via Sokoto was thwarted by
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Sultan ʿAlī ibn Muhammad Bello of Sokoto (r. 1817-37). When Clapperton arrived in Sokoto in March 1824, Bello prohibited his onward journey and he was forced to return to Kukawa, to find that Oudney had died. He and Denham returned to Europe in 1825 without achieving their aim. An account of their travels was published in 1826 under the title Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822-1823 and 1824. Shortly after his return, Clapperton set out on another Niger expedition. Together with his assistant Richard Lander, along with Captain Pearce and Dr Morrison (both of whom died within a month of each other), he set out to reach Sokoto via the Bight of Benin. Again, tensions between Bornu and Sokoto disrupted the expedition. When Clapperton and Lander reached Sokoto in July 1826, al-Kanemi and Bello were at war. Because of Clapperton’s acquaintance with the former, Bello detained Clapperton in Sokoto, where he died in April 1827, leaving Lander the sole survivor of the expedition. Lander eventually returned to England with Clapperton’s papers, and the narrative of Clapperton’s second journey was published posthumously in 1829 as Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa. Lander also published Records of Captain Clapperton’s last expedition to Africa ... with the subsequent adventures of the author and undertook two more exploration tours of the Niger in the 1830s. The most comprehensive 19th-century West African expedition was conducted in the 1850s. Between 1849 and 1855, the German scholarexplorers Heinrich Barth (see the entry on Barth in CMR 22) and Adolf Overweg (1822-52) joined an expedition headed by the British missionary and abolitionist James Richardson (1809-51). They crossed the Sahara together and then set out on different routes. After Richardson died in 1851, Barth became the leader of the expedition, trekking across the Sahel, visiting Agadez, Timbuktu, the Masina Empire, the Sokoto Caliphate, Bornu and several other polities in Central Africa, while Overweg departed for Kukawa to chart Lake Chad (where he died). Barth, who was well versed in Arabic and Islam and the only survivor of the expedition, is still considered one of the most comprehensive and authoritative 19th-century sources on West and Central Africa. Shortly after his return, he published a five-volume travelogue of his African explorations, with simultaneous editions in both German and English: Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa. The reports of Barth’s contemporary Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (1831-96), also a German national, are much more succinct. Disguised as an Arab, he travelled from Tripoli via the Sahara and Lake Chad, and along the River Niger to present-day Lagos, a journey he documented in his travelogue
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Quer durch Afrika. In Kukawa, he met with Umar of Bornu, al-Kanemi’s son, who inquired after Barth, whom he nicknamed Abd el-Kerim, and stayed in the ‘Christenhaus’ where Barth, Clapperton, Denham and Overweg had also lodged (Quer durch Afrika, pp. 89-91). Unlike Barth, who was an admirer of African Muslim scholarship, Rohlfs was rather hostile towards Islam, which he called ‘the most intolerant religion’. He contradicted the idea that Islam could contribute to the civilisation of Africa and even attributed the golden age of the ʿAbbasids and al-Andalus solely to Christian influence (Rohlfs, Land und Volk, pp. 3, 7). Gustav Nachtigal, another 19th-century German explorer to Muslim West Africa, was also fluent in Arabic. A military surgeon, he undertook a series of expeditions to Central Africa between 1869 and 1875. He explored the unfamiliar territory of the central Sahara and visited Bornu and the sultanate of Wadai (present-day Chad). The slave-raids and treatment of slaves he witnessed during his travels made him an ardent supporter of colonial intervention, resulting in his appointment by Otto von Bismarck as special commissioner for West Africa in 1884. Nachtigal’s three-volume travelogue Sahărâ und Sudan was published between 1879 and 1889. Such travelogues offer a window into understanding the patchwork of the Islamic states and the nature of Islam and Muslim life that existed in 19th-century West and Central Africa. Travellers visited, among others, the Bornu Empire, the Sultanate of Bagirmi, the Sultanate of Wadai, the Sultanate of Mandara (also called Wandala), the Caliphate of Sokoto, the Massina Empire, the Sultanate of Darfur, the Adawama Emirate and the Imamate of Futa Jallon. They document the politics, history and geography of the various empires as well as the trade opportunities they offered. Together, the travelogues reveal the volatile political situation of the region over the course of the 19th century. When Hornemann travelled to Bornu, Kano and Nupe around 1800, the region was relatively stable and the Hausa states were still independent polities. Some 25 years later, the Hausa states had been incorporated into the Caliphate of Sokoto and the Sokoto Empire had turned its attention to Bornu, Mandara and Yorubaland. Denham recorded that incessant Fulani jihads had forged a coalition of the Shehu of Bornu and the Sultan of Mandara to fend off Sokoto incursions, the alliance being sealed by a marriage between the Shehu of Bornu and the daughter of the Sultan of Mandara (Denham, Narrative, p. 89). Sokoto and Bornu had reached a temporary stalemate when Denham and Clapperton visited Kukawa in 1824. However, a mere 16 years earlier, in 1808, Fulani jihadists had sacked the Bornu capital Birni Ngazargamu and plundered the surrounding area (Denham, Narrative, p. 118). While
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in Sokoto, Clapperton realised that Muhammad Bello was wary of anyone travelling from Bornu (Clapperton, Narrative, p. 70). Two years later, during Clapperton’s second expedition to Sokoto in 1826, relations between Sokoto and Bornu had again deteriorated, and the two empires were at war once more. Denham also reported on other conflicts in the region: in the 1820s there were military clashes between Bornu and the rising Wadai Empire as well as between Bornu and Bagirmi (Denham, Narrative, p. 163, 165). By the time Nachtigal visited the area, Wadai had become a powerful sultanate and had conquered Bagirmi in 1870, enslaving ten thousand of its population (Nachtigal, Sahărâ, vol. 2, pp. 727-8). Similarly, when the North African Muḥammad al-Tūnisī lived in Darfur as a merchant between 1804 and 1814, the Sultanate of Darfur was at the peak of its power and al-Tūnisī documented its prosperity in his travelogue In Darfur. An account of the sultanate and its people (first published in 1845). By the time Nachtigal visited in the 1870s, the sultanate had begun to fall apart and the eastern province of Kordofan had gained a form of independence (Nachtigal, Sahărâ, pp. 294-5). Travelogues do not merely document the clashes between empires but also hint at the power struggles within them. Clapperton, for example, was visited a number of times by Muhammad Bello’s brother, Ateeko, who had vied with Bello for the succession as Caliph of Sokoto. Fearing that Bello would misconstrue his association, Clapperton kept his distance from Ateeko (Clapperton, Narrative, p. 74). When Rohlfs visited the Lamido of Bauchi in 1866, a malam (religious scholar) from Kano called Ssala had incited an insurgence against the Fulani overlords. The troops he rallied had conquered large parts of the sultanate and threatened the capital at the time of Rohlfs’s visit (Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, p. 140). It was via these travelogues that knowledge of these West African Muslim empires reached the European public. The Church Missionary Gleaner in 1889, carrying information about the ‘powerful Mohammedan states, the ruling races of which are Mandingo, Fulah, and Hausa’, declared: ‘Our knowledge of all these territories is mainly due to the travels of Barth (1850-55) and Rohlfs (1866-67)’ (CMS, ‘The Society’s missions’, p. 40). The military prowess of the states and their commitment to Islam made a deep impression. The popular 19th-century magazine, The Fortnightly Review, published an article that concluded: ‘Believe me, the greatest foe that European civilization has to fight during the next century will be African Islam’ (Johnston, ‘Are our foreign missions a success?’, p. 488).
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As well as documenting the political landscape of West Africa, the travelogues are also a rich resource for the day-to-day practice of Islam in the 19th century. Denham, for example, attended the celebrations of ʿĪd al-Fiṭr and ʿĪd al-Kabīr, as well as Mawlid, the Prophet’s birthday, in Bornu in 1824 and observed that, whereas the main social activity for ʿĪd al-Fiṭr was wrestling, during Mawlid the women took the stage, performing dances. Barth, who was in Bornu during the ʿĪd al-Fiṭr festivities in 1851, noticed that for Muslims of Bornu the festival was an occasion to buy new clothes and he recorded that, apart from the ʿĪd prayer, the main celebration consisted of a parade by the shehu and his court. Clapperton observed that Muslims in Bussa marked the end of Ramaḍān with the ritual ‘drinking the Qur’an’, whereas Denham observed that ‘drinking the Qur’an’ was also used to perform an exorcism. Rohlfs, who was in the sultanate of Djauro, just south of Bauchi, during the ʿĪd al-Fiṭr celebration of 1866, observed that Muslims and non-Muslims alike took part in the festivities (Denham, Narrative, pp. 130, 141, 144, 156, 162, 195; Barth, Reisen, vol. 3, pp. 13-19; Clapperton, Records, p. 225; Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, p. 145). The travelogues make clear that the degree of rigour with which Islam was practised differed from place to place. Denham noted on numerous occasions that Muslim practice in Bornu was quite strict. For example, Muslims in the town of Agornou were affronted by the pictures Denham showed them and told him they considered it a sin ‘to write people’, i.e. to make drawings of people (Denham, Narrative, p. 64). Denham was also struck by the severity of the sentences passed by the Shehu of Bornu; adultery in particular was harshly punished (Denham, Narrative, pp. 140, 160). Yoruba Islam on the other hand, according to Clapperton, was ‘a loose Mahomedanism, the most pious of which can only say their prayers and are called malam or learned’ (Clapperton, Records, pp. 188-9). Rohlfs reported that Sultan Muhammad of Wadai and his relatives had been notorious in the region for their cruelty and inebriation (Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, p. 120). All travellers were questioned about their faith, even men like Caillié and Hornemann, who for most of their travels posed as Muslims. Denham records that, despite the courteous reception in Kukawa, he was frequently greeted with ‘the contemptuous appellation of kaffir, kelb, insara, unbeliever, dog, christian’ (Denham, Narrative, p. 158). Denham, Clapperton, Barth, Rohlfs and Nachtigal, who were identifiably Christian, all engaged in extensive discussions about the Christian faith. Clapperton recorded some of these conversations in great detail.
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One of Clapperton’s Muslim interlocutors was ʿAlī ibn Muhammad Bello, the Sultan of Sokoto. In his discussion with Clapperton, the sultan displayed his extensive knowledge of contemporary world politics (referencing e.g. the British conquest of India) and proved better versed in Christianity than Clapperton himself: He asked me a great many questions about Europe, and our religious distinctions. He was acquainted with the names of some of the more ancient sects, and asked whether we were Nestorians or Socinians. To extricate myself from the embarrassment occasioned by this question, I bluntly replied we were called Protestants. ‘What are Protestants?’ says he. I attempted to explain to him, as well as I was able, that having protested, more than two centuries and a half ago, against the superstition, absurdities, and abuses practiced in those days, we had ever since professed to follow simply what was written ‘in the book of our Lord Jesus’ as they call the New Testament, and thence received the name of Protestants. He continued to ask several other theological questions, until I was obliged to confess myself not sufficiently versed in religious subtleties to resolve these knotty points, having always left that task to others more learned than myself. (Clapperton, Narrative, pp. 62-3)
Another of his interlocutors was a relative of the sultan. This man, whom Clapperton calls ‘Abdelgader’, raised a variety of issues with him: Abdelgader was particularly inquisitive about our religious observances, prayers, the worship of images, and the eating of pork. I told him we were commanded by our religion to pray without ceasing; but as no people on earth does it as they ought, we generally pray at stated times. The worship of images, with which I was repeatedly charged, I indignantly abjured. Of course I represented the eating of pork as a mere matter of policy. My Mahomedan catechist next inquired, with some degree of ridicule, as to the doctrine of the Trinity; and turning to his countrymen who were present, without waiting for my reply, exclaimed, in allusions to the three persons of the Godhead: – ‘Father, Son and Uncle’. In this Mahometans are wont to turn to scorn the pure morals inculcated by Christianity, both in precept and in practice. (Clapperton, Narrative, pp. 38-9)
The governor of Hadiya also interrogated Clapperton, inquiring whether the hospitality extended to him would be reciprocated to Africans in Europe: ‘You are a Christian, Abdullah?’ – ‘Yes.’ ‘And what are you come to see?’ – ‘The country.’ […] At this he smiled, and again asked ‘Would you Christians allow us to come and see your country?’ I said, ‘Certainly.’ – ‘Would you force us to become Christians?’ ‘By no means; we never meddle with a man’s religion. – ‘What!’ says he, ‘and do you ever pray?’ – ‘Sometimes; our religion commands us to pray always; but we pray in secret, and not in public,
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except on Sundays.’ One of his people abruptly asked what a Christian was? ‘Why, a Kafir,’ rejoined the governor. (Clapperton, Narrative, p. 50)
Similarly, Denham was interrogated about the Bible and told that ‘because it says nothing about Saidna Mohammed’ it must be false and that Denham would surely ‘be sitting in the third heaven amidst the flames’ (Denham, Narrative p. 95). Likewise, the wazir of Bornu, al-Hajj Bashir, interrogated Barth on what he considered an objectionable practice, this being the consumption of alcohol, and told Barth that although he was eager to establish trade relations with Europeans, he intended to prohibit the sale of alcohol and Bibles by Europeans (Barth, Reisen, vol. 2, p. 382). Rohlfs was interrogated by the sultan of Mandara about his views on the prophethood of Muḥammad (Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika, p. 112). The ubiquity of slavery and slave-raiding expeditions in Muslim West Africa is another recurring theme in the travelogues. Caillié, Watt, Clapperton and Barth all comment on the local economies’ dependence on slaves. During his visit to Timbo (Sierra Leone) in 1794, James Watt estimated the ratio of slaves to free people at about 5 to 1, whereas Clapperton approximated that about half the inhabitants of Kano were enslaved (Watt, Journal, pp. 51-2; Clapperton, Narrative, p. 38). Several explorers also explicitly flagged Muslim involvement in slave-raiding and trading, whether as a by-product of jihads among non-Muslims or as the result of Muslim mercantile slave-raiding expeditions. Denham, who even participated in a Bornu and Mandara slave-raiding expedition in 1823, observed that Islam was used as a pretence for war and slave-raiding (Narrative, pp. 76-113). He personally witnessed the devastation brought about by the raiding Fulani, encountering more than 30 Bornu towns that were ‘completely razed to the ground’ in the 1808 jihad, who had also ransacked the former Bornu capital Birni Ngazargamu and enslaved many of its inhabitants (Denham, Narrative, pp. 118). Further south, the Fulani jihads also wrought havoc. When Clapperton travelled through Yorubaland on his second West African expedition, he observed the wreckage and devastation caused by the Fulani jihads that had beset the country, burning villages, killing people and selling the young into slavery (Hugh Clapperton p. 168). Almost all travellers encountered slave-caravans on their journeys, some with as many as 750 captured individuals (Barth, Reisen, vol. 2, p. 424). Rohlfs and Nachtigal, who visited Bornu in late 1860 and the early 1870s, estimated that on a weekly basis as many as 1,500 enslaved were sold at the Kukawa slave market (Fisher, Slavery, p. 106), and Nachtigal approximated that in the 1870s the Sultanate of Wadai alone exported as many as 15,000 slaves annually (Fisher, Slavery, p. 100). Both Hornemann and
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Barth recorded that tribute payments often included slaves. According to Hornemann, the conquered polity of Kashna had to pay an annual tribute of 100 slaves to the Sultan of Bornu (Hornemann, Missions to the Niger, vol. 1, p. 121). Barth was told that the Lamido of Adamawa, Muhammadu Lawal bi Adama (r. 1847-72), had to pay the Caliph of Sokoto an annual tribute of 5,000 slaves as well as horses and cattle (Barth, Reisen, vol. 3, p. 601). According to Barth, nowhere in Africa was slavery more rampant and more large-scale than in the Emirate of Adamawa; many of its inhabitants owned as many as a thousand slaves, who were used for farming and for slave-raiding expeditions (Barth, Reisen, vol. 2, p. 600). The reports about the slave-raids, the large-scale enslavement of conquered populations and the slave-driven economies in Muslim West and Central Africa received extensive media coverage in Europe. In 1889, The Fortnightly Review wrote : Read – with patience if you can – the account given by Barth and Nachtigal of the manner in which the vile Mohammedan robbers and slave-raiders of Bornu, Adamawa or Bargirmi nearly destroyed the gentle, industrious, handsome Musgu people in the Shari districts, and then see if you can state with sincere conviction that the Mohammedans have exercised civilizing influence in Africa. (Johnston, ‘Are our foreign missions a success?’, p. 488)
Missionary publications also cited the travelogues. Referencing Barth, the Church Missionary Gleaner of 1859 wrote about the ‘plundering expeditions’ of the shaykh of Bornu, whose ‘chief booty was […] slaves’, after which ‘the country was wasted’ and ‘the poor inhabitants’ were obliged ‘to fly for their lives’, while those left behind ‘were either slaughtered or sold as slaves’ (‘The Musgu people’, pp. 26-7). The Church Missionary atlas referenced Clapperton on the forced conversion of pagans to Islam and claimed that ‘in many parts of Africa Mohammedans are trained from their infancy to slave-hunting expeditions among their pagan neighbours’ (p. 19). In the heydays of the abolitionist lobby, the West African travelogues corroborated the entanglement of Islam and slavery, and implicitly paved the way for colonial intervention and mission among Muslims. Travelogues are a complex genre with regard to Christian-Muslim relations. Explorers to the interior of West Africa rarely foregrounded their Christian identity. On the contrary, several 18th- and 19th-century explorers, such as Hornemann and Caillié, posed as Muslims to facilitate travel and gain trust, though this was not always sufficient to dispel suspicion. Hornemann and his companion were accused of being Christian on various occasions and had to ‘prove’ their innocence by reciting and reading the Qur’an and by writing Arabic (Hornemann, Missions to the Niger, vol. 1,
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pp. 34-5). Caillié even went to the extent of being circumcised in order to pass for an Arab Muslim trader. Nevertheless, as Mervyn Hiskett has argued, West African Muslims regarded European explorers as Christians rather than Europeans (Hiskett, Development of Islam, p. 223), for as Muhammad Umar has observed, ‘religion was an important part of the cultural baggage that Europeans carried with them into the interior of Africa’ (Umar, ‘Islamic discourses’, pp. 152-3). As the 19th century progressed, explorers (e.g. Clapperton, Barth, Rohlfs and Nachtigal) seem to have more explicitly styled themselves as Europeans than Christians, possibly because part of their mission involved establishing political and commercial relations between European countries and West African empires and polities. Significance As noted above, while the travelogues in themselves cannot be construed as material on Christian-Muslim relations per se, the information they contain about Muslim empires in the West African interior and their expansion among non-Muslims are significant in terms of the awareness they raised in Europe and North America about ongoing Islamisation in West Africa. Among other things, the travelogues prompted a sense of missionary urgency among both Protestant missionary societies and Roman Catholic missionary orders, who interpreted these reports as evidence that West Africa had become the arena for a relentless religious rivalry between Christianity and Islam. Indirectly, therefore, the travelogues kindled missionary zeal and roused aspirations (especially among evangelical missionaries) to evangelise these Muslim communities. When, over the course of the 19th century, it became increasingly evident that Muslim conversion was not forthcoming, the detailed ethnographic observations recorded in the travelogues served as input for identifying groups of nonMuslim people living in the vicinity of Muslim empires and polities whose Christianisation, it was believed, would serve as a living religious ‘barrier’ to halt the expansion of Islam. Missionary zeal was further fuelled by the reports of large-scale enslavement of non-Muslim groups in the West African interior. In an era when the abolition movement had begun to gain ground in Europe, the reports reinforced the conviction that Islam and slavery were inextricably intertwined, indirectly fuelling both political and missionary intervention. However, it would appear that there has been little or no systematic study so far of how and to what extent travelogues and exploration reports influenced and fashioned missionary thinking in the 19th century, and especially of attitudes towards Islam (which they clearly reveal) and views on the nature and prospects for any form of dialogical relations between
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Christians and Muslims, which for the most part may be inferred as being negative. Publications D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 1826 D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 18262, repr. 1926, 1985, Cambridge, 2011; 008585262 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Voyages et découvertes dans le nord et dans les parties centrales de l’Afrique: au travers du grand désert, jusqu’au 10e degré de latitude nord et depuis Kouka, dans le Bournou, jusqu’à Sackatou, capitale de l’empire des Felatah: exécutés pendant les années 1822, 1823 et 1824, trans. J.-B.-B. Eyriès, Paris, 1826 (French trans.); bpt6k104427v (digitised version available through BNF) D. Denham, H. Clapperton and W. Oudney, Beschreibung der Reisen und Entdeckungen im noerdlichen und mittlern Africa in den Jahren 1822 bis 1824, Weimar, 1827 (German trans.); 3810475 (digitised version available through Universität Innsbruck Digital Library) D. Denham, H. Clapperton and W. Oudney, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 18283, repr. 1831; 001605521 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton and R. Lander, Richard Lander from Kano to the seacoast, London, 1829, repr. 1966, Cambridge, 2015; 17879 (digitised version available through Wellcome Collection) H. Clapperton, Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo, London, 1829, repr. Philadelphia PA, 1829, London, 1926, 1966, Cambridge, 2015 (includes Richard Lander from Kano to the sea-coast as appendix); 008585196 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton, Second voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, depuis le Golfe de Benin jusqu’a Sackatou, pendant les années 1825, 1826 et 1827: suivi du voyage de Richard Lander, de Kano à la côte maritime, trans. J.-B.-B. Eyriès and P.F.L. De la Renaudière, Paris, 1829 (French trans.); 008396350 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton and R.L. Lander, Reis in de Binnenlanden van Afrika ... gedurende de jaren 1825, 1826, 1827: benevens het reisverhaal van
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Richard Lander, zijn bediende, Rotterdam, 1830-1 (Dutch trans.); 008643538 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Lander and H. Clapperton, Records of Captain Clapperton’s last expedition to Africa ... with the subsequent adventures of the author, 2 vols, London, 1830, repr. 1967, Eastbourne, 2007; 001609525 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton and R. Lander, Tagebuch der Zweiten Reise des Capt. Clapperton in’s Innere von Africa, Weimar, 1830 (German trans.); 3809178 (digitised version available through Universität Innsbruck Digital Library) H. Clapperton and D. Denham, ‘Ultimo viaggio del tenente Clapperton nell’ interno dell’ Africa. Preceduto dal giornale dompendiato del suo viaggio da Kuka a Sackatu, e da alcuni altri cenni su quello contemporaneo del Magg. Denham’, Compendio dei Viaggi Moderni 33-4 (1833) 189-414 (Italian trans.) H. Clapperton, D. Denham, E.W. Bovill, W. Oudney and Hakluyt Society, Missions to the Niger, vol. 4/3. The Bornu mission, 1822-25, Cambridge, 1966 H. Clapperton and J.R. Bruce-Lockhart, Clapperton in Borno. Journals of the travels in Borno of Lieutenant Hugh Clapperton, RN, from January 1823 to September 1824, Cologne, 1996 H. Clapperton, J. Bruce-Lockhart and J.L. Wright, Difficult and dangerous roads. Hugh Clapperton’s travels in Sahara and Fezzan (1822-25), London, 2000 H. Clapperton, J. Bruce-Lockhart and P.E. Lovejoy, Hugh Clapperton into the interior of Africa. Records of the second expedition, 1825-1827, Leiden, 2005 R. Caillié and E.F. Jomard, Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l’Afrique centrale, précédé d’observations faites chez les Maures Braknas, les Nalous, et d’autres peuples, pendant les années 1824, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1828, 3 vols, Paris, 1829-30, repr. 1965, Neuilly-sur-Seine, 2000; bpt6k1049685 (digitised version available through BNF) R. Caillié, ‘Description de la ville de Tembouctou’, Revue des Deux Mondes 1 (1830) 254-95 R. Caillié and E.F. Jomard, Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo. And across the Great Desert, to Morocco, performed in the years 1824-1828, 2 vols, London, 1830, repr. 1968, 1982, 1992, 2007, 2011, Cambridge, 2013, London, 2014 (English trans.); 001609516 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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R. Caillié, Dagverhaal eener reize naar Temboktoe, de westkust af van Afrika, door de binnenlanden over Jenné, Kabra, Arawan en vele andere opmerkelijke plaatsen, de groote woestijn door, op Tanger, gedurende de jaren 1824-1828, 2 vols, Haarlem, 1831 (Dutch trans.); 3153 F 7-8 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R. Caillié and E.F. Jomard, Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l’Afrique Centrale, précédé d’observations faites chez les Maures Braknas, les Nalous, et d’autres peuples, pendant les années 1824, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1828, 7 vols, Turin, 1832 R. Caillié, Voyage d’un faux musulman à travers l’Afrique. Tombouctou, le Niger, Jenné et le désert, Limoges, 1880, repr. 1882, 1885, 1891, Paris, 2013; bpt6k1035432 (digitised version available through BNF) R. Caillié, Voyage à Tombouctou, 2 vols, Paris, 1985 R. Caillie and J.-L. Dodeman, Tombouctou. Ou le premier voyage à Djenné et à Tombouctou (1826-1828), Paris, 1991 (abridgement for young readers) R. Caillié, Voyage d’un faux musulman à travers l’Afrique. Tombouctou, le Niger, Jenné et le désert, Vearsa, 2015 R. Caillié, Tombuctú. De Djenné a Tombuctú, Barcelona, 2015 (abridged Spanish trans.) H. Barth, Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa. Being a journal of an expedition undertaken under the auspices of H.B.M.’s government, in the years 1849-55, 5 vols, London, 1857-8, repr. 1965, Cambridge, 2011; 011439771 (digitised version available through Hathi Digital Trust) H. Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855. Tagebuch seiner im Auftrag der Brittischen Regierung unternommenen Reise, 5 vols, Gotha, 1858, repr. 2004, Cologne, 2005 (German trans.); bsb11121697-701 (digitised version available through MDZ) H. Barth, H.M.C. van Oosterzee, and J. van der Hoeven, Lotgevallen en ontdekkingen op eene reis in het noorden en midden van Afrika. Op last der Britsche regering in de jaren 1849 tot 1855 gedaan, trans. H.M.C. van Oosterzee, 5 vols, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1858-61 (Dutch trans.); 1227 F 23-27 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) H. Barth, Voyages et découvertes dans l’Afrique septentrionale et centrale pendant les années 1849 à 1855, trans. P. Ithier, 4 vols, Paris, 1860-1 (French trans.); cb34580115r (digitised version available through BNF)
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H. Barth, Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa: from the journal of an expedition undertaken under the auspices of H.B.M.’s goverment, in the years 1849-1855, Philadelphia PA, 1866; 101796326 (digitised version available through Hathi Digital Trust) H. Barth, Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa, London, 1890; 001605519 (digitised version available through Hathi Digital Trust) H. Barth and R. Italiaander, Im Sattel durch Nord- und Zentral-Afrika. Reisen und Entdeckungen in den Jahren 1849-1855, Wiesbaden, 1967, repr. 1980, Stuttgart, 2000 H. Barth, Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Zentralafrika: 20.000 Kilometer durch Afrika, Wiesbaden, 2021 G. Rohlfs, Land und Volk in Afrika. Berichte aus dem Jahren 1865-1870, Bremen, 1870, repr. 1882, 1884, Saarbrücken, 2005, Norderstedt, 2017; bsb10622073 (digitised version available through MDZ) G. Rohlfs, Quer durch Afrika. Reise vom Mittelmeer nach dem TschadSee und zum Golf von Guinea, 2 vols, Leipzig, 1874, repr. Darmstadt, 1984, Berlin, 1988, Stuttgart, 2004, Wiesbaden, 2012; bsb11357808 (digitised version available through MDZ) G. Rohlfs, ʿAbra Ifrīqiyā. Riḥla min al-Baḥr al-Mutawassiṭ ilá Buḥayrat Tshād wa-ilá Khalīj Ghīniyā, trans ʿImād al-Dīn Ghānim, Sabhā, Libya, 1975 (Arabic trans.) G. Nachtigal, Sahărâ und Sûdân. Ergebnisse sechsjähriger Reisen in Afrika, 3 vols, Berlin, 1879-81, 1889, repr. Leipzig, 1927, Norderstedt, 2016; 1981185920/35757 (digitised version available through Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt) G. Nachtigal, Sahara et Soudan, trans. J. Gourdault, Paris, 1881 (French trans.); bpt6k6211374m (digitised version available through BNF) G. Nachtigal, Voyage au Ouadaï, trans. J. van Vollenhoven, Paris, 1885, repr. 1903, 1988 (French trans.) G. Nachtigal and F. Albert, Reisen in der Sahara und im Sudan, Leipzig, 1887, repr. Saarbrücken, 2006 G. Nachtigal, Le voyage de Nachtigal au Ouadai, Paris, 1903 (French trans.) G. Nachtigal, Reise durch Bagirmi, Cologne, 1942 G. Nachtigal, A.G.B Fisher, and H.J. Fisher, Sahara and Sudan, 5 vols, London, 1971-87 (English trans.) G. Nachtigal, Sakhara i Sudan. Rezul’taty shestiletnego puteshestviya po Afrike, trans. G.A. Matveevoi, Moscow, 1987 (Russian trans.) J. Watt and B.L. Mouser, Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo, capital of the Fula Empire in 1794, Madison WI, 1994
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E.W. Bovill, F. Hornemann, and A.G. Laing, Missions to the Niger, vol. 1. The journal of Friedrich Horneman’s travels from Cairo to Murzuk in the years 1797-98; The letters of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, 182426, Farnham, 2010 Studies C. English, The book smugglers of Timbuktu, London, 2017 (includes descriptions of European travellers in Timbuktu, Caillié, pp. 99-108 and Barth, pp. 159-78) M.S. Umar, ‘Islamic discourses on European visitors to Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century’, Studia Islamica 95 (2002) 135–59 E. de Veer and A. O’Hear, ‘Gerhard Rohlfs in Yorubaland’, History in Africa 21 (1994) 251–68 C. Vereecke, ‘The slave experience in Adamawa. Past and present perspectives from Yola (Nigeria)’, Cahiers d’études Africaines 34/133 (1994) 23–53 R.O. Collins, African history. Text and readings, vol. 1. Western African history, New York, 1990 E. Püschekl, ‘Der Afrikaforscher Gerhard Rohlfs auf dem Wege zum Sultan Omar von Bornu (Mittelafrika)’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 23 (1988) 164–7 G. Spittler, ‘European explorers as caravan travellers in the West Sudan. Some thoughts on the methodology of journeys of exploration’ Paideuma 33 (1987) 391–406 M. Hiskett, The development of Islam in West Africa, London, 1984 A.G.B. Fisher, H.J. Fisher and G. Nachtigal, A Christian among Muslims. Nachtigal in Muslim Black Africa, 1869-1875, Bremen, 1976 H. Schiffers (ed.), Heinrich Barth. Ein Forscher in Afrika. Leben, Leistung, Wirkung, Wiesbaden, 1967 H.H. Johnston, ‘Are our foreign missions a success?’, The Fortnightly Review 51 (1889) 481-9 CMS, ‘The Society’s missions. III The Niger mission’, Church Missionary Gleaner 16 (1889) 40-2 G.L. Taylor, ‘The new Africa. Its discovery’, Methodist Review 4 (1888) 376-88 CMS and E.J. Lake, The Church missionary atlas. Maps of various missions of the Church Missionary Society, London, 18623 CMS, ‘The Musgu people of Central Africa’, Church Missionary Gleaner 9 (1859) 25-7 Martha T. Frederiks
Ludwig Krapf Johann Ludwig Krapf Date of Birth 11 January 1810 Place of Birth Derendingen, Württemberg Date of Death 26 November 1881 Place of Death Kornthal
Biography
Ludwig Krapf was born in Derendingen near Stuttgart, Württemberg, to a farming family with strong Protestant pietistic leanings. He attended Anatolishe Schule at Österberg near Tübingen, where he showed an aptitude for languages. In 1827 he started his studies at the Basel Missionary Institute but left after two years when he doubted his missionary vocation. He then studied theology at Tübingen and was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1834. After a year in parish ministry, he met Peter Fjellstedt, a Basel-trained Swiss missionary, who rekindled his missionary call and encouraged him to offer to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in England. Krapf returned to Basel and was accepted by the CMS and assigned to Ethiopia. In preparation, he studied Ge’ez, Amharic and Arabic and read Hiob Ludolf’s History of Ethiopia (Paris, 1728) and James Bruce’s Travels to discover the source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1790) (Pirouet, ‘Legacy’, p. 70; Frankl, ‘Krapf’). In 1837, Krapf went to Ethiopia and worked there until 1842, learning the language of the Oromo people (whom he knew as the Galla) of the central and southern parts of the country. He described them as ‘the most intellectual people of Eastern Africa’ (Krapf to H. Knolleke, 3 March 1860, Editorial Correspondence Inwards 2, Bible Society Archives, University Library, Cambridge). After being forced to withdraw from Ethiopia by the Negus of Šawā, Sahla Sellase (r. 1813-47), in 1842, he became fixated on finding a way to reach the Oromo, as he saw them as the key to the evangelisation of the continent. Whilst in Ethiopia, he translated the Gospels of John and Matthew into Oromo, as well as writing a grammar and vocabulary. ‘In 1842 his pioneering linguistic achievements were recognised when he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Tubingen University’ (Pirouet, ‘Legacy’, p. 70). He wrote about his time in Ethiopia in The journals of
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the Rev. Messrs Isenberg and Krapf, missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, published in 1843. Krapf married Rosine Dietrich in 1842 in Cairo, from where they travelled to Aden in another attempt to reach Ethiopia. This failed, so they went on to Zanzibar, arriving in January 1844. Krapf was granted permission by the ruler Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān (r. 1807-56) to proceed to Mombasa on the mainland: This comes from Said Sultân, to all our subjects, friends, and governors, our greeting. This Note is given in favour of Dr. Krapf, the German, a good man, who desires to convert the world to God. Behave ye well toward him, and render him services everywhere. This has been written by Achmed, the Secretary and Servant, at the order of your Lord. (‘East-Africa Mission’, Proceedings, 1845, p. 49)
Krapf proceeded to Mombasa where, tragically, his wife and daughter died. He remained there and was joined in 1846 by Johann Rebmann (182076), also seconded by the Basel Mission to CMS. They travelled around the coastal areas and the island of Pemba as well as making longer journeys inland, where they were the first Europeans to see the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. They established a mission station inland of Mombasa at Rabai Mpya. Reports of Krapf’s activities were regularly published in Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East. Already fluent in Arabic, Krapf used his language skills to create word lists of several languages and translated some passages of the Bible. After a few years, Krapf’s health failed. When he left Africa in 1853, he stated his vision for a chain of mission stations across the continent. After spending a year in Britain, he revisited Ethiopia to assess the possibilities of re-establishing mission work there (Pirouet, ‘Legacy’, p. 72). He then returned to Germany and settled in Kornthal, a centre of pietism, where in 1856 he married Charlotte Pelargus from Stuttgart. In 1862, he led a party from the United Methodist Society to East Africa, as they were considering establishing a mission to the Oromo. Then, in 1867-8, he accompanied Robert Napier, as translator, on the British expedition to Ethiopia to rescue British captives held by Emperor Tewodros (r. 1855-68), but he was forbidden to evangelise whilst there (Pirouet, ‘Legacy’, p. 72). His second wife died in 1868 and in 1869 he married Nanette Schmidt, who had been his housekeeper. Krapf died in Kornthal, Württemberg, in 1881, maintaining his interest in mission in East Africa to the end.
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Krapf published Reisen in Ost-Afrika in 1858, with an English translation, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, in 1860. In addition, he published translations of books of the Bible and grammars for a variety of African languages, including Swahili and Oromo. His Dictionary of the Suahili language was published posthumously in 1882. The announcement of Krapf’s death appeared in the Proceedings of the CMS Three ideas shaped themselves in his [Krapf’s] mind: (1) a chain of stations stretching right across the continent; (2) a colony for freed slaves similar to Sierra Leone, for which he affirmed that Mombasa and its environs would be the best site; (3) in his own words, ‘A black bishop and black clergy may ere long become a necessity in the civilization of Africa.’ (Proceedings of the CMS, 1882, p. 33)
Writing in July 1881 in the Preface to his Dictionary, Krapf stated: [T]his volume may be of material aid in the spread of Christianity and Christian civilization in Central and Southern Africa. May it also help in forming a great chain of mission stations which shall unite the East and West of Africa. […] Nearly the half of this chain has been happily inaugurated by the stations established in Mpuapua [Mpwapwa], Kagei and the kingdom of Uganda, from which no great distance intervenes to the Livingstone or Congo river, which, being a vast water-way, seems destined to facilitate the accomplishment of this undertaking. (‘Preface’, p. xi)
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham – Church Missionary Society Archives, CMS/CA5/ M1 Kenya Mission: Mission book, 1842-1846 (transcribed copies of correspondence): ‘Log of journey from Aden to Mombasa December 1843 and January 1844’ (pp. 290312); ‘Revd. Dr. Krapf’s additional remarks on the island of Zanzibar or Ongoodja [Unguja] (January-June 1844)’ (pp. 319-43 [incorrectly numbered as 443]), ‘Letter to Lay Secretary dated 13 August 1844’ (following the death of Krapf’s wife and daughter) (pp. 447-71) C.W. Isenberg and J.L. Krapf, The journals of the Rev. Messrs Isenberg and Krapf, missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1843 ‘East-Africa Mission’, Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, 1845, 49-51
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J.L. Krapf, Reisen in Ost-Afrika, 2 vols, Stuttgart, 1858 J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, London, 1860 L. Krapf, ‘Preface’, in L. Krapf, A dictionary of the Suahili language, with introduction containing an outline of a Suahili grammar, London, 1882, vii-xii CMS, ‘The missionary career of Dr Krapf’, Church Missionary Intelligencer 33 (1882) 65-81, 133-46, reprinted as The missionary career of Dr. Krapf, London, 1882 W. Claus, Dr. Ludwig Krapf, weil. [weiland] Missionar in Ostafrika, Basel, 1882 K.F. Ledderhose, art. ‘Krapf, Johann Ludwig’, in R. von Liliencron et al. (eds), Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, Leipzig, 1883, vol. 17, pp. 49-54 CMS, ‘240, Krapf, John Ludwig, Ph.D. – age 27’, in A register of missionaries and native clergy, 1804-1904, London, 1905, p. 43 Secondary P.J.L. Frankl, art. ‘Krapf, (Johann) Ludwig’, in ODNB M.L. Pirouet, ‘The legacy of Johann Ludwig Krapf’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 23 (1999) 69-74 Provincial Unit of Research, Rabai to Mumias. A short history of the Church of the Province of Kenya 1844-1994, Nairobi, 1994, pp. 1-11 R.C. Bridges, ‘Introduction’, in J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours, by J.L. Krapf, London, 1968, 7-75 C.C. Richards, Ludwig Krapf, missionary and explorer, London, 1958
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Letters and diaries Date 1844-82 Original Language English Description Ludwig Krapf sent frequent reports to the CMS during his years in Mombasa and then in Rabai Mpya; many of these appeared in Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East. Krapf also kept a journal recording his work and the journeys of exploration carried out by him and his colleague Johann Rebmann. These accounts make frequent references to contacts with Muslims and reveal Krapf’s knowledge of Islam and his attitude towards its followers. Copies of Krapf’s correspondence are held in the CMS archives in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham; much of it has been digitised. Zanzibar and the ‘coastal strip’ were ruled by Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān (r. 180756), an Ibāḍī Muslim who gave Krapf permission to travel to Mombasa and
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ordered the governor to assist him. Before travelling there, Krapf visited the island of Pemba in March 1844 and reported on his discussion with the governor: ‘I met in this Governor a Mahomedan who could be reasoned with, and who listened dispassionately to arguments diametrically opposed to the doctrines of the Kôran’ (Proceedings, 1845, pp. 49-50). In his ‘Additional remarks on the Island of Zanzibar’, Krapf describes the climate, flora, fauna and peoples of the island as well as the political structures of the state. In section 4, ‘Inhabitants’, he refers to faith: ‘The whole island of Zanzibar has adopted the Mahomedan tenets, but the foreigners (as Banians [Hindus] and White people) are not disturbed in their persuasions’ (‘Remarks’, p. 322). The mission work was primarily amongst non-Muslim Africans, the Wanyika (now known as Digo). The scepticism of the Arab Muslims is seen in Krapf’s February 1845 letter: ‘[T]he Sultan’s realm is formidable in this quarter, and the Mahomadens laugh at my attempt to convert these deluded Heathen’ (Proceedings, 1846, p. 53). The lack of progress on the coast led the mission to consider working inland in Taita. In a letter written in October 1847, Krapf wrote: [T]here are some encouragements held out to the Missionary, that might induce him to wish to begin his work there as soon as possible. For there is not so much of the Mahomaden influence, which among the Wanika proves a considerable barrier to the introduction of Christianity; for whenever we are speaking of Christ to an Emnika, he thinks that Christ was our Prophet just in the same way as Mahomed was the Prophet of the Suáheli. […] The Taitas are entirely captured in the dread of sorcery; and a great deal of the guilt devolves upon the Mahomadens of the coast, who, on visiting the Natives inland, bear them out in their superstitious ideas and practices. (Proceedings, 1849, pp. lxxxvi-vii)
In contrast, the report published in 1850 states ‘The fact that, in this direction [inland], Mahomadenism seems to have lost that proselytising energy which has so remarkably distinguished it to the north of the equator’ (Proceedings, 1850, p. civ). Krapf and Rebmann’s engagement with Islam and Muslims primarily concerned the desire to counteract their influence among the groups they were working with, whilst maintaining good relations with the Muslim authorities in Mombasa and Zanzibar. These extracts reveal the influence of Islam on the non-Muslim Africans and the idea that as Muḥammad was the Prophet for the Swahili (coastal peoples), so Christ was the prophet for the Christians.
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Krapf also wrote a diary, Reisen in Ost-Afrika (1858), first published in German in two volumes, each around 500 pages in length, then in English, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa (1860; all references come from this edition), a single volume of 566 pages. It is in three parts: Part one, ‘Researches and missionary labours. Extracts from journals’ (pp. 1-217), which begins with a description of Krapf’s attempts to reach Ethiopia before his arrival in Zanzibar and then Mombasa, where the focus is on missionary outreach and translation work; Part two, ‘Travels in Eastern Africa’ (pp. 223-408), which relates Rebmann’s journeys to Kadiaro and Jagga and Krapf’s to Usambara and Ukambani, assessing the possibilities of establishing new mission stations whilst giving a detailed account of the geography; Part three, ‘Geography, topography and history. The south Suahili coast’ (pp. 411-84), which records Krapf’s journey south from Zanzibar to Cape Delgado, the edge of the sultan of Zanzibar’s territory, then an account of Krapf’s final attempt to reach Ethiopia, travelling from Jerusalem to Gondar, and the return to Cairo. The final chapter, ‘Conclusion’ (pp. 485514), includes notes on the existence of an ‘inland sea’ (lakes Tanganyika and Victoria) and a description of the various trade routes used by Arab traders (pp. 487-8), information which excited the interest of explorers such as Richard Burton (see A. Dingle, ‘Richard Burton’, in CMR 17, 368-83) in the search for the source of the Nile. This is followed by ‘Notes on EastAfrican history’ (pp. 515-40), from the arrival of Arabs and Islam on the coast, to the occupation by the Portuguese and then the advent of Omani rule. The Appendices include discussion on the ‘snow-capped mountains’ (pp. 543-9) and the ‘probable sources of the Nile’ (pp. 548-54), as well as lists of ‘Literature on Abyssinia’ (pp. 555-60) and ‘Books illustrative of the languages of Eastern Africa’ (pp. 561-6). Again, in the ‘extracts from journals’, frequent reference is made to Islam and Muslims, which indicates Krapf’s level of knowledge and his attitude towards them. Reporting on his meeting with Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān, Krapf writes that ‘All religions are, however, tolerated; and the intercourse of the Mohammedans with the heathen tribes […] hold in check the usual fanaticism of the Arabs’ (Travels, p. 125). When Krapf was looking for a way to reach the Oromo (Galla) of Ethiopia, and sailed north, We touched at the island of Pemba, which lies five degrees south of the Equator, where the governor received me kindly, and warned me not to proceed to Lamu, as now the Kus, the south wind, was beginning to blow and would prevent my returning to Zanzibar before the end of November. He
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asked me many questions concerning the politics and religion of Europe, and expressed a wish for an Arabic Bible. This I sent him afterwards through Mr. Waters [the American consul], the only European who before my arrival had given Bibles and tracts to the natives. (Travels, p. 127) An Arab chief from Lamu who saw me reading the Psalms asked me for the book, and being much pleased with it begged for a complete Bible. Arabic tracts would have been eagerly welcomed by the people. (Travels, p. 130) In times of famine, which often occur, many Wanika become Mohammedans in order to save themselves from starvation; but throw off their new creed as soon as they have enough to eat. From this it may be seen how religion, politics, and trade are combined in the case of the followers of Mahomet. (Travels, p. 139)
Krapf’s Travels also includes reports of Rebmann’s travels, who in 1848 went inland to visit the Jagga (Chagga) people, and so became the first European to see Mount Kilimanjaro. When the Arab governor of the fort in Mombasa was giving permission for Rebmann to travel he said that he was not to ‘ascend the mountain Kilimanjaro because it is full of evil spirits (Jins)’ (Travels, p. 192), and that these had caused all kinds of disasters to those who had attempted the climb. Krapf further writes that Rebmann reported that Europeans are looked upon as magicians: ‘the lying Mohammedan traders for purposes of their own seek to alienate the natives of the interior from Europeans, by ascribing to the latter all sorts of crimes, and cannibalism among the rest’ (Travels, pp. 231-2). Whilst visiting Usambara, Krapf reports on the influence of Muslim teachers on the people in Pangani: [They] are like lost sheep, without any other shepherd than the false teachers of the Koran. Their chief occupations are, gossiping, drumming, feasting, running into the mosques […]. The degradation of the Mohammedans of this village is very great, and one cannot but admire the long-suffering of God, in permitting such a people to sink thus in the scale of humanity, trusting that in His good time they may in consequence the more readily discern the imposture of the Koran, and become desirous of the truth as it is in Christ, which is about to be proclaimed to them by a Christian mission. (Travels, p. 402)
Much of Krapf’s time was spent in understanding languages in order to be able to translate the Bible. The origin for his A dictionary of the Suahili language (1882) is four volumes of Swahili words with definitions in English compiled between 1846 and 1853, a copy of which is in the USPG/UMCA
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Archives in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The dictionary includes neologisms that either Krapf or other early missionaries created as they prepared material in Swahili. For example, there had previously been no word for ‘holy’ in Swahili, yet by 1860 a word takatifu was being used; its origin was the word takasa (‘ritual cleansing’) (P.J.L. Frankl and Y.A. Omar, ‘The idea of “the holy” in Swahili’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999) 109-14). Significance Ludwig Krapf’s facility with languages, especially Arabic, meant that he was able to talk with the rulers of Zanzibar and their governors on the coast, as well as with many Arab traders. Krapf’s reports show that they were willing to discuss the differences between their faiths and that they were interested in receiving copies of the Bible in Arabic. At this distance it is not possible to know whether the Bibles and tracts that Krapf gave them were actually read, though his linguistic work had a lasting significance as a foundation for later work by Edward Steere, Arthur Madan and Charles Sacleux on dictionaries, grammar and translation work. Whilst much work has been done on Krapf’s linguistic efforts and his geographical descriptions, an under-researched aspect of his journals and letters is the many references to Islam in East Africa. Much of Krapf’s significance lies in his being the first Christian missionary to East Africa in ‘modern times’. His reports on his missionary and linguistic endeavours, together with his descriptions of explorations inland, were read with great interest in Europe. His missionary service can be regarded as a precursor to the inrush of Christian missionaries from the 1870s onwards, as well as an impetus for the colonial ‘scramble for Africa’ which brought Islam and Christianity into greater contention. Krapf’s death inspired a Bavarian Lutheran mission to the Kamba in 1886. In Krapf’s view, the Islam found away from Mombasa and Zanzibar was degraded, and he considered that it had corrupted indigenous peoples with a fear of spirits. Interestingly, he never seemed to differentiate between Ibāḍī and Sunnī Islam. His view of the Qur’an as an imposture and of the teachers as false reflects his pietistic background and prevalent European opinions. His views are reflected in later missionary attitudes in East Africa. Krapf’s memorial in Mombasa, close to his wife’s grave, indicates something of his lasting significance. Each of the three plaques, in Swahili, German and English, has a different emphasis. The Swahili describes him as the founder of the Church in Kenya, the German as a linguist, and
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the English as an explorer who ‘discovered’ the mountains Kenya and Kilimanjaro. Publications Krapf’s correspondence and journals are held in the archives of the Church Missionary Society at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. A large part of the archival materials has been digitised by Adam Matthew Publications and is available on-line; they can also be consulted at the Crowther Library of the Church Missionary Society in Oxford, as well as at the Cadbury Research Library. For more details on the archival corpus, see: https://churchmissionsociety.org/about/our-history/ archives/. Archives Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham – Church Missionary Society Archives, CMS/CA5/ O16/1-161 Kenya Mission: Original papers: Letters and papers of individual missionaries: Dr John Ludwig Krapf (1840-80) Archives Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham – Church Missionary Society Archives, CMS/CA5/ M1 Kenya Mission: Mission book, 1842-1846 (transcribed copies of correspondence): ‘Journey from Aden to Mombasa December 1843 and January 1844’ (pp. 290-312); ‘Revd. Dr. Krapf’s additional remarks on the island of Zanzibar or Ongoodja [Unguja]’ (January-June 1844) (pp. 319-343 [incorrectly numbered as 443]) Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford – USPG/UMCA Archives USPG X Series 158-61 Dictionary of Swahili Language, in four volumes, 1846-53 Archives Basel, Basel Mission Archives – 90 letters from Krapf to the mission (1826-56) Reports in Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, 1845-79 J.L. Krapf, Reisen in Ost-Afrika, 2 vols, Stuttgart, 1858, repr. 1964, Munster, 1994; It.sing. 509 f-1-2 (digitised version available through MDZ) J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, London, 1860, repr. 1865, 1867, New York, 1968; 007695714 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, Boston MA, 1860 (same text as the London edition, but different pagination); 002241025 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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J.L. Krapf, Krapf, missionary & explorer, ed. C.G. Richards, Edinburgh, 1950 (selections from Travels, researches and missionary labours, during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa) J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours, by J. L. Krapf, London, 19682, repr. 2014 L. Krapf, A dictionary of the Suahili language, with introduction containing an outline of a Suahili grammar, London, 1882, repr. Ridgewood NJ, 1964, New York, 1969, Cambridge, 2012; 73086 (digitised version available through Yale University Library Digital Collections) Studies Pirouet, ‘Legacy’ Bridges, ‘Introduction’ John Chesworth
Juan Maria Schuver Date of Birth 27 February 1852 Place of Birth Amsterdam Date of Death 1883 Place of Death Tek, Western Dinka territory, South Sudan
Biography
Juan (Joannes) Maria Schuver was the only child of a rich merchant family in Amsterdam. His father, Joannes Theodorus Antonius Schuver, was a wealthy tea and coffee merchant, and his mother, Theodora Paulina Roothan, was from a rich merchant family. Schuver attended a French school and later the Willibrord College in Katwijk. After the death of his mother and on completion of his secondary education, his father took him on a tour through Europe. Starting in France and Spain, father and son then parted ways, with Juan continuing to Switzerland and from there to Italy. Following his mother’s death, Schuver came into a substantial inheritance which he used to finance further travel. In 1872, he went from Sicily to Cairo, from there to Palestine, and then Lebanon and Syria. Travelling became his passion, so he did not continue formal education but instead began a career as a war correspondent. He first went to Spain to cover the Second Carlist War. In 1879, he was assigned by the Dutch magazine Handelsblad to report on the Balkan War. After a short interlude to take a journey through Egypt, on which he also reported for the magazine, he returned to the Balkans to report on the Russo-Turkish War. Schuver was captured by the Russians and charged with espionage. After he was released, he went to Istanbul to prepare for a journey through the Caucasus to Asia. By 1880, it seems his desire to become an explorer had taken full shape. In London, he approached the Royal Geographical Society for training in order to prepare properly for his planned expeditions in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. He then returned to Albania and continued on to Turkey, seeking permission to excavate Palmyra, though this was not granted. He went back to Egypt with a newly formed ambitious plan to explore the areas between the Blue Nile and the White Nile, which was meant to take him on through the interior of East Africa to the East African coast.
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Schuver’s patron was General Charles P. Stone, who was at that time the chief of staff of the Egyptian Army; he was a professional soldier with experience in exploration and mapping in North America (James, Johnson and Baumann, Juan Maria Schuver’s travels, p. xxxii) and was working on mapping the Sudanese interior on behalf of the Egyptian Army. Between 1881 and 1883, Schuver trekked from Khartoum to areas of eastern Sudan and present-day western Ethiopia, sending home artefacts and notes of his exploration as well as lists of vocabulary from the peoples he encountered (Kan, ‘De Reizen van Juan Maria Schuver’). He ventured to the previously little-known southern edges of the Ottoman sphere of control and across the border into the Ethiopian realm of the Oromo chief Jote Tullu. Earlier travellers such as Ernst Marno and Pellegrino Matteucchi had not been able to travel further than the sheikhdom of Fadasi, so the passage from the Sudan to the Oromo land of Wollega and from there to Kaffa had remained unexplored by Europeans. Schuver died in 1883 in Tek in the territory of the Dinka, where he was presumably killed after being mistaken for a slave hunter. The materials Schuver bought at the local markets of the villages he travelled through, as well as in Khartoum, were sent to Amsterdam and are now kept in the Ethnographic Museum of Leiden. He sent sketch maps and his travel log to Gotha, where his maps were published in Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen (1883), along with his most comprehensive account. The manuscripts for a book and a substantial number of letters and notes were kept by his family, and were eventually edited by Wendy James, Gerd Baumann and Douglas Johnson (1996). This edition forms the basic guide to his life and explorations.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary J.M. Schuver, ‘Von Cairo nach Fadassi, 1. Januar bis 12 July. 1881’, Dr. A. Petermann’s Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt 28 (1882) 1-4 J.M. Schuver, ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet. Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen auf der Wasserscheide zwischen Blauem und Weissem Nil und in den ägyptischabessinischen Grenzländern 1881 and 1882’, Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen 72 (1883) 1-95 C.M. Kan, ‘De Reizen van Juan Maria Schuver in het gebied van den Blauwen Nijl’, Tijdschrift van het Aardrijkskundig Genootschap 7 (1883) 80-101 W. James, D. Johnson and G. Baumann (eds), Juan Maria Schuver’s travels in North-East Africa, 1880-1883, London, 1996
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Secondary W. James, ‘A “frontier mosaic”. Ethiopia’s western edge’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 40 (2007) 277-91
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet’ ‘Travels on the Upper Nile’ Date 1883 Original Language German Description ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet’ (97 pages, including an introduction by the editor, itineraries and a map; its full title is ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet. Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen auf der Wasserscheide zwischen Blauem und Weissem Nil und in den ägyptisch-abessinischen Grenzländern 1881 und 1882’, ‘Travels on the Upper Nile. Experiences and observations on the watershed between the Blue and White Nile and in the EgyptianAbyssinian borderlands 1881 and 1882’) appeared as a supplement to Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen, the leading 19th-century geographical journal, published by Justus Perthes in Gotha. It is Schuver’s principal publication and covers his travels over about 20 months in the Sudanese-Ethiopian borderlands. It was edited in Gotha by Ernst Behm using Schuver’s French and English notes, diary excerpts and itineraries sent to Gotha from the field. It is divided into three chapters. The first covers a short introduction to the Berta territories south of Famaka, including the regional administration of the Egyptian Sudan. The second and most extensive focuses on the areas around Fadasi and the indigenous communities, including the Western Oromo outside the Egyptian sphere of influence. The third describes explorations undertaken from Famaka to Qubba and Abu Ramleh. Schuver’s reports, written in the first person, focus mainly on regional, ethnic, political and above all geographical observations. ‘Reisen’ does not consider Christian-Muslim relations as such, although Islam forms a background to Schuver’s journey, which was undertaken at a time when the Ottoman Empire was slowly disintegrating and the Mahdist uprising was beginning to spread. The Abyssinian Empire was yet to expand its influence in the regions of present-day Benishangui-Gumuz and the far west
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of Oromia, although in the borderlands near Qubba Schuver observes Ethiopian settlers from Gojjam and describes the territorial expansion of the Ethiopian Empire, which was soon to clash with the followers of the ‘prophet of the White Nile’, the Mahdī (Schuver, ‘Reisen’, pp. 83, 88). In 1889, at the battle of Metemma, the Christian Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia was killed during the confrontation with the Mahdī’s army. Schuver was interested in Islam as it was emerging in the region and its effects on the local population. The wold el-Arabs (‘sons of the Arabs’, pp. 4-5) still appear as individual traders and religious scholars moving between Islamised, semi-Islamised and indigenous polities, while only the chiefs of certain groups seem to follow Islam and the population still refuses to accept the religion so that traders and scholars do not put much effort into spreading it (p. 4). But the expanding frontier of Islam also extends the slaving frontier. Schuver mentions both frequent and occasional slave raids, and condemns the large-scale exploitation of the local population where the Ottoman Empire is well established. The work highlights traces of indigenous religious systems and the slow encroachment of Islam into traditional social systems. The second chapter covers Schuver’s explorations south of Fadasi, which took him into areas not yet influenced by Islam. There, in the royal court, he was witness to a ceremony involving an Oromo king, which his two Muslim guides describe as ‘magical’ (codschur, p. 34). The third chapter describes Schuver’s return and the areas between Famaka and Qubba. It also discusses the political situation under ‘Mohammedan rule’, and the peculiar political situation of vassal states that exert power over the local population through the force of only a few guns (p. 71). The emerging Mahdiyya is a topic in the last part of the report (pp. 7085). During Schuver’s explorations between Qubba and Abu Ramleh, his guide, a staunch follower of the Mahdī, proclaimed in villages they passed through that the Mahdī was coming. This was a situation that Schuver thought a danger to his exploration activities and hence he eventually dismissed the guide (pp. 89-90). Schuver speaks of two teachers who arrive to preach the Mahdī’s teachings. His judgement about this is neutral: he believes the teachings of the Mahdī are as ‘honest in his purpose as [the Prophet] Mohammed himself, but the movement which the Italians would no doubt call patrioticoreligioso is doomed to fail for want of communication with the exterior’ (i.e. the emerging imperial powers; ‘Reisen’, pp. 84-5).
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Significance Unlike many European travellers of his time, Schuver had great sympathy for the ethnic groups he found still untouched by Islam, and placed much emphasis on the devastating effects of the slave trade, which he attributed to Muslim practices. He did not see Ottoman influence as beneficial to the local population, in contrast to his contemporary Ernst Marno, who was much more involved in local administration (‘Ueber Sclaverei und die jüngsten Vorgänge im Egyptischen Sudan. Die Nilfrage’, Mittheilungen Der k. k. Geographischen Gesellschaft zu Wien 17 (1874) 243-55). Schuver was not interested in religion per se, but nonetheless ‘Reisen’ is of tremendous value as one of the rare grass-roots reports on historic and far-reaching events: the crumbling Ottoman Empire and the emerging Mahdī rebellion which shaped the north-east African region for many years, destined as it was to influence the regional power balance between Christian Ethiopia, the Sudan and the emerging colonial powers. Schuver’s ethnographic scrutiny is unprecedented in its detail and thoroughness, and his concern with the region’s population, especially with the smaller indigenous groups, remains of great ethno-historical value to this day (Meckelburg, ‘From “subject to citizen”?’). Publications J.M. Schuver, ‘Von Cairo nach Fadassi, 1. Januar bis 12. Juli 1881’, Dr. A. Petermann’s Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt 28 (1882) 1-4; 006784648 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.M. Schuver, ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet. Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen auf der Wasserscheide zwischen Blauem und Weissem Nil und in den ägyptisch-abessinischen Grenzländern 1881 and 1882’, ed. Ernst Behm, Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen 72 (1883) 1-95; 100523420 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies A. Meckelburg, ‘From “subject to citizen”? History, identity and minority citizenship. The case of the Mao and Komo of western Ethiopia’, Hamburg, 2019 (PhD Diss. Universität Hamburg) James, ‘A “frontier mosaic”’ James, Johnson and Baumann, Juan Maria Schuver’s travels Alexander Meckelburg
Edward Blyden Edward Wilmot Blyden Date of Birth 3 August 1832 Place of Birth St Thomas, Danish Virgin Islands Date of Death 7 February 1912 Place of Death Freetown, Sierra Leone
Biography
Edward Blyden was born on St Thomas, one of the Danish Virgin Islands, in 1832 to free parents of West African extraction, in a Caribbean society built on enslaved African labour. He was recognised for his high intelligence early on, though racial prejudice derailed his plan to enrol at Rutgers Theological Seminary in the United States. He emigrated to Liberia in 1850 with support from the American Colonization Society, and for many years promoted its programme to settle African Americans in West Africa. In 1856, Blyden married Sarah Yates in Monrovia. They had three children but the marriage was not happy. In the 1870s, Blyden began a much happier relationship with Anna Erskine in Sierra Leone. They had five children together. Educated only through high school in Liberia, and ordained a Presbyterian minister there in 1858, Blyden was largely self-taught. Adept at languages, he read not only Hebrew, Latin and Greek but also several modern European languages and learned something of West African languages too. In a career of over 50 active years in various government posts in Liberia and the British colonies of Sierra Leone and Lagos, including as government minister and envoy to Europe, the United States and the African interior, he was keen to shape the policies of these states. Much of his career concerned education; he served, for example, as the president of Liberia College from 1880 to 1884 and as Director of Muslim Education in Lagos from 1901 to 1906. Diplomatic tours of the West African interior, starting in the 1860s, allowed him close observation of the Muslim states there, many of them undergoing reform and expansion. In order to equip himself to understand these societies better and also to learn Arabic, Blyden travelled to Syria and Lebanon in 1866.
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He published writings from the 1850s onwards and by the 1870s he was widely recognised as an erudite spokesman for the African point of view in West Africa, Europe and America, editing newspapers, speaking widely, and appearing in the periodical press. He also became closely connected to Muslim scholars and leaders in Lagos, Freetown and the West African interior. He dedicated his career to the advancement of Africa and to combatting the denigration of Africans, which was widespread in the Atlantic world. He held for many years that Africa, suffering from a ‘hoary and pernicious Paganism’ (Blyden, Christianity, p. v), needed to be lifted from stagnation by the modern skills of educated Christian African Americans. He became an advocate for colonial rule in Africa (especially by the British), but in his government service and his writings he relentlessly criticised anything that suppressed African interests or aspirations. From the 1860s, he became increasingly doubtful that the societies emerging along the coast under Christian missionary and African American guidance were desirable models. Instead, he advised taking inspiration from Muslim societies in the interior, not least for their lack of racism and successful organisation. In his last decades, especially in African life and customs (1908), he added a more positive evaluation of African culture to his vision. To improve Africa, Christian and Muslim influences needed to build on what he termed the unique ‘African personality’. Although contradictory in many ways, his writings remain a reference point in discussions about African development and identity. African and European leaders, as well as large numbers of Freetown Muslims, attended his funeral in Freetown in 1912. Memorials, funded by both private subscription and government support, soon appeared in Freetown and Lagos, and various efforts to mark his achievements appeared in West Africa, England and the United States in the following decades.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, London, 1887 E.W. Blyden, African life and customs, London, 1908 E. Holden, Blyden of Liberia. An account of the life and labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden, L.L.D. as recorded in letters and in print, New York, 1966 E.W. Blyden, Black spokesman. Selected published writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. H.R. Lynch, London, 1971
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E.W. Blyden, Selected letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden, ed. H.R. Lynch, Millwood NY, 1978 Secondary T. Tibebu, Edward Wilmot Blyden and the racial nationalist imagination, Rochester NY, 2012 L. Barrows, art. ‘Blyden, Edward Wilmot’, in The Oxford encyclopedia of African thought, New York, 2010, 183-7 T. Tiénou, art. ‘Blyden, Edward Wilmot’, in G.H. Anderson (ed.), Biographical dictionary of Christian mission, Grand Rapids MI, 1998, 70-1 E.A. Ayandele, African historical studies, London, 1979, pp. 196-210 G. Benjamin, Edward W. Blyden, messiah of Black Revolution, New York, 1979 T. Livingston, Education and race. A biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden, San Francisco, 1975 R. July, The origins of modern African thought. Its development in West Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, London, 1968, pp. 208-33 H.R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden, London, 1967 R. July, ‘Nineteenth-century negritude. Edward W. Blyden’, Journal of African History 5 (1964) 73-86
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Christianity, Islam, and the Negro race Date 1887 Original Language English Description Blyden published Christianity, Islam and the Negro race in 1887 to coincide with the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, ‘to set forth to Africans and to their foreign helpers, secular and religious, some of the conditions of the problem before them’ (Blyden, Christianity, p. iii). The book consolidated Blyden’s growing status as a spokesman for Africa, a claim resting on his direct knowledge of Islamic West Africa, his erudition in 19th-century Orientalist and biblical scholarship, and the authority awarded by what contemporaries called his ‘purest Negro parentage’ (Blyden, Christianity, p. viii). Enthusiastic reception led to a second edition in 1888 containing the original 15 chapters plus a new preface and an appendix on Liberia, altogether 447 pages. All but two chapters had appeared previously, from as early as 1871, most as articles in British and American periodicals. The 1967 reprint by Edinburgh University Press (the edition used here) has a foreword by George Shepperson and an
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introduction by Christopher Fyfe, prominent historians of pan-Africanism and modern West Africa respectively. Two other reprints, in 1994 and 2016, are of the second edition. Blyden’s earlier writings said little about Islam, focussing instead on the need for Christian African Americans to return to Africa and advance the ‘triumphs of Christianity over heathenism’ (Blyden, Liberia’s offering. Being addresses, sermons, etc., New York, 1862, p. 21). Christianity, Islam and the Negro race carries forward Blyden’s concerns with the advancement of Africa evident in his earliest writing, touching especially on the need to devise appropriate education, his appeal for African American return to Africa, the evils of racism, the missteps of Christian missionaries and the need to recognise Africans’ unique racial abilities. But Islam becomes more central, most prominently in ‘Mohammedanism in Western Africa’ (1871), ‘Mohammedanism and the Negro race’ (1875), ‘Islam and race distinctions’ (1876), ‘Philip and the eunuch’ (1882), and ‘The Mohammedans of Nigritia’ (1887). ‘Mohammedanism and the Negro race’, a review essay endorsing Reginald Bosworth Smith’s 1874 lectures on ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’, is the opening chapter. The relation between Islam and Christianity was a matter of urgent debate in these years as Europe’s political presence and missionary enterprise in Islamic societies expanded. Requested by and initially published in the British fortnightly Fraser’s Magazine, the essay expands on Bosworth Smith’s challenge to missionaries and others to re-evaluate the idea that Islam was a false and dangerous religion, urging instead that it should be studied sympathetically, and that Muslims should be approached with empathy and respect. The book was enthusiastically endorsed by Europeans holding similar positions, and welcomed in some journals in Damascus, Istanbul and Beirut as a defence of Islam (Lynch, Blyden, pp. 73-8). Blyden’s interest in Islam seems to have changed because of disappointment with early colonial societies on the coast juxtaposed with the favourable impression made on him by Islamic societies in the West African interior. In his view, Christianity in West Africa had come in conjunction with the Atlantic slave trade and then colonial rule. It was imbued with the imperial attitudes of 19th-century Europe, and widely used to sustain racist social relations, especially in the United States and the Caribbean. African Christians would always struggle to realise their full humanity under this strain of Christianity. He did not doubt that ‘the Gospel, pure and simple’ would be ‘an unspeakable blessing’ to Africa. The problem was that it had never ‘come pure and simple’ (Blyden, Christianity, p. 309). He supported
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the creation of African churches independent of European oversight because they would be better able to express the true Christian spirit. The Muslim societies of the interior that Blyden visited were being swept by vibrant reform movements inspired by events such as Uthman dan Fodio’s initiation of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1804. Blyden used them as a foil to highlight the flaws of the colonial enclaves on the coast. His depictions tended not to highlight problems with interior societies, treating slavery there as benign, for example (Blyden, Christianity, pp. 186, 326-7). His position was not, for the most part, theological. The essential point was that Islam, innocent of the racism of Christian Europe and its colonies, had much to offer as a model for an improved African future, and that the Christian model launched in Sierra Leone and Liberia should not be accepted as necessarily superior. Sometimes Blyden presented Islam as a stage Africans should go through to reach Christianity (Blyden, Christianity, p. 24); at other times (more clearly in later years) he seems to see Islam as a more permanent good. He elaborated his argument in various ways in this work and in his later writings, but certain elements recur. From its earliest history, Islam had welcomed and included Africans fully, without racial prejudice. It had come to West Africa over a long period peacefully, in conjunction with trade, education and cultural connection to western Asia. Interwoven with this historical claim, he argued that the aesthetic traditions of Europe, by using European human bodies to represent concepts such as beauty, virtue and God, damaged African attempts to identify with this culture. Islamic aesthetic traditions, in contrast, eschewing representations of humans, allowed Africans to embrace it in a less troubled way, and become proud and confident. Similarly, the harmful effects of alcohol – an important commodity in colonial trade – on coastal societies helped Blyden to contrast the positive effects of its absence among Muslims (Christianity, pp. 68-9). Blyden’s more enduring reasons to prefer Islam were that certain of its essential qualities better suited what he deemed ‘Negro’ racial characteristics, and later termed the ‘African personality’ (Lynch, Blyden, p. 54). Deploying the racial thinking typical of the late 19th century, he argued that ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ were closely related races, and that the latter shared the former’s affinity with Islam. The key themes of Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, and Blyden’s efforts to explain and develop empathy for African Muslims, persist in later writings such as ‘Islam in the Western Soudan’ (Journal of the Royal African society 2 [1902] 9-37). Some scholars have suggested that late in his life Blyden became a Muslim. The evidence is circumstantial but he
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clearly came to identify very closely with the community of Muslim scholars and students around him and distanced himself from the Presbyterian Church in which he had been ordained (Mudimbe, Invention, pp. 127-8; Turner, Islam, pp. 56-8). As Dorman (‘Lifted out’, p. 412) argues, this more ecumenical attitude in his later years extended to African religions. Whereas in Christianity, Islam and the Negro race Blyden welcomed the expanding Islamic states in West Africa in part because they were replacing Africans’ ‘irrational and debasing superstitions of a hoary Paganism’ (Blyden, Christianity, p. 313), in African life and customs (London, 1908), his last major work, he sees much virtue in African values and social practices as principles for building a future suited to the African character. Islam would also be part of this future, extending its past successes. This revised position, like much of Blyden’s work, was intended as a critique of colonial policies – especially in education – which intended to remake Africans according to Western models. Although Christianity is often used to represent Blyden’s thought, recent scholarship tends to stress that Blyden constantly advanced his thinking about Islam in Africa and other questions as relevant concepts changed, while he steadily deepened his understanding of Africa and its place in the world (Odamtten, Blyden’s intellectual transformations). Significance For most scholars and activists, Blyden’s significance, well-established by Christianity, arises from his inspiration to later African nationalists and pan-Africanists, even if, as many have pointed out, his writings entail powerful internal contradictions (Mudimbe, ‘Blyden’s legacy’; Curtis, ‘Blyden’, pp. 42-3; Tibebu, Blyden, pp. 146-72). The need to discover and develop the ‘African personality’ was expressed by a fictionalised Blyden in Ethiopia unbound, published in 1911 by the Ghanaian intellectual J.E. CaselyHayford just before Blyden’s death (Korang, Writing Ghana, p. 207). The leaders of West African anti-colonial movements who assumed power in the mid-20th century, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, all acknowledged inspiration from Blyden’s confidence in Africa’s future and appeal for panAfrican solidarity. Concerning Christian-Muslim relations, three overlapping legacies can be identified. Blyden’s obvious erudition, his standing as an African, and his direct and extensive experience of Muslim Africa all made his contributions to debates about missionary policy and attitudes to Islam influential in Africa, Britain and the United States. He endorsed and advanced the position associated with such contemporaries
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as R. Bosworth Smith, recognising Islam as helpful rather than harmful for Africa’s advance. Among West African intellectuals, Blyden had a parallel impact. Abolitionist, missionary and colonial plans carried the assumption that Christianity would be key to Africa’s future. The elite of the coastal societies tied to Europe had adopted this assumption, and many continued to do so after Blyden. But Blyden led his peers towards a vision of Africa’s future that would merge elements of Western civilisation with Muslim and traditional African societies, guided by the Africans’ unique racial genius, as E. Dovlo argues (‘The African Christian and Islam. Insights from the colonial period’, in J. Azumah and L. Sanneh [eds], The African Christian and Islam, Carlisle, 2013, 85-102). This understanding of Africa in terms of a ‘triple heritage’ – traditional, Islamic and Christian – has been developed along various lines since, for example by Ali Amin Mazrui in his book The Africans. A triple heritage (Boston MA, 1986). Finally, Blyden’s appreciation of Islam and especially of Islamic Africa, deployed as a critique of European and American anti-black racism and as a superior model for African advancement, has resonated strongly among African Americans since early in the 20th century in their battles against racist oppression in America. The Nation of Islam and similar movements, many scholars argue, drew direct inspiration from Blyden’s arguments (R. Turner, ‘Pan-Africanism and the new American Islam’, in R. Turner, Islam in the African-American experience, Bloomington IN, 1997, 48-59; Curtis, ‘Blyden’). Publications E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, London, 1887; 123456789/25716 (digitised version available through University of Ghana Digital Collections) E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, London, 18882, repr. Baltimore MD, 1994, Mansfield Center CT, 2016; 100657986 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, Edinburgh, 1967, with a ‘Foreword’ by G. Shepperson and ‘Introduction’ by C. Fyfe Studies H. Odamtten, Edward W. Blyden’s intellectual transformations, East Lansing MI, 2019 Tibebu, Blyden Barrows, ‘Blyden’
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J. Dorman, ‘Lifted out of the commonplace grandeur of modern times. Reappraising Edward Wilmot Blyden’s views of Islam and Afrocentrism in light of his scholarly Black Christian Orientalism’, Souls. A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 12 (2010) 398-418 M. Echeruo, ‘Edward W. Blyden, “The Jewish question”, and the diaspora. Theory and practice’, Journal of Black Studies 40 (2010) 544-65 E. Curtis IV, ‘African-American Islamization reconsidered. Black history narratives and Muslim identity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (2005) 659-84 K. Korang, Writing Ghana, imagining Africa. Nation and African modernity, Rochester NY, 2004, 70-89 E. Curtis IV, ‘Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) and the paradox of Islam’, in E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America. Identity, liberation, and difference in African-American Islamic thought, Albany NY, 2002, 21-43 M. Moore Jr, ‘Edward Wilmot Blyden. From old school Presbyterian missionary to “minister of truth”’, Journal of Presbyterian History 75 (1997) 103-18 M. Echeruo, ‘Edward W. Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the “color complex”’, Journal of Modern African Studies 30 (1992) 669-84 M.-B. Sillah, ‘Edward Blyden and Islam in Sierra Leone. A study of African intellectual response to British colonialism’, Hamdard Islamicus 14 (1991) 23-42 V.Y. Mudimbe, ‘E.W. Blyden’s legacy and questions’, in V.Y. Mudimbe, The invention of Africa. Gnosis, philosophy and the order of know ledge, London, 1988, 98-133 B. Neuberger, ‘Early African nationalism, Judaism and Zionism. Edward Wilmot Blyden’, Jewish Social Studies 47 (1985) 151-66 J. Lyon, ‘Edward Blyden. Liberian independence and African nationalism, 1903-1909’, Phylon 41 (1980) 36-49 W. Moses, The golden age of Black nationalism, 1850-1925, Hamden CT, 1978 M. Frenkel, Edward Blyden and African nationalism, trans. E. Mozolkova, Moscow, 1978 P. Edwards, ‘Edward W. Blyden. Sense and sentimentality’, in A. Niven (ed.), The Commonwealth writer overseas. Themes of exile and expatriation, Brussels, 1976, 139-49 A. Billingsley, ‘Edward Blyden. Apostle of Blackness’, Black Scholar 2 (1970) 3-12
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M. Frenkel, ‘Edward Blyden and the concept of African personality’, African Affairs 73 (1974) 277-89 P. Esedebe, ‘Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) as a pan-African theorist’, Sierra Leone Studies 25 (1969) 14-23 E.W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro race, Edinburgh, 1967, ‘Foreword’ by G. Shepperson, and ‘Introduction’ by C. Fyfe Lynch, Blyden J. Ojo Cole, Edward Wilmot Blyden. An interpretation, Lagos, 1935 A. Deniga, Blyden, the African educationalist, Lagos, 1923 J.E. Casely Hayford, Ethiopia unbound. Studies in race emancipation, London, 1911 Philip Zachernuk
Samuel Crowther Samuel Ajayi Crowther, Adjai (or Ajai) Crowther Date of Birth About 1806 Place of Birth Osogun (present-day Iseyin), Nigeria Date of Death 31 December 1891 Place of Death Lagos, Nigeria
Biography
Born around 1806 or 1807, Ajayi, as he was then called, grew up in the Yoruba town of Osogun (or Oshogun) in what later became Nigeria. Symptomatic of the disintegration of the Oyo Empire and the establishment of the Fulani Empire in the north, the region was prone to civil unrest and intermittent raiding in the early 19th century. In Ajayi’s midteens, a party of Fulani-linked Muslims raided Osogun and took Ajayi as a slave. Passing through the hands of several Africans, he was eventually put on a Portuguese slave ship bound across the Atlantic. In 1822, British patrols intercepted the ship, liberated Ajayi and his fellow passengers, and brought them to Sierra Leone, a British colony recently founded to support the anti-slavery cause. In Sierra Leone, Ajayi received Christian instruction from missionaries of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and was baptised in 1825, taking the name Samuel Crowther. Proving himself an avid student, he pursued higher education in England and at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. For the next decade or so he served as a mission-linked teacher, preacher, and linguist in Sierra Leone. From the 1840s onward, Crowther was positioned at the forefront of British missionary and commercial expansion into the region that later became Nigeria. In 1841, he participated in the first Niger Expedition, an exploratory voyage up the Niger River to establish footholds for missionary activity and trade – inspired, among other things, by abolitionist zeal to replace the regional slave trade with alternative forms of commerce. His conduct on the voyage earned him a place on the subsequent Niger Expeditions of 1854 and 1857, and it also caught the attention of the CMS, which sponsored further training for Crowther at the society’s training school in London.
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Illustration 7. Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther
In 1843, Crowther was ordained a priest in the Church of England and returned to West Africa, initiating nearly five decades of ordained ministry in the region. He worked initially in Sierra Leone before moving in 1846 to the recently-established Yoruba Mission based at Abeokuta. In the late 1850s, he established the extensive Niger Mission further inland, staffing it with African Christian teachers and pastors, many of them liberated slaves or their children from the Sierra Leone colony. In 1864, Crowther was ordained as the first African Anglican bishop, and given authority over the ‘countries of Western Africa beyond the Queen’s dominions’. In this capacity, he exercised nearly 30 years of formal episcopal leadership in the Niger River basin, though in practice his authority was qualified, not extending to mission stations where European missionaries operated. Towards the end of his life, European missionaries contested his authority, overruling him in matters of personnel and
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finance and effectively undermining his power. Nevertheless, he presided for decades over a sizeable network of African teachers and pastors, who were the primary agents responsible for early Christian evangelisation efforts in Nigeria. Crowther has been variously described as a product and developer of Victorian missionary strategy, a scholar of West African languages, an architect of Yoruba ethnic identity, and an early African nationalist. Noteworthy too were his activities in interreligious engagement. His ministry routinely involved interaction with both Islam and African traditional religions, and his writings reflect the centrality of interreligious engagement to his evangelising efforts. They feature numerous accounts of his interactions with Muslims and practitioners of African traditional religions, descriptions of rituals he observed and beliefs reported by his interlocutors, and theological and social evaluation of the religious customs he encountered. His journal entries from visits to the Niger Mission’s northern reaches, such as Ilorin or the Nupe region, feature lively narrations of conversations with Muslims and descriptions of local Muslim folklore and religious practice. Among the most visible and widely-known African Christian leaders in the 19th century, Crowther was a prolific writer. His journals, reports and letters are preserved in the CMS archive. He also produced linguistic works – grammars, vocabularies, and Bible translations in several West African vernaculars – to facilitate missionary activity. Several journals and reports were also published as books in England for an audience of missionary supporters and those interested in West African geography, cultures, and languages. Crowther died in Lagos in 1891.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives Birmingham, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library – Church Missionary Society Archive. See especially Crowther’s original papers at CA1O79 (1837-44), CA2O31 (1844-57), CA3O4 (1857-80). Other documents pertaining to Crowther’s life and work can be found throughout the Sierra Leone Mission (CA1), Yoruba Mission (CA2, G3A2), and Niger Mission (CA3, G3A3) records (Microfilm copies are published by Adam Matthew Publications, see ‘Section IV: Africa Missions’ [Parts 1-6, 8-11] for corresponding material pertaining to Crowther. Digital copies of some CMS documents by and about Crowther are available through Adam Matthew’s online databases ‘Empire Online’ and ‘Church Missionary Society Periodicals’)
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S. Crowther, ‘Crowther to Captain Bird Allen 3.9.1841’, repr. in A.F. Walls, ‘A second narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s early life’, Bulletin of the Society for African Church History 2 (1965) 5-14 J.F. Schön and S. Crowther, Journal of an expedition up the Niger in 1841, London, 1842 (appendix contains an 1837 letter in which Crowther narrates his enslavement, emancipation and life in Sierra Leone) S. Crowther, Journal of an expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers, London, 1855 S. Crowther and J.C. Taylor, The gospel on the banks of the Niger, London, 1859 S.A. Crowther, Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa, London, 1892 E. Stock, ‘The Niger and its black bishop’, in The history of the Church Missionary Society. Its environment, its men and its work, vol. 2, London, 1899, 450-65 J. Page, The black bishop, London, 1908 Secondary O. Oduntan, art. ‘Samuel Ajayi Crowther, 1806–1891’, in Oxford research encyclopedia of African history, 22 January 2021; https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780190277734.013.278 A. Barnes, art. ‘Samuel Ajayi Crowther. African and Yoruba missionary bishop’, in Oxford research encyclopedia of African history, 26 February 2018; https:// doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.278 S. Ney, ‘Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the age of literature’, Research in African literatures 46 (2015) 37-52 A. Fitchett Climenhaga, ‘Heathenism, delusion, and ignorance. Samuel Crowther’s approach to Islam and traditional religion’, Anglican Theological Review 94 (2014) 661-81 J.J. Hanciles, In the shadow of the elephant. Bishop Crowther and the African missionary movement, Oxford, 2008 J. Flint, art. ‘Crowther, Samuel Ajayi (c. 1807-1891)’, in ODNB J.D.Y. Peel, Religious encounter and the making of the Yoruba, Bloomington IN, 2003, 123-86 J.F. Ade Ajayi, Patriot to the core. Bishop Ajayi Crowther, Ibadan, 2001 L. Sanneh, ‘The CMS and the African transformation. Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the opening of Nigeria’, in K. Ward and B. Stanley (eds), The Church Missionary Society and world Christianity 1799-1999, Grand Rapids MI, 2000, 173-97 L. Sanneh, Abolitionists abroad. American Blacks and the making of modern West Africa, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 126-9, 139-81 A. Hastings, The church in Africa. 1450-1950, Oxford, 1994, pp. 338-58, 389-93 E.A. Ayandele, The missionary impact on modern Nigeria, 1842-1914. A political and social analysis, London, 1966
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa Bishop Crowther’s experiences in West Africa Date 1888 Original Language English Description Samuel Crowther prepared the manuscript of Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa for publication in 1888 while he was in England attending the Lambeth Conference, an international gathering of Anglican bishops. Sixty pages in length, it was published posthumously in 1892 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). As the title suggests, the work recounts his experiences of engagement with Muslims and practitioners of African traditional religions, and recommends strategies by which Christian evangelists might productively interact with them. The book collates anecdotes and recommendations drawn from Crowther’s life experience, integrating narratives drawn from reports he had submitted to the CMS decades earlier with ample original material. It presents his most systematic and self-conscious articulation of his approach to interreligious engagement, and includes some comments about interacting with African traditional religions, but it is primarily concerned with the relationship of Christian communities, especially missionaries and other pastoral workers engaged in evangelisation, with Muslims. The work comprises four sections containing different types of material. First (pp. 5-11), Crowther explains his purpose and rationale for writing: to educate Christian evangelists, particularly the young African Christian teachers at the forefront of Christian evangelisation efforts in 19th-century West Africa. By presenting them with methods and resources developed through his own nearly 60 years of experience as a Christian teacher and clergyman, he aims to facilitate future engagement with Muslims and practitioners of African traditional religions. Crowther especially warns his coreligionists against combative, confrontational interactions driven by ‘zeal, not yet tempered with experience’ (p. 6). Prone to such excesses himself earlier in his career, he illustrates the futility of such aggressive encounters by narrating two
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anecdotes of his own disastrous interactions with Muslims and devotees of Shango in Sierra Leone. When he worked as a schoolmaster in 1831, he forcibly removed a qur’anic charm hanging around a pupil’s neck. This brusque action incurred the rage of the boy’s father and precipitated a formal meeting with local Muslim elders in which Crowther pitted the Bible against the Qur’an, with the result that the Muslims refused to engage with him or his arguments. Similarly, his bold interruption of Shango devotees’ worship in 1844 to preach to them and debate with them produced a noisy stand off that left his interlocutors indisposed to engage with his religious message. Significantly, Crowther sounds concerns about how the folly of such confrontational approaches is aggravated in places such as the 19thcentury missions in the Niger River basin, where Christian missionaries wielded limited formal power and depended on the goodwill of local leaders to operate. Second (pp. 12-30), Crowther proposes an alternative approach that he considers more conducive to effective evangelisation in the West African context. He exhorts Christian teachers to model their conduct on that of Jesus, whom he presents as restraining misplaced zeal and winning followers through gentle persuasion. He recommends that evangelistic outreach should be characterised by a reliance on the Bible – presented in local vernaculars – and confidence in the Holy Spirit to transform listeners’ hearts after the Christian evangelist has respectfully presented the Gospel. Rather than arguing with interlocutors, teachers should respond to their questions and challenges by reading appropriate passages of scripture to them, a strategy calculated to diffuse hostility and undercut misinformed perceptions of Christian teaching with the direct testimony of authoritative scripture. Crowther illustrates what he means by narrating at length his own visit to the Emir of Ilorin and his court in 1872, during which he responded to numerous inquiries about Christian teaching from the emir and other Muslim leaders (pp. 16-21). Reflecting his concern for missionary formation and his conviction that Muslims were particularly resistant to Christian conversion because they had authoritative scripture to which they could appeal, Crowther enumerates some of the most prominent theological points of contention between Christians and Muslims that evangelists would encounter, preeminently disputes over the Christian claim that Jesus is the Son of God. He also states the need to provide Christian evangelists with appropriate training and resources, including a topical handbook (offered in various vernacular translations) of scripture passages to help them respond swiftly and effectively to their interlocutors’ inquiries.
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Third (pp. 30-58), Crowther presents a foundation for the recommended handbook, marshalling a collection of passages from both Old and New Testaments that support the claim that Jesus is God’s Son. Comprising fully half of the book, this catalogue of verses forms the heart of Crowther’s text. He presents myriad references to God having a son, and especially identifications of Jesus as the Son of God, citing various scriptural figures as authorities: the Psalmist, the Israelite prophets, the angel Gabriel, the Holy Spirit, Jesus himself both before and after the resurrection, John the Baptist, Jesus’s early followers, and the Apostles. Muslims themselves revered some of those figures, a fact upon which Crowther capitalises. He also highlights the testimony of the opponents of Jesus – Satan, demons, and the Jews – who, despite their hostility, likewise refer to him as God’s Son. Fourth (pp. 58-60), Crowther appends a passage from the preface to George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’an, first published in 1734 and widely respected among late 19th-century Anglophone audiences. The extract enumerates four rules that Sale proposes for how Christians should debate with Muslims and attack the Qur’an: avoid forcing conversion, teaching things contrary to common sense, making weak arguments, and compromising any element of Christian teaching. Written for an audience of Christian evangelists, the book’s overarching purpose is to recommend methods of engaging with Muslims in the context of Christian missionary efforts. Within this project, several theological subthemes emerge as especially salient for Christian-Muslim interaction: the authority of scripture as revelatory of the divine will, angels and prophets as God’s reliable messengers, Jesus’s miraculous birth, and Jesus as the Son of God. Also present, but more tangential, is consideration of Christian and Muslim views about the Trinity, final judgement, and the presence or absence of references to the Prophet Muḥammad in the Bible. Crowther’s approach to engaging with Muslims stands out among those of his contemporaries. Andrew Walls considers West Africa as a major sphere of sustained Christian missionary engagement with Islam, carried out in circumstances in which Christian evangelists had limited political authority (Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre of Christian engagement’, pp. 155-71). Walls contrasts Crowther’s approach to Islam emerging from the West African Christian experience with that of Karl Gottlieb Pfander, a German missionary in Central Asia, whose Mizān al-ḥaqq (‘Balance of truth’) shaped Protestant efforts to evangelise Muslims well into the 20th century. Where Pfander’s disputational approach sought to undermine
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the Qur’an’s reliability and to depict Christian and Muslim scriptures as mutually exclusive, Crowther’s Experiences with heathens and Muslims treats the Qur’an as the starting point of Christian apologetics. The work urges the use of qur’anic confessions about Jesus, Muslims’ respect for scripture as an authoritative vehicle for divine communication, and convictions about the angel Gabriel as a reliable messenger who transmitted material contained in the Bible as a basis for presenting the truth contained in Christian scriptures (pp. 16-18, 22, 29-31). The approach outlined in Crowther’s Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans similarly departs from that presented in the front matter of George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an. Crowther shared with Sale unease that contact with Roman Catholics rendered Muslims hostile to Christianity, because Catholic Marian veneration served only to confirm Muslim concerns that Christians failed to practise monotheism. Crowther cites recent Catholic missionary activity in the Niger River basin as a goad to urge Christians to pursue the evangelisation of local Muslims more assiduously (pp. 30, 58). Yet, while Crowther quotes Sale at length, his own approach to engaging Muslims sits uneasily alongside Sale’s recommendations, which aim to help Christians to attack the Qur’an effectively. While Crowther exhorts Christians to avoid confrontational, polemical debate with Muslims, his treatise nevertheless frequently employs derisive terminology, for instance describing Muslims as ‘ignorant’, ‘uneducated’, ‘fanatic’, and ‘bigoted’ (pp. 9, 22; Fitchett Climenhaga, ‘Heathenism, delusion, and ignorance’, pp. 666-79). In this, he echoes the attitudes and usage of many of his missionary contemporaries. The intended audience of his book – fellow Christians – perhaps mitigates the import of this negative language; Crowther did not commend using such terms in encounters with Muslims themselves. Nevertheless, the vocabulary he uses to describe Muslims reflects his ambiguous attitude towards Islam: he considered it a false religion and thought Muslims potentially difficult interlocutors, yet he insisted that Christian evangelists should treat Muslims with dignity and respect. Significance Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans is noteworthy in at least three respects: its normative suggestions for Christian-Muslim relations, its depiction of the practices used by Christians to engage Muslims in 19th-century West Africa, and its author’s stature among West African Christians.
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First, as discussed above, Crowther’s recommendations about how evangelists should relate to Muslims differ markedly from those of other figures whose work featured prominently in 19th-century Christians’ efforts to evangelise Muslims. While Crowther deployed derisive language to describe Islam and Muslims, he departed significantly from influential peers by framing the Qur’an and Islamic theology as useful bridges for Christian proclamation rather than things to be systematically undermined. Second, while Crowther’s text is predominantly hortatory, reflecting ideals about how Christian evangelists should interact with Muslims, the book also contains descriptive material illuminating concrete practices of Christian-Muslim engagement in 19th-century West Africa. Narrating his own or other missionaries’ behaviour, sometimes as an aside, Crowther depicts Christian leaders participating in formal debates and measured discussions with Muslim leaders (pp. 8, 16-21), Christian preachers entering Muslim worship spaces unbidden in order to preach (pp. 8-9), and mission agents and Muslim clerics gathering regularly at mission stations to read the Bible in Arabic together (p. 24). Such anecdotes render Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans a valuable resource for historical analysis of interreligious engagement in the region. Third, the text is significant as an example of a work produced by an African Christian for other African Christians to inform them about how to interact with African Muslims. SPCK’s publication of the book testifies to English missionaries’ perception of its value. Moreover, there is some indication that Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans did indeed influence missionary practice in colonial Nigeria. For instance, Solihu credits Crowther’s work with providing impetus for Michael Samuel Cole, an Egba clergyman affiliated to the CMS, to complete the first translation of the Qur’an into Yoruba, first published in 1906 as Al-Kurani ti a Yipada se Ede Yoruba (‘The Qur’an translated into Yoruba’) (Solihu, ‘Yoruba translation’, p. 14). Recently, some West African Christian leaders have also presented Crowther and his book as a resource and model for productive contemporary Christian approaches to Muslim communities (Azumah, ‘Patterns of Christian-Muslim encounters’, pp. 60-1; Dovlo, ‘The African Christian and Islam’, pp. 99-100).
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Publications Archives Birmingham, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library – Church Missionary Society Archive: CA3/04A-04B (Crowther’s original 1872 report of his interaction with the emir’s court at Ilorin, subsequently published as S. Crowther, Report of the overland journey from Lokoja to Bida, London: Church Missionary House, 1872, pp. 17-20) Samuel Adjai Crowther, Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa, London, 1892 Studies C. Tieszen, The Christian encounter with Muhammad. How theologians have interpreted the Prophet, Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 121-32 S. Ney, ‘Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s journeys in Christian and Islamic book history’, Social Sciences and Mission 32 (2019) 31-53 A.K.H. Solihu, ‘The earliest Yoruba translation of the Qur’an. Missionary engagement with Islam in Yorubaland’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17 (2015) 10-37 Fitchett Climenhaga, ‘Heathenism, delusion, and ignorance’ J. Azumah, ‘Patterns of Christian-Muslim encounters in Africa’, in J. Azumah and L. Sanneh (eds), The African Christian and Islam, Carlisle, 2013, 41-63 E. Dovlo, ‘The African Christian and Islam. Insights from the colonial period’, in J. Azumah and L. Sanneh (eds), The African Christian and Islam, Carlisle, 2013, 85-102 A. Walls, ‘Africa as the theatre of Christian engagement with Islam in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999) 155-74 P.R. McKenzie, Inter-religious encounters in West Africa. Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s attitude to African traditional religion and Islam, Leicester, 1976, pp. 13-14, 18, 57-8 Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga
Louis Faidherbe Date of Birth 3 June 1818 Place of Birth Lille, France Date of Death 29 September 1889 Place of Death Paris
Biography
Louis Léon César Faidherbe, a general in the French army engineers, is particularly known for his accomplishments during his two periods of governorship of Senegal in 1854-61 and 1863-5, and for his successes as commander-in-chief of the Army of the North during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). He is also remembered for his research and published writings on history, geography, linguistics, anthropology, and also ethnography. He undertook some of this work in Senegal and later in Algeria between 1866 and 1870, and also after he retired from active military service in April 1871. Faidherbe was of lower middle-class origin. He was admitted on a scholarship to the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1838 and then to the École d’Application de l’Artillerie et du Génie in Metz in 1840. Although his academic performance was hardly brilliant, he was nevertheless commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1842 in the Engineer Corps, considered an arme savante (intellectual branch) of the French army. Faidherbe’s military career and intellectual development blossomed, thanks to two postings to Algeria (May 1844-June 1846, and December 1849-June 1852) and one to Guadalupe (1848-9). The two Algerian assignments awakened in him a growing interest in Islam and Islamic societies, and in the Arabic and Berber dialects spoken in Algeria. His stay in Guadeloupe stimulated a growing curiosity about the West African origins of the former slaves whose final emancipation, a result of the Revolution of 1848, was being realised just as he arrived in the colony. Continued curiosity about West Africa was one of the reasons Faidherbe requested assignment to Senegal. In addition to fostering his intellectual development, Faidherbe’s postings to Algeria involved him in the closing campaigns against the Algerian resistance leader Abdel Kader, and then in the campaign against the Kabyle leader, Bou Baghla. These campaigns imbued in him the ethos of the Armée d’Afrique and the conviction that brute force, including
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scorched earth campaigns, was justified to bring about the conquest of Algeria, however much he might come to admire aspects of Algerian Muslim civilisation. Faidherbe arrived in Senegal in November 1852 as head of the Engineer Corps detachment in Saint-Louis. During the two years that he held this position, he devoted his spare time to familiarising himself with the languages, religious practices, social structures and politics of the local populations. He began a relationship with a very young, presumably Muslim, Sarrakolé woman with whom he lived until 1857 and from whom he apparently learned three Senegalese languages. A mission that he undertook to inspect the fortifications at Assinie and Grand Bassam in what is now Ivory Coast, and at Libreville in Gabon, left him with a very poor impression of the mostly ‘pagan’ indigenous peoples he encountered, and also the growing conviction that Islam for such people was a ‘civilising’ force. During this period, Faidherbe launched his parallel scholarly career. In March 1853, he wrote to Edme-François Jomard, president of the Société de Géographie de Paris, offering to do research and write on geographical, ethnographic, and historical questions that might be of interest to the Society. Jomard’s reply gave rise a year later to the publication of Faidherbe’s first scholarly article, ‘Les berbères et les arabes des bords du Sénégal’, in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris (1854). As governor of Senegal, Faidherbe was as much a consolidator as an innovator. Thanks to the support he received from his superiors in Paris and the major Bordeaux trading firm in Saint-Louis, Maurel and Prom, he fulfilled the so-called Plan of 1854. Its elements had been proposed by a previous governor, Louis Édouard Bouët-Willaumez (1843-4), the first governor to have had Algerian experience, and it reflected the advice of the principal French trading firms in Saint-Louis. It called on the French authorities to take control of the 1000-kilometre seasonally navigable course of the Senegal River and to take charge of the conditions of trade between African producers and French traders and merchants. The various African societies, the Mauritanian gum producers, the Trarza and the Brakna on the right bank of the river, and the sedentary peoples on the left bank, the Wolof kingdom of Walo, the Fouta Toro Confederation, the Galam polities, Bundu and Khasso were to be forced to accept French domination of the Senegal River. They would be pacified but not conquered or annexed outright unless unavoidably necessary. Through vigorous but targeted warfare, Faidherbe not only fulfilled this plan but after 1859 sought to extend it to the navigable portions of other rivers controlled by the French: the Saloum River estuary and the
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Casamance River in territory they always viewed as belonging to the colony of Senegal, and further south, the estuaries of the Nuñez and Pongo rivers in the ‘Southern Rivers’ zone of what would become French Guinea. In order that the French might control all the rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean between Arguin on the coast of Mauritania, north of the Senegal River, and Sierra Leone, he proposed that France and Great Britain should arrange an exchange in which France would acquire Gambia in return for ceding French claims south of Sierra Leone to Great Britain and buy out the Portuguese posts in what became Portuguese Guinea. Despite the limited nature of this plan in not securing the annexation of much territory, it still involved the French authorities in unprecedented warfare with the native polities and led to the construction of additional fortified French posts. Also, Faidherbe had to contend with the unforeseen outbreak in 1854 of the jihad launched in the upper reaches of the Senegal valley by the Toucouleur Islamic reformer and state builder, al-Hajj Umar Tal. Faidherbe succeeded in defeating Umar and deflecting his jihad to the east, to Kaarta and Ségou. Although it is an exaggeration to say that Faidherbe conquered Senegal, he did vastly strengthen the French presence in what remained a disparate collection of French posts. Faidherbe’s involvement in the conquest of predominantly Muslim Algeria, and the pacification of Senegal, where Islam, the main religion, was undergoing reform and expansion, produced in him by fits and starts attitudes and policy options with regard to Islam that would influence his approach to the administration and education of an increasing number of colonial Muslim subjects and his contributions to the evolution of French policy regarding Islam. Between Faidherbe’s two periods of governorship in Senegal, he served as commandant of the Military Subdivision of Sidi-Bel-Abbès in Algeria. Upon leaving Senegal for good in 1865, he became commandant of the Military Subdivision of Bône (Annaba) in Algeria in 1866, a position he held until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War led to his being appointed commander-in-chief of the Army of the North. For Faidherbe, later Algerian assignments were very anti-climactic. After his service in the Franco-Prussian War, he was increasingly beset by health problems and, by the early 1880s, he was confined to a wheelchair. He served briefly as a Republican Union deputy in the French National Assembly representing the Département du Nord, and then as a senator. In 1880, he was named Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour. During all of this time, he pursued scholarly interests involving African anthropology, history and linguistics. In 1878, when the French began their push
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from the upper Senegal region towards the Niger River at Bamako and eventually Timbuktu, Faidherbe was often called upon to offer advice to various political leaders and military figures involved in the French conquest of the Sudan. General Faidherbe died in Paris, in the Chancellery of the Legion of Honour, on 29 September 1889. Following a state funeral in Paris, his remains were interred in Lille.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Government Archives Primary sources of information regarding the military and colonial aspects of Faidherbe’s career are found in the official French and Senegalese archives. Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM), 29 Chemin du Moulin de Testas, 1390 Aix-en-Provence, France CAOM – Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 11 April 1855, no. 154 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 15 June 1855, no. 244 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 3 November 1855, no. 440 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 25 December 1855, no. 518 CAOM – Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 6 April 1856, no. 141 CAOM – Sénégal Ia 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 5 June 1856, no. 245 CAOM – Sénégal I 43a, Faidherbe, ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal par le gouverneur Faidherbe, 5 août 1856’ CAOM – Sénégal I 45a, ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal, 1 octobre 1858, par le gouverneur L. Faidherbe’ CAOM – Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 13 April 1860 (confidential) CAOM – Sénégal VII26bis, Faidherbe, Address to the Executive Council of Senegal, 21 May 1864 Archives of the Republic of Senegal, Immeuble Central Parc, 2e étage, avenue Malick Sy X, Autoroute, Dakar Series B General Correspondence – Sub-series 1B: Minister of Navy and Colonies to the Governor of Senegal; Sub-series 2B: Governor of Senegal to the Minister of Navy and Colonies
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Service Historique de la Défense, Château de Vincennes, Avenue de Paris, 94300 Vincennes Faidherbe Louis Léon César, Armée GD2 1515 Faidherbe Louis Léon César, Archives Nationales Colonies EE 875 Private Archives Ets. Maurel et Prom, 51 rue d’Anjou, 75008 Paris (This company, which played a major role in the commercial development of Senegal in the 19th and 20th centuries, has retained a number of correspondence registers covering the years before, during and after Faidherbe’s periods of governorship. They can be consulted at the former headquarters of the company at 18 rue Porte Dijeaux, Bordeaux) Bound Registers Copies de lettres: Saint-Louis, Afrique: 1852-3, de Marc Maurel à Hilaire Maurel et divers; 1853-4, Marc Maurel en France à Hubert et à Jean-Louis et à divers; 1854-5, à Hilaire Maurel, S. Auxcousteaux et divers Copies de lettres: direction Marc Maurel, 1856-8 de Saint-Louis Ets. Maurel et Prom, Livre Journal, 1861-3 Lettres de Marc Maurel, Bordeaux, décembre 1863 au 23 décembre 1866 Typescripts of Letters Marc Maurel à mes bons amis, Bordeaux, 3 août 1859 Extrait d’une lettre de Monsieur Marc Maurel, 18 août 1859 Marc Maurel à Pinet-Laprade, Bordeaux, 19 août 1859 Private Papers Le Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer (CAOM) holds a small collection of Faidherbe’s private papers purchased in 1995. Fonds Faidherbe 113 APOM 113 APOM 3: Correspondance: letters from Faidherbe to his mother, 1844-52, 20 letters from Algeria, one from London and one from Saint-Louis (note: During a recent check, the three Faidherbe letters written from Algeria in 1844 were no longer part of the file. Although their present location is unknown, they have been replaced by photocopies.) 113 APOM 5: Notes on historical, geographical, and linguistic subjects Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances (titled Feuille Officielle du Sénégal et Dépendances, 1860-4), Saint-Louis [Dakar], 1856-87 Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances, Saint-Louis [Dakar], 1858-1904 L. Faidherbe, Le Sénégal – la France dans l’Afrique Occidentale, Paris, 1889 Secondary J. Schmitz, art. ‘Faidherbe, Louis Léon César’, in F. Pouillon (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, Paris, 2012, 394-5
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A. Coursier, Faidherbe 1818-1889 – Du Sénégal à l’armée du nord, Lille, 1989 L.C. Barrows, ‘L’oeuvre du Général Faidherbe et les débuts de l’Afrique noire française’, Le Mois en Afrique – Etudes Politiques, Economiques et Sociologiques Africaines nos 235-6 (August-September 1985) 120-50; nos 237-8 (OctoberNovember 1985) 130-56; nos 239-40 (December 1985-January 1986) 120-50 L.C. Barrows, ‘Faidherbe (1818-1889)’, in L.H. Gann and P. Duignan (eds), African proconsuls. European governors in Africa, London, 1978, 51-79 G. Hardy, Faidherbe, Paris, 1947 A. Demaison, Faidherbe, Paris, 1932 J.E. Froelicher, Trois colonisateurs – Bugeaud, Faidherbe, Galliéni, Paris, 1903
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Letters and reports Date 1844-89 Original Language French Description Faidherbe’s personal letters Faidherbe’s letters, of varying scope and depth, reflect their author’s welldeveloped powers of observation and his growing interest in and curiosity about the native peoples of Algeria. They indicate that he agreed with the official justifications for the French conquest and, although he might admire certain cultural characteristics of the Muslims of Algeria, he seems not to have questioned the brutality of the conquest. A letter that Faidherbe addressed to his mother illustrates the ambivalence of his thoughts. While he refers to the ‘Arab’ and mostly Muslim population as ‘savages’, he considers the physical characteristics of the Algerian men he encountered as far more pleasing than those of typical peasants and labourers in northern France, portraying the latter as unsophisticated, awkward, deformed, badly dressed – fit to be exhibited in freak shows on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, yet, he ironically observes, such folk are considered ‘civilised’. The ‘most impoverished of Arabs’ provide a welcome contrast: […] with what taste, what majesty, he drapes himself in his rags covered with holes and dust, […] what gravity he reflects in the way he carries himself and in the way he walks, [...] he is conscious of his human dignity, [...] the first improvement that civilisation will impart [to the Arabs] is
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alcoholism which will weaken yet another handsome race – Muḥammad was a very great man, he who shielded one-third of the world from this scourge. (Letter to his mother from Mostaganem in June 1844)
But in regard to the military campaigns that were being conducted as he wrote, he concludes the letter with the following words: You are witnessing a war of extermination, and unfortunately it is impossible to conduct it in any other way; despite many efforts to inspire [among the Arabs] respect for the rights of others, one ends up concluding that for each Arab killed, there will be two fewer Frenchmen assassinated; and we treat them as we would wild animals. (Letter to his mother from Mostaganem in June 1844)
A long postscript on toleration follows, beginning with the acknowledgement that Christians depopulated much of the Americas believing that ‘idolaters did not deserve any pity’. It also evokes well-known religiously inspired massacres and instances of religious intolerance, including the wars of religion in France, struggles between Sunnīs and Shīʿīs in Islam, and between various sects in Protestantism and Catholicism. His conclusion states, bluntly: Poor humanity, as if […] diseases, calamities, misery did not exist, [it] had to invent fanaticism that by itself has devoured more people than all the other causes of destruction. All of this is to say that the Muḥammadan religion is not as black as people have thought. Muḥammad was a perfectly honest man who rescued his compatriots from idolatry in order to make them adopt a higher faith that was better equipped to civilise them. (Letter to his mother from Mostaganem in June 1844)
In another letter to his mother seven years later (dated 22 September 1851) he describes his participation in one of the French campaigns against the Kabyle leader, Bou Baghla (Muhammad al-Amjad bin Abd Almalik). It reveals both the brutality of the campaign and a difficulty Faidherbe faced in employing native Muslim troops (tirailleurs indigènes) within Algeria. Having cornered a number of Kabyle fighters in a ravine, he declared that he had never ‘seen people as paralysed by fear as these poor Kabyles. There was really no merit in killing them; however, it is unfortunately necessary to kill as many as possible. I forced the [Algerian] riflemen to kill all those whom we could catch.’ Faidherbe’s ‘difficulty’ was, that if he had not forced his riflemen to kill the cornered Kabyle fighters, ‘they [would have] content[ed] themselves with seizing the rifles while permitting the men to escape’ (letter to his mother 22 September 1851).
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These letters, along with others in the collection, clearly indicate Faidherbe’s divided feelings about Islam and its practitioners: great sympathy and tolerance for Islamic societies and individuals of note that posed no threat to French rule, but implacable opposition to any resistance. Two sub-themes that would carry over to his approach to the administration of native peoples in Senegal were, first, a strong belief that conversion to Islam by those whom he qualified as ‘pagans’ or ‘fetishists’ was a positive step on the way to civilisation (Faidherbe, ‘Notice sur la colonie du Sénégal et sur les pays qui sont en relation avec elle’, Annuaire du Sénégal 1858, p. 90), and second, strong approval of the anti-alcohol stance of Islam, particularly in Senegal, where he praised the sober Toucouleur marabouts and even in some situations state-building jihadists such as al-Hajj Umar and Maba Diakhou. But he condemned the traditional Wolof and Serer ruling classes and their crown slave-soldiers, the tiedo, for being perpetual drunkards (Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 3 April 1855, no. 148, in Sénégal I 41b; Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 6 January 1860, no. 5; Faidherbe to Maba Diakhou quoted in ‘Note sur Maba’ by Louis Alexandre Flize, Director of Exterior Affairs, in Moniteur du Sénégal 431, 432, 28 June and 5 July 1864). Governor Faidherbe’s correspondence addressed to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies (1855-61) Islam is only one of many subjects covered by the correspondence between Governor Faidherbe and other colonial officials in Senegal and the colonial authorities in Paris. Faidherbe intended much of his reporting both to inform the Minister of the Navy and Colonies of his progress in pacifying the French sphere according to the dictates of the Plan of 1854, and to steer the minister towards approving its extension beyond the confines of the Senegal River valley into Cayor, the Wolof kingdom linking Saint-Louis to Dakar and Gorée, and beyond. Islam is frequently evoked in these reports because the foes of the French as well as their native allies were Muslims of varying degrees of observance. The unexpected clash, starting in December 1854, between French aims in the Senegal River valley and the initial aims of the jihadist leader, al-Hajj Umar, required Faidherbe to develop a Muslim policy that would favour Muslim groups, such as the majority of the native population of SaintLouis who were content to live and even thrive under French rule, while opposing jihadist state-builders like al-Hajj Umar. Ironically, however,
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once colonial troops had forced the latter to transfer his state-building activities eastwards to Kaarta and Ségou, Faidherbe was eager to establish commercial relations with the new empire. As early as the summer of 1855, he had begun to exploit the fear that many of the upriver traditional leaders had of Umar and of the strict Tijānī Islam he imposed to persuade them to agree to a form of French overrule. Faidherbe and the French establishment in Senegal may have exaggerated the threat posed by Umar, for he had seemed willing at first to maintain peaceful relations with the French. However, he expected them to confine their activities to trade and otherwise to conform to the acceptable norms of behaviour of Christian minorities in a Muslim polity – an attitude that Faidherbe viewed as both hostile and contrary to his perception of French sovereign rights in Senegal. After four years of struggle, Faidherbe reported to Prince Jérôme Bonaparte, the newly appointed Minister of Algeria and the Colonies, that France had gained ‘preponderance (rather than domination)’ (‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal’, 1 October 1858, prepared for Prince Jérôme, in Sénégal I 45a) along the 1,000-km seasonally navigable course of the Senegal River from Saint-Louis to Médine in Khasso, near the Félou cataracts. This distinction between ‘predominance’ and ‘domination’, like that between ‘pacification’ and ‘conquest’, reflects Faidherbe’s understanding that there was a clear difference between French efforts to conquer and annex Algeria, eliminating the existing political structures of the territory, and his efforts to pacify Senegal, that is, to impose a rigorous form of indirect rule, French style, rather than the outright conquest of the Senegalese polities. Faidherbe made this distinction clearly in the major summing-up report, ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal’ of 1 October 1858 that he addressed to Prince Jérôme. Despite his claimed preference for predominance and his assertion that French forces had succeeded in pacifying the upper river and in defeating al-Hajj Umar’s forces in every battle in which they had engaged them, Faidherbe nevertheless argued that Umar still posed a serious threat to the French presence in Senegal. As he saw it, Umar’s jihad was at least partly inspired by ‘the uprising in the whole Muslim world, in Asia, in Arabia, and in Turkey’. At this point Faidherbe probably exaggerated the threat posed by Umar in order to coax additional funding from Paris. At the start of his governorship in early 1855, Faidherbe had found himself at war or in a state of extreme dissidence with most of the Mauritanian
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and Senegalese societies bordering the Senegal River. But at the same time, he had to deal with the reality that most of the native population of Saint-Louis was Muslim, including the native soldiers, volunteers and laptots (native sailors who served on the boats of the local French fleet and also fought on land), so he took steps to assure their loyalty and support. Fortunately, only the struggle against Umar’s partisans was truly ideological. The struggle with the Mauritanians was mostly over contested commercial rights, thus, from a French secular point of view, easier to manage. Faidherbe began by displaying tolerance and even sympathy towards the Muslim elite in Saint-Louis, most of whom were linked to the Qādiriyya, a major Muslim brotherhood, but he reacted with implacable force towards any indigenous Muslim residents of Saint-Louis, particularly members of the Tijāniyya, who seemed hostile to France. Early on, he had a number of pro-Umar (probably Tijānī) marabouts expelled from Saint-Louis with the warning that they would be executed if they attempted to return. He then took measures to have the marabout schools in Saint-Louis and their teaching marabouts licensed and required to send their pupils to a lay evening school that he created so that they could learn French and arithmetic. As demonstrated in a report dated 11 April 1855 (in CAOM: Sénégal I 41b), which Faidherbe addressed to the Minister of the Navy, he reacted forcefully to actions that Umar had taken in the upper river (Galam) with respect to the boycotts and the pillaging that the latter had ordered in autumn 1854 against Saint-Louis traders and their agents. Suggesting that there was some link between Umar’s jihad and British efforts to channel the trade of the upper Senegal and Futa Jallon regions away from the French sphere to Gambia and Sierra Leone, he claimed that al-Hajj Umar had lived in Sierra Leone. He based this claim on what he knew about trade links between Dingiray, the settlement northeast of Timbo, in Futa Jallon, from which Umar had launched his jihad, and Freetown. He went on to declare: I shall have spent a part of my life in Algeria and in Senegal combatting these intriguers who go to Mecca to receive their marching orders, frequently at our expense [referring to French subsidies for Algerians going on the pilgrimage]. Were this city to be destroyed, Islam would rapidly lose the unity from which it derives the strength that enables it, no matter what we do to oppose it, to invade all the black [societies] in Africa. Many people believe that if Al-Hajj is successful in the upper river and moves close to Saint-Louis, half of the inhabitants of the town will join him.
The evocation of a link between Umar’s jihad and British attempts to channel trade from the upper Senegal-Niger region to Gambia and Sierra
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Leone was no doubt intended as an extra stimulus for Paris to approve aggressive action against Umar, for the French naval/colonial authorities and the Bordeaux commercial houses with links to Senegal were very concerned about British competition. But it is also true that in 1854 and 1855 Umar had many partisans in Saint-Louis. At the same time, there was also a strong anti-Muslim current in Saint-Louis among the mostly Roman Catholic European and métis (Eur-African) population. They would be fired up by publication of De la Sénégambie française (Paris, 1855) by Frédéric Carrère, the head of the colonial judicial service in Saint-Louis, and Paul Holle, a prominent métis trader and post commandant. Carrère was particularly hostile to Islam, making little distinction between the relatively pro-French Muslim establishment in Saint-Louis headed by the French-recognised tamsir or head of the Muslim community, Hamat Ndiaye Anne, and the partisans of al-Hajj Umar. The authors claimed that Islam was suffocating Saint-Louis and its Christian community. If the colonial government continued to honour marabouts (implying Hamat Ndiaye) and permitted the local Frenchauthorised and French-built mosque to remain standing, Christianity in Senegal would make no progress. Religious freedom, they argued, was meaningless in a primitive native society whose members only respected force (De la Sénégambie française, p. 360). Faidherbe reacted very negatively to the anti-Muslim passages in the book that he viewed as derogatory if not insulting to the loyal Muslim employees of the colonial establishment. In a message to the Minister of the Navy dated 6 April 1856 (CAOM: Sénégal I 41b), he praised the laptots of Saint-Louis: ‘Nobody is more worthy of wearing the Military Medal than those excellent laptots who serve on the boats of the government fleet. They spend their lives working for us and take risks on a daily basis. As their courage is unlimited, it is fair to say that without their support, we might as well give up Senegal.’ He continued his defence of the Muslim loyalists in Saint-Louis in a ‘Report on the Colony of Senegal’ dated 5 August 1856 (CAOM: Sénégal I 43a), which he addressed to the Minister of the Navy, Admiral FerdinandAlphonse Hamelin, while on leave in France. Defending Hamat N’Diaye who had been awarded membership of the Légion d’Honeur, Faidherbe pointed out that over the last twenty years in Senegal, not a single shot has been fired without Hamat being in his place, the most dangerous place, beside the governor. […] It is not for the personal pleasure of Hamat that governors have sought out the services that he provides but because they wish to benefit from his influence and his experience which he has always offered loyally to us.
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But Faidherbe adds, ‘By reducing [the power of the Mauritanians] and halting the progress of al Hajj’s [movement], I have significantly damaged the prestige of Islam among the Blacks’. The negative comments made in De la Sénégambie française, he adds, could only set back the efforts of the French administration to manage Islamic affairs. Seizing the occasion offered by publication of the book, Faidherbe argued that the French authorities should offer compensation and proof of its appreciation for the efforts of the loyal Muslims by approving the establishment of a Muslim tribunal, which the Muslim community had been requesting since 1842. The Muslim tribunal was set up by an Imperial Decree of 20 May 1857. The magistrate (qāḍī) in charge of it, Bou el Mogdad, another leader of the Muslim community in Saint-Louis, would be as highly praised by Faidherbe as Hamat N’Diaye Anne and was sent on an exploration mission that was combined with an official sponsorship that enabled him to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Faidherbe’s approach to Senegalese Muslims continued to reflect ambivalence. In the same report of 5 August 1856, he indicated that, in order to manage the hinterland, ‘it was necessary always to be in a state of war but not in a state of hostilities’. Faidherbe’s actions suggest that, for him, all African polities situated within the French sphere in Senegambia should be defeated by French forces at least once or rescued from aggressive neighbours, so that in either case their leaders would understand that they owed their continued independent and presumably peaceful existence to France. This approach to pacification worked some of the time, but certainly not in all cases. Following Faidherbe’s two resignations from the governorship of Senegal in 1861 and 1865, Fouta Toro and Cayor, both supposedly pacified areas, rebelled. Faidherbe’s method of colonial rule clearly favoured pacification over conquest, and ‘predominance’ over ‘domination’, and was personal to him. It depended for its success upon his presence in Senegal as governor. What seems to prove this point is the way Senegal was described 11 years after Faidherbe’s final departure in 1865. In the instructions the Minister of the Navy and Colonies penned for newly appointed Governor LouisAlexandre Brière de l’Isle, he described Senegal as ‘an aggregate of commercial establishments’ (Ndiaye, ‘La colonie du Sénégal’, p. 463), about what it was in 1852 when Faidherbe arrived. As indicated above, Faidherbe stressed the threats posed by al-Hajj Umar and ‘fanatical’ Islam in general in his 1 October 1858 ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal’. He succeeded in persuading Prince Jérôme to agree to a number of requests, particularly enhanced funding for the Senegalese
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budget, the reattachment of Gorée and its Dependencies as far south as Sierra Leone to the administration of Senegal, and permission to intervene in Cayor, the independent Wolof kingdom linking Saint-Louis to Dakar and Gorée. His plea for additional funding evoked the threat of holy war in commercial rather than military terms: I have been able to resist everything up until now. On the one hand, however, financial difficulties are holding us back and on the other hand holy war is still threatening us very seriously, not necessarily in terms of the security of our persons, our posts, and our goods, but in terms of the future of our trading relations. Given that it might become impossible for me to fulfil my responsibilities, I am requesting that the government make a serious effort to assist the colony [financially].
As a result, Faidherbe received some of the funding that he had requested, the reintegration of Gorée and its Dependencies into the administration of Senegal, and eventually permission to ‘reorganise’ (invade) Cayor. But before beginning the Cayor venture, Faidherbe requested the short-term loan of some Algerian riflemen (tirailleurs indigènes d’Algérie or turcos) (Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 13 April 1860, in CAOM: Senegal I 46a), justifying his request in the following terms: ‘My principal motive is the substantial moral effect that the sight of Arabs who are submitted to France and serving in a French regiment will have not only on the local population but on the whole of the Western Sudan.’ Altogether, these documents, drawn from official archives, demonstrate Faidherbe’s willingness to evoke the threat of militant Islam to obtain enhanced support from Paris. They also demonstrate his tolerance and even support for what one might call ‘conforming Islam’, that is, religious practice that did not threaten the French position in Senegal and might even support it. He did not hesitate to defend the loyal Muslim establishment in Saint-Louis against detractors among the Christian population. His use of Muslim troops fighting voluntarily for France in a Muslim society could be construed, he hoped, as proof that Muslims who submitted to French rule might be satisfied with it. Official media: The Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances and the Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances During his first governorship, Faidherbe founded two official periodical publications. The first of these, the Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances, dating from 16 March 1856, was a weekly periodical appearing each
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Tuesday. During the first four years of its existence, its scope expanded well beyond the publication of administrative notices and local news. It included articles on the history and ethnography of Senegal as well as reprints on similar subjects from Algerian and French publications. Its references to Islam were oblique, appearing in numbers of articles about the indigenous peoples of Senegal and Algeria and their relations with the French authorities. In 1860, because of lack of staff to produce the Moniteur, Faidherbe reduced it to a strictly administrative bulletin, renaming it Feuille Officielle du Sénégal et Dépendances, a title that it would retain through the short governorship (1861-3) of Captain Jean-Bernard Jauréguiberry. In 1864, Faidherbe gave the publication back its original title and scope. The Moniteur went into decline following the death of Governor PinetLaprade in 1869, and ceased publication in 1887. Most of what was written in the Moniteur was in French, though certain administrative notices considered to be important for the non-European population of SaintLouis were bilingual (French and Arabic). One example is a notice that appeared in the 22 July 1856 issue, reminding the Muslim population that they must register births and deaths with the Saint-Louis civil registry or face prosecution. News items viewed as having propaganda value were also bilingual, including a notice regarding French victories over the forces of al-Hajj Umar that appeared in the issue of the Moniteur of 12 July 1859 no. 172, pp. 123-5. Faidherbe was quite clear that he wanted the Moniteur to be written in French as much as possible, following an aim of his educational policy to discourage the use of Arabic. He considered that, for the Wolof and Poular speakers of Saint-Louis and the nearby Wolof kingdoms, Arabic was as much a foreign language as French, but it was making headway because of Islamisation. As he wrote to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies in December 1855, ‘[…] it would be infinitely preferable that the flyer or the newspaper be translated by those who know French rather than by those who know Arabic because we must oppose the latter’ (CAOM: Sénégal I 41b 25 December 1855, no. 518). Of particular interest in the Moniteur are speeches that Faidherbe delivered at the opening and end-of-term ceremonies in various French schools in Saint-Louis. In several of these speeches, he stressed the compatibility of Islam and French secular learning, in particular mastery of French, as in the speech that he delivered at the opening of the Lay School on 31 March 1857, reproduced in the Moniteur of 7 April 1857.
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What does learning a language have to do with the practice of a religion? One can know how to speak French, know elementary arithmetic, the system of weights and measures, and practise any religion. The Arabs of Algeria, who are very good Muslims, educate themselves in our schools; moreover, commentators of the Qur’an offer proof that studying languages is not forbidden to Muslims.
In a speech quoted in the Moniteur of 17 July 1860 that Faidherbe delivered on 14 July at the end-of-term celebration for the Lay School and the Hostage School (Ecole des Otages), he stressed that France was seeking to educate the [Senegalese] population so as to better assimilate it. […] For the most part [he added] you received the religion of the Arabs from your fathers […] something that in your interest we regret even though we do not raise any objections. […] Nevertheless, you are not obliged to imitate the [Mauritanian] Arabs so far as their customs, their mores, their ignorance, their vices, their lack of cleanliness, their backward ideas […] are concerned. […] Your tastes are more directed towards culture and commerce, the love of family, luxurious clothing, games, and dancing—these are your needs. So, it is not from the Mauritanians that you should seek models and intellectual inspiration, but from us, we who love peace, order, we who are sedentary, producers, merchants, liking well-being, pleasure, and luxury as you do.[…] As you know, there is no exclusion on account of colour or of caste among us, and anybody can achieve anything if he meets the conditions required of everybody.
Urging his audience to take advantage of the educational and career possibilities that were being offered, he exclaimed, ‘Let us not have the Wolofs, the Peuls, the Mandinkas, the Sarracolés – superior races inhabiting the Soudan – be outdistanced by the Bushmen of the Coast’ (referring to the re-captives who were being educated by British missionaries in Sierra Leone). So, in Faidherbe’s mind, French secular education could trump what he believed were the bad influences of Islam, particularly jihadist Islam. But Faidherbe also realised that French secular education was important for the African residents of Saint-Louis because of the assimilationist tradition that had existed there for many years. The French Civil Code had been extended to Senegal, specifically to the residents of Saint-Louis and Gorée, in 1830. The 1848 Revolution in France had given the residents of Saint-Louis and Gorée the right to elect a deputy to the French parliament, a right suspended in 1851 but reinstated in 1871. Traditionally, both SaintLouis and Gorée had elected mayors, the right to vote being accorded to
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any free man who had resided in either of the two towns for five years. Yet even while he was promoting the usefulness of the French language and instruction in French and arithmetic and suggesting assimilation, Faidherbe also believed that, in the un-annexed hinterland, Islam was a step upwards on the ladder of civilisation, as he would state in a rather backhanded way in the article that he published in the first (1858) volume of the Annuaire du Sénégal. The Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances, the other official publication that Faidherbe created, was an almanac published annually, beginning in 1858 and continuing until 1904. Very typical for the period, it contained diverse useful bits of information including lists of government officials and other personages in France, Senegal, Algeria and elsewhere, military promotions, obituaries, and the like. During Faidherbe’s two governorships, and that of Pinet-Laprade (1865-9) that followed, it also published accounts of military campaigns in Senegal and scholarly articles on Senegalese subjects. The first such article by Faidherbe himself, ‘Notice sur la Colonie du Sénégal et sur les pays qui sont en relation avec elle’, appeared in the 1858 issue and includes the following remark about the non-Muslim or lax-Muslim peoples inhabiting the upper Senegal region, upon whom al-Hajj Umar had declared jihad: As it seems that these peoples are not attracted by our civilisation, the next best alternative for them is to adopt the half-civilisation of the Qur’an, it being better for them than continuing to be savages, but only on the condition that they consent to live with us in peace. The [partisans of al-Hajj Umar] are convinced of their eventual success because for the [pagans] they represent progress (p. 90).
Personal memoir: Le Sénégal. La France dans l’Afrique occidentale (1889) Faidherbe’s Le Sénégal, his last publication, 516 pages long, is considered his magnum opus even though it was compiled from a broad range of his earlier writings. Given the very poor state of Faidherbe’s health at the time of publication and his reliance on the assistance of his son-in-law, Brosselard-Faidherbe, and his aide, Captain J. Ancelle, in producing it, it is not clear how much of the book Faidherbe wrote himself. Much of it consists of republished military annals going back to a long chapter, ‘Journal des opérations de guerre au Sénégal suivi des traités de paix passés avec les divers états indigènes et qui réglent aujourd’hui nos relations avec
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elles’, published in the Annuaire du Sénégal in 1861. The book also includes numerous anecdotes and personal reminiscences reflecting Faidherbe’s experiences in Senegal and Algeria and his impressions of the indigenous peoples. Here again, one can observe Faidherbe’s ambiguity regarding Islam and even, at this point, regarding al-Hajj Umar himself. Although he had written and spoken very harshly about Umar when, as governor, he was locked in combat with the Umarian movement, his reflections appeared to be softer, almost philosophical, when he and his associates put the finishing touches to this last book. The introduction to the section describing the rise of Umar’s movement includes what could be interpreted both as endorsement of and praise for a vanquished foe: Civilisation has only made great progress in the world as the result of the formation of vast empires by conquerors. While alive, these persons are veritable scourges, but soon after [they have passed away] the fortuitous results of their passage through life become apparent among the ruins that they have amassed. They will have created means of communication among men that did not exist in the acephalous states in which savage societies exist, means by which material and intellectual exchanges can take place, much to the benefit of progress (p. 158).
But, as Faidherbe continues: Shayk al-Hajj Umar, a Senegalese marabout, made an immense effort in the western Sudan to marshal all the strength of fanatical Islam in an effort to destroy the negro states that were still pagan and to throw the Europeans on the coast into the sea. In this titanic struggle, he had as adversary and victor a governor of Senegal (p. 159).
Various anecdotes that appear in the book include observations about characteristics of Islamic society in Senegal and Algeria. One passage in particular describes Faidherbe’s reaction to difficulties in applying the senatus-consulte of 14 July 1865 relative to the naturalisation of Muslim subjects in Algeria (pp. 89-94). Other than the ideological and theological reality that the religious leaders of the Muslim population considered acceptance of the French Civil Code to be tantamount to apostasy, there was the practical problem of polygamy. So Faidherbe in his capacity as commandant of the Military Subdivision of Bône (Annaba) in Algeria (1867-70), made a study of a hundred heads of family in the four cercles comprising the subdivision. Unlike many French administrators and settlers in Algeria, who considered that, because of polygamy and the ease with which wives could be repudiated, the family, as they understood it, did not exist among Muslims, Faidherbe demonstrated that polygamous
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families were stable. He concluded that to require a respectable and responsible head of family to repudiate all but one of his wives in order to obtain French naturalisation would be ‘highly immoral […], our aim being to strengthen the family and we begin by disorganising it’ (p. 92). Faidherbe’s approach to the assimilation of the Algerian Muslim family into French civil society was the following: It seems to us that the proper way to strengthen the family would be […] to forbid both monogamously and polygamously married men to repudiate their wives and thus [over time] to achieve a state of monogamy through the natural elimination of plural wives. That way, we would not destabilise any families, cause any wives to be driven out of their homes, or create any orphans. […] We would be committing a serious injustice and we would be very cruel toward women and children if we were only willing to grant the status and the rights of [French] citizens to the natives on the condition that they reduce their families to one wife and expel the others (p. 93).
While this illustrates the tolerant side of Faidherbe’s attitude towards Islamic society, it also reveals that he would use the force of law to prevent repudiations. He probably would have favoured legislation to outlaw polygamy. He does not state clearly here whether, over an interim period, he would have favoured the automatic accession to full naturalisation of polygamous men judged ‘respectable’ along with their wives and children. Faidherbe’s correspondence, starting with that with his mother, reveals a tolerance for the brutality of colonial conquest, yet it also clearly shows that he recognised the value of Islamic civilisation, particularly those aspects that might serve as the first step towards advanced civilisation for tribal societies in tropical Africa, or to permit co-existence, if not integration into a French-ruled secular society. Possibly his apparent tolerance for the brutality of conquest as expressed in his letters to his mother from Algeria came about because he did not question the French image of Algeria as a settler colony, even if, as he did in at least one case, he might refer to the incoming settlers as good-for-nothings (chenapans) (Faidherbe to his mother, Mostaganem, June 1844). Also, he was young, ambitious, and a participant in the conquest. But he was writing informally to his mother, not officially. Some 30 years later, well after the conquest period in northern Algeria had ended, Faidherbe concluded that the Muslim population of Algeria should be assimilated to France, but he apparently failed to find a workable way around the incompatibility of sharīʿa law and the Civil Code of France, not to mention the opposition of the settler population to the assimilation of the Muslim population of Algeria.
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As far as Senegal was concerned, he understood from the moment of his arrival that Senegambia and the Sudan would never be European settler colonies and that any wealth they might generate for France could only come from the labour of the native peoples, who therefore needed to be nurtured. Thus, he thought of ways to make French rule compatible with the aspirations of the subject populations, most of them Muslim, particularly the elites in the colonial capital, finding common ground in the French language and secularism. The task was facilitated for him because he himself was highly secular and had no purely religious objections to Islam. Significance Faidherbe bequeathed to his successors who constructed French West Africa an attitude of tolerance and accommodation to forms of Islam that were peaceful and compliant, and to Muslims who were willing to work productively within the colonial economy. At the same time, however, and while he held power, he never failed to use brute force against any Muslim dissidence that threatened French control. He bequeathed to his successors both tolerance of Islam and willingness to use brute force against it. Publications Archives Aix-en-Provence, CAOM – Fonds Faidherbe Faidherbe’s letter to his mother from Mostaganem, Algeria, June 1844 Faidherbe’s letter to his mother from Bou Saada, Algeria, 22 September 1851 Official Archives (CAOM), Aix en Provence CAOM: Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 3 April 1855, no. 148 CAOM: Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 11 April 1855, no. 154 CAOM: Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 25 December 1855, no. 158 CAOM: Sénégal I 41b, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 6 April 1856, no. 141 CAOM: Sénégal I 43a, ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal par le gouverneur Faidherbe, 5 août 1856’ CAOM: Sénégal I 45a, ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal par le gouverneur L. Faidherbe, 1 Octobre 1858’ CAOM: Sénégal I 46a, Faidherbe to the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, 13 April 1860 (confidential)
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Works by Faidherbe L. Faidherbe, ‘Les Berbères et les arabes des bords du Sénégal’, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie de Paris 7 (February 1854) 89-112; cb34424377d (digitised version available through BNF) L. Faidherbe, ‘Notice sur la colonie du Sénégal et sur les pays qui sont en relation avec elle’, Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances (1858) 49-122 Notice regarding French victories over the forces of al-Hajj Umar Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances 172 (12 July 1859) 123-5 ‘Report of speech by L. Faidherbe given in Saint-Louis’, 14 July 1860, Feuille Officielle du Sénégal et Dépendances [Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances] (17 July 1860) 65-7; 008956008 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) L. Faidherbe, ‘Journal des opérations de guerre au Sénégal de 1854 à 1861 suivi des traités de paix passés avec les divers états indigènes et qui réglent aujourd’hui nos relations avec elles’, Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances (1861) 117-285; cb32697753r (digitised version available through BNF) Letter from Faidhberbe to Maba Diakhou, in ‘Note sur Maba’, by Louis Alexandre Flize, Director of Exterior Affairs, in Moniteur du Sénégal 431-2 (28 June and 9 July 1864) L. Faidherbe, Le Sénégal. La France dans l’Afrique occidentale, Paris, 1889; cb304158282 (digitised version available through BNF) Studies T. M’Bayo, Muslim interpreters in colonial Senegal, 1850-1920. Mediations of knowledge and power in the lower and middle Senegal River valley, Lanham MD, 2016 L.C. Barrows, ‘Bambuk gold. General Faidherbe’s Senegalese chimera’, in A. Varnava (ed.), Imperial expectations and realities. El Dorados, utopias, and dystopias, Manchester, 2015, 66-88 H. Jones, The métis of Senegal. Urban life and politics in French West Africa, Bloomington IN, 2013 B. Singer and J.W. Langdon, Cultured force. Makers and defenders of the French colonial empire, Madison WI, 2004 D. Robinson, Paths of accommodation. Muslim societies and French colonial authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920, Athens OH, 2000 A. Pondopoulo, ‘La construction de l’altérité ethnique peule dans l‘oeuvre de Faidherbe’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 36/143 (1996) 421-41
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A. Pondopoulo, ‘L’image des peul dans l’oeuvre du général Faidherbe’, History in Africa 23 (1996) 279-99 Y.-J. Saint-Martin, Le Sénégal sous le second empire. Naissance d’un empire colonial (1850-1871), Paris, 1989 D. Robinson, The holy war of Umar Tal. The Western Sudan in the midnineteenth century, Oxford, 1985 L.C. Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe, the Maurel and Prom Company, and French expansion in Senegal’, Los Angeles, 1974 (PhD Diss. University of California, Los Angeles) L.C. Barrows, ‘The merchants and general Faidherbe. Aspects of French expansion in Senegal in the 1850’s’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer 61/223 (1974) 236-83 R. Pasquier, ‘L’influence de l’expérience algérienne sur la politique de la France au Sénégal (1842-1869)’, in H. Deschamps (ed.), Perspectives nouvelles sur le passé de l’Afrique noire et de Madagascar. Mélanges offerts à Hubert Deschamps, Paris, 1974, 263-84 A.S. Kanya-Forstner, The conquest of the western Sudan. A study in French military imperialism, Cambridge, 1969 F. Ndiaye, ‘La colonie du Sénégal au temps de Brière de l’Isle (18761881)’, Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, 30/B2 (1968) 463-514 F. Carrère and P. Holle, De la Sénégambie française, Paris, 1855 Leland C. Barrows
Arthur Rimbaud Date of Birth 20 October 1854 Place of Birth Charleville, France Date of Death 10 November 1891 Place of Death Marseille
Biography
Best known as a poet and writer, Arthur Rimbaud also spent time as a trader in Aden, Zaylaʿ, Tağūra, Harär and Šäwa. During his adolescence, he was an outstanding poet on the Paris literary scene. His first poem, ‘Les étrennes des orphelins’ (‘The orphans’ New Year’s gift’), was published in early 1870, when he was only 15 years old. In 1875, he ceased writing poetry and instead began his travels. After a brief stay in Alexandria (1878), he moved to Cyprus, and from there returned home to his family in France. In 1880, he travelled to Alexandria, from there to Cyprus and Aden, and finally arrived in Harär in north-east Ethiopia, where he stayed intermittently for several lengthy periods trading in coffee, rubber, ivory and weapons. Up to 1884, he travelled from time to time among the ʿAfar, Somali and Oromo peoples, who lived in and near Harär. He learnt Arabic, Oromo and Amharic, and also gained some knowledge of the Qur’an. In his free time, he would teach local boys how to read (Eldon, ‘Rimbaud in Harar’, p. 59). His main commercial activities included importing arms and exporting coffee, gum and hides (some foreign traders in Harär claimed that he was also involved with the slave trade, though there is no definitive proof of this), and he was also a pioneering photographer, though his photographs are mostly of low quality. Rimbaud was well accepted within the local Muslim Haräri societies. He had various relationships with men and women, some of whom are mentioned in his writings. It seems that his greatest love was Ĝāmi Wadaʿī, a Harärian boy who was his manservant from 1883 to 1890. On his deathbed, he described Harär and especially his beloved manservant at great length to his sister Isabelle (‘Letter from Isabelle Rimbaud to her mother’, Marseille, 25 October 1891, in Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, p. 803), and one of his last requests to his sister was to send Ĝāmi a sum of money to serve him for an ‘exalted purpose’ (Nicholl, Somebody else, pp. 167-8). In 1884, Rimbaud married a Šäwan or Argobba wife, with whom he left for Aden. As a result of an earlier liaison, he had contracted syphilis and,
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as if bad health were not enough, he also failed in his business dealings, and his get-rich-quick hopes faded after a falling-out with his employer (Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, p. 355). When his health took a turn for the worse he returned to France, where he died of cancer at the age of 37.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary A. Bardey, Barr-adjam. Souvenir d’Afrique orientale, 1880-1887, Paris, 1981 A. Rimbaud, Lettres du Harar, Paris, 2001 A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, Paris, 2009 Secondary A. Ben-Dror, ‘Arthur Rimbaud in Harär. Images, reality, memory’, Northeast African Studies 14 (2014) 159-82 P. Brunel, art. ‘Rimbaud, Arthur’, in F. Pouillon (ed.), Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, Paris, 20122, 877-8 W. Smidt, art. ‘Rimbaud, Arthur’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Wiesbaden, 2010, vol. 4, 392b-3a J.L. Steinmetz, Arthur Rimbaud. Une question de présence, Paris, 2004 C. Nicholl, Somebody else. Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91, Chicago IL, 1999 E. Foucher, ‘Harar au temps d’Arthur Rimbaud, 1880-1891’, in T. Beyene (ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International conference of Ethiopian studies, Addis Ababa, 1988, vol. 1, 367-73 A. Borer, Rimbaud en Abyssinie, Paris, 1984 E. Foucher, ‘Une page de l’histoire de Harar, ou Arthur Rimbaud sous l’administration égyptienne’, Quaderni di Stadi Etiopicu 5 (Asmara, 1984) 479-85 E. Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, London, 1961 R. Eldon, ‘Rimbaud in Harar’, Ethiopia Observer 2/2 (March 1958) 59-62 (Special issue on Harar)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Arthur Rimbaud’s letters from Harär and its surroundings Date 1868-91 Original Language French Description When Rimbaud returned to Harär from Aden in 1883, the situation in the city had changed. The Turco-Egyptian occupation army had progressively
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weakened, and the fears that the Egyptians had once instilled in the hearts of the Oromo and Somalis between Harär and the Somali coast were gradually being eroded. Harär became an enclave of a weakened TurcoEgyptian regime. A combination of the British occupation of Egypt during September 1882, the Mahdist revolt that spread through Sudan in 1883, and British concerns as to its effect on the Somalis in the area between Berbera and Zeila, spurred Britain to remove the Egyptian army from Sudan and the coast of Somalia. An important actor who entered the colonial fray was Mǝnilǝk, king of Šäwa. He was well aware of Harär’s strategic and economic importance and aspired to take control of the town after the withdrawal of the Turco-Egyptian army. Thus, in the summer of 1883, Mǝnilǝk’s armies set out for Harär (see R.A. Caulk, ‘The occupation of Harar: January 1887’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 9 [1971] 1-20). Drawing on his wanderings in the hinterland of Harär, Rimbaud wrote for the Société de Géographie a detailed report from the Ogaden desert in 1883 that is considered the earliest written account of the region. In addition, he composed shorter reports and letters concerning his daily life in Harär and his journeys. His letters contain details about trade, local living patterns of the people of Harär and surrounding populations, local notables, European travellers, and traders. Rimbaud gave voice to his sense of the ‘crusader’ and ‘white man’ who shoulders the burden of a ‘civilising mission’ in Harär: these stupid black people expose themselves to the risk of tuberculosis when they stand naked in the torrential rain. Often, I return home almost naked, having given one of them my outer clothing. You try to improve their difficult lives, but all they want is to take advantage, and their laziness, treacherousness and stupidity is vexing. (‘Letter from Harär’, 25 February 1890, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 726-7)
He further expressed opinions as a French patriot, defending his country’s imperialist interests and lashing out at the actions of its British rivals (‘Letter from Aden’, 30 December 1884, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 554-6). Yet Rimbaud’s writings also contain expressions of compassion and sympathy towards the local people, and he rails against European expressions of superiority over them. He emphasises that the people of Harär are no more animalistic, crooks and scoundrels than the whites in the countries that stake a claim to civilisation. They are no different from any other race. Aside from specific cases, they display loyalty and gratitude. It all depends on the manner in which they are treated. (‘Letter from Aden’, 25 February 1899, in Œuvres complètes, p. 727)
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During his first year in Harär, Rimbaud mostly wrote about his exhaustion, the cold nights and the profound boredom and loneliness that marked his life, as well as his desire to escape from the town as quickly as possible (‘Letter from Harar’, 25 May 1881, in Lettres du Harar, pp. 19-20). While merchants and missionaries saw the Turco-Egyptians as cordial hosts trying to make the Europeans’ stay in the city pleasant by serving them meals and playing ‘European-style’ music, Rimbaud scorned the Egyptians, calling them ‘a bunch of curs and thieves’ (‘Letter from Harar’, 15 February 1881, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 488-90). His statements about them were in line with his blunt writing style. One can also assume that the syphilis he contracted in the summer of 1881 (only the Egyptian doctor who treated him had medication that could ease his symptoms) contributed to his anger at the town’s rulers. He did not fully recover, and his disease kept him isolated from his surroundings. During this period, Rimbaud’s writing was indicative of depression and bleakness. In May 1883, in reply to his mother, who had written to him about recent political developments in Europe, he writes: ‘If only you knew how far removed I am from it right now. Over the past two years I have not read a newspaper. I’m like the Muslims – I know no more than that the events occurred.’ In the same letter Rimbaud also writes about his fear of remaining lonely and without family; about his wanderlust; and about his life among ‘other races’ and the various languages he learned from them (‘Letter from Harar’, 6 May 1883, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 5267). His comment about Muslims, who were ‘oblivious’ to their surroundings, can be seen not only in a moral context but also as an expression of his abrasive, cutting style. Despite his bluntness about the Egyptians and his fellow merchants, Rimbaud showed empathy and compassion for Haräris and for the Muslims in the town’s surroundings, describing them in positive terms. For example, he wrote of the hierarchy among the Somali tribes in the Ogaden Desert, and referred to one of their leaders as ‘my friend’. As opposed to the one-dimensional view of ‘the Muslims’ shared by the European merchants and the Capuchin missionaries, Rimbaud distinguished between Somali and Egyptian Muslims. He described in detail the tribal structure in Ogaden and the power relations between the tribal chiefs, and noted explicitly that, even though they were Muslim, they still differed from the Egyptians (‘Rapport sur l’Ogadine’, Harar, 10 December 1883, in Œuvres complètes, pp. 537-42).
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Significance Rimbaud’s writing differed from that of most European travellers in its ability to observe the environment and differentiate between occupiers and occupied, in its depictions of Islam and Muslims, and in its intimate, personal style. Rimbaud’s Ogaden report has been widely discussed because it is the only systematic description of the Somali tribes in the area written by a European traveller at that time. In his ‘Rapport sur l’Ogadine’ Rimbaud laid down important scientific groundwork for later researchers – Philipp Paulitschke, Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, and Jules Borelli – who studied Harär and its surroundings in the second half of the 1880s (Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, p. 358). In general terms, his ‘Rapport sur l’Ogadine’ is also important for its unorthodox style, contents and approach to the tribal Muslim and Ethiopian Christian ‘other’. Rimbaud described groups of locals, for the most part without revealing any opinions. He distinguished between various groups of Muslims, analysed the relations between the Somalis and the ʿAfar and the Turco-Egyptian rulers of Harär, and described the conquests of Mǝnilǝk in the Muslim populated areas of the southern Ethiopian highlands. Such descriptions were absent from the writings of his European contemporaries in the area. It needs to be said that the Rimbaud of Harär does not correlate with the typical pattern of Edward Said’s Orientalist. On the one hand, the complexity of Rimbaud’s character, his varied forms of behaviour, his conceptions of the Orient and the Occident, and his writings from Harär contribute to the criticism of Said’s comprehensive and literal view of Orientalism (for the critical discourse on Said’s conceptions, see N. Harrison, ‘A roomy place full of possibilities. Said’s Orientalism and the literary’, in R. Ghosh (ed.), Edward Said and the literary, social and political world, New York, 2009, pp. 3-18; W.D. Hart, Edward Said and the religious effects of culture, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 62-87). On the other hand, it needs to be emphasised that Rimbaud was no humanist, missionary or scientific observer. He was among the Europeans who came to Africa to amass wealth by taking advantage of the colonial balance of power established in Harär by the Egyptian and Ethiopian occupiers in the 1880s. The omission of this historical context from the academic literature on Rimbaud obfuscates the real reason behind his arrival there. Any discussion of the man and his writing should be part and parcel of the academic study of Orientalist and colonialist discourse.
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Publications Rimbaud’s letters have been published in many editions. Those listed here are the most complete collections. A. Rimbaud, ‘Le Bosphore égyptien’, 25 and 27 August 1887, in J.-M. Carré (ed.), Lettres de la vie littéraire d’Arthur Rimbaud (1870-1875), Paris, 1931, pp. 190-216, repr. 1950, 1991 A. Rimbaud, ed. J.-M. Carré, Cartas de la vida literaria de Arthur Rimbaud (1870-1875), Buenos Aires, 1945 (Spanish trans.) A. Rimbaud, Lettres du Harar, Paris, 2001 A. Rimbaud, Rimbaud. Complete works, selected letters. A bilingual edition, trans. W. Fowlie, ed. S. Whidden, Chicago IL, 2005 , repr. 2010, 2021 (English trans. includes many of the letters cited) A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Guyaux and A. Cervoni, Paris, 2009 A. Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Guyaux and A. Cervoni, Paris, revd ed. 2013, repr. 2016 Studies Nicholl, Somebody else Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud Eldon, ‘Rimbaud in Harar’ Avishai Ben-Dror
ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī l-Mundhirī Date of Birth About 1866 Place of Birth Zanzibar Date of Death 9 January 1925 Place of Death Zanzibar
Biography
ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Mundhirī came from a family of Ibāḍī scholars who had settled in East Africa. He was the son of the chief Ibāḍī qāḍī in Zanzibar, Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Mundhirī (d. 1869), who was succeeded by his brother, ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAlī (d. 1888). Their cousin, Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān ibn Muḥammad al-Mundhirī (1813-1914), was also an important qāḍī. ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad became a qāḍī during the reign of Sayyid Ḥamūd ibn Muḥammad (r. 1896-1902), and continued in this position during the reigns of Sayyid ʿAlī ibn Ḥamūd (r. 1902-11) and Khalīfa ibn Ḥārib (1911-60), until his death in 1925. He was a member of the advisory board on religious education in 1923 (Bang, Sufis and scholars, pp. 178-9; Loimeier, Social skills, pp. 300-1). ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad wrote a number of works: Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā (1891), a rebuttal of the 9th-century apology of al-Kindī; Ikhtiṣār al-adyān li-taʿlīm al-ṣibyān (1896), a short textbook on religious doctrine and practice; Nahj al-ḥaqāʾiq, an abridgement and simplification of Kitāb al-istiqāma by Abū Saʿīd Muḥammad al-Kudamī (10th century); Al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (1899), a short work explaining the differences between Ibāḍism and Sunnism and why Ibāḍism is the true form of Islam; and Nūr al-tawḥīd (1900), on doctrine.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION A.H. al-Mundhirī, Jawāb al-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya, ed. Sulṭān ibn Mubārak al-Shaybānī, Muscat, 2012 N.A. Al Riyami, Zanzibar personalities & events (1828-1972), trans. Ali Rashid al Abri, Beirut, 2012 R. Loimeier, Between social skills and marketable skills. The politics of Islamic education in 20th century Zanzibar, Leiden, 2009 A.K. Bang, Sufis and scholars of the sea. Family networks in East Africa, 1860-1925, London, 2003
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R.S. O’Fahey and K.S. Vikør, ‘A Zanzibari waqf of books. The library of the Mundhirī family’, Sudanic Africa 7 (1996) 5-23 A.Ḥ. al-Khalīlī, ‘Al-ʿUmāniyyūn wa-āthāruhum fī l-jawānib al-ʿilmiyya wa-lmaʿrifiyya bi-sharq Ifrīqiyā’, in Faʿʿāliyyāt wa-munāqashāt, ḥaṣād anshiṭat al-muntadā li-ʿāmm 1991-1992, Muscat, 1993, 177-92
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣāra ‘Treatise in rebuttal of the Christians’ Date 2 May 1891 Original Language Arabic Description This treatise (also known as Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya, ‘Response to the Nestorian treatise’, and Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-mansūba ilā ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī l-Naṣrānī, ‘Response to the treatise attributed to ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī the Christian’) is a rejoinder to the wellknown Risālat al-Kindī (‘Apology of al-Kindī’). The original, written in al-Mundhirī’s own hand (316 pages), is in the Zanzibar National Archives, and there is a copy (295 pages) in Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture. In 2012, an edition (187 pages) was published in Oman under the title Jawāb al-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya. References here are to this edition. The Christian Risāla was supposedly written around 830 by an Arab Christian courtier of the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn in response to a letter written by his Muslim friend ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ismāʿīl al-Hāshimī, inviting him to embrace Islam. He is named in the Risāla as ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī, but he was probably writing under a nom-de-plume, and his Muslim friend is generally regarded as fictitious. In 1880, the Turkish Mission Aid Society published the Risāla, edited by Anton Tien, and it was reissued in 1885 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Sir William Muir published a commentary, summary and partial translation of the text in 1882, with ‘the primary object’ of placing it ‘in the hands of those who will use it in the interests of the Christian faith’. Although Muir found that al-Kindī’s arguments contained ‘a good deal that is weak in reasoning, some things that are even questionable in fact, and an abundance of censorious epithets against the Moslem, Jewish, and Magian faiths that might well have been materially softened, yet, taken as a whole, the argument is, from the Apologist’s standpoint, conducted with
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wisdom and agility’ (Muir, The Apology of Al Kindy, written at the court of Al Mâmun, London, 1882, pp. v, vii). An unnamed missionary in Zanzibar, perhaps Bishop Edward Steere, who cultivated close relations with Muslim scholars and had encouraged SPCK to publish ‘any and every book and tract on the Muhammadan controversy’ (R.M. Heanley, A memoir of Edward Steere, London, 1888, p. 313), brought a copy of al-Kindī’s published text to ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Mundhirī, and used it to debate with him. Al-Mundhirī thought the treatise was important and well-argued, and of better quality than the polemical works the missionary had previously brought to him, which, he says, he had easily ‘refuted and destroyed’ (p. 28). He felt obliged to respond to al-Kindī’s treatise, even though it was more than a thousand years old, because of its recent publication and its strong arguments, because he did not know of any other Muslim response to it, and because it was a religious obligation to refute all heresies, especially in cases such as this, which could do great harm to Islam (p. 29). He explains that, as al-Kindī’s treatise employed proof texts from ‘the ancient scriptures’, he felt compelled to do the same, because, since Christians do not accept the Qur’an, arguments based on the Qur’an would not be effective (p. 28). Al-Kindī’s treatise consists of: 1. an attempt to prove the Christian doctrine of the Trinity; 2. a derogatory examination of the life of the Prophet Muḥammad and a discussion of the signs of true prophethood; 3. a discussion of the ‘true’ origin of the Qur’an as the work of a Christian monk named Sergius, with an argument that the first four caliphs hated each other and corrupted its text, and a condemnation of its language; 4. a denigration of Muslim ritual practices and customs, including ablutions, circumcision, the pilgrimage, and Muslim marriage and divorce; 5. a denial that Muslim holy places offer any benefit, in contrast to the healing miracles of the Apostles; 6. a condemnation of the Muslim practice of jihad, and the sufferings of Christians under Muslim rule; 7. a condemnation of Muslim preoccupation with the pleasures of this world; and 8. a long summary of the teachings of the life of Christ and the teachings of Christianity. Al-Mundhirī responds to these arguments point by point. He demonstrates an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the Bible, which he had read in three English-language editions, as well as Bishop Steere’s translation of the New Testament into Swahili, which was published in 1879 (p. 45). It seems that al-Mundhirī did not have access to a Bible in Arabic. Al-Mundhiri’s arguments are often quite original. He usually appears to have accepted the Bible he has in his hands as authentic, though he
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occasionally accuses al-Kindī of altering the text (taḥrīf), as when al-Kindī uses the word rabb for ‘lord’ in Psalm 110:1; he believes the original word must have been sayyid, ‘master’ (p. 168). Likewise, when al-Kindī tells a strange and insulting story about Muḥammad, al-Mundhirī declares that this is evidence that Christians are untrustworthy and of the need to be wary of the authenticity of their texts (p. 97). But when al-Kindī attributes words from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to Jesus, al-Mundhirī replies that they are God’s words, not Jesus’s, because he was merely the recipient of his Lord’s message, as Jesus affirms in John 14:24: ‘The word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me’, where al-Mundhirī translates ‘the Father’ as ‘Allāh’ (p. 30). Al-Mundhirī follows the standard Muslim interpretation that the promised ‘spirit of truth’ who would come after Jesus (John 16:12-14) was Muḥammad, and says that, unlike Muḥammad, Jesus admitted that he was not revealing the whole truth when he said, ‘I have many other things that I do not tell you because you cannot bear them now, but when the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you to the whole truth’ (p. 31). Al-Kindī argued that, when Genesis 15:6 says of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command ‘he believed the Lord and it was accounted to him for righteousness’, this means that until that time Abraham had not believed in the one God, and had worshipped an idol while he lived with his father in Harran. Hence, when al-Hāshimī invited al-Kindī to be a ḥanīf like Abraham, this must be a call to be an idolater. Al-Mundhirī finds it unthinkable that a prophet could ever worship an idol, and sees al-Kindī’s statement as slanderous and unmanly. Al-Mundhirī comments that not only does Genesis 15:6 not indicate that Abraham was unbelieving beforehand, but that Hebrews 11:8 affirms that ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance’, indicating that he had faith when he was still living in Harran (pp. 7-8). Likewise, when al-Kindī limits the legitimate heirs of Abraham to the descendants of Isaac, al-Mundhirī quotes Galatians 3:28-9, which declares that all who ‘belong to Christ’ are descendants of Abraham. Al-Mundhirī challenges al-Kindī: ‘Do you think Abraham left his son Ishmael without knowledge of the oneness of God?’ (p. 35). He points out that Genesis says that God heard Ishmael’s voice in the wilderness and promised to bless him, and Muḥammad was his descendant (pp. 35-6). Al-Kindī found cryptic references to the secret of the Trinity in the Old Testament, as when God identifies Himself to Moses as ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:15).
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Al-Mundhirī retorts that by such logic, if God had mentioned His name four or five times, this would mean that He is four or five persons (pp. 37-8). Al-Kindī’s Arabic translation of ‘God’ in Genesis 1:1 was al-āliha, ‘the gods’, and he saw this plural form as a reference to the Trinity as well. Al-Mundhirī, not realising that in the original Hebrew what is translated as ‘God’ is Elohim, a plural form, accuses al-Kindī of distorting the text. ‘Because of such examples, we suspend judgment concerning the acceptance of all that is in the books in your hands, except what is in agreement with the truth we have’ (p. 44). Al-Kindī pointed out that the Qur’an also uses the plural ‘We’ in reference to God, but al-Mundhirī retorts that this is merely for magnification and to emphasise God’s greatness (p. 45). Al-Kindī also saw an allusion to the Trinity in the three men who appear to Abraham in Genesis 18:2-3, but al-Mundhirī responds, ‘Then you must affirm Marcionite teachings, for you follow their doctrine that these three whom Abraham saw were separate gods.’ Al-Mundhirī says the three men were angels, because God cannot be in a body, contained in a place, move, or be seen by the eye. He says this is confirmed by Genesis 18:22, ‘The men turned from there and went towards Sodom, while Abraham remained standing before the Lord’ (pp. 46-7). Al-Kindī wrote that Q 5:73, ‘Those who say that God is the third of three are unbelievers’, refers not to Christians, but to the Marcionites, for they believe in three separate gods, whereas Christians affirm that God is one and three. Al-Mundhirī is willing to concede this, provided that Christians really do not believe that God is three. He challenges: Do you not believe in three Persons, all of whom you profess to be divine, existing in His essence, as is indicated by what you say concerning His word, “I will praise the Word of God” (Psalm 56:10), that this indicates that the Word of God is a god in truth, and that this indicates that each of the Persons is a god in truth? (p. 48)
Rather than finding it problematic that Jesus is called Son of God, al-Mundhirī agrees with al-Kindī that ibn (‘son’) does not mean walad (‘child by generation’), because the Qur’an itself gives assurance of this; ibn can be used in a metaphorical way, and others have also been called sons of God, e.g. Adam in Luke 2:38. ‘Does this mean that Adam also existed from eternity and is uncreated?’ challenges al-Mundhirī: ‘Calling Jesus the Son of God does not remove him from the attributes of creatures; it simply means that like Adam he was created without a father – and Adam had no mother either, which is even more amazing!’ Likewise in Luke 4:35, Jesus
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tells his disciples that if they love their enemies they will be sons of the most High (p. 41). Al-Mundhirī is greatly affronted by al-Kindī’s depiction of Muḥammad as a brigand who stole people’s possessions; on the contrary, al-Mundhirī writes, this is prohibited and given the severest punishment in Islam. ‘By God!’ he exclaims, ‘you have told a staggering lie and committed a grave sin, [...] and the book of Jesus does not permit that’ (p. 52). Al-Mundhirī says that al-Kindī’s calumnies against Muḥammad and Islam are no worse than the lies he wrote about the Torah, Moses and Abraham (p. 52). As evidence that the Muslims did not enjoy God’s support, al-Kindī cited a Muslim raid on a Meccan caravan that was aborted because the Meccans outnumbered the Muslims more than three to one, ‘whereas you know that [the angel] Gabriel in human form rode [as protector of the Israelites] on an ash-grey camel wearing a green mantle while Pharaoh and his host of 4,000 horses pursued the Israelites’, and angels also fought for Joshua at Jericho. So, if Muḥammad were a man of God, an angel would have protected him from getting wounded at the Battle of Uḥud, as Elijah was protected from King Ahab, Daniel from the lions of Darius, and the three men from the furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. Al-Mundhirī responds by referring to Numbers 13: Although God had said He would cast fear of the Israelites into the hearts of the people so the Israelites could take their land, Moses sent men to spy out the land. Why, al-Mundhirī challenges, did he do this? ‘Is this a sign of fear or because of a lack of angelic support? [...] Beware of criticising what the prophets do and say, for if you criticise one of them, you criticise all of them!’ (p. 60). Referring to the spies’ fearful report of the strong people of the land and the people’s fear and doubts on hearing this report, al-Mundhirī asks, ‘Does this mean that Moses was not a prophet? Why did not angels come at that point to support and encourage them and to fight on their behalf – and Joshua was among them, for whom the angels fought [at Jericho]!’ (p. 63). Al-Mundhirī defends Muḥammad’s severity towards the Jews by comparing his actions to the Apostle Peter’s harshness towards a couple who had hidden some of the money gained from the sale of their land, at a time when all the Christians were sharing all things in common. Peter announced that they would die on the spot, and so they instantly fell down dead at Peter’s feet (Acts 5:8). Al-Mundhirī finds this inconsistent with Christian ways: ‘Surely this is something of which Jesus would not approve!’ (pp. 75-6).
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Al-Kindī argued that, if Muḥammad had really been a prophet, he would have performed miracles, and all the people would have believed in him. Al-Mundhirī retorts that Muḥammad performed more miracles than he has time to mention (p. 63), and that if miracles were sufficient to convince all the people then everyone would have believed in Moses and Jesus, although it is stated in John 12:37 that people did not believe in him despite all his miracles, and it says in Mark 6:4 that Jesus could not perform any miracles in his hometown and with his relatives because of their lack of faith (p. 91). Al-Kindī wrote that Muḥammad ordered his followers not to bury him when he died because God would raise him to heaven, as Christ was raised, and that he was too dear to God to be left on earth more than three days; and that when the promised event did not happen his body could not be washed because it was already decaying, so he was buried without being washed. Al-Mundhirī declares this ‘the worst calumny that you utter about his life’ and says this is proof that what Christians say on religious matters cannot be trusted, nor can the authenticity of the Christians’ Gospel be known. Nonetheless, al-Mundhirī does not accuse the Christians as a whole of propagating such a falsehood – ‘just this Kindī, who allegedly belonged to their religion and who by his lies defiled their religion and its people’ (p. 97). Concerning this strange story, al-Mundhirī denies there is any report that Muḥammad ever said he should not be buried (p. 98). Al-Kindī felt that, as a true Arab, he was able to assess the Qur’an’s literary qualities. He found fault with its use of foreign words when there was no language with as rich a lexicon as Arabic. He claimed to have read the language of the muṣḥaf of Musaylima, who made his claim to prophet hood after Muḥammad’s death, and found it superior to the language of the Qur’an. He proceeded to boast of the lineage of the tribe of Kinda, which, he said, was superior to that of Quraysh. Al-Mundhirī responds that al-Kindī is ignorant of the origin of the Arabs and of his own lineage. He said it is true that the Kinda were kings, but they were conquered by al-Mundhirī’s own ancestor, the Lakhmid king al-Mundhir ibn Māʾ al-Samāʾ, who won people over with prudence and generosity rather than brute force (pp. 127-8). Al-Kindī claimed that he found the Qur’an was nothing but disorganised, self-contradictory phrases with no literary merit or meaning. Al-Mundhirī advises him to remove the log from his own eye before trying to extract the speck of dust from someone else’s (a reference to Matthew 7:3-5 and Luke 6:41-2), and points out contradictions between stories in
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the Gospels (pp. 121-3). He goes on to write at some length about Arab eloquence and the reactions of Muḥammad’s contemporaries to hearing the Qur’an (p. 125). There are many indications that al-Mundhirī had a very full command of the Bible, and was able to use it to good and original effect. When al-Kindī tells a very bizarre story concerning the origins of circumcision (trans. Tien, Apology, in N.A. Newman [ed.], Early Christian-Muslim dialogue, Hatfield PA, 1993, p. 471), he refutes it by reference to the book of Genesis (p. 136), and when on the same topic al-Kindī gives an apparently inaccurate quotation from St Paul, al-Mundhirī is only too ready to respond with an accurate quotation of Romans 2:25 (p. 138). When al-Kindī argues that it is unnecessary to wash after ejaculation, al-Mundhirī responds with a quotation from Leviticus 15:17 indicating that seminal emission is indeed unclean, and everything that comes into contact with it must be washed with water (p. 139). When al-Kindī criticises Islamic food prohibitions by saying, ‘God saw that all that He made was good, and He made pigs’, al-Mundhirī says this deception is from Satan, for Satan deceived Adam into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree that God had made (p. 139). He interprets the story of Jesus casting the demons out of two men and sending them into a herd of pigs as an indication of the uncleanness of pigs (Matthew 8:30-3). If the pigs were not unclean and the men were not prohibited from owning them, Jesus would never have allowed himself to destroy the herd, for he would not destroy lawful property (p. 139-40). After finding fault with the powerlessness of Muslim holy places, al-Kindī admitted that Christian holy men no longer performed miracles, explaining that they were only needed when the faith was new. Al-Mundhirī finds this unconvincing and affirms that God continues to perform great miracles among the Muslims: God answers the prayers of Muslims, and those who are especially pure of soul experience special graces (p. 145). Significance As far as can be known, this is the only Muslim response to the Risālat al-Kindī. The work displays a great deal of originality and an impressive knowledge of the Bible. The context in which al-Mundhirī says he received the work is also interesting for what it reveals about the strategies of Christian missionaries in the second half of the 19th century and MuslimChristian interactions in Zanzibar.
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Publications MS Zanzibar, Zanzibar National Archives – ZA 8/10, 316 pages (pp. 80-281 are missing), written in the author’s hand (2 May 1891) MS Muscat, Ministry of Heritage and Culture – 2089, 295 pages (26 August 1891; a copy of the Zanzibar MS) Al-Mundhirī, Jawāb al-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya, ed. S. al-Shaybānī, Muscat, 2012 Studies V.J. Hoffman, ‘Muslim-Christian encounters in late nineteenth-century Zanzibar’, The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (2005) 59-78 O’Fahey and Vikør, ‘Zanzibari waqf of books’ Valerie J. Hoffman
Lorenzo Antonio Massaia Guglielmo Massaja; Gugliemeo Massaia Date of Birth 1809 Place of Birth Piovà d’Asti, Piedmont, Italy Date of Death 1889 Place of Death San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples
Biography
Lorenzo Antonio Massaia was born in La Braja di Piovà d’Asti in northwest Italy on 8 June 1809. In 1824 he joined the seminary at Asti and in 1826 he became a Capuchin friar, taking the name Guglielmo. He was ordained priest in Vercelli Cathedral in 1832 and completed his training at the monastery of Testona near Moncalieri in Piedmont in 1833. He started as chaplain to the Mauriziano Hospital in Turin in 1834, then in 1836 he was appointed professor of philosophy and theology at Testona monastery. On 26 April 1846, Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831-46) created the Apostolic Vicariate of Galla in Ethiopia, and on 12 May he appointed Massaia titular bishop of Cassia and apostolic vicar of the Oromo people of south-west Ethiopia. After some years of trying, Massaia managed to cross the Blue Nile on 21 November 1852 and set foot in his mission area for the first time. He established his residence at Assandabo. In December 1862, he made the decision to return to Europe, but was arrested on 27 June 1863 when crossing the eastern border back into Ethiopia and was banished from the country. He reached Rome in April 1864, and moved to Lyons and then Paris. On 6 February 1867, he left for Aden and then Zeila on the Somali coast, from where he intended to return to his station, but he was called back to Europe. On 9 September, he set sail once more for Alexandria, and went on to Cairo, Suez, Aden, Tajura and finally Ambabo. On 11 March 1868 he arrived at the court of Menelik II (King of Shewa, 1866-89, Emperor of Ethiopia, 1889-1913), who granted him permission to set up the first missionary station in Shewa in central Ethiopia. In 1872, at Menelik’s invitation he organised a diplomatic mission from the Kingdom of Shewa to the Italian King Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1861-78) to set up an agreement of friendship and cooperation. In June 1876, he contributed to the organisation of a new diplomatic mission charged with making contact with the Holy See and with the Egyptian, English, French
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and Italian governments. At court, he and Menelik received members of the Italian geographical expedition. After a defeat in battle by the forces of Emperor Yohannes IV in March 1878, Menelik was forced to accept harsh peace terms which included the removal of all Catholic missionaries from his kingdom. Massaia was expelled on 3 October 1879. At the end of an exhausting journey, he reached Cairo in early 1880, and returned to Europe in July. After a brief stay in France, he set up residence between Rome and Frascati. In December, he began drafting his missionary memoirs. On 2 August 1881, Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903) promoted him to the post of titular archbishop of Stauropoli and during the Consistory of 10 November 1884 he was made a cardinal. The first volume of his epic memoir was published in August 1885. He died in San Giorgio a Cremano, on the outskirts of Naples, in 1889.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary G. Massaia, I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia, 12 vols, Rome, 1885-95 A. Rosso (ed.), Lettere e scritti minori (1827-1889), 5 vols, Rome, 1978 A. Rosso (ed.), Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla (1845-1880), 6 vols, Padua, 1984 Secondary P. Magistri et al. (eds), Guglielmo Massaja. 1809-2009, 5 vols, Rome, 2009-11 (a comprehensive series that traces Massaia’s life and work in Africa) M. Forno, Tra Africa e Occidente. Il cardinal Massaja e la missione cattolica in Etiopia nella coscienza e nella politica europee, Bologna, 2009 (English trans. Cardinal Massaja and the Catholic mission in Ethiopia. Features of an experience between religion and European politics, Nairobi, 2013) C. Durante, Guglielmo Massaja. O.F.M. Cap. – Vicario apostolico dei Galla. Cardinale di Santa Romana Chiesa. Saggio storico-critico secondo documenti inediti, Sessano del Molise, Isernia, 1998; abbreviated edition, Turin, 2004
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia ‘My 35 years of mission in high Ethiopia’ Date 1885-95 Original Language Italian
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Description I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia is Guglielmo Massaia’s main work. It consists of 12 volumes, published – in part posthumously – between 1885 and 1895. It was a great success and went on to be republished, in whole or in part, in a number of languages including French, Spanish and German. The 12 volumes contain substantial differences from the handwritten notes made by Massaia on his return from Ethiopia in 1879, probably the result of the editing work done by his personal secretary, Giacinto da Troina, in order to soften some of his more polemical comments – particularly political ones – and make the text more readable and accessible to a general audience. In 1984, the Capuchin priest Antonio Rosso published the text of the original manuscript in a six-volume edition, entitled Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla (‘Historical memoirs of the Apostolic Vicariate of Galla’). Both editions contain frequent references to the relationship between Christianity and Islam, in a general sense and in relation to the East African context. To understand fully Massaia’s views on this subject, it is necessary to refer to two other works. These are the collected letters, edited by Antonio Rosso and published in five volumes in 1978, under the title Lettere e scritti minori (‘Letters and minor works’), and a pamphlet on Muslim propaganda in Africa and the Indies, De la propagande musulmane en Afrique et dans les Indes (‘On Muslim propaganda in Africa and the Indies’), published anonymously by Massaia himself in Paris in 1851. It was published in Turin in 1859 under the title Della propaganda musulmana nell’Africa e nelle Indie per monsignor Massaja vescovo di Cassia e vic. ap. dei Gallas (‘On Muslim propaganda in Africa and the Indies by Monsignor Massaia, Bishop of Cassia and Ap. Vic. of Galla’). All four works contain information about Massaia’s thinking on the relationship between Christianity and Islam. Essentially, he identifies two distinct expressions of Islam: on the one hand, a ‘political’ Islam tied to an Ottoman Empire in rapid decline and forced to open itself up to Western-style reforms in order to survive; on the other, a baldly religious Islam, ardent, fanatical and, as he terms it, ‘persecutory’ and ‘intolerant’, emanating from Mecca and Egypt (De la propaganda musulmane, p. 24). In the late 19th century, this latter type of Islam was spreading in East Africa through the activities of merchants and itinerant religious reformists seeking to re-establish the true model of Islam as laid out by the Prophet Muḥammad. Massaia recalls witnessing some ‘mysterious messengers’ preaching ‘a kind of Muslim holy war against the invasions of the Ottoman Porte led by the Sharif of Mecca, considered in Muslim tradition
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as the true successor of Mohammed’ (Memorie storiche, vol. 3, p. 219; vol. 6, pp. 220-1). This type of Islam was spreading in Africa (through the Red Sea and Sudan) and Asia (through India and present-day Pakistan). It was considered so dangerous for the future of the entire continent of Africa that Massaia was compelled to hope for a new Western ‘crusade’ to stop its spread. He warns that particular attention should be paid to southern India where, to his mind – after the disintegration of the Mogul Empire as a result of the invasion of the British – an Islamic purification movement was spreading, which preached jihad. If Europe could not stop the spread of this alarming type of Islam, the Western world would soon find itself in an extremely difficult situation. Massaia regarded Islam in general as an intolerant religion characterised by purely external forms of worship. A clear example of this was the fast of Ramaḍān, which did not seem to be a true ‘mortification’ of the body but rather a purely symbolic type of observance. As Massaia is recorded as stating in Memorie storiche, Islam was a religion that violated no fewer than four of the Ten Commandments: the fifth, respect for life, which was contravened by slavery and the threat of death for any Muslim who wished to convert; the sixth, on sexual ‘purity’, which was contravened by tolerance of ‘sodomy’; the seventh (‘thou shall not steal’), which conflicted with the Muslim tendency to ‘legitimise theft’ from ‘infidels’; and the eighth, which conflicted with the ‘natural’ Muslim tendency to bear false witness. Clearly, these were moral aberrations which, in Massaia’s view, Muslims tolerated primarily in order to keep open the possibility of proselytising and attracting new followers (e.g. Memorie storiche, vol. 2, pp. 259-61; vol. 3, pp. 186-91; vol. 4, p. 324; see also Lettere e scritti minori, vol. 1, pp. 198-200). Alongside these strong sentiments, Massaia occasionally recognised some virtues in Muslims. For example, he considered praiseworthy their strong sense of the primacy of God, a sentiment in danger of being lost in the Christian West. He also approved of the religious zeal of many Muslim missionaries, which he thought greater than that demonstrated by Catholic missionaries (e.g. Memorie storiche, vol. 4, pp. 154-6). Significance The 12 volumes of Massaia’s monumental memoirs were born out of the explicit desire of the then Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903), who was convinced that the story of the missionary’s experience could benefit the Church. Massaia was not of the same opinion. He thought his story would be of little interest to readers, though he set to with the intention of completing
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something that would be of use to future missionaries, to whom he hoped to provide advice and guidance (Memorie storiche, vol. 4, p. 105). The result was a very long story, complex and at times difficult to read, but giving an extraordinary portrait of the cultural, religious, political and social life of 19th-century Ethiopia (Bertacchini, Continente nero, pp. 40-1). It was therefore no coincidence that, in later years, these memoirs were looked on as some of the most important works by travellers and explorers in the 19th century (cf. G. Mazzoni, L’Ottocento, Milan, 1943, p. 1242; G. Mazzoni, Memorialisti dell’Ottocento, Milan-Naples, 1958, p. 746; A. Rosso, ‘Guglielmo Massaja ritratto dai contemporanei’, L’Italia Francescana 1-2 (1988) pp. 129-40). Contrary to what Massaia expected, they met with such immediate success that the first volume, published in 1885 with an original print run of 3,000 copies, soon had to be reprinted. The work was also reprinted several times in cheap editions and abbreviated versions. A translation of the first volume into French was published in 1887, a translation of the first eight volumes into Spanish appeared between 1934 and 1959, and an extensive paraphrase in German in 1939. Interest in Massaia and his memoirs was further strengthened in Italy during the Fascist period. The proponents of the country’s ‘imperial vocation’ believed they could identify in the character of the missionary described in the Memorie the shining figure of a forerunner, not to say an advocate, of Italian colonial expansion in Africa. This was also the interpretation taken up by various Catholic magazines, which equated Massaia’s mission of evangelisation with that of ‘civilisation’ carried out by the Fascist regime through the conquest of Ethiopia. These included Il Frontespizio, Il Massaia, La Rivista del Clero Italiano and Rassegna Romana, whose director, Egilberto Martire, wrote a 466-page biography entitled Massaja da vicino (‘Massaja up close’) (Ceci, ‘Chiesa e questione coloniale’, pp. 623-5). The passages in the memoirs that expressed Massaia’s clear opposition to Islam were placed to one side because they did not sit easily with the pro-Arab policy promoted by Fascism, especially from the 1930s. These opinions were probably also the cause of the decision taken by Pope Benedict XV (r. 1914-22) in January 1916 to block the process of Massaia’s beatification. With the outbreak of conflict between France and the Ottoman Empire, which threatened Catholic interests in the Empire, the pope presumably considered it appropriate not to exacerbate tempers by continuing to promote to sainthood a man known for his harsh opposition to the Islamic world (Forno, Tra Africa, pp. 354-5).
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If the memory of Massaia remained of considerable interest within the ecclesiastical world, where he became the icon of an indomitable and courageous form of evangelisation (in 1929 the missionary and Lazarist historian Jean-Baptiste Coulbeaux wrote in Histoire politique et religieuse d’Abyssinie depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à l’avènement de Ménélick II [Paris, 1929], his political and religious history of Abyssinia: ‘To read his I miei trentacinque anni [...] is to be amazed, as though by the vision of a superman!’, pp. 440-1), interest was also shown in the literary and artistic world, where some went so far as to identify in the monumental Memorie echoes of the writings of Manzoni (e.g. C. Aureli, ‘Alessandro Manzoni e Guglielmo Massaja’, Illustrazione Cattolica, July, 1904, pp. 5-6; S. Cultrera, Gli scrittori italiani e il cardinale Massaja, Rome, 1948). Referring to an abbreviated edition of the work published in the 1930s (probably G. Massaja, I miei trentacinque anni di missione, estratto a cura del p. Samuele Cultrera, Turin, 1932), the intellectual and politician Antonio Gramsci went so far as to comment that, in the face of the mediocre level of Catholic ‘adventure literature’, ‘the events of Cardinal Massaja’ represented ‘the most remarkable book’ he could report (Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, Turin, 1975, vol. 3, p. 2119). The numbers are also very clear. In an analysis carried out over 50 years ago of biographies, studies, articles and monuments dedicated to Massaia after his death, no fewer than 2,000 written works alone were recorded (Dalbesio, Guglielmo Massaja). However, as Carlo Giglio has written, while the figure of Massaia ‘loomed large’ for some time in African missionary history (C. Giglio [ed.], Italy in Africa, vol. 1. Ethiopia-Red Sea, 1. 1857-1885, Rome, 1958, p. 143), any reconstruction of his work that departed from the strictly hagiographical was lacking. It was not until the 1970s that the first analyses began to appear, published by the Centro Studi Massajani. These were characterised by a greater attention to the critical use of sources and therefore by greater consistency. Of particular note were the efforts of the Capuchin friar Antonino Rosso, who published five volumes of Lettere e scritti minori and the original version of Memorie (Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla). In his dense introduction, Rosso explains, with a great amount of detail, the genesis, objectives and futures of the work (see in particular vol. 1, pp. vii-xxxix). Of some additional interest, although it is a typically Capuchin reading of Massaia, is the essay published in 1998 by Carmelo Durante, Guglielmo Massaja (this was his doctoral thesis which he had defended in 1946 at the Gregorian University, Rome). In the wake of the renewed interest in the
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re-opening of the process to beatify Massaia in 1993 and the approach of the bicentenary of his birth in 2009, memories of him were widely taken up and discussed. In 2003, Gianpaolo Romanato remarked that, even though Massaia was ‘definitely the best-known Italian missionary’, a convincing historicocritical reconstruction of his works was still lacking (L’Africa nera fra cristianesimo e Islam. L’esperienza di Daniele Comboni 1831-1881, Milan, 2003, p. 159). With the establishment of the National Committee for the celebrations of the birth of Guglielmo Massaia, the situation improved significantly. In particular, new interest in him was shown in the academic world. Not specifically focusing on Memorie, but with very numerous references to them, was Mauro Forno’s Tra Africa e Occidente (published in English in 2013), the five-volume series, Guglielmo Massaja. 1809-2009 (Rome, 2009-11), and Nicola Neri’s two-volume mainly descriptive Guglielmo degli imperi. Publications Prosper Faugère [G. Massaia], De la propagande musulmane en Afrique et dans les Indes, Paris, 1851; 011614238 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Massaia, Lectiones grammaticales pro missionariis qui addiscere volunt linguam Amaricam …, Paris, 1867; 011727138 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Massaia, I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia, 12 vols, Rome, 1885-95, repr. 1921-31, Turin, 1936-43 G. Massaia, Mes trente-cinq années de mission dans la Haute-Éthiopie. Mémoires historiques du cardinal Guglielmo Massaja, capucin, autrefois Vicaire Apostolique des Galla, trans. A. Gaveau, Lille, 1887 (French trans.); cb304909759 (digitised version available through BNF) G. Massaja, I miei trentacinque anni di missione, estratto a cura del p. Samuele Cultrera, Turin, 1932 G. Massaja, Mis treinta y cinco años de misión en la Alta Etiopía, trans. M. de Escalada, 8 vols, Vigo, 1934-59 (Spanish trans.) G. Massaia, 35 Jahre in Abessinien. Missionserinnerungen des Apostolischen Vikars der Gallaneger und nachmaligen Kardinals Wilhelm Massaia, trans. D. Wierl, Munich, 1939 (German trans.) A. Rosso (ed.), Lettere e scritti minori (1827-1889), 5 vols, Rome, 1978 A. Rosso (ed.), Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla (18451880), 6 vols, Padua, 1984
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Studies Magistri et al., Guglielmo Massaja Forno, Tra Africa N. Neri, Guglielmo degli imperi. I giorni dell’Africa del cardinal Massaja. Lettere e memorie, Bari, 2009 L. Ceci, ‘Chiesa e questione coloniale. Guerra e missione nell’impresa di Etiopia’, Italia Contemporanea 233 (2003) 617-36 Durante, Guglielmo Massaja A. Dalbesio, Guglielmo Massaja. Bibliografia-iconografia, Turin, 1973 R. Bertacchini (ed.), Continente nero. Memorialisti italiani dell’800 in Africa, Parma, 1966 E. Martire, Massaja da vicino. Con una scelta di cento e più lettere di Massaja e di altri e otto tavole fuori testo, Rome, 1937 Mauro Forno
Karl Winqvist Date of Birth 14 October 1847 Place of Birth Smedstorp, Västergötland, Sweden Date of Death 4 December 1909 Place of Death Bellesa, Eritrea
Biography
Karl Winqvist was born 1847 in western Sweden. His parents were farmers, and he grew up in a pious Christian context. In his early twenties, he was drawn into revival groups and gradually became convinced of his call to mission. In the years following 1870 he received a broad theological education at the Johannelund mission institute in Stockholm. He was ordained in 1877 and served for a year as a pastor in Sweden and then for a year as a pastor to seamen in Grimsby, England. For the next four years, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and took an advanced medical degree with distinction in 1883. In November 1883, he married Elsie Hefter in Frankfurt. She came from a Jewish-Christian family and her father had served as a missionary to Jews for many years. After the wedding, Elsie and Karl travelled to Ethiopia, and arrived in Massaua (Massawa) at the end of December 1883. The Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (Swedish Evangelical Mission, SEM), a Lutheran low-church mission, started its work in Massaua in 1866 with the ultimate aim of reaching the Oromo peoples of inner Ethiopia. This proved to be very difficult as Abyssinian rulers prevented Swedish missionaries from entering the country for decades. Meanwhile, the SEM started a ‘waiting mission’ on the coast, trying the reach groups in what is now Eritrea. Winqvist was asked to come to Massaua to start a medical mission, as the climate and the health situation were very difficult in this area. The first years of service in Massaua proved to be very demanding. The political situation was turbulent: Mahdist forces from Sudan, robber bands and Abyssinian troops threatened local people and the mission several times. The years 1890-2 were particularly difficult as thousands of sick and starving people came to the mission asking for help. However, from 1885 onwards Italian troops occupied parts of what is now Eritrea, and this gradually brought some stability. In Massaua, Winqvist tended to sick
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people three days a week and on the other three days he and his local co-workers would undertake evangelism in the Muslim villages around Massaua. He also started to collect words and expressions in the Tigré language and, together with his local co-workers, he started to translate the New Testament into Tigré. In 1897, Winqvist and his wife moved to Bellesa in Hamazén, in the Eritrean highlands. Located at 2,400 metres above sea-level, it had a cool climate. Winqvist started a small clinic and treated many patients from the area. He was also the spiritual head of the station and the congregation from an area that included some 36 villages and nine schools. He noted that the local people did not understand the Amarinja or Tigré languages, but many spoke only Tigrinya and so needed a translation of the Bible in that language. The translation would be his major passion and achievement during the years up to his death and occupied most of his free time. One of his colleagues, Twoldo Medhen, who was fluent in Tigrinya, did the main work with Winqvist, who had oversight of the project as a whole. Just before he died, in 1909, the first edition of the New Testament in Tigrinya was printed and his wife Elsie continued translating the Old Testament after his death.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary K. Winqvist, En liten återblick på min 25-åriga verksamhet som läkaremissionär (‘A small review of my 25-year work as a medical missionary’), Stockholm, 1908 E. Winqvist, Med livet som insats. Läkaremissionen i Eritrea (‘At the cost of one’s life. Medical mission in Eritrea’), Stockholm, 1944, pp. 13-103 (an accurate biography written by Winqvist’s wife, covering the life of Karl Winqvist and Nicola de Pertis, the first two SEM doctors in Eritrea) E. Janér, Under heligt tvång (‘Under holy compulsion’), Stockholm, 1958 (a biography written by Winqvist’s daughter) Secondary K-J. Lundström and E. Gebremedhin, Kenisha. The roots and development of the Evangelical Church of Eritrea 1866-1935, Uppsala, 2011, particularly pp. 171, 173, 176-7, 213-14, 220, 226-8, 280-4, 454, 482 R. Voigt, art. ‘Winqvist, Karl’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Wiesbaden, 2010, vol. 4, pp. 1188-9 G. Arén, Evangelical pioneers in Ethiopia. Origins of the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, Stockholm, 1978, pp. 288-92, 296, 303, 321, 323-5, 333-7
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Letters from Karl Winqvist in Missions-Tidning Date 1890, 1892, 1896 Original Language Swedish Description Although Karl Winqvist did not write any substantial work with a focus on Christian-Muslim relations, he sometimes refers to his evangelistic work among Muslims in his annual reports to Sweden and also comments on Muslims and Islam. These reports, in the form of letters, were published in the Missions-Tidning (‘Mission-Magazine’) of SEM. The following is a summary of the main points in his reports from 1890, 1892 and 1896. The famine of 1890-92 enabled the mission to reach new groups who came from the interior to seek help on the coast. Hundreds of starving people received food and medical treatment. Before treatment began there was always a short Christian service, usually with a sermon by a local Christian. Some of the Muslims present listened to the sermon while others avoided that part of the service (Missions-Tidning, 1892, p. 66). Winqvist and his co-workers often visited the marketplace and the villages around Massaua. Before going there, the Winqvists kept open house for their co-workers. After a cup of coffee, they sang hymns, read the Bible, and prayed together, and then went two by two to contact local people (Missions-Tidning, 1892, p. 66). Now and then in the marketplace, a zealous Muslim came by shouting, ‘Do not listen to them’. Some Muslims, however, did stay and listen. The poorer Bedouins were generally more open to what was said than the Arab traders. Winqvist’s group discovered that preaching and lecturing was often not the best method; rather, dialogues and conversations with the people present gained them more attention. Winqvist argued that dialogue with questions and answers was the best way to understand the thinking of his listeners and to get into fruitful conversation (MissionsTidning, 1890, p. 60; 1892, pp. 66-7; 1896, p. 66). Some of the evangelists who worked with Winqvist were former Muslims. One of them, Dawit Amanuel, was the first Mensa to become an evangelical Christian. Another was Dawit’s cousin, Alazar Hemmed, who was baptised in 1887. Both Dawit and Alazar often went to bear witness to the Christian faith. They had been familiar with Muslim thought and practice from their childhood and, by observing their way of presenting the
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gospel, Winqvist realised the importance of studying the Qur’an. He urged his colleagues to give up their prejudices and read it to equip themselves for fruitful dialogue with Muslims (Arén, Evangelical pioneers, pp. 3235). Winqvist himself had often used terms from the Qur’an as a basis for Christian witness. His report from 1892 gives some examples of the form of argument he used (Missions-Tidning, 1892, pp. 66-7). Significance Karl Winqvist’s letters have a two-fold significance. On the one hand, in terms of their content, the comments within them about interactions with Muslims as well as about Muslims themselves give insight to prevailing attitudes and also in evangelical or mission methodology. These signal, at the very least, that Muslims and their faith needed to be taken seriously and understood thoroughly. On the other hand, their circulation through the mission magazine is indicative not only of interest in mission work but also in the subjects of this work. Missions-Tidning had a wide circulation among low-church Lutherans at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1906, the magazine had some 25,000 subscribers, though it was read and listened to by many more Swedish people in their homes, in women’s sewing groups, and in mission meetings. The result was that many of the ‘mission friends’ had an intimate knowledge of the missionaries and their work. The letters served an educative function, even though this was not an intended consequence of their publication. Publications Untitled letters of/from Karl Winqvist in: Missions-Tidning 8a (28 February 1890) pp. 60-1 Missions-Tidning 9 (9 March 1892) pp. 65-7 Missions-Tidning 9a (20 February 1896) pp. 66-7 Copies of Missions-Tidning are available at the following: Kungliga biblioteket (The Royal Library) Stockholm Uppsala universitetsbibliotek, Carolinabiblioteket (Uppsala University Library) Lunds universitetsbibliotek, Universitetsbiblioteket (Lund University Library) Johannelunds teologiska högskola (Johannelund School of theology) Uppsala Missions-Tidning has been partly digitised. Issues from 1890, 1892 and 1896, for example, may be accessed as follows: http://efsarkiv.nu/3/.
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The original letters and reports are available in Riksarkivet (The National Archives) in Uppsala. See Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS) Huvu darkivet. Rapporter och korrespondens 1856-1945: E I a:59 (1890), E I a:69 (1892), E I a:90 (1896) Studies Arén, Evangelical pioneers Klas Lundström
W.E. Taylor William Ernest Taylor Date of Birth 25 January 1856 Place of Birth Worcester, England Date of Death 2 October 1927 Place of Death Bath, England
Biography
William Ernest Taylor was born in Worcester in 1856 and went to school there before going to Hertford College, Oxford. Graduating in 1878, he spent a year in Edinburgh studying medicine and working at Cowgate Dispensary (Frankl, ‘Taylor’). He then applied to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and was accepted in 1880. He was ordained deacon by the bishop of Mauritius in London in July 1880 immediately before leaving for Eastern Equatorial Africa. He was based in Mombasa from 1881 and worked there until 1884. In 1885 he was ordained priest in Mombasa by Bishop James Hannington (Register, p. 190). During his first tour, he acted as a medical assistant and used the opportunity to improve his Swahili language skills as he evangelised his patients. In a May 1883 letter to Robert Lang (1840-1908, Africa Secretary for CMS [1881-92]), Taylor explained his initial purpose in spending time in Mombasa: My chief business there has been hitherto confined to the study of the language. From my experience at Freretown, I can assure you, that it is almost impossible to learn correct Swahili there, […] I have found my sojourn in the town [Mombasa] of the greatest benefit in improving my knowledge of Swahili. (Taylor to Lang, 19 May 1883, CMS Archives, G3 A5/1883/70)
In order to improve his Swahili, he spent time talking to elders in Mombasa on the veranda of the mosque and they helped him when he began to write in Swahili and to translate parts of the Bible (Annual Letters, 1896, p. 584). In the Introduction to his African aphorisms or saws from Swahililand (London, 1891), an annotated collection of 600 proverbs, Taylor pays tribute to his Swahili teachers, naming two in particular, Mwalimu Sikujuwa bin Abdallah al-Batawi (d. 1890), an accomplished poet, and Bwana
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Hemedi bin Muhammad bin Shaykh al-Mambasi (d. 1892), an authority on prose. He also produced Raha isiyo karaha (‘Unhampered happiness’) (Mombasa, 1893), a short tract for Muslims, and St. John’s Gospel in Swahili (London, 1897), both published in Arabic script, together with a catechism and a hymn. He collected a large number of Swahili manuscripts, now in collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the University of Hamburg (Frankl, ‘Taylor’). He is regarded as one of the finest European scholars of Swahili. During his second tour, Taylor travelled to various mission stations around Mombasa. In 1892, whilst on leave, he married Catharine Tesseyman. Bishop Tucker posted the couple to Mombasa town. An indication of his good relations with the Swahili elders there is the letters he received from them on news of his marriage, then on the birth of his first child. The birth delighted the Swahili gentry, whose slaves took time off for a ngoma (dance) to celebrate the occasion; the proud father also received a letter of congratulation from the Mombasa-born qāḍī of Zanzibar (Frankl, ‘William Ernest Taylor’, p. 167). During this time, Taylor conducted openair evangelism in the markets, which he outlined in his Annual Report to the CMS (Annual Letters, 1896, p. 584). In 1896, the CMS asked Taylor to continue his translation work in Cairo, rather than Mombasa. In Cairo, he studied Arabic before serving with the CMS in Egypt and Sudan until 1904, when he returned to Britain. Frankl considers Zaburi za David (‘Psalms of David’), published in 1904, Taylor’s finest Bible translation (Frankl, ‘Taylor’). In England, he retained an interest in work amongst Muslims, translating Thomas Upson’s Unabii (‘Prophecy’), the first of his Khutbas, from Arabic to Swahili for the Nile Mission Press in 1911. In 1915, he published the first English translation of an epic Swahili poem, Inkishafi (‘The soul’s awakening’). He served in various parishes in England until his death in 1927.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary W.E. Taylor’s Annual Letters and the Register of Missionaries are held in the archives of the CMS at the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham. A large part of the archival materials has been digitised by Adam Matthew Publications and are available on-line. For more details on the archival corpus, see: https://churchmissionsociety.org/about/our-history/ archives/.
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W.E. Taylor, ‘Frere Town, 14 February 1889’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the year 1889-90, London, 1890, 292-4 W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 25 November 1893’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the year 1893-94, London, 1894, 7-10 W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 1894’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the year 1894-95, London, 1895, 7-10 W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 29 January 1896’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries for the year 1896, London, 1896, 583-7 CMS, ‘905 Taylor, William Ernest – age 24’, Register of missionaries and native clergy 1804-1904, London, 1905, p. 190 Secondary P.J.L. Frankl, art. ‘Taylor, William Ernest’, in ODNB P.J.L. Frankl, ‘William Ernest Taylor (1856-1927). England’s greatest Swahili scholar’, Afrikanische Arbeitspapiere 60 (1999) 161-74
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Raha isiyo karaha ‘Unhampered happiness’, ‘Comfort without discomfort’, ‘Joy without alloy’ Date 1893 Original Language Swahili Description In 1892, Taylor began working on a tract Raha isiyo karaha, which he translated as ‘Unhampered happiness!’ and ‘Joy without alloy’. Neither is a literal translation, which is either ‘Peace without provocation’ or ‘Joy without giving offence’. Farouk Topan translates it as ‘Comfort without discomfort’ (‘Swahili as a religious language’, p. 345, n. 15). A mimeographed copy was first published in Mombasa in 1893 in Swahili (Kimvita); a copy was sent to the CMS and presented at a committee meeting held on 25 July 1893, with a request for a grant to pay for printing equipment; this copy can no longer be traced in the CMS archives. On award of a grant, it was reproduced using a cyclostyle (1895), but the results were found to be unsatisfactory (Chesworth, Mixed messages, pp. 37-9). The earliest extant copy was printed by the Religious Tract Society in London in 1897 in Roman and Arabic script (13 double pages), and in 1902 in Arabic script (13 pages) with a reprint in Nairobi in 1934. The 1941 edition appeared in Nairobi in Swahili in Roman script (17 pages). All quotations are translated from this
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Illustration 8. Cover of Raha isiyo karaha in Swahili, using Arabic script
edition. It is probable that the Swahili in this edition was changed to standard Swahili, as in 1925 the Inter-Territorial Conference of the Committee for the Standardisation of the Swahili Language chose the Zanzibar dialect of Swahili, Kiunguja, as the standard form, rather than the Kimvita of Mombasa or any of the other dialects, and regularised the orthography of Swahili in Roman script. Copies of the 1934 and 1941 editions were still available in the late 1950s. The efforts Taylor made to produce the tract are given in Chesworth, Mixed messages (pp. 36-44), which traces the correspondence between Taylor and the CMS concerning the 1893, 1897 and 1902 publications. The tract is written in dialogue form, representing a conversation between a missionary doctor and a Muslim imam. The missionary tells the Muslim that he had once lived in a village where many Muslims lived:
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W.E. Taylor [T]hey were smart, intelligent people, but their hearts were evil. I began to preach to them, and they would not listen to me, because they saw that the way of Muhamadi was sufficient for them. One by one I tried to find the people who would listen to me. They said, ‘Go away, you unbeliever’, and I am a man of the Book. (pp. 3-4)
He goes on to explain how Islam distinguishes between communities that do not possess a revealed book and those that do. Quoting the Qur’an, he challenges Muslims who do not accept the People of the Book, saying they are unbelievers. But he is told he has lost his way and invited to go to the mosque (pp. 4-5). He does so, and there he meets the imam, who asks him to recite the shahāda. He questions the meaning of the second part, ‘Muhamadi is His messenger’, because he ‘does not understand it and cannot accept it’ (pp. 5-6). A crowd of Muslims gather in the mosque, excited that a European is going to convert. The discussion continues when someone who knows the Qur’an by heart and who can answer the questions that are raised, arrives. The Christian asks what a person has to do to be saved, and is told that he must do good works and keep the Muslim law. He replies that this is practically impossible: ‘There is no one able to keep God’s commandments, or to do His work, as you say. The Alkoran says, “God’s curse is on the man who tells lies” [Q 24.7]. So who is standing here who will dare to say that he has not lied anywhere?’ (p. 6), and gives the example of Adam to demonstrate that no one is wholly good: ‘Even our father Adam was removed from happiness because of only one sin’ (p. 8). The Christian asks the imam who it was that claimed that Muḥammad interceded for people, to which the imam replies that God himself said that Muḥammad intercedes for people and that there are over a hundred verses that say this in the Qur’an. When the Christian challenges him to quote a single one, he and the Muslims are silent and the memoriser of the Qur’an refuses to help. The Christian ridicules this inability to respond (p. 10). The exchange includes further quotations from the Qur’an and Hadith, and then the missionary asks the imam, ‘What are the benefits of the faith of Muhamadi? Even if I agree that Muhamadi is the prophet of God, the Alkoran is the word of God, and Islam is the true Faith, what good will that do me?’ (p. 13). He also asks him about judgement after his death: ‘On that day what good will it do you that you are a Muslim?’ He himself gives the answer: ‘Do not delude yourself that repentance and remorse will wipe out sin, […] that there is no forgiveness of sins in Islam.’ He underlines this by arguing that there is no verse in the Qur’an that says salvation can
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come through Muḥammad (pp. 13-15). The final pages (15-17) explain how salvation comes only through Yesu Masihi (Jesus the Messiah), including a prayer that the reader can recite (p. 16). Topan reports that the 1902 edition ends with a notice encouraging readers to read copies of other books in Swahili (Arabic script), including the Gospels of John and Luke, ending with the qur’anic invocation Wa-l-ḥamdu li-llāhi (All praise be to God) (‘Swahili as a religious language’, p. 345 n. 15). Significance This was probably the first tract to be written in Swahili by a Christian to challenge Muslims in their beliefs. Its being written in Arabic script meant that it was accessible to readers at a time when most mission material was printed in Roman script. In 1914, it was listed with other tracts about Islam in Führer, the annual Lutheran guide published in Dar es Salaam, indicating that it was regarded as a useful resource. In 1935, Alfred Pittway related in his Annual Letter to the CMS that the tract had been re-printed in Nairobi in Arabic script: We then got an old tract reprinted. This tract was written by a missionary named Taylor who worked at Mombasa years ago. […] This tract created quite a stir and I was told in the street by a leading Moslem that if it were not for the British being in authority I should have by this time been killed.
Pittway regarded the tract as showing ‘the failure of the Moslem religion to meet man’s deepest needs and the adequacy of the Gospel’ (Annual Letter, p. 3). In 1960, Bethwell Kiplagat and Sigvard von Sicard reported finding a copy in a bookshop, together with some books by Godfrey Dale of the UMCA. They comment: ‘[U]nfortunate comparisons and arguments have caused these books to become obnoxious in the eyes of E.A. Muslims. They should, therefore, be read with this in mind and not be made the sole source of information in regard to Islam’ (Kiplagat and von Sicard, Report, p. 32). The contents of the tract have not so far been examined in any detail; most references to it do little more than note its existence as a rare example of Christian use of Swahili in Arabic script, together with the negative response made by Muslims due to its polemical tone. The views of Shaykh al-Amin bin Ali, a prominent Mombasan qāḍī, are particularly notable. He wrote in 1936 that ‘Christians have composed many books to show to the peoples of East Africa the wickedness of the Islamic religion and its teachings, and have insulted the apostle Muhammad’ (quoted in
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Lacunza Balda, ‘Translations’, p. 99), and in 1939 he criticised Raha isiyo karaha and some polemical tracts by Godfrey Dale (Al-Amin bin Aly, Dini ya Islamu, p. 1). Publications Copies of the 1902 and 1940 editions are held by the British Library. W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, Mombasa: CMS, 1893 (Swahili in Arabic script; no known copy) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, Mombasa: CMS, 1895 (Swahili in Arabic script; no known copy) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, London: RTS, 1897 (Swahili in Arabic and Roman script) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, London: RTS for CMS, 1902 (Swahili in Arabic script) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, Nairobi: CMS Bookshop, 1934 (Swahili in Arabic script) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, Nairobi: n.p., 1940 (Swahili in Roman script) Studies J.A. Chesworth, Mixed messages. Using the Bible and Qurʾān in Swahili tracts, Leiden, 2022 Frankl, ‘William Ernest Taylor’ J. Lacunza Balda, ‘Translations of the Quran into Swahili, and contemporary Islamic revival in East Africa’, in D. Westerlund and E.E. Rosander (eds), African Islam and Islam in Africa, London, 1997, 95-126 F. Topan, ‘Swahili as a religious language’, Journal of Religion in Africa 22 (1992) 331-49 B. Kiplagat and S. von Sicard, A report on Islam in Kenya for the Department of Biblical Study and Research of Christian Council of Kenya, Nairobi: Christian Council of Kenya, 1960 Al-Amin bin Aly [al-Mazruʿi], Dini ya Islamu, Mombasa, 1939 Archives Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham – Church Missionary Society Archives, G3 AL 19351950 (A. Pittway, ‘Annual letter for 1935’)
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Annual letters Date 1883-96 Original Language English Description Taylor was the first CMS missionary in East Africa since Ludwig Krapf (1810-81) to have facility in a range of languages, and the first to develop an active interest in Islam in order to be more effective in evangelism. Reports taken from his letters were published to inform his British supporters. They reveal a certain amount of knowledge of Islam, with a conviction that it was inferior to Christianity. He wrote an Annual Letter to the CMS, reporting on his work. Items from these letters were reprinted in Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East and in Extracts from Annual Letters. From these published reports it becomes clear that Taylor was interested in evangelising, but also in becoming proficient in Swahili in order to be able to communicate effectively. During his first tour, he ran a clinic where he was able to use his medical experience from Edinburgh. He did not restrict himself to dealing with physical health but took the opportunity to distribute copies of tracts to his patients. He wrote: I have had many opportunities of preaching Christ in my medical practice, and have been able to lend Arabic works, as Al Kindy and Pfander’s Mizan, in quarters where they may do good. Of the Arabs resident in Mombasa, there are several said to be well disposed towards Christianity, but afraid to declare their belief. (‘East Africa Mission’, Proceedings, 1883, p. 44)
Following his marriage in 1892, he was based in Mombasa, and Taylor reports that his wife and the other women visited ladies in the town and supported the weekly outreach meetings, usually forming a choir and, on occasion, preaching. They used ‘the spacious basement of the Women Workers’ House … as our msikiti – mosque, i.e., mission chapel and evangelistic hall’ (Taylor, Mombasa, 25 November 1893, Annual Letters, 1894, p. 6). In the same letter he reports a conversation between his wife and a Muslim woman: ‘I am the wife of a Mohammedan divine, and you are the wife of a Christian divine. Well, when I die I shall go to heaven, and when you die you will go to hell-fire: and then I, in heaven shall see you in the fire!’ My wife replied, ‘But I hope, through Jesus Christ, that we shall both meet in heaven!’ thus giving the listener a practical example, bound to commend itself to the light of
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The public meetings were held at the market-place and at Zizi t’a K’onzi several times a week. Taylor describes these and the responses of the Muslims in several of his Annual Letters. [A]lthough we often meet with ridicule, and sometimes with bitter opposition and conflict […] wherever one goes one hears the words, ‘Tela sizue!’ (Taylor, don’t tell lies!) being the refrain of one of the most popular songs, a sort of parody of one of our choruses; or else it is ‘Stop and tell us something about Isa (Jesus)!’ or ‘Come in, tell us an anecdote!’ (a parable or miracle in the life of our Lord here on earth.) Usually you have not got halfway through before you are interrupted by having objections propounded that you have answered a thousand times before, such as ‘How can God have a Son, seeing the Korân says, He begets not, neither is He begotten?’ ‘Why don’t you piga shahada?’ that is, to say the Mohammedan confession: ‘There is no God but God: Mohammed is the prophet of God.’ These they think were the characteristics of Jesus whom we profess to follow, and are even binding upon all true followers of His. (Taylor, Mombasa, 25 November 1893, Annual Letters, 1894, pp. 8-9)
In his Annual Letter to the CMS for 1894 he described a holiday in Lamu where he introduced open-air meetings to the German missionaries of Neukirchen Mission. We had great pleasure in inaugurating market services similar to those at Mombasa, and these have been kept up ever since by the German Neukirchen missionaries. We found the fame of the Mombasa services had preceded us, and the town was ringing with our choruses and parodies on them – or, rather, answers directed against our Gospel. The Lamu people have the gift of poetry very commonly diffused among them, and are of a more polite and intellectual cast than are the people of Mombasa. […] This interesting people (Lamu) are nevertheless rank in sins – in a more deeply degraded way than are the people of Mombasa. (Taylor, Mombasa, 1894, Annual Letters, 1895, p. 8)
Taylor was unafraid to report setbacks as well. ‘[S]ometimes the opposition can be very noisy […] too. (I was suffering from an ear infection and had cotton-wool stuffed into my ears.) The quick-eyed opponents saw this, and immediately objected. “He has stopped his ears; he is afraid to hear our arguments.” Of course, I had to remove it’ (Taylor, Mombasa, 29 January 1896, Annual Letters, 1896, p. 586). In the same letter, Taylor reveals something of his view of the differences between Islam and Christianity:
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We have been allowed to meet and argue with Mohammedan doctors on the very steps of the mosque porticoes wherein they give their lectures, and have been able, by God’s blessing, to let them see some of the differences that lies between a soul-satisfying religion and the husky, strawy character of what they call Islam. (Taylor, Mombasa, 29 January 1896, Annual Letters, 1896, p. 586)
He also explains that only one of the Mombasa maalims, a Baluchi shaykh, had been ready to challenge the message at the open-air meetings. This individual ‘marched into our ring in the hope that he was going to convince us of the error of our ways and teachings, and of the truths of Islam’ (Taylor, Mombasa, 29 January 1896, Annual Letters, 1896, p. 586). The response of the wa’tu wa mji, ‘the Swahili people of Mombasa’, is summed up in a snatch of doggerel that was current in Mombasa at that time: ibada ya Mala * haiko sokoni ‘the worship of the Lord is not (to be found) in the market-place’. Taylor’s hymns were often parodied, but they were remembered for many years and recorded as far down the coast as Mozambique (Frankl, ‘William Ernest Taylor’, p. 166). The interest excited by the services has spread all along the Swahili coast, not only northward, but also to the south. Even at Mgau (the populous strip of Swahili coast lying furthest south, just north of Mozambique) a Swahili gentleman, formerly a great bigot, who has made a trip there during the year, tells me that all were asking about the new departure at Mombasa, and that the hymns we sing in the sokoni (market-place) had made their way, no doubt in a very fragmentary state, even there. (Taylor, Mombasa, 1894, Annual Letters, 1895, p. 8)
In his final Annual Letter from Mombasa, Taylor reflected on the Swahili scholars who had assisted him in his studies and their concern to assist him with his language studies and translation work, without helping to advance his evangelistic work. Some able Mohammedan ‘lay’ men, whose orthodoxy is looked upon here as beyond suspicion, leaders in the scrupulous observance of their religious rites and ceremonies, have not only discussed with us the claims we press upon them with patience, but have even lent their abilities to us in the service of our translational work. […] To show you that this help has not been given without due consideration of the grave responsibility incurred by such conduct, […] an accomplished scholar of Swahili and Arabic, always formerly refused to give an opinion on linguistic questions where religion was involved – often just where we needed criticism and guidance […] – because he feared he might be ‘selling his soul’.
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Significance Taylor’s reporting of Muslim responses to his and to his wife’s evangelism serves to give a sense of Muslims’ desire to engage with them and to defend Islam. It must be assumed that a certain amount of editing of the original letters took place before they were published, so the emphasis of what was reported could well have been changed (see Wild-Wood, ‘Interpretations’). The public meetings, where Taylor and others preached and hymns were sung, engaged the interest of the local community. As they were a regular occurrence, they formed a part of the warp and weft of Mombasa life, no doubt seen as a distraction or entertainment by many people, although it is clear that for some it was an opportunity to challenge the message being presented, and to debate with Taylor. The pattern of openair evangelism continues to be used in East Africa, with Alfred Pittway describing it in his Annual Letters to the CMS as occurring in Nairobi in the 1930s (CMS Archives, G3 AL 1917-1934, 1935-1949, Pittway Annual Letters for 1930, 1935). In more recent years, it has been used by Muslims in the form of mihadhara (public debates), notably by Muslim preachers of the Bible (Chesworth, ‘Fundamentalism’, pp. 168-72). Publications W.E. Taylor’s Annual Letters and the Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East are held in the archives of the CMS at the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham. A large part of the archival material has been digitised by Adam Matthew Publications and is available online. For more details on the archival corpus, see: https://church missionsociety.org/about/our-history/archives/. ‘East Africa Mission’, Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, London, 1883, 40-7 ‘East Africa Mission’, Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, London, 1894, 37-41 (includes an extract from Taylor’s annual letter for 1893, p. 38)
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W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 25 November 1893’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the missionaries for the year 1893-94, London, 1894, 7-10 W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 1894’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the missionaries for the year 1894-95, London, 1895, 7-10 W.E. Taylor, ‘Mombasa, 29 January 1896’, in Extracts from the Annual Letters of the missionaries for the year 1896, London, 1896, 583-7 Studies E. Wild-Wood, ‘The interpretations, problems and possibilities of missionary sources in the history of Christianity in Africa’, in M. Frederiks and D. Nagya (eds), World Christianity. Methodological considerations, Leiden, 2021, 92-112 J.A. Chesworth, ‘Fundamentalism and outreach strategies in East Africa. Christian evangelism and Muslim daʿwa’, in B.J. Soares (ed.), Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, Leiden, 2006, 159-86 Frankl, ‘William Ernest Taylor’ R.L. Pouwels, Horn and crescent. Cultural challenge and traditional Islam on the East African coast, 800-1900, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 186-8 (on Muslim responses to Taylor’s Swahili verses) John Chesworth
Charles August Blackburn Date of Birth About 1845 Place of Birth Chamarel, Mauritius Date of Death 1918 Place of Death Mauritius, possibly Port Louis
Biography
Charles August Blackburn was an ordained minister of the Church of England, and Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary to his native country, Mauritius. Born around 1845 of Anglo-French parents, he grew up on his father’s estate in Chamarel, Mauritius. He studied theology at St John’s Theological College, Islington, and was ordained deacon in 1873 and priest in 1878. From 1877 to 1881, he served as superintendent of the Anglican church on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles. He later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he specialised in Indian languages while simultaneously serving as curate of the embassy church in Paris. In 1883, he returned to his home country to serve as a local CMS missionary among indentured Indian labourers. Blackburn was renowned for his linguistic versatility. He appears to have been fluent in a number of Indian dialects, which he used to preach to the Indian population; he also learned Chinese and Arabic in order to reach out to the Arab and Chinese merchant community. Both his reputation and his publications indicate that he had an extensive knowledge of Islam, and he is known to have engaged in public debates with Muslims. In 1903, Blackburn retired from active ministry due to illness; he died in 1918. In his monumental The history of the Church Missionary Society, Eugene Stock lauds Blackburn for both his expertise and his piety, describing him as ‘a local clergyman of excellent qualifications [...] especially competent to deal with Mohammedans’ (p. 548).
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION E. Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society. Its environment, its men and its work, vol. 3, London, 1899, p. 548 C.F. Pascoe, Two hundred years of the S.P.G., London, 1901, p. 902 D.E. Anderson, The epidemics of Mauritius, London, 1918, p. 284
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mahomet et le koran comparés au Christ et à l’évangile, and other works Date 1894, 1897 Original Language French Description Blackburn wrote several books in various languages. Three of his publications, in French, Urdu and Arabic respectively, address Islam and Muslims. In 1894, he published Mahomet et le koran comparés au Christ et à l’évangile. Réponse aux musulmans, 111 pages long, which compares Muḥammad and the Qur’an with Jesus and the gospels. A revised and somewhat shorter edition (95 pages) was issued a year later. Blackburn possibly composed the book in response to the Muslim polemical tracts that were in circulation in Mauritius in the early 1890s and also as a reply to the public attacks against Christianity by a Mr Wilson, an itinerant British Muslim convert, who visited Mauritius in 1891. Because both editions of the book were printed locally in Mauritius, copies of it are extremely rare and its content is unknown. In 1897, the Punjab Religious Book Society (PRBS) in Lahore published an Urdu tract written by Blackburn entitled Ek likcar: jo Pādrī Blaik’baran [...] ne jazīrah-yi Mārīshis ke Muḥammadīyon ko diyā (‘A lecture that Rev. Blackburn gave to the Muslims of the Island of Mauritius’). The only copy known to have survived was once part of the Free Reading Room collection of the CMS in Hyderabad (Sind) and is currently kept at the McGill University Library. The tract consists of a 16-page lecture and two short overviews of kindred publications by the PRBS. The lecture is explicitly polemical and endeavours to argue that only Christ can reconcile humankind with God. In the first part of the lecture, Blackburn outlines that Muḥammad, being a sinner, cannot serve as an intercessor between God and humankind, repeatedly referencing the Qur’an (in Arabic as well as in an improvised Urdu translation) to underscore his argument. In presenting this position, Blackburn uses well-known polemical arguments to discredit Muḥammad, such as that he resorted to violence, that he was polygamous, that he was sensual and succumbed to temptation (specifically referencing the Zaynab affair), and that he repeatedly strayed from the straight path. In the second part of the lecture, which mainly cites the Bible, Blackburn aims to convince his audience that Jesus is the Messiah, the only one who can reconcile humans with God. Throughout his lecture,
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Blackburn consistently uses the word Muhammadi (Muḥammadans) rather than Muslims. Also, the Urdu form of addressing the audience somewhat condescendingly underscores the presumed superiority of the speaker (in terms of social standing) vis-à-vis the listeners. (I gratefully acknowledge the aid of Dr Jan Slomp in summarising the content of Ek likcar.) According to an obituary by Anderson, Blackburn also published ‘An appeal to Mohammedans in Arabic’ (Epidemics of Mauritius, p. 284), of which no extant copy seems to exist. It is unclear whether Anderson mistook the Urdu tract for Arabic or whether there were indeed two versions of the pamphlet. It is also uncertain whether the Urdu tract was printed in Lahore solely for practical purposes (the existence of an Urdu printing press) and that Mauritius was considered to be the main distribution market, or whether it was also intended to serve the Indian subcontinent. The extant copy in the McGill library, which was once part of the collection of the Free Reading Room of the CMS in Hyderabad, Sind, would seem to suggest the latter. Significance Blackburn’s publications seem to have been aimed at evangelising the newly-arrived Hindu and Muslim indentured labourers on the plantations in the Indian Ocean. If Ek likcar is indicative of his other two works, they seem to be local examples of a well-worn polemical tradition. In a broader context, Blackburn’s publications show that indigenous clergy produced and published materials for the local market to support their missionary work among Muslims. Further, the fact that Blackburn’s Urdu pamphlet was published in Lahore and seems to have circulated in the Indian subcontinent as well as in Madagascar, suggests that locally produced materials were shared in missionary networks to be utilised in other parts of the world. Publications C.A. Blackburn, Mahomet et le koran comparés au Christ et à l’évangile. Réponse aux musulmans, Mauritius, 1894 C.A. Blackburn, Mahomet et le koran comparés au Christ et à l’évangile. Réponse aux musulmans (new revised and augmented edition with the aid of the venerable A.D. Mathews), Mauritius, 1895 C.A. Blackburn, Ek likcar: jo Pādrī Blaikʹbaran [...] ne jazīrah-yi Mārīshis ke Muḥammadīyon ko diyā, Lahore: Punjab Religious Book Society Press, 1897 (abbreviated version in Urdu); BV2625B51897-20021 (digitised version available through McGill University Library)
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Studies Anderson, Epidemics of Mauritius, p. 284 ‘Annual Letter from Charles Blackburn’, in Extracts from Annual Letters for the year 1891-92, Part 2, London, pp. 80-1 Martha T. Frederiks
Shaykh Hussein Jibril Date of Birth 1818 Place of Birth Warra Himano (Koreb), Wallo, Ethiopia Date of Death 1916 Place of Death Warra Himano
Biography
Shaykh Hussein Jibril came from Wallo (Wollo) Province in north-eastern Ethiopia. He was known as a satirist, religious commentator, historian and, above all, a distinguished and highly respected Islamic scholar in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result of the belief that he was endowed with supernatural powers (arising from his profound prophetic knowledge), he was widely venerated by all classes of people, Muslims and Christians alike. Not much is known about Shaykh Hussein’s life, apart from details to be found in his poems. As the tradition goes, he did not receive a formal education and was illiterate. Nevertheless, he was knowledgeable about Islamic scholarship and was called to the courts of rulers of Wallo and Ethiopia. He is known to have spent long periods in the courts of Tewodros II (r. 1855-68), Negus Mikael ‘Ali (r. 1874-1918) and Menilek II (r. 1889-1913). At Menilek’s court he seems to have gained the favour of the emperor’s close family, probably due to his powers of divination. Shaykh Hussein was well-known for preaching religious cooperation and coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Wallo. A widely circulated story about him and Akale Wold, a well-known Orthodox priest who also worked for understanding between the two confessions, illustrates his approach. As the story goes, in order to show the possibility of coexistence and tolerance, the two leaders slaughtered an ox together. Out of respect for the shaykh’s age, the priest allowed him to slaughter the ox, and when the animal did not die the priest dealt the final blow after reciting Christian prayers. The two men then shared the meat, despite the prohibition in both religions on eating animals that had been slaughtered by the other. This story of the two leaders eating at one table is still told on occasions when Christians and Muslims meet formally in Ethiopia. Shaykh Hussein’s poems, which have been transmitted orally, have been recited by members of various Ethiopian religious communities because
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of their prophetic character. They have had a far-reaching influence on relations between the faiths, especially in Wallo Province.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Getie Gelaye (ed.), Yäšheh Husen Ǧǝbril tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč (‘Prophetic poems of Shaykh Hussein Jibril’), Hamburg, 2004 Secondary H. Ahmed, Islam in nineteenth-century Wallo, Ethiopia. Revival, reform and reaction, Leiden, 2001 Begna Fekadu, ‘A tentative history of Wallo 1855-1908’, Addis Ababa, 1972 (BA Diss. Addis Ababa University)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Poems Date Late 19th century Original Language Amharic Description Many of Shaykh Hussein’s verses are widely known. An example is his comparison of Christian and Muslim religious objects: ‘From above we have the tabot (ark of the covenant) and from below we have the rekebot (the holy table of cups for coffee rituals used by shaykhs for prayers)’ (Informant, Shaykh Hussein Abdella, interviewed in Dessie, Wallo, 2019). There is also the popular saying that hints at the need to deepen understanding among Christians and Muslims by following the example of the Christian priest Akale Wold and Shaykh Hussein. It goes: ‘We have Memhir Akalye at one end and Shaykh Hussein at the other, so we are complete.’ This witnesses to tolerance, coexistence and cooperation between followers of Christianity and Islam, going as far as a call to build churches and mosques together. One of the main focuses of Shaykh Hussein’s poems is the anti-Islamic policies of the Emperor Yohannes IV (r. 1871-89), who launched a campaign of forced conversion of the predominantly Muslim population of Wallo under the pretext that territorial integrity and national sovereignty would only be possible if religious uniformity was achieved. This was not the policy of rulers earlier or later. It resulted in a mass exodus of Muslims
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from Wallo to other parts of the country and the Sudan, while many Muslim clerics who resisted the measures suffered torture, imprisonment, banishment or death. Shaykh Hussein was very critical of these policies, not least because he himself was compelled to flee. His poems that summarise the vicissitudes suffered by Muslims became instruments of protest and resistance. Below are some of his stanzas concerning the injustices provoked by Yohannes’s religious policies. The land glorifies Christianity. What will be the fate of the Muslims fleeing Koreb now? The situation is precarious in both the highlands and the lowlands, Thus, what will happen for Muslims, the followers of Muḥammad the Prophet? (Täfäri, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 32-3) Yohannes was so lonely because he did not have a friend. O Metemma, blessed land, you freed us from a tyrant. Menilek rejoiced when he heard the news. I, too, was liberated from such a brutal leader by chewing khat and prayer. May God bless us with a ruler who favours Muslims alike. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 8)
These verses convey a sense of injustice at the forcible conversion by Christian priests of Muslim communities in Wallo. Shaykh Hussein recalls the battle of Metemma on the north-west borders of Ethiopia, where Yohannes was killed by Sudanese Mahdists, as a place that is blessed for Muslims. Among those forcibly converted in Wallo the new faith remained only nominal. While they spent much of the day in the church compound taking part in Christian services, at night they came together in the mosque to recite Muslim prayers. Many instances were reported of nobles and dignitaries who had converted reverting to Islam on their deathbeds. In the three extracts below the central point is what will happen to Yohannes, who has introduced the policy of religious uniformity in opposition to his predecessors’ ‘guarded tolerance towards their Muslim subjects’ (Asnake, ‘Political history of Wallo’, p. 19; Ahmed, Islam in nineteenth-century Wallo, p. 4). They reflect the general sorrow provoked by his injustices, and at the same time they focus on his dramatic fate, being decapitated by the Sudanese. It was popularly believed that the prayers of the Muslims in Wallo helped to secure the victory and the emperor’s end. The news from Metemma gravely terrible, It worries the emperor Yohannes, And the worst is yet to happen. (Täfäri, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 35)
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Whoever has heard let him lament and pour out his tears. I do not fear the debtera [Christian scholars] or the priests. I said: He will not emerge a victor, And if he is, I will no longer pray. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 7) They say we are barbarian and impure. We were labelled the same by the priests. I pleaded the injustice to Emperor Yohannes. Although I foretold the fall of Meqdela, Pity it is that a servant of the Prophet is called impure. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 6)
Shaykh Hussein also dedicated poems to Yohannes’s successor, Emperor Menilek II (r. 1889-1913), who reversed the policy of religious uniformity, declaring: ‘Religion is a private business while a nation is for all.’ In response, Shaykh Hussein composed a poem full of respect and hope for a brighter future for both Christians and Muslims. I attended your royal enclosure to pay you homage. Muslims prayed for you to be crowned. May you be warm or just to Islam, For you are considerate, unlike Yohhannes IV, who made many suffer. Muslims rejoiced and honoured your coronation. [...] Menilek emperor, if you love me and if I act likewise, I will address you as equal due to our love. In this may your father confessor not be surprised Unless it is in [communal or public] prayer – but I will not dare you [to do this]. You are aware of it; I do not have to tell you. The mother of Shawarega [Menilek’s wife] sympathises with me. At my arrival she washes her pots, She scatters green grass on the floor and burns incense to celebrate. She is pleased and laughs out loud, She joins in my prayers from dusk to dawn. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 11) Menilek, such a ‘wise man’, tested me in many ways. He tried to burn me as he did other sorcerers, Though no human but only Allāh will devour me, Lucky I am that Allāh has blessed me, If not, I would have been destroyed. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 9)
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In these extracts, Shaykh Hussein expresses his relief at the death of Yohannes and the succession of Menilek. He goes further and advises the new emperor to be liberal in religious matters. Indeed, Menilek reversed the religious policies of Yohannes with a decree granting religious freedom. Following this, many Wallo Muslims returned to their original religion, and there was growing cooperation and respect between Muslims and Christians. Another important theme of the verses is the ambiguous relationship between the shaykh and the emperor. Whilst Hussein enjoyed intimacy with Menilek’s family, he was also challenged by a sceptical and shrewd sovereign. If the priest heard the news of my arrival and decided to stay, Let him be ready to accept our difference. It is good to notice that Empress Taytu [Menilek’s wife] knows how to work with me. As such your father confessor must be open-minded enough for all engagement in the palace. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, pp. 11-12) If this priest is your father confessor, Why did he not join us in prayer all night? Though we have differences, it is tolerable, This is for the happiness of the emperor and for the peace of the country. (Getie, Tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč, p. 12)
Here the shaykh celebrates the gradual changes and improvements in relations between Muslims and Christians. Moreover, they reflect his growing confidence when he is in the Christian emperor’s palace. The two poems also applaud the emperor’s humane attitude in his treatment of the two religious communities in his empire. Significance These and poems like them have had profound influence on ChristianMuslim relations in Wallo and the rest of Ethiopia. They have made Shaykh Hussein widely known as a prophetic figure who sees coexistence, cooperation and understanding as the only way to righting social injustice among believers. Publications Bogale Täfäri (ed.), Yäšheh Husen Ǧǝbril tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč (‘Prophetic poems of Shaykh Hussein Jibril’), Addis Ababa, 1985
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Getie Gelaye (ed.), Yäšheh Husen Ǧǝbril tǝnbitawi gǝṭǝmoč (‘Prophetic poems of Shaykh Hussein Jibril’), Hamburg, 2004 Studies Ahmed, Islam in nineteenth century Wallo Gashaw Ayiferam, ‘YäWollo Bahilawi muziqawoch käWollo yäsälam, Fikir en abronät eset antsar yalachäw endimta btämärtu muziqawoch tätäkuwarinät’ (‘The implication of Wallo cultural music for the values of peace, coexistence and love’), in Zewdu Nahusenay et al. (eds), Culture and art for societal unity and peace building, Debre Birhan, 2019, 234-6 Berhanu Gebeyehu, ‘Islamic oral poetry in Wollo. A preliminary descriptive analysis’, Addis Ababa, 1998 (MA Diss. Addis Ababa University) Mamo Assefa, ‘Some prominent features of the manzuma genre in Wallo’, Addis Ababa, 1987 (MA Diss. Addis Ababa University) Ali Asnake, ‘Some aspects of the political history of Wallo, 1872-1916’, Addis Ababa, 1983 (MA Diss. Addis Ababa University) Bogale Täfäri, Šeh Husen Ǧǝbrilǝnna gǝṭǝmočačäw (‘Shaykh Hussein Jibril and his poems’), Addis Ababa, 1980 (BA Diss. Addis Ababa University) Fekadu, ‘Tentative history of Wallo’ Ebrahim Damtew Alyou
The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in the 19th century, the Gambia The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) was established in October 1818, although the first Methodist missionary ventures date back to the mid-18th century. Managed and financed mainly by the indefatigable Thomas Coke (1747-1814), early Methodist missionary endeavours were rather serendipitous and frequently followed up on work started by individual Methodists who had settled abroad. By the early 19th century, this had resulted in two strands of mission work: the so-called foreign missions aimed at strengthening and expanding Methodist communities in the colonies and mainland Europe, and the missions ‘among the heathens’ and Muslims, which were focused on evangelisation and converting people to Christianity. With more than 40 missionaries around the globe by 1810 and the coordination and funding dependent on a single person (Thomas Coke), the need to establish an effective missionary structure was evident. The formation of WMMS was most likely inspired by kindred organisations such as the Baptist Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society. However, in many ways the Methodist home organisation was different in that the Methodist Conference remained responsible for the selection, stationing and supervision of missionaries, while WMMS’s task was to raise the necessary funds and arrange practicalities (Pritchard, Methodists and their societies, p. 25). Methodist missionary work during the 19th century depended entirely on voluntary donations. To raise awareness, church circuits organised monthly missionary prayer meetings and women’s and youth auxiliaries took on fundraising for mission. To promote the missionary endeavour, WMMS supervised the publication of the periodical Missionary Notices, later continued as Wesleyan Missionary Notices (1816-1904). Missionaries also played their part in lobbying for mission work and writing quarterly letters and reports to keep contributors abreast of developments on the mission field. When on furlough, missionaries travelled around the country on speaking tours and a substantial number also published their diaries or travelogues. The fact that these texts were produced for the purposes of fundraising profoundly shaped both their style and content. For most of the 19th century, missionary training was scant and informal. Candidates aspiring to missionary service usually participated in the
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regular two-year ministerial training course, while language, intercultural skills and familiarity with the context were to be acquired on the job, provided missionaries survived long enough to master them. West Africa in particular had a reputation as ‘a white (wo)man’s grave’ – it seems that candidate missionaries frequently indicated their willingness to be sent anywhere, apart from West Africa (Pritchard, Methodists and their societies, p. 25). Missionaries sent to areas with a substantial Muslim population received no special training, nor were they required to have specific qualifications for interaction with Muslims. The linguist Robert Maxwell MacBrair (1775-1866), who briefly served in Egypt before he was sent to the Gambia in 1835 to work as a Bible translator, seems to have been an exception. MacBrair read and spoke Arabic and was well versed in the Qur’an and key themes in Christian Muslim polemics. However, his insistence that all missionaries working among Muslims should learn Arabic as well as a vernacular spoken by Muslims went unheeded (Findlay and Holdsworth, History of WMMS, vol. 4, p. 120). The awareness that mission in a predominantly Muslim context might require distinct missionary strategies only gradually became apparent. Most missionaries were convinced that truth could only be found in (certain forms of) Christianity; all other forms of religiosity were considered ‘superstition’, ‘false religion’ or ‘paganism’. Though certain that no other religious traditions had any salvific potential, theologically trained missionaries seem to have valued some traditions above others in line with prevalent ideas of their time. In the hierarchy of religions, Islam was considered ‘higher’ than what was called ‘paganism’ but ‘lower’ than Judaism and Christianity (Pritchard, Methodists and their societies, pp. 20-1). Nonetheless, the prevailing sentiment regarding Islam (usually called Mohammedanism) and Muslims was one of disapproval and denunciation. Islam was considered a ‘false religion’ and Muḥammad ‘a false prophet’ and ‘an imposter’. Not only theology, but also racism shaped Methodist perceptions of Muslims (and non-Muslims) in West Africa. William Fox (d. 1845), who worked in Bathurst (1834-43), compiled A brief history of the Wesleyan missions on the western coast of Africa and wrote: Whether Mahometan or Pagan, Africans are all ignorant, guilty and depraved, ‘earthly, sensual and devilish’, ‘sitting in darkness and in the region of the shadow of death’, ‘having no hope, and without God in the world’. The
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Despite the all-prevailing deprecation of Islam, the faith was considered a considerable missionary threat and rival. Particularly in the Gambia and Nigeria, where jihads had become an effective means of spreading Islam in the 19th century, missionaries keenly felt the competition. In 1912, George Findlay and Mary Findlay recorded in their history of WMMS: Every advance made among the negro peoples of Western Africa brings the Church in closer conflict with Islam, the Antichrist of this continent, by whose aggression the ancient flourishing Christianity of Northern Africa was destroyed. […] Islam has much to offer to the untutored pagan. Admittedly, it effects a partial elevation of the fetish-worshipping negro; there its redeeming influence stops. Muhammadanism is ‘a religion without the Divine Fatherhood, without compassion for those outside its pale; and to the womanhood of Africa it is a religion of despair and doom.’ Muhammad is no ‘schoolmaster to lead to Christ’; but a rival who bars His way. Paganism cannot live in the new light; but where Islam steps in first by ever so little, Christianity is shut out for generations. […] For the honour of Christ, for the love of souls, for the sanctity of womanhood, for the peace and safety of Europe, the march of Muhammad must be challenged. A new and holier Crusade is called for…. (Findlay and Findlay, Wesley’s world parish, p. 202).
Despite these experiences, theological reflection and policy documents on Islam and mission to Muslims in the 19th century were rare. Although one of the society’s first secretaries, Richard Watson, was particularly interested in missions to the Islamic world, most of the actual missionary work was conducted in Roman Catholic contexts in Europe, in the colonies, China, southern India and the Pacific. In the 1830s, there was a brief experiment in Egypt; however, the work seems to have consisted mainly of distributing Arabic tracts and Bibles among Copts, and the initiative was terminated after a few years. Also, in Sri Lanka and India, Methodist missionaries occasionally encountered Muslims, but it was in 19th-century West Africa that WMMS missionaries had their most extensive encounters with Islam and Muslims. Even there, interactions were limited: colonial policy constrained missionary work among Muslims in northern Ghana and Northern Nigeria, and mission work in Sierra Leone was confined to Freetown for most of the 19th century. Likewise, Methodist missionary work in Nigeria only ventured beyond the Abeokuta region in the late 19th century. Chronic lack of funds and personnel, the safety hazards
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caused by the Soninke-Marabout wars and the focus on work among liberated Africans notwithstanding, only in the Gambia did joint teams of indigenous and expatriate missionaries regularly interact with Muslims throughout the 19th century. It was in situ that policy and theological reflection emerged, and then only sporadically; official policy documents were few and far between. Two examples of such more systematic theological reflections are discussed below: the work of the linguist Robert MacBrair and a reflection by William Maude (1846-1931), a veteran missionary to West Africa who served in the Gambia for two periods, 1883-5 and 1897-1910. In most cases, however, missionary reflection on Islam and mission to Muslims is to be reconstructed from the scattered, brief remarks in letters or reports mainly devoted to other topics. Given the immense amount of written material produced by Methodist missionaries in the 19th century, this is no easy task. While some local mission histories (especially for the 20th century) dedicate a paragraph or chapter to Christian-Muslim encounters and theological reflection on Islam, no attempt has so far been made systematically to map and compare attitudes to Muslims from various contexts in 19th- and 20th-century WMMS materials.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary The archives of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (1791-1948) are kept at the School of Oriental and African Studies and organised in ‘boxes’. References to the archives therefore includes the box number in which the material can be found. The archives were put on microfiche by IDC Publishers, Leiden, and the collection is now owned by Brill Publishers. In addition to the box number, each note to archival material therefore also includes the series and microfiche number of the reference (abbreviated as mf.). SOAS collection: http://archives.soas.ac.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=Calm View.Catalog&id=MMS&pos Elizabeth Bennett’s guide to the MMS collection at SOAS: http://archives.soas. ac.uk/CalmView/GetDocument.ashx?db=Catalog&fname=modified_bennett_guide.pdf W. Fox, A brief history of the Wesleyan missions to the Western coast of Africa, London, 1851 Secondary J. Pritchard, Methodists and their missionary societies 1760-1900, Farnham, 2013
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G.G. Findlay and W.W. Holdsworth, The history of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 5 vols, London, 1921-4 G.G. Findlay and M.G. Findlay, Wesley’s world parish, London, 1912 W.T.A. Barber, ‘The work of British societies’, in W.J. Townsend, H.B. Workman and G. Eayrs (eds), A new history of Methodism, London, 1909, vol. 2, 283-361 J. Telford, A short history of the Wesleyan Methodist foreign missions, London, 1905 J. Telford, The makers of our mission, London, 1895 W. Moister, The rise, progress and present state of Wesleyan missions in various parts of the world, London, 1868
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in the 19th century, the Gambia Date 19th century Original Language English Description When John Morgan (d. 1872), the first missionary to work in the Gambia estuary, arrived in Bathurst in 1821, Islam had not yet become the religion of the majority of the people. However, Muslims such as the Jakhanke and the Torodbe had settled in the area from the 11th century onwards, founding Muslim homesteads adjacent to established villages. In addition to trade and agriculture, they made a living by performing services for the community in the form of writing and teaching, and the production of amulets and traditional medicine. Gradually, over the centuries, more and more people embraced Islam and, as the number of Muslims increased, so did their influence (Sanneh, The Jakhanke, pp. 215-38). The mid-19th century saw a wave of Muslim emancipation and revivalist movements in the area, which erupted in a series of jihads against traditional leadership. On the banks of the Gambia, these jihads became known as the SoninkeMarabout wars (1849-1919). During these hostilities, which destabilised the area for the larger part of the 19th century, traditional leadership was overthrown, villages were pillaged and destroyed, and small transient Muslim states were established (Frederiks, We have toiled all night, pp. 12850; Klein, Islam and imperialism; Quinn, Mandingo kingdoms). It was during these 19th-century jihads that the majority of the people living along the River Gambia became Muslims, though the popularisation of Islam continued well into the 20th century.
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Nineteenth-century Methodist missionary activity therefore coincided with a time of profound religious change. The missionary materials mirror this turmoil and ponder its consequences for Christian mission. Initially, Methodist missionaries to the area were convinced that the conversion of the Gambian peoples to Christianity would be merely a matter of time, echoing the prevalent contemporary European view that African attachment to Islam was superficial. Many people seemed to show an interest in Methodist preaching; John Morgan describes these audiences as leisurely, reclining on their mats under a mango tree, listening to his sermons as long as he would want them to (Morgan, Reminiscences, pp. 6-7). However, his hope that these were indications that all would soon convert to Christianity proved unfounded, and he had to conclude that, whilst adherents of the African traditional religions were quite open to Christianity, Muslims were not. It made him exclaim that ‘Mohammedans seemed to be shielded against Christianity as perfectly as the crocodiles in the river were against the spear and the bullet’ (Morgan, Reminiscences, p. 46). This opinion was reiterated again and again in the history of Christianity in the Gambia. Missionaries observed with growing concern that, while Christianity made little headway and mainly found support among the Liberated African community and some of the Wolof enslaved originating from Saint-Louis and the Petite Côte, Islam seemed to win the vast majority of the people. This appeared to confirm the classical Muslim retort to Christian preaching that ‘Jesus Christ is white man’s God and Mahomet black man’s God’ (Pullen to WMMS, St Mary’s, 12 March 1882, Box 296/ H2709 mf. 920). Also, polygamy, ‘this woman question’, proved to be an obstacle for conversion to Christianity. Many missionaries realised that Islam offered a worldview that could compete with Christianity, which meant that Muslims were not as open to the gospel as traditionalists and, furthermore, that Islam was a formidable missionary competitor. James Fieldhouse stated in 1876: ‘I add that a Moslem is much more difficult to deal with than a Pagan, that a mind frequently preoccupied with specious errors will not so soon embrace the truth as a mind unfettered by false teachings’ (Fieldhouse to WMMS, 20 October 1876, Box 295/H2709 mf 904). The scarcity of converts caused many 19th-century Methodist missionaries to believe that Muslims were ‘indoctrinated’ against Christianity from childhood onwards (e.g. Peet to WMMS, 21 April 1859, Box 286/ H2709 mf. 933). If Muslims were to be ‘gained for Christ’ at all, it would have to be at a young age. By exposing children at a tender age to both
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Western culture and Christian teaching, missionaries attempted to counter the influence of Islam and the African traditional religions. Education therefore became the mainspring of Methodist missionary work in the 19th century. Benjamin Tregaskis (1814-85; chair 1865-74), one of West Africa’s more notorious Methodist chairmen, is known to have exclaimed: ‘You may sooner think of closing your chapels than of extending religion without education’ (Prickett, Island base, p. 100). However, despite the truly impressive Methodist dedication to education in the Gambia, the results in terms of converts were extremely meagre. Where in other areas in West Africa schooling proved to be a powerful medium for spreading Christianity, in the Gambia education had no such result whatsoever. Conversions of Muslims were few and far between, but the tales of those who did convert were recorded in detail and served as evidence that it was possible to break through the barrier of Islam (e.g. Cooper to WMMS, St Mary’s, 20 April 1859, Box 286/H2709 mf. 933). Therefore, despite all evidence to the contrary, Methodists continued to hope for a turn of events, if only they tried hard enough. James Peet wrote in 1860: ‘The day will come (that is certain) when thousands of Mohammedans who live near this place will be brought to Christ and instead of mosques of the false prophet being seen, the temples of Jehovah shall rise in Holy Grandeur to be a blessing to Africa’ (Peet to WMMS, St Mary’s, 25 January 1860, Box 286/H2709 mf 938). But neither he nor his colleagues lived to see that day. By the 1880s, the Roman Catholic Spiritan missionaries had given up their attempts to convert Muslims and focussed on the evangelisation of adherents of the various African traditional religions. They hoped that the conversion of traditionalists would stop ‘the tide of Islam’ (Frederiks, We have toiled all night, pp. 231-2). The Methodists continued their attempts at Muslim evangelism for another 40 years. Because the traditional methods of preaching and education did not bring the desired result, different methods were contemplated. There were proposals for a medical mission, for better training of existing personnel, for engaging specifically trained personnel, for enforcing strict discipline amongst the membership so that they could be a better witnessing community, and so forth. But none of these initiatives produced significant results (Letter to Mission Committee. Synod 1917, Box 235/H2708 mf. 426; Synod Minutes 1922, Box 236/H2708 mf. 428). The Soninke-Marabout wars, which started in 1849 and continued throughout the 19th century, not only hampered effective evangelism in the rural areas, but also profoundly shaped Methodist perceptions of Islam. John Bridgart (d. 1859) and George Meadows (c. 1825-97), who
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served in the Gambia colony during the clashes with jihadist Fode Kabba in the 1850s, saw some of the Methodist chapels burnt and regarded Islam as very aggressive. Meadows wrote: ‘Mohammedanism in a more bigoted and cruel form than it has hitherto shown, appears to be fast gaining the ascendancy in this part of Africa so far as I can learn’ (Meadows to WMMS, St Mary’s, 7 August 1855, Box 295/H2709 mf. 891). And later that month, Bridgart observed: ‘It is well for the native Christians that we are under the protection of the British government. If it were not so I doubt (humanly speaking) whether Christianity would long be permitted to exist here’ (Bridgart to WMMS, St. Mary’s, 22 August 1855, Box 295/H2709 mf. 89). William Titcombe Pullen (1854-1930), who in 1882 had the Arabic tracts that he was distributing thrown back at him, also considered Islam to be an antagonistic religion (Pullen to WMMS, Bathurst, 12 March 1882, Box 296/H2709 mf. 920). After the wars had subsided, Methodist perceptions about Islam mellowed. The veteran missionary William Maude, who worked in West Africa between 1867 and 1920 and served in the Gambia at the turn of the century when the Soninke-Marabout wars had ended, considered Islam to be superficial and little more than paganism: ‘The Mohammedanism of the Gambia is of a very low type and may better be described as paganism, witchcraft and greegreeism’ (Maude to WMMS, St Mary’s, 31 January 1899, Box 288/H2709 mf. 1001). For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Methodist missionaries underestimated the depth of commitment to Islam. They considered Islam to be a religion that had not truly touched people’s lives. As late as 1929 the Africa Secretary Thompson wrote: The Muhammedanism of West Africa is not at present of a fanatical type. The chief reason is that it is so superficial and barbarous. The Muhammedanism which I have seen in our West African Colonies is paganism with the thinnest possible veneer of Islam on the surface. The feelings, convictions and practices of many West African Moslems have not been deeply affected by the change of religion. (Thompson to Eburne, London, 31 December 1929, Box 763/H2709 mf. 1084)
Superficial, barbarian, ignorant and false were words frequently used in connection to Islam. Methodists were convinced that neither Islam nor African traditional religions would endure in the encounter with modernity. Once exposed to sound – Christian – education, Islam’s ‘weaknesses’ would become evident and Muslims would convert to Christianity ‘en masse’. The 1924 Synod – wishfully – wrote that, though Islam had claimed
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some of the indigenous ethnic groups, ‘Muhammadanism itself is breaking up under the influence of modern education and modes of thought and life. Because it is a religion of the letter and not of the spirit, it does not progress and it cannot satisfy the needs of our age’ (Synod Minutes 4 (1924), Box 238/H2708 mf. 428). This echoed a widely carried prediction that adherence to Islam would crumble once its adherents had been exposed to modern civilisation and Western education. It is unnecessary to add that these predictions never materialised. Only in the late 1920s, nearly 40 years after their Roman Catholic colleagues, did Methodist missionaries begin to conclude that Muslims were not willing to convert to Christianity. From then on, the focus of the Methodist mission shifted to adherents of African traditional religions who had recently migrated to the Gambia. Once again, however, this led to a confrontation with Muslims as both groups engaged in fierce competition to win the newcomers for their religion. Thus, Methodists and Muslims laboured side by side in the Gambian ‘race for the African soul’. Though many among the indigenous agents and the Methodist community at large must have had daily interactions and conceivably also social or familial ties with Muslims, this is not reflected in the written materials; there are only intimations in the letters and reports that hint at this. In part, the reason is the underrepresentation of indigenous voices in the 19th-century material, and in part the concern of its authors. Close reading, however, reveals a few pointers. Robert MacBrair, for example, indicated that it was the Wolof evangelist John Cupidon who brought him into contact with a number of Muslim leaders (MacBrair, Sketches, p. 252). And a letter from the indigenous minister York Clement to WMMS from the mid-1860s evidences his connections with Muslims in the Georgetown area (among whom was the King of Kattaba) and describes his diaconal ministry among refugees (Muslims as well as non-Muslims) from the Soninke-Marabout wars (Clement to WMMS, Georgetown, 14 August 1867, Box 287 H2709 mf. 781). Also, there must have been regular interactions with Muslims in the schools (pupils as well as parents), but this is only mentioned in passing. The dominant representation of Muslims in 19thcentury Methodist documents from the Gambia is that of Muslims as objects of conversion, or ‘aggressive’ competitors for the souls of Africans. The texts rarely reference social interactions with Muslims or portray them as neighbours, shopkeepers, artisans, etc. Despite the fact that the Gambia became a predominantly Muslim society from the mid-19th century onwards, the Methodists did very little theological reflection in relation to Islam, though there are two exceptions:
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Illustration 9. A Mandingo, accompanied by MacBrair’s description
Robert Maxwell MacBrair produced a policy paper entitled On the best method of disseminating the scripture in north-western Africa (c. 18369), and William Maude wrote Memorandum on Mohammedanism and Christianity in West Africa (c. 1910). Both men were experienced missionaries who had worked among Muslims in more than one context. MacBrair had briefly worked in Egypt before he was sent to West Africa in 1835, where he served a two-year term. A gifted linguist, he was charged with making Mandinka and Fula translations of the Bible while in the Gambia. To facilitate contact with informants, he was stationed upriver in an area with a strong Muslim presence. During his term of service, MacBrair, who was fluent in Arabic, had numerous interactions with Muslim scholars who were deeply impressed by his linguistic abilities and knowledge of the Qur’an, though less impressionable when it came to MacBrair’s not too subtle attempts at evangelisation. His letters and
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travelogues document recurring discussions with Muslims on familiar polemical themes such as the crucifixion, Jesus as the Son of God and the beauty and inimitability of the Qur’an. MacBrair had a low opinion of West African Islam. He writes: ‘The religious creed of the Mandingoes and their neighbours consists, almost entirely, of a number of heathenish superstitions and “country fashions”, which would be an abomination to rigid Musselmen, and which some of their fodays look down upon with contempt, as being only “fit for children”’ (MacBrair, Sketches, p. 315). Some of his favourite methods of evangelisation seem to have included public debates with marabouts, exposing them as charlatans, debunking their claim to Arabic literacy and ridiculing them by publicly challenging them to prove the protective powers of their charms. Muslim scholars who were well-versed in Arabic and the Qur’an received more respect. One of them, a Fula foday from Futa Jallon, aided MacBrair with his grammars of Mandinka and Fula; the manner in which MacBrair describes his interactions with ‘Gabriel’ gives the impression that the two men struck up some sort of a collegial friendship (MacBrair, Sketches, pp. 294-7). MacBrair was struck by the prevalence of books among Muslim scholars; his travelogue narrates time and again that Muslim scholars carried their books with them whenever they travelled. He also observed that quite a few of them possessed copies of the Bible or the New Testament in Arabic; several others visited him to solicit free copies. It was with respect to this high regard for texts written in Arabic that MacBrair saw an opening for the evangelisation of Muslims, especially since ‘I cannot learn that they have imbibed the eastern dogma of the adulteration of the sacred text’, most likely meaning by this taḥrīf (MacBrair, Sketches, p. 316). This was perhaps one of the reasons for his policy document to WMMS entitled On the best method of disseminating the scripture in north-western Africa (MacBrair, Sketches, Appendix II, pp. 314-27). Some parts of the document are worth quoting: Again: the holy scriptures in Arabic are eagerly received by the native priests and religious people, though few can read or understand them. And here it must be remarked, that more importance has been attached to the Arabic, with respect to Western Africa, than is warranted by actual fact. Were the Arabic language really understood, by even the maraboos, amongst the people, nothing more than the circulation of the Bible amongst them might be deemed suitable for the overthrow of Mahometanism; for I cannot learn that they have imbibed the eastern dogma of the adulteration of the sacred text. But this is not the case; yet as the Mahometans of Western Africa are much attached to the Arabic characters, missionaries acquainted with this
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language might thus advantageously teach and explain to these people the holy scriptures, which are ‘able to make wise unto salvation’. (MacBrair, Sketches, Appendix II, pp. 315-16)
And also: Many of the Negro Mahometans have no doubt embraced this false system [Islam] for want of a better, whilst others have been converted by the sword; and the hold which the precepts of the Koran have upon such is not very strong, being mixed up with their country superstitions. But though most of these would no doubt be willing to learn the Bible, it is to be feared that they would draw back from the Roman characters with superstitious dread believing them to contain some white man’s greegrees. For though they reverence the ‘law and the gospel’, and acknowledge Jesus the Son of Mary (not of God) to be the only Messiah, and also believe that Christianity shall finally pervade all the world, yet they are scrupulously attached to the customs of their fathers, and would regard the leaving of them as being a greater crime than that of apostasy. […] The matter, therefore, stands thus: To circulate the Arabic scriptures to much advantage amongst the Mandingoes, would require missionaries conversant both with Arabic and Mandingo, to teach and explain the Bible to the people. On the other hand, a missionary acquainted with the Mandingo might teach the people out of the scriptures translated into this language, and written in Roman characters; but he might not easily prevail upon the Mahometans to learn in this form. Another course still remains, which is, to translate the scriptures into Mandingo, but to write it in Arabic instead of Roman characters. The Mandingoes might wish to receive the Bible in this shape; and as they usually learn to repeat whatever they read, portions of the scripture might eventually be more widely diffused than the precepts of the Koran, because they would be better understood. It is also a custom with some of the people to write down in Arabic characters anything that they wish to remember in Mandingo; and they have their own form for this purpose. (MacBrair, Sketches, Appendix II, pp. 319-20)
Therefore, MacBrair recommended the distribution of the Bible in Arabic and ajami (vernacular translations in Mandinka and Fula written in Arabic script): You will agree with me in recommending, that in all missions to the Mahometans, the most expedient plan is at once to instruct them in the word of God; and, for this purpose, to collect a few of them together, and teach them to read the scriptures, explaining their meaning, and exhorting them to obey the heavenly voice. ‘It is the law’, ‘it is the gospel’, ‘it is the word of God’ comes with powerful influence to the minds of the superstitious, as well as to the wise. On these principles, I should also recommend, that as
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Again: … in case of Christian missions being engaged in to any considerable extent amongst Mahometans, I might recommend that such extracts and passages of the New Testament as are most easy of comprehension, and which embrace the most important incidents in the history of our blessed Saviour, and the most prominent doctrines of the gospel (thus forming an antidote to Mahometanism and a guide to the path of truth), be published in Arabic-Mandingo. It would be expedient that such extracts be arranged in short paragraphs or chapters, so as to form convenient lessons for reading and committing to memory, and that they be printed in a clear type (like the last edition of the Arabic Testament by the British and Foreign Bible Society,) and on a small duodecimo page for the convenience of portability: because the natives are accustomed to carry their Breviaries in small leathern pouches suspended from their necks by thongs of the same material. [...] I do not propose that the Arabic-Mandingo should now be published, yet a few small pages (say the third chapter of John and the first of Hebrews) might be lithographed by way of experiment, to see if the Mahometans will wish to learn the Bible in this form, as many of them have assured me they would. (MacBrair, Sketches, Appendix II, pp. 326-7)
In his policy document, MacBrair therefore proposes the production and distribution of ajami Bible texts as a key instrument in evangelising Muslims. His evangelisation strategy seems to have hinged on three features: an ajami text would build on Muslim acquaintance with and respect for books as well as for the Arabic script and thus evoke a more ‘familiar’ feel than a sacred text in Roman letters; an ajami text, though written in Arabic script, was essentially a text in the vernacular and would therefore be comprehensible for a large audience, quite unlike the Arabic text of the Qur’an – this combination of Arabic script and vernacular message would make an ajami text a suitable instrument to explain the gospel and persuade people to embrace Christianity; by producing small, portable passages of an ajami Bible that could easily be distributed, carried and memorised, MacBrair proposes to copy methods of dissemination and memorisation of scripture that were already practised in the Muslim community in the Gambia. Though innovative and creative, there are no indications that MacBrair’s proposals for ajami texts or for personnel wellversed in Arabic and Islam were taken up by WMMS.
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Another person who reflected on the relationship of Christian mission to Muslims in West Africa was William Maude, a Methodist missionary with considerable experience in West Africa, serving in various capacities between 1867 and 1920. Commencing his missionary career in Sierra Leone, he later worked in the Gambia and Ghana. Towards the end of an extensive missionary career, he composed a reflection on Christian mission to Muslims and the various approaches to mission adopted by Muslims and Christians entitled Memorandum on Mohammedanism and Christianity in West Africa (c. 1910). In it he writes: No organised effort has even been made to get at the Mohammedanism of West Africa. Christian workers have been divided between those who seem to think (and sometimes openly declare) that the Mohammedan cannot be won for Christ, those who believe he can, but don’t know how, and those, perhaps the greater number, who have thought nothing about it. For myself I can come to no other conclusion than that, despite all our resolutions and regrets, unless something very remarkable takes place, something there is no sign of, West Africa, outside the present spheres of Christian influence, will be Mohammedan, after a fashion and that before very long. […] It is not in this way [i.e. by force] Mohammedanism is spreading in West Africa today, but by the more peaceful methods of the missionary teacher and settler. The Mohammedan teacher is everywhere. He needs no society behind him, no funds to sustain him. He goes forth, as the first Christians went, with his staff and his wallet, and wherever he goes, he is at home. He is everywhere welcomed – though not perhaps more freely than the Christian teacher would be. Both have the prestige of being Book Men and God Men, and as such have a ready acceptance, wherever they go. […] The Christian teacher goes as a stranger, amongst foreigners, and must be supported from without. It is just here that the Mohammedan scores. From the very first he has no difficulty in making a living. […] It seems to me as if the first thing to be done, if we are to win these Mohammedan people to Christ, whom we love and whom we would serve, is to make ourselves neighbourly. We must show that, differences notwithstanding, we are their friends. We must gain their confidence, ministering to their bodily needs, familiarising them with Christian ideas, getting the children, humbling ourselves, after the manner of our Master, and making ourselves of them as far as we innocently and healthily can. (Maude on Mohammedanism, Box 295/H2709 mf. 1031)
Two things are worth noting in this pamphlet. First, Maude shows an awareness that mission to Muslims calls for a different approach from evangelism amongst adherents of African traditional religions. His report demonstrates that, possibly for the first time in Methodist history in the Gambia, Methodist missionaries were beginning to reflect on whether
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and, if so, how the missionary target group affected the method of witness. Hence, Maude calls for a thorough reflection on what it means to witness to Muslims. His own view on ‘being neighbourly’ sounds uncommonly modern. In his opinion, witness to Muslims takes place in day-today relationships in which trust, service and friendship play a central role. Also, Maude stresses in other writings that spoken forms of witness are only one aspect of mission. In 1906, he had already pointed to the importance of witness in life and deeds (Maude to WMMS, Freetown, 24 January 1906, Box 795/H2709 mf. 1023). Thus, Maude can be seen as the forerunner of a new Methodist approach, an approach that focuses on Muslims rather than on Islam and that promotes a missionary attitude rather than a missionary strategy, an attitude in which the concepts of presence and service played a key role. Second, in his Memorandum Maude points to the different ways in which Methodists and Muslims propagate their religion; his phrasings seem to echo the work on African Islam by Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912). Maude describes how the Muslim Qur’an teacher contextualises his habits and services whereas the Christian catechist and missionary ultimately remains a stranger and outsider. Significance For most of the 19th century Methodists in the Gambia had extensive interactions with Muslims. Initially convinced of the superiority of the Christian tradition, Methodist missionaries (expats as well as indigenous) gradually became aware that Islam was more deep-rooted in the region than they had originally assumed. Neither preaching nor educational efforts proved effective in persuading Muslims to convert. Rather, Islam offered a worldview that could compete with Christianity. By pointing to issues such as polygamy, Muslim scholars seemed to be able to make a convincing case that ‘Jesus Christ is white man’s God and Mahomet black man’s God’, thus demonstrating that, by the late 19th century, the argument that Islam was an ‘indigenous African’ religion, whereas Christianity was essentially a ‘foreign’ religion, was already common in West Africa. The resistance by Muslims to conversion attempts, Muslim competition for converts among adherents of African traditional religions, and the Soninke-Marabout wars, fed into already preconceived negative theological assessments of Islam and resulted in antagonistic and hostile representations of Muslims in Methodist missionary materials during most of the 19th century: Islam was considered a ‘false’ and ‘aggressive’ religion and Muhammad a ‘false prophet’. The close contacts with Muslims in day-to-day life do not seem to have engendered any in-depth theological
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reflection; perhaps the short terms of service of most missionaries (largely caused by health challenges) and their relatively modest theological training played a part in this. Notable exceptions are the policy papers written by MacBrair and Maude, both men with extensive missionary experience. Though written at different times and with a different focus, both papers reflect on Christian witness among Muslims from the perspective of lived experiences and give concrete suggestions for Christian witness in a predominantly Muslim context; neither document, however, seems to have made much impact. Despite the numerous set-backs and disappointments, the Methodist mission never entirely abandoned its hope of converting Muslims; the commitment to evangelisation persisted, including the evangelisation of Muslims. But during its history of nearly two centuries in the Gambia, the Methodist church gradually accepted that evangelisation could take manifold forms and that a meaningful Christian witness should not merely be assessed in terms of numbers of converts. Publications Archives London, School of Oriental and African Studies – Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Archives, Gambia Correspondence and Reports Synod reports (1842-1946) MMS/West Africa/Synod Minutes/FBN 1 MMS/West Africa/Synod Minutes/FBN 10 Microfiche: H2708 mf. 1- 34; 425 – 456 Correspondence (1821-1922) MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 3 MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 4 MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 5 MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 6 MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 7 MMS/West Africa/Correspondence/FBN 8 MMS/Home/Correspondence/FBN 36 Microfiche: H2709 mf. 823-1107 Published travelogues and diaries by Methodist missionaries to the Gambia R.M. MacBrair, A grammar of the Mandingo language, with vocabularies, London, 1837, repr. 1842, 1845; 102396756 (a digitised version of the 1842 reprint is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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R.M. MacBrair, Sketches of a missionary’s travels in Egypt, Syria and Western Africa, London, 1839, repr. London, 2011; 009735804 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.M. MacBrair, Negro children, or the sad condition of Africa with the blessed effects of Christian missions, New York, 1841, repr. 1849 R.M. MacBrair, Negro children, or the sad condition of Africa with the blessed effects of Christian missions, London, 18512, repr. New York, 1853, 1856 R.M. MacBrair, Grammar of the Fulah language. From a Ms. by the Rev. R.M. Macbrair in the British Museum, edited, with additions, by E. Norris, London, 1854, repr. n.p., 2011 R.M. MacBrair, The Africans at home. Being a popular description of Africa and the Africans, London, 1861; 008585071 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.M. MacBrair, Afrika en de Afrikanen, Leiden, 1861 (Dutch trans.); 008642166 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.M. MacBrair, Afrika en de Afrikanen, mededeelingen uit de beste bronnen bijeengebragt, Haarlem, 1863 (Dutch trans.); AB 077:20 (digitised version available through Koninklijke Bibliotheek) R.M. MacBrair, The Africans at home. Being a popular description of Africa and the Africans, London, 18642; 010105291 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Moister, Memorials of missionary labours in Western Africa, the West Indies, and at the Cape of Good Hope, London, 1850; 006019226 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Moister, Memorials of missionary labours in Western Africa, the West Indies, and at the Cape of Good Hope, New York, 18512; 100219890 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Moister, Memorials of missionary labours in Western Africa, the West Indies, and at the Cape of Good Hope, London, 18663, repr. 1917, Norderstedt, 2019; 001414318 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Moister, A history of Wesleyan missions in all parts of the world, from their commencement to the present time, London, 1871 W. Moister, A history of Wesleyan missions in all parts of the world, from their commencement to the present time, London, 18712; 007667990 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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W. Moister, A history of Wesleyan missions in all parts of the world, from their commencement to the present time, London, 18713; 007667990 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Moister, The father of our missions. Being the story of the life and labours of T. Coke, London, 1871, repr. n.p., 2009 W. Moister, Missionary stories. Narratives, scenes and incidents related to the state of the heathen and the effect of the gospel in various parts of the world, London, 1877 W. Moister, Missionary stories. Narratives, scenes and incidents related to the state of the heathen and the effect of the gospel in various parts of the world, London, 1889, repr. n.p., 2010; 006018663 (a digitised version is available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) W. Fox, A brief history of the Wesleyan missions to the Western coast of Africa, London, 1851, repr. n.p., 2013; 592 (digitised version available through Center for Research Libraries) J. Morgan, Reminiscences of the founding of a Christian mission on The Gambia, London, 1864, repr. n.p., 2010; 328631.39088000423152 (a digitised version is available through Smithsonian Libraries) Studies M.T. Frederiks, ‘Methodists and Muslims in the Gambia’, ICMR 20 (2009) 61-72 M.T. Frederiks, We have toiled all night. Christianity in the Gambia 14562000, Zoetermeer, 2003 P. Sonko-Godwin, Leaders of the Senegambia region. Reactions to European infiltration 19th and 20th century, Banjul, 1995 F.K. Mahoney, Stories of Senegambia, Banjul, 19952 (1982) L. Sanneh, The Jakhanke Muslim clerics. A religious and historical study of Islam in Senegambia, New York, 1989 L. Sanneh, West African Christianity. The religious impact, London, 1983 F.E.R. Renner, ‘Inter-group relations and British imperialism in Combo, 1850-1902’, Ibadan, 1982 (PhD Diss. University of Ibadan) C.A. Quinn, Mandingo kingdoms of the Senegambia, London, 1972 B. Prickett, Island base. A history of the Methodist Church in the Gambia 1921-1969, Freetown, 1969 M.A. Klein, Islam and imperialism in Senegal. Sine-Saloum 1847-1914, Stanford CA, 1968 Martha T. Frederiks
Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi Ibn Abi Bakr ibn ‘Uthman al-Kabbawi, al-Kanawi ibn ‘Uthmān, Al-ḥājj ‘Umar ibn Abī Bakr, Alhajj Umar bin Abubakar bin Umar ibn Uthman, Al-ḥājj ‘Umar ibn Abī Bakri Date of Birth Mid-19th century; 1850 or 1854 Place of Birth Kano, Sokoto Caliphate Date of Death 1934 Place of Death Kete-Krachi, Ghana
Biography
Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi, whose full name was ‘Umar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ‘Uthmān al-Kabawī l-Kanawī l-Salaghawī, was from the Kebbi tribe and a native of Kano by birth. The actual date of his birth is unknown, though some authors suggest that he was born in the mid-19th century, somewhere around 1850 or 1854 (Goody, ‘Restricted literacy’, p. 242; Abdul-Razaq, ‘Alhaji Umar of Kete-Krachi’, p. 24). His father Abu Bakr was a renowned merchant and cleric who came from a line of kola traders from Northern Nigeria who had traded with Salaga since the mid-15th century and had also lived there from time to time (Goody and Mustapha, ‘Caravan trade’, p. 612; Wilks, ‘Growth of Islamic learning’, p. 412). It is generally agreed that al-Hajj Umar was born in Kano in presentday Northern Nigeria, and that he had a Hausa upbringing. Birth narratives about him indicate that he was brought up in the tradition of the 19th-century Muslim reform movement of Northern Nigeria that had been initiated by Uthman Dan Fodio (Martin, ‘Translations’, p. 192). He received his early education in Kano, Kebi and Gobir in Northern Nigeria, and is believed to have accompanied his father on several trade missions from Kano to Salaga. After completing his studies in Hausaland, he settled in Salaga in 1876 to teach and write poetry. While in Salaga, al-Hajj Umar wrote many works on religion, poetry and history, which attracted large numbers of students and admirers from far and near. Following a war in Salaga in 1892, he moved to Kete-Krachi, where he remained until his death in 1934. According to C.C. Stewart, al-Hajj Umar went on pilgrimage to Mecca in 1917. Before this journey, he was a member of the Qādirī order, but by
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the time of his return to Ghana he was a Tijānī, and later became an influential muqqadam (local leader) of the Tijāniyya order (Stewart, ‘Tijaniyya in Ghana’, p. 34). The presence of al-Hajj Umar as a Sufi scholar in Kete-Krachi played a crucial role in the establishment of Islam in Kete, the Muslim section of the settlement, and Kete-Krachi as a whole. Squabbles between Muslim scholars about who should lead Friday prayers prompted the German colonial authorities to organise an Arabic reading contest. Al-Hajj Umar won, and he became the chief imam of Kete-Krachi (Al-Hassan, ‘Imam Imoru’s troubles’). He proceeded to organise the construction of the first mosque in the region, and then established an Islamic centre of learning, where he taught the Qur’an and other Islamic sciences (Bah, ‘Islam in the Volta region’, pp. 48-9). After the First World War, Britain and France took over German colonial territories in Africa. Kete-Krachi, which had been under German control, had the British as their new colonial masters. These changes enabled al-Hajj Umar to gain insights into the various aspects of colonial rule, first under the Germans and later the British. His poems and other writings reflect his attempts to accept the new circumstances. He got to know some of the British colonial officials who held various positions between the 1920s and early 1930s, including Angus Duncan-Johnstone, who in the 1920s appointed a student of al-Hajj Umar as the leader of the Muslim community in Kumasi. Al-Hajj Umar’s influence continued throughout the British colonial era until his death (Hanson and Gibrill, ‘Discourses of Muslim scholars’). Al-Hajj Umar taught both Muslims and Europeans, including Adam Mischilch, a German administrative officer, Gottlob Adolf Krause, a German trader and linguist, Robert Sutherland Rattray, a British lawyer and anthropologist, and Angus Duncan-Johnstone, the British administrator. Many of the Europeans who studied under him appear to have been impressed by his intelligence and scholarship. As a result of these relationships, Umar became an advisor to the colonial authorities on Islam and African social structures. Consequently, both parties learnt from and understood each other’s religion better and eventually co-operated and worked together in peace during the colonial era. Al-Hajj Umar died in 1934, and was buried in the Krachi mosque, ‘now beneath the waters of the Volta Lake’ (Goody, ‘Restricted literacy’, p. 243).
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Legon, Ghana, University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies – Arabic Archives 127 (date unknown; al-Hajj Umar’s Tanbīh al-ikhwān al-munazza) Secondary J. Hanson and M.M. Gibrill, ‘Discourses of Muslim scholars in colonial Ghana’, African online Digital Library, 2016; http://aodl.org/islamicpluralism/ goldcoast/essays/6F-2DA-4 I. Bah, ‘Islam in the Volta region. A case study of Ave Afiadenyigba’, Cape Coast, Ghana, 2010 (MPhil Diss. University of Cape Coast) S. Piłaszewicz, Hausa prose writings in Ajami by Alhaji Umaru from A. Mischlich / H. Sölken’s collection, Berlin, 2000 A.R. Al-Hassan, ‘Imam Imoru’s troubles in Karachi’, The Accra Mail, 2 October 2000 I. Abdul-Razaq, ‘Alhaji Umar of Kete-Krachi. A Muslim leader, a teacher, a poet and a social commentator of his time’, Legon, 1996 (MPhil Diss. University of Ghana, Legon) S. Piłaszewicz, ‘From Arabic to Hausa. The case of the Hausa poet Alhaji Umaru’, Rocznik Orientalistyczny 46 (1988) 97-104 S. Piłaszewicz, Alhadżi Umaru (1858-1934) – Poeta ludu Hausa. Studium historyczno-literackie [Alhajj Umaru (1858-1934) – a poet of the Hausa people. Historical and literary study], Warsaw, 1981 S. Piłaszewicz, ‘Homiletic poetry of Al-Haji Umaru’, Africana Bulletin 30 (1981) 73-110 T. Mustapha, ‘A historiographical study of four works of al-Hajj Umar ibn Abu Bakr of Kete-Krachi’, Toronto, 1970 (MA Diss. Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University), pp. 32-56 J.R. Goody, ‘Restricted literacy in northern Ghana’, in J. Goody (ed.), Literacy in traditional societies, Cambridge, 1968, 198-265 J. Goody and T.M. Mustapha, ‘The caravan trade from Kano to Salaga’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3 (1967) 611-16 B.G. Martin, ‘Translations, commentary and introduction to two poems of al-Hajj ʿUmar’, in J.A. Braimah and J. Goody (eds), Salaga. The struggle for power, London, 1967, 189-209 C.C. Stewart, ‘Tijaniyya in Ghana’, Legon, 1965 (MA Diss. University of Ghana, Legon) I. Wilks, ‘The growth of Islamic learning in Ghana’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2 (1963) 409-17 R.S. Rattray, ‘Hausa poetry’, in E. Evans Pritchard et al. (eds), Essays presented to C.G. Seligman, London, 1934, 255-65
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Poems about Christians Date 1899-1903 Original Language Arabic and Hausa Description Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi wrote many poems on a wide variety of topics, including three poems about the coming of Europeans and Christianity to West Africa. Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduha bi-l-naẓar (‘Entrance to the water gorge of history, by one who comes to it with insight’) was completed on 9 Muḥarram 1317/20 May 1899. Its purpose is to warn of the European conquest of Africa. Written in Arabic, it consists of 87 verses divided into six sections. The first of these (lines 1-32) is subdivided into two, with the first five lines dedicated to the praise of God and Muḥammad, then lines 6-32 list the towns in North Africa and some southern parts of presentday Nigeria and Ghana that were controlled by the Europeans in the 19th century. The second section, entitled ‘Submission to God’ (lines 33-8), cautions Muslims to submit to God and not depend on their own might, because whether they chose to stay or migrate they would still be subjects of colonial rule. In the third section, entitled ‘Decision making’ (lines 39-40), al-Hajj Umar appeals to Muslims to devise ways and means to submit to the colonial authorities and their rule. He further implores Muslims to endure colonial rule even if the colonialists go astray. The fourth section, entitled ‘Admonition’ (lines 41-4), warns Muslims not to doubt God and Islam because the colonialists cannot destroy it. In the fifth section, ‘Completion’ (lines 45-8), he again enumerates other towns conquered by the Europeans and ends the section with a prayer to God. The sixth section (lines 49-87), entitled ‘Dialogue’, appears to be a reply to someone who enquires about where he intends to settle. He answers, ‘Do you not realise what has happened? With all our dwelling places unsafe for us I am at a loss what to do in this world. I cannot say I am staying here. Nor can I say I am going there’ (lines 52-5). The rest of the poem continues the dialogue where the person admits that the whole world has become uninhabitable and everything that has been built has been destroyed. Hence, it is difficult to find a good place of abode (lines 53-5). However, he chooses to stay in Kete (line 62) instead of Salaga (lines 56-61), though not because of envy, oppression or hatred for the people of Salaga (lines 58-72), though
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if he decided to leave Kete, he would go to Sokoto (lines 72-4). The poem ends with Umar asking for God’s forgiveness for the Muslim umma (line 75) and pleading for Muslims to be steadfast no matter what they may face (line 83). The second poem, Naẓm al-laʾālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām (‘A string of pearls, for informing and warning the noble’), comprising 219 verses, was written around 1318/1900-1. It begins with praise for God and Muḥammad, and then states its purpose as being ‘to inform and warn noble men’, by whom it means Muslims. It gives details about towns in Ghana and other countries in West Africa that are under European domination, identifying all Europeans as Christians. It describes the attitudes of the colonial authorities towards colonised people, and further evidences how al-Hajj Umar and other Muslims felt about colonialism. Al-Hajj Umar laments this situation and draws attention to the activities and methods adopted by the colonial authorities, as well as their intention to change the social structure of indigenous society (lines 16-35). In lines 36-61, it mentions towns that were conquered by the colonialists and gives examples of how ‘noble men’ should behave, and in lines 62-9 it calls upon all to emulate this behaviour. Then al-Hajj Umar goes on to enumerate more towns that had been conquered by the Europeans. It is evident in this poem that al-Hajj Umar perceives European domination in Africa as a threat to Islam. He remarks that the intention of the colonial authorities is ‘to fight against Muslims, and they came with quarrels’ (line 164). He comments that ‘there is nothing to say in this time of ours’ (lines 171-5), but people should pray and ask for God’s mercy as they are not living in an era of ‘truth’. Lābārin Naṣārā, written around 1903 in Hausa and comprising 209 verses, contrasts with these earlier works. Here, al-Hajj Umar accepts the domination of the Europeans and expresses the futility of trying to oppose colonial rule. He compares the weapons of the Africans with those of the Europeans and concludes that ‘it is difficult to defeat the Christians; it is senseless to clash with the Christians, and who is there to challenge the rule of the Christians? As for us, we have agreed to their rule’ (lines 1915), and so ‘whoever disagrees with the Christian administration we are not with him’ (line 197). Al-Hajj Umar puts aside his fears, mistrust and abhorrence of European rule to recognise Europeans, and to appreciate and praise them and their colonial rule. In lines 175-8 he lists some of the benefits of European rule, such as clearing the bush, constructing roads, bridges and market places, and
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administration. But even though he praises European justice, which he prefers to Muslim justice, he is quick to admit it has its faults (line 201). The poem ends with the acknowledgement that God is the Creator of both Muslims and Christians, and the hope that Christians will not destroy the Islamic religion. In this third poem, it is evident that, through observing and encountering Europeans and Christians, al-Hajj Umar has learnt enough to accept European domination and to call for other Muslims to accept and support the Europeans. He considers this an attribute of good leadership. He also shows gratitude to God and asks for His mercy and guidance, especially for ignorant, greedy and corrupt leaders. He urges his followers to accept and support colonialism when he sees that the European presence is not going to be a threat to Islam and Muslims in West Africa. He further acknowledges God as Creator of all, including Christians, thereby opening new possibilities of Christian-Muslim relations between his followers and non-Muslims. Significance Al-Hajj Umar’s poems give an early account of colonial rule in West Africa. They remain significant for understanding both how the colonial authorities related to Africans and Muslims, and the later Muslim and African acceptance of colonial rule. In recognising that Muslims and Christians are both created by God, his last poem creates a new form of thinking and paves the way for an open attitude to Christian-Muslim relations. Publications MS Legon, Ghana, University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies – Arabic Archives 417 (May, 1899; Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduha bi-l-naẓar) MS Legon, Ghana, University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies – Arabic Archives 39 (1899/1900; Naẓm al-la ʾālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām) MS Legon, Ghana, University of Ghana, Institute of African Studies – Arabic Archives 43 (c. 1903; Lābārin Naṣārā, written in Hausa) Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi, Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduhā and Naẓm al-la ʾālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām, in B.G. Martin, ‘Translations, commentary and introduction to two poems of alHajj ʿUmar’, in J.A. Braimah and J. Goody (eds), Salaga. The struggle for power, London, 1967, 189-209 (English trans.)
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Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi, Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduhā, Nazm al-la’ālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām, in T. Mustapha, ‘A historiographical study of four works of al-Hajj Umar ibn Abu Bakr of Kete-Krachi’, Toronto, 1970 (MA Diss. Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University) pp. 103-35 (English trans.), 141-81 (facsimile); 895000742 (digitised version available through Library and Archives Canada) Studies Hanson and Gibrill, ‘Discourses of Muslim scholars’ Jibril Abubakr Gabid, ‘Imitation and originality in four poems by alHajj ʿUmar ibn Abi Bakr ibn ʿUthman Krachi (c. 1856-1934)’, Cairo, 2016 (MA Diss. American University in Cairo) M.M. Gibrill, ‘A structural-functional analysis of the poetics of Arabic qaṣīdah. An ethnolinguistic study of three qaṣīdahs on colonial conquest of Africa by al-Ḥājj ʿUmar B. Abī Bakr B. ʿUthmān Krachi (1858-1934)’, Bloomington IN, 2015 (PhD Diss. Indiana University) U.A. Muhammed, ‘Alhaj Umar Abubakar Krachie. A bio-critical study’, Cairo, 2003 (MA Diss. American University of Cairo) Al-Hassan, ‘Imam Imoru’s troubles’ Abdul-Razaq, ‘Alhaji Umar of Kete-Krachi’ Piłaszewicz, ‘Homiletic poetry of Al-Haji Umaru’ S. Piłaszewicz, ‘The Arrival of the Christians. A Hausa poem on the colonial conquest of West Africa’, Africana Bulletin 22 (1975) 55-129 Mustapha, ‘Historiographical study of four works of al-Hajj Umar’ N. Levtzion, ‘Reflections on Muslim historiography in Africa’, in T.O. Ranger (ed.), Emerging themes of African history, Nairobi, 1968, 22-7 Martin, ‘Translations, commentary and introduction’ B.G. Martin, ‘Arabic materials for Ghanaian history’, Research Review, Institute of African Studies [Legon, Ghana] 2 (1966) 74-83 Makafui Tayviah
M.S. Cole Date of Birth 29 May 1875 Place of Birth Abeokuta, Nigeria Date of Death 10 December 1946 Place of Death Nigeria, possibly Lagos
Biography
Michael Samuel Cole was born in Abeokuta, Egbaland, western Nigeria, on 29 May 1875, one of six children. His father, Samuel Cole, was born in Sierra Leone to Egba liberated slaves. Returning to Abeokuta in 1843, he worked from 1858 until his death in 1905 as a catechist for the Church Missionary Society. Michael Samuel engaged in the same work. In 1896, along with some other local and European clergy, including T.A.J. Ogunbiyi, M.T. Euler-Ajayi, and most significantly James Johnson, he began attending Arabic classes in Lagos. It was this group that later translated and published Christian tracts specifically for Muslim readers, including Ogunbiyi’s Aṣaro Kukuru (‘Tracts for Muhammadans’), Awọn Ọrọ Ọlọrun (‘The words of God’) both in Yoruba and Arabic, Awọn Imale (‘The Muslims’) and Itan Mọmọdu (‘The story of Muḥammad’). Cole continued his study of Arabic when he enrolled at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, which had been founded by the CMS to train Africans as catechists, schoolmasters and clergy. On his return to Nigeria from Sierra Leone in 1902, Cole participated actively in both academic and missionary activities, and held several positions in the CMS. He was assigned to serve as a lay agent of the Lagos Native Pastorate at Holy Trinity Church, Ebute Ero on Lagos Island, under A.W. Howells, and put on the payroll of the CMS. He started his work of Qur’an translation in 1902. He was ordained deacon in the Townsend Memorial Church at Abeokuta on 23 September 1906, and licensed as a curate of Christ Church. In 1903, he began teaching at the CMS Grammar School in Lagos as a Senior Teacher, and in 1908 he was invited to establish a grammar school at Abeokuta in the Igbein district. He served as principal of Abeokuta Grammar School from 1908 to 1920. In 1932, he went on to found Oduduwa College, Ile-Ife, in present-day Osun State, continuing as principal until 1942.
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When St John’s Anglican Church, just beside Abeokuta Grammar School, was granted parish status in March 1913, Cole was appointed as the first vicar, a position he held until 1920. Within a year, he built the third church and mission house, the first having been built by Samuel Crowther in 1847, and the second by J.B. Wood (1892-5). In 1916, he laid the plans for the construction of the fourth and present church (Idowu, History of St. John’s Anglican Church, p. xxiii.). In January 1924, Cole introduced and became the first editor of the Christ Church Cathedral Magazine. He also translated part of the Bible into Yoruba (Idowu, History of St. John’s Anglican Church, p. 9), though he remained best known for his translation of the Qur’an into Yoruba (1906). Cole retired from active service at Oduduwa College in 1942. He returned to Lagos, preaching and teaching until his death on 10 December 1946.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary MS Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library – CMS archives, CMS/B/OMS/ CA2/056 (CMS Minute Book for Yoruba Mission 1902-7) ‘Cole, Michael Samuel’, in CMS Register of Missionaries 1905-1918, Register of Native Clergy, vols A-D, 1905 onwards, Entry 733 ‘Ordinations’, The Church Missionary Intelligencer, November 1906, p. 879 ‘Western Equatorial Africa’, The Church Missionary Intelligencer, December 1906, pp. 920-1 M.S. Cole, ‘The Rev. M.S. Cole, African tutor, Grammar School, Lagos’, Extracts from annual letters, London, 1907 Secondary F.O. Falako, art. ‘Cole, Michael S.’, Dictionary of African Christian biography; https://dacb.org/stories/nigeria/cole-michael/ I. Nwanaju, Christian-Muslim relations in Nigeria. A historical-theological reflection upon the mutual co-existence of Christians and Muslims, Lagos, 2004, pp. 71-2 E.O. Idowu et al., The history of St. John’s Anglican Church, Igbein, Abeokuta 18471998 (151 years), Abeokuta, 1998 J.H. Kopytoff, A preface to modern Nigeria. The ‘Sierra Leonians’ in Yoruba, 1830– 1890, Madison WI, 1965, p. 284
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba ‘The Qur’an translated into Yoruba’ Date 1906 Original Language Yoruba Description In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Yorubaland in south-west Nigeria was a place of serious engagement between Muslims and Christian missionaries. In this, translations of religious texts played a major role. Michael Samuel Cole embarked on his translation of the Qur’an at the suggestion of members of Holy Trinity Church in Lagos. His objective, as stated in the preface, was to ‘help the cause of Christianity, and dispel the darkness of ignorance that now prevails among Mohammedans in Yorubaland, and they will be in a position to compare the Bible with the Koran and see which satisfies best the needs of humanity’ (1906 edition, English Preface, unnumbered p. 9; the quotations that follow are from this edition). Cole believed that his translation would help Christians to know how better to deal with Muslims. He began the work towards the end of 1902 and completed it in July 1906. At the end of 1906, it was published in Lagos by the Native Literature Publishing Society (printed by Samuel E. Richards, Nottingham, England) under the title Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba (‘The Qur’an translated into Yoruba’). Later, in 1924, the work was republished by the CMS in Lagos under the title Al-Kurani ni ede Yoruba (‘The Qur’an in the Yoruba language’). The cover page contains the title in both Arabic and Roman-based Yoruba script preceded by a face-down crescent symbol surrounded by seven stars. The 1906 edition consists of 452 numbered, 19 unnumbered preliminary (including 14 preface pages), and 2 unnumbered pages. Each sūra is introduced by its number, title in Arabic and Yoruba, place of revelation, and number of verses. The phrase ‘Halaihi Salam! Alafia fun u!’ (in transliterated Arabic and in Yoruba), meaning ‘peace be upon him’, is added to sūra titles named after biblical prophets, such as Yūsuf (Q 12) and Ibrāhīm (Q 14), but does not appear in sūra titles named after other prophets, such as Muḥammad (Q 47) and Hūd (Q 11), as was the practice in Gustav Flügel and John Medows Rodwell’s editions. The translation is in colloquial Yoruba printed in Roman script, and does not include the Arabic text or notes.
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Illustration 10. Cover and opening sūra of Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba, the Qur’an in Yoruba
While Cole’s moderate knowledge of Arabic was helpful, he was ready to ‘disclaim any pretensions to depth in Arabic literature, or oriental research’ (p. 9). In the preface, he describes himself as at most ‘a beginner’, ‘an amateur’ with ‘limited knowledge of Arabic’, and says that he learned more about the Qur’an during the process of translating. This draws heavily on the translations of G. Sale (1734) and J.M. Rodwell (1861), while the verse numbering follows that of Gustav Flügel, which J.M. Rodwell had earlier adopted (different from the Cairo system that is widely recognised in the Islamic world today). The preface, written in both Yoruba and English but with slight differences between the two in content, outlines the objectives of the work, drawing a sharp contrast between Islam and Christianity and between Muḥammad and Jesus in a way that shows Islam and Muḥammad at a disadvantage. The Yoruba section also gives a brief biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, which is highly polemical, while the English section identifies the reference materials used. Cole also mentions a few qur’anic
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teachings that agree with biblical teachings. In the last part of the Yoruba preface, Cole promises that, if given the opportunity, he will write a book identifying all the verses that testify to the veracity of Christianity and the authenticity of the Bible. This plan, however, did not materialise. The work is a significant interpretation of Yoruba qur’anic vocabularies in the light of Christian-Muslim engagement. Although a translated work is meant to be faithful to the original text, and thus not much within it is expected to express the translator’s personal convictions or conversations with Muslims, the lexical choices made by Cole bear clear religious undertones. He uses a considerable number of Yoruba words, both indigenous and loanwords introduced by early Muslims, which were in use irrespective of the user’s religious affiliation. But there is another set of words and expressions that is peculiar to each speech community of Muslims, Christians and followers of traditional religions, and forms a boundary which each community typically does not cross, in order to maintain its linguistic-cultural identity. Cole’s translation understandably contains characteristically Christian words and expressions, drawn from the Yoruba Bible, in line with his belief that what is true in the qur’anic teachings and narratives is what Muḥammad had earlier adapted from the Bible and observed from Jews and Christians. One example is the translation of the Arabic nabī (prophet) as woli instead of anabi (derived from nabī), the translation of the Arabic that was common in the Yoruba Muslim community. This use was earlier confirmed by Crowther in his scriptural engagement in the Ilorin court in 1872 (Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa, London, 1892, pp. 18-19). However, in the Yoruba Bible entitled Bibeli Mimọ tabi majeṃu Lailai Ati Titun, published in 1900 by the British and Foreign Bible Society, and also in the Dictionary of the Yoruba language published in 1913 by the CMS, woli is used for ‘prophet’. Cole’s choice of words thus appears to ignore Muslim community convention. Another example is Cole’s use of adura (used in the Yoruba Bible to translate ‘prayer’) to translate both ṣalāt and du‘ā’ without any distinction between the obligatory ṣalāt and supererogatory du‘ā’. Irun (and its variants, irọn, ikirun and ikirọn), which is exclusively used for Muslim ṣalāt and which was recognised as such in Crowther’s Vocabulary of the Yoruba language (1843), is not used in Cole’s translation. Such interpretations of familiar qur’anic words was meant to reinforce the Christian right to the Yoruba religious language and discourse that had long been dominated by the Muslims since their earlier arrival in Yorubaland.
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Significance Islam arrived in Yorubaland sometime before the 17th century. Following the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate under Uthman dan Fodio (d. 1817), Yoruba Muslims had intensified the process of Islamisation of Yoruba culture and the infusion of key Islamic conceptual terms into the Yoruba language by the time Christianity arrived in the region in the 19th century. As part of the strategy to counteract or check the growth of Islam in the region, leading Christian missionaries, most notably Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (d. 1891) and the Revd James Johnson (d. 1917), promoted literacy in Arabic, which by then had become a language of scholarship among Yoruba Muslims in addition to being the language of the Qur’an and Islamic studies. Production of Arabic-cum-Yoruba texts was another major missionary strategy for dealing with the Muslims in Yorubaland. Cole’s work was produced within the context of this Christian-Muslim engagement. It was the first translation of the meaning of the Qur’an into Yoruba and also the first known translation into any African language (the second being Godfrey Dale’s translation into Swahili, published in 1923). This ground-breaking work, written primarily for a Yoruba Christian audience and prospective Christians among the followers of Yoruba traditional religion, was not widely circulated among Yoruba Muslims and thus did not generate significant scholarly discourse. Although the CMS was usually involved in publishing missionary projects, there is no reference to Cole’s Al-Kurani in the CMS record covering the years of its translation and publication and immediately afterwards, even though Cole was on the CMS payroll. This suggests that the CMS was not directly involved in the 1906 edition, unlike the 1924 edition which it practically published. The earliest reference to the work occurs in the editorial of The Moslem World 7 (1917) p. 89. In a section on ‘Notes on current topics’ the editorial remarks: ‘We are glad to call attention to a translation hitherto omitted, viz., that in Yoruba begun in 1902 […] published in 1906.’ A second edition of Cole’s work was published in 1924, and later, in 1965, another Yoruba translation of the Qur’an was produced by another Christian author, E.K. Akinlade, who was deeply influenced by Cole’s work. Western education that used roman script was considered an instrument of Christian evangelisation. As a result, it was not until the second half of the 20th century, when roman script had become acceptable to the Yoruba Muslim communities, and objections to translating the Qur’an had also been eased in the Arab world, that Muslims themselves embarked upon the translation of the Qur’an into Yoruba in roman script. The earliest Muslim translation of the Qur’an was produced by a committee of
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eminent Yoruba Muslim scholars and published by the Muslim World League in 1973. Cole’s work unquestionably set the stage for this and other translations of the Qur’an into Yoruba. Publications M.S. Cole, Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba, Lagos, 1906 M.S. Cole, Al-Kurani ni ede Yoruba, Lagos, 1924 Studies A.K.H. Solihu, ‘The earliest Yoruba translation of the Qur’an. Missionary engagement with Islam in Yorubaland’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17 (2015) 10-37 A.K.H. Solihu and A.A. Abdulhameed, ‘Christian translations of the Qur’an into Yoruba and their historical background’, ICMR 26 (2015) 465-81 M.H. Khan, ‘Translations of the Holy Qur’an in the African languages’, The Muslim World 77 (1987) 250-8 T.G.O. Gbadamosi, The growth of Islam among the Yoruba, 1809-1948, London, 1978, pp. 129-30 Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
Karl Kumm Date of Birth 19 October 1874 Place of Birth Markoldendorf, Germany Date of Death 22 August 1930 Place of Death Pacific Beach, California, USA
Biography
Hermann Karl Wilhelm Kumm, usually known as Karl, was born into a military family in Germany in 1874. After finishing his secondary education in 1894, he joined the army and resigned as soon as his mandatory year of service was completed. He then followed in the footsteps of an older sister to Britain, where he hoped to polish his English and perhaps find a job. However, in 1896 he decided to become a missionary, and began his career in Egypt in 1898 as a member of the North African Mission, whose goal was the evangelisation of the Muslim peoples of Mediterranean Africa. Two years later, in 1900, still in Egypt, he met and married Lucy Guinness, his first wife. The young couple used their wedding ceremony as the occasion to announce the establishment of a new mission, the Sudan Pioneer Mission (SPM), dedicated to preaching Christianity among the once Christian, but now Muslim peoples of the upper Nile Valley. Kumm and his wife returned to Europe. However, once back there, Kumm became preoccupied with other things, among them completing a doctorate in geography at the University of Freiburg in 1903. He also spent more and more time in England and the board governing the SPM in Germany eventually dismissed him for failing to meet his responsibilities as a missionary. Kumm then settled in Britain and in 1904 gained British backing to found a second mission, the Sudan United Mission (SUM) to work in the British colony of northern Nigeria. Its goal was the conversion of African traditionalists to Christianity before they could be converted to Islam. Kumm promoted the SUM as a collective organisation under whose shelter Protestant missions from across the British Commonwealth and the North Atlantic Protestant world could come to Nigeria to help in the battle to bring Christian civilisation to peoples not yet compromised by Islamic beliefs. In 1908, Kumm travelled to Nigeria to tour SUM mission stations and, in the summer months of 1909, instead of heading back to Europe at the end of the tour, he led an expedition across the territories between
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the Niger and the Nile. Back in Europe in 1910, he published two books on his adventures that cemented his reputation as both a missionary and an explorer and, in the same year, became a naturalised British citizen. Kumm’s wife Lucy died tragically in 1906. In 1912, while travelling in Australia to promote the SUM, he met and married Gertrude Cato. In 1914, the outbreak of World War I impelled Kumm to migrate to the United States, where he served primarily as the head of the North American SUM. During a visit to Nigeria in 1923, he fell victim to an attack by a form of parasite, and the side effects of the drugs used to treat him caused heart problems from which he could not recover. In 1924, Kumm resigned from the SUM for health reasons and moved with his family to southern California. He died in San Diego in 1930.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION K. Kumm, African missionary heroes and heroines. Six lectures given before the College of Missions, New York, 1917 K. Kumm, The future of Africa, s.l. [SUM Press], s.d. [1917?] M.M. Timur, Dr. Karl Kumm’s attack on the Holy Quran, Lahore: Mohammadan Tract and Book Depot, 1917 K. Kumm, ‘The Sudan United Mission and Islam’, The Moslem World 8 (1918) 295-8 I. Cleverdon, Pools on the glowing sands. The story of Karl Kumm, Melbourne, 1936 J.L. Maxwell, Half a century of grace. A jubilee history of the Sudan United Mission, London, 1955, p. 195 E.P.T. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, London, 1979, pp. 35-78 J.H. Boer, Missionary messengers of liberation in a colonial context. A case study of the Sudan United Mission, Amsterdam, 1979, pp. 111-217 E.A. Ayandele, ‘The missionary factor in Northern Nigeria, 1870-1918’, in O.U. Kalu (ed.), The history of Christianity in West Africa, London, 1982, 133-58 P.J. Spartalis, Karl Kumm. Last of the Livingstones, pioneer missionary statesman, Bonn, 1994 C. Sauer, Reaching the unreached Sudan Belt. Guinness, Kumm and the SudanPioneer-Mission, Nuremberg, 2005 A.E. Barnes, ‘The cross versus the crescent. Karl Kumm’s missiology’, ICMR 30 (2019) 483-503
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The Sudan. A short compendium of fact and figures about the land of darkness Date 1907 Original Language English Description The Sudan (xiv, 224 pages, 45 leaves of plates) offers what purported to be the first geographical survey written by a European Christian of the region in Africa between the Sahara and the rain forest belt. It was written to serve as a primer for European missionaries and prospective economic developers. With the second group in mind, three of the 15 chapters are dedicated to discussions of geophysical features of the region such as botany, meteorology and hydrography. With the first group in mind, the remaining chapters promote the goals of the Sudan United Mission, which Kumm had recently founded. Written as a first-person narrative, these chapters combine anecdotes about exploration and big game hunting with entreaties for money and recruits to occupy missionary stations in the region. Two of the chapters focus explicitly on the nature and character of Islam. Ch. 9, ‘The open sore of Africa – slave raiding’, makes the case that the capture and enslavement of non-believers is an obligation set out in the Qur’an. Ch. 10, ‘Only a woman’, demonstrates the extent to which misogyny was inherent in the Islam Kumm encountered. The book was Kumm’s first to be published in English and he would draw upon the arguments in these two chapters in all his subsequent writings in English about Islam. Significance In the early 20th century, in the years leading up to World War I, Karl Kumm was perhaps the best known missionary advocate of two complementary ideas: the threat posed to European (Christian) civilisation by the advance of Islam in Africa; and the need for Protestant missions to come together to form a collective front against this advance. Implicit in these two arguments were two others that came to be associated with Kumm’s name: the imperviousness of African Muslims to Christian conversion; and the necessity for Christian evangelical focus on the conversion of African traditionalists.
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Kumm saw himself, and was depicted particularly in the missionary press, as sounding the alarm against Muslim exploitation of European imperialism and the concomitant spread of Islam. His solution to this problem, the formation of an umbrella mission organisation to coordinate outreach to the traditionalist peoples in the regions adjacent to Muslimheld territories, had real impact on the policies of Protestant missions and colonial governments throughout the colonial era. Key to that impact was Kumm’s presentation of Islam as an inherently evil and pernicious faith. He helped popularise among Christians the notion of the cross versus the crescent; of Christian evangelism as a bulwark against Islamic expansion; and of the modern missionary movement as the final, culminating battle in the Christian war against Islam. Viewing European imperial conquest of the peoples and states of the Sudanic region as a gift from God, Kumm argued that European armies had won the war on the military front, and now it was time for European missionaries to complete the conquest on the spiritual front. Kumm preached and canvassed support for his missionary endeavours in both German and English for more than a decade before he pulled his arguments together and published them, in English, in The Sudan, which deliberately sought to present Kumm as both a missionary and a scientist in the mould of David Livingstone. He built his charges against Islam upon empirical observations, both his own and those of other European explorers. The book appeared at a time when there was a real debate among European missionaries about whether the best course to follow in Nigeria was to attempt to convert Muslim or traditionalist peoples. The Sudan was notable in the case it made against the proselytisation of Muslims. The influence of that case can be discerned most clearly in the two tracts written and published by the independent missionary Ethel Miller, The truth about Muhammed. An appeal to Englishmen in Nigeria (Minna: The Niger Press, 1926), and Women count (Minna: The Niger Press, n.d.). Publications K. Kumm, The Sudan. A short compendium of fact and figures about the land of darkness, London, 1907; 008441539 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies Barnes, ‘The cross versus the crescent’, pp. 497-500
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From Hausaland to Egypt, through the Sudan Date 1910 Original Language English Description From Hausaland to Egypt, through the Sudan (xi, [2], 324 pages, includes illustrations, plates, maps) presents a first-person narrative of Kumm’s expedition during the middle months of 1909 from the Niger-Benue confluence in Nigeria through Chad, the Central African Republic and the Sudan to the Nile Valley in Egypt. Kumm maintains his persona as a geographer/scientist/explorer throughout the book. Four of the 21 chapters and the four appendices sum up various sorts of information Kumm collected over the course of the expedition, while the first 16 chapters are framed as a travelogue depicting the events that took place over the course of his journey. Although the book contains no systematic discussion of Islam, Muslim populations predominated in the regions described and Islam is characterised in some fashion in each of the chapters. One of Kumm’s main criticisms of Islam was that Islamic states were built upon coercion and slavery. He expands upon this in two chapters. In ch. 9, ‘The birth of a new protectorate’, in the context of celebrating French imperial conquests in Africa he relates the story of the French pursuit and capture of the Muslim ruler Rabbah, whose empire was built upon the exploitation of ‘between 200,000 and 300,000 slaves’ (p. 110). A photograph of a group of liberated women is offered as confirmation that the French released all of these people from captivity. In ch. 13, ‘In terra incognita’, Kumm describes his visit to the court of the Sultan Sinussi, the Muslim ruler who replaced Rabbah as the greatest slave trader in Africa, the point being that Rabbah’s fall only created an opportunity for another Muslim to exploit the innocent. A key development in the expedition was Kumm’s decision, at Fort Archambault in the Central Africa Republic, to allow a group of over 60 Muslims performing the ḥajj to join his party. Thus, Kumm the Christian missionary became the leader and provider for a group of Muslim pilgrims. Incidents and events related to his Muslim followers are a source of running commentary through the second part of the book. Ch. 20 is devoted to a geographical discussion of the network of Muslim pilgrimage rest stops linking the region to Mecca. The short last chapter, ‘The Moslem political danger’, rehashes Kumm’s case for the threat to Islamic expansion that was posed by European
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colonisation of Africa. The one new idea appears to be borrowed from the North African philosopher and historian (regarded as the first Arab sociologist) Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406). Kumm posits that great religions always appear first in deserts, and then spread from there. These religions reach their limits in the mountains, where resisters take refuge to avoid conversion. Thus, from the perspective of religion, history turns on a dialectic of desert dwellers versus mountain dwellers. In Africa, Islam had spread across the Sahara until it reached the mountainous terrains that make up the southern boundaries of the Sudan. There, it had been held in check for centuries by the traditionalist peoples who had escaped and/or militarily repulsed Islamic conversion or enslavement. European colonisation, however, had put an end to the ability of these people to rebuff Islamic expansion. There was a need for Christian missions to step in and give traditionalists the spiritual weapons they needed to continue to hold back the expansion of Islam. Significance In the British colony of Northern Nigeria at the moment when From Hausaland to Egypt was published, a bitter confrontation was taking place between Christian missionaries and the colonial government over the issue of Christian proselytisation in territories designated by the government as under the jurisdiction of Muslim rulers. The government justified its prohibition of Christian evangelism in such areas with the argument that it could not protect missionaries from assault. Yet the government permitted, and indeed from a missionary perspective, encouraged, Islamic proselytisation among traditionalists. Christian missions accused the government of a covert strategy of promoting the spread of Islam. In truth there was in Britain, and among colonial administrators in Nigeria, a group of men convinced that Islam offered a more secure pathway than Christianity towards social evolution, towards civilisation for Africans. These men aspired to keep missionaries at bay for as long as they could in the hope of giving Islamic rulers enough time to show the good they could do for African peoples. Kumm wrote From Hausaland to Egypt as a challenge to the line of thinking that held that the best way to develop Africa was through the promotion of the spread of Islam. Everywhere Kumm looked in the region there were Muslim predators whom he saw as holding back, not sponsoring, social development. He depicts Africans as celebrating European conquest as a release from Muslim slave-raiding. As he narrates it, Muslims were afraid of other Muslims, which is why a group of Muslim pilgrims sought to attach themselves to his entourage. Kumm never joined with
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other missionaries in directly condemning the practices of the British government, but in this book he does his best to demonstrate the case that, on the ground in Africa, Islam was the opposite of a civilising influence. From Hausaland to Egypt brought Kumm some fame as an explorer and expert on the Sudan region. He used all the recognition he gained to try to steer colonial governments away from policies that gave Muslims a featured role in the colonisation project. Publications Karl Kumm, From Hausaland to Egypt, through the Sudan, London, 1910; fromhausalandtoe00kumm (digitised version available through Internet Archive) Studies Barnes, ‘The cross versus the crescent’, pp. 497-500
Khont-hon-Nofer. The lands of Ethiopia Date 1910 Original Language English Description In Khont-hon-Nofer (330 pages long) Kumm works through the arguments for two of his more important intellectual claims: first that the only future for Christianity in Africa is through the conversion of traditionalists, and second that the missionary effort to convert Muslims is a waste of time. He spells out his case in a chapter on ‘Mohammedanism, with a short history of Sinussism’ (pp. 111-32). Going back to the same passages from the Qur’an that he used in The Sudan, Kumm argues that Islam inculcates in its adherents a sense that a different morality exists for those inside and those outside the faith. Islam brings out instinctive inclinations towards violent conquest and slavery, and the history of Islam is the history of Muslims acting out these instincts until they are forced to do otherwise. European military valour first stopped Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732 before finally putting an end to Islamic expansion in the 19th century through the conquest of Muslim lands. Kumm identifies the Sinussi movement in Islam as a reforming attempt that emerged in the wake of the imposition of European hegemony over Islamic lands. The movement had initially aimed to lead Muslims towards the core human values shared by followers of the other great religions. But
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followers of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sinussi could not shed the ideas of right and wrong taught in the Qur’an. So, within a few generations, the leaders among the Sinussis, had returned to violent conquest and slave raiding. The lesson Kumm would have readers take from this was that Christians could not convert people whose existing belief made them impervious to any appeal to common human notions of right and wrong. Significance In 1910, Kumm wrote and published with two different publishers two books based upon his 1909 expedition across the Sudan. They had different foci and were aimed at different readerships. From Hausaland to Egypt was aimed at those generally interested in adventure and travel literature. It provided a narrative of peoples and places observed and events witnessed. Khont-hon-Nofer was written with a Christian readership in mind and Kumm reserves his discussion of the spiritual and missiological lessons he took from his experience for this book. He was not a systematic writer and he struggled to stay on any point for more than five or so pages. Yet, to the extent to which he offers a systematic case in favour of the conversion of African traditionalists, the ‘baby’ peoples of the world, he does so in this work. He consistently calls upon European Christians to recognise their Christian duty to help African peoples grow up in a righteous fashion. By the same token, the case he seeks to make against Islam from a historical perspective breaks down after a few pages and he then uses the Sinussi movement he describes in From Hausaland to Egypt to demonstrate his point that the Qur’an locks the growth of Islamic societies into one pattern, that is, towards conquest and exploitation of outsiders. The book cemented Kumm’s fame as an expert on the Sudanic region, and he continued to write and speak from the basis of that expertise for the rest of his public career, which lasted until 1923. Publications H.K.W. Kumm, Khont-hon-Nofer. The lands of Ethiopia, London, 1910, repr. Westport CT, 1970; 007700324 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Studies Barnes, ‘The cross versus the crescent’, pp. 497-500 Andrew E. Barnes
CMS policy regarding Islam and Muslims in Africa The Church Missionary Society was established on 12 April 1799 by a group of evangelical ministers and laymen within the Anglican Church. Initially named the Society for Missions to Africa and the East, it is best known under its later name (since 1812), Church Missionary Society (CMS). Like the Baptist Missionary Society (1792) and the London Missionary Society (1795), the CMS was a product of the 18th-century evangelical revival in Britain. The founders had noticed that ‘next to nothing was done by British Christians to spread the knowledge of the Gospel among the Pagan, Heathen, and Mohammedan nations’ (Centenary volume, p. 1). While there were already two missionary societies active within the Anglican Church, they saw a niche for a new society: As it appears from the printed Reports of the Societies for the Propagation of the Gospel and for Promoting Christian Knowledge that those respectable societies confine their labours to the British Plantations and the West Indies, there seems to be still wanting in the Established Church a society for sending missionaries to the Continent of Africa, and other parts of the heathen world. (Centenary volume, p. 3)
The society’s principle aim was thus to conduct mission work outside the British Isles. However, the rapid expansion of the British Empire during the 19th century soon overturned this plan, with the result that the CMS mainly conducted its work within the empire. The society’s initial ambition had been to send missionaries to Bengal, but the East India Company objected to mission work in ‘their’ territories. Since not only world evangelism but also the abolition of slavery was a chief concern of the CMS founders, in 1804 the society sent its first two missionaries, German Lutherans trained at a Berlin seminary, to the colony of Freetown in what is present-day Sierra Leone (Keefer, ‘First missionaries’, pp. 203-5). Soon they were followed by missionaries to New Zealand (1809), India (1813), Ceylon (1814), the West Indies (1818), Canada (1820), Ethiopia (1827), Australia (1830), South Africa (1836), China (1844), East Africa (1844), Palestine (1856), Japan (1868) and Persia (1875), with India becoming one of the CMS’s most important mission fields in the 19th century (Centenary volume, p. 20). The CMS sought to achieve its aim of world evangelism by direct as well as indirect missionary work. The so-called ‘Mediterranean missions’
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that commenced in 1815 aimed to ‘revive’ Oriental Christianity (churches in the Middle East), assuming that this in turn would kindle missionary zeal in the Eastern churches: ‘The hope was entertained that the Eastern Churches, if they could be brought back to the knowledge and love of the Sacred Scriptures, would reflect the Gospel light on the Mohammedans and Heathen around them’ (Centenary volume, p. 15). Work in Turkey and Egypt, however, suffered from a number of setbacks because of the shifting political circumstances. With time, missionary assessments of Oriental Christianity became increasingly negative; some regarded Oriental Christianity as ‘a debased Christianity that had called Mohammedanism into being in the first place’ and considered it to be beyond reform, resulting in ‘mission work’ among Oriental Christians rather than Muslims (Porter, ‘Evangelicalism’, p. 70). Over the course of the 19th century, the society employed some 1,500 missionaries, expatriate as well as local; a little under a third of them were women, mostly engaged in the last two decades of the 19th century. From 1825 onwards, all male CMS missionaries received preparation training in the CMS Training College in Islington, North London; the length and content of training varied, depending on the candidate’s education. By the late 19th century, the curriculum included the study of religious traditions such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Islam, as well as comparative religion (Hodge, ‘Training of CMS missionaries’, p. 91). From the late 1880s onwards, women missionaries also received training, some at ‘The Willows’, a training home connected with the Mildmay Training Institutions, some at a private home known as ‘The Olives’, but little is known about the content of what they learnt in the late 19th century (Centenary volume, p. 6). Attitudes towards Islam CMS missionaries engaged with Muslims and Islam in a wide variety of localities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and attitudes were diverse, depending on variables such as a missionary’s background, locality, context, and moment in time. In the first half of the 19th century, CMS missionaries were optimistic about the prospects of converting Muslims, assuming that Muslims would embrace Christianity with fervour once the Gospel was explained to them in clear terms. By the final quarter of the 19th century, when several decades of futile attempts had taken their toll, this optimism had begun to waver. The rise of militant Islam, the British debacle in the Sudan and the rapid growth of Islam in Africa all began to
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cast doubt on the effectiveness of evangelisation via English education, rational argument and translation work. Christianity seemed to be losing out against Islam, especially in Africa. Therefore, in October 1875, the CMS organised a two-day conference to reflect on the challenges of ‘Missions to the Mohammedans’. Held at Church Missionary House in Salisbury Square, London, experts and representatives from a variety of mission fields shared their experiences, thoughts and best practices. The overall tone of the conference was optimistic and confident, anticipating the fall of the Ottoman Empire and stating that while ‘Mohammedanism will probably continue for a season as an Asiatic and an African religion [...] it will cease to be European’ (CMS, Conference, p. 7). The delegates attributed the lack of conversions chiefly to the fact that missionaries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa had been so preoccupied with other matters that ‘no special effort had been made to deal with Mohammedanism’; ‘to all intents and purposes the proclamation of the Gospel to the hearts and consciences of the Mohammedan is a thing yet of the future – a work not yet entered upon’ (CMS, Conference, pp. 8-9). The conference participants also considered the ‘corruption of the fallen Churches of Greece and Rome […] a great hindrance to Christianity among the followers of Islam’, but were sufficiently meek to concede that ‘our own want of faith, of deeper personal holiness, and of more earnest zeal’ also hampered effective witness, as did the ‘Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Sonship of Christ’ (CMS, Conference, p. 11). But whereas the delegates were in unison in identifying the main obstacles to mission among Muslims, there was ‘a good deal of diversity of opinion’ about ‘the most effective mode of dealing with Mohammedanism’, possibly due to the wide variety of contexts in which the delegates worked (CMS, Conference, pp. 11-12). As a result, the conference did not issue generic recommendations on how to evangelise Muslims. The Africa reports at the conference were presented by veteran missionary James Frederick Schön, who served in West Africa from 1832-45, Metcalfe Sunter, principal of Fourah Bay College between 1870 and 1882, and Carl Anders Gollmer, who had extensive missionary experience in both Sierra Leone (1835-45) and Nigeria (1845-62). Their presentations oscillated between optimism and realism. Schön, drawing on experiences from earlier in the century, was optimistic. He maintained that relations with Muslims in Sierra Leone were cordial and that the majority of Liberated African Muslims in Sierra Leone were recent converts to Islam
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who had been pressurized into becoming Muslims by the Fulani militias. The fact that several among them had converted to Christianity suggested to Schön that their allegiance to Islam was superficial. He was confident that many more would become Christians provided that ‘both European and Native missionaries should be set apart for Missionary enterprise, and especially among the Mohammedans’. Schön was also hopeful about the outcomes of evangelising the wider West African Muslim community, who, in his opinion, were ignorant about their faith and who would, he thought, therefore be open to Christianity (CMS, Conference, pp. 27-8). Sunter, who was still serving in West Africa at the time of the conference, was less optimistic. He agreed with Schön that many West African Muslims were illiterate and uninformed about the Qur’an and Muslim teachings. And while he conceded that ‘the wave of Mohammedan progress has been to some extent stopped’ and ‘that much of the prejudice, which in past times has been shown by the Mohammedans to Christianity in Africa, is now on the wane’, he also observed that ‘direct converts are few and far between’ (CMS, Conference, pp. 29, 32). Likewise, Gollmer, who had worked among the Yoruba, concurred with the view that ‘[a]s a rule, in West Africa, the Mohammedans are entirely uneducated’, though he also remarked that this was different in the interior, where some Muslims were highly sophisticated and literate (CMS, Conference, p. 37). Nevertheless, the three men maintained, West African Muslims ‘cannot be reached through books which contain anything like elaborate arguments or abstract reasonings’, but rather ‘should be reached through the living Teacher’, who could converse with Muslims in their local vernacular, and whose ‘aim should be to set up Christian truth – based upon Revelation – rather than destroy Mohammedan error by means of reason’ (CMS, Conference, p. 39). Sunter also a made a case for the inclusion of Arabic in the curriculum at Fourah Bay College, for both missionary and commercial purposes (CMS, Conference, p. 33); James Johnson, a ‘native clergyman’ who was later appointed assistant bishop in Western Equatorial Africa, in a letter to the CMS written in 1875, also emphasised the importance of training in Arabic and Islam for local CMS staff (Cole, Krio, p. 137). The discussion on Africa led to the overall conclusion that rational debates, education and translation work alone were insufficient to engender Muslim conversion; mission among Muslims required missionaries (expatriate as well as native) who would be specifically assigned to work among Muslims and would be well-versed in Islam and versatile in the vernaculars used by West African Muslims (e.g. Mandinka, Hausa and
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Fula). The participants also held high hopes of the distribution of Arabic Bibles and ajami tracts. Since the conference took place just as the CMS was beginning to revive work in East Africa with the arrival of William Price, who focused on working with freed slaves, there was no representation from there at the conference. Subsequent missionary strategies began to favour peripatetic evangelism by specialised staff (indigenous and expatriate) and evangelical preaching. Heather Sharkey notes that, despite earlier experiences of failure, in the 1880s, CMS missionaries began to discuss Christian rivalry with Islam in terms of a contest for African souls. [...] As the nineteenth century ended, CMS missionaries were nevertheless becoming increasingly committed to, and aggressive about, work in Muslim regions. Emboldened by, and proud of, the spread of the British Empire, they felt confident that work among Muslims was feasible as never before. (Sharkey, ‘Christians among Muslims’, p. 54)
In 1887, a heated debate on Islam in Africa was sparked off in Anglican circles when Canon Isaac Taylor, perhaps building on ideas by men like Richard Burton and Edward Blyden, stated to a predominantly missionary audience that Islam had done much more than Christianity to civilise Africa and was much more suited to Africans than Christianity, a view that evoked strong emotions in CMS circles (Prasch, ‘Which God for Africa’, p. 62). While this view gained much support among colonial officers, its impact on missionary engagement with Muslims remained limited (see C. Bennett, ‘Isaac Taylor’, in CMR 17, 307-15). The rapid expansion of the British Empire over the course of the 19th century had made Britain, to use the words of Andrew Porter, ‘the greatest of all rulers of Muslims’ (Porter, Religion versus Empire, p. 211). The fact that increasing numbers of Muslims had come under ‘Christian’ (European) rule during the 19th century fuelled millennial sentiments among evangelical Christians in the last decades of the century. Many believed that the political circumstances signalled a specific calling for missionary work among Muslims. Porter quotes a paper read by William Dumerque, vicar of Fareham, at a CMS prayer meeting in 1881, in which Dumerque remarked: Certainly it is a sign of the times that the Crescent is waning before the Cross, that though Mohammedanism as a religion is not worn out, Mohammedan nations have come under the power or the influence of Christian rulers.
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Surely, then, the conversion of the Mohammedans should be a special subject at missionary conferences. (Porter, ‘Evangelicalism’, p. 62)
Some 25 years later, William St Clair Tisdall (see G. Nickel, ‘William St Clair Tisdall’, in CMR 20), a CMS missionary in India (1884-7) and Iran (18921900), in his contribution to the 1907 ecumenical missionary conference on ‘Mohammedanism in the world to-day’ in Cairo, also flagged the significance of the political climate for mission to Muslims, stating: ‘This fact […] renders it much easier for missionaries to evangelize these great populations than it would be if the Koranic law condemning Christian converts from Islâm to death were still in force’ (‘Islam and Christian missions’, p. 207) History proved him wrong; in various colonial settings (e.g. West Africa) British colonial rule proved a hindrance rather than an aid to mission to Muslims, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced few proofs that substantiated Tisdall’s confident and somewhat triumphalist claims of a bright future for Christian mission among Muslims, because ‘Islam as a religion is doomed to fade away in time for the advance of humanity, civilization, and enlightenment’, and that Bible translation ‘into all the main languages spoken by Mohammedans has laid the axe to the tree of Islâm’ (Tisdall, ‘Islam and Christian missions’, p. 207). Rather, in numerous settings, colonialism kindled a revitalisation among religious others, including Muslims. As Porter is careful to point out, 19th-century British Protestant interest in mission among Muslims was not merely the result of Britain’s expanding empire, but had multiple origins (Porter, ‘Evangelicalism’, p. 63). Evangelical commitment to the abolition of slavery was another source of Protestant preoccupation with Islam, including in the CMS. In the minds of many, Muslims were key players in the perpetuation of the African slave trade. The Fulani jihads in West Africa were not considered a threat only because they imposed Islam on non-Muslim Africans but also because they sold large numbers of the conquered populations into slavery, while in East Africa, Muslim traders and the Sultanate of Zanzibar were deemed to be linchpins in the Swahili slave trade and the supply of slaves to the Ottoman Empire. Hence, mission to Muslims was also considered an important strategy in the anti-slavery lobby. The international conference held in Berlin in 1884-5 led to the ‘carvingup’ of Africa amongst European powers; it also meant that the preferred missionary groups working in an area would be from the colonial country that ruled it. This meant that the CMS found itself having to relate to German and French colonial officials.
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The archives of the CMS are held at the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham. The collection comprises records of the society’s home administration (e.g. annual reports, minutes, ledgers, publications) as well as records from mission stations and missionaries (e.g. correspondence, progress reports, journals, annual letters, etc.). Currently, the materials from 1799-1959 are open for research. A large part of the archival materials has been digitised by Adam Matthew Publications and is available on-line; they can also be consulted at the Crowther Library of the CMS in Oxford, as well as at the Cadbury Research Library. For more details on the archival corpus, see: https://churchmissionsociety.org/ about/our-history/archives/. Over the years the CMS has published a large number of periodicals, some general, some focusing on specific target groups, such as women, children or Sunday schools (e.g. Church Missionary Juvenile Instructor, The Quarterly Token), some focusing on specific forms of mission (e.g. medical mission) or specific regions (e.g. Ruanda Notes); some newsletters published by the newly established local churches. A large number of the periodicals have been digitised, including: Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (1801-1921, continued as Annual Report, 1922-61), The CMS Gleaner (continued in 1922 as the CM Outlook, and from 1973 onwards as YES Magazine), The CMS Intelligencer (continued in 1907 as the Church Missionary Review, in 1928 as Church Overseas, and in 1934 as the East and West Review), Ruanda Notes, Mid-Africa Ministry News, Register of Missionaries, Homes of the East, Mercy and Truth, The Medical Mission Quarterly, The Kwangsi Hunan Diocesan Newsletter, The Bulletin of the Diocese of Western China, CMS Japan Quarterly, The Home Gazette of the CMS, CMS Historical Record and CMS Awake! The CMS has also published a large number of linguistic materials, such as grammars, dictionaries, and primers, missionary tracts, Bible translations and children’s books.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION E. Wild-Wood, ‘The interpretations, problems and possibilities of missionary sources in the history of Christianity in Africa’, in M. Frederiks and D. Nagya (eds), World Christianity. Methodological considerations, Leiden, 2021, 92-112
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K.H.B. Keefer, ‘The first missionaries of the Church Missionary Society in Sierra Leone, 1804-1816. A biographical approach’, History in Africa 44 (2017) 199-235 G.R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa. Islam, culture, creolization, and colonialism in the nineteenth century, Athens OH, 2013 A. Porter, ‘Evangelicalism, Islam, and millennial expectation in the nineteenth century’, in D.L. Robert (ed.), Converting colonialism. Visions and realities in mission history, Grand Rapids MI, 2008, 60-85 A. Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914, Manchester, 2005 H. Sharkey, ‘Christians among Muslims. The Church Missionary Society in the northern Sudan’, Journal of African history 43 (2002) 51-75 K. Ward and B. Stanley, The Church Mission Society and world Christianity, 17991999, Grand Rapids MI, 1999 T. Prasch, ‘Which God for Africa. The Islamic-Christian missionary debate in lateVictorian England’, Victorian Studies 33 (1989) 51-73 J. Murray, Proclaim the Good News. A short history of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1985 G. Hewitt, The problems of success. A history of the Church Missionary Society, 19101942, 2 vols, London, 1971 A. Hodge, ‘The training of missionaries for Africa. The Church Missionary Society’s training college at Islington, 1900-1915’, Journal of Religion in Africa 4 (1971) 81-96 C. Hole, The early history of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1914 E. Stock, ‘The CMS missions to the Mohammedans’, The Moslem World 2 (1912) 122-32 E. Stock, The history of the Church Missionary Society. Its environment, its men, and its work, 4 vols, London, 1899-1916 W.S. Tisdall, ‘Islam and Christian missions’, Church Missionary Review 57 (1907) 206-10 Church Missionary Society, The centenary volume of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, London, 1902 Church Missionary Society, One hundred years. Being the short history of the Church Missionary Society, London, 18992 Church Missionary Society, Conference on missions to the Mohammedans held at the Church Missionary House, Salisbury Square, on the 20th and 21st of October, 1875, n. p., n.d. Church Missionary Society and E.J. Lake, The church missionary atlas. Containing an account of the various countries in which the Church Missionary Society labours, and of its missionary operations, London, 1857 (revised edition in 1879)
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The CMS in West Africa Date 1804-1914 Original Language English and other languages Description In the 19th century the areas in West Africa where the CMS encountered Muslims on a regular basis were the riverine territory of present-day Guinea Conakry with Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In the Sierra Leone and Guinea Conakry area, where the CMS had commenced its work in 1804, missionaries interacted with three distinct groups of Muslims. The first comprised Liberated African Muslims (often of Yoruba descent) who had been settled in the colony of Freetown after they were freed when the slave ships transporting them were intercepted by the British navy. According to Schön most of them had only recently, and under coercion, embraced Islam. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (see A. Fitchett-Climenhanga, ‘Samuel Crowther’, CMR 19, 219-28), the CMS’s most renowned 19th-century African employee, gained his first experiences of Christian mission to Muslims with these Muslims. Also living in the colony was a small group of Fulani Muslims, often traders who had moved to the colony to exploit the economic opportunities it offered, with whom relations were said to be cordial and who were considered to represent ‘a Mission-field which ought to be occupied by labourers set apart for them’ (CMS, Conference, p. 27). However, there are no indications that a systematic attempt to evangelise this group took place during the 19th century. Rather, Schön saw certain advantages to allowing the resident Fulani and the large number of Muslim visitors to the colony ‘to practice their religion without let or hindrance, and enjoy religions toleration to the full extent’. He stated: ‘I do not disapprove of this at all; on the contrary, I rejoice in it, because it will be setting an example which we hope they will imitate in future days, and grant to us the same privileges in their own countries’ (CMS, Conference, p. 27). The third group of Muslims with whom CMS missionaries interacted were Muslims from the Sierra Leone hinterland (Susu, Mandingo and Fulani). The first CMS missionaries, Peter Hartwig and Melchior Renner, had been instructed to work ‘inland’ among the Susu and Bullom peoples, following up on work commenced there by the Edinburgh Missionary Society in 1797. On the advice of Henry Brunton (see M.T. Frederiks, ‘Henry
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Brunton’, in CMR 19, 59-66), Hartwig and Renner’s training had included the study of Arabic, so that they were equipped to engage with these predominantly Muslim groups. Gradually, however, after the Act of Abolition of 1807 CMS staff were increasingly drawn into the pastorate for Liberated Africans. As a result, the Susu mission, which had suffered from the antagonism of resident slavers and rebuff from Muslims ever since its inception, was abandoned until the 1850s, when the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel took over missionary responsibilities for the Rio Pongas region (Gibba, ‘West Indian mission’). CMS contacts with the Fula Muslim Empire of Futa Jallon and with the Mandinka Muslim Empire of Wassoulou were limited to exploratory journeys and commercial relations. CMS interactions with Muslims in Sierra Leone are fairly well documented. Apart from the conventional progress reports and correspondence that mention interactions with Muslims, there is a Memorial of the agents of the CMS respecting the spread of Mahomedanism among the Liberated Africans as well as a petition from African lay preachers on the same subject, both from January 1839, and reports by Schön, Sunter and Gullmer presented at the 1875 Conference on missions to the Mohammedans. In addition, there are linguistic materials, developed for the evangelisation of Muslims, as well as material on Ajayi Crowther’s interactions with Liberated African Muslims which fashioned his attitude towards Muslims in the Niger mission. However, apart from an article by Andrew Walls (‘Africa as theatre’) and a number of references in the work of Gibril Cole (The Krio), there has been no systematic historical analysis of these interactions in Sierra Leone. The materials available indicate that attitudes regarding Islam and Muslims in Sierra Leone changed over time. While CMS missionaries working among the Susu and among liberated African Muslims initially assumed that Muslims would be as receptive to the Gospel as other groups, this optimism gradually changed into scepticism, antagonism and a sense of competition with Islam (Walls, ‘Africa as theatre’, p. 45). From Sierra Leone, the CMS commenced mission work in Nigeria in 1844. After an exploratory but calamitous expedition undertaken on the Niger in 1841, the society chose Badagry, Abeokuta, and later Lagos, as its missionary centres. Characteristic of CMS mission work in Nigeria in the 19th century was that the majority of its staff were African, many of them Liberated Africans from Sierra Leone, or their descendants. The most prominent among them was the Yoruba clergyman Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809-91). Because of his cultural and linguistic skills and his extensive missionary experience, Crowther was appointed head of the
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all-African Niger mission in 1857, and consecrated bishop in 1864. During the four-and-a-half decades he served the mission, he engaged in translation work, initiated mission stations and schools in his immense diocese (e.g. Bonny and Calabar) and explored missionary opportunities in the middle and northern Niger region, such as Ilorun and the Nupe region. His journals testify to his numerous encounters with Muslim leaders and traditional believers, and underscore the dialogical and non-confrontational approach to the religious ‘other’ that Crowther himself personified. In the decades following the colonisation of Lagos in 1861, CMS work in Nigeria suffered a series of setbacks. Resident traders in Lagos opposed missionary work because they felt it interfered with trade interests, while a series of wars between Yoruba polities caused upheaval in large parts of the Niger Diocese. Also, personnel and funds were scarce. By the mid1880s, when Britain had extended its influence in the Niger Delta, relations between expatriate and indigenous CMS workers became increasingly strained. A group of young university-educated expatriate missionaries imbued with evangelical zeal and imperialist attitudes, began to contest African leadership and effectively undermined Crowther’s authority, overruling him in matters of personnel and finance. The tensions came to a head in 1890, when Crowther resigned as bishop. With this, the CMS ‘allAfrican pastorate experiment’ came to an end; an expatriate missionary succeeded Crowther as bishop. The conflicts between expats and local missionaries also encompassed missionary strategies; many of the expat missionaries criticised the non-confrontational approach towards Muslims and adherents of traditional religions that Crowther and his African colleagues had favoured. They advocated a more confrontational approach and sought to start mission work in the predominantly Muslim north. In 1890, the so-called ‘Sudan Party’, under the leadership of J.A. Robinson and Wilmot Brooke, set out for the northern regions, with the specific aim of reaching out to Muslims in the Hausa states, but the mission failed. In 1900, a new attempt was made to establish a mission in northern Nigeria. However, the party, headed by Bishop Herbert Tugwell (1854-1936), had failed to request permission from the colonial authorities and had to withdraw after they met with fierce resistance from the Emir of Kano. Among the party was the medical missionary Walter Miller (1872-1952), who returned to the area in 1902 and settled in Zaria with the consent of the emir of Zaria. Miller worked in Zaria and its surroundings until his retirement in 1935 (see M.A.B. Gaiya, ‘Walter Miller’, in CMR 19, 462-72), thus effectively starting CMS missionary work in northern Nigeria.
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With the establishment of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1900, Christian missionary work in northern Nigeria became increasingly difficult. Colonial officers subjected Christian missionary work to a variety of rules and regulations, which, while not formally prohibiting missionary work, in practice impeded missionary activities. Andrew Barnes observes that ‘[c]olonial administrators justified these practices by reference to the pledge Lugard made to the Sultan of Sokoto at the moment of British Conquest that “Government will in no way interfere with the Mohammedan religion”’ (Barnes, ‘“Great prohibition”’, p. 442). Administrators took this to mean no proselytisation of Muslims by Christian missionaries, a policy that effectively thwarted all aspirations of missionary work in the Muslim north. C.N. Ubah concludes: By the first decade of this century the missionaries in Nigeria were increasingly realizing the hopelessness of their position, and in 1909 the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) bitterly complained that if, as the British administration insisted, they had to subject their coming to the approval of the emirs, they might as well be excluded forever. (Ubah, ‘Problems of Christian missionaries’, p. 354)
Hence, the main encounters between CMS missionaries and Muslims in Nigeria in the 19th century took place in Yorubaland. In the mid-1870s, aware of the importance of knowledge of Arabic and Islam for missionary work, Crowther, Johnson and others began to send indigenous ministers to Fourah Bay College and other training institutions to study Arabic and Islam, in order to equip them for debates with Muslim apologists (Akinade, Christian responses to Islam). This policy produced indigenous CMS ministers like T.A.J. Ogunbiyi (1866-1952), M.S. Cole (1875-1946) and M.T. Euler-Ajayi (1846-1913), who were well-versed in Arabic and had a considerable knowledge of Islam. These ministers not only engaged with Muslims orally, but also wrote Yoruba tracts specifically for Muslims. Examples include Ogunbiyi’s Aṣaro Kukuru (‘Tracts for Muhammadans’), Awọn Ọrọ Ọlọrun (‘The Words of God’), a translation of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and some Bible passages, Awọn Imale (‘The Muslims’), a collection of stories of Muslims who had converted to Christianity, and Itan Mọmọdu (‘The Story of Muḥammad’), a brief biography of Muḥammad, published in Lagos by CMS, 1911-15 (Shitu, ‘Review’, pp. 29-30). Possibly the most extraordinary document was a Yoruba translation of the Qur’an, prepared by Michael Samuel Cole (1906, revised edition 1924). Intended for a Christian audience, this translation aimed to educate and
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forearm Christians and traditional believers against Islam. Cole wrote in the introduction that the book was intended to ‘help the cause of Christianity, and dispel the darkness of the ignorance that […] prevailed among Mohammedans in Yorubaland’ (Solihu, ‘Earliest Yoruba translation’; see A.K.H. Solihu, ‘M.S. Cole’, in CMR 19, 325-31). Significance The missionaries’ perception of rivalry between Islam and the message of Christianity had a lasting influence on the ways in which the CMS worked in West Africa. Early on in the work of the mission, the challenges of competition with Islam led to the decision to focus on non-Muslims and recently Islamised groups, such as Liberated Africans (freed slaves) and the Yoruba, whose attachment to Islam was perceived to be superficial, rather than working amongst groups with a long-established Islamic tradition, such as the Hausa and Fulani. When work amongst Muslims began, it is significant that Liberated Africans were involved in the work together with European missionaries. The Liberated Africans who were educated at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, were ordained as deacons and often returned to work in the communities from which they came. Literature was produced using local vernaculars written in Arabic script, making them accessible to many more people than material printed using Roman script. The material produced by the CMS included both western and African contributors. Among the latter, Crowther’s reflections on Islam and Muslims were influential far beyond the local context, whereas M.S. Cole’s version of the Qur’an in Yoruba (1906) was significant as the first Qur’an to be available in an African language, pre-dating Godfrey Dale’s Swahili version by 17 years. During the 19th century, by means of conferences and publications, the CMS stimulated not only work among Muslims but also reflections on Islam and mission to Muslims, which shaped attitudes both in England and in the mission field. In this, they can be viewed as being more progressive in their outlook than some other Protestant mission agencies. In day to day living, relations between Christians and Muslims were generally cordial and courteous, allowing opportunities for interactions. Canon Isaac Taylor’s paper ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, given at the Church Congress in 1887, positing the greater suitability of Islam than Christianity for Africans, gave rise to discussion among missionaries not only in West Africa but in East Africa, too. This focused on the question of whether or not Islam should be seen as a step towards the ‘civilisation’ of Africans and so as an improvement on traditional religion.
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Throughout the period, attitudes regarding mission to Muslims varied greatly between locations, often shaped by personal preferences and insights, leading to a gradual collapse of the optimism that Muslims would be converted. Decisions made by colonial authorities had a lasting effect on the work that the CMS could do among Muslims. This was particularly true in the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, where in 1900 Lord Lugard as HighCommissioner issued a directive of non-interference with the Muslim religion within the protectorate (see J.A. Mbillah, ‘Lord Lugard’, in CMR 19, 436-9). This restricted the CMS and other missions from working in the north until after independence in 1960. Publications Archives London, The National Archives – Public Record Office, CO 267/154 Doherty to Russell, dispatch 77, enclosure 1, Memorial of the agents of the CMS respecting the spread of Mahomedanism among the Liberated Africans (4 December 1839) Church Missionary Society, Conference Isaac Taylor, ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’, in C. Dunkley (ed.), The official report of the Church Congress, held at Wolverhampton [...] 1887, London, 1887, 325-31 M.S. Cole, Al-Kurani. Ti a yapada si ede, Lagos, 1906 G.T. Manley, ‘Africa’s choice. Islam or Christ’, Church Missionary Intelligencer 63 (1913) 594-602 Studies F.J. Kolapo, Christian missionary engagement in Central Nigeria, 18571891. The Church Missionary Society’s all-African mission on the Upper Niger, Cham, 2019 Keefer, ‘First missionaries’ A.K.H. Solihu, ‘The earliest Yoruba translation of the Qur’an. Missionary engagement with Islam in Yorubaland’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17 (2015) 10-37 A.E. Akinade, Christian responses to Islam in Nigeria. A contextual study of ambivalent encounters, New York, 2014 S. Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Christian origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, ca. 1890/1975, Athens OH, 2014 M.H. Shitu, ‘A review of the activities of Christian missionary and clergy “experts” and writers on Islam in Nigeria’, Journal of Islamic Studies and Culture 2/3 (2014) 25-46 Cole, Krio
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B. Gibba, ‘The West Indian mission to West Africa. The Rio Pongas Mission 1850-1963’, Toronto, 2011 (PhD Diss. Toronto University) A.E. Barnes, ‘“The great prohibition”. The expansion of Christianity in colonial Northern Nigeria’, History Compass 8 (2010) 440-54 A.E. Barnes, ‘The colonial legacy to contemporary culture in Northern Nigeria. Islam and Northern Administrators 1900-1960’, in T. Fayola and S.M. Hasan (eds), Power and nationalism in modern Africa. Essays in honor of Don Ohadike, Durham NC, 2008, 251-80 Porter, ‘Evangelicalism’ H. Sharkey, ‘Empire and Muslim conversion. Historical reflections on Christian missions in Egypt’, ICMR 16 (2005) 43-60 A. Barnes, ‘“Religious insults”. Christian critiques of Islam and the government in colonial Northern Nigeria’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (2004) 62-81 Sharkey, ‘Christians among Muslims’ A.F. Walls, ‘Africa as theatre of Christian engagement with Islam in the nineteenth century’, in D.J. Maxwell, I. Lawrie and A. Hastings (eds), Christianity and the African imagination. Essays in honour of Adrian Hastings, Leiden, 2002, 41-62 A.E. Barnes, ‘“Evangelization where it is not wanted”. Colonial administrators and missionaries in Northern Nigeria during the first third of the twentieth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (1995) 412-41 Prasch, ‘Which God for Africa’ C.N. Ubah, ‘Christian missionary penetration of the Nigerian emirates. The village school approach’, Transafrican Journal of History 17 (1988) 108-22 C.N. Ubah, ‘Christian missionary penetration of the Nigerian emirates, with special reference to the medical missions approach’, The Muslim World 77 (1987) 16-27 A. Porter, ‘The Hausa association. Sir George Goldie, the Bishop of Dover, and the Niger in the 1890s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7 (1979) 149-79 L.L. Vander Werff, Christian mission to Muslims. The Record. Anglican and Reformed approaches in India and the Near East, 1800-1938, South Pasadena CA, 1977 C.N. Ubah, ‘Problems of Christian missionaries in the Muslim emirates of Nigeria, 1900-1928’, Journal of African Studies 3 (1976) 351-71 E.A. Ayandele, ‘The missionary factor in Northern Nigeria, 1870-1918’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2 (December 1966) 503-22 Martha T. Frederiks
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The CMS in East Africa Date 1844-1914 Original Language English Description The attitudes, understanding and response to Islam of CMS missionaries can be found in their Annual Letters, reports and diaries and in CMS magazines. These are held in the CMS archives at the Cadbury Research Library Special Collections, University of Birmingham. Whilst much has been written about the work of the CMS in East Africa, less research has been conducted on the attitudes and approaches of CMS missionaries to Muslims and Islam before 1914. However, James Holway, ‘C.M.S. contact with Islam’) and Ethan Sanders (‘Close encounters’) have both written about CMS and Islam in East Africa before 1914 and made a preliminary search of the CMS archives and published literature. Even though missionary work in Africa was one of the main aims of the founders of the CMS when it was founded in 1799, CMS missionaries only arrived in East Africa in 1844, as the result of one person’s desire to find a way to enter Ethiopia in order to evangelise the Galla (now known as Oromo) peoples. Ludwig Krapf (1810-81), born in Württemberg, was one of a number of Germans who joined the CMS through links with the Basel Mission (Hastings, Church in Africa, p. 242; see Chesworth, ‘Ludwig Krapf’, in CMR 19, 195-204). The CMS arrived in East Africa before European colonisation, meaning that the mission was not initially constrained by any restrictions from European powers. The Berlin Conference in 1884-5 led to the ‘carving-up’ of Africa, with Buganda becoming a protectorate and British Imperial East Africa (Kenya) becoming a colony. Tanganyika became Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa). In 1890, the status of the coastal strip was ‘agreed’ between Germany and Britain and forced on the Sultan of Zanzibar. The coastal strip was ceded to the colonies on a 99-year lease from the sultan, with the sole proviso that Islamic courts should still operate there (Chesworth, ‘Kadhi’s courts’, p. 4). Here, reports from missionaries will be used to show the range of knowledge of, and attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in the various areas where they worked: Mombasa and Kenya, Mengo (Kampala) and Uganda, Mpwapwa and Tanganyika. The number of CMS missionaries was relatively small until the 1890s when their number in Mombasa, Uganda and Mpwapwa increased greatly up to the outbreak of the First World War.
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Having failed to reach Ethiopia from the north and east, Krapf arrived in Zanzibar in 1844, where he was granted permission by the ruler, Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān (r. 1807-56), to proceed to Mombasa on the mainland. Despite the tragic death of his wife and daughter, Krapf remained in Mombasa, where he was joined in 1846 by Johann Rebmann (1820-76), also seconded by the Basel Mission to the CMS. They travelled around the coastal areas and the island of Pemba as well as making longer journeys inland, where they were the first Europeans to see the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. They established a mission station inland of Mombasa at Rabai Mpya. Already fluent in Arabic, Krapf used his language skills to create word lists of several languages and translated some passages of the Bible. He departed in 1853 leaving Rebmann in Rabai Mpya, where the latter and his wife were briefly joined by John Erhardt (1823-1901) in 1855 before the latter’s transfer to the CMS India in 1856. Otherwise, they were mainly alone until the 1860s, when interest in East Africa was revived as a result of British attempts to abolish the slave trade. The Proceedings of 1855 reported: Mahommedanism is stated by Mr. Erhardt to be on the increase on that portion of the African coast, very many poor people having lately embraced it, chiefly Washinsi [Washenzi, ‘those from the interior’], in the hope of being exempted from being sold into slavery. (Proceedings, 1855, p. 59)
In a number of reports, Rebmann mentions the Africans in Bombay (freed slaves) who were training in Christian knowledge and industrial pursuits to return to work as Christian missionaries (Proceedings, 1859, p. 57; 1862, p. 53). In 1865 the Proceedings reported that: Mr. Rebmann is greatly rejoiced to receive the [six Africans from Bombay]. He feels that this is of itself an ample reward for all his labours. The Mohammedans of Mombas [sic] are astonished. They have before said that the poor Wanika converts were becoming better men (i.e. superior) than themselves. Now they meet Africans who speak English and Hindostani, in addition to their own language. (Proceedings, 1865, p. 180)
Rebmann retired in 1875, just as CMS work was beginning to expand rapidly following the British Government commission on the suppression of the slave trade of 1873. The commission was led by Sir Bartle Frere (1815-84), the former British governor of Bombay (Mumbai). It resulted in a treaty with the sultan of Zanzibar and the establishment of settlements for freed
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slaves. The proposal to establish a freed slave settlement in Mombasa was announced in the September 1873 Church Missionary Intelligencer (pp. 262-3) and was then reported in detail in the October and November issues of the Church Missionary Intelligencer (‘Mission of Sir Bartle Frere to the East Coast of Africa’, October, pp. 296-306, November, pp. 333-44; Sanders, ‘Close encounters’, pp. 249-50). In 1874, William Salter Price (1825-1911) arrived in Mombasa with a party of CMS missionaries to re-establish and extend the mission in East Africa and to start a settlement on the mainland, which they named Frere Town. Price had worked with the CMS in India from 1850 and had been responsible for the ‘African-asylum for rescued slaves’ at Nasik (Register, entry 401). The Church Missionary Intelligencer gives a full report that sets out the purpose of the mission, the identification of a suitable site for the settlement for freed slaves across the creek from Mombasa and the difficult reception due to the resistance of slave traders (‘The East African Mission’, May 1875, 145-60). The arrival of ‘Native Christian East Africans from Bombay to help with manual labour’ is reported in the June Church Missionary Intelligencer (p. 163), with regular updates on the work in later issues. The earliest Africans to be ordained, William Jones (d. 1904) and Ishmael Semler (d. 1924), were ‘Bombay Africans’ who had been rescued from slave ships by the British navy and spent time in India before coming to work with the CMS in Mombasa. They were ordained by Bishop James Hannington in 1885. The CMS classed ordained indigenous workers such as Jones and Semler as ‘native clergy’, and published extracts from their letters. Semler’s letter of 19 December 1887 refers to the reluctance of slaves to become Christians out of fear for their Muslim masters. Frere Town is not like Rabai or Giriama where you are surrounded with people who have no ‘Book’, but we are in the midst of the slaves, the property of the bigoted Swahilis, who are of the Mohammedan religion. So these slaves will tell you, ‘Yes, it is true what you say. I am afraid of my Master’. (Semler, Frere Town, 19 December 1887, Annual Letter, 1888, p. 120)
From then on, the number of CMS missionaries on the coast increased. They mostly lived in Frere Town, as the focus of the CMS was on freed slaves and not on working amongst Muslims. Following a visit to Zanzibar, and seeing the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa’s (UMCA) work amongst Muslims, Bishop Henry Parker (1852-88) placed an advertisement: ‘Wanted, three ladies for East Africa’ in the Church Missionary Intelligencer (12 May 1887, p. 309; Sanders, ‘Close encounters’, p. 251). One
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Illustration 11. W.E. Taylor and other missionaries at Fort Jesus, Mombasa
response came with the arrival in 1892 of the three Misses Bazett, Louisa (d. 1949), Mary (1867-1948) and Sibella (1868-1953), as honorary missionaries (self-funding) to work in Mombasa, where they visited the homes of Muslim women with Mrs Catherine Taylor (1864-1959). From around this time it was decided that work should start in Mombasa with several houses being rented there including the Women Workers’ House whose ‘spacious basement […] serves us admirably […] as our msikiti – mosque, i.e. mission chapel and evangelistic hall. (Taylor, Mombasa, 25 November 1893, Annual Letter, 1894, p. 7)
In her Annual Letters for 1893 and 1894, Sibella Bazett describes her work in the part of Mombasa town assigned to her: [I]n one house I was visiting with Miss Farley, where we had been invited by a woman, another one came out of the house who evidently did not look upon us as friends, and who asked what we wanted; on hearing that we only came with one object before us, to tell them of Jesus their saviour, she burst into a torrent of abuse against the religion of Jesus, repeating the Mohammedan formula in Arabic – ‘There is no God but one, and Mohammed is His prophet,’ and openly declaring to us that she did not want Jesus Christ. Mohammed was her Saviour, and she was satisfied and wanted no other. (Sibella Bazett, Mombasa, 24 November 1893, Annual Letter, 1894, p. 14)
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Her letter for 1894 was published in the Church Missionary Intelligencer, ensuring a wider readership. A colony of Baloochees [Baluchis]. […] Of course there are numbers of Swahilis in the rest of my district, but I think, on the whole I have had a warmer welcome from the Baloochees than the others, and have made some firm friends amongst them, especially amongst the women and children, and some are earnestly listening to the Gospel story, though they are very bigoted Mohammedans, and much more religious than the Swahilis. They are very regular in their prayers; never mind what they are doing; and even the women are taught the Koran by heart. (‘Women missionaries in East Africa’, Church Missionary Intelligencer, March 1895, 188-97, p. 190)
In the same letter, Sibella Bazett mentions the ‘utter worthlessness of Islam’ and the ‘wickedness of Islam’ (p. 190). Reports of the work amongst women by female CMS missionaries indicate the openness of Muslim women to listen and to talk about their faith. Annie Isabel Grieve (b. 1868) wrote about travelling from Zanzibar to Aden with Muslim women, one of whom was a ‘female Koran teacher’. Grieve read most of the Gospel of Luke to the female deck passengers and talked about it with them. ‘One woman said, “Then who is Mohammed, our prophet?” [Then she] said he was not wanted’ (Grieve, Mombasa, 8 November 1895, Annual Letter, 1896, p. 7). Annie also wrote about her work with Baluchi women in Mombasa: One woman said. ‘Some years ago, I lost my Koran; so you must be my Koran, Bibi,’ and she is willing to hear of Jesus. Another said, ‘Oh! How these love one another. We do not know how to love.’ Another said, ‘These ladies never, never tell lies; and yet again, ‘I do love to hear these stories; all your words are beautiful.’ (Grieve, Mombasa, 8 November 1895, Annual Letter, 1896, p. 8)
Minnie Isabella Culverwell (1867-1949) wrote about Muslim women’s responses to her visits: [Having prayed for a Muslim woman’s health, the next day] she seized my hand and said, ‘Bibi, it was the prayer in the name of Jesus that made me well.’ These were no light words to come from the lips of a Mohammedan woman. […] One feels that it is so important to teach the women that prayer is something more than the repetition of words, and the empty form of Mohammedan prayers. (Culverwell, Mombasa, 9 November 1897, Annual Letter, 1898, pp. 32-3)
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CMS policy regarding Islam and Muslims in Africa [On one woman who had allowed services to be held in her home,] I sometimes wondered if Fatuma was really as earnest as she appeared to be, and it was a great joy to me when I heard her spoken of as a Christian by her neighbours. Then again, all traces of Mohammedanism have disappeared from her house – the Koran, which used to be in a niche in the wall, has disappeared; moreover, I was told when Ramadhan, the great Mohammedan fast, came around this year, that she did not fast, as she had always previously done. […] The answer one so often gets is, ‘Oh yes, Jesus Christ is your Saviour, but Mahomet is ours.’ (Culverwell, Rabai, November 1898, Annual Letter, 1899, p. 437)
At this point during the 1890s, few of the CMS missionaries showed any real knowledge of Islam. An exception was William Taylor (1856-1927), who chose to live in Mombasa town and used the opportunity to develop his linguistic skills, especially in Swahili, sitting on the baraza (veranda) of the mosque and conversing with the elders of the town, getting their help in translating books of the Bible. He was also involved in open-air preaching, responding to challenges from Muslims. He wrote a Swahili tract, using Arabic script, for use amongst Muslims. It was entitled Raha isiyo karaha (‘Unhampered happiness’), first published in Mombasa in 1893 with later reprints in London in 1897 and 1902 (see J. Chesworth, ‘W.E. Taylor’, in CMR 19, 278-89). In 1905, the CMS published Shuhuda za dini ya kimasihia Pamoja na kupeleza kidogo dini ya Isilamu, a Swahili translation of Evidences of the Christian religion, together with a short examination of Muhammadanism, by John Murray Mitchell (1815-1904), a Scottish missionary to India. In 1911, Taylor translated Thomas Upson’s Unabii (‘Prophethood’), from Arabic to Swahili, for the Nile Mission Press, and in 1912 Habari ya Waarabu na Islamu (‘Notes on Arabs and Islam’) was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) for the CMS. Joseph Wray (1856-1931) worked with Taylor on open-air evangelism; together they built a church at Kilindini on Mombasa Island. The seating for this was given by the local mosque: ‘The seats are cocoa-nut tree logs and were given by the chiefs of the Mohammedan mosque’ (Wray, Taita, 16 November 1893, Annual Letter, 1894, p. 19), indicating that in this case relationships were friendly. Frederick Burt (1864-1950) wrote that in Mombasa ‘Many of our hearers who have but the slightest veneer of Mohammedanism […] scoff at the Name of Christ […] because they think that they have become followers of Mohammed, a greater than Christ’ (Burt, Mombasa, 7 November 1903, Annual Letter, 1904, p. 79). That thin veneer of knowledge is seen in Edmund Crawford’s (1884-1946) first annual letter:
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[T]hey seemed to know practically nothing about the religion which they professed, though the deep rooted bigotry peculiar to all followers of the false prophet was quite evident. For instance, at one village at which we arrived the leading man of the place, though wearing the Mohammedan dress and able to repeat the Arabic formula used in prayer, was not able to tell us the meaning of the latter or the present whereabouts of Mohammed, though he thought he was living in Mecca! (Crawford, Shimba, 10 December 1903, Annual Letter, 1904, p. 84)
Work amongst the Wanyika (Digo), living to the south of Mombasa, was seen to be under the threat of their becoming Muslims unless the CMS placed teachers there ‘or we shall find increasing numbers becoming Mohammedans. The transition from Heathenism to Mohammedanism is so easy’ (Church Missionary Intelligencer 54 [1903] p. 202). Little seems to have been done, and concern that the Digo would succumb to Islam is expressed in 1912: These tribes have held the power of Islam on the coast at bay for four centuries [...] but I very much doubt whether they will be able to do so for much longer, and if they do not largely accept Christianity they will almost certainly fall a prey to Islam. (CMS Gazette 6 [1912] p. 113)
The same issue of the Gazette reported that, on a visit to the Digo, George Wright (1873-1956) ‘found the people much more receptive and much less Muslim than they had been led to believe’ (CMS Gazette 6 [1912] p. 337). The building of the railway from Mombasa to Uganda made it easier for the CMS to start work up-country. Reports show that they were concerned that Islam would also find an opportunity to expand. Writing from Embu, on the slopes of Mount Kenya, Alice Crawford (1872-1943), wife of Edmund, implored ‘Oh, let us pray that some true ambassadors of the Cross may claim these pagan nations for God before the followers of Islam overflow the country!’ (CMS Gazette 6 (1912) p. 239). Mengo and Uganda (1879-1914) Interest in Frere Town and the work in Mombasa were soon eclipsed after 1875, when the journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), best known for ‘finding’ David Livingstone, reached the court of the Kabaka at Mengo (Kampala) in Buganda, where he found Muslim traders present and interest expressed in Christianity. A report was published in the Daily Telegraph of 15 November 1875 calling for missionaries, because ‘in one year you will have more converts to Christianity than all other missions united can muster’ (Sundkler and Steed, History, pp. 567-8). This resulted
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in a party of eight CMS missionaries setting off to Buganda in 1876, though Charles Wilson (1852-1916) and an engineer Alexander Mackay (1849-90) were the only members of the party to arrive, others being killed or dying on the journey across Tanganyika. In 1879, the CMS established a station near Mengo (Kampala), where Kabaka Mutesa had his court, and began some teaching. With more missionaries arriving, and several parties coming up the Nile, assisted by the Governor-General of Khartoum, Charles Gordon, the Kabaka was concerned as he feared the expansionist tendencies of the Egyptians. There was competition between the CMS and the Catholic White Fathers (Missionaries of Africa), who had arrived a few months after Mackay, as well as with the Muslim faction in the court, the Kabaka Mutesa favouring each party in turn. Mutesa died in 1884 and his son, Mwanga, succeeded. In 1886, a number of the young vigalagala (page boys) who were Christians and Readers (catechists), both Protestant and Catholic, were killed by the Kabaka. The missions were forced to withdraw from 1888 until 1890, when the Muslim ‘party’ were defeated and the Kabaka welcomed the missions back. News from CMS missionaries’ reports were published in British newspapers. In general, up to 1890 there was a three-way struggle for influence between Muslim traders, the CMS and the White Fathers (see Chesworth and Frederiks, ‘White Fathers’, in CMR 19, 395-403). This tended to depend on the whims of the Kabaka as he played each faction against the others, with frequent confrontations in court, in order to gain more goods from them. Reports and letters from Alexander Mackay and Philip O’Flaherty (1836-86), an Anglican priest who had previously worked as a lay missionary in Turkey, include many references to the influence of Islam on the Baganda. In 1885, the CMS published King Mtesa of U-ganda, a collection of extracts from missionaries’ diaries and letters. A report by O’Flaherty illustrates these confrontations: The King [Kabaka] asked me in full court one day what I thought of the Koran and Mohammed. I proved from that book itself that it was a tissue of falsehoods, and the author an impostor, and the religion of Islam a delusion. (O’Flaherty, 27 May 1881, King Mtesa of U-ganda, p. 18)
In 1884, O’Flaherty wrote about his last meeting with Mutesa, when the Kabaka recounted his having won an argument with the Arab mwalima (teacher): Whom do the Arabs say that Jesus, the son of Mary, is? They say that He is the word and spirit of God – Kelemet Ulla ve Rúhu hu. Well I told him thus:
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Argue no more in presence with Philipo. You have no leg to stand upon; for the Word of God must come from God, and be God. […] It is a Spirit of God; and secondly the Spirit of God must be one with God. (O’Flaherty, 10 October 1884, King Mtesa of U-ganda, p. 31)
Following Mackay’s death in 1890, his sister Alexina, Mrs Harrison, wrote his biography, using his letters. These clearly show Mackay’s attitude towards Islam. Mutesa asked the Muslims to read a passage from the Qur’an: [A]bout Solomon sending a letter by an eagle to a distant queen, whom he afterwards vanquished for refusing to pay him tribute. Mtesa asked me what I thought of the story. I replied that it was very nice; but was it true? ‘Oh, Mohammed got it direct from heaven!’ they said. I explained that most of the accounts of ancient Jews given in the Koran were obtained from the Jewish Talmud. (Letter of 11 September 1880 in Harrison, A.M. Mackay, pp. 126-7) Terrific conflict with the Mussulmans again. They blasphemed terribly against the assertion that our Saviour was Divine. [… Mutesa] then spoke about translating, and jested about the absurdity of the Koran being a book for all people, seeing that it could not be translated into Luganda. […] The Superior of the French mission [Siméon Lourdel (1853-90)] was present, but understood very little. The Mussulmans are themselves [not] only illinformed on their own creed, but are correspondingly fanatical. (Letter of 16 September 1880 in Harrison, A.M. Mackay, p. 127)
These debates between CMS missionaries and Muslims were often played out in the court before the Kabaka, who seems not only to have been keen to understand but also to have relished the competition between the faiths. The Church Missionary Intelligencer for February 1889 gives a helpful summary of the history of the mission and of the events during Mwanga’s rule as Kabaka, including the killing of a number of catechists and the expulsion of missionaries (‘Uganda a test of faith’, pp. 65-74). Following the intervention of the British in Buganda, it became a protectorate in 1894. Writing that year, Ernest Millar (1878-1917) reported that a leading Muslim teacher had become a Christian ‘owing to the lives of the Christians whom he knew’ (Millar, Mengo, 12 December 1894, Annual Letter, 1895, p. 236). However, CMS missionaries continued to be wary of the influence of Islam. Hugh Savile (1876-1958) reported in 1905 on Muslim proselytising and encouragements to conversion:
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John Willis (1872-1954) was concerned at the possibilities of Muslim advance from the north and the east. In an article in 1904, ‘Christianity or Mohammedanism in the Uganda Diocese’, he wrote: It was inevitable that with the railway should come in a gush of Swahili. [...] For many years past missionary caravans have passed through these lands on their way to Uganda; yet none has remained behind to tell the story of the Cross. (J.J. Willis, ‘Christianity or Mohammedanism in the Uganda Diocese’, Church Missionary Intelligencer 55 [1904] p. 487)
Then, in 1906, Willis wrote ‘Steadily, year by year, the tide of Mohammedan influence is flowing southwards’ (Church Missionary Intelligencer 57 [1906] p. 83). Albert Cook (1870-1951) reported that Islam was less of a threat. In the Protectorate of Uganda, Mohammedanism is not advancing, but rather retreating [...] since 1897 [Muslims] only exist because tolerated by the British Government which allows to every man full religious liberty. […] The ignorance of Moslem observances is profound. […] Still their very ignorance is a formidable obstacle, behind which bigotry entrenches itself. (Cook, ‘Missionary News’, p. 223)
However, concerns were raised in 1914 when the Government proposed placing the Northern Province of the Uganda Protectorate under the administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, because ‘the Province is already peculiarly open, owing to its geographical position, to Mohammedan influence and this change will inevitably mean an inrush of Moslems’ (CMS Gazette 8 (1914) p. 271). Mpwapwa and Tanganyika (1876-1914) Buganda was far inland on the northern shores of Lake Victoria-Nyanza and the journey there was long and difficult, so the CMS opened a staging post in 1876 at Mpwapwa in central Tanganyika. This became the base for CMS work amongst the Gogo people. Most parties for Buganda travelled by this route, but the party with Bishop James Hannington, the first CMS
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bishop to Uganda, chose to use the northern route through Kenya, and the bishop and most of his party were murdered on the borders of Buganda in 1885. The mission station at Mpwapwa was on the route of Arab traders and the main interaction with Islam during the first ten years was with traders passing through. The CMS missionaries included a doctor, and a number of out-stations were set up. In 1886, Septimus Pruen (1859-1915) and Arthur Wood (1862-1909) arrived to work in the area. In his first annual letter, Wood mentions one of the head-chiefs under the Sultan of Mamboya attends regularly. […] Every week-day morning a service is held for the workmen and mission people. If any Mohammedans are on the station as workmen, they are not compelled to come in, but are given to understand that they will be welcome if they choose to come. (Wood, Mamboya, July 1887, Annual Letter, 1887, p. 11)
Wood reports at greater length on his interactions with Muslims in his next annual letter Through the medical work, I have had several interesting conversations with Mohammedans and others. One day a Hindu [Indian] trader came for medicine, and I had some conversation with him on Mohammedanism. He seemed very ignorant about both the false prophet and the false religion. I asked him if he was keeping up the prayers and observances. He said that since he had left the coast he had not observed any. I then tried to point out to him some of the distinctive truths of Christianity in contrast with Islamism. […] Another young man asked for the story of Jesus in Arabic. I gave him some Arabic tracts of the Universities’ Mission [UMCA]. The next day his companion came up and requested some also. Both said they were very pleased with the contents. (Wood, Mamboya, 12 July 1888, Annual Letter, 1888, p. 17)
In 1888, there was a revolt against the German colonial government, led by Bushiri bin Salim al-Hatthy (c. 1833-89), a slave trader who was trying to protect the slave traders’ interests against German taxation and control (I. Lapidus, A history of Islamic societies, Cambridge, 2002, p. 744; Beidelman, Colonial evangelism, pp. 57-8). The mission station at Mpwapwa was destroyed during the revolt, though the missionaries refused to leave their posts (Stock, History, vol. 3, p. 421). A letter from Pruen’s wife Constance (1858-1915) to her parents, detailing events from 18 October to 16 November around Mpwapwa, was published in the Church Missionary Intelligencer (‘Through German East Africa’, 97-107) together with a subsequent letter written from Zanzibar on 22 November.
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Pruen’s own Annual Letter written in January 1889 refers to ‘a Mohammedan convert who had diligently studied God’s Word’ and accompanied them on their journey to the coast, but left them at Zanzibar, having refused to go to Frere Town. He stated that ‘he was not going to give up “Isa Masiya,” but he could not come with [them]’, evidently having been pressured by his people (Pruen, Mpwapwa, January 1889, Annual Letter, 1889, p. 289). In his The Arab and the African (p. 290), Pruen later refers to him as a ‘secret and unknown believer’. The Pruens returned to Britain in 1889. Pruen wrote The Arab and the African, a popular account of life in East Africa, with descriptions of topography, flora and fauna (pp. 1-61), and the people and their daily lives (pp. 62-141). The book has a chapter on the climate and diseases (pp. 14251) and a description of travelling as a European (pp. 152-207), together with an appendix ‘list of supplies necessary for one person travelling in Central Africa for one year’ (pp. 321-38), chapters on ‘The slave-trade’ (pp. 208-32), and ‘The slave’ (pp. 233-48), which graphically report on the continuing trade on the African littoral and conclude with a copy of the declaration of the prohibition of the slave trade by the sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Ali Bin Said (r. 1890-3), dated 1 August 1890, and a chapter entitled ‘The Arab’ (pp. 249-62) who ‘In the opinion of some, his adherence to Mohammedanism and his brave warlike nature place him on an eminence as high as […] that of a Christian’ (p. 249). This chapter also describes the curious relationship between Arab traders and the missionaries, in that an Arab trader, if he was short of bearers, would leave loads of valuable ivory in the care of a missionary and would accept English cheques from missionaries in exchange for goods (pp. 255-6). The Arab Muslims’ attitude towards conversion to Christianity is also discussed: whilst they ‘fiercely resent one of their number becoming a Christian, they are not on that account hostile to Christians, who have not been Mohammedans; nor do they take much, if any, trouble to convert either Christian or heathen to Mohammedanism’ (pp. 256-7). Whilst not objecting to Christian missionaries speaking about Christianity, they ‘consider any personal questions as to their own individual belief an exhibition of bad manners’ (p. 257). The final chapter of the book, ‘The missionary’ (pp. 263-319), includes a section in which Pruen muses on Islam being more suited to Africans than Christianity, and whether an African Muslim is half way towards Christianity (pp. 290-8). The merits of African Muslims and Christians are examined and Pruen judges that the main difference is between the ‘civilized true Christian’ and the ‘semi-civilized true Mohammedan’ with those who are nominally Christian or Muslim. When comparing the ‘true
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believer’ he finds that the ‘African Christian […] is far above the African Mohammedan in truthfulness, honesty, and love towards his neighbour. […] But [the Christian is] often below the Mohammedan in courtesy, deference to his superiors, and sometimes obedience to his master’ (p. 292), whereas, for nominal Christians all they gain is the rudiments of civilisation, rather than the semi-civilisation that nominal Muslims get from the Arabs (p. 293). The fanaticism of some Muslims is condemned (pp. 2967) and there is an earlier reference to ‘Wahabbees’ as Muslim Puritans (p. 258). The greater straightforwardness of following Muslim regulations is acknowledged in comparison with the difficulties in following Christianity, but at the cost of salvation (pp. 298-9). The problems for a Muslim to become a Christian are discussed: ‘The penalties are so fearful that a Mohammedan, in a Mohammedan country or district, hardly dares to take even the first step of allowing himself to say, even in secret, that Christianity is true’ (p. 300), and the comparison of the two faiths concludes with: Willingly then as we admit the really good and desirable features of Mohammedanism when compared with heathenism, naturally as we might at first imagine that with its purer creed and nobler life it might be a handmaid to Christianity, we yet cannot shut our eyes to the fact that practically it is not so, and that the persecuting tenets inseparably bound up with the system of Mohammedanism far more than neutralize any assistance which it might otherwise lend to the cause of Christianity. (p. 301)
Following the suppression of the Bushiri revolt, the mission stations were rebuilt and their work expanded. In 1908, with the building of the Central Line railway from Dar es Salaam to Tabora, and branches to Mwanza and Kigoma on lakes Victoria-Nyanza and Tanganyika, CMS missionaries began to raise concerns about the spread of Islam. John Briggs (1867-1944), then based at Mvumi, writing in 1908, warned in the CMS Gazette that: Coast influence is coming in like a flood. With a railway almost at our doors these people will not remain the simple folk they are for very long. [...] Unless we raise a strong barrier against Mohammedanism, many will become nominal followers of the False Prophet – believing they know not what; but becoming all the more bigoted for that very reason. (CMS Gazette 2 [1908] p. 112)
The annual letter from Elizabeth Forsyth (1874-1955), based at Mvumi, reports on the effects of the advance of the railway:
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CMS policy regarding Islam and Muslims in Africa All along the line, from the coast to the interior, as far as it has reached, are little Moslem mosques, quite insignificant little huts, but still sufficient for the scattering broadcast of the seeds of false doctrine which we know are being sent forth from each one. Which is to be triumphant in Ugogo? – the Cross or the Crescent? (Forsyth, Mvumi, 28 November 1910, Annual Letter, 1911, p. 197)
Elizabeth Forsythe’s question ‘Which is to be triumphant in Ugogo? – the Cross or the Crescent?’, was subsequently quoted in the CMS Gazette (5 [1911] p. 81), the CMS Annual Report for 1910 (p. 57) and the Moslem World (1 [1911] p. 223). In a report in the CMS Gazette in 1913, William Peel (1854-1916), bishop of Mombasa (r. 1899-1919), reports an experience when visiting a remote area and finding that Islam was already present: The chief and his people are urging us to give them [Christian] teachers. […] We were startled to see a small building in [the chief’s] enclosure used as a mosque, and to discover some Mohammedans living with the chief, and an educated Mohammedan residing near who enjoys the title mwalemu (teacher). We were disconcerted when the chief told us he was a Mohammedan and that a number of his people were such also. [On questioning the chief, they were] relieved to learn that the being ‘Mohammedans’ had not gone deeper than the initiatory rite. A soldier from the fort, Kilimatindi, about three days’ and a half march from here came years ago and admitted many as Mohammedans. […] So here we are today, saving the man and his people from Islam, which they do not want, but were inclined to receive it as so much better than what they had, in the sad absence of Christian teachers and lack of Christian teaching. (CMS Gazette 7 [1913] p. 368)
Many of the askaris (soldiers) based at the German fort at Kilimatinde were Muslims and it appears to have become a centre for the spread of Islam in the wider district, as is suggested in a 1914 article, ‘German East Africa, where Islam is aggressive’, in the CMS Gazette, which reports that missionaries were finding that Islam was strongly established to the west, and that the CMS was ‘only just in time to stem the wave of Islam from inundating Ugogo’ (CMS Gazette 8 [1914] p. 208). The same article quotes John Briggs: ‘The very customs which the heathen hang on to so tenaciously, for example polygamy and circumcision, are more than sanctioned by that creed’ (p. 208). Briggs then relates a discussion with a chief who had chosen to become a Muslim:
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because he thought it preferable to remaining a heathen […]. He said he would consider the question of becoming a Christian, but that he feared it would not be nearly so easy a religion as Islam, there being, he found, much more to renounce. (p. 208)
Isa or Yesu? One of the areas that the CMS was very concerned with was the preparation of translations of the Bible in the languages of the groups with whom they were working. One question was how to translate the name ‘Jesus Christ’ into Swahili; should it follow the Arabic form, ʿĪsā al-Masīḥ (Isa Masiya, in Swahili), the title that Muslims in East Africa were familiar with? Or should it be based on the Greek, Yesu Kristo? The various mission agencies and publishers had different views, with the UMCA favouring Isa Masiya and the CMS favouring Yesu Kristo. This led in 1894 to the SPCK refusing to publish a Swahili hymn book prepared by W.E. Taylor because he used ‘Jesu’ (CMS Precis Book G3 A5 P4:1892-1895: 23.10.1894: item 196). The issue remained unresolved, partly because of the inability of missionaries from the CMS and the UMCA to agree to discuss revisions of Bible translations. Their failure to come to an agreement on a common translation of the name in Swahili led, in 1906, to a meeting organised at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, between the CMS and the UMCA, together with the SPCK and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), who were both publishing Bibles in Swahili. Frederick Baylis of the CMS then wrote to Bishops Peel and Tucker setting out the position (1901-1906 CMS Letter-book [outgoing] 10 January-26 October 1906 XCMS/B/OMS/A5/G3 L 9). The discussion seems to have taken into account the Muslim usage of Isa Masiya, as well as the use in other Bantu languages of Yesu Kristo. The Greek transliteration was adopted and Yesu Kristo became the accepted translation (Chesworth, Mixed messages, pp. 76-9). Significance The attitudes towards Islam and Muslims shown by CMS missionaries in East Africa during this period reveal a certain amount of knowledge about Islam but with many preconceptions. When considering the published material, it is necessary to bear in mind the reasons that editorial decisions were made as it is apparent that
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the published reports were edited in order to promote the work of the mission, and ‘difficult’ views and opinions were often struck out with a blue pencil. It is also apparent from the language and attitudes shown that the original authors and editors never considered that the descendants of Africans and Arabs written about would ever be in a position to read and observe what was said. Emma Wild-Wood’s ‘Interpretations’ (2021) addresses these issues further. Krapf’s and Rebmann’s engagement with Islam and Muslims primarily concerned the desire to counteract their influence among the groups with whom they were working, whilst maintaining good relations with the Muslim authorities in Mombasa and Zanzibar. The quoted extracts reveal the influence of Islam on non-Muslim Africans and the idea that, as Muḥammad was the Prophet for the Swahili (coastal peoples), so Christ was the prophet for the Christians. When the CMS reached Buganda and faced competition for influence with Muslims and the Catholic White Fathers, the attitudes apparent were in many ways those prevalent in British society at the time, showing some knowledge of Islam, the Qur’an and Muḥammad, whilst regarding Islam as a false religion and Muḥammad as an impostor. Only a few CMS missionaries in East Africa had knowledge of Islam. Following W.E. Taylor’s move to Egypt in 1902, no one took over his work. In the 1930s, some of Taylor’s polemical material was used in open-air rallies in Nairobi by Alfred Pittway (G3 AL, 1935-1950, 1935, p. 3). It was only with independence in the early 1960s that the training of priests in CMS dioceses regularly included the study of Islam in the curriculum, with some going on to further studies of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at the Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, and elsewhere. The fears raised by CMS missionaries that Islam might triumph, typified by Elizabeth Forsyth’s question ‘Which is to be triumphant in Ugogo? – the Cross or the Crescent’, were only partially realised as both Islam and Christianity spread in East Africa following the First World War. In both Kenya and Uganda, the percentage of Muslims is still relatively small, with only Tanzania having a population that was more than 30% Muslim (H. Kettani, The world Muslim population, Singapore, 2020, gives the figures for Muslims in Kenya as 11.2%, for Tanzania as 31.8% and for Uganda as 13.8%, pp. 313, 326, 352; the percentage of Christians in the World Christian database, Hamilton MA, 2020, is given as 81.0% for Kenya, 55.3% for Tanzania, and 84.4% for Uganda). Competition between Islam and Christianity, together with encouragements to conversion, have become more apparent in their attempts ‘to win Africa’ (Chesworth, ‘Challenges’,
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pp. 124-7). It is also acknowledged that the steps needed for an African to become a Muslim were easier than to become a Christian, with a greater possibility of ‘accommodation’ and ‘adaptation’ (S. Kaplan, ‘The Africanization of missionary Christianity. History and typology’, Journal of Religion in Africa 16 [1986] 166-86). Publications Archives, Birmingham, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library Special Collections – Church Missionary Society CMS/CA5/O16/164 1843/44 (Krapf’s log of his journey from Aden to Mombasa, December 1843 and January 1844) G3 A5 P4 CMS Precis Book: 1892-1895: 23.10.1894: item 196 (report on the refusal by SPCK to print the Swahili hymn book, October 1894) XCMS/B/OMS/A5/G3 L 9 – CMS Letter-book (outgoing) 10 January – 26 October 1906 CMS Register of missionaries and native clergy 1804-1904, London, 1905, printed for private circulation Extracts from the annual letters of the missionaries for the years 1880-1910 Letters from the front-line 1911-14 Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East 1844-1914 Church Missionary Intelligencer 1873-1906 CMS Gazette 1907-14 J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa; together with journeys to Jagga, Usambara, Ukambani, Shoa, Abessinia, and Khartum, and a coasting voyage from Mombaz to Cape Delgado, London, 1860, repr. 1865, 1867, New York, 1968; 007695714 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J.L. Krapf, Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, Boston MA, 1860 (same text as London edition, but different pagination); 002241025 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) CMS, King Mtesa of U-ganda. Extracts from letters and journals […] 1877-1884, London, 1885 C. Pruen, ‘Through German East Africa’, Church Missionary Intelligencer (1889) 97-107
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A.M. Harrison, A.M. Mackay. Pioneer missionary of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, London, 1890, repr. 1892, 1970 A.M. Harrison, A.M. Mackay. Pioneer missionary of the Church Missionary Society in Uganda, New York, 1890; 100480232 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) S.T. Pruen, The Arab and the African. Experiences in Eastern Equatorial Africa during a residence of three years, London, 1891, repr. 1986, 2011; gt33yeaj (digitised version available through Wellcome Collection) W.E. Taylor, Raha isiyo karaha, Mombasa, 1893 J. Murray Mitchell, Shuhuda za dini ya kimasihia Pamoja na kupeleza kidogo dini ya Isilamu (‘Evidences of the Christian religion, together with a short examination of Muhammadanism’), London, 1905 W.E. Taylor (trans.), Unabii, Cairo, 1911 Anon., Habari ya Waarabu na Islamu (Notes on Arabs and Islam), London, 1912 A. Cook, ‘Missionary News’, The Moslem World 3 (1913) 219-23 Studies J.A. Chesworth, Mixed messages. Using the Bible and Qurʾān in Swahili tracts, Leiden, 2022 E. Wild-Wood, ‘The interpretations, problems and possibilities of missionary sources in the history of Christianity in Africa’, in M. Frederiks and D. Nagya (eds), World Christianity. Methodological considerations, Leiden, 2021, 92-112 F. Becker, ‘Islam and imperialism in East Africa’, in D. Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European empires, Oxford, 2014, 112-29 E.R. Sanders, ‘Close encounters of the Muslim kind. The CMS and Islam on the east African coast, 1874-1911’, Transformation 27 (2010) 248–60 J. Chesworth, ‘Kadhi’s courts in Kenya. Reactions and responses’, in A. Tayob and J. Wandera (eds), Constitutional review in Kenya and kadhis courts, Cape Town, 2011, 3-17 J. Chesworth, ‘Challenges to the next Christendom. Islam in Africa’, in F. Wijsen and R. Schreiter (eds), Global Christianity. Contested claims, Amsterdam, 2007, 117-32 R. Loimeier and R. Seesemann (eds), The global worlds of the Swahili. Interfaces of Islam, identity and space in 19th and 20th-century East Africa, Berlin, 2006 P.J.L. Frankl, art. ‘Taylor, William Ernest (1856-1927)’, in ODNB L.E.Y. Mbogoni, The cross versus the crescent. Religion and politics in Tanzania from the 1880s to the 1990s, Dar es Salaam, 2005
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D. Robinson, Muslim societies in African history, Cambridge, 2004 B. Sundkler and C. Steed, A history of the Church in Africa, Cambridge, 2000 V. Pawliková-Vilhanová, ‘Crescent or cross? Islam and Christian missions in nineteenth-century East and Central Africa’, in U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt in Afrika, Stuttgart, 2000, 79-95 A. Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450-1950, Oxford, 1996 Provincial Unit of Research, Rabai to Mumias. A short history of the Church of the Province of Kenya 1844-1994, Nairobi, 1994 R.L. Pouwels, Horn and crescent. Cultural change and traditional Islam on the east African coast 800-1900, Cambridge, 1987 T.O. Beidelman, Colonial evangelism, Bloomington IN, 1982 R.W. Strayer, The making of mission communities in East Africa, London, 1978 W.B. Anderson, The Church in East Africa 1840-1974, Dodoma, 1977 D.J. Holway, ‘C.M.S. contact with Islam in East Africa before 1914’, Journal of Religion in Africa 4 (1972) 200-12 S. von Sicard, The Lutheran Church on the coast of Tanzania, 1887-1914, Uppsala, 1970 R. Oliver, The missionary factor in East Africa, London, 1952 Stock, History John Chesworth
The Holy Ghost Fathers The Congregation of the Holy Ghost, commonly known as the Spiritans, have a complex twofold origin. This is reflected in their somewhat ungainly formal Latin name since the middle of the 19th century, Congregatio Sancti Spiritus sub tutela Immaculati Cordis Beatissimae Virginis Mariae (Congregation of the Holy Spirit under the Protection of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary). Following the initials in their Latin name, members affix CSSp to their names to identify their belonging to the Congregation of the Holy Ghost. The first part of the extended formal name, by which they are best known, goes back to the initial origins in the early 18th century, and to a short-lived and pious mission-minded priest from Brittany, Claude Poullart des Places (1679-1709). Poullart founded a group in Paris consisting of fellow seminarians and priests who would serve the poor. His seminary was called Holy Spirit (or Ghost) Seminary and, after his death, it struggled for legal recognition in France and faced challenges from Jansenism. Eventually, however, it became a site well-known for the formation of diocesan clergy, who served both in France and in the growing French colonial empire. The second part of the title, referring to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, derives from an originally unrelated second founding of sorts in the 19th century. By that time, the Holy Ghost missionaries, diminished by the French Revolution and its aftermath, were few and disorganised, though they served in many places, including overseas. A new start would come when an Alsatian convert from Judaism who eventually became a priest, Jacob (Francis) Libermann (1802-52), helped by two seminarians, founded the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which was organised to evangelise slaves and former slaves from the French colonies. With the support and encouragement of the Vatican, Libermann’s more dynamic body eventually assumed control over the Holy Ghost missionaries through a merger in 1848. This led to today’s Congregation, which is formally registered as a Catholic religious congregation in the Catholic Church, unlike the earlier Holy Spirit priests, who had attended or were affiliated to the seminary of that name, generating a certain shared identity but no formal status. Their Latin title therefore
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reflects both the original Poullart-linked Holy Spirit reference and the Libermann-linked Immaculate Heart of Mary reference. Prior to the merger with Libermann’s body in 1848, the early Spiritans had little contact with Muslims, their work outside France being mostly in the Americas and East Asia, where Islam was rare. In Africa and adjacent islands, there were Holy Spirit priests in Réunion, an island off the coast of East Africa, and in Madagascar, both places where there were very few Muslims. One small mission in Senegal, under the direction of graduates of the Holy Spirit Seminary since 1779, mainly focused its energies on the French settlers and their mixed-race offspring, especially in the town of Saint-Louis and Gorée Island, with little engagement with the predominantly Muslim local population. Holy Ghost missionaries there sought to expand their work in the 1820s and, with the help of Sister Anne-Marie Javouhey (1779-1851), founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny and a renowned missionary, the work in Senegal began to expand in the 1830s with several Africans brought to France to the Holy Spirit Seminary in 1839. In 1842, when the Vicariate of the Two Guineas and Sierra Leone – comprising much of the coast of West Africa – was entrusted to the American Edward Barron, the new Vicar Apostolic sent for Libermann’s priests and brothers of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Koren, Spiritans, pp. 76-83).
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary
The centralised archives of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost are located in Chevilly-Larue, outside Paris. They also have archival holdings in other places including at their Rome generalate, at an older residence and former congregational headquarters on Rue Lhomond in Paris (which also houses archival photographs), and at various other places around the world. Of special note are the resources available through Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Besides holding some early primary sources, Duquesne University also houses the Center for Spiritan Studies (https:// www.duq.edu/about/centers-and-institutes/spiritan-studies), which both maintains some original documents and also offers electronic access to many important historical documents on Spiritan history. The most important near-primary historical source available on relations with Islam in Africa is the Bulletin Général, an internally circulating chronicle of Spiritan news from around the world, published from
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1874 to 1975 and now available electronically. The Bulletin collected and edited reports from Spiritan missions. Also through the Center for Spiritan Studies, one can access other historical documentation on the founders of the Spiritans, as well as a great deal of secondary literature in English and French. The main archives in Chevilly-Larue, as well as the archival collections at the generalate in Rome and at Duquesne, are well-maintained and quite accessible to researchers. In the early 2000s, the long-time numbering system operative at the main archives was overhauled, so there are an older series of numbers and a new series. This can be confusing, though the archives do provide a correspondence to link the older and newer systems of identification. (The references below are to the older system, with the notation CSSp followed by the box number, and then details about the document in question.) A description of the archives and their history can be found in G. Vieira, ‘Les archives générales de la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit. Présentation historique et contenu’, Histoire et Missions Chretiénnes 3 (2007) 147-61. Secondary G. Vieira, ‘300 ans d’histoire spiritaine au service de la mission (1703-2003)’, Mémoire Spiritaine 16 (2002) 6-41 H. Koren, Essays on Spiritan charisma and on Spiritan history, Bethel Park PA, 1990 H. Koren, To the ends of the earth. A general history of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, Pittsburgh PA, 1983 H. Koren, Les Spiritains. Trois siècles d’histoire religieuse et missionnaire, Paris, 1982 H. Koren, The Spiritans. A history of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, New York 1958
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The Holy Ghost Fathers and Christian-Muslim relations in Africa Description Starting with Libermann’s direction after 1848, the focus of the newly merged and revivified congregation grew in Africa. This brought many Spiritan missionaries into contact with Muslim populations, especially in West and later East Africa. Spiritan depictions of Islam thus begin to appear. For example, Father Stanislas Arragon, who served in Senegal between 1845 and 1855, reported to Libermann that local Muslim leaders
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cordially welcomed the Spiritan missionaries, stating that both Christians and Muslims served the one God. A Muslim Wolof chief shared with Arragon that, in his opinion, there were only minor differences between Christianity and Islam, while a marabout told Arragon that ‘the ministers of the gospel would go to heaven just like those of Islam. Muslims in the country were of the opinion that Christianity was a good religion, though this did not prevent them from considering their own to be excellent’ (Essertel, ‘Pédagogie de l’évangélisation’, p. 25). Libermann encouraged his Spiritan missionaries to reciprocate this courtesy. When Arragon, a man of quick temperament, expressed his intention to engage Muslims in a public debate, Libermann cautioned him to opt for a less polemical approach: ‘Be prudent in your interactions with Muslims and don’t say anything negative about Muḥammad. Don’t act too abruptly; you could ruin everything. Rather follow what you have been doing so far, that is, gaining their confidence’, and Libermann advised against polemical interactions because ‘a dispute does not convert anyone, but rather hardens the heart’ (Essertel, ‘Pédagogie de l’évangélisation’, p. 25). Libermann himself, in 1848, wrote courteously to a local ruler in Dakar with regard to his missionaries’ presence (Botzung, ‘Spiritan interreligious dialogue’, p. 95). Others, such as Benoît Truffet, who briefly served as vicar apostolic of the Two Guineas in 1847, and the Spiritan Superior General, Alexandre Le Roy, also advocated a non-confrontational approach to Islam. Le Roy, who served as general superior between 1896 and 1926, stressed that Spiritans encountering pious and educated Muslims should underscore the commonalities between Christianity and Islam, such as ‘the one God, Lord of all, the rewarder of good and avenger of evil, eternal life, prayer, fasting, the merits of charity, sin, and repentance’. He advised them to avoid controversial topics such as the Trinity, the means of redemption and the use of images in worship (Essertel, ‘Pédagogie de l’évangélisation’, p. 26). This irenic approach notwithstanding, Spiritans in West Africa certainly aspired to Muslim conversions to Christianity. By the mid-19th century, however, the hope that this mission would succeed began to wane. While Bishop Truffet in the 1840s still maintained that West Africa was only superficially Islamised and thus that Muslim conversion would be ‘no problem’, later Spiritan missionaries were far less optimistic. Attempts to evangelise Muslim children via Catholic schools proved unsuccessful and were met with fierce resistance by Muslim elders; by the early 20th century, these conversion endeavours had ceased. Towards the end of the
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19th century, the majority of Spiritans working in the Senegambia no longer believed that Muslims would convert to Christianity and had begun to direct their energy towards the evangelisation of non-Muslims, a strategy recommended by Hillaire Dréano as early as 1853 and endorsed by men such as François-Xavier Riehl and François Alphonse Kunemann, who both served as vicars apostolic of Senegambia in the late 19th century. While there were occasional voices advocating and anticipating Muslim conversion in the late 19th century, they were few and far between. When in 1899 Joachim-Pierre Buléon had his episcopal shield depict a cross above a crescent to signify the envisaged triumph of Christianity over Islam, the Spiritans working in the Gambia commented, ‘May God help him realise it’, and continued with their work among the non-Muslim Jola and Serer (Frederiks, We have toiled all night, p. 232). Despite this history of contact, Spiritan descriptions of Muslims and Islamic beliefs and practices in West Africa remained sparse. There were comments on Islamic political control, and at times close descriptions of Muslim political rulers upon whom the Spiritan presence depended in places like Senegal, but little attention was given to Muslims themselves and their behaviour. In East Africa, the pattern was similar. Replicating his confreres’ pattern in Senegal, the first Spiritan superior in Zanzibar, Antoine Horner, initially described the sultan of Zanzibar respectfully, praising the freedom of religion he allowed and the order he maintained. Horner and his colleagues, like earlier Spiritans in Senegal, worked to maintain cordial relations with these Islamic authorities who allowed them to have their missions in the first place. This could generate positive descriptions of Muslim officials. In 2010, for example, Bishop Augustine Shao CSSp reflected on the longstanding Spiritan interactions with Muslims in Africa, noting the respect with which the Spiritans treated the sultan of Zanzibar from their arrival in 1863, so much so that one holder of the position, Barghash, visited the headquarters of the Congregation in Paris as part of a European tour in 1885 (Shao, ‘Spiritans and interreligious dialogue’, pp. 47-9). In one 1868 report to Propaganda Fide, Horner also described variations of Islam among Zanzibar’s diverse inhabitants. He discerned that some were linked to Oman, where the sultanate itself had its origins, while others came from India or derived from local African forms of Islam (CSSp, 195ii, Horner to Barnabo, 1 January 1868). Yet, like many other missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, he and his colleagues saw no hope for conversion among them, and descriptions remained superficial. Substantive descriptions of the cultural and religious features of East Africans in Spiritan
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writings up to the late 20th century focused mostly on so-called African or ‘African traditional’ religion(s) instead of Islam. An historical retrieval of Spiritan approaches to Muslims in Africa has been undertaken by Spiritan theologian Elochukwu Uzukwu, who sees the longstanding Spiritan evangelical witness as laying the basis for fruitful interreligious dialogue well before such a missionary stance embracing dialogue was self-consciously pursued. He highlights the compassion of Libermann’s first missionary, Jacques Laval, who toiled in Mauritius in the mid-19th century, focusing on advancing the well-being of the poorest, many of whom were Muslims. In East Africa, Uzukwu notes, though Spiritans had little engagement with Muslims until after Vatican II, scholarly work into the KiSwahili language by Charles Sacleux CSSp showed respect for Islam and the Arabic language. Earlier, in the 1840s in Senegal, the Spiritan Bishop Benoît Truffet befriended local Muslim leaders and refused to support French efforts to establish colonial overrule. When two Spiritan missionaries were kidnapped by a local Muslim ruler, the bishop refused to countenance French naval efforts to free them, earning the respect of Muslims who effected their release peacefully. Uzukwu raises the possibility that the present-day warm relationship between Muslims and Christians in the Gambia, a country where the two faiths coexist amicably, might be one consequence of that early gentle missionary presence (Uzukwu, ‘Spiritan congregation’s mission’, pp. 176-91). Interestingly, Truffet’s actions might even have changed Libermann’s approach to Muslims, for in an 1848 letter the second founder of the Spiritans wrote to one Senegalese ruler acknowledging his people’s love of God, which they shared with Christians (Derenthal, ‘You are not Christians’, p. 56). Over time, as Islam was blamed for anti-colonial resistance to European overrule, Spiritan depictions of Islam grew more negative. Though Raoul de Courmont CSSp, first bishop in East Africa, initially at least partially blamed European cruelty and dishonesty for African agitation, by the late 1880s, Spiritans in East Africa mostly saw Islam as an enemy of civilisation in the region and their missionary strategy never foresaw many possible conversions among Muslims. One Spiritan, when asked in 1889 by a Protestant missionary about their reluctance to engage Islam in coastal East Africa, allegedly said, ‘Oh, our mission is not for them at all’ (Harrison, A.M. Mackay, p. 428). When they evangelised in the interior, the Spiritans sought groups that had not been ‘corrupted’ by Islamic influence. By 1896, in a report to Propaganda Fide on slavery in eastern Africa, Courmont stated clearly, ‘Islam is the enemy’ (CSSp, p. 195iii, Courmont to Ledochowski, February 1896).
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The major histories of the Congregation, such as the works of Henry Koren, make little mention of Islam and give few references to Spiritan work with Muslims. Historical writings about Spiritan work in the Congo, Nigeria and Guinea-Conakry (formerly French Guinea), as well as eastern Africa, also discuss Islam very little. The recent attention to Islam by Spiritans reflects post-Vatican II Catholic openness to non-Christian religions and also responds to internal Spiritan dynamics. A significant turning point came with a renewed Spiritan missionary call embodied in a document entitled ‘Spiritan Rule of Life’ adopted at their 1987 General Chapter. Among other things, this new document enshrined interreligious dialogue as a central plank of their work, which was reaffirmed at their 2012 General Chapter held at Bagamoyo, Tanzania. Spiritan writings from before the 20th century, at least those known to scholars, offer little systematic reflection on Islam, and few details about relations with Muslims or descriptions of Muslim beliefs and practices. There were often moments of courteous interaction with Muslim authorities in both East and West Africa, yet in general the Spiritans echoed negative assessments of Muslims typical of 19th-century Europeans. In West Africa, initial optimism about the possibility of converting Muslims to Catholic Christianity evaporated, leading to other strategies such as evangelising children through Christian education and a focus of missionary efforts on non-Muslims. In East Africa, the later 19th century in particular saw Muslims as implicated in the slave trade and as resisting efforts at civilising allegedly sought by Europeans. There and elsewhere, Spiritan missionaries considered the conversion of non-Muslims to Christianity as the most effective way to impede the spread of Islam. Significance Unlike other Catholic missionary bodies such as the Missionaries of Africa (MAfr, often known as the White Fathers) and the Comboni Fathers (earlier the Verona Fathers), the Spiritans do not have a rich history of missionary or intellectual engagement with Islam, in Africa or elsewhere. On the contrary, prior to Vatican II Spiritan depictions of Islam were typically negative, following tropes familiar in other European portrayals (Botzung, ‘Spiritan interreligious dialogue’, pp. 95-7), with little interest in understanding Islam in any substantive way. In recent times, a number of Spiritans and their lay associates who are engaged in missionary work with and among Muslims in Africa have offered personal reflections on their experiences. Examples include reflections about the Spiritan mission among Muslims in Zanzibar (Shao,
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‘Spiritans and inter-religious dialogue’; Shao, ‘Interreligious dialogue’), Algeria (Gonnet, ‘Reflections’), Kenya (Beusmans, ‘Mission as dialogue’; Githui, ‘Role of interfaith dialogue’), Central African Republic (Derenthal, ‘Comment les religions’), Cameroon (Ayanz, ‘Un survol historique’), Nigeria (Isah, ‘Spiritans engaged’), Mauritania (Mbabe, ‘Dialogue interreligieux’), and Maurice (Tambyapin, ‘Le dialogue interreligieux’). Some of these mostly pastoral reflections also include focused historical reflection on long overlooked archival records that capture early Spiritan writings in which interactions with Muslims in West and later East Africa are described, including the episodes and impressions noted above. Such studies discern and highlight instincts and attitudes that, though they are quite rare amidst a much more common discourse of disdain and condemnation, nonetheless suggest habits better disposed to a missionary attitude shaped by hopes for fruitful interreligious dialogue between Christians and others, including Muslims. This historical work supports the ideals by which Spiritans seek to guide their missionary engagement in the present, especially with regard to interreligious dialogue, and that interest shapes the historical work. These moments of more amicable interaction with Muslims, and positive depictions of them, are rare within the larger archival record, to be sure, which is dominated by denigrations of Islam in Spiritan discourse until the later 20th century. Yet one can only wonder what further archival research into the vast records of Spiritan missionary activity in Africa might discover. Publications See details of archival collections for the Holy Ghost Fathers in Primary Sources above. Archives Chevilly-Larue, Congregation of the Holy Ghost – CSSp 195ii (Horner to Barnabo, 1 January 1868) Archives Chevilly-Larue, Congregation of the Holy Ghost – CSSp 195iii (Courmont to Ledochowski, February 1896) Studies M. Beusmans, ‘Mission as a dialogue between communities and religions. Experiences in Mombasa and Netherlands’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 16-25 W. Headley, ‘Interreligious dialogue as a peacebuilding tool in conflict situations’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 26-41 M. Botzung, ‘L’engagement spiritain dans le dialogue interreligieux. Un regard sur le chemin parcouru’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 48-56
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O. Derenthal, ‘Comment les religions sont instrumentalisées pour des buts militaro-politiques en RCA’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 70-5 P.N. Githui, ‘The role of interfaith dialogue in conflict management’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 64-9 J. Ayanz Otano, ‘Un survol historique à rebours des courants islamiques présents au Cameroun’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 76-89 K. Isah, ‘Spiritans engaged in interreligious dialogue. Nigeria North West Province missions’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 90-7 P. Mbabe, ‘Dialogue interreligieux en Mauritanie’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 106-9 M. Tambyapin, ‘Le dialogue interreligieux à Maurice’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 110-14 A. Saniko, ‘Dialogue interreligieux au Molenbeek-Centre, Bruxelles’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 125-30 Spiritan Ministry of Interreligious Dialogue, ‘Spiritan forum on interreligious dialogue, Zanzibar, 3-9 December 2018’, Spiritan Horizons 15 (2020) 142-53 M. Botzung, ‘Spiritan interreligious dialogue. The journey so far’, Spiritan Horizons 14 (2019) 95-105 E. Foster, African Catholic. Decolonization and the transformation of the Church, Cambridge MA, 2019 Y. Essertel, ‘La pédagogie de l’évangélisation des noirs d’Afrique selon la Congrégation du Saint-Esprit de 1841 à 1930. Une démarche anthropologique’, Social Sciences and Missions 29 (2016) 1–36 O. Derenthal, ‘“You are not Christians, but I also know that…(you) know God”. Interreligious dialogue – a Spiritan vocation’, Spiritan Horizons 10 (2015) 52-63 E. Foster, Faith in empire. Religion, politics and colonial rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940, Stanford CA R. Gonnet, ‘Reflections on my experience of interreligious dialogue in Algeria’, Spiritan Horizons 8 (2013) 123-6 E. Uzukwu, ‘The Spiritan Congregation’s mission to Africa. Clues to an appropriate relationship of Christians with Muslims’, in M. Iwuchukwu and B. Stiltner (eds), Can Muslims and Christians resolve their religious and social conflicts? Cases from Africa and the United States, Lewiston ME, 2013, 173-96 A. Shao, ‘Spiritans and inter-religious dialogue with particular emphasis on Spiritans and Islam’, Spiritan Horizons 5 (2010) 45-57 J.R. de Benoist, Histoire de l’église catholique au Sénégal. Du milieu du XVe siècle à l’aube du troisième millénaire, Paris, 2008
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P. Kollman, The evangelization of slaves and Catholic origins in eastern Africa, Maryknoll NY, 2005 G. Diouf, ‘Enseignement catholique et diversité culturelle. Etude sur l’ouverture de l’enseignement catholique aux musulmans dans l’école française et dans l’école sénégalaise’, Lyon, 2004 (MA diss. Université de Lyon II) M. Frederiks, We have toiled all night. Christianity in the Gambia, 14562000, Zoetermeer, 2003 R. Ellison, Spiritans and Islam, Rome, 2002 L. Njoroge, A century of Catholic endeavour. Holy Ghost and Consolata missions in Kenya, Nairobi, 1999 G. Vieira, Sous le signe du laïcat. Documents pour l’histoire de l’église catholique en Guinée, Dakar, 1992 P. Coulon and P. Brasseur, Libermann, 1802-1852. Une pensée et une mystique missionaire, Paris, 1988 J.R. de Benoist, Eglise et pouvoir colonial au Soudan français. Administrateurs et missionnaires dans la boucle du Niger (1885-1945), Paris, 1987 P. Brasseur, ‘Les religions traditionnelles et l’islam vus par les premiers Français de la Côte d’Afrique, 1815-1880’, in G. Duboscq et al. (eds), Les réveils missionnaires en France du moyen-âge à nos jours (XIIeXXe siècle), Paris, 1984, 353-62 J. Delcourt, Histoire religieuse de Sénégal, Dakar, 1976 P. Brasseur, ‘Missions catholiques et administration français sur la côte d’Afrique de 1815 à 1870’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outremer 228 (1975) 415-46 A. Mackay Harrison, A.M. MacKay. Pioneer missionary of the Church Missionary Society to Uganda, London, 1890 Paul Kollman
Universities’ Mission to Central Africa Like many missionary organisations, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) was founded in response to David Livingstone’s challenge issued during his lectures in Cambridge and Oxford in 1857. The UMCA mission was born out of the Anglo-Catholic tradition, which advocated episcopal autonomy, meaning that UMCA missionaries answered to their local bishop, rather than to the committee at home in Britain. In 1858, the Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central Africa was formed, Dublin and Durham were added in 1860, and the mission then became the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in 1865. Prior to the UMCA’s formal establishment in 1865, the first bishop of the UMCA, Charles Mackenzie (1825-62), was consecrated in 1860 and the following year travelled up the Zambezi and Shire rivers. Mackenzie died soon after in 1862 and was succeeded by William Tozer (1829-99). With disease rife and work painfully slow in Lake Nyasa, Bishop Tozer decided to steer the Mission back towards Zanzibar, which became the UMCA base and continuing stronghold from 1864. The UMCA returned to Lake Nyasa later in 1884, but first settled in stations in what is today mainland Tanzania during the late 1870s and early 1880s. In 1910, the Mission spread to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). During the First World War, many UMCA missionaries returned to England, but some stayed and assisted with the war effort on the British side. Frank Weston (1871-1924), who was UMCA bishop at the time, even helped the British recruit porters to serve with the armed forces against the Germans (‘The Lord Bishop’s Zanzibar Carrier-Corps’ [Transcript, 1917], A1 [21/22]). Before the First World War and the spread of Islam into the hinterland, UMCA activities directed towards Islam were limited mostly to coastal areas, especially the island of Zanzibar. These activities frequently dealt with the way in which slavery and the legacy of slavery shaped relations between Christians (who were at this early stage often ex-slaves) and Muslims. Being based on Zanzibar, the Mission had daily interaction with Muslims, including the ruling elite, who were Ibāḍī, as well as Arab and African Muslims, who were mainly Sunnī, following the Shāfiʿī school of law. The UMCA was involved in the suppression of the slave trade, establishing a village for freed slaves at Mbweni on Zanzibar (AndersonMorshead, History, p. 104). An indication of the success of this work and relations with the ruling family is the building of Christ Church, the UMCA
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Illustration 12. UMCA postcard showing Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar
cathedral, on the site of the old slave market, with the altar placed where the ‘whipping post’ had been. It was begun in 1873. In 1879, permission was given to add a spire, as long as its height did not exceed that of the Bayt al Ajab (‘House of Wonders’), the sultan’s palace, and the sultan donated a clock so that all could know the time (Anderson-Morshead, History, pp. 90-5). The clock understandably followed ‘eastern time’. The UMCA continued working in East and Central Africa until 1965, when it joined with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), which had been founded in 1701, becoming the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG), now United Society Partners in the Gospel. Records and copies of books and magazines published by the UMCA are held as part of the USPG archives at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary E. Steere, Some account of the town of Zanzibar, London, 1869 E. Steere, Central African Mission, its present state and prospects, London, 1873 H. Rowley, Twenty years in Central Africa. Being the story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, from its commencement under Bishop Mackenzie to the present time, London, 1881
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A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1859-1898, London, 19023 G. Dale, ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’, Central Africa (May 1905) 113-18 A.G. Blood, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol 2. 1907-1932, London, 1957 Secondary J.A. Chesworth, Mixed messages. Using the Bible and Qurʾān in Swahili tracts, Leiden, 2022 J. Chesworth, ‘Anglicans and Islam in East Africa. The Diocese of Zanzibar and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (1923-63)’, ICMR 25 (2014) 231-43 A.G. Bremner, ‘The architecture of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. Developing a vernacular tradition in the Anglican mission field, 1861-1909’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68 (2009) 514-39 F. Becker, Becoming Muslim in mainland Tanzania 1890-2000, Oxford, 2008 A. Bang, Sufis and scholars of the sea. Family networks in East Africa, 1860-1925, Abingdon, 2004 A. Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914, Manchester, 2004 S. von Sicard, ‘Missionary attitudes and approaches to Muslims, Zanzibar 18641890’, in U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt, Stuttgart, 2000, 113-37
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Attitudes to Islam and Muslims in UMCA materials Date 1866-1914 Original Language English Description The UMCA published a broad range of works that dealt with ChristianMuslim relations, some more directly than others. Central Africa, the mission’s main periodical, spanned the lifetime of the mission and published many articles about missionaries contending with Islamic beliefs and practices. They also published biographies of several key UMCA missionaries, all of which record relations between Muslims and Christians. Prominent among them are Rowley, Story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa; Rowley, Twenty years in Central Africa; Anderson-Morshead, History; Keable, Darkness or light; Maynard Smith, Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar (the drafts for Weston’s biography can be found in the Bodleian Library: H. Maynard Smith, ‘Frank Weston’s biography’ [c. 1924], A1 (17) 9).
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Edward Steere (1828-82), who became the third UMCA bishop in 1872, established a printing press in Zanzibar and published extensively on Muslim-Christian relations. His Some account of the town of Zanzibar, published before Steere became bishop, details the initial interactions that took place between the UMCA, the Muslim population and the Omani sultan. Though only a short account of 19 pages, it is important in that it explains the UMCA’s rationale for settling in Zanzibar. He also wrote a slightly longer (28 pages) work, Central African Mission, with the continued aim of justifying the UMCA strategy to stay in Zanzibar. This account allays UMCA fears about the town and the Muslim population there as a ‘temptation’ for young ex-slave converts. May Allen (1835-1912), who trained as a nurse and was the only UMCA missionary known to work extensively with ‘Arab ladies’, wrote dozens of letters home to her father, which were published in Eddowes’s Shrewsbury Journal and Salopian Journal between 1876 and 1881 (Brown, Zanzibar; Prichard, ‘“I am … but a pawn”’). Much of this material relates to her work at the hospital, but she also wrote about her conversations with the ‘Arab ladies’ of the town. She befriended many, though she often found they were moved away so as to make it impossible for her to find them again. Through her published letters, she managed to secure funding to build a women’s gallery in the newly-built cathedral, so that Muslim women who had converted to Christianity could worship without forgoing decency by mingling with the males in the congregation (AndersonMorshead, History, 1859-1898, p. 87).The church synod held after Charles Smythies (1844-94) became bishop of Zanzibar in 1884 passed a resolution that ‘definite instructions as to Mohammedanism be given to all catechumens’ (A1 [V] A [‘Acts of the Synod of 1884’]). This was enacted and, in 1887, the UMCA College at Kiungani reported that trainee teachers were taught about the life and teaching of Muḥammad (Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims’, p. 12). Examples of questions asked in the half yearly exam included ‘What do you know of the Kaba, Ohod, Black Stone?’ and ‘What great differences are there between our religion, and that of Mahommed?’ (Central Africa 5 [1887] pp. 144, 159, cited in Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims’, pp, 12-13). Arthur Madan’s tract Muhammadi, maisha yake (‘Muḥammad, his life’) was published in 1888. In the 1893 synod meeting, Bishop Charles Smythies (r. 1892-4) called for a specialist to work amongst the Muslims in Zanzibar. This was in order to influence the large population of Arabs and Indians and their coloured Mohammedan followers, of which the town of Zanzibar consists. […] We
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It was Godfrey Dale who was to answer the call. Godfrey Dale (1861-1941) worked for UMCA on the mainland from 1889 to 1897, when he resigned to get married (see J. Chesworth, ‘Godfrey Dale’, in CMR 19, 440-56). He rejoined the mission in 1902 and, having spent a term at Oxford studying Islam, was appointed to concentrate on missionary work amongst Muslims in Zanzibar. In 1905, he spent a further year studying in Oxford, after which he used Arabic continually and his knowledge of the language became very great. It was his regular practice to meet Mohammedans, both Arabs and Africans, in public discussion, listening to all their arguments against Christianity and discovering the most effective ways of answering them. (‘Obituary’, Church Times, 13 September 1941, p. 554)
Dale worked in Zanzibar until 1920 and resigned from the UMCA in 1924. A progression of his ideas and knowledge can be traced through his short articles in Central Africa and multiple published works. He had many speeches published, e.g. ‘The Thirty-Second Anniversary’, Central Africa, 1893; ‘The Anniversary’, Central Africa, July 1909; ‘Canon Dale at Holborn Town Hall’, Central Africa, August 1909; see also Dale, ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’. Most notably, The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism, first published in 1905 (63 pages), thoroughly explores Muslim-Christian relations from the missionary perspective. This work was the basis for his Swahili handbook on Islam, Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu (156 pages), published in 1909. In 1913, Dale wrote an article about Islam in East Africa as part of a series for the newly started International Review of Mission (‘Vital forces of Christianity and Islam’). Each contributor was asked to reflect on six elements in the context of their own region: individual Muslims’ dissatisfaction with their faith on specific points; features in Christianity that appeal to the Muslim in East Africa; the presentation of the Christian faith to the Muslim; elements in Christianity that excite opposition; the influence of Islam on the character of the East African Muslim; and the light shed by Islam on Christianity. In 1923, the UMCA published the first Swahili version of the Qur’an, translated by Dale, Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu. The copies were reported to have been bought up by a group of Muslims with the intention of
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destroying them (Dale, ‘Editor’s notes. The Swahili Koran’, Central Africa [1924] 42-3). Some missionaries, such as Gerald Broomfield, who was urged to become Dale’s understudy, were unconvinced that debating religion with Muslims led to conversion (Chesworth, ‘Anglicans and Islam’, p. 234). Before the First World War, no works appear to have been written by Africans on Muslim-Christian relations. It seems that missionaries from African backgrounds were not outspoken against Islam, perhaps because they tended to take a less oppositional approach. Nevertheless, there are some examples of African missionaries who were particularly interested in Islam or positioned themselves quite subtly and diplomatically against it. In his autobiography, An African David and Jonathan (Westminster: UMCA [n.d.], 29 pages), Manfred Mabundo writes about how Christian missionaries acted humbly, throwing themselves into communities. This, he implies, was not how any respectable Muslim proselytiser would operate, as they preferred to wait for converts to come to them. Unsurprisingly, UMCA accounts of Islam increased exponentially after the First World War in line with the sudden expansion of Islam into the hinterland at this time (see Becker, Becoming Muslim). As Islam spread, the missionaries’ urgency to address the religious competition intensified. In the early days of British colonialism in Tanganyika, Bishop Frank Weston wrote a series of articles on Zigua society, which was predominantly Muslim, that were published in Central Africa. They were based on his travel diary from about 1921 (now held at the Bodleian Library). In this account, Weston details the tensions between indigenous, Muslim and Christian religious beliefs and practices. For instance, he writes that ‘The old men of Zigualand are not Moslem, but simple old Pagans. They dislike our faith because of its marriage law and its rejection of some old tribal customs. They dislike the really zealous Moslems almost as much as they dislike us!’ (Frank Weston, ‘In Zigualand’ [Diary, c. 1921], pp. 47–8, A1 [18] B). Strikingly, all the UMCA accounts of Zigualand that predate the First World War show that Islam did not appear to have rooted there in any significant way. Like most British Christian missions established in the late 19th century, the UMCA was closely connected with the anti-slavery movement. The theological tensions between Islam and Christianity are inextricably connected to the history of slavery. Equally, these theological tensions could prevent UMCA converts from advancing socially and economically. The missionaries often felt the need to discourage or prevent Christian converts from integrating with Muslims as they worried that the work of
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their conversion might be undone (J.P. Farler to Rev. W.H. Penney, 1883, A1 [IX], pp. 126-8). The missionaries also worried that engaging with the culture of ungwana (urban Muslim civilisation) might corrupt the converts, who were taught to live simply and mistrust the materialism of both European and coastal cultures (Maxwell, Christians and chiefs, pp. 2, 59; Porter, Religion versus empire?). Despite the UMCA missionaries’ distaste for slavery and Islam, the delicate political situation in Zanzibar meant that they were reluctant to publish their opinions frankly. The situation altered on the island of Zanzibar once it became a British protectorate in 1891, and on the mainland with the departure of the Germans from the coastal areas during the First World War. Unpublished works were usually more candid. We can learn from Edward Steere’s early personal letters (A1 [3] A) from the 1870s that missionaries in Zanzibar were referred to as watakalifu (‘troublemakers’) and wengi dhambi (‘sinners’) because of their involvement in the anti-slavery movement. In a letter from 1875, we learn that Steere sought to prepare ‘a little anti-Mohammedan manual or some fly sheets’ to explain the meaning of the Qur’an. Missionaries were still hoping in the 1890s that printing pamphlets about Islam would help their cause (Edward Steere, Zanzibar, May 1875, A1 [3] A, p. 212). Significance With their arrival on Zanzibar in 1864, the UMCA were the first ‘modern missionaries’ to become established on the island, interacting with the Muslims rulers and inhabitants. Their attitudes shown in their writings reveals knowledge of Islam and concerns about its spread on the African mainland. In Bishop Smythies’s call for a specialist in Islam to work amongst Muslims, and in UCMA subsequently identifying and training a missionary, Godfrey Dale, to study Islam and Arabic, the society was in advance of many other missionary societies. The concern actually to live and work amongst Muslims effectively continued with Bishop Frank Weston’s recommendation that all African teachers had a copy of Dale’s Maisha ya Muhammad (‘The life of Muḥammad’) and by supplying priests in training with copies of material on Islam by Samuel Zwemer, indicating that they should be informed and equipped to be able to respond to Muslims. This was an attitude held by the clergy in the diocese in 1944, when the UMCA held a synod to plan for post-war work. The minutes show that Islam was very much a matter of unease: To deal with Moslems we must understand Moslem books and Moslem Religion, e.g. Canon Dale’s work in Zanzibar. […] We are also convinced that it would be of great assistance to have at least one Islamic expert in
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the Diocese. (A 4 [1]: Verbatim Report of Proceedings of 1944 Diocesan Conference, 1944)
This reflects back to the work of Dale and Weston and the need for knowledge and the support of experts to enable work amongst Muslims. Muslims in East Africa were particularly aware of Dale’s works. Shaykh al-Amin bin Ali, a senior Mombasan qāḍī, criticised Dale’s polemical tracts, as well as William Taylor’s Raha isiyo karaha, as he resented printed attacks made on Islam by Christian missionaries (Ali Mazrui, Dini ya Islamu, Mombasa, 1939, p. 1). The inclusion of Islam in the curriculum at theological colleges continued after UMCA dioceses joined with former CMS dioceses and became a province in 1971. Publications The UMCA archives form part of the USPG archives and are held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Some material, including all issues of Central Africa (1883-1964), has been digitised and is available in the Tanzania and Malawi in Records from Colonial Missionaries 1857-1965 collection, through British Online Archives; https://micro form.digital/boa/collections/29/tanzania-and-malawi-in-records-from -colonial-missionaries-1857-1965. Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A1 (3) A, 212 (Edward Steere, Zanzibar, May 1875) Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A1 (IX), 126-8 (J.P. Farler, Letter to Revd W.H. Penney, 1883) Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A1 (V) A (‘Acts of the Synod of 1884’) Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A1 (21/22). ‘The Lord Bishop’s Zanzibar Carrier-Corps’, Transcript, 1917 Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A1 (18) B (Frank Weston, ‘In Zigualand’, Diary, c. 1921) Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – UMCA/USPG Archives, A 4 (1) (verbatim report of proceedings of the 1944 Diocesan Conference, 1944) H. Rowley, The story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. From its commencement, under Bishop Mackenzie, to its withdrawal from Zambesi, London, 1866; 007936607 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Rowley, The story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, London, 18672, repr. New York, 1969, Norderstedt, 2017
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E. Steere, Some account of the town of Zanzibar, London, 1869; 1157559027 (digitised version available through Internet Archive) E. Steere, Central African Mission, its present state and prospects, London, 1873; 1041781237 (digitised version available through Internet Archive) H. Rowley, Twenty years in Central Africa. Being the story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, from its commencement under Bishop Mackenzie to the present time, London, 1881 (revised abridgement of The story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa) H. Rowley, Twenty years in Central Africa, London, 18822, repr. 1887; 100787915 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Rowley, Twenty years in Central Africa, London, 18893 M. Allen, ‘Zanzibar Mission: Mkunazini, Zanzibar 9 September, 1881’, Eddowes’s Shrewsbury Journal, and Salopian Journal, 19 November 1881 A.C. Madan, Muhammadi, maisha yake, London, 1888 A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 1859-1896, London, 1897, repr. 1899; 008415527 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 1859-1898, London, 1905; 008734378 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, 1859-1908, London, 1909, revised ed. 1955; 006634802 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Dale, The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism. Four lectures delivered in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, Zanzibar, 1904 G. Dale, The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism, London, 19052, with seven further editions: 1908, 1909, 1913, 1925, 1928, 1948, 1042446303 (digitised version of the 1913, sixth edition, available through Internet Archive) G. Dale, ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’, Central Africa 23 (May 1905) 113-18; 72542ca23 (digitised version available through British Online Archives) G. Dale, Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu. Kwa mukhtasari pamoja na maelezo ya ihtilafu Zilizopo kati ya dini ya Kiislamu na dini ya Kikristo, London, 1909, repr. 1912, 1921; 010561166 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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R. Keable, Darkness or light. Studies in the history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, illustrating the theory and practice of missions, London, 1912; 100884863 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Dale, ‘The vital forces of Christianity and Islam – VI’, International Review of Mission 2 (1913) 305-17, repr. in G. Dale, ‘Sixth study’, in S. Zwemer (ed.), The vital forces of Christianity and Islam, London, 1915, 193-212; 005777054 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Keable, Darkness or light. Studies in the history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, illustrating the theory and practice of missions, London, 19142; 1042912224 (digitised version available through Internet Archive) G. Dale, The peoples of Zanzibar. Their customs and religious beliefs, London, 1920, repr. New York, 1969; 1050754039 (digitised version available through Internet Archive) G. Dale, Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu, London, 1923, repr. 1931 G. Dale, Islam and Africa. An introduction to the study of Islam for African Christians, London, 1925; 006500520 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R. Keable and Revd G. Dale, Darkness or light. Studies in the history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, illustrating the theory and practice of missions, London, 19253 (ch. 7 ‘Islam in Africa’ added); 007344092 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Maynard Smith, Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar. Life of Frank Weston, 1871-1924, London, 1926, repr. 1928, 1939; 007351317 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G.W. Broomfield, The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. What it is, London, 1938 L.P. Harries, Islam in East Africa, London, 1954; 006167817 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G.W. Broomfield, Towards freedom, London, 1957; 006662524 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) A.G. Blood, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. 2. 1907-1932, London, 1957 G. Dale and L. Harries, Allahu akbar. Maelezo ya dini ya kiislamu, London, 1961 G.W. Broomfield, Praying for the Church overseas, London, 1964
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Studies Chesworth, Mixed messages M. Liebst, Labour and Christianity in the mission. African workers in Tanganyika and Zanzibar, 1864-1926, Oxford, 2021 A.C. Prichard, ‘“I am … but a pawn in your chess board”. Letters, selfpresentation, and the making of a lady missionary’s career’, Women’s History Review 28 (2019) 159-75 A.C. Prichard, Sisters in spirit. Christianity, affect, and community building in East Africa, 1860-1970, East Lansing MI, 2017 M. Liebst, ‘Sin, slave status, and the “city”. Zanzibar, 1865-c. 1930’, African Studies Review 60 (2017) 139-60 M. Liebst, ‘African workers and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar, 1864-1900’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 8 (2014) 366-81 F. Becker, ‘Islam and imperialism in East Africa’, in D. Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European empires, Oxford, 2014, 112-29 E. Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims in East Africa before the Great War’, Henry Martyn Seminar, Cambridge, 2011; https://www.cccw. cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Sanders-Ethan-9-Mar -2011.pdf Chesworth, ‘Anglicans and Islam’ Becker, Becoming Muslim Y. Brown, Zanzibar. May Allen and the East African slave trade, Ruyton XI Towns, Shropshire: Eleventownshistory, 2005 A.K. Bang, Sufis and scholars of the sea. Family networks in East Africa, 1860-1925, London, 2003 Porter, Religion versus empire? A.M. Stoner-Eby, ‘African leaders engage mission Christianity. Anglicans in Tanzania, 1876-1926’, Philadelphia PA, 2003 (PhD Diss. University of Pennsylvania) S. Rizvi and A.J. Mayunga, ‘Introduction’, in Quran Tukufu 1-2 (Dar es Salaam, 2003); http://quran.al-shia.org/sw/quran/tarjomee/moq/01. htm V. Pawliková-Vilhanová, ‘Crescent or cross? Islam and Christian missions in nineteenth century East and Central Africa’, in U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt, Stuttgart, 2000, 79-95 Von Sicard, ‘Missionary attitudes’ D. Maxwell, Christians and chiefs in Zimbabwe. A social history of the Hwesa people c. 1870s-1990s, Edinburgh, 1999 Michelle Liebst and John Chesworth
The White Fathers Date 1871-1914 Original Language French Description In Algeria in 1868, Charles Lavigerie established the Missionnaires d’Afrique (MAfr – Missionaries of Africa), better known as the White Fathers (see D. Sarrió Cucarella, ‘Charles Lavigerie’, in CMR 18, 934-58). From 1875 onwards, Lavigerie became interested in expanding the work of the mission into sub-Saharan Africa. Two missions started in the late 19th century, in East Africa from 1879, and in Francophone West Africa from 1891. East Africa 1879-1914 With an interest in the freeing of slaves, Lavigerie followed events closely in sub-Saharan Africa. Henry Stanley’s 1875 letter to the Daily Telegraph with its call for Christian missionaries to go to Uganda gave Lavigerie the impetus to plan for work in East Africa. In a ‘Secret Memorandum on the evangelisation of Equatorial Africa’, dated 2 January 1878 and addressed to Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-78), Lavigerie presented his ideas on organising Catholic missions by ‘promoting the transformation of Africa by the Africans, training a plentiful number of auxiliaries, and fighting against slavery and the slave trade’ (Pawliková-Vilnahová, ‘White Fathers, Islam and Kiswahili’, p. 202). On 24 February 1878, the new pope, Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903), ratified the decree of Propaganda Fide entrusting the organisation of missions to subSaharan Africa to Lavigerie, who arranged for the first ten missionaries to go to Equatorial Africa (Lamey, Cardinal Lavigerie, p. 223). ‘Hoisting the flag of the abolition of African slavery by the Cross, in the name of the Church’ became Lavigerie’s slogan when seeking the means of launching a crusade against East African slavery and the slave trade (PawlikováVilnahová, ‘White Fathers, Islam and Kiswahili’, p. 202). The party, led by Siméon Lourdel (1853-90) and Auguste Simon Léon Livinhac (1844-1922), arrived in Buganda in 1879 shortly after the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries, including Alexander MacKay. The White Fathers were given permission to establish a mission at Rubaga.
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In discussions at court, Mutesa, the kabaka (ruler of the Buganda Kingdom), set the White Fathers off against the CMS missionaries and the Muslim traders in order to gain the most benefit in terms of goods and support. In January 1880, Livinhac wrote to Lavigerie about the White Fathers’ reception: Like all travellers who have visited Uganda, we have been deceived by the appearance of civilisation of the king and the leaders of the kingdom, and especially by the great desire that they wanted to know and to embrace our religion. [...] It took us several months to know the real dispositions of the people around us. [...] We have been deceived by the accounts of Stanley, and also deceived, all along the road, by the negroes and the Arabs whom we asked for information. (20 January 1880, Chronique de la Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, no. 84, I. de 1879-1885)
At court, the White Fathers were called Bafransa (the French), the CMS Bangereza (the British) and the Muslim traders Baarabu (the Arabs). The White Fathers were able to evangelise, but found that many of the ‘readers’ (catechists), eager to learn, moved readily between them and the CMS. Lourdel complained of the ‘readers’ visiting the ‘heretics’ (Nicq, Vie du Vénérable Père Siméon Lourdel, pp. 135-42). The ‘readers’ were mainly drawn from the young vigalagala (page boys) who were spending time at court (Robinson, Muslim societies, pp. 161-2). Mutesa initially showed an active interest in Christianity, but then wavered between traditional religion and Islam. Having made some converts before November 1882, both missions had to withdraw for security reasons. This led to the White Fathers establishing a new mission in south Nyanza at the southern end of Lake Victoria, led by Livinhac. Rivalry with the CMS and competition for influence with the kabaka had shaped the White Fathers’ experience in Buganda. Lavigerie clearly kept close control of the mission and its work. His refusal to allow baptism until converts had spent four years as catechumens was certainly a factor in their not being able to persuade Mutesa to become a Christian. The White Fathers’ attitude towards Islam in this context was thus shaped by the competition between the Muslim traders and the two Christian parties. Following Mutesa’s death in November 1884, Lourdel wrote to Lavigerie that Mutesa was inclined to Islam at the time he died: ‘Mtésa! Poor Mtésa is dead, the Koran on his chest, blinded more and more since our departure by the Muslim Wanganas [with] whom he liked to talk’ (Lourdel to Superior, 1 December 1884. Chronique Trimestrielle 26, April 1885). With Mutesa’s demise, the White Fathers felt that it was safe to return, as they
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regarded his successor, Mwanga, as being favourable to them. However, in June 1886 Mwanga had 150 of the mostly Catholic ‘readers’ executed at Namugongo (see J. Faupel, African holocaust. The story of the Uganda martyrs, Nairobi, 2007). There followed a period of open warfare between the various factions. Mwanga was deposed and replaced by Kiwewa, another of Mutesa’s sons, who was soon himself deposed and replaced by the genuinely Muslim Kalema. Mwanga took sanctuary with the White Fathers at Bukumbi and Lourdel wrote of his concerns about Muslim Arab influence leading to unrest: When in Europe will we understand the evil that Muslims do in Africa? We should not think of abolishing the slave trade as long as we leave the Arabs in the interior. The Europeans have no enemies more bitter and opposed to civilisation, to their trade and to their religion. [...] Their success in Bouganda will exalt them even more and I would not be surprised if they do not manage to expel all Europeans from these countries. (Lourdel to Superior General, 11 November 1888: Chronique Trimestrielle 42, April 1889)
The Muslims were initially victorious in driving out both the White Fathers and the CMS by the end of 1888. However, civil war ensued until Mwanga was reinstated as ruler in 1890. Lourdel died in 1890, the same year as Alexander MacKay, his main CMS rival. Lourdel’s successor was Jean-Joseph Hirth (1854-1931). That year Captain Frederick Lugard of the British East Africa Company arrived in Buganda to establish order (see J.A. Mbillah, ‘Lord Lugard’, in CMR 19, 436-9). His actions in agreeing to the return of Muslims to Buganda and apportioning land to them led in 1892 to a civil war between Protestants and Catholics. In a letter to Livinhac, Hirth reveals his views about Islam and Lugard’s partiality towards the Muslim element: European agents were negotiating the return of Muslims to the country. For two years, these, always beaten and discouraged, had lost much of their prestige; they even began to disperse in the surrounding countries, […] without making any more propaganda. The moment was judged favourable to throw them in the melee. [...] To these implacable enemies of all civilisation, was given the administration of three beautiful provinces of Uganda, while the Catholics, five times more numerous, hardly have one province for them. […] One could hope for some time, to have brought to Islamism in Africa a fatal blow, by stopping at the limit of the equator its invasions towards the south: Protestant heresy came to lose everything. (15 June 1892, in L’Ouganda et les agissements de la Compagnie Anglaise ‘East Africa’, p. 124)
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Illustration 13. A party of White Fathers, with three Africans who trained in Malta, one of whom is Adrien Atiman, before the seventh caravan travelled from Bagamoyo to Lake Tanganyika in 1888
Buganda became a British protectorate in 1894. British mistrust of a French missionary congregation led to the arrival of the Mill Hill Fathers (Shorter, Cross and flag, pp. 12-14). In 1897, Mwanga led a rebellion against the colonial authorities with some support from Muslims; he was finally defeated and exiled by the British in 1898 to the Seychelles, where he was baptised as an Anglican and died in 1903. Language in Buganda became an issue, as Kiswahili from the coast was seen to be associated with Islam, which was regarded as a rival and ‘inferior’ religion and viewed with suspicion. Lourdel used biblical texts translated by the White Fathers, who used Kiswahili in their other East African missions but eventually turned away from Kiswahili in Uganda and increasingly favoured the use of Luganda (Pawliková-Vilnahová, ‘White Fathers, Islam and Kiswahili’, p. 212). An example of Lavigerie’s desire to train auxiliaries to work with the priests is Adrien Atiman. He was originally from Mali, enslaved by Tuareg nomads as a child and ransomed in 1876 by the White Fathers, who sent him to Malta, where he trained as a doctor. In 1888, he went to East Africa and worked at Karema on Lake Tanganyika, serving the community there until 1956. When Charles Lavigerie died in 1892 and Livinhac (r. 1892-1912) became Superior General of the order, based in Algiers, he handed over the work in East Africa to Hirth. White Fathers established missions in north and south Nyanza, Tabora, Upper Congo and Upper Nile. In time, these became apostolic vicariates. The main focus of the White Fathers here was initially
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among African traditionalists, rather than among Muslims. In this they were eventually very effective; Lavigerie’s strict rule of four years’ preparation before baptism was only applied to adults. However, an awareness of the competition from Islam continued, such that: The ‘conversion’ of a negro to Mohammedanism is a very easy matter. He need not abandon the superstitions of his pagan life, and may indulge his vices, and have as many wives as before; besides making the profession of faith […] he merely submits to circumcision, and performs a few external rites. Thereafter he looks down with contempt on pagans and Christians alike. (Bouniol, White Fathers, p. 218)
West Africa 1891-1914 In the wake of French colonial expansion in Africa, the White Fathers extended their missionary work to the French Sudan in the last decade of the 19th century. Previous attempts in the 1870s to start missionary work in the Sahel had failed, due to fierce Tuareg opposition (Shorter, Cross and flag, p. 147). The widening of French colonial control, and the colonial protection and support this implied, enabled the White Fathers to establish themselves in the western Sudan (Kobo, Unveiling modernity, p. 91). In 1895, a group of White Fathers headed by Prosper-Augustine Hacquard opened a mission station in Timbuktu. There, as elsewhere, they focused on education, medical work and establishing orphanages for children who had been freed from slavery. From Timbuktu, the work expanded further south. In 1901, the White Fathers established mission stations among the Mossi in Kopèle and Ouagadougou (present-day Burkina Faso) and from there extended their range of operations to northern Ghana (Kobo, Unveiling modernity, p. 91). In Ghana, as in Burkina, they mainly focused on non-Muslim communities. In northern Ghana, this was the result of the British colonial policy that discouraged Christian mission among Islamised groups such as the Gonja, the Dagbani and the Wale. From their centres in Navrongo and Lawra (est. 1906), the White Fathers gradually expanded their missionary work to other parts of Ghana (Dah, Women do more work, p. 89). The White Fathers invested in two main ‘strategies’ vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims in West Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In predominantly Muslim areas, they established ministries of presence, often acted out by services to the community, such as teaching and medical work. Henri Marchal (1875-1957), Assistant General of the White Fathers
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between 1913 and 1947, further developed the congregation’s approach to mission among Muslims. Based on his personal experiences as a missionary in the Sahara and influenced by his relationship with Charles de Foucauld (see B. Bürkert-Engel, ‘Charles de Foucauld’, in CMR 18, 9971002), Marchal emphasised a ministry of presence. He justified this theologically by distinguishing between conversion to God, conversion to Jesus and conversion to Christianity. He recognised that Muslim conversions to Christianity were rare, not least because of social pressure and apostasy laws. He therefore considered it to be the White Fathers’ primary calling to work with the Holy Spirit in inviting all people to convert to God, which he interpreted as moving ‘away from a ritualistic conception of religion to a level of inner surrender’ (Gaudeul, Encounters and clashes, p. 318). In order to conduct this mission effectively, Marchal emphasised the need for comprehensive training in Arabic and Islam. In non-Muslim areas, such as among the Mossi in Burkina and the nonMuslim communities in northern Ghana, the work of the White Fathers entailed evangelisation, often supported by educational and medical work. Also, the evangelisation of non-Muslims was part of a wider strategy vis-à-vis Islam since, in the words of Ousman Kobo, the aim of establishing Christian communities among the Mossi and non-Muslims groups was ‘to act as a fortress against Islam’s expansion further South’ (Kobo, Unveiling modernity, p.91). Significance The White Fathers began (and have continued) as a leading Catholic missionary group engaging with Muslims on the African continent. This contrasts to a considerable degree with Protestant missions that for the most part ‘focussed on the potential conversion harvest to be gained from the vast field of African traditional religions and cultures’ (D. Pratt, Christian engagement with Islam. Ecumenical journeys since 1910, Leiden, 2017, p. 142). Awareness of the continued spread of Islam inland from the coast was reflected by Joseph Bouniol in 1928: [When the Arab traders] saw that European nations were gaining more and more influence in Africa, they set themselves to win their ascendancy by converting the Africans to Mohammedanism. […] At the present time, every Mohammedan in Africa, be he merchant, soldier or official, is an ardent worker on behalf of his religion, and hides his propaganda so successfully that it attracts little notice and so the danger goes unrecognised. [...] Many European residents and political officers look upon Mohammedanism as ‘a suitable religion for negroes’, a stepping-stone to Christianity. Whoever holds such an opinion does not know Islam. (Bouniol, White Fathers, p. 218)
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In more recent years, many White Fathers have studied at the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam (PISAI) in Rome before engaging with Muslim communities in parishes in East and West Africa. They include Jean-Marie Gaudeul and Peter Smith, who both became involved in dialogue with Muslims in Tabora, western Tanzania. Reflecting the twin concerns of bearing witness to one’s faith and engaging openly and respectfully with those of another faith, the experience and literature of the White Fathers provides a significant resource and insight into the development of relationships, including the foundations of a more dialogical modus vivendi between Christians and Muslims in African contexts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Publications Archives Rome, Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) Archives – Chronique de la Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, no. 84, I. de 18791885 (20 January 1880) Archives Rome, Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) Archives – C13 Vicariat du Nyanza (Uganda), Correspondance des Vicaires Apostoliques: Mgr Livinhac (1878-89), Mgr. Hirth (1889-92) Archives Rome, Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) Archives – C14, Vicariat du Nyanza (Uganda). Correspondance des missionnaires Chronique Trimestrielle (published copies of many of the letters, 1879-1909) Procure des missions d’Afrique, L’Ouganda et les agissements de la Compagnie anglaise ‘East-Africa’, Paris, 1892; bpt6k56111508 (digitised version available through BNF) Pére J.M., L’Ouganda. La mission catholique et les agents de la Compagnie anglaise, Paris, 1893; bpt6k5611213b (digitised version available through BNF) A. Nicq, La vie du Vénérable Père Siméon Lourdel, Algiers, 1906; bpt6k11744429 (digitised version available through BNF) Studies I.D. Dah, Women do more work than men. Birifor women as change agents in the mission and expansion of the Church in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana), Eugene OR, 2018 O. Kobo, Unveiling modernity in twentieth-century West African Islamic reforms, Leiden, 2012 B. Taith, ‘Missionary militarism? The armed brothers of the Sahara and Léopold Joubert in the Congo’, in O. White and J.P. Daughton (eds), In God’s empire. French missionaries and the modern world, New York, 2012, 129-50
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V. Pawliková-Vilnahová, ‘The role of early “Missionaries of Africa” or “White Fathers” in the study and development of African languages’, Asian and African Studies 20 (2011) 267-88 J-C. Ceillier, Histoire des Missionnaires d’Afrique (pères Blancs). De la fondation par Mgr Lavigerie à la mort du fondateur (1868-1892), Paris, 2008 A. Shorter, The cross and flag in Africa. The ‘White Fathers’ during the colonial scramble (1892-1914), Maryknoll NY, 2006 D. Robinson, Muslim societies in African history, Cambridge, 2004 (see pp. 153-68 on the White Fathers’ arrival and reception in Buganda) V. Pawliková-Vilnahová, ‘White Fathers, Islam and Kiswahili in nineteenth-century Uganda’, Asian and African Studies 13 (2004) 198-213 C. Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860-1960, Cambridge, 2003 J. Rowe, ‘Mutesa and the missionaries. Church and state in pre-colonial Buganda’, in E.H. Hansen and M. Twaddle (eds), Christian missionaries and the state in the third world, Oxford, 2002, 52-65 H.B. Hansen, ‘The colonial states’ policy towards foreign missions in Uganda’, in E.H. Hansen and M. Twaddle (eds), Christian mission aries and the state in the third world, Oxford, 2002, 157-75 B. Sundkler and C. Steed, A history of the Church in Africa, Cambridge, 2000 V. Pawliková-Vilnahová, ‘Crescent or Cross? Islam and Christian missions in nineteenth-century East and West Africa’, in U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt. Der Umgang christlicher Missionen mit Gewalt in Afrika und Asien in der Zeit von 1792 bis 1918/19, Stuttgart, 2000, 79-95 A. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450-1950, Oxford, 1996 P.D. Gaffney, ‘Christian-Muslim relations in Uganda’, Islamochristiana 20 (1994) 131-77 R.X. Lamey, Cardinal Lavigerie. Selection of articles, Rome, 1990 P. Smith, ‘Christianity and Islam in Tanzania. Development and relationships’, Islamochristiana 16 (1990) 171-82 J.-M. Gaudeul, Encounters & clashes. Islam and Christianity in history, vol. 1, Rome, 1990, pp. 313-20 E. Diemer, ‘Essai de bibliographie des travaux bibliques des Pères Blancs en Afrique’, Nouvelle Revue de Science Missionnaire 17 (1961) 127-34 G.D. Kittler and L. Rugambwa, The White Fathers, London, 1957
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D. Attwater, The White Fathers in Africa. The Society of Missionaries of Africa, London, 1938 J. Bouniol, The White Fathers and their missions, London, 1929 A.-P. Hacquard and E.-A.-L. Hourst, De Tombouctou aux bouches du Niger avec la mission Hourst, s.n, 1897 John Chesworth and Martha T. Frederiks
German Protestant mission in East Africa The German Protestant mission movement arose from private initiatives in the latter half of the 18th century. While its beginnings were clearly connected with European expansion overseas, German-speaking missionaries had little support from European powers for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. The question of state support came to the forefront only in the 1880s when the German Empire began to acquire territories as colonies. Meanwhile, for much of the 19th century German Protestant missionaries worked between various constellations of British, Danish and French colonial and settler states and communities.
Illustration 14. Detail of a map of East Africa showing Protestant mission stations as they were in 1896, including Berlin III (DOA), Leipziger Mission (Lp), Neukirchener Mission (Nk), CMS and UMCA (Un)
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The beginnings of missionary work in East Africa are a case in point. The first German-speaking missionaries in this region were Ludwig Krapf (1810-81) and Johannes Rebmann (1820-76). Both had originally been trained in Basel, but were seconded to the British Church Missionary Society (CMS). In 1837, Krapf was engaged in missionary work in Ethiopia and then, in 1844, he founded the first mission station in Mombasa, a Swahili port town with a large Muslim population. Rebmann joined him in 1846. Their success, however, was much more in the field of geographical exploration than in converting Africans to Christianity. They were the first Europeans to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, but their converts were numbered only in the dozens (see J. Chesworth, ‘Ludwig Krapf’, in CMR 19, pp. 195-204). Only with the beginning of the scramble for Africa did Germanspeaking missionaries return to this part of the world. Preliminary considerations for the start of missionary activities in East Africa began in the early 1880s. The first step was the so-called Kamba mission, established by the Gesellschaft für Evangelisch-Lutherische Mission in Ostafrika (Society for Evangelical Lutheran Mission in East Africa), which was strongly influenced by the work of Krapf. Its founder, Max Ittameier, a Bavarian pastor, built a first mission station in the hinterland of Mombasa in 1893. For European missionaries, the East African coast and its hinterland were quite complicated fields of work given the long traditions of Islam there, but to go further inland was also a dangerous endeavour. Only with the colonial conquest, which began in earnest in the early 1890s, were missionaries able to penetrate further into the interior, where the population was less influenced by Islam. With the re-unification of Germany in 1871, the Berlin and Leipzig Missions, which had been founded in the middle of the 19th century, became increasingly connected with the slowly growing colonial movement. In 1879, the head of the Rheinische Mission (Missionary Society of the Rhine), Friedrich Fabri (1824-91), published an article calling for a prominent role for the mission in Germany’s rise as an imperial and colonial power. Six years later, in 1885, the Extraordinary Conference of German Missions wholeheartedly subscribed to the empire’s rise as a colonial power and, in the same year, the Protestant missions created the German Committee for Missions to promote coordination with the government and the colonial movement. Close cooperation with the emerging colonial movement grew even deeper in the latter half of the 1880s, when Germany acquired territories in Africa and Asia. In 1886, the Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für
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Deutsch-Ostafrika (EMS; Protestant mission for East Africa, commonly known as Berlin III) was founded. In the same year, a first agreement between the British and the German Empires had demarcated their respective spheres of influence. German Protestant missions therefore shifted their interest towards the south of Mount Kilimanjaro. In November 1890, the Berliner Mission (Berlin I, founded in 1824) extended their activities to German East Africa. In 1891, the Moravian (Unitas Fratrum, Brüdergemeine) Herrnhuter Mission established its first station in the colony. An early focus of activities was Lake Nyasa and the Kilimanjaro region, where German authorities had brutally established their rule in the early 1890s. In many cases, German missionaries took over the stations of the London Missionary Society and the CMS. In one case, the takeover was forced by the government in Dar es Salaam after accusations that the British missionaries had supported a rebellion against the Germans in 1892. In 1894, the German colonial administration divided the territory into Catholic and Lutheran regions, with each agreeing to the principle of non-interference (Sundkler and Steed, History, p. 548). Up to 1914, the Herrnhuter Mission had 16 stations in German East Africa, all on Lake Nyasa or in Unyamwezi, a region on the central plateau. The majority of the 22 stations of the Berliner Mission covered similar parts of the colony, as well as stations in Dar es Salaam and Morogoro. The Leipziger Mission arrived in 1893 and had stations in the north of the colony in Arusha and Moshi. Some smaller missionary societies were also active in the colony. In the later years of German colonial rule, the Breklumer Mission (SchleswigHolsteinische evangelisch-lutherische Mission in Breklum) arrived in 1912 at the Muslim trading settlement of Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika and the Free Protestant Neukirchener Mission established itself in the north-west of the colony in 1911, having worked on the Kenyan coast at Lamu since 1887.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION F. Becker, ‘Islam and imperialism in East Africa’, in D. Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European empires, Oxford, 2014, 112-29 K. Fiedler, Christianity and African culture. Conservative German Protestant missionaries in Tanzania 1900-1940, Leiden, 2006 U. van der Heyden and H. Stoecker (eds) Mission und Macht im Wandel politischer Orientierungen: europäische Missionsgesellschaften in politischen Spannungsfeldern in Afrika und Asien zwischen 1800 und 1945, Stuttgart, 2005 M. Pesek, ‘Kreuz oder Halbmond. Die deutsche Kolonialpolitik zwischen Pragmatismus und Paranoia in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1908-1914’, in U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt, Stuttgart, 2000, 97-112
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B. Sundkler and C. Steed, A history of the church in Africa, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 510-61 J. Bückendor, ‘Schwarz-weiss-rot über Ostafrika!’. Deutsche Kolonialpläne und Afrikanische Realität, Münster, 1997, pp. 108-57 and 269-89 J.D. Fage and R. Oliver (eds), The Cambridge history of Africa, vol. 6. 1870-1905, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 539-91 H. Gründer, Christliche Mission und deutscher Imperialismus. Eine politische Geschichte ihrer Beziehungen während der deutschen Kolonialzeit (18841914) unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Afrikas und Chinas, Paderborn, 1982 T.O. Beidelman, Colonial evangelism. A socio-historical study of an East African mission at the grassroots, Bloomington IN, 1982 W.B. Anderson, The Church in East Africa 1840-1974, Dodoma, 1977 M. Wright, German missions in Tanganyika 1891-1941, Oxford, 1971 S. von Sicard, The Lutheran Church on the coast of Tanzania, 1887-1914, Uppsala, 1970 J. Eggert, Missionsschule und sozialer Wandel in Ostafrika. Der Beitrag der deutschen evangelischen Missionsgesellschaften zur Entwicklung des Schulwesens in Tanganyika 1891-1939, Bielefeld, 1970
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations German Protestant mission in East Africa Date 1896-1914 Original Language Various Description There are several archives for the history of missionary societies active under German colonial rule in East Africa. The most accessible are those of the Berlin Mission I and III, the Bethel- and the Herrnhuter Mission. These archives, united under the umbrella organisation of the Landeskirchliches Archiv (‘National Church Archive’) in Berlin offer wellorganised and easy access to the documents. In addition to reports and correspondence between missionaries in the field and the headquarters in Berlin, the archive has a huge library of publications ranging from travel accounts to ethnographic studies of African societies. The Herrnhuter archives are located in the small town of Herrnhut in Saxony. The catalogue is available online and the documents are accessible in situ. The archives of the Bethel Mission are in the mission’s main archives at Bielefeld. They are fairly well organised and accessible, but have no online catalogue. The Breklum Mission has its archives in the
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small coastal town after which it is named. The Archives of the Leipzig Mission are accessible in the Studienzentrum August Hermann Francke in Halle. The Federal Archive in Berlin-Lichterfelde contains a rich collection of documents regarding the relationship between the missions and the colonial state in German East Africa. German missionary societies produced a huge number of publications and periodicals. The Berlin Mission Societies had their own publishing house, Buchhandlung der Berliner evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft (Bookstore of the Evangelical Missions of Berlin), founded in 1899. It issued several periodicals: Beiträge zur Missionskunde, focused on more lengthy contributions with some academic approach, while Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift, Allgemeine Missions-Nachrichten, and Berliner Missionsberichte dealt more with reports and op-eds. It also published works by the most influential missionaries (including Alexander Merensky, Deutschlands pflicht gegenüber den Heiden, Martin Klamroth, Der Islam in Deutsch-Ostafrika, and his ‘Religionsgespräche mit einem Führer’, and Julius Richter and Karl Axenfeld, Vom Kampf des Christentums). The Bethel Mission also had its own publishing house, which issued the monthly Beth-El. The Herrnhuter Mission’s main periodical was the Missionsblatt der Brüdergemeinde. The German missions produced a number of tracts in Swahili that indicate their intention to challenge Muslims and inform Christians about Islam. The 1914 edition of Führer (Guide) lists the following tracts: Habari za Muhammadi (‘Information about Muḥammad’), Dar es Salaam, 1912, and Leben Mohammeds (‘Life of Muḥammad’), Vuga, 1913, both from EMS; Christus oder Mohammed? (‘Christ or Muḥammad?’), np, nd, from the Herrnhuter Mission. However, missionary publishing houses and journals were not the only channel used by missionaries to disseminate their views. Many were wellconnected to the colonial movement, which published the Deutsches Kolonialblatt (‘German Colonial Magazine’), to which some of them quite regularly contributed. Others sought to establish themselves in national and international academia. Axenfeld was a long-standing member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islamkunde (German Society for Islamic Studies), which published the journal Die Welt des Islams, and Richter wrote several articles for The Moslem World, which was published by Nile Mission Press in Cairo at that time. Missionaries often had an ambivalent relationship with Islam in German East Africa. Many were interested in the culture and thinking of Africans who could be potentially converted to Christianity. Missionary
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work often included some ethnographic enquiry, even though it was performed with bias and superficiality. As they arrived in East Africa, they were often confronted with coastal cultures deeply influenced by Islam. Many of their porters, cooks and servants were Muslims. Despite some collaboration between the colonial government and the missions, their relationship was far from cordial. Islam was one topic where mission and colonial government did not always see eye to eye. Berlin Missions I and III were at the forefront of these debates. Some of their mission stations were in regions (e.g. Unyamwezi) where the influence of Muslims was rising. They were also closely connected to the colonial movement in Germany and therefore fully part of the debates about the aims and nature of German colonialism. A major bone of contention was the dependence of the colonial administration and the military on African Muslims. A huge majority of the askari (soldiers), the Africans who served as mercenaries in the colonial forces, were Muslims, while many of the clerks and newly appointed intermediaries of colonial rule were former traders, who were predominantly Muslims from the coast. Given the low European staffing levels of colonial rule in German East Africa, missionaries often had to deal with African representatives of the colonial government. This was certainly the case in the remote areas which the missions preferred. Missionaries often complained that these African intermediaries promoted Islam rather than Christianity as the new faith that Africans should follow. In his account of the first years of a mission station in the Kilimanjaro area, Alexander Merensky (1838-1918) described how ‘the Arabs’ did all they could to sabotage his attempts to establish relations with the people and the rulers (Eine neue Missionsstation, p. 11). At the Second Colonial Congress of 1902, representatives of the missions called for the colonial government to promote more African Christians as intermediaries and support the work of the missions with greater fervour (BArch R 1001/7003 Congresses: Resolutions of the German Colonial Congress of 1902 [Part II]). The policy of the government on religious questions was guided by a Machiavellian pragmatism and not, as the missions hoped, by a vision of colonial rule as a propagation of a German culture, defined by them as based on Christianity. German colonialism had never had its ‘Mahdi moment’: in contrast to the British and the French, who during the initial phase of conquest were confronted with fierce resistance motivated by Islamic millenarianism, the Germans fought mainly against foes whose opposition to colonial rule was more inspired by a general hostility to foreign rule than by religion. A less debated aspect of German colonialism
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was that it was from the beginning more a vehicle for imperial diplomacy than being itself aimed at creating a colonial empire. Already in 1886, with Germany gaining a hold on the East African coast, German diplomats had an eye on the consequences of these events for their relationships with major Islamic powers such as the Ottomans. In the colony, the government never went off this approach of prioritising political stability over the national character of its colonial project. This became obvious in its attitude towards slavery. The battle against the slave trade had been a core argument for the necessity of European intervention in the scramble for Africa. Missionary travellers like David Livingstone and Alexander Mackay in the late 1870s had already spearheaded a crusade against the growing influence of Muslim traders in the interior of Africa based on allegations of their dominant role in the slave trade. The fight against the slave trade was used for much of the 19th century as an argument for European intervention and it was consequently prominent as a justification for the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and afterwards. A short but informative argument was published in one of the leading science journals in 1888 (Anon., ‘Mohammedanism and slavetrade in Africa’, Science 12 [1888] 325-6). The German Empire had in 1884 signed the Congo Treaty, which made the battle against the slave trade a priority for European powers in Africa, but the colonial government never enforced a general ban on slavery. Officials argued that this would endanger cooperation with the Muslim elites on the coast, of which many were owners of large plantations with slaves as the majority of their labourers. In some cases, German authorities even returned escaped slaves to their owners. Missionaries of Berlin Mission I saw in these policies not only a betrayal of what they regarded as the noble goals of Europe’s colonial rule, but also, since a great part of their early converts were slaves, as an obstacle to further conversions. The fight against the slave trade had always included enmity towards Muslims, who had been portrayed as its main perpetrators since the days of Livingstone. German Protestant missionaries widely used this argumentation in their criticisms of the colonial government. Protestant missionaries such as Martin Klamroth (1873-1918) and Karl Axenfeld (1869-1924) first made the dominance of Muslims in the colonial administration and military into a subject of debate in the aftermath of the Maji-Maji rebellion of 1905/6. Government investigations led to accusations that chiefs appointed by the Germans, many of them Swahilispeaking Muslims from the coast, had misbehaved. The missionaries knew that in many areas these chiefs were hated as much as the Germans
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but they nevertheless stressed the religious undertones of the rebellion, allotting a role to Islam as an ideological foundation for anti-European opposition. Protestant missionaries such as Axenfeld, Klamroth and Julius Richter (1862-1940) now painted Islam in German East Africa as a danger to colonial rule. In 1905, Axenfeld published an article in the influential Kreuz-Zeitung, in which he stated that Islam was not only a religion but also a political ideology principally directed against European rule (BArch R 1001/820, The language question in German East Africa: Cutting from the Kreuz-Zeitung, 21 March 1905, Governor Alfred von Götzen to Colonial Department of the Foreign Office, 9 May 1905). In response to the mounting campaign of the Berlin missionaries, the government initiated a general investigation into the role of Islam in the colony. The results were unambiguous. In the previous two decades, Islam had spread in many parts of the colony, and many Africans looked to the Qur’an rather than the Bible for guidance in these troubled times; it was not Christian but Muslim values that were seen by the new elites of African intermediaries as the way to succeed under colonial rule. Nevertheless, the government refused to see Islam as a political movement directed against colonial rule, although an event that took place in 1908 fuelled the alarmist debates of an ‘Islamic threat’: it became known as the ‘Mecca letter affair’. The government discovered that letters had been circulated among soldiers and Muslim scholars that prophesied an end of colonial rule. Missionaries took this as proof of their assumptions, though German experts in Islamic cultures and religion such as Carl Becker (18761933) disagreed with the missionaries’ interpretation of the letters. Becker did not see in the letters a call for an uprising, but a millenarist response to the upheavals experienced by many Africans. The government adopted this line, and the official report denied any connections between Muslim scholars and opposition to German rule (BArch: R 1001/6885 Spread of Islam in German East Africa: Letter of the Imperial Colonial Office to the Foreign Office, 4 August 1909). The missionaries then placed the matter on the agenda of public and parliamentary debates in Germany. At the Colonial Congress of 1910, Islam was a major topic. Again, Becker rejected the missionaries’ scaremongering, but the pressure they exerted resulted in several trials in German East Africa, where some Muslims were sentenced to long prison terms. During the trials, the judge repeated earlier assumptions about the role of Muslims in the Maji-Maji rebellion. Educational policy was another major bone of contention. From the perspective of the mission, teaching Africans was at the core of its work. From the time of the call by Hermann Wissmann, the first governor of
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the colony, to Protestant missions to support building and maintaining schools in the colony, a major conflict arose over what exactly Africans should learn there. The colonial government needed trained intermediaries, soldiers and workers. The missions wanted educated Christians who could read the Bible, which the missionaries began to translate into local languages. Colonial officials criticised the missionaries’ focus on local languages because they themselves preferred Swahili, which they had elevated to an official language in the colony but, for the missionaries, Swahili was closely tied to the Muslim cultures of the coast. Only under pressure from the government and after the failure of their attempts to replace Swahili with German as a lingua franca did Axenfeld, the inspector of Berlin Mission I, acknowledge the importance of Swahili as a lingua franca in the colony and supported it as the language to be taught at mission schools (BArch R 1001/820: Axenfeld to Dernburg, 15 February 1909; Carl Velten, lecturer in Swahili, to Dernburg, 17 April 1909). Nonetheless, because of the increasing need for Swahili-speaking intermediaries, the government supported not only mission schools but also Qur’an schools, notably in regions where the government saw that Muslims formed the majority. This was not only on the coast, but also in the central regions and in some southern parts of the colony. In the 1910s, around half of the 815 mission schools were maintained by Protestant missions. There were probably three times as many Qur’an schools, but these are only rough estimates. Government investigations found that Qur’an schools were to be found in close proximity to every major town and along the main roads. In the years immediately before the First World War, the government in Dar es Salaam paid more attention to the ‘problem of Islam’. In 1910, another investigation, now under the auspices of the Reichskolonialamt (Imperial Colonial Office), was undertaken to clarify the role of Islam in German East Africa. Many of its findings echoed arguments by the missionaries of the Berlin Mission. Three years later, the Reichstag (the parliament in Berlin) adopted a resolution that recommended a change in the policy in Dar es Salaam. More Christian Africans should be recruited for government bureaucracy and the colonial forces, anti-Christian propaganda should be outlawed, and the recognition of Muslim holidays should be limited. This resolution, however, did little to change the actual policy of the colonial government. The governor, Albrecht von Rechenberg (18611935), and many of the district officers still dismissed the missionaries’ campaign as scaremongering. The Berlin Mission missionaries responded with several publications. In 1912 alone, two major publications of the Buchhandlung der Berliner Evangelischen Missionsgesellschaft focussed
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on Islam in German East Africa. Erich Schulze’s book put the question of the soul of the empire’s colonial project in its title: Soll Deutsch-Ostafrika christlich oder mohammedanisch werden? (‘Shall German East Africa be Christian or Muslim?’). He portrayed Islam as alien to African cultures and a danger to colonial rule and economic development. Many of his sources were government reports but, in contrast to colonial officials, he draws an almost hysterical picture of the progress of Islam in the colony. Klamroth’s Islam in Deutsch-Ostafrika adopts a similar approach and tone. For him, Muslim success in converting Africans is rooted in the decay of African cultures and the upheavals of colonialism. His criticism is directed not so much at the colonial government as against its army of Muslim personnel and intermediaries. The outbreak of the First World War was a turning point. As allies of the Ottoman Empire, Germany supported the declaration of jihad by the Ottoman sultan against the allies’ Entente, allowing the possibility of interpreting the war with the French, Russians and British as a religious crusade. The declaration was published in many places in German East Africa. The war established a new dividing line within colonial society. The main difference had previously been between Europeans and nonEuropeans. Germans saw themselves as protectors of European prestige, but now the main line was between enemies and allies. The German military imprisoned Europeans who belonged to the Entente, among them many British and French missionaries. Investigations by the British government reported degrading treatment of these prisoners at the hands of African soldiers. To the detriment of German Protestant missionaries, who envisioned colonial rule as the spread of a German national culture defined at the core by Protestantism, the actual colonial policies of the government in Dar es Salaam were never based on such assumptions. Instead of spreading Christianity as the religion of Europeans, it maintained a close relationship with the predominantly Muslim elites. As a consequence, Islam made new advances into East Africa. The proportion of Muslims from the 1880s until the end of the First World War grew from three percent to 25 percent, or two million Africans. The success of the mission was meagre in comparison. By 1911, the Protestant missions had only baptised around 15,000 Africans. In 1911, an ecumenical conference was held in Dar es Salaam to consider how to Africanise the Church. Most of those attending were from the Lutheran and Moravian missions, with a single missionary representing the CMS and UMCA. On the one day set aside to discuss Islam,
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Martin Klamroth gave a paper entitled ‘Our attitude and responsibility to Islam’, based on an analysis of questionnaires from the territory. He demonstrated that the indigenous coastal ‘Swahili’ people were the main bearers of Islam, rather than Arabs and Indians. At the same conference, Bible translation was discussed and the need for a Bantu-Swahili version devoid of Arabic loan-words was proposed to aid understanding ‘up-country’, as well as to reduce Muslim influence (von Sicard, Lutheran Church, pp. 204-9). Significance The most basic question in the history of Protestant missions is whether this history is a part of East African history or predominately part of German history. This is a question of perspective and of agency; its answers rely on various methods and sources. Historians who see missions as part of German overseas expansion highlight the many similarities, overlappings and connections between the missions’ attempts to convert Africans to Christianity and the colonial state’s fight for power and control over African societies. The first studies focused on the missions’ role in colonial education (Eggert, Missionsschule; Beidelman, Colonial evangelism) or their participation in the colonial movement (Gründer, Christliche Mission; Bade, Imperialismus). Some historians have seen missionaries primarily as helping hands of the colonial state, while others have taken a more nuanced stance. For an introduction to these debates, Ulrich van der Heyden (‘Christian missionary societies’) provides a good start. Van der Heyden was also the editor of two anthologies, published in 2000 and 2005, on the history of missionary societies which provide a fairly good overview over the field of research. Most authors in these anthologies see missions mainly as part of German history, albeit one that did not take place in Germany but in Africa. Their sources are mainly written records of either the colonial state or the missionary societies. In contrast, historians who focus mainly on processes in Africa itself have relied much more on oral sources, and their perspective is focused on local interactions between the missionaries and African societies. For a long time, this approach attempted to trace the roots of African nationalism back to the early expression of local churches (see Kimambo, Mbiru, and the contributions in Spear and Kimambo, East African expressions of Christianity). Studies of the relationship between Protestant missions and Muslim societies follow this line of argument in various ways. They focus on the conflict between missionaries and Muslims as a political conflict between paranoia (on the side of the missionaries) and self-assertation against
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European rule (on the side of Muslims). The First World War, which not only shattered colonial rule but also led to a crisis in missionary work and the renewed spread of Islam, has attracted several studies (Pierard, ‘Shaking the foundations’; Pesek, ‘Kreuz oder Halbmond’). Overall, the fact that Germans ruled over a colony in which Muslims played an important role in political affairs (either as intermediaries or opponents) has so far hardly been brought to the forefront in historical research. There has been no real debate on how this historical experience shaped longer-term trajectories of German attitudes towards Muslim societies. Nonetheless, the great efforts of missionaries in the study of African languages contributed to the development of area studies in Germany in the interwar period and afterwards. The role of Protestant missions in the further history of the MuslimChristian relationship is hard to access. The First World War brought a major reversal for their work, as most missionaries were expelled by the British authorities and only allowed to return in the 1920s. British officials were suspicious of their role in the war effort and their politicised approach to religion (see several reports in TNA CO 691/23, for instance Enclosure no. 1 in Confidential Dispatch of 19 September 1919 by the Political Office Moshi, 21 August 1919). Nonetheless, British officials were indirectly influenced by the Protestant debate about the ‘Muslim threat’. Authors such as W.J.W. Roome, in his article ‘Dead weight of Islam’, relied extensively on missionaries’ publications and reports as they assessed the implications of the First World War on Muslim societies and Muslim attitudes towards the West. And so, to a certain extent, did British intelligence officials who, while citing these experts, painted a similar picture of a dangerous Islam in the last years of the war. Nonetheless, after the paranoia caused by the Ottoman sultan’s jihad declaration, the British returned to a more unagitated attitude towards East African Muslims. British policies in Tanganyika Territory are not within the scope of this contribution, but overall the British distrusted the former African intermediaries of German rule (of whom the majority were Muslims) and also dissociated themselves from the German use of Muslim schools to train a new administrative elite in the colony. This led to the rising attraction of mission schools and a surge in Christian conversions in the following decades. The Protestant debates at the beginning of the 20th century therefore had only a small impact on the history of the relationship between African Muslims and Christians. In the post-Nyerere era after 1985, however, some Muslim authors referred to the times of the Germans as an initial moment in their politicisation (Said, Life and times of Abdulwahid Sykes, p. 30).
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Publications Archives Berlin, Landeskirchliches Archiv, holds the records of most of the mission agencies, as well as colonial records. The website is user-friendly and is also available in English and French; https://ezab.de/. A. Merensky, Eine neue Missionsstation im Innern von Ostafrika, Berlin, 1896, repr. 1901 A. Merensky, Deutschlands pflicht gegenüber den Heiden und dem Heidentum in seinen Kolonien, Berlin, 1905 J. Richter and K. Axenfeld, Vom Kampf des Christentums um Asien und Afrika, Berlin, 1910 M. Klamroth, Der Islam in Deutsch-Ostafrika, Berlin, 1912; 30:2-321816 (digitised version available through Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main) E. Schultze, Soll Deutsch-Ostafrika christlich oder mohammedanisch werden?, Berlin, 1912; 30:2-321867 (digitised version available through Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main) [Anon.], Habari za Muhammadi, Dar es Salaam: Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1912 P. Wohlrahb, Leben Mohammeds, Vuga: Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1913 M. Klamroth, ‘Religionsgespräche mit einem Führer der Daresalamer Mohammedaner’, Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift 40 (1913) 65-79 Studies Becker, ‘Islam and imperialism’ U. van der Heyden, ‘Christian missionary societies in the German colonies, 1884/85-1914/15’, in V. Langbehn and M. Salama (eds), German colonialism. Race, the Holocaust, and postwar Germany, New York, 2011, 216-39 Fiedler, Christianity and African culture van der Heyden and Stoecker, Mission und Macht U. van der Heyden and J. Becher (eds), Mission und Gewalt. Der Umgang christlicher Missionen mit Gewalt und die Ausbreitung des Christentums in Afrika und Asien, Stuttgart, 2000 Pesek, ‘Kreuz oder Halbmond’ T.T. Spear and I.N. Kimambo (eds), East African expressions of Christianity, Oxford, 1999
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R.V. Pierard, ‘Shaking the foundations. World War I, the Western allies, and German Protestant missions’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 22 (1998) 13-19 M. Said, The life and times of Abdulwahid Sykes (1924-1968). The untold story of the Muslim struggle against British colonialism in Tanganyika, London, 1998 K.J. Bade, Imperialismus und Kolonialmission. Kaiserliches Deutschland und Koloniales Imperium, Wiesbaden, 1984 Gründer, Christliche Mission Beidelman, Colonial evangelism I.N.M. Kimambo, Mbiru. Popular protest in colonial Tanzania, Nairobi, 1971 von Sicard, Lutheran Church Eggert, Missionsschule W.J.W. Roome, ‘The dead weight of Islam in equatorial and southern Africa’, The Moslem World 4 (1914) 273-90 Michael Pesek
Ibrahim Njoya Date of Birth Approximately 1873 Place of Birth Fumban, Cameroon Date of Death 30 May 1933 Place of Death Yaoundé, Cameroon
Biography
Ibrahim Njoya, born around 1873, was the 17th king of the Bamum, a large ethnic group living in the grasslands of western Cameroon. He was to become the best known Bamum king, although when he succeeded his father in 1885 or possibly a few years later, aged between nine and 12, he was too young to govern. His mother, Njapndunke, served as regent until the young sovereign became the true master of the country sometime between 1892 and 1894. Having heard many tales of events in the years before his own time, Njoya was aware of the fragility of political power. In 1895, he had to face an attempt to unseat him, and his position was only assured when he asked for military help from the Fulani state in 1896. Soon afterwards, impressed by Fulani successes in battle, which they attributed to their religion, he decided to convert to Islam. During his reign, his kingdom became first a German and then a French colony. The period of German colonial rule, 1902-15, saw the climax of Njoya’s power and prestige. The first Germans arrived in the Bamum region in 1902, and when Njoya went to wage war against the Banso of north-west Cameroon, he sought German aid. Quick success led him to the conclusion that the Germans were more powerful than the Banso because their God was stronger, so he abandoned Islam for Christianity, which signalled the introduction of Protestant Christianity in the Bamum region. However, some years later, when he asked to be baptised he was informed that a good Christian should have only one wife. This requirement embarrassed both him and his notables, and he decided to revert to Islam, though the Islamic prohibition on alcohol continued to constitute an obstacle. Up to the time of his return to Islam in 1916, Njoya worked closely with the Basel Mission. This German period saw his strongest attempts to introduce innovations in Bamum society. Especially noteworthy is his system of writing the Bamum language, known as a ka u ku. Njoya encouraged
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Illustration 15. Ibrahim Njoya, Chief of the Bamum
the use of this script by requiring it to be taught in schools and used at all levels of government. He also directed the writing of an impressive history of his dynasty and his country in this new script. For the first time, Bamum people could read about their traditions, laws and customs. Njoya even had pharmaceutical formulae recorded in the new script. Over 8,000 original documents written at this time are still preserved in the palace archives. Germany lost control of Njoya’s domain during the First World War. In December 1915, Anglo-French forces reached Fumban, the capital of the Bamum kingdom, and the mostly German Christian missionaries had to leave the country. They were replaced by French missionaries and Njoya was told that they too were Christians. Since he believed that the power of a man came from the god in whom he believed, he found it difficult to understand how two people who believed in the same God could be
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of unequal strength. When he discovered that the Allied forces included Christian soldiers as well as Muslim soldiers of Indian descent, he concluded that it was the alliance between the God of the Muslims and the God of the Christians that gave the French the strength to defeat the Germans. He therefore decided to create a religion that drew on the Bible and the Qur’an, as well as ancestral rites. He set this out in a work entitled Nuot nkoueto (‘Pursue and achieve’; also transliterated as Nwet nkete). The First World War and its aftermath led to dramatic changes that soon affected Njoya and his alphabet in unexpected ways. Njoya adapted easily when subsequent Anglo-French territorial agreements shifted his kingdom into the French-controlled area at the beginning of 1916. With French occupation, however, royal power began to decline as local government institutions were progressively dismantled. In 1917 Njoya returned to Islamic orthodoxy. He was sent into exile in Yaoundé in 1931 and died there in 1933.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Sultan Ibrahim Njoya, Histoire et coutumes des Bamum, trans. H. Martin, Paris, 1952 Secondary K.J. Orosz, ‘Njoya’s alphabet. The sultan of Bamum and French colonial reactions to the A ka u ku script’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 217 (2015) 45-66 Roi Njoya Colloque international, Le roi Njoya. Créateur de civilisation et précurseur de la renaissance africaine, Paris, 2014 E.D. Eloundou and A. Ngapna, Un souverain bamoum en exil. Le roi Njoya Ibrahima à Yaoundé (1931-1933), Paris, 2011 M. Chimoun, ‘La contribution anglo-saxonne à la compréhension de l’écriture bamoum. Des signes du roi Njoya au manuel didactique de Njoya Mounga’, Éthiopiques 7 (2007) 137-47 C. Tardits, ‘Le Roi N’joya. L’image allemande et l’image française d’un souverain africain’, Paiduma 36 (1990) 303-17 C. Geary, Images from Bamum. German colonial photography at the court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902-1915, Washington DC, 1988 A. Ndam Njoya, Njoya. Réformateur du royaume bamoum, Paris, 1977 I. Dugast, ‘La langue secrète du Sultan Njoya’, Études Camerounaises 31-2 (1950) 231-60 O.G.S. Crawford, ‘The writing of Njoya’, Antiquity 9/36 (1935) 435-42 M. Göhring, ‘Der König von Bamum und seine Silbenschrift’, Mitteilungen Geographische Gesellschaft für Thuringen zu Jena 25 (1907) 68-9
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Nuot nkoueto ‘Pursue to attain’ Date 1916 Original Language Bamum Description King Njoya wrote Nuot nkoueto in 1916. It draws on Islam, Bamum traditional religion and Christianity, and was written when the political and religious situation in the Bamum kingdom was complex (see Tardits, ‘Pursue to attain’). It can be situated in the context of the power struggles in the Bamum region and the response of King Njoya to his encounters with Islam and Christianity. Some of the key contextual factors need to be mentioned before discussing the text itself. In 1896 the young King Njoya decided to convert to Islam, an event that marked the beginning of the religion in the Bamum region. In 1902, he became Christian, but then he returned to Islam in 1917. His entourage had followed him in his Islamic practice of prayer and fasting, and when he decided to convert to Christianity and sent his children to the mission school, some parents did the same, while not necessarily abandoning Islam. Despite the involvement of the court in both religions, the general population followed their own religious traditions. In 1916, Njoya designed a doctrine of salvation, inspired by what he knew of Islam and Christianity, but which in his view was better adapted to the way of life of his people. At this time, he was displaying some hostility towards both Christianity and Islam. Royal schools, in which the Bamum script and the history of the country were taught, replaced Christian establishments, and there were even some violent incidents. Njoya also forbade his sons to attend Qur’an school. It was in this religiously and politically unstable and unsettled context that he wrote Nuot nkoueto. The book was written in the a ka u ku alphabet. Its title means ‘Pursue to attain’ or ‘Pursue and achieve’, which indicates that if people are persistent they will attain the basics of the religions of salvation, Christianity and Islam (Njoya had been struck by the similarities between the two). Details about any manuscript of the work are hard to find, though it is not long: the French version consists of 36 pages with the text divided into 30 chapters. Some of these contain an account of the doctrinal foundation of the cult, while others enumerate the laws of God, the things that God
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condemns and loves, and the consequences of human conduct. The influence of Mālikī teaching is evident. No attempt is made in the book to address all possible issues. At times, it is evident that its author diverges from Islam: he ignores the pilgrimage to Mecca and makes Bamum rather than Arabic the language of the religion, and some aspects of his doctrinal teachings depart from traditional Islamic beliefs and practices. Ch. 1 is about the existence and character of God: ‘He has neither father, mother nor children. Nobody knows where He lives. It is He who created mankind’ (Tardits, ‘Pursue to attain’, p. 158). Ch. 2 is about the violent end of the world, chs 3 and 4 are about the resurrection and last judgement, ch. 5 deals with Ajana, and ch. 6 enumerates the sins that prevent one from entering the kingdom of God. The work refers to God creating the Parum which, according to Bamum traditional beliefs, are evil creatures, and also Chedani (Satan): ‘It is he who incites people to commit all sort of sins.’ These brief details show that in Nuot nkoueto basic themes from the ‘religions of salvation’ coexist with traditional beliefs. Themes related to the ‘religions of salvation’ include belief that there is a creator God, that the world will come to an end, that there will be judgement, and that there will be an afterlife in which humankind will be divided, some enjoying a permanent state of well-being, the rest eternal torment. Ajana, the place of blessing, is described more elaborately than the fire of torment. The text calls for five prayers a day, with the midday prayer on Fridays to be said at a mosque. Ablutions are required before prayer and fasting is also enjoined. Several chapters deal with human conduct in the light of the divine commandments. A fundamental feature emphasised from the start is that one’s conduct determines one’s fate in the afterlife. The blessings and pleasure of Ajana awaiting good people are elaborately described. This is significant because the Bamum tradition only mentions misfortunes against which people had to guard themselves. Nuot nkoueto also alludes explicitly to aspects of the Christian tradition, such as the rosary, the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, Christian imagery of Judgement Day, and so forth. The work was apparently circulated in 1916 and 1917, but opposition from Njoya’s family and remonstrations from Hausa marabouts must have carried weight, and Njoya returned to Islam. No doubt he realised that his knowledge of Islam was limited and the criticisms of the representatives of orthodoxy were well founded.
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The doctrinal basis of Nuot nkouoto and the important part played by ritual borrowings from the Mālikī rite are such that several writers have spoken of a short-lived ‘Bamum Islam’ (Tardits, Dubié, NjiasséNjoya), even though there are distinct differences between what it contains and orthodox Islam. Aboubakar Nijassé-Njoya carefully compares Nuot nkouoto with orthodox Islamic teaching, showing the aspects that clashed with Muslim orthodoxy and traditional practices, and pointing to the heretical element in the king’s approach. Claude Tardits discusses the Bamum traditions that are evident in the work and Njoya’s attempt to grasp the difficulties he obviously faced as an African king invested with a traditional religious role. Significance Nuot nkouoto is a unique example of a response to a particular context in which Christianity, Islam and traditional religions competed for public attention. It is maybe not surprising that it failed because its syncretistic character meant that it could not please the followers of any one of them. Publications Sultan [Ibrahim] Njoya, Poursuis pour atteindre, transliterated and translated into French by Ibrahim Njoya and Isaac Paré, 1961 (unpublished); recorded by Idelette Dugast and M.D.W. Jeffreys as no. 74 in their repertory J. Mfochivé, ‘L’éthique chrétienne face à l’interconnexion culturelle et religieuse en Afrique. Exemple du pays bamoun 1873-1937’, Leiden, 1983 (PhD Diss. Leiden University) Studies C. Tardits, ‘Pursue to attain. A royal religion’, in I. Fowler and D. Zeitlyn (eds), African crossroads. Intersections between history and anthropology in Cameroon, Providence RI, 1996, 141-64 Ibrahim Mouiche
Nigerian Muslim responses to the British colonisation of Northern Nigeria Date 1803-1918 Original Language Arabic and Hausa Description In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the European presence in the areas of what is today Northern Nigeria and southern Niger (as well as parts of north-eastern Cameroon and western Chad) initially took the form of exploratory journeys by individuals, expeditions operated by trading companies and occasional missionary ventures, before colonial rule was finally imposed. The presence of Europeans evoked a broad range of responses from Muslims, which are recorded in both Arabic and Hausa documents of various kinds. Understandably, references from the earlier 19th century are fleeting and brief, while later comments are more extensive and detailed. This entry discusses some of these materials, taking a chronological approach. The so-called Fulani jihad in Northern Nigeria under the leadership of Usman dan Fodio was directed against the traditional Habe or Hausa, who had been only nominally Islamised, and against ‘pagan’ kingdoms. Neither Europeans nor Christian communities were yet present in the area, and British colonialism was still beyond the immediate horizon of Usman and his flagbearers, who carried the jihad further to the south and to the west, establishing emirates and at least nominally claiming Islamisation by imposing Fulani rule. Leaders such as Usman dan Fodio and his son and successor Muḥammad Bello were very well aware of both the advance of the French in Africa and the British occupation of India, but they seem to have missed the reality of the imminent colonial threat against their own lands. Accordingly, if they made any references at all to Christians or Europeans, it was on a very abstract level and only using very generic terms as ‘unbelievers’ or ‘Franks’, following conventional Islamic juridical categories. Writings that referred to questions about non-believers were usually dependent upon classical sources and written in Arabic for a scholarly readership. For a broader readership, treatises, poems and other works were also composed, predominantly in Hausa and Fulfulde. At first, direct contact with Europeans was restricted to single meetings, such as visits from European travellers, or to the very peripheries of the
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Sokoto Caliphate, such as the riverine areas of the Niger-Benue. Treaties concluded by caliphs and individual travellers were established according to sharīʿa injunctions that regulated the rights of individual foreigners in the dār al-islām and took the form of an amān (temporary guarantee of security). Later accords between the caliphs or emirs and Europeans during the advancement of colonial intrusion in the wider region were likewise formulated according to sharīʿa law. They resembled permanent treaties with dhimmīs and therefore included clauses granting jurisdiction over Europeans in the caliphate and the payment of a tax. They were strictly confined to commercial transactions. British colonisation did not start until 1 January 1900, when the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria was formally proclaimed, with Sir Frederick Lugard as its first High Commissioner. It was implemented with the British conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903. However, as a prelude to direct colonial intervention and against the background of growing interest on the part of other European countries in the Niger area during the last quarter of the 19th century, the Royal Niger Company (known then as the ‘National African Company’) had been given consular powers in 1884 and a charter in 1886 that empowered it to act as an agent for British interests in the wider region (G.L. Baker, Trade winds on the Niger, London, 1996, pp. 37-75). Even before this, efforts at civilising and evangelising the people, trade, farming and scientific exploration had paved the way for colonial intervention, particularly the Niger expedition of 1841, facilitated by the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilisation of Africa (Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the banks of the Niger; Crowther and Schön, Journals). Sources from the 19th century comprise general treatises written by the Fodiawa, the intellectual Fulani elite, in this case primarily works of ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad Fūdī/Fodiye (Usman dan Fodio, 1754-1817) and Muḥammad Bello ibn ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad Fūdī (Mohammed Bello, 1781-1837) themselves. These were treaties in the form of an amān, as mentioned above, and later treaties granting permanent permission for trade, and letters. From the Fodiawa treatises, the most important, referred to time and again by Muslims as they responded to the challenge of British colonialism, was Usman dan Fodio’s Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā l-ʿibād (‘Explanation of the requirement for migration on servants of God’) of about 1806, while the works of his son Mohammad Bello and his younger brother ʿAbdallāh ibn Muḥammad Fūdī/Fodiye (c. 1764/7-1829) were overlooked. Contracts in the form of an amān, and also treaties and letters are preserved in reports and collections written or edited by
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contemporary European authors. An example is the accord made between Sultan Mohammad Bello and Hugh Clapperton in 1824, which is referred to in Clapperton’s journal of his second expedition ( Journal, p. 275). On the other hand, the Arabic original of the amān granted by Sultan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Bello to the German explorer Heinrich Barth in 1853 can be found in the Public Records Office, London (MS F093/97/1, 2 May 1853). There are indirect references to treaties in Crowther and Schön’s journal of the Niger expedition, such as the one they made with the Atta of Idah (Crowther and Schön, Journals, p. 101). Occasionally, original agreements or letters are preserved in correspondence, an instance being the agreement of the Emir of Nasarawa in 1883 giving permission to Bishop Samuel Crowther to build a station at Loko (CMS Archives Birmingham, file G3/ A3/1883 no. 156, Crowther to Lang, 16 October 1883). Equally, reports such as those of Lugard include two letters from Sultan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Abī Bakr al-ʿAtīq (Aburrahman) (r. 1891-1902) that express his complete lack of interest in making any political accord with the British (Lugard, Annual reports, p. 65). Beyond ‘official’ documents, there are references to Muslim-Christian relations that reveal their ambivalent nature. While the Revd Charles Paul, a Yoruba Christian missionary, was given permission by a son of the Sultan of Sokoto to go on a missionary tour through some Northern Nigerian emirates in the early 1890s, and Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was on friendly terms with three generations of Nupe rulers, the Emir of Bida wanted to have all white missionaries removed from his emirate (Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, p. 35). After the high tide of colonial confrontation and its aftermath around 1903, various Muslim treatises, letters and fatwās were written dealing with the question of what position to take in view of the successful implementation of British rule over Northern Nigeria. The author of the Risāla wa-naṣīḥa ilā l-muʿāṣirīn al-muʿtanīn bi-mā yudkhiluhum fī zumrat al-muslimīn al-nājīn (‘An epistle and advice to contemporaries who are concerned with what brings them into the fold of saved Muslims’), ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Bakr, born sometime in the 1840s or 1850s during the reign of Sultan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Bello, succeeded his father as imām of the mosque of Usman dan Fodio in Sokoto before he was appointed qāḍī under Sultan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAtīq. In 1903, he decided to follow Sultan Muḥammad al-Ṭāhir I (Muhammadu Attahiru I) on his hijra and was killed at the battle of Burmi on 27 July. His treatise, written in Arabic probably during the British advance on Sokoto in early 1903, discusses the three possible options for Muslims facing the European invasion: to
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fight, to submit, or to migrate. It decides for the last as the most appropriate course of action (ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Bakr, Ulama and colonialism). This option for migration received support in an anonymous 55-line poem in Hausa, Wakar Nasara (‘The song of the Christians’), written in the same period and partially translated by Mervyn Hiskett (Hiskett, Development of Islam, pp. 269-71). The verses consider the alternatives to migration: death, submission, or ‘following the Christians’, who are referred to as ‘enemies of Muḥammad’, offering a gift that is ‘toxic’ and ‘have fitna [civil strife, temptation or turmoil – a term with strong religious connotations] and machination, to spoil the religion of Islam’. The conclusion of the poem is that ‘it is obligatory on everyone to prepare for hijra’, and it promises that ‘if Almighty Allah shows mercy on us, He will give us a mujaddid [reformer] for us to overwhelm the Christians’. In view of ‘the signs of the hour’ signified by the British conquest and indicating the imminent end of the world, prayer, the remembrance (dhikr) of God’s name, moral restoration and meticulous piety are mandatory for every Muslim. This anonymous poem must not be confused with a poem of the same title written by al-Ḥājj ʿUmar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ʿUthmān Krachi/ʿUmar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ʿUthmān al-Ṣalaghawī al-Kabawī al-Kanawī (1858-1934), also known as Imam Imoru, Umaru Krakye (or Karki) and Muhammadu Salaga, one of the most renowned Muslim writers in the region during his lifetime. Born in Kano and spending the first decades of his life in Hausaland, he moved to Salaga in the early 1890s and later to Kete Krachi in the Volta Region of what is today Ghana. Between about 1899 and 1907, he wrote three poetic narratives that came to be referred to as ‘colonial poems’ concerned with the conquest of West Africa by European powers and the establishment of colonial rule: Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduha bi-l-naẓar (‘Entrance to the water gorge of history, by one who comes to it with insight’, a qaṣīda in Arabic forewarning Africans of colonial conquest by summoning the dawn of Africa’s rebirth), Naẓm al-laʾālī bi-ikhbārin wa-tanbīhi l-kirām (‘A string of pearls for informing and warning the noble’, a qaṣīda in Arabic referring to the African colonial conquest by depicting clashes between the colonial troops and Africans), and Lābārin Naṣārā (‘History of the Christians’), also known as Wākar al-Naṣārā (‘The song of the Christians’), a Hausa poem, written in ajami, grieving over the colonial conquest and the establishment of colonial rule, as well as the impact of colonialism on African cultures and societies. ʿUmar’s oeuvre generally, and his Lābārin Naṣārā specifically, are highly ambivalent. On the one
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hand, he laments the occupation of Africa by the colonial powers, which he conceptualises as a triumph of the ‘Christians’ over dār al-islām, and on the other, he admires the colonial powers’ bravery, warns against challenging the Christians’ authority, and concludes that, for his part, he is thankful to God ‘for they have treated me well, these Christians’ (Gibrill, ‘Structural-functional analysis’, p. 345). Muḥammad al-Bukhārī ibn Aḥmad ibn ʿUthmān ibn Abī Bakr (c. 18421910), who was the Wazīr of Sokoto from 1886 until his death in 1910, serving under four successive caliphs, took a different stance from the Risāla wa-naṣīḥa and the anonymous Wakar Nasara. In his Risālat al-wazīr ilā ahl al-ʿilm wa-l-tadabbur (‘The treatise of the vizier to the people of knowledge and reflection’; see Adeleye, ‘Dilemma of the wazir’), he ponders in great detail all the possible options, taking into consideration the promise of the British that they would not interfere with religious practices or prohibit the observance of the Five Pillars of Islam. While he does not reject hijra outright, he rates it as an impracticable option. Likewise, due to the real military power of the colonialists, fighting and martyrdom do not seem to be feasible possibilities because they would lead to the danger of Islam being entirely destroyed. Accordingly, the wazīr argues for a sort of conditional, outward submission, and justifies his suggestion by pointing to the doctrine of taqiyya (‘dissimulation’) derived from Q 3:28, and by referring to the consensus (ijmāʿ) of the ʿulamāʾ that it ‘is permissible […] to have relations with unbelievers and to befriend them (out of fear of them) with the tongue but not with the heart’ (Adeleye, ‘Dilemma of the wazir’, p. 307). To be on the safe side, he sought the advice of the Qāḍī of Gwandu, Aḥmad ibn Saʿd ibn Muḥammad al-Amīn (d. after 1903), who issued a fatwā fully endorsing the wazīr’s decision; this is included in the Risāla. Beyond references to qur’anic injunctions and legal discourses, both the wazīr and the qāḍī make a case for their position by what Muhammad S. Umar has characterised as ‘a close reading’ of Shaykh Usman dan Fodio’s Bayān in order to advocate their own views (Umar, Islam and colonialism, p. 81). At the climax of African military encounters with British colonialists, immediately before, during and after the British campaigns against the Sokoto caliphate, there is a growing diversity of genres in Muslim responses to the British conquest, from traditional forms such as letters, treatises and epistles to poems and songs in both oral and written forms, and legal opinions. Again, we come across letters referred to or quoted in contemporary European sources, such as a letter by the Emir of Kano to Edmund D. Morel, the editor of the African Mail, confirming what he
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had said in an interview with the journalist: ‘As regards the preaching (of Christianity) […] my opinion is that it were better to stop it altogether. […] On the other hand, as regards secular matters and the affairs of this world, we can do anything’ (Morel, Nigeria, 1911, p. 135). The anonymous poem Begen yaskin shuhadar Hadejia (‘In praise of the martyrs of Hadejia’), about the battle that took place in 1906 when Hausa troops under the leadership of Muhammad Haru, the Emir of Hadejia, were defeated by British troops, refers to Christian-Muslim relations only insofar as it remembers the emir as ‘martyr, manifestly’ (Hiskett, History of Hausa Islamic verse, p. 145); he is still memorialised as mai shahada (‘the martyred one’) with the kirari (‘praise-epithet’) of the man who ‘did not follow the Christians’ (Umar, Islam and colonialism, p. 90). Another genre of poems consists of Hausa songs of warfare. One that memorialises the uprising in Satiru, a small town about 20 km from Sokoto, in the same year, mocks Christians as adults who dress in children’s clothes, pointing to the moral decadence of the Christians in their mode of dressing that contradicts Islamic dress codes by leaving the lower part of the legs uncovered (Umar, Islam and colonialism, p. 92). Abū Bakr ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿd ibn Muḥammad al-Amīn (d. after 1908), the son of the Qāḍī of Gwandu referred to above, discusses legal aspects of the colonialists’ presence in his Irshād al-ḥayārā fī muʿāmalat aʾimmatinā bi-l-Naṣārā (‘Guidance for the perplexed on the conduct of our leaders towards the Christians’), written about 1906. He argues that colonial rule must be accepted because of British military superiority and for the sake of survival, and refers to the principle of dissimulation (taqiyya) of otherwise banned ‘friendship’, namely, ‘friendship out of fear and necessity’ (muwālāt al-khawf wa-l-ḍarūra). This is a concession (rukhṣa) to the wellbeing (maṣlaḥa) of the Muslim community by preferring the principle of takhfīf (‘softening’) to that of tashdīd (‘hardening’). While he deplores the fact that the Muslims have fallen victim to the British colonialists, who as Europeans are identical with ‘the people of the book’ (ahl al-kitāb), he holds that Muslim involvement is justified because this will at least leave open the option of imparting some basic moral knowledge to the British, who as infidels will otherwise go completely astray because they do not know how to establish justice (Umar, Islam and colonialism, p. 110). A specific aspect of Hausa poetry can be found in the poems of ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mūsā (d. 1924), known as Aliyu dan Sidi, who was installed by the British as Emir of Zazzau in 1903 and deposed in 1920. His poems are pervaded by allegorical allusions that occasionally make them somewhat opaque. His Wakar zuwa birnin Kano (‘The poem on going to
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Kano’) deals with the event of a Durbar festival in Kano, referring twice to the Europeans/Christians by mentioning ‘white’ and ‘black’ who are present, though without indicating the hierarchial relationship between colonisers and colonised. However, he juxtaposes ‘the white-man’s learning at Nasarawa’, the colonial school in the ‘Christian’ quarter outside the walled city, and Islamic learning inside the city walls, implicitly contrasting incompatible modes of knowledge acquisition aiming at different bodies of knowledge. Wakar diga (‘The poem on the digger’), about the construction of a railway, acknowledges European technological capability but puts it into perspective by emphasising that all power belongs to God alone, while Wakar batu (‘Poem on conversation’) alludes to the imminent changes prompted by the arrival of the Europeans, but rates these changes as a reversal of the natural order. Less ambiguous are the responses to British colonialism of ʿulamāʾ such as Zumʿa ibn Muḥammad al-Fullānī (or al-Fallātī), called Malam Zum’atu (d. 1948). While it is not quite clear whether he originally came from Yola, Kano or Kumasi in what is today Ghana, he composed poems expressing a critical attitude to the changes brought about by colonisation. His ʿAjāʾib al-asfār wa-mtiḥān al-bilād wa-l-aqṭār (‘The wonders of travels and the assessment of countries and regions’) reflects on journeys and concludes with a prayer to God, asking for protection against ‘the evil of all types of pagans and Christians’, who bring about fitna, while his Qaṣīda dāliyya (poem rhyming on the letter dāl, also ascribed to a certain Isḥāq Kano under the title Dalāʾil al-Mahdī, ‘The signs of the Mahdī’) laments the moral decline caused by colonialism that he refers to as ‘an eschatological sign of the hour’ (Umar, ‘Muslims’ eschatological discourses’, pp. 73-8). Likewise, open criticism of colonialism is articulated in anonymous poems most likely composed by ʿulamāʾ, such as Taʿziyat al-ikhwān (‘Consolation to the brothers’) or the untitled poems called Rāʾiyya and Nūniyya (named from their rhyming letters rāʾ and nūn) that express the same criticisms (Umar, Islam and colonialism, pp. 172-7). It is not known exactly when these poems were written, though they are likely to date from the 1920s, placing them outside the scope of this survey. Muhammad Dikko (1865-1944), who was installed by the British in 1906 as Emir of Katsina, decided for an option different from the harsh criticism of colonialism found in these texts by demarcating Islam and colonialism along the lines of considerations quite similar to those of Wazīr Muḥammad al-Bukhārī. His views are documented in journals of his travels dictated to his scribe, Malam Barmo. In his opinion, there is no absolute antagonism between Islam and colonialism as the colonisers do not interfere in religious issues. Later, he shifted to a strategy of
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‘domesticating’ colonialism by utilising selected colonial innovations to the advantage of the emirate. At the very end of the period under consideration, new genres appear that mark a very particular type of Muslim response to colonialism, namely conversion stories like that of Yarima Inusa, who had migrated from what is today Niger to Northern Nigeria and was baptised in 1914. This is written in the form of an autobiography and a diary begun in about 1910 (Shankar, ‘Fifty-year Muslim conversion’; Shankar, Who shall enter paradise?). Literary compositions such as novels by Western-educated Muslims are not found before the 1930s. Significance Muslim responses to British colonisation in Northern Nigeria show major shifts of emphasis. Some of the early sources suggest that the Europeans were viewed with the utmost suspicion, at least from the perspective of those in power in the Sokoto heartlands, despite repeated attempts by colonial agents to promote ‘the theme of British friendship toward Muslims’ (Umar, Islam and colonialism, p. 28) that was first mentioned by Hugh Clapperton in his conversation with Sultan Muhammad Bello (Denham and Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries, second edition, 1826, vol. 2, pp. 294-314). Towards the end of the century, as a result of growing secularisation and the colonisers’ strategic considerations of the emirs’ anticipated reaction, distinctions were increasingly made between mission and religion on the one hand and, on the other, different aspects of the colonial programme such as trade and commerce. Whether this had an impact on the emirs’ attitude to Christianity and mission is still an open question – the reactions of the Muslim leaders to missionaries’ requests were too varied to give a clear picture. Sources of Muslim responses to the British conquest of Northern Nigeria primarily reflect three possibilities in this situation of conflict with powerful ‘unbelievers’: military confrontation, hijra, or submission (including the strategies of taqiyya and clandestine opposition). Later, when colonial control was firmly established, Muslims responded in a variety of ways to the challenges that were materialising, by choosing options ranging from silent opposition and resistance to compliance and to what M.S. Umar has referred to as ‘compartmentalisation’ of Islam. The strategies they adopted – apart from the defence of traditional morality, including dress codes and gender relations – were aimed at preserving the religious domain as a focal point of Muslim identity. In this process, a wide variety of traditional Islamic concepts was applied, both to assess responses to sudden new eventualities and to vindicate feasible strategies
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as consistent with Islamic principles. These extended from fitna, jihād and hijra to shahāda, tawḥīd and taqiyya. Predictably, one of the common features of the sources considered here is that throughout the whole 19th century the responses found in them interpreted the situation within an explicitly Islamic frame of reference. The responses they made referred back to injunctions in the Qur’an and Hadith, and to advice in classical and more recent writings. In this way, present decisions were legitimised by reference back to accepted authorities. Thus, the administration of the Sokoto Empire was structured according to the ideals of al-Māwardī’s political theory. Similarly, Muḥammad al-Bukhārī, the Wazīr of Sokoto, made his case for surrendering to the British colonial power by referring to Usman dan Fodio’s Bayān. Publications MS London, Public Record Office – F093/97/1 (2 May 1853; amān granted by Sultan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Bello to the German explorer Heinrich Barth) MS Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, CMS archives – G3/ A3/1883 No. 156, (16 October 1883; letter from Crowther to Lang) D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 1826 D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 18262, repr. 1926, 1985, Cambridge, 2011; 008585262 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) D. Denham and H. Clapperton, Voyages et découvertes dans le nord et dans les parties centrales de l’Afrique: au travers du grand désert, jusqu’au 10e degré de latitude nord et depuis Kouka, dans le Bournou, jusqu’à Sackatou, capitale de l’empire des Felatah: exécutés pendant les années 1822, 1823 et 1824, trans. J.-B.-B. Eyriès, Paris, 1826 (French trans.); bpt6k104427v (digitised version available through BNF) D. Denham, H. Clapperton and W. Oudney, Beschreibung der Reisen und Entdeckungen im noerdlichen und mittlern Africa in den Jahren 1822 bis 1824, Weimar, 1827 (German trans.); 3810475 (digitised version available through Universität Innsbruck Digital Library) D. Denham, H. Clapperton and W. Oudney, Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822, 1823 and 1824, London, 18283, repr. 1831; 001605521 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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H. Clapperton, Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo, London, 1829, repr. Philadelphia PA, 1829, London, 1926, 1966, Cambridge, 2015; 008585196 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton, Second voyage dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique, depuis le Golfe de Benin jusqu’a Sackatou, pendant les années 1825, 1826 et 1827: suivi du voyage de Richard Lander, de Kano à la côte maritime, trans. J.-B.-B. Eyriès and P.F.L. de la Renaudière, Paris, 1829 (French trans.); 008396350 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) H. Clapperton, Reis in de Binnenlanden van Afrika ... gedurende de jaren 1825, 1826, 1827: benevens het reisverhaal van Richard Lander, zijn’bediende, Rotterdam, 1830-1 (Dutch trans.); 008643538 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) J. Bruce-Lockhart and P.E. Lovejoy (eds), Hugh Clapperton into the interior of Africa. Records of the second expedition, 1825-1827, Leiden, 2005 R. Lander, Records of Captain Clapperton’s last expedition to Africa, with the subsequent adventures of the author, London, 1830, repr. London, 1967, Hildesheim, 2000, Cambridge, 2011; 001609525 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) S.A. Crowther and J.F. Schön, Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther: who, with the sanction of Her Majesty’s government, accompanied the expedition up the Niger, in 1841, on behalf of the Church Missionary Society, London, 1842, repr. London, 1970, La Vergne TN, 2009; 006535714 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) S.A. Crowther and J.C. Taylor, The gospel on the banks of the Niger. Journals and notices of the native missionaries accompanying the Niger Expedition of 1857-1859, London, 1859, repr. London, 1968, Cambridge, 2010; 9780511697852 (digitised version available through Cambridge Library Collection) E.D. Morel, Nigeria. Its peoples and problems, London, 1911; OL37806W (digitised version available through Internet Archive) E.D. Morel, Nigeria. Its peoples and problems, London, 19122 E.D. Morel, Nigeria. Its peoples and problems, London, 19683 F.J.D. Lugard, Annual reports. Northern Nigeria 1900-1911, London, 1913 R.A. Adeleye, ‘The dilemma of the wazir. The place of the Risālat alwazir ilā ahl al-ʿilm wa-al-tadabbur in the history of the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 4 (1968) 285-312 (includes the text of the risāla and an English trans.)
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H.F. Blackwell (ed.), The occupation of Hausaland, 1900-1904, being a translation of Arabic letters found in the house of the wazir of Sokoto, Bohari, in 1903, London, 1969 S. Piłaszewicz, ‘“The arrival of the Europeans”. A Hausa poem on the colonial conquest of West Africa by Alḥāji ʿUmaru’, Africana Bulletin 22 (1975) 55-129 N. Skinner, An anthology of Hausa literature in translation, Madison WI, 1977, pp. 145-9 ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad Fūdī, Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā l-ʿibād wa-bayān wujūb naṣb al-imām wa-iqāmat al-jihād, ed. and trans. F.H. Elmasri, Khartoum and Oxford, 1978 M. Hiskett, The development of Islam in West Africa, London 1984, pp. 269-71 ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Bakr, Ulama and colonialism in Nigeria: Risāla ilā al-muʿāṣirīn by al-Qāḍī, trans. O. Bello, Sokoto, n.d. [1985?] M.S. Umar, ‘Muslims’ eschatological discourses on colonialism in Northern Nigeria’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (1999) 59-84 M.S. Umar, Islam and colonialism. Intellectual responses of Muslims of Northern Nigeria to British colonial rule, Leiden 2006 (includes translations of several texts) S. Shankar, ‘A fifty-year Muslim conversion to Christianity. Religious ambiguities and colonial boundaries in Northern Nigeria, c. 19061963’, in B.F. Soares (ed.), Muslim-Christian encounters in Africa, Leiden, 2006, 89-114, pp. 95-114 (extracts from Inusa’s ‘diary’ and ‘autobiography’) M. Gibrill, ‘A structural-functional analysis of the poetics of Arabic qaṣīdah. An ethnolinguistic study of three qaṣīdahs on colonial conquest of Africa by Alhājj ʿUmar b. Abī Bakr b. ʿUthmān Krachi (18581934)’, Bloomington IN, 2015 (PhD Diss. Indiana University) Studies S. Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Christian origins in Muslim northern Nigeria, ca. 1890-1975, Athens OH, 2014, pp. 3-23 Umar, Islam and colonialism Shankar, ‘Fifty-year Muslim conversion’ Umar, ‘Muslims’ eschatological discourses’ M.T. Usman, ‘Intellectual tradition in Sokoto Emirate 1903-1960’, Sokoto, 1998 (PhD Diss. Usumanu Danfodiyo University) G.L. Baker, Trade winds on the Niger. The saga of the Royal Niger Company, 1930-1971, London, 1996
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J.O. Hunwick (ed.), The writings of Central Sudanic Africa, Leiden, 1995 J.O. Hunwick (ed.), The writings of Western Sudanic Africa, Leiden, 1995 A.E. Barnes, ‘Evangelization where it is not wanted. Colonial administrators and missionaries in Northern Nigeria during the first third of the twentieth century’, Journal of Religion in Africa 25 (1995) 412-41 S. Junaid, ‘Resistance to Western culture in the Sokkwato Caliphate. A lesson to generations yet unborn’, in A.M. Kani and K.A. Gandi (eds), State and society in the Sokoto Caliphate, Zaria, 1990, 238-53 A.B. Yahya, ‘The significance of the 19th-century Hausa poetry teachings’, in A.M. Kani and K.A. Gandi (eds), State and society in the Sokoto Caliphate, Zaria, 1990, 280-90 A.S. Mohammed, ‘A social interpretation of the Satiru revolt of c. 18941906 in Sokoto province’, Zaria, 1987 (MSc. Diss. Ahmadu Bello University) A.-M. al-Amin, ‘Al-usus al-fiqhiyya li-hijrat amīr al-muʾminīn at-Tāhir al-awwal min Sakkwato’, Dirāsāt Ifriqiyya 5 (1989) 21-49 A.A. Boahen, African perspectives on colonialism, Baltimore MD, 1987 J.U.J. Asiegbu, Nigeria and its British invaders, 1851-1920. A thematic documentary history, New York, 1984 Hiskett, Development of Islam Z. Uthman and N. Bamalli (eds.), Wakokin Aliyu dan Sidi, Sarkin Zazzau, Zaria, 1980 D. Abdulkadir (ed.), Zababun wakokin da da na yanzu, Lagos, 1979 B. Saʾid, ‘Gudummawar masu jihadi kan abadin Hausa’, Kano, 1978 (MA Diss. Bayero University) M. Aminu, ‘Sharhin wakokin Hausa na karni goma sha tara da karni ashirin’, Kano, 1977 (MA Diss. Bayero University) E.P.T. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, London, 1975 M. Hiskett, A history of Hausa Islamic verse, London, 1975 J.N. Paden, Religion and political culture in Kano, Berkeley CA, 1973 R.A. Adeleye, Power and diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804-1906, London, 1971 T. Mustapha, ‘A historiographical study of four works of Alhājj ʿUmar b. Abī Bakr of Kete-Krachi (ca 1850-1934)’, Montreal, 1970 (MA Diss. McGill University) Adeleye, ‘Dilemma of the wazir’ M.B. Kagara, Sarkin Katsina, 1865-1944. Alhaji Muhammadu Dikko, Zaria, 1951 Klaus Hock
Lord Lugard Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, First Baron Lugard Date of Birth 22 January 1858 Place of Birth Madras (Chennai), India Date of Death 11 April 1945 Place of Death Dorking, England
Biography
Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, known simply as Sir Frederik Lugard or Lord Lugard, was born in Madras (present-day Chennai) in India on 22 January 1858 to the Reverend Frederick Grueber Lugard, British Army Chaplain, and his wife Mary Howard, youngest daughter of the Reverend John Garton Howard. Raised in Worcester, he received his education at Rossall School, Lancashire, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He was commissioned in 1878 into what was called the Ninth Foot (East Norfolk Regiment) and joined the second battalion in India. He participated in the Second Afghan War (1879-80), the Sudan Campaign (1884-5), and the Third Burmese War (1886-7). He was Military Administrator of Uganda (1890-92), High Commissioner of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate (19006), Governor of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate (1912-14), and later Governor-General of the Combined Colony of the Northern and Southern Protectorates of Nigeria (1914-19). Lord Lugard is best known as the architect of the British colonial policy of indirect rule, which had a direct impact on the development of Islam, Christianity and Christian-Muslim relations especially, but not exclusively, in Nigeria. Apart from being referred to as the father of indirect rule, he is credited with being the initiator of policies supporting non-interference by Christian missionaries in areas that were perceived to be dominated by Muslims. In 1900, as High Commissioner of the Northern Nigeria Protectorate, which fell within the area of the Sokoto Caliphate (established in 1809 by Uthman dan Fodio’s jihad), Lugard issued a directive of non-interference with the Muslim religion inside the protectorate. This was the result of a pledge he made to the Sultan of Sokoto that he would protect Muslims of the north from Christian missionaries.
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Lugard received multiple recognitions for his services, culminating in his elevation as Baron Lugard of Abinger in 1928. In 1902, he married the writer and journalist Flora Louise Shaw; the couple had no children. He died in Dorking, Surrey, on 11 April 1945 at the age of 87.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, art. ‘Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry, Baron Lugard (18581945)’, in ODNB T.P. Ofcansky, ‘A bio-bibliography of F.D. Lugard’, History in Africa 9 (1982) 209-19 L.H. Gann and P. Duignan, The rulers of British Africa 1870-1914, Stanford CA, 1978 F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, London, 1965 M. Perham, Lugard, vol. 1. The years of adventure 1858-1898, London, 1956; Lugard, vol. 2. The years of authority 1898-1945, London, 1960 D. Middleton, Lugard in Africa, London, 1959
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The dual mandate in British tropical Africa Date 1922 Original Language English Description In The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, first published in 1922 and republished in 1965, Lord Lugard elucidates the ‘foundations of British colonial policies in Africa’. Described as a ‘masterpiece of literature and policymaking’ (Ogechukwu Ezekwem, Review of The dual mandate, https://notevenpast.org/the-dual-mandate-in-british-tropical-africa-by -frederick-john-dealtry-lugard-1965/), the 696-page work became a handbook for all administrators of British rule in Africa, and also an influencing force on them. It apportions blame for the partitioning of Africa to French and German rivalry, and suggests that Britain became involved unwillingly. As its title suggests, the book contends that Britain, having become involved, had a dual mandate in Africa, first and foremost to administer the continent and exploit its resources for imperial benefit, and second, to develop the continent. It outlines how Islam befits the African, and also contends that Western-style education as promoted by the missionaries
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alienates Africans from their own people and makes them less submissive to colonial rule. The governance structure Lugard promotes hinges on the concepts of decentralisation, continuity and cooperation, resulting in so-called ‘indirect rule’. In practice, this meant that traditional governance structures remained in place where British rule prevailed, and that predominantly Muslim territories continued to be ruled by Muslim authorities, with the colonial authorities barring Christian missionary societies from working in them. The separation of Christians and Muslims in distinct protectorates came to an end in 1914 when the British amalgamated the northern and southern Nigeria protectorates into a colony, with Lugard as its first Governor-General. This marked the beginning of Christian-Muslim interaction in Nigeria. Significance The story of Christian-Muslim relations in Africa, commencing with the policy of non-interaction between Christianity and Islam within the framework of British colonial rule, always cites Lord Lugard as the initiator. Though his book mainly focuses on Nigeria, it also exerted influence on other parts of British Africa. In the Gold Coast (now Ghana), for example, the northern territories, which were a British protectorate and were perceived as Muslim, were declared a no-go area for Christian missionaries in what was regarded as an implementation of the Lugardian principle. In Sudan (now Sudan and South Sudan), Zanzibar and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) similar policies of separate administrations were also set in place. While it is disputable whether Lord Lugard should be held responsible for partition in every one of these countries simply because the British policy of indirect rule was his brain-child, the explicit prevention of Christian missionary activities in perceived or actual areas of dominant Muslim presence was undoubtedly his initiative. Publications F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 1922; 001607243 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 19232 F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 19263
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F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 19294 F.J.D. Lugard, The dual mandate in British tropical Africa, Edinburgh, 19655, repr. Abingdon, 2005, London, 2013 (M. Perham, Introduction) Studies U. Bello, ‘Colonial essentialism in Lord Lugard’s “The dual mandate”. A critical textual analysis’, Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal 4 (2017) 73-90 O. Vaughan, Religion and the making of Nigeria, Durham NC, 2016 S.T. Ali et al. (eds), The road to the two Sudans, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014 A.E. Barnes, ‘The great prohibition. The expansion of Christianity in colonial Northern Nigeria’, History Compass 8 (2010) 440-54 P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British imperialism. Innovation and expansion 1688-1914, New York, 1993 Z.O. Apata, ‘Lugard and the creation of provincial administration in Northern Nigeria 1900-1918’, African Study Monographs 11 (1990) 143-52 M. Crowder, West Africa under colonial rule, London, 1976 Middleton, Lugard in Africa G.C. Latham, ‘Indirect rule and education in East Africa’, Journal of the International African Institute 7 (1934) 423-30 R.S. Rattray, The tribes of the Ashanti hinterland, 2 vols, Oxford, 1932 Johnson A. Mbillah
Godfrey Dale Date of Birth 1861 Place of Birth Lewisham Date of Death 15 October 1941 Place of Death Blyth, Suffolk
Biography
Godfrey Dale (1861-1941) was born in Lewisham, London. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, was ordained in 1886 and served at St Peter’s Church, Rochester, before joining the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in 1889. From 1890 to 1897, he was based in Bondei where he became proficient in Bondei and Swahili. He translated the Gospel of John into Bondei, Anjili kwa Yohana (Magila, Zanzibar, 1895), and wrote an article: ‘An account of the principal customs and habits of the natives inhabiting the Bondei country’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1896) 181-239. In 1897, he resigned from the mission in order to marry; at that time the mission only accepted single missionaries and expected priests to be celibate. After Dale returned to Britain, he spent a term at Oxford studying Arabic and Islam. His bishop, William Richardson (r. 1895-1901), referred to this in a talk given to UMCA supporters, saying that there was a need for workers to know Arabic in order to work in Zanzibar (Church Times, 11 June 1897, pp. 686-7). Dale and his wife Janet then spent five years in Britain and he was vicar of All Saints, Newmarket, from 1898 to 1902. During this time, he regularly spoke at UMCA meetings in support of the mission. For example, the Church Times of 15 April 1898 advertised a meeting in Shoreditch where Dale would speak on 21 April; the Church Times of 31 May 1901 gives a report of the UMCA’s 40th anniversary meeting and of Dale’s speech (p. 665). In 1902, the couple were accepted by UMCA, Janet as a teacher. Dale was appointed as a specialist on Islam and a worker amongst Muslims, based in Zanzibar with responsibilities at the cathedral where he became a canon and later archdeacon of Zanzibar. In September 1903, he gave a series of lectures on four Sundays at the cathedral on ‘the contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism’. These were published in 1904, going into six editions by 1913.
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In 1905, Dale spent a year at Oxford studying Arabic before returning to Zanzibar. His obituary in the Church Times reports that: ‘On his return to Zanzibar he used Arabic continually and his knowledge of the language became very great. It was his regular practice to meet Mohammedans, both Arabs and Africans, in public discussion, listening to all their arguments against Christianity and discovering the most effective ways of answering them’ (‘Obituary’). Randall Pouwels reports that these debates centred on topics such as the divinity of Christ versus the miracles of Muḥammad or Ḥusayn; the crucifixion of Christ; the Holy Trinity; Muḥammad as Paraclete (R.L. Pouwels, Horn and crescent, Cambridge, 2002, p. 187). Dale wrote two tracts in Swahili, Khabari za dini ya kiislamu (‘Notes on Mohammedanism’), and Maisha ya Muhammad (‘The life of Muḥammad’). Both were published in 1909 and were republished many times after, forming the basis for Islam and Africa. An introduction to the study of Islam for African Christians (1925), which he prepared for students in Nyasaland (Malawi). Dale retired from the mission field in 1920, due to poor health. He remained with UMCA, working at their offices in London until 1924 and publishing a number of books, including The peoples of Zanzibar. Their customs and religious beliefs (London, 1920), and Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu (‘Interpretation of the Arabic Qur’an’, London, 1923), the first version of the Qur’an in Swahili. In 1925 he edited a revision of Darkness or light. Studies in the history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, illustrating the theory and practice of missions, adding ch. 7, ‘Islam in Africa’. In 1925 Dale became vicar of Sternfield, Saxmundham, where he served until his death in 1941, continuing to edit the UMCA magazine Central Africa.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Records and copies of books and magazines published by the UMCA, including by Godfrey Dale, are held as part of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) archives at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. ‘Notices’ Church Times, 17 June 1887, p. 498 (Dale’s ordination as priest by the Bishop of Rochester on 11 June 1887) ‘Report’, Church Times, 28 May 1897, p. 643 (of Dale speaking at the AGM of UMCA on its 36th anniversary at Church House, London) ‘Report of UMCA meeting’, Church Times, 11 June 1897, pp. 686-7 (when the Bishop of Zanzibar and Dale spoke)
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‘Notice’, Church Times, 16 December 1898, p. 726 (of Dale’s appointment as Vicar of All Saints, Newmarket) ‘Report of UMCA anniversary meeting’, Church Times, 31 May 1901, p. 665 (where Dale spoke) ‘Report’, Church Times, 20 January 1905, p. 71 (of a speech by Dale where he refers to Arabic and that the African is reached by the African) A.E.M. Anderson-Morshead, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. 1, 1859-1908, London, 1909 ‘Obituary’, Church Times, 24 October 1941, p. 621 A.G. Blood, The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, vol. 2, 19071932, London, 1952 Secondary J.A. Chesworth, ‘Anglicans and Islam in East Africa. The Diocese of Zanzibar and the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (1923-63)’, ICMR 25 (2014) 231-43 E. Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims in East Africa before the Great War’, Henry Martyn Seminar, Cambridge, 2011; https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Sanders-Ethan-9-Mar-2011.pdf
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism Date 1904 Original Language English Description From 1902, Dale’s work was as a specialist in Islam for the UMCA. In September 1903, he gave a series of four lectures at Christ Church Cathedral in the heart of Zanzibar Old Town. In 1904, the lectures were printed at the Universities’ Mission Press, Mkunazini, Zanzibar, as The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism. Four lectures delivered in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar (43 pages, plus 8 unnumbered pages of front matter). Subsequent editions, with unchanged text, were published in London by the UMCA, 63 pages in length, including front matter; all references are to the sixth edition of 1913. The ‘Introduction’ (pp. 5-6) by John Hine (r. 1901-8), the bishop of Zanzibar, explains that the lectures had been given at the bishop’s behest and that they
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seemed […] likely to be useful to others [...] who live and work in Muhammadan lands. [… in] contact with a great religion like Muhammadanism, [… there is need for a] guide as to the real truth about that religion, and as to the relation it stands to Christianity. (p. 5)
In the ‘Preface’ (p. 7), Dale lists his sources of information as the translations of the Qur’an by Henry Palmer (1880), John Rodwell (1861) and George Sale (1734), as well as the Qur’an in the original Arabic, together with Edward Sell’s Faith of Islam (1880), John Muehleisen Arnold’s Islam and Christianity (1866) and Thomas Hughes’s Dictionary of Islam (1885). He adds: But the conclusions to which these and other books have led me have been verified by constant discussions with Muhammadans, by contact with Muhammadanism in Zanzibar and East Africa, by some study of the Qur’an in the original, and by some knowledge of Muhammadanism as it is popularly believed and practised in Zanzibar at the present time. (p. 7)
Each of the lectures, which are presented in four chapters, contrasts an aspect of the two faiths. Lecture 1 is ‘Christianity and Muhammadanism’ (pp. 11-22). Dale’s use of the Qur’an in ch. 1 will serve as an example of his approach. John 1:1 is used to introduce the subject of the Incarnation, and Muslim responses are given from the Qur’an, using both Palmer’s 1880 and Rodwell’s 1876 versions (both have different versification to present-day versions). Hear the Muhammadan version; I quote the Qur’an, Sura cxii. [Q 112] the chapter of Unity: Say, ‘‘He is God alone, God the Eternal, He begets not and is not begotten. Nor is there like unto Him any one.’ These words are held in particular veneration, and if a Christian enters into discussion with a Muhammadan he is certain to hear them. They occur in the daily prayers. (p. 16)
Several other passages from the Qur’an are used to demonstrate that Islam considers that Jesus ‘was created from the earth’ (Q 3.59 [Palmer, 3.51]), that ‘Christians twist their tongue concerning the Book’ (Q 3.78 [Palmer, 3.72]), ‘Infidels now are they who say, “Verily God is the Messiah son of Mary!” Say: “And who could aught obtain from God, if he chose to destroy the Messiah”’ (Q 5.17 [Rodwell, 5.19]), ‘The Jews say Ezra is the son of God; and the Christians say that the Messiah is the son of God; that is what they say with their mouths, imitating the sayings of those who misbelieved before. – God fight them! how they lie’ (Palmer Q 9.30).
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Having quoted these verses Dale then adds: I have no doubt myself that Muhammad entirely misconceived the nature of the Christian belief in the Incarnation. He took a carnal, a material view of the Christian doctrine of the Sonship of Christ. […] Can Christian people then allow races, even backward, to be misled by a faith which denies the central doctrine of the Christian religion? (p. 17)
The chapter then examines Muslim views of the Incarnation and Atonement: The Muhammadan denies altogether both the Incarnation and Atonement. In fact it is said in a book about the birth of Muhammad very much read in Zanzibar that the day Muhammad was born all the crosses fell down. There is a tradition that Muhammad hated crosses so much that he destroyed everything that was marked with one. Some Christians have had the same dislike to the symbol but they have generally been those who have preached most vigorously the fact. The Muhammadan denies the fact. (p. 19)
It then examines Muslim views of the Crucifixion and Resurrection: Some think that He did not die but will come again, overcome the great Dejjal or Anti-Christ and then die Himself. A vacant place is reserved for our Saviour’s grave near the Prophet’s tomb at Medina. Sura iii. says: ‘God said, Jesus, I will cause thee to die and I will take thee up unto Me.’ In sura xix. Jesus says, ‘Peace be on the day I was born and the day whereon I shall die and the day whereon I shall be raised to life.’ But in spite of these two passages, and in spite of the unanimous testimony of the Evangelists, who wrote the Gospel which the Qur’an says is sent down by God, the doctrine of Christ’s Resurrection is explained away as I have described. Divorced from the Crucifixion it would lose half of its meaning to the Christian world. (p. 19)
The lecture ends looking at Muslims’ denial of the Atonement, the Holy Spirit and the Trinity using verses from the Qur’an but seemingly using the translation that best suits Dale’s argument (pp. 18-22). Lecture 2, ‘Christ and Muhammad’ (pp. 23-36), opens with the words of the ‘Muhammadan creed’ (shahāda). Dale quotes F.D. Maurice’s Religions of the world concerning notions of the divine in reference to the first clause (p. 23), before examining in greater detail the second clause that ‘Muhammad is the Prophet of God’ (in the Arabic ‘Apostle of God’) and relating the life of Muḥammad (pp. 22-34). Dale quotes Carlyle’s On heroes, together with many references from the Qur’an, in order to question Muḥammad’s character, commenting that he was a sinner (Q 94),
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referencing his use of violence (ʿAbd al-Masīḥ al-Kindī) and the number of his wives (Q 33:3, 49, 96:2). To Dale it is preferable to compare Muḥammad with David, rather than with Jesus (p. 34). He concludes by confirming the role of Jesus (pp. 35-6). Lecture 3, ‘The Bible and the Qur’an’ (pp. 37-49) starts with an explanation that the focus is ‘mainly on the Qur’an, concluding by some sort of comparison, as far as comparison is possible, between the two books’ (p. 37). The history of the revelation and later compilation of the Qur’an is related (pp. 37-9). Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the ‘very Word of God, both in matter and form’ (p. 39). The importance for Muslims of the ‘correct repetition and pronunciation of the Qur’an […] often […] without having the least knowledge of the meaning of the passage’ (p. 40) is stated. The abrogation of passages in the Qur’an is explained, saying that Sale lists 223 abrogated passages, before giving some examples, including the move of the qibla from Jerusalem to Mecca (Q 2:114, 137, Palmer 2:109, 139) (pp. 41-3). The similarities of events related in the Qur’an to the versions in the Talmud and the Apocryphal Gospels is discussed (pp. 43-5). Dale refers to the advantage of using Rodwell’s translation of the Qur’an, as the suras are ordered chronologically (p. 45). The relationship between ‘the Book’ and the Gospel is addressed (pp. 45-7). He states that Muslims seem to believe that the Gospel was given to Jesus all at once, in a book, during Ramaḍān: ‘We gave Him the Book – the Injili’ (p. 45). He makes reference to higher criticism being applied to the Qur’an as well as to the Bible (p. 47). The lecture concludes with four points (pp. 48-9): 1. The question of inspiration or dictation of scriptures; 2. The Qur’an deals with ‘precepts and positive ordinances and not principles’; 3. The Qur’an is ‘spuriously catholic’, whereas the Bible is ‘genuinely so’; 4. The lack of order and arrangement in the Qur’an contrasts with the Bible’s ‘definite aim’ to prepare for the Kingdom of God. Lecture 4, ‘The spirit of Islam and the spirit of Christianity’ (pp. 50-63), sets out to examine first principles and to test ‘the ethical and social results’ that are ‘an outcome of the teaching of [each] religion’ (p. 50). As in the other lectures, the main content concerns Islam. As the first principle, the fundamental difference between the two faiths is their conception of God. Dale writes ‘the strength of Muhammadanism and the secret of the astonishing success […] lies in […] the recognition of […] an absolute eternal Being’ (p. 51). He wonders what Muslims think when they watch Europeans at their worship. He thinks that they must doubt whether the Europeans believe in God at all (p. 51). He quotes F.D. Maurice on the success of Islam being ‘due to intensity of belief that God is, that
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God is omnipotent, and that man must either obey or be made to obey His revealed will’ (pp. 51-2). Having been so positive about Islam, Dale then raises difficulties with it: the ‘impassable chasm’ between man and God in Islam (p. 52); the arbitrariness of God’s will (pp. 52-5), several examples of which are given, both from the Qur’an and a lengthy quote from William Palgrave’s Travels in Arabia (Narrative of a year’s journey through central and eastern Arabia, 1865); the role of jihad, the use of force (pp. 56-8, 59); women in Islam (pp. 58-9); slavery in Islam (pp. 60-1); punishments in Islam (pp. 61-2); and Paradise (p. 62), all with references to the Qur’an. A short conclusion turns wearily away from the ‘darkness’ of Islam to the ‘light’ of Christianity (pp. 62-3). Significance The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism gives an indication of Dale’s knowledge and understanding of Islam at the point when the lectures were delivered. Using mainly non-Muslim sources, he reflects the prevailing Western attitudes of the time to Islam. It was reprinted many times, without revision, after Dale’s further year of studies in Oxford. In contrast, his later writings show his knowledge and use of Muslim sources. The number of reprints indicates a continuing interest in this book. Even though reprints were made in London, they were available in East Africa. The 1929 stocklist of the Dar es Salaam Bookshop lists copies of the book (Bodleian Library, Oxford – USPG archives, UMCA SF 112 I & II Dar es Salaam Bookshop 1929-1933 Stocklist 1929). There has been no detailed analysis of The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism, and there are few references to it in later studies of Christian-Muslim relations in East Africa, other than including it in lists of Dale’s works. Publications G. Dale, The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism. Four lectures delivered in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, Zanzibar, 1904 G. Dale, The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism, London, 19052, with further editions (reprints): 1908 (twice), 1909, 19136, 1925, 1928, 1948; 1042446303 (digitised version of the 1913, 6th edition, available through Internet Archive)
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Articles on Islam Date 1905, 1909, 1913 Original Language English Description Three of Dale’s articles are particularly informative as to his attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. His 1905 article ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’, for the UMCA journal Central Africa, is 6 pages long and is in three parts, looking at the past, present and future of work amongst Muslims on Zanzibar. The first part (pp. 113-14) reflects on the challenges of working there, starting from his first arrival in 1889, when the ending of the slave trade had caused ‘a barrier between the Muhammadan and the Christian Missionary’ (p. 113). The small number of missionaries had meant they were too few to do more than work amongst the freed slaves. Seyyid Barghash (r. 1870-88) warned Bishop Edward Steere (1828-82) that, if the UMCA attempted to proselytise, the sultan would not be responsible for the lives of the converts (p. 114). The second part (pp. 114-17) looks at the challenges of working amongst Muslims where many can read the Qur’an in Arabic, though not very many understand it. [Where] converts are living, and will continue to live, in a Muhammadan atmosphere, and will perforce constantly hear Muhammadan objections to Christianity. The language of Swahili is filled with Arabic expressions culled from the Qur’an, and Muhammadanism, with the one exception of strong drink, offers to our converts those indulgences which Christianity forbids. We have little reason for supposing that they will refrain from attempting to influence our converts. (p. 116)
In a poor part of the town, the UMCA had established a school where there were ‘many Muhammadan young men and boys whose principal object no doubt is to secure an education, but who seem willing enough to listen to anyone who explains to them the truths of the Christian faith’. Dale specifically mentions the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity (p. 116). Because Zanzibar was a British Protectorate, toleration was guaranteed and there was a tendency for fair and open discussion between Muslims and Christians (p. 117). In the third part, ‘The future’ (pp. 117-18), Dale sets out a list of ‘needs and wants’ for effective work amongst Muslims, including the desirability of publishing in Swahili using Arabic script, rather than mainly Roman script, to enable material to be read by all, and the need for missionaries who know Arabic and their own faith well enough to be able to explain it and answer objections (p. 118).
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When Temple Gairdner was preparing his review of missionary work amongst Muslims for The reproach of Islam (1909), he contacted ‘experts’ in various mission fields. He included Dale’s remarks which begin with ‘The problems of East Africa ...’ (pp. 286-8), where the ways of effectively reaching Muslims with the message of Christianity are given as ‘prayer for the Mohammedans for the gift of the Holy Spirit’, ‘colleges of trained Christian scholars in Mohammedanism’ and ‘a series of books, […] containing the best and soundest answers to all the usual Mohammedan objections, and free from all unsound and defective arguments’ (pp. 287-8). Following the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910, the Inter national Review of Mission asked six people to respond to a set of questions, including local details. Their responses were published as a series of articles in ‘The vital forces of Christianity and Islam’. Dale’s contribution, the sixth and final article, is 13 pages long (references are to this). The articles were also published as a book edited by Samuel Zwemer in 1915; there, Dale’s ‘Sixth study’, with identical text, is 19 pages long. In Dale’s article, after a paragraph setting the context of the series (p. 305), the first section, ‘Vital elements in Islam’ (pp. 305-8), focuses on the ‘very sense of the existence and unity of God, of the divine government of the universe, of the providential control over the little details of everyday life’ (pp. 305-6) found in the Islam of Zanzibar and coastal East Africa. A generally positive view of what makes Islam real for Muslims is presented. Prayers, fasting and almsgiving are ‘associated with the idea of wages earned for so much work done […] connecting the present life with the life of the world to come’ (p. 307). The ideas of God’s transcendence and the sovereignty of the divine will found in Islam ‘contain in them the essence of all true awe and resignation and obedience and wonder and adoration’ (p. 307). The second section, ‘Dissatisfaction of individual Mohammedans with their faith on specific points’ (pp. 308-10), lists slavery, polygamy, concubinage, fatalism and compulsion in religion as areas where Muslims had raised dissatisfaction with their faith (pp. 308-9), before mentioning that a few had doubts about the science found in the Qur’an and the example set by Muḥammad (p. 310). The following sections, ‘Features in Christianity which appeal to the Moslem in East Africa’ (pp. 310-11) and ‘The presentation of the Christian faith to the Moslem’ (pp. 312-13), show an awareness that aspects of Christianity, such as God’s love and grace, were attractive to Muslims, as long as they were separated from the Sonship of Christ (pp. 310-11); that
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‘everyday life is the best commentary on and the best witness to the truths of Christian teaching’ (p. 313). ‘Elements in Christianity which excite opposition’ (pp. 313-14) refers to a Muslim pamphlet on Christian schools circulating in Zanzibar that listed belief in the Holy Trinity and the doctrine of Incarnation as being unacceptable (p. 313). Dale quotes Siraj-ud-Din of Lahore, ‘that the error of Christianity does not lie in making Christ God but that it lies in making God Christ’ and comments that it ‘is one that we shall do well to bear in mind’ (p. 314). ‘The influence of Mohammedanism on the character of the East African Moslem’ (pp. 314-15) states briefly that Muslims are lax, have little understanding of the Qur’an and are superstitious. The final section, ‘The light shed by Islam on Christianity’ (pp. 315-17), identifies the value of a religion like our own which responds to human needs which are left untouched by Mohammedanism; and in the second place, contact with Mohammedanism does awaken the Christian to some elements in his own faith which perhaps, but for that contact, he would have forgotten. (pp. 315-16)
This second element made a Christian think out the exact meaning of his belief in the unity of God, and […] to think out the idea of the transcendence of God […] startled into self-examination by the in sha Allah and the alhamdu li’llah of the Moslem; they have been reminded that religion is a power that touches life at all points and at all times, and cannot be kept in a separate compartment of the mind. (p. 316)
Significance Dale’s articles were written to inform and educate a mainly Western readership with an interest in Christian mission work amongst Muslims. His articles in Central Africa were written to inform supporters of the UMCA about the challenges of the work. ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’ was written after Dale’s first tour on Zanzibar as the UMCA’s expert on Islam. It gives an insight into his views and attitudes based on that experience and his knowledge at the time. The other articles, written for a wider mission-supporting readership, reflect an appreciation of aspects of Islam and a deeper knowledge. That Dale was asked to contribute to Temple Gairdner’s The reproach of Islam
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and to the series in International Review of Mission is an indication that his work with the UMCA as an expert in Islam was widely known in mission circles. It also shows that, at the time, there were few other English speakers with such a level of knowledge of Islam in East Africa. Dale’s articles are useful in indicating views of the work amongst Muslims by Christian missions of the time. An analysis of them, together with the companion reports in The reproach of Islam and The vital forces of Christianity and Islam is yet to be made. Publications G. Dale, ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’, Central Africa 23 (May 1905) 113-18; 72542ca23 (digitised version available through British Online Archives) G. Dale, ‘The problems of East Africa ...’, in W.H.T. Gairdner, The reproach of Islam, London, 1909, pp. 286-8; 001936583 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Dale, ‘The vital forces of Christianity and Islam – VI’, International Review of Mission 2 (1913) 305-17, repr. in G. Dale, ‘Sixth study’, in S. Zwemer (ed.), The vital forces of Christianity and Islam, London, 1915, 193-212; 005777054 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
Maisha ya Muhammad: The life of Muhammad; Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu, ‘Notes on Mohammedanism’; Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu kwa lugha ya Kiswahili, ‘Translation of the Arabic Qur’an into the Swahili language’ Date 1909, 1923 Original Language Swahili Description In 1909, Dale produced two books in Swahili, Maisha ya Muhammad: The life of Muhammad (In the Swahili language) and Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu: kwa mukhtasari pamoja na maelezo ya ihtilafu Zilizopo kati ya dini ya Kiislamu na dini ya Kikristo (‘Notes on Mohammedanism, with answers to some Mohammedan objections to Christianity / Summary remarks about the religion of Islam together with an explanation of the
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existing differences between the religion of Islam and the religion of Christianity’). He intended these for students and catechists. Maisha ya Muhammad is 207 pages long and the Preface in English gives Dale’s purpose in writing the book: ‘To give African converts a knowledge of the Life of Mohammed, sufficient to enable them to contrast his life and teaching with the life and teaching of our Saviour. The facts are largely drawn from Mohammedan sources’ (p. 2). It consists of 28 chapters: chs 1-3 deal with Arabia before the time of Muḥammad, giving the geographical and socio-political background (pp. 1-26); chs 4-5 deal with Muḥammad’s birth and life before his ‘call’ to be a prophet (pp. 27-39); chs 6-8 deal with his time in Mecca (pp. 40-75) – in ch. 6, he quotes Q 95, 100 and 104 (pp. 45-7) in words that are similar, but not identical to, his 1923 translation of them. In chs 9-28, the life of Muḥammad in Medina, from the hijra to his death, is covered in detail (pp. 75-203). Each chapter indicates the year and main incident, e.g. ch. 9 ‘Muhammad anafika Madina, AH 1’ (Muḥammad arrives in Medina, AH 1, pp. 75-79), ch. 15, ‘AH 4, AD 625 umri wake Muhammad 56’ (AH 4, AD 625, Muḥammad aged 56, pp. 115-17). Dale’s account of Muḥammad’s life and the spread of Islam shows that he has used Muslim sources, and whilst no details are given as to what they were, they appear to be based on Ibn Hishām’s biography. Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu is 128 pages long and was written at the request of African Christian teachers who wanted a text that explained the main teachings of Islam. Dale wrote that he had done this in the way that Muslims themselves explain it (p. 5). Lawrence Mbogoni agrees that, whilst the book ‘does indeed explain in simplified terms the basic teachings of Islam […] he also compares Islam to Christianity’ (Mbogoni, The cross versus the crescent, p. 73), a comparison seen as helping Christians to ‘rebut Muslim criticism of Christianity and to offer their own criticism of Islam’ (Mbogoni, The cross versus the crescent, p. 73). The book is in two main parts. Part 1 (pp. 5-74) covers the faith and practice of Islam. The first two chapters (pp. 5-18) introduce Usulu-ddini (the principles of religious belief) and Ilmu-l-fikh (the principles of religious practice). The beliefs are explained in chs 3-7: ch. 3, ‘Elimu ya Umoja wa Mungu (tawhid)’ (Teaching on the oneness of God, tawḥīd, pp. 18-24), ch. 4, ‘Malaika, Majinni, Vitabu vitakatifu’ (Angels, jinn, holy books, pp. 25-30), ch. 5, ‘Manabii, miujiza, wali’ (Prophets, miracles, saints, pp. 30-3), ch. 6, ‘Kufa, kiyama, hukumu, peponi, jehannum, dalili zilizo kubwa’ (Death, resurrection and allied topics, pp. 33-40), and ch. 7,
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‘Predestination’ (pp. 40-6). The practices of Islam are explained in chs 8-10: ch. 8, ‘Sala’ (Prayer, pp. 46-60), ch. 9, ‘Zakat au sadaka’ (almsgiving) (pp. 60-1), ‘Kufunga (saum au siyamu)’ (fasting, pp. 61-3) and ‘Al hajj’ (pilgrimage) (pp. 63-70), and ch. 10, ‘Ndoa (nikaha)’ (Marriage, pp. 70-4). Part 2 (pp. 75-128) comprises eight suggested responses to Muslim objections to Christian beliefs. These are: 1. ‘Leteni hoja zenu mkiwa mnasema kweli’ (Bring your concerns if you think that you are speaking the truth), which responds to the claim that Jews and Christians have tampered with their sacred books (pp. 75-85); 2. ‘Injili haikutanguka’ (The Gospel has not been annulled) replies to the claim that the Qur’an has abrogated the Gospel (pp. 85-91); 3. ‘Ihtilafu za vitabu vya dini. A. Kusulubiwa kwake Bwana wetu’ (Differences in the books of religions. A. the crucifixion of our Lord) is a reply to the statement in the Qur’an that the Jews did not crucify Jesus (pp. 91-6); 4. ‘B. Khabari ya kufufuka kwake Bwana wetu Yesu Kristo’ (B. Concerning the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ) responds to the denial of the resurrection as it appears in the Gospels (pp. 96-100); 5. ‘C. Roho Mtakatifu’ (C. The Holy Spirit) responds to Muslim beliefs about the Holy Spirit, referring to the Archangel Gabriel (pp. 100-6); 6. ‘Kwa namna gani Yesu Kristo Bwana wetu ni Mwana wa Mungu?’ (In what way is Jesus Christ, our Lord, the Son of God?) replies to the Muslim denial of the divine Sonship of Christ (pp. 106-16); 7. ‘Mwokozi hana buddi kuwa hana khatiya’ (The Saviour has no faults) argues that Christ was sinless while Muḥammad and other prophets in the Qur’an sinned (pp. 117-25); 8. ‘Manabii’ (Prophets) deals with the Muslim belief in the superiority of Muḥammad over Christ, referring to the Christian view of the difference between the prophets and the Son of God (pp. 125-8). Mbogoni describes these responses as ‘imaginary dialogues in which a Christian is confronted by a Muslim who criticizes Christian belief’ (Mbogoni, The cross versus the crescent, p. 76). In 1925, Dale produced Islam and Africa. An introduction to the study of Islam for African Christians (141 pages), which was compiled at the request of the Bishop and Synod of the Diocese of Nyasaland. The object aimed at is to supply European teachers of African Christians, who are living in districts where Islam is aggressive, with a small manual dealing with the points which are certain to be discussed when Christian and Moslem come into contact. (p. iii)
Much of this book is a direct translation of Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu (pp. 52-141), with additional material on the life of Muḥammad (pp. 1-20) and ‘The Koran’ (pp. 21-51).
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In 1961, Lyndon Harries, the UMCA’s expert on Islam, updated Dale’s material from Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu in Allahu akbar. Maelezo ya dini ya kiislamu (‘God is great. A description of the Muslim religion’), which only looks at the beliefs of Islam, with 9 chapters in under 40 pages. Dale is remembered most for his version of the Qur’an in Swahili, Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu kwa lugha ya Kiswahili pamoja na Dibaji na maelezo machache (‘Translation of the Arabic Qur’an into the Swahili language together with a Preface and a few brief explanations’) (1923). Starting with a 16-page Dibaji (Preface), which sets out Dale’s reasons for producing a Qur’an in Swahili, each of the 114 suras, which are unnumbered, begins with the name and the total number of verses. The meaning of the text is clear and understandable. It is followed by Maelezo (Comments) with 723 endnotes (pp. 543-682) providing a brief commentary on each sura and a few clarificatory notes, which ‘reveal a biased turn of mind’ (P.J.L. Frankl, ‘Review of Tarjama ya al-muntakhab katika tafsiri ya Qurʾani tukufu by Ali Muhsin al-Barwani’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25 [1998] 1913, p. 192) and tend to be polemical. In an article entitled ‘A Swahili translation of the Koran’ in The Moslem World, Dale explained that the text of the translation itself was not versified, nor did it have an Arabic parallel text, as ‘In East Africa there is a stereotyped edition of the Arabic Koran, very cheap. […] This has been taken as a standard text, and the Swahili translation corresponds with it, page with page’ (Dale, ‘Swahili translation’, p. 9). Significance Dale’s books in Swahili were used by the UMCA to train teachers and ordinands, following Bishop Frank Weston’s (r. 1907-24) recommendation that all African teachers should have a copy of Maisha ya Muhammad (‘The life of Muḥammad’). He supplied priests in training with copies of material on Islam by Dale, so that they would be informed and equipped to be able to respond to Muslims (Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims’, p. 16). A 1923 report mentions Dale’s books as having ‘been written to inform the Christian Church in this part of Moslem Africa about the nature of Islam’ (C.H. Patton [ed.], Christian literature in Moslem lands. A study of the activities of the Moslem and Christian press in all Mohammedan countries, New York, 1923, pp. 153-6). They were also listed on the stocklist of the Dar es Salaam Bookshop in 1929 (Archives Oxford, Bodleian Library – USPG archives, UMCA SF 112 I & II Dar es Salaam Bookshop 1929-1933, Stocklist 1929). In 1960, Bethwell Kiplagat and Sigvard von Sicard reported finding some books by Dale in
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East Africa. They comment: ‘[U]nfortunate comparisons and arguments have caused these books to become obnoxious in the eyes of E.A. Muslims. They should, therefore, be read with this in mind and not be made the sole source of information in regard to Islam’ (Kiplagat and von Sicard, Report, p. 32). Muslim reception of Dale’s books was negative. Shaykh al-Amin ibn Ali Mazrui (1890-1949), a notable Mombasan qāḍī, wrote in 1936 that ‘Christians have composed many books to show to the peoples of East Africa the wickedness of the Islamic religion and its teachings, and have insulted the apostle Muḥammad’, mentioning Dale’s Tarjuma ya Kur’an and Maisha ya Muhammad (quoted in Lacunza Balda, ‘Translations’, p. 99). In Dini ya Islamu, published in 1939, he criticised polemical tracts by Dale, together with Raha isiyo karaha by W.E. Taylor, as he resented printed attacks on Islam by Christian missionaries (Mazruʿi, Dini ya Islamu, p. 1), challenging Dale’s criticisms of Islam by listing ‘the praises of various European intellectuals for Islam’ (Pouwels, ‘Sh. Al-Amin B. Ali Mazrui’, p. 341). Of all his works, Dale’s Swahili version of the Qur’an has had the most lasting influence. Because Dale was not a Muslim, his reasons for producing a version of the Qur’an in Swahili were viewed with suspicion and his ability to understand Arabic and his style of writing in Swahili were also questioned. Anne Bang regards Dale’s purpose in producing a Swahili version of the Qur’an as being to provide a tool for the missionaries active in Zanzibar. He was also of the view that a vernacular version of the Quran would be beneficial to the Muslim population, whose religious education chiefly consisted of ‘parrotlike’ memorisation of the Arabic text. […] Unsurprisingly, his work did not make it into either the government schools or the Quranic schools. It was, however, used in the mission schools. (Bang, Sufis and scholars, pp. 176-7)
Hartmut Bobzin wrote that the translation ‘was deemed unacceptable for Muslims due to an added Christian apologetic text, despite the quality of its language’ (Bobzin, ‘Translations of the Qurʾān’, in J. Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, vol. 5, Leiden, 2006, 340-58, p. 342). Its publication spurred Muslims to start producing Swahili versions themselves, starting with al-Amin ibn Aly Mazrui in the 1930s, who realised that Islam had to use Swahili as the medium of communication to inform and educate Muslims. He was only able to complete a few chapters.
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The Ahmadiyya movement published a translation of the Qur’an by an Indian missionary, Mubarak Aḥmadi (1910-2001). Kurani tukufu (‘The glorious Qurʾān’; Nairobi, 1953) was produced in response to Dale’s translation; several footnotes refer to his inaccuracies, and the introduction explains that Dale had previously produced a version of the Qur’an in Swahili, but that he did not know Arabic. He had relied on an English version and had consequently made many mistakes (Aḥmadi, Kurani tukufu, pp. xvii-xviii). Mazrui’s student, Saleh al-Farsy (1912-82), was the first East African to produce a complete Swahili version, Qurani Takatifu (The Holy Qur’an; Nairobi, 1969), which responded more to the Ahmadiyya version than to Dale’s. In the introduction to Ali bin Juma bin Mayunga’s (b. 1947) Tarjuma ya Quran tukufu (‘Interpretation of the glorious Qur’an’, Dar es Salaam, 2003) Sayyid Saeed Akhtar Rizvi wrote: The first Swahili translation was done about a hundred years ago by Canon Godfrey Dale (Zanzibar); it was printed in 1923 in London. Those who had seen it were of the opinion that it was not good. Some Muslim scholars suspected that [the] Canon had intentionally twisted the translation so that he could use it for attacking the Qur’an. Be it as it may, now it is out of print and is not seen even in big libraries. (Rizvi, ‘Foreword’, in Mayunga, Quran tukufu, p. i)
Lawrence Mbogoni’s critique of Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu and Tafsiri ya Kurani was written in response to the rise in tensions between Muslims and Christians in Tanzania in 1998. With a desire to explain the historical context, it shows the ongoing influence of the polemical elements of Dale’s work on attitudes between Muslims and Christians in the East African context. Publications G. Dale, Khabari za dini ya Kiislamu: kwa mukhtasari pamoja na maelezo ya ihtilafu Zilizopo kati ya dini ya Kiislamu na dini ya Kikristo, London, 1909, repr. 1912, 1921; 010561166 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Dale, Maisha ya Muhammad. The life of Muhammad (in the Swahili language), London, 1909 G. Dale, Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu, London, 1923, repr. 1931 G. Dale, ‘A Swahili translation of the Koran’, The Moslem World 14 (1924) 5-9
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G. Dale, Islam and Africa. An introduction to the study of Islam for African Christians, London, 1925; 006500520 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) G. Dale and L. Harries, Allahu akbar. Maelezo ya dini ya kiislamu, London, 1961 Studies J.A. Chesworth, Mixed messages. Using the Bible and Qurʾān in Swahili tracts, Leiden, 2022, pp. 98-101 J.A. Chesworth, ‘The Qur’an in Swahili’, in C. Mauder, T. Wurtz and S. Zinsmeister (eds), Koran in Franken, Wurzburg, 2016, 175-96 Sanders, ‘Missionaries and Muslims’ L.E.Y. Mbogoni, The cross versus the crescent. Religion and politics in Tanzania from the 1800s to the 1990s, Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2005 A. Bang, Sufis and scholars of the sea. Family networks in East Africa, 1860-1925, London, 2003 J. Lacunza Balda, ‘Translations of the Quran into Swahili, and contemporary Islamic revival in East Africa’, in D. Westerlund and E.E. Rosander (eds), African Islam and Islam in Africa, London, 1997, 95-126 Pouwels, Horn and crescent, p. 187 R.L. Pouwels, ‘Sh. al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui and Islamic modernism in East Africa, 1875-1947’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1981) 329-45 S. von Sicard, ‘Christian and Muslim in East Africa’, African Theological Journal 7 (1978) 53-67 B. Kiplagat and S. von Sicard, A report on Islam in Kenya for the Department of Biblical Study and Research of Christian Council of Kenya, Nairobi: Christian Council of Kenya, 1960 M.A. Aḥmadi, Kurani Tukufu, Nairobi: Aḥmadiyya Muslim Mission, 1953 Al-Amin bin Aly [al-Mazruʿi], Dini ya Islamu, Mombasa, 1939 John Chesworth
Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse Date of Birth 1878 Place of Birth Manz region Date of Death 1938 Place of Death Bath, United Kingdom
Biography
Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse, who was later given the title Blatten Gētā to distinguish him as a royal servant, received both a traditional and a modern education. His experiences helped to shape his unusual intellectual personality. In his youth, he began his church education in his village in the Manz region, and then in Salāle. With a basic competence in Christian teaching, he came to Addis Ababa and became a student at the famous church of ʾƎnṭoṭṭo Rāguʾel, where he pursued an advanced level of church education, qualifying in the theological field of liturgical dance and its instrumental accompaniment. While at school, he attracted the attention of Gabra Śǝllāse Walda ʾAragāy, the church administrator and chief secretary of Emperor Mǝnilǝk II (r. 1889-1913), who entrusted him with administrative tasks and later opened his way to a political career. As a result, he emerged as one of Ethiopia’s leading intellectuals during the period before the Italian invasion in 1935. Ḫǝruy learned English at the Swedish mission school in Addis Ababa and a little French while working with a French veterinary team. He even started taking lessons in Arabic but had to abandon them because of rumours that he had become a Muslim. Thanks to his knowledge of foreign languages and his academic talent, he took part in several imperial delegations abroad. In 1911 he travelled to England as a member of the Ethiopian delegation to the coronation of George V (r. 1910-36), accompanying one of the most important imperial Ethiopian officials, Rās Kaśā Ḫāylu. In 1919, he travelled to England again, and also to the United States, to congratulate the allies on their victory in World War I. He also visited Jerusalem in 1920 and 1923, accompanied Rās Tafari (the future Ḫāyla Śǝllāse I) on his historic tour of Europe in 1924, and travelled to Japan in 1931. Ḫǝruy was a distinguished author; he wrote over 20 books on a wide range of topics, including history, biography, travel and literature. He was also a dedicated public servant, rising from the post of being secretary of the municipality of Addis Ababa in 1914/15 to Ethiopian foreign minister
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in 1931. A mark of international recognition for his literary achievements is that he was made an honorary member of the German Oriental Society in 1929. When the Italians entered Addis Ababa in 1936, he accompanied Ḫāyla Śǝllāse I into exile in England, where he died in Bath in September 1938.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Ḫeruy Walda Śǝllāse, Wazemā-bamāgǝstu ya-ʾItyoṗyan nagastāt yatārik baʿāl lamākbar [‘In honour of the feast of Ethiopian kings on the following day’], Addis Ababa, 1928 Asfa-Wossen Asserate, Die Geschichte von Šawā (Äthiopien) 1700-1865 nach dem Tārika nagaśt des Belattēn Gētā Ḫeruy Walda Sellāsē, Wiesbaden, 1980, Introduction Secondary Bahru Zewde, ‘Heruy’s Ya-heywat tarik and Mahtama-Sellase’s Che balaw. Two perceptions of a biographical dictionary’, in Bahru Zewde (ed.), Society, state and history: Selected essays, Addis Ababa, 2008, 1-14 Bahru Zewde, art. ‘Ḫǝruy Wäldä Śǝllase’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Wiesbaden, 2008, vol. 3, 20a-21b M. Kropp, ‘Ein später Schüler des Julius Africanus zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts in Äthiopie: Heruy Wäldä-Sellase und seine Listen der altäthiopischen Königszeit’, in M. Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus und die christliche Weltchronistik, Berlin, 2006, 303-28 Bahru Zewde, Pioneers of change in Ethiopia. The reformist intellectuals of the early twentieth century, Oxford, 2002 L. Fusella, ‘Le biografie del Blātengētā Ḫeruy Wålda Sellāsē’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 30 (1987) 15-52
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Tārika nagaśt ‘History of the kings’ Date 1936 Original Language Amharic Description Tārika nagaśt (‘History of the kings’) is a brief history of the kings of Šawā in the 18th and 19th centuries. It consists of 17 short chapters, comprising
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30 pages in Asfa-Wossen’s edition of the Amharic text, and 86 pages in his German translation. References below are to this edition. In the preface to his earliest published Amharic work, Wāzemā-bamāgǝstu ya-ʾItyoṗyan nagastāt (‘In honour of the feast of Ethiopian kings’), Ḫǝruy writes: ‘I hope that when the history of the Ethiopian kings which I began writing a few years ago is published, it will be a feast of joy for scholars as well as for ordinary people’ (p. 3). The final draft of the book was not completed until 1936, when Ḫǝruy gave it to the Gohā Ṣǝbāh printing press. However, while it was in press, and before the pages were bound, the Italians invaded Addis Ababa and forbade the book’s publication. From that time, historians and anthropologists used the draft version until the Asfa-Wossen edition appeared. The work is a brief narrative from the time of the founder of the kingdom of Šawā, ʾAbeto Nagāsi Krǝstos, to the time of King Mǝnilǝk, who later became emperor of the modern state of Ethiopia. It begins with the genealogy of the Šawā kings relating to the family of King Lǝbna Dǝngǝl in the 16th century, and outlines the history of the founder of the Šawā dynasty, ʾAbeto Nagāsi Krǝstos. Following the death of Nagāsi Krǝstos, there was a power struggle between his children, and he was eventually succeeded by his son, Sǝbastyānos (r. 1703-19), who began expanding the kingdom to the south of Šawā by fighting against the Oromo. Sǝbastyānos was succeeded by one of his sons ʾAbbǝye (1719-43). Significantly, he established an alliance with the Muslim Walāsmā rulers of ʾIfāt and confronted his power rival in the kingdom. He also fought the Oromo and expanded the Šawā kingdom towards the south. The work recounts major events during the reigns of the three successive kings of Šawā, ʾAmmǝḫā ʾIyasus (r. 1743-75), ʾAsfā Wasan (r. 1775-1808) and Wasan Sagad (r. 1808-13), who pursued a policy of expanding the kingdom of Šawā further south, annexing new territories. Then it deals with the reign of the powerful King Śahla Śǝllāse (r. 1813-47), whose rule was marked by the unprecedented arrival of European travellers, missionaries and diplomats, as well as explorers, at his court. The text also hints that the king had friendly relations with the Muslim communities in the region. It then describes the reign of Ḫāyla Malakot (r. 1847-55), who was later defeated by King Tewodros II (r. 1855-68), and it ends with the territorial expansion by Tewodros, followed by the capture of Mǝnilǝk, who later fled from the court and returned to Šawā. Mǝnilǝk II (r. 1889-1913) restored the kingship of Šawā after defeating his political rival, Bazzābbǝh.
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Significance While the work is a history of successive Šawā kings from the beginning of the 18th century into the 19th century, it provides very useful information about Christian-Muslim relations. In the long history of the kingdom of Ethiopia, there were repeated hostilities and rivalries between Christians and Muslims. But this text reveals that in the 19th century relations became smooth and friendly, at least between the kingdom of Šawā and its surrounding Muslim neighbours. Indeed, rivalry in the period was mainly with the Christian Oromo for political and economic reasons. It provides much information to show that the Muslims in the kingdom of Šawā created an alliance with their Christian counterparts and that, when the kings of Šawā faced challenges from the Oromo, they retreated to the Muslim Šawā, who offered protection. All this indicates that the work is perhaps one of the few Christian documents that present the Muslims as the allies of the Christian kingdom in the 19th century. Publications MS Addis Ababa, National Library of Ethiopia – uncatalogued Amharic MS; see Asfa-Wossen, Die Geschichte von Šawā (Äthiopien) 1700-1785, p. 19 (introductory note) MS Addis Ababa, private collection of Emperor Haile Selassie – manuscript copy; see Asfa-Wossen, Die Geschichte von Šawā (Äthiopien) 1700-1785, p. 19 (introductory note) Ḫǝruy Walda Śellāse, Wāzemā-bamāgǝstu ya-ʾItyoṗyan nagastāt yatārik baʿāl lamākbar (‘In honour of the feast of Ethiopian kings on the following day’), Addis Ababa, 1928 Asfa-Wossen Asserate, Die Geschichte von Šawā (Äthiopien) 1700-1865 nach dem Tārika nagaśt des Belāttēn Gētā Ḫeruy Walda Šellāsē, Wiesbaden, 1980 Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse, Wāzemā-bamāgǝstu ya-ʾItyoṗṗyan nagastāt yatārik baʿāl lamākbar, ed. Šǝmallǝs Yǝlmā, Addis Ababa, 2008 Studies Shiferaw Bekele, art. ‘Śahlä Śǝllase’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 465a-7a D. Nosnitsin, art. ‘Province of Šäwa’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 554a-8b S. Dege, art. ‘Sǝbǝstyanos’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 587a-b S. Dege, art. ‘Wasan Sagad’, in S. Uhlig and A. Bausi (eds), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 2010, 1153b-4a
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S. Dege, art. ‘Nagāsi Krǝstos’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 3, Wiesbaden, 2008, 1110a–11b Bahru Zewde, art. ‘Ammǝḫa Iyäsus’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, Wiesbaden, 2003, 247a-b Bahru Zewde, art. ‘Asfa Wäsän’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, Wiesbaden, 2003, 366a S. Ege, art. ‘Abbǝyye’, in S. Uhlig (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, Wiesbaden, 2003, 32a-b V. Luling, review of the Asfa-Wossen edition in Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 56 (1986) 251-3 Kofi Darkwah, Shewa, Menilek and the Ethiopian Empire, London, 1975 Solomon Gebreyes Beyene
Walter Miller Date of Birth 1872 Place of Birth Honiton, Devonshire Date of Death 27 August 1952 Place of Death Bukuru, Nigeria
Biography
Walter Richard Samuel Miller was born in 1872 in Devonshire, United Kingdom. According to his autobiography he ‘converted’ at the age of 14 at a Children’s Service Mission at Clifton College, Bristol, and later enrolled at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School. While attending a camp meeting at Keswick, Miller experienced his missionary calling. Though intending to follow a missionary career in Northern Nigeria in what was called the ‘Hausa Party’ of the Church Missionary Society, an appeal from Canon (afterwards Bishop) Taylor Smith, took him to Sierra Leone in 1897, although a bout of malaria sent him home soon after his arrival. Nigeria continued to attract Miller. Organising a team of like minds in England, Miller and four others, Bishop Herbert Tugwell, Albert Ernest Richardson, Claud Dudley Ryder and Richard Burgin, began to prepare for Northern Nigeria. As part of their preparation, they were sent to Tripoli, Libya, for Hausa language training. Miller was commissioned by the British and Foreign Bible Society to translate the Bible into Hausa as part of his mission work. In Tripoli, Miller met a boy, Abdul Majid Tafida, 14 years old, from Katsina in Northern Nigeria, whom he would later adopt as his son. The boy had accompanied his father on pilgrimage to Mecca. The father had died in the Sahara Desert, but the boy wanted to complete the religious obligation. Miller assisted him to proceed to Mecca, promising to meet him again in Egypt when the boy returned. However, by the time Abdul Majid returned from Mecca, Miller was on his way to Nigeria on the first visit. The five men arrived in Lagos late in 1899. Their goal was the city of Kano, little known to Europeans at that time. A year earlier, one Canon Charles Robinson had visited Kano and learnt enough Hausa to write its grammar. However, he had also ‘experienced almost unbelievable difficulties’ in being there. In January 1900, the party began its journey to Kano, a distance of about 800 miles. After three months, the missionaries reached the town, having travelled through Zaria, another Hausa town.
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In Kano, the party received a cold reception from the emir, Aliyu the Great, who refused to grant any of their requests. He had remarked: ‘Start a school? No. We have our own and our children are taught the Holy Kur’an.’ ‘Medical work? No. Our medicine is in the Holy Kur’an and the name of Allah!’ ‘We don’t want you; you can go. I give you three days to prepare – a hundred donkeys to carry your loads back to Zaria, and we never wish to see you here again’ (Miller, Walter Miller, p. 35). Miller and his companions would have been killed but for the intervention of the waziri (Prime Minister) who refused to allow any harm to be done to them. The emir of Zaria proved equally reluctant to allow them to settle in his domain. As they wondered how to proceed, they receive a letter from Colonel Lowry Cole, who was ‘in charge of a military expedition to take over the Hausa country’, asking them to move southwards from Zaria to a military camp in Girku where they could be given protection until an agreement could be reached with the emir of Zaria. While waiting for further instruction in Girku, Claude Ryder died of dysentery, followed three days later by Albert Richardson. A pioneer missionary of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Walter Gowan, had also died of dysentery in Girku, a few years before the arrival of the CMS group. Therefore, there were three graves of pioneer missionaries in Girku. Then came further bad news; all the soldiers would be moved to Ghana to fight in the AshantiBritish war. The emir of Zaria ordered some ‘highwaymen’ to destroy the mission station, which was now unprotected. Early one morning, as Miller recalled, ‘all our huts were on fire; our stores, my medical instruments and drugs all burning; our sleeping hut and little grass church alone remaining’ (Walter Miller, p. 40). Subsequently, the Governor, Lord Lugard, instructed the missionaries to leave Girku for Loko on the Benue river, where they met two other missionaries recently recruited for the Hausa mission, the Revd G.P. Bargery and Hans Vischer. Thus, the first attempt at mission work among the Hausa ended. Bishop Tugwell returned to his diocese in Lagos and Burgin and Miller returned to England. Only Bargery and Vischer remained in Loko. In England, Miller made contact with Abdul Majid, the lad he had met in Tripoli. Abdul Majid had returned from Mecca and was staying with some missionaries in Egypt. Arrangements were made for Abdul Majid to meet Miller in England. The two returned to Nigeria in 1901. Meanwhile, the situation in Zaria had changed, making it favourable to mission work. The colonial soldiers had just saved Zaria from attack by a notorious slave dealer, the emir of Kontagora, Nagwamachi. This endeared the British to the emir and, as an act of gratitude, he was ready to receive Miller and
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his colleagues into the city of Zaria. Miller and Bargery entered Zaria city in 1902. The emir eventually gave Miller a place within the city to build a mission compound. Having settled down, Miller began his medical work and translation of the Bible, but he soon realised that the people did not trust his medicine. The better option was to begin a school. This proved more successful when the emir and some of his courtiers sent their children there. Miller kept a dispensary open, however, as a way of gradually gaining the people’s confidence in the white man’s medicine. The school began as a boys’ school and later, girls were also admitted. To help the girls, women missionaries were recruited, one of whom was Miller’s sister Ethel. News of Miller’s school in Zaria spread throughout Northern Nigeria and the new intakes went beyond Zaria as students were drawn from Plateau, Kabba and Niger provinces. The mission compound expanded rapidly. This expansion created tension between the mission and its hosts. The situation worsened with the arrival of children of Hausa converts, who had already heard about Isa (Jesus) through a fiery qur’anic teacher, Ibrahim. Ibrahim had taught that this figure was superior to Muḥammad and had begun to revere him above the Prophet. As he was about to be impaled in the market square in Kano for refusing to recant his teaching, he asked his followers to flee from Kano to neighbouring Hausa cities to await preachers from the West who would tell them more of Isa. Some of Ibrahim’s disciples (now called Isawa or the followers of Isa) met Miller in Zaria in 1913 and told him their stories. The Isawa children soon formed the majority in Miller’s school. The growth of the Christian population in the city required more space, but the emir would not allow further expansion except outside the city. Meanwhile Miller had also become engrossed in the politics of the emirate – which concerned the colonial authorities, some of whom distrusted his reports (Shankar, Who shall enter paradise, p. 14). According to Miller, the emir was oppressive. Miller claimed that he had endeared himself to the hearts of ordinary Hausa, so they would come to him at night and tell him of the emir’s atrocities. He began to send the stories of this misrule to the British Resident of Zaria Province, and in 1921 the emir was dethroned and sent into exile. The new emir feared Miller and did not want him in the city so the mission was moved to a nearby site in 1929, about two miles outside the city, and was named Wusasa. Discouraged, since he would lose his friends in the city, Miller moved to Kano to continue his translation of the Bible, which he completed in
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1932; the British and Foreign Bible Society published the Hausa Bible in the same year and Miller’s translation has been extensively used in evangelism among the Hausa in Northern Nigeria. The first four indigenous missionaries to the Hausa of the Sudan Interior Mission, all of them from the Tangale ethnic group, had Miller’s Hausa Bible as their most significant tool for evangelism. His work in Kano was less exciting. He was much more involved in the local church than in any meaningful evangelistic work among Hausa Muslims. After the Bible translation, Miller felt redundant and decided to return to England for good. But England had changed and offered nothing to Miller, now in his sixties. He resigned from the Church Missionary Society in 1939 at the age of 67. He returned to Nigeria and eventually settled in Bukuru, a tin mining city south of Jos in Plateau Province (now Plateau State). Here he devoted himself to writing, of which his autobiography was one result, together with teaching Hausa, in which he had become an indisputable authority. At this time Miller was, as he put it, the ‘oldest remaining European resident in Nigeria’. He died on 27 August 1952 at the age of 80 and was buried at the St Piran’s cemetery in Jos. E.A. Ayandele (Missionary impact, p. 126) called Miller ‘…the best-known white man in Northern Nigeria’. Indeed, Miller was the most dedicated Western missionary in Northern Nigeria. He devoted the best part of his life to Nigeria, having laboured there for 52 years, perhaps the longest period of missionary service in that country. The Hausa elites remembered him fondly, and one of them, Abubakar Imam, wrote a tribute, Likita Mila (‘Dr. Miller’).
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Entry, ‘1495. Miller, Walter Richard Samuel’, CMS Register of Missionaries, part 2, list 1, 1895-1904, London, 1905, p. 390 W.R.S. Miller, Reflections of a pioneer, London, 1936 W.R.S. Miller, Walter Miller. An autobiography 1872-1952, Zaria, 1953 Secondary S. Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Christian origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, ca. 1890-1975, Athens OH, 2014 M.A.B. Gaiya, Portrait of a saint. The life and times of Pa Yohanna Gowon (d. 1973), Jos, 1998 E.A. Ayandele, The missionary impact on modern Nigeria. A political and social analysis 1842-1914, London, 1966 [Abubakar Imam], Likita Mila (Dr. Miller), Zaria, 1956
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Reflections of a pioneer Date 1936 Original Language English Description Reflections of a pioneer (227 pages) is an official account of the Church Missionary Society’s (CMS) work in Northern Nigeria under the leadership of Walter Miller from 1900 to 1935. It relates two pioneering efforts to evangelise the Hausa of Northern Nigeria. The first was the visit to Kano in 1900, which ended disgracefully. The second was Miller and his Western colleagues’ work in Zaria city. They were the first Western missionaries, and probably the last, to have a Christian mission station within an entirely Muslim city. In Zaria, Miller started medical work on a limited scale because the Hausa Muslims did not trust Western medicine. But his more successful projects in Zaria city were the school and his translation of the Bible into Hausa. But Miller was more than a missionary, he was a keen observer of things happening around him. He saw the suppression of the ordinary Hausa by the Fulani emirs in Zaria. To resist this, he became a social activist for the protection and well-being of his Hausa friends. In carrying out this side of his mission in Nigeria, Miller was instrumental in the dethronement of one of the emirs of Zaria and the enthronement of two other emirs (Reflections of a Pioneer, pp. 139, 155). He was equally a trenchant critic of the British government that supported such Fulani misrule. He was an unapologetic believer in the readiness of the Hausa to convert to Christianity but for the fear of their Fulani overlords – a notion that was popularised by Canon Robinson (Ayandele, Missionary Impact, p. 124). Miller’s consuming desire to have Hausas brought into the church was heightened by the miraculous conversion of some Hausa in Kano through reading the New Testament in Arabic. This story is the central theme of the book. Reflections of a pioneer describes a rare opportunity Miller had during his stay in Zaria city to Christianise a large number of Kano Hausa Muslims (who eventually founded a kingdom, Ningi in present-day Bauchi State). In 1913, Miller was visited by a representative of the Muslim sect called Isawa or Ansa (Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, p. 129), or ‘the children of the Israelites’ as Ian Linden calls them (‘Between two religions’). They were a group of Muslims who had accepted the Jesus of
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the Qur’an. The founder of the sect, Ibrahim, had asked rhetorically, ‘Who is this of whom our own Prophet writes? Can this be a man like the others mentioned in our sacred Book? Is not this a greater than all, greater even then Mohammed himself?’ (Reflections, p. 106). The group came to the conclusion that ‘He alone was the saviour; Muhammed never having announced himself as such’. The sect rejected ‘anything unusual about Muhammed and a refusal to retain the latter part of the Kalimat [the declaration of faith]: “And Muhammed is the Prophet of God”’ (Linden, ‘Isawa mallams’, p. 6). With this belief, the Isawa were clearly outside the ambit of Islam. Thus, they had effectively become Christians as a result of reading the Qur’an – a unique phenomenon indeed. However, Miller believed that, although the sect had moved away from the basic tenets of Islam, they were ‘“Nonconformists”, while essentially Moslems’. They ‘were performing all the Moslem ritual and holding to their religion and law’ (Reflections, p. 108). Further, because the sect ‘knew no Christians and nothing of the Christian religion’ (Reflections, p. 108), there was the need to establish a colony for them in order to teach them Christianity, so between 1914 and 1915 a Christian village was built in Gimi (Reflections, p. 117). The practice of establishing Christian villages was already popular with the CMS mission in East Africa (Strayer, Making of mission communities). Apart from the need to inculcate the rudiments of Christianity in the new sect, one other reason for the creation of the colony was, perhaps, to assuage the fears of the colonial authorities and the emirs that the Isawa were seditionists or Mahdists (as Adell Paton says, Malam Ibrahim, the founder of the Isawa, had links with a certain Malam Hamza who was a Mahdist [in Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, p. 130]). The meaning and importance of this development must not be missed: it is the only instance of a group of Muslims embracing Christianity through the Qur’an, where the ʿĪsā of the Qur’an is seen as the ʿĪsā in the Arabic New Testament. If the group had survived, a Christo-Islamic religion might have emerged similar to Aladura Christianity in the south-west of Nigeria. It would have been a Christianity in which the Bible and the Qur’an were used together. Miller, in fact, was conscious of the role of the Qur’an in the life of his Muslim converts and would have dialogue with Muslims using both the Bible and the Qur’an. This partly explains why some of his Muslim converts, like Malam Hasan, who could recite the whole of the Qur’an by heart, were closely associated with him (Reflections of a Pioneer, pp. 152, 153).
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The Isawa community had been settled on a piece of land donated by the emir of Zaria. Its leader was an assistant of Miller, a West Indian clergyman named W.A. Thompson, who, apart from teaching the Isawa the rudiments of Christianity, also established a sugar manufacturing industry, the first modern industry in Northern Nigeria. The Christianisation of the sect was thorough. Roman script replaced Arabic script in writing and reading Hausa, and the Christian converts had to learn to read and write in it. Hence, in the eyes of these ex-Muslims the church became a school, or in Hausa makarantan boko, a place of formal learning not a place for prayer or worship, as the mosque was in Islam. Furthermore, the Isawa ‘catechumens were required to renounce their Qur’an’ as no longer an authoritative book for understanding God. They were further told that only monogamous marriage was acceptable. The first book in the Bible the convert was taught was the Gospel of John where new religious concepts, difficult to grasp against a background of strict Islamic monotheism, were introduced, such as Jesus’s divinity and divine sonship. Some, such as Bulus Audu, accepted the new teaching, while many others, such as Kadiri, objected to the implication that they should reject their old faith in the literal truth of the Qur’an, and later they renounced Christianity altogether (Linden, ‘Between two religions’, p. 9). We see the effect of de-Islamisation in Abdul Majid Tafida, Miller’s adopted son, who affirmed after returning from pilgrimage to Mecca, ‘if there is anything in Islam of truth, the most truth and holiness ought to be found in Mecca, our holy City, but it is the wickedest, most depraved City in the world’ (Shankar, Who shall enter paradise?, p. 8). Such negativity regarding Islam is also seen in Miller’s home correspondence: Islam, he writes, ‘seems to blight a people and throw over them a mantle of darkness and moral crookedness which they can never throw off’, it was ‘that soul-destroying, manhood-sapping religion…’ (Ayandele, ‘Missionary factor’, p. 144). Islam, according to Miller, ‘sterilizes the mind of its adherents’ (Reflections, p. 52). This stance, however, not only prevented the emergence of a truly Hausa Christianity, which would have embraced perhaps the whole of the Isawa, but also sowed a puritanical form of Christianity that demonised Islam, an attitude that has characterised Muslim-Christian relations in Northern Nigeria ever since, with disastrous consequences. Also, the idea of a discontinuity between Christian and Islamic notions has remained a contentious issue in Muslim-Christian debates in Nigeria. In particular, Christians have argued that the ʿĪsā of the Qur’an is not the Jesus of the English Bible or Yesu of the Hausa Bible or Jesu of the Yoruba Bible. It is said that ʿĪsā is actually one of the deities of pre-Islamic Arabia, so, it is
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inappropriate to refer to Jesus by this name (Luka, ‘Theological study’). So also the argument that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God. But Lamin Sanneh asserts, ‘If you accept, as Muslims and Christians do, that there is only one God, then it seems theologically imperative to say that the God of one religion is none other than the God of the other. Was not the name “Allah” of Arabian Islam the same as the “Allah” of preIslamic Arab Christianity? Accordingly, there is no sense on linguistic or historical grounds to make exclusionary claims for the name of “God” (The Christian century, p. 35). Meanwhile, the CMS Christian village in Gimi did not last long, not least because the young Christian community was decimated by the sleeping sickness epidemic. Only a few members of the community survived, though their children, who were in Zaria city attending Miller’s school, grew up to form the nucleus of the Hausa church in the mission station within the walls of the city of Zaria and its successor, the new Christian community at Wusasa (Reflections, p. 118). Significance Reflections of a pioneer describes the challenge of understanding the religious background of Muslim converts and helping them to make a meaningful transition from Islam to Christianity. It tells of the sharp differences in culture and morality between the Hausa and Fulani and Westerners, whether missionaries or colonial authorities. Publications W.R.S. Miller, Reflections of a pioneer, London, 1936 (digitised version available through missiology.org.uk) Studies R.T. Luka, ‘A theological study of major African ancestor Christologies in conversation with the patristic Christologies of Tertullian and Athanasius’, Jos, 2017 (PhD Diss. ECWA Theological Seminary) Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Lamin Sanneh, ‘Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?’, The Christian Century (4 May 2004) 35-7 I. Linden, ‘Between two religions of the book. The children of the Israelites (c. 1846-c. 1920)’, in E. Isichei (ed.), Varieties of Christian experience in Nigeria, New York, 1982, 79-98 E.A. Ayandele, ‘The missionary factor in Northern Nigeria’, in O.U. Kalu (ed.), The history of Christianity in West Africa, London, 1980, 133-58 E.P.T. Crampton, Christianity in Northern Nigeria, London, 1979
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R.W. Strayer, The making of mission communities in East Africa. Anglicans and Africans in colonial Kenya, 1875-1935, London, 1978 I. Linden, ‘The Isawa mallams c.1850-c.1919. Some problems in the religious history of Northern Nigeria’, paper presented at the Ahmadu Bello Social Sciences Seminar, Zaria, 1974
Walter Miller, 1872-1952. An autobiography Date 1953 Original Language English Description Walter Miller, 1872-1952. An autobiography is Miller’s posthumously edited and published autobiography, 75 pages long. He wrote it in Bukuru, where he spent the last part of his life. The editor, who added Miller’s obituary at the end of the book, is not known. Miller, in fact, did not think the manuscript would be published (Miller, ‘Foreword’). In some ways, it is an abbreviated version of Reflections of a pioneer, with the addition of the story of Miller’s stay in Kano and final retirement in Bukuru. It was written for Miller’s many friends and admirers in Nigeria. Miller’s consuming passion was the Christianisation of the Hausa Muslims, to whom he returned in 1901 after his disastrous visit to Kano a year earlier. With him was his adopted Hausa Muslim son, Abdul Majid. Even before setting foot in Nigeria, he was already proficient in Hausa, a language he learnt in Turkish Tripoli (Walter Miller, pp. 12, 17). He had set himself to learn it so well that ‘he should not be detected, when speaking in the dark, by a native of the country’ (Reflections, pp. 1, 18). Hence the missionary team of which he was part was called the ‘Hausa party’ or ‘Hausa band’. He believed the Hausa people had been forced to convert to Islam by their Fulani conquerors, and that they still remained only nominal Muslims. His love for them can be seen throughout his writing. In a communication to one of the CMS authorities, F. Baylis, in 1905 he describes them as ‘a virtuous race, industrious, able builders, weavers and blacksmiths’, and the non-Muslim Hausa, the Maguzawa, were ‘infinitely purer in their customs, more honest and more truthful than their Moslem fellow countrymen’ (Ayandele, ‘Missionary factor’, p. 143). Because of these qualities, he believed the Fulani aristocracy would soon be dethroned by the British and power restored to the Hausa (Walter Miller, p. 23).
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Miller and his colleagues held strongly to this notion, hence their shock when they were rejected and driven out of Kano and Zaria. He believed this ugly treatment was caused by the ruling Fulani, whom he dreaded and regarded as usurpers of power, ‘evil and oppressive’, and the major cause of the backwardness of Northern Nigeria (Walter Miller, pp. 23, 24). He equated them with ‘Genghis Khan, Hitler and Mussolini’ (Ayandele, ‘Missionary factor’, p. 144). Miller’s closeness to the colonial authorities gave him privileges no earlier missionary had enjoyed in Nigeria. He was the only Western missionary allowed to live and work within the walls of the Muslim city of Zaria; he quickly became ombudsman, or better, as Ayandele puts it, the ‘tribune of the oppressed’ of the Hausa people (‘Missionary factor’, p. 147). Through his love for the Hausa, the Hausa language, rather than Arabic, became Miller’s second language and he fought to make it the official language in Northern Nigeria (Walter Miller, pp. 28-9). Subsequently, with the help of other missionaries and native Hausa speakers, he was able to produce a translation of the Bible into Hausa, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1932. His mastery of the Hausa language was acknowledged by the British authorities, and he was employed to teach the language to British officials working in Northern Nigeria. Miller returned to Zaria in 1901 and was allowed to settled in there in 1902 as a guest of the emir; in 1905, a portion of land was given to him to build the first mission station in Hausa land. This tenacity was born of a desire to work among Muslims in Northern Nigeria. He believed progress could be achieved there if Islam were modernised, because ‘Islam in every way is one of the most difficult problems for modern nations’ (Walter Miller, p. 49). One way to do this was through the provision of Western education – this would prove even more successful than the provision of modern medicine (in which Miller was trained; Walter Miller, p. 50). His school in Zaria was long considered the best school in Northern Nigeria. Women missionaries were recruited to teach the girls, one of them Miller’s sister, Ethel, who would later gain a reputation for unguarded attacks on Islam (A. Barnes, ‘“Religious insults”. Christian critique of Islam’, Journal of Religion in Africa 34 (2004) 62-81). Thinking along the same lines as his sister, Miller believed that Hausa Muslim women who lived in purdah were treated as slaves in their husbands’ homes (Walter Miller, p. 30). Miller also became engrossed in the politics of the emirate (Shankar, Who shall enter paradise?, p. 14). In his view, Emir Aliyu of Zaria was
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oppressive, so he began to send accounts of this misconduct to the British Resident of Zaria Province. In 1921, the emir was dethroned and sent into exile. The new emir feared Miller and so Miller moved to Kano to continue his translation of the Bible. He went back to England for a while but returned to Nigeria in 1939 and eventually settled in Bukuru, Plateau Province. Here he died on 27 August 1952, aged 80. Significance Walter Miller gives insight into the first missionary endeavours in Northern Nigeria and the relations and tensions between mission, colonialism and local people. It is a rare, if not unbiased eyewitness account of the power dynamics between the various groups in Northern Nigeria in an era when the region was closed to European missionaries. Miller believed there was some light at the end of the tunnel with the imposition of British rule. The role of Christian mission was to help in the modernisation of Nigeria so as to enable it to join the community of nations. Publications W.S.R. Miller, Walter Miller. An autobiography, Zaria, 1949 W.S.R. Miller, Walter Miller, 1872-1952. An autobiography, Zaria, 1953 Studies Shankar, Who shall enter paradise? Gaiya, Portrait of a saint Ayandele, ‘Missionary factor’ Ayandele, Missionary impact [Abubakar Imam], Likita Mila (Dr. Miller) Musa Ahmadu Barnabas Gaiya
Latin America
Map 3. Latin America and the Caribbean
Introduction: Islamophobia in Latin America in the 19th century Arely Medina and Diego Melo Carrasco Muslim arrivals in Latin America It was during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909) that the Ottoman Empire gradually began to change. Although the Tanzimat spirit of progressive reform continued, there was a feeling that the sultan’s behaviour was dictatorial. Coupled with this was the poor economic situation, which showed little scope for improvement, as is evidenced by the near total absence of industrialisation, dependence on agriculture and livestock, and the lack of access to consumer goods.1 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all this, combined with an increase in taxes and the imposition of a military levy that caused the gradual depopulation of rural areas, gave rise to the first major wave of migration to Latin America.2 This diaspora would come to be known as the Turkish or Ottoman migration, though other groups, such as Arabs from North Africa, migrated as well.3 The principal objective in making the journey was to get to the United States, ‘the land of opportunity’, though migrants were looking above all for refuge from disputes between social classes and ethnic and religious conflict, as well as from intervention by European countries.4 Although many of these groups set off for the United States, there were often complications along the way. Lack of familiarity with local languages and geography and sometimes the high cost of the journey meant that many landed at various points in Latin America. Some were under the impression that, by arriving in these countries, they would be able to get to 1 D. Melo Carrasco, art. ‘Shi‘i Islam in Chile’, in H.P.P. Gooren (ed.), Encyclopedia of Latin American religions, Cham, Switzerland, 2017, 1-4. 2 Melo Carrasco, ‘Shi‘i Islam in Chile’. 3 T. Alfaro-Velcamp, ‘Arab “Amirka”. Exploring Arab diasporas in Mexico and the United States’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 2 (2011) 282-95, p. 286. 4 S. Bernal and I. Lasel, ‘La presencia del Medio Oriente y el Norte de África en México’, Memorias recientes’, Centro de Estudios Internacionales para el Desarrollo XIX Simposio Electrónico Internacional Medio Oriente y Norte de África, 2009, 1-8, pp. 1-2; http://www.ceid. edu.ar/biblioteca/2009/indira_iasel_sanchez_bernal_la_presencia_del_medio_oriente_y_ el_norte_de_africa_en_mexico_memorias_recientes.pdf.
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Mexico and from there continue north over the border. However, many became discouraged by the cost of this final part of the journey and the US government’s restrictive policies, and instead decided to settle where they had landed. Therefore, a series of waves of migrants arrived in Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina.5 Brazil and Argentina played host to a particularly large population of migrants, and some from Argentina would later move on to Chile under mainly economic pressures. It is important to note that the majority of these migrants carried passports from the Ottoman Empire, which led in Chile and elsewhere to their being dubbed ‘Turks’. The areas where they settled were already home to Christianised Muslims, or Muslims who, at the very least, practised taqiyya (dissimulation as circumstances required) and crypto-Muslims who made new relationships with Christians, or rather with the Catholic world in which they lived, by having nothing to do with anything Arab or Islamic. The prejudice shown or implied left a ‘Turkophobic’ or ‘Islamophobic’ attitude towards Muslims. The political management of ‘otherness’ The policies put in place in various parts of Latin America to manage migration and ‘otherness’ cannot be fully understood from a 19th-century political perspective alone. They must be viewed instead as a longstanding amalgamation of politics, the economic situation and culture within individual nations, in which religion played a defining role in judging a person’s cultural belonging or individuality. As a result, to be Arab, Ottoman or Muslim was synonymous with being ‘other’. The general view of immigration at this time was that foreign labour and the capital it brought were needed for the pursuit of economic prosperity. But there were also notions of racial superiority at play, so that, while there was a certain openness towards migration, this was only really directed towards migrants of European origin, while entry to Arabs, Chinese and Jews was restricted because it was believed that these were inferior races who brought little economic advantage.6 Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Chile did not pursue an open-door immigration policy. Entry into the country was selective, following a formula that sought to 5 M. Olguín Tenorio et al., La inmigración árabe en Chile, Santiago, 1990, p. 60. 6 L. Agar Corbinos, ‘El aporte de los árabes al desarrollo y la cultura en Chile’, in K. Hauser and D. Gil (eds), Contribuciones árabes a las identidades iberoamericanas, Madrid, 2009, 45-64, p. 48.
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reproduce European societies and their achievements in reason and science. This idea was developed through a classification system recommended to the Chilean House of Representatives by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, which categorised European migrants according to the value Chile should place on them. First were the Germans, Italians and Swiss, followed by the Irish, Scots and English. In third place were the French, and last were the Spanish. From 1850, Chile allowed the entry of North African diplomats, followed by permission for a consular presence from other Middle Eastern countries. Between 1878 and 1887 this policy was relaxed, allowing entry (though still restricted) to migrant groups. Mexico did the same and opened its ports to the arrival of Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian and Iraqi migrants, all from the Ottoman Empire. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created complications when attempts were made to document recent arrivals in Latin American countries. This resulted in a marked homogenisation without reference to an immigrant’s country of origin, giving rise to a number of general synonyms. Thus, an Arab could be arbitrarily identified as Arab, Turkish, Ottoman Syrian or Lebanese, simply on the basis of the category that appeared on different registration cards. Similarly, Spanish forms of names appeared in migration registers because officials did not know the differences between nationalities or languages. The immigrants themselves also began to use Spanish versions of their names as a way of avoiding rejection and dislike on the part of local people. Hernán Taboada mentions that some migrants went as far as to define themselves as Catholic Muslim.7 The construction of ‘otherness’: from Islamophobia to the image of the ‘businessman’ It has been suggested that Latin American societies generally constructed an image of ‘Arabs’ as businessmen, particularly in the case of Syrians and Lebanese, and consequently did not react to them with hostility.8 But this attitude did not come about immediately. To begin with, migrants from regions considered Arab, Turkish or Muslim were targets of xenophobic 7 Melo Carrasco, ‘Shi‘i Islam in Chile’. 8 C. Martínez Assad, ‘Los libaneses inmigrantes y sus lazos culturales desde México’, Dimensión Antropológica año 15 44 (2008) 132-55; L.A. Ramírez Carrillo, ‘De buhoneros a empresarios. La inmigración libanesa en el sureste de México’, Historia Mexicana 43 (1994) 451-86.
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attacks and prejudice against their culture and faith. As Theresa AlfaroVelcamp points out,9 Arab migrants in the 19th and early 20th century faced marked xenophobia, despite the fact that the majority were Christians. In Mexico, for example, while only 4.2 per cent of ‘Arab’ migrants were Muslims, they were all stereotyped as Turks or Muslims. Concerning relations between Christian (overwhelmingly Roman Catholic) and Muslim migrants, government policies in the various states of Latin America influenced perceptions of migrants. For example, Arabs, who were always perceived as Muslims, were considered as uniformly lustful because of the association between Islam and polygamy. Their clothes and customs were perceived as alien, they were seen as dirty and beggars, and as they began to integrate economically they were met with accusations of stealing jobs from the native population. On the other hand, there were also views of Arabs as exotic, charismatic figures.10 Certain Latin American countries were experiencing political and economic crises at the time, which gave rise to a shift in favour of openness towards ethnic and religious diversity. In Mexico, for example, the Porfiriato (the presidential period through the later decades of the 19th century led by Porfirio Díaz) and later the revolution (1910-17), were key in redefining the image of ‘the Arab’ and recognising them as a part of the workforce. In Cuba, the War of Independence from 1895 to 1898 created a need for workers and an openness to immigration.11 After Chile gained independence from Spain in 1810 its immigration policies aimed to promote economic development and repopulate the country.12 The reactions of the local population influenced by these measures changed from xenophobia and Islamophobia to begrudging acceptance of the immigrants’ contribution to the economy, though this was not always the case. Many immigrants of Arab origin worked as street vendors, which contributed to a certain type of Islamophobia in Chile.13 The Arab merchant came to be stereotyped as a pedlar or falte (from the verb faltar, ‘to be lacking’, as they provided what was needed). However, these faltes often faced hostility from their customers, so every day’s work was an exercise in proving that 9 Alfaro-Velcamp, ‘Arab “Armikar”’. 10 M. Díaz de Juri and L. MacLuf, De Libano a México. Crónica de un pueblo emigrante, México City, 1999; C. Pastor, ‘Lo árabe y su doble. Imaginarios de principios del siglo en México y Honduras’, in K. Hauser and D. Gil (eds), Contribuciones árabes a las identidades iberoamericanas, Madrid, 2009, 287-347. 11 Melo Carrasco, ‘Shi‘i Islam in Chile’. 12 Alfaro-Velcamp, ‘Arab “Amirka”’. 13 L. Agar and N. Saffie, ‘Chilenos de origen árabe. La fuerza de las raíces’, Revista Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos 54 (2005) 1-23, p. 7.
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their trade was as honest as any other.14 Paradoxically, the work that these faltes did actually helped to meet the needs of the Chilean population. With over 60 per cent of the population living in the countryside, there was huge demand for the goods the pedlars supplied because country people were able to buy the everyday products they needed cheaply without having to pay the inflated prices that local establishments were charging. In Mexico, several accounts have been unearthed that describe the intolerant atmosphere surrounding migrants at the time of the revolution. One of these demonstrates the perpetual limbo between rejection and acceptance that migrants experienced: Some Villista soldiers [supporters of Pancho Villa] came into the shop and paid with one of these notes. My father didn’t want to accept it because it was crumpled and torn. The next day, they came for him and they were going to shoot him. Luckily, he got to see Villa and explained to him that he had not accepted the note because it was ripped. The general spared his life and told him that he liked Arabs because they were working people.15
These attitudes softened somewhat when Lebanese migrants used religion as a strategy to help them integrate: in a Catholic community, religion was a way of gaining acceptance. The majority of these immigrants were Christians, usually Maronites or Orthodox.16 so their rituals and the establishment of their churches went largely unnoticed. Catholics might visit their churches without noticing many differences from their own and, as is the way with religion in Latin America, they adopted some of the immigrants’ practices, including the cult of the Maronite Saint Charbel. Marriage was another integration strategy that could be used, but despite the majority of Christian migrants being young men, only a small percentage opted to marry local Catholic girls, except in Chile, where marriage to Chilean women and subsequent conversion to Catholicism was common. Through these approaches to integration, public perception of ‘the Arab’ shifted from that of the stereotypical Turkish Ottoman Muslim (despite the majority being Christian) to identifying an Arab as Lebanese (or in Chile, Turkish). A figure worth mentioning here because he stands out for his unusually tolerant attitude towards Muslims and Islam is José Joaquín Fernández de 14 P. Menéndez and D. Rigoberto, ‘Del Medio Oriente a la mayor islam del Caribe. Los árabes en Cuba’, in Hauser and Gil (eds), Contribuciones árabes a las identidades ibero americanas, 17-44, p. 19. 15 Juri and MacLuf, De Libano a México, Crónica de un pueblo emigrante, p. 89. 16 Agar and Saffie, ‘Chilenos de origen árabe’, p. 17.
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Lizardi (1776-1827).17 Born and brought up in the viceroyalty of New Spain under Spanish rule, he sided with those who fought for Mexican independence and strongly advocated reforms such as freedom of the press, limitations on the power of the Church, and education for women. It was probably this liberal approach over matters of politics and religion that brought him to regard Islam as a religion that could be respected alongside Christianity rather than condemned out of hand. His publications show that he became aware that his initial intolerance towards Islam was a product of the Christianity that had been brought to Mexico from Spain, and he gradually moved to a more open acceptance of the Moors. This transition can be seen in references he makes in some of his works. In the relatively early El Pensador Mexicano (1812-13) he identifies Muḥammad as uncouth and an enemy of science, who imposed his religion by force of arms. But in later years, with the experience of travel in Europe, he came to see that in other parts of the church attitudes were less vehement. He also realised that the principle of religious tolerance came from Muslims, affirming in Correo Semanario de México (1827) that Christians who were living under the rule of the Moors in Spain were free to follow their religion. Lizardi can be seen as a leading example of the shift from an intolerant Spanish form of Christianity to a less narrow Mexican form of the faith.18 Here to stay Middle Eastern migrants constructed an identity from their history, culture, language and religion. It is particularly interesting to look at how religion played a part in the social and cultural integration of migrants. While Lebanese Christians managed to integrate successfully, both politically and business-wise, Muslims found it more difficult to integrate culturally. For this reason it is probable that not all perceptions of the TurkishOttoman or Muslim Arab were linked to the image of the businessman.
17 For full documentation on Lizardi, see: https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/ fernandez_lizardi/. 18 These paragraphs on Lizardi were contributed by Eduardo Quintana Salazar.
Christian-Muslim Relations in the Caribbean 1600-1900 R. Kirtie Algoe Unlike many societies in the world, those in the Caribbean were created ‘anew rather than [being] imposed on existing ones’ under colonial rule.1 They were plantation societies where first the colonial state was established, affecting the atmosphere for developing Christian-Muslim relations. In the course of time, the Caribbean evolved from having an indigenous population with their own religious beliefs to what is currently a varied religious landscape populated predominantly by Christians and where Muslims are a minority. Estimates for 2020 show that the population of the Caribbean and Latin-American region was composed of almost 90 per cent Christians, with less than 0.1 per cent being Muslims.2 The largest share of Muslims are found in Suriname (13.8 per cent), followed by Guyana (5.9 per cent) and Trinidad3 and Tobago (5.8 per cent).4 For this reason, this essay mainly considers these three countries. The nature of religion in the Caribbean is often discussed according to plantation theory, plural society theory and creolisation theory.5 To understand interreligious relations, it is advisable to use works that elaborate on major religion-related issues of the Caribbean nations.6 The main topics to be examined are: colonialism, power relations between state officials and 1 M. Schalkwijk, The colonial state in the Caribbean. Structural analysis and changing elite networks in Suriname, 1650-1920, The Hague, 2011, pp. 18-19. 2 Pew Research Centre, The future of world religions. Population growth projections, 2010-2050. Latin America and the Caribbean, Washington DC, 2015; https://www.pewforum. org/2015/04/02/latin-america-and-the-caribbean/. 3 Trinidad and Tobago are hereafter referred to as Trinidad. 4 Pew Research Centre, Future of world religions. See also H. Kettani, ‘History and prospect of Muslims in South America’, Social Indicators Research 115 (2014) 837-68. 5 E.B. Edmonds and M.A. Gonzalez, Caribbean religious history. An introduction, New York, 2010. 6 R.K. Algoe, Hindu and Muslim responses to Christian dominance. Interreligious relations in Suriname and Guyana 1950-2014, Paramaribo, 2017; R.K. Algoe, ‘Institutional development of Christianity, Hinduism and Islam in Suriname and Trinidad. An exploration in religious practices and festivities from 1900-2010’, Academic Journal of Suriname 2 (2011) 186-97.
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labourers, Christian dominance, and responses of marginalised groups to this dominance. It is important to examine the diversity within each religious group. With regard to Christians, between 1600 and 1900 Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches can be distinguished, while with respect to Muslims differentiation by ethnicity can be added to theological diversity. In Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad, there were traditionalists and reformists.7 The majority of Muslims were of Indian and Indonesian descent, and a small proportion were Africans. The earliest traces of Muslims in the Caribbean go back to the slavery period, followed by the Indian and Indonesian indenture period.8 Years of settlement The settlement of Christians in the Caribbean was the result of imperialist and colonialist forces. The lands in which they settled were inhabited by indigenous nomads who practised traditional religions,9 such as shamanism in Suriname, for example. In some countries, the religious landscape began to change as early as the late 15th century, when, for example, settlers in Suriname introduced Christianity and Judaism,10 and by 1900 Christians comprised 76 per cent of the country’s population.11 When the Dutch ruled Suriname in the 17th century, the Dutch Reformed Church officially became the state religion. The Octroy ofte fondamenteele conditien (‘Granting of fundamental conditions’) of 1682 included permission for the preaching of Christianity in the colony,12 though some denominations were not included: Moravians and Catholics received permission to 7 R.S. Chickrie, ‘Islamic organizations in Guyana. Seventy years of history and politics, 1936-2006’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27 (2007) 401-28. 8 For Suriname 1838-1916, see R. Hoefte, ‘Control and resistance. Indentured labor in Suriname’, New West Indian Guide 61 (1987) 1-22; for Guyana 1838-1917, see B. Mangru, An overview of Indian Indentureship in Guyana, 1838-1917, https://www.stabroeknews.com/ 2013/05/04/news/guyana/an-overview-of-indian-indentureship-in-guyana-1838-1917/; for Trinidad 1845-1917, see J.A. Perry, ‘A history of the East Indian indentured plantation worker in Trinidad, 1845-1917’, Baton Rouge LA, 1969 (PhD Diss. Louisiana State University). 9 J. Meier, ‘The beginnings of the Catholic Church in the Caribbean’, in A. Lampe (ed.), Christianity in the Caribbean. Essays on Church history, Kingston, 2001, 1-85. 10 A. Loor, Andre Loor vertelt... Suriname 1850-1950, Paramaribo, 2013; J. Vernooij, De regenboog is in ons huis. De kleurrijke geschiedenis van de RK-kerk in Suriname, Nijmegen, 2012. 11 Algoe, Hindu and Muslim responses. 12 S.L. Gobardhan-Rambocus, Onderwijs als sleutel tot maatschappelijke vooruitgang. Een taal- en onderwijsgeschiedenis van Suriname, 1651-1975, Zutphen, 2001, p. 80.
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establish their own institutions, but they did not have equal status with the Dutch Reformed Church.13 The Catholic and Moravian churches gradually became key players in the field of interreligious relations when they started to expand their missionary work. Christian settlements were also established in other countries in the Caribbean. In Guyana and Trinidad, the Anglican Church played an important role in interreligious relations. The first records of its presence in the West Indies date from the early 17th century,14 most likely in Saint Kitts and Nevis in 1624.15 In addition, other denominations such as the Presbyterian Church were also important in shaping interreligious relations, in particular between the East Indian community and Christians. Muslims appeared in the Caribbean as a result of both forced and voluntary migration.16 Islam was introduced by enslaved labourers from Africa.17 It has been estimated that at least 10 per cent of the enslaved workers in the Caribbean were Muslims.18 A proportion of African Muslims who were brought to the Americas during the first three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade were Mande speakers from the Upper Guinea region.19 By the early 1800s, a large proportion of the Africans brought to Cuba, Bahia in Brazil, and Santo Domingo were Muslims from the Hausa and Yoruba ethnic groups from Lower Guinea.20 In Suriname, Muslim settlements comprised groups of enslaved Africans and also indentured labourers from India and Java. It is extremely difficult to give reliable statistics concerning the early settlements,21 but 13 Gobardhan-Rambocus, Onderwijs als sleutel tot maatschappelijke vooruitgang. 14 N. Titus, art. ‘Anglican Church’, in P. Taylor and F.I. Case (eds), The encyclopedia of Caribbean religions, Urbana IL, 2013, vol. 1, 39-47, p. 42. 15 Titus, ‘Anglican Church’, p. 39. 16 H. Kassim, ‘Identity and acculturation of Trinidad Muslims. An exploration of contemporary practices’, in M.S. Hassankhan, G. Vahed and L. Roopnarine (eds), Indentured Muslims in the diaspora. Identity and belonging of minority groups in plural societies, New Delhi, 2016, 110-41. 17 M.S. Hassankhan, ‘Islam and Indian Muslims in Suriname. A struggle for survival’, in M.S. Hassankhan, G. Vahed and L. Roopnarine (eds), Indentured Muslims in the diaspora. Identity and belonging of minority groups in plural societies, New Delhi, 2016, 184-228. 18 S.A. Diouf, Servants of Allah. African Muslims enslaved in the Americas, New York, 1998. 19 J.T. Karam, ‘African rebellion and refuge on the edge of empire’, in M. del Mar Logroño Narbona, P.G. Pinto, and J.T. Karam (eds), Crescent over another horizon, Austin TX, 2015, 46-62. 20 Karam, ‘African rebellion and refuge’, p. 46. 21 M.S. Hassankhan, Gedenkboek Himayatul Islam, Welgedacht C, Suriname. Himayatul Islam en haar Ontwikkeling. Groei te midden van Beroering 1902-2014, Wanica, Suriname, 2014.
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official estimates indicate that the Muslim population in Suriname grew from zero in 1873 to 5.7 per cent in 1900.22 A significant proportion were Javanese Muslims who arrived in the Suriname plantations between 1890 and 1940.23 According to the records, a small number of the enslaved people were African Muslims: a missionary confirmed that the majority of enslaved workers from the Sokko nation were Muslim.24 A Dutch writer and traveller, Marten Douwes Teenstra, also said that this group were Muslims.25 In Guyana, Muslim settlements consisted initially of enslaved Africans. They were mostly Mandigos and Fulanis, who were referred to as fullah, a term derived from the name of the Fulani tribe.26 Writings in Arabic by enslaved people in the early 1800s confirm the presence of African Muslim slaves in Guyana.27 This country also had indentured Indian Muslims (known as Hindustani Muslims), who arrived between 1838 and 1917.28 Official estimates show that the Muslim population increased from zero in 1831 to 11,691 or 4.2 per cent in 1891.29 In Trinidad, Muslims were primarily from three groups: enslaved Africans, indentured Indian migrants, and migrants from the Levant region.30 According to a 1901 census, there were 11,478 Muslims in Trinidad, equal to 4.2 per cent of the population.31 The first sizeable Muslim community was in Port of Spain,32 where individuals with the names Muhammad Sisse and Muhammad Hausa were known in the first half of the 19th century. It has been argued that, by the mid-1800s, Port of Spain had a remarkable Muslim community led by an imam named Muhammad Bath. Communities also existed in the areas called Quaré and Manzanilla.33 22 H. Kettani, ‘History and prospect of Muslims in South America’, Social Indicators Research 115 (2014) 837-68. 23 S.L. Soeropawiro, ‘The development of Islam amongst the Javanese in Suriname’, in M.S. Hassankhan, G. Vahed and L. Roopnarine (eds), Indentured Muslims in the diaspora. Identity and belonging of minority groups in plural societies, New Delhi, 2016, 229-73. 24 E.M.L. Klinkers, Op hoop van vrijheid. Van slavensamenleving naar Creoolse gemeenschap in Suriname, 1830-1880, Utrecht, 1997, pp. 32-3. 25 M.D. Teenstra, De landbouw in de kolonie Suriname voorafgegaan door eene geschieden natuurkundige beschouwing dier kolonie, Groningen, 1835. 26 R. Chickrie and B.H. Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims in Guyana. Tradition, conflict and change, 1838 to the present’, in Hassankhan, Vahed and Roopnarine (eds), Indentured Muslims in the diaspora, 109-40. 27 D. Bisnauth, History of religions in the Caribbean, Trenton NJ, 1996. 28 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’. 29 Kettani, ‘History and prospect of Muslims’. 30 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’. 31 West Indian Census 1946, Kingston, 1948, p. xi. 32 Edmonds and Gonzalez, Caribbean religious history, p. 183. 33 Edmonds and Gonzalez, Caribbean religious history, p. 183.
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They seemed to be well organised socially and financially, and were able to express their religious beliefs publicly. It is believed that the expansion of Islam was a consequence of the limited number of Christian clergy in the Muslim areas.34 Trinidad’s Muslim community was considered one of the largest, most successful and most visible in the Americas. Christian-Muslim relations under slavery Between 1600 and 1900, Christian-Muslim relations evolved within the colonial system under the domination of Christianity, as is shown in the link between religion and state and by Christian missions among non-Christians.35 This dominance and responses to it helped to shape Christian-Muslim relations. In Suriname, Christian conversion projects had already started in the early 18th century, when evangelistic missions by the Moravian and Catholic Churches were first conducted among the indigenous and enslaved people. The Moravians obtained state permission for missions among enslaved people in 1765,36 when they were allowed by plantation owners to send preachers among enslaved workers. Catholic missions began a little later.37 In the 19th century, the colonial authorities introduced a religious assimilation policy among enslaved people.38 Financial support was provided for indoctrination with Christian values and principles such as respect for Christians and the colonial authorities and, after emancipation in 1863, in order to deter rebellion.39 The Maatschappij tot bevordering van godsdienstonderwijs onder de slavenbevolking in Suriname (‘Society for the encouragement of religious education among slaves’) was founded in 1828 to encourage the development of a ‘Christianity-oriented mind’ among the enslaved population,40 with colonists in charge of arranging finances for churches, payment of clergy, building schools and welfare organisations.41 The religious assimilation policy also prohibited the 34 Edmonds and Gonzalez, Caribbean religious history, p. 183. 35 Algoe, Hindu and Muslim responses. 36 H. Jap-A-Joe, ‘Afro-Surinamese renaissance and the rise of Pentecostalism’, Exchange 34 (2005) 134-48. 37 J. Vernooij, De regenboog is in ons huis. De kleurrijke geschiedenis van de RK-kerk in Suriname, Nijmegen, 2012. 38 Gobardhan-Rambocus and McLeod, ‘“Herinneringen aan Mariënburg”’. 39 Jap-A-Joe, ‘Afro-Surinamese renaissance’; Vernooij, De regenboog is in ons huis. 40 Gobardhan-Rambocus, Onderwijs als sleutel tot maatschappelijke vooruitgang. 41 J. Vernooij, Indianen en kerken in Suriname, Paramaribo, 1988.
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practice of traditional religions among enslaved people, and allowed them to be granted freedom if they abided by Christian principles.42 As a result, enslaved people were compelled to convert to Christianity, and most became Moravians or Catholics.43 Muslims among the enslaved workers were also targeted by the Christian missions. Moravian missionaries were aware of them in Suriname as they wrote about enslaved workers belonging to the Sokko-nation.44 Understandably, a number of them refused to convert to Christianity.45 Moravians, for instance, wrote about an old slave from the De Vier-Hendrikken plantation in Saramacca who stated that he could not be baptised again as he had already been baptised in the name of Muḥammad in Africa. At the Burnside sugar plantation in Coronie, however, the missionary A.H. Räthling did convert an African Muslim to Christianity. According to the missionary J.G. Menze, in 1859 Räthling spoke to a group of free Africans, including some Muslims.46 Not all converted to Christianity, but neither did they seem able to pass on their own faith to the next generation. Some records point to the involvement of enslaved African Muslims in rebellion against colonial powers in Suriname.47 There were resistance movements led by two maroons (Africans who had escaped from slavery in Jamaica) with Muslim names: Samsam, one of the leaders of the Saramacca maroon group in 1747, and Arabi, the leader of the Aucaners maroons.48 In Guyana, enslaved workers were forced to convert to Christianity, which included changing their African Muslim names to Christian ones.49 Some enslaved African Muslims who converted in exchange for freedom and became prominent Christian preachers in Guyana had the names 42 Gobardhan-Rambocus and McLeod, ‘“Herinneringen aan Mariënburg”’. 43 Vernooij, De regenboog is in ons huis. 44 In 1835, a missionary in Paramaribo spoke to a Muslim enslaved worker from Senegal. The man had learned to write in his homeland and in Suriname had written in a book as much about Islam as he could remember. He translated it into Sranan for the missionaries and wrote about the strict discipline practised in Senegal. Those who did not regularly visit the mosque and the school there were not only fined but also punished physically. A pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina took seven years. Many also went to Jerusalem, but many never returned from the long journey (sources: Hassankhan, ‘Islam and Indian Muslims’; Klinkers, Op hoop van vrijheid, pp. 32-3). 45 Hassankhan, ‘Islam and Indian Muslims’. 46 E.M.L. Klinkers, Op hoop van vrijheid. Van slavensamenleving naar Creoolse gemeenschap in Suriname, 1830-1880, Utrecht, 1997, pp. 32-3. 47 Hassankhan, ‘Islam and Indian Muslims’. 48 Hassankhan, Gedenkboek Himayatul Islam. 49 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’.
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Tobi, Romeo and Jason.50 The lack of Qur’ans, imams and mosques are regarded as factors that explained why Islam did not survive among African slaves and maroons.51 Although enslaved African Muslims did not have the Qur’an in their possession, there is evidence of the presence of imams and slaves who had memorised passages from it.52 The harsh living conditions meant that enslaved Muslims were not allowed to observe their native traditions and religious practices, such as praying five times a day.53 Nevertheless, Islamic influence among enslaved groups in Guyana did exist, as is evidenced by known Muslim names. The slave uprising or protest led by the enslaved Muslim Cuffy (Kofi) in Guyana is well recorded. He wrote a letter in Arabic stating terms and conditions for peace with the Dutch colonisers,54 and led the first slave revolt in 1763. Around the time of the abolition of slavery in 1834, several AfroGuyanese bore Muslim names such as Bacchus, Mammadoe, Mohamed, Mammadou, Sallat, Hannah, Mousa, Sabah, Russanah and Feekea,55 and not all accepted the Christian religion. The name Cuffy means ‘born on the Jummah’ and is related to the Akan tribe of Ghana.56 He was believed to be a Muslim since he was literate in Arabic, while a few of his ‘lieutenants’ were Muslims: Akara, his chief army commander from the same plantation, and Atta and Quabi were also from the Akan tribe. In addition to Cuffy, other Muslims also took part in rebellions against the colony. Ray Chickrie and Shabnam Alli mention records in Arabic about slave revolts in the early 1800s and cite Thomas Staunton St Clair’s 1834 autobiography, A soldier’s sojourn in British Guiana, 1806-1808, which refers to a revolt planned for Christmas Eve 1807.57 They also cite Emilia Viotti da Costa’s Crowns of glory, tears of blood (Oxford, 1994) that refers to the involvement of African Muslims in the 1823 Demerara rebellion. In addition to Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad, the presence of Muslim communities is also known in Brazil and Jamaica. As João José Reis notes, 50 R. Chickrie and S. Alli, ‘The Muslim-led slave uprisings in Guyana’, letter in Guyana Chronicle, 5 July 2016; https://guyanachronicle.com/2016/07/05/the-muslim-led -slave-uprisings-in-guyana/. 51 Bisnauth, History of religions. 52 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’. 53 R. Chickrie, ‘Muslims in Guyana. History, traditions, conflict and change’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19 (1999) 181-95. 54 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’, p. 111. 55 Chickrie and Khanam, ‘Hindustani Muslims’. 56 Chickrie and Alli, ‘Muslim-led slave uprisings’. 57 Chickrie and Alli, ‘Muslim-led slave uprisings’, https://guyanachronicle.com/2016/ 07/05/the-muslim-led-slave-uprisings-in-guyana/; see also E.V. da Costa, Crowns of glory, tears of blood. The Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, Oxford, 1994.
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‘Brazilian slaves knew about Haiti and considered it an almost mythical touchstone’, and says that Africans in Rio de Janeiro wore necklaces that bore the image of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution, within a year of his declaration of the independence of SaintDomingue.58 Despite the conditions in which they lived, enslaved African Muslims in the Americas remained faithful to Islam in the various places that were shaken by Muslim-led rebellions.59 One of the best known was led by African Muslims in Salvador da Bahia in the year 1835. During these revolts, both Muslim and non-Muslim African slaves carried for protection amulets called mandingas, strips of cloth wrapped around a small piece of paper inscribed with one or more Qur’an verses in Arabic (a common practice in Lower Guinea), which were prepared by educated enslaved African Muslims. Enslaved African ‘insurgents’ were sent back to Africa by the Brazilian colonial authorities. After the rebellion in Salvador da Bahia in 1835, Islam was labelled as ‘foreign’ by the Brazilian colonial authorities, and Christianity was confirmed as the state religion. In Jamaica, many enslaved African Muslims brought from West Africa were forced to observe the religion of their masters.60 There are reports of thousands of enslaved people undergoing baptism. Many enslaved African Muslims gave the appearance of practising Christianity in public to avoid punishment by the slave masters and the church, but a large group remained faithful to Islam and practised it privately. There were enslaved African Muslims within this group who had memorised the entire Qur’an and had studied Islamic theology. One of these was Abu Bakr al-Siddiq who, even after living in Jamaica for 30 years, knew the Qur’an by heart.61 Christian-Muslim relations during the indenture period Relations during the indenture period (1873-1917 in Suriname, 1845-1917 in Trinidad and 1838-1917 in Guyana) primarily concerned relations between 58 Karam, ‘African rebellion and refuge’, p. 53. Dessalines was a leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution. 59 P. Curtin, Africa remembered. Narratives by West Africans from the era of the slave trade, Madison WI, 1967, p. 163; Diouf, Servants of Allah, p. 58; M.A. Gomez, Black crescent. The experience and legacy of African Muslims, New York, 2005, p. 54; D.V. Trotman and P.E. Lovejoy, ‘Community of believers. Trinidad Muslims and the return to Africa, 18101850’, in P.E. Lovejoy (ed.), Slavery on the frontiers of Islam, Princeton NJ, 2004, 219-32. 60 S. Afroz, ‘The unsung slaves. Islam in plantation Jamaica’, Caribbean Quarterly 41 (1995) 30-44. 61 Afroz, ‘Unsung slaves’.
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Christians and Muslim indentured workers. The latter were predominantly of East Indian descent in all three nations, along with a small number of Javanese in Suriname. In British Guyana, the colonial government facilitated Christian conversion missions among indigenous and African people by giving state subsidies, but in the 19th century East Indians were not under severe pressure.62 Evangelistic missions by Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Catholics were few.63 Schools were established for children of indentured workers, where they were taught reading, writing, elementary arithmetic, and religious knowledge (the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments) and learned to recite passages from the Bible and sing hymns,64 though these schools did not attract many pupils. By the mid-19th century, churches in the colony felt a need to ‘civilise’ newly arrived East Indians and received financial support for this from the colonial government,65 though financial difficulties prevented serious funding being made available until the second half of the 19th century. These problems related to economic setbacks in Britain between 1836 and 1843, losses in trade and agriculture and financial crises in 1845-6.66 As in the time of slavery in Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad, ChristianMuslim relations during the indenture period were characterised by inequality and Christian dominance. There were Christian mission activities among East Indian indentured workers, a strong link between the state and Christianity, and Christians had far more private sources than Muslims. In Trinidad, attempts to proselytise were made by Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians.67 One of the most popular methods was education, but the Indian community in Trinidad resisted and initial enrolment numbers were low. In 1890, Indian schools were established.68 In 1882, policies were established in Trinidad to discourage the practice of non-Christian religious processions. These affected Shīʿī Muslims, who celebrated the festival of Hosay which commemorates the martyrdom of the Imam Ḥusayn, grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad. The festival attracted a number of religious groups. In 1882, Ordinance no. 9 62 Algoe, Hindu and Muslim responses. 63 Schalkwijk, Colonial state in the Caribbean, p. 288. 64 M. Mangru, ‘Would you believe????’, The Arithmetic Teacher 25 (1977) 39. 65 Bisnauth, History of religions. 66 Bisnauth, History of religions. 67 H. Kassim, art. ‘Education. Hinduism and Islam in Trinidad’, in P. Taylor and F.I. Case (eds), The encyclopaedia of Caribbean religions, Urbana IL, 2013, 279-82, p. 279. 68 Kassim, ‘Education’.
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was passed to reduce the number of participants and the routes taken by Hindu, Muslim and Afro-Trinidadian processions.69 These policies strongly reflected Christian dominance. A number of missionary societies operated in Guyana, including the Wesleyan Methodist East Indian Mission, the Church of England East Indian Mission and the Canadian Presbyterian East Indian Mission.70 A minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Church stated that, between 1861 and 1870, around 37 indentured labourers in Guyana converted to Christianity. But growth in the numbers of converts was stagnant due to the high number of them who returned to India, continual migration of labourers to other parts of Guyana, and the high death rate among East Indian converts. The Church of England had managed to secure 226 East Indian members between 1871 and 1881, but about 70 of these were lost because of the high death rate and migration back to India.71 Overall, Christian rule did not lead to mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity.72 There were reactions to Christian dominance as well as to the exploitation of labourers. The role of Janey Tetary, a female Muslim indentured worker, in leading a labour protest in 1884 in Suriname is remarkable. Born in India under British rule, she was divorced at a young age. Life for divorced women was tough, and the stories told by recruiters who promised well-paid jobs overseas were very appealing, so she decided to migrate, arriving in Suriname in 1880 with her ten-year-old son. She became an indentured worker, effectively working in conditions of enslavement.73 Here Tetary got her nickname ‘Begum’, meaning noblewoman, as she was committed to improving the conditions of the other contract workers and defended women who were treated badly by their husbands. In 1884, it was announced that contract workers must carry out heavy labour for very low payment, and if the work was not completed no payment was made. The day this change was announced, Janey’s workgroup, along with some men, attacked and injured a white officer. In order 69 Edmonds and Gonzalez, Caribbean religious history. 70 C. Shameerudeen, ‘Christian history of East Indians of Guyana’, Journal of Adventist Mission Studies 16 (2021) 146-71. 71 Shameerudeen, ‘Christian history of East Indians’. 72 R.K. Algoe and J. Menke, ‘Afro-Surinamese Muslims in Suriname. Between ignorance and acceptance’, Academic Journal of Suriname 2 (2011) 186-97; Algoe, Hindu and Muslim responses. 73 R. Bhagwanbali, Tetary, de koppige. Het Verzet van Hindoestanen tegen het indentured labour system in Suriname, 1873-1916, The Hague, 2011; H. Cheney and V. Ziherl, ‘Janey “Begum” Tetary, indentured rebel of Suriname’, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner Too?, online, 2019; http://deappel.nl/en/files/janey-begum-tetary-indentured-rebel-of-suriname.
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to suppress the uprising, the colonial government sent soldiers to arrest the contract workers involved in the assault. However, the workers revolted and dispersed in groups, arming themselves with sticks and cutlasses. Led by Janey, the female workers fought alongside the men. Janey challenged the soldiers, who failed to stop the uprising at their first attempt. Snipers were then ordered to eliminate the leader of the female rebels. The gunshot wound that killed Janey was also the trigger that ended the resistance. Conclusion Christian-Muslim relations in Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad from 1600 to 1900 developed within a power structure that favoured Christians over others. In all three countries, Muslims made up a very small percentage of enslaved workers. After the abolition of slavery, the Islamic population increased with the arrival of Muslim indentured labourers from Asia. Christian-Muslim relations developed differently for particular Muslim enslaved groups and Muslim indentured labourers. In Suriname, a religious assimilation policy was pursued for enslaved workers, who included some Muslims, but this did not apply to Muslim indentured workers. In Guyana and Trinidad, Muslim enslaved workers and indentured labourers were both targeted by Christian missions, though working conditions made the situation harsher for enslaved people. In all three countries, Muslims rebelled against Christian dominance and colonial exploitation, probably on the largest scale in Trinidad.
The ‘Islamic Orient’ in Latin American reading and writing culture. Mexico, Central America and Cuba (1808-1914) Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro Islam, religion and academy Between the time of the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502) from Spain and the legalisation of freedom of worship in 1868, Roman Catholicism was the only religion permitted in Spain and Spanish colonies in America. In the colonies, there always lurked elements of pre-Columban forms of religion and, among former slaves of African origin, features of ancestral beliefs and practices. Islamic practices are documented in isolated cases of slaves and Moriscos, and, in 1511, the Inquisition was introduced, partly to eradicate Muslims along with crypto-Jews, Protestants and other heretics. On independence in 1821, Mexico and Central America retained Catholicism as the sole official religion, though a process of secularisation had begun at the end of the 18th century. Publications that had previously been unknown became available, with a resultant increase in the flow of information and, among other things, an interest in the East. After independence, culture and education became the main secularizing agents.1 Although there was no religious freedom in law, the new cultural, intellectual and spiritual atmosphere contributed to the emergence among the lettered classes of para-religious groups such as Freemasonry, Theosophy and Spiritualism, which incorporated Oriental elements such as Egyptian cults, Hermeticism and Hindu beliefs. After the introduction of laws guaranteeing freedom of religion by various national governments (El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica in the 1830s, Mexico in 1860, Guatemala in 1873 and Nicaragua in 1893), immigrants and missionaries, mainly Protestants, arrived. Arab immigrants, the majority of them Christians, arrived in El Salvador from the 1850s, later in 1 E. Madrigal, ‘El concepto de cultura en México (1840-1846). Distinciones y disrupciones en contexto’, Ariadna histórica. Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas 9 (2020) 177-207, p. 187.
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Illustration 16. A maternity hospital in the town of Puebla, designed by Eduardo Tamariz, showing the influence of Islamic architecture he had seen on his visit to Iberia and North Africa
other countries, and lastly in Honduras from 1893. They were not the kind of individuals envisaged by immigration policies but they were gradually assimilated, although not without being the targets of xenophobic attitudes, mainly inspired by economic factors. In the 1920s and 1930s, these attitudes led to laws restricting the immigration of ‘Semitic races’.2 The only Muslim community known in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the Lebanese Shīʿī community of Torreón, Mexico, which became established between 1906 and 1908. However, Islam was not practised in public until 1989, the year in which this community erected a mosque. Formal studies on Islam and the Arabs were not known during the 19th century, though there are some signs that interest in the East was growing. The closest there were to experts on Islam were people who had travelled to the Islamic world and Catholic intellectuals, with the single exception of the Cuban Juan Miguel Dihigo, who was awarded a doctorate in 1898 by the University of Havana for a dissertation in Spanish on ‘The Arabic language and the history of Spain’. However, no academic institution specialising in the Middle East was established in Latin America until the 20th century.
2 C. Pastor, ‘Lo árabe y su doble. Imaginarios de principios de siglo en México y Honduras’, in G. Martín Muñoz (ed.), Contribuciones árabes a las identidades iberoamericanas, Madrid, 2008, 287-347, p. 298.
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Throughout the 19th century, the main source of information about Islam and Muslims was the press and general literature. Hernán Taboada observes that, in the 18th century ‘The Moor had disappeared from the imaginary in America (and even in Spain). [...] Instead, due to the growing ultra-Pyrenean influence, his most complex descendant had found a place: the Oriental.’3 In fact, this change began in the 17th century through works about the Islamic East in Mexico. Available in monasteries and places of higher studies, these primarily included philosophical-theological works, Arabic dictionaries and grammars, accounts of journeys to the East, anthologies such as Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697), Johann Jahn’s Arabische Chrestomathie (1802), André du Ryer’s Qur’an translation (1685) and ʿĪsà de Ŷābir’s Breviario sunní (15th-century; it had been employed by the Spanish Inquisition). Most of these works were academic and were used for the evangelisation of the Muslims of the Philippines. In the 19th century, it was common for the Hispanic American press to republish news from abroad on topics that included the Eastern Question, archaeological discoveries in the East, cultural reports and essays on Muslim doctrines, cultural and religious practices, and accounts of cities in the East. José Antonio Conde’s La historia de la dominación de los árabes en España (1820) was in circulation in Mexico from 1835, and Washington Irving’s Mahomet and his successors (Spanish translation 1850), William Muir’s The life of Mahomet (1861) and Joseph-François Michaud’s Histoire des croisades (Spanish translation 1840) were all known. The Qur’an, formerly forbidden to the laity, was finally circulated outside the Church in translations by Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire (1865), George Sale (1881), and Vincente Ortiz de la Puebla, El Corán: ó Biblia mahometana (Barcelona, 1872), translated from the French translation by Albert de Biberstein Kazimirski (1832). François-René Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811) and Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1835) were the models for Hispanic American travel accounts. Stories of exploration were held in esteem, and explorers among Muslims such as Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley were regarded as cultural heroes. 3 H. Taboada, Un orientalismo periférico. Nuestra América y el Islam, México City, 2012, p. 75.
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Literary classics such as Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata and Ariosto’s Orlando, were complemented by works by Byron, Scott, Loti and Salgary, and also Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in Edward Fitzgerald’s translation. Among such creations, The thousand and one nights was central. The oldest copy in Mexico was a selection of Antoine Galland’s French version translated into Spanish under the title Aventuras del célebre califa de Bagdad Harun-Alrachid (Madrid, 1806). This was followed by a full Spanish version of Galland’s translation (1846), which was published in Mexico in 1852. In addition to written culture, European companies staged operas with an Eastern theme in Havana and México City. Even though popular literature and the performing arts usually made no pretensions to accuracy about the Islamic East, they were treated as authorities so that their portrayals of a world that was fantastic, mysterious, sensual, mystical, primitive, lazy, fanatical, lugubrious, cruel and despotic were accepted as the truth. As a result, Hispanic American knowledge of the Islamic Orient has been called peripheral by H. Taboada, Ignacio López-Calvo and Araceli Tinajero among others.4 Peripheral knowledge and ‘Islam’s backwardness’ In 1863, the Mexican liberal newspaper El Siglo diez y nueve published (in Spanish) Ernest Renan’s lecture De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation, in which he states that ‘The Arab at least, and more generally, the Muslim, today is further away from us than ever […] as two beings of different species, who have nothing in common in their way of thinking and feeling.’5 He also states that, except for religion, European civilisation owed nothing to the Semites (including Muslims). His ideas, together with those of others who wrote on Orientalist matters such as Edgar Quinet, Arthur de Gobineau, Herbert Spencer and Gustave le Bon, exerted great influence on Latin American thought. As noted by the Mexican José López-Portillo, Islamic backwardness revealed itself to foreign travellers in multiple ways: corruption in the customs house, requests for bakshish and attacks by Bedouins,6 in all of which 4 H. Taboada. ‘Latin American Orientalism. From margin to margin’, in S. Nagy-Zekmi (ed.), Paradoxical citizenship. Essays on Edward Said, Lanham MD, 2006, 121-8. 5 E. Renan, ‘Discurso de M. Renan’, in El Siglo Diez y Nueve, México City, 18 January 1863, pp. 1-2. 6 J. López-Portillo, Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje, México City, 1874, vol. 1, p. 64; vol. 2, pp. 189, 226-7.
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despotism, anarchy and laziness converged. The Mexican friar José María Guzmán remarks that Arab Muslim customs ‘are very weird’: in public they abstain from wine, but not in secret; the houses and streets are dirty and they are ‘naturally lazy’ – for him, all signs of Muslim corruption.7 Writing about Tangier, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío judges that ‘contemporary Morocco is always the Moorish empire of the 12th century, with its feudal organisation, its luxury and its exquisite arts’.8 For the Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Fez in Morocco was a time capsule of al-Andalus: ‘The same Moors, dressed in the same way and having the same attitudes, the same gestures, the same habits, feel the same way, think with the same thoughts, they express in the same way [as their ancient forebears]’, and asserts that Muslims fear change and that time had not passed in the Arab world since the era of Muḥammad.9 The Mexican Luis Malanco’s interpretation of mosque architecture led him to conclude that Islam lay somewhere between paganism and Christianity.10 Based more on anticlericalism than on any anti-Islamic attitude, Gómez Carrillo pointed out that from ‘the point of view of world pedagogical advances, al-Azhar [University in Cairo] presents nothing but a spectacle of barbarity’,11 while the hinterland of Algeria was ‘a mosque populated by fanatics’.12 He did not even spare the people of Istanbul, who were ‘Europeans and progressives in the streets and reactionaries in their homes’.13 On the other hand, the Mexican cleric Sebastián Camacho, in addition to being impressed by the beauty and sumptuousness of the Cairo mosques, appreciated the public devotion of Muslims (although he regretted that this was not to Christ). However, when he was invited to a Sufi ceremony, he criticised the 7 J.M. Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración del viaje que hizo a visitar los Santos Lugares de Jerusalén’, in V. Quirarte (ed.), Jerusalén a la vista. Tres viajeros mexicanos en Tierra Santa, Toluca, 2003, pp. 63-4. 8 R. Darío, Tierras solares, Madrid, 1904, p. 42, cited by R. Dakir, ‘Tánger entre Rubén Darío y Roberto Arlt’, Aljamía. Revista de la Consejería de Educación en Marruecos 26 (2015) 15-21, p. 16. 9 E. Gómez Carrillo, Fez, la andaluza, Fez, 1926, pp. 59-60, cited in A. Bounou, ‘El orientalismo en la obra de Enrique Gómez Carrillo. De la periferia a la centralidad’, paper submitted in the II Congreso Internacional. Reencuentro con Enrique Gómez Carrillo, July 3-4, 2012, Universidad Rafael Landivar and Asociación Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Guatemala City. 10 L. Malanco, Viaje a Oriente, México City, 1882, vol. 1, pp. 288-90. 11 E. Gómez Carrillo, La sonrisa de la esfinge, Madrid, 1913, pp. 72, 179, cited in K. Hajjaj, ‘Oriente en la crónica de viajes. El modernismo de Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873-1927)’, Madrid, 2001 (PhD Diss. Universidad Complutense de Madrid), p. 402. 12 E. Gómez Carrillo, Nostalgias, Valencia, 1911, p. 61, cited in Hajjaj, ‘Oriente en la crónica de viajes’, p. 455. 13 Hajjaj, ‘Oriente en la crónica de viajes’, p. 361, based on E. Gómez Carrillo, ‘Los cosmopolitas de Turquía’, in Romerías, Paris, 1912, p. 64.
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participants’ long hair, their bellowing and the ritual of thumping their heads; this must also be a reason for the attacks on dervishes that were common in the international press.14 In Beirut, Guzmán was impressed by the nakedness of the dervishes and the ‘blindness, ignorance and fanaticism’ shown towards them.15 López Portillo regarded the traditions and fables associated with the Dome of the Rock as childish, absurd and ridiculous. He also attributed Islamic splendour to the indwelling of the spirit of the West in the Muslim conquerors, because ‘the Qur’an does not have in itself the germ of progressive improvement’.16 Similarly, the Mexican historian Ricardo García Granados, writing in 1910, insisted that the development of philosophy and science under Islam during the Middle Ages was due to the influence of the experts of classical times.17 López-Portillo and Malanco also repeated the legend about the Caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634-44) ordering the burning of the Library of Alexandria,18 the latter taking this from Ferdinand de Géramb.19 In the Mexican Protestant press, the Yucatan Presbyterian pastor Alfonso Herrera posited that Islam ‘today occupies the last scale of civilisation’,20 by which he meant that it was the least advanced, with which the Catholic friar Guzmán concurred, blaming Ottoman Muslim despotism for the decline of the Levant, once ‘opulent countries […it] destroyed [them…] without building again’.21 Guzmán related that in order to increase the amount of private and public funds being collected for the custodians of the Holy Land, the Turks ‘have Christians and Jews in the most horrible oppression. They cannot do anything without asking for money.’22 He acknowledged, however, that Muḥammad ʿAlī’s regime in Egypt was attempting to remedy this situation.23 Half a century later,
14 S.R. Camacho, Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén, Guadalajara, 18732, pp. 164, 233-5. 15 Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración, pp. 63-4. 16 López-Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 1, pp. 8, 139-45, vol. 2, pp. 152, 191-2 (the quotation is from p. 192). 17 R. García Granados, ‘El concepto científico de la historia’, in J.A. Ortega y Medina, Á. Matute and E. Walerstein Meyer (eds), Polémicas y ensayos mexicanos en torno a la historia, México City, 20013, 365-428, p. 377. 18 López-Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 1, pp. 66-7. 19 L. Malanco, Viaje, 1882, vol. 1, pp. 123-4, quoting Ferdinand de Géramb, Pèlerinage à Jérusalem et au Mont-Sinaï en 1831, 1832 et 1833, Paris, 1836, pp. 196-9. 20 A. Herrera, ‘Controversia. La Biblia y la civilización’, in El Abogado Cristiano Ilustrado, México City, 19 October 1905, p. 7. 21 Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración, pp. 57, 62. 22 Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración, p. 61. 23 Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración, p. 62.
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López Portillo confirmed this change: ‘Palestine is a tolerant country’,24 though he attributes this not to Islam but to the influence of Russia. The image of Muslims as an enemy of faith dates back to the colonial period (16th-18th centuries). In order to increase the collection of alms made permissible by the Bull of the Crusade (granted by the Holy See to the Spanish crown), which theoretically would be used for carrying on the war against the ‘infidel’ Moors and for rescuing Christians captured by them, the Spanish Commissariat of the Crusade published reports of assaults on galleys and the lives and redemption of captives. In addition dramas were performed.25 During the Spanish American wars of independence of the early 19th century, Spanish despotism was compared by Spanish American patriots to its Ottoman equivalent. Like Lord Byron, Hispanic Americans were attracted to the Greek cause against the Ottomans. The Cuban José María Heredia composed an ode, A la insurrección de Grecia en 1821 (‘To Greece’s insurrection in 1821’, 1823).26 The Central American Cecilio del Valle also linked the French Revolution and the Hispanic American Revolution to the Greek.27 Another form in which Oriental-Islamic despotism took material form was slavery. In Mexico, Central America and Santo Domingo, it was abolished in the 1820s, but in the remaining Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico it continued until the end of the 19th century. Influenced by abolitionism, the Hispanic American press published notes on slavery around the world. For Guzmán, Muslim women were the most oppressed: ‘To satisfy their passions they [the men] buy them like beasts and treat them as slaves; keep them locked up and if they ever go out, they must always be covered up, even their faces, so that nobody can see them.’28 Likewise, López Portillo relates that the respected Cairene Shaykh Sadat ‘as a good Mohammedan, is extremely corrupt in his customs. He likes not only women (twelve in his harem), but also children.’29
24 López-Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 2, pp. 96-7. 25 H. Taboada, Extrañas presencias en Nuestra América, México City, 2012, p. 172, citing M. Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes y del norte de África en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII. Los caracteres de una hostilidad, Madrid, 1989, pp. 170, 178. 26 E. Miranda, ‘La lucha por la independencia griega en el imaginario poético cubano del XIX’, Rialta Magazine, Querétaro, 19 (September 2018). 27 J. Cecilio del Valle, Obra escogida, ed. M. García Laguardia, Caracas, 1982, p. 58, cited in Taboada, Un orientalismo periférico, p. 111. 28 Guzmán, ‘Breve y sencilla narración, p. 62. 29 López-Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 1, pp. 182-3.
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Hispanic American artists who studied in Europe or with European painters depicted what Fatima Mernissi calls the Western harem,30 in particular portraying odalisques.31 Karima Hajjaj Ben Ahmed notes that the ‘stereotypes of the odalisques and the harem appeared in the travel accounts of Nerval, Burton, Lane and in the novels of Balzac and Flaubert’,32 while Gómez Carillo builds an archetype of the Islamic woman as a dancer and an object of admiration.33 Sexual objectification as part of the representation of a gloomy, sordid and lustful Orient was overstressed by the Mexican Julio Ruelas in his illustrations in Revista Moderna magazine. By contrast, Christianity, in addition to being a civilising agent was salvation and the future. In 1843, the Mexican historian José María Lacunza considered that ‘Without the Crusades, perhaps today the entire world would be Mohammedan, as degraded as the Turkish Empire.’34 López Portillo also predicted that modernity would permit the triumph of Christianity. In this sense, the civilising mission of the faith would allow ‘the homeland of the Pharaohs to regain its rightful place’.35 He concluded that ‘the West […] is the loving son who, seeing his father fall into misery, vice, the most pitiful degradation, reaches out to him, solicitous, remedies his needs, lifts his spirit and tries to restore him to his primitive dignity.’36 As can be seen, while Hispanic Americans in general rejected colonialism and gunboat diplomacy (from which they also suffered), they reflected general European views about the Islamic world of the time and supported the European civilising mission there. Inheritances, presences and alterities Taking Islam to represent backwardness, despotism and slavery, during the wars of independence in the early 19th century royalists and patriots each 30 F. Mernissi, Le harem et l’Occident, Paris, 2001. 31 R. Gutiérrez Viñuales, ‘Arte y orientalismo en Iberoamérica. De la fantasía árabe a la edad del encantamiento’, in J.A. González Alcantud et al. (eds), La invención del estilo hispano-marroquí. Presente y futuros del pasado, Barcelona, 2010, 285-310. 32 Hajjaj, ‘Oriente en la crónica de viajes’, p. 208. 33 Hajjaj, ‘Oriente en la crónica de viajes’, p. 209, referring to E. Gómez Carrillo, Bailarinas, Madrid, 1902, p. 68. 34 J.M. Lacunza, ‘Discurso pronunciado por el señor licenciado don J.M.L. en la apertura de la Cátedra de Humanidades, El Museo Mexicano o Miscelánea Pintoresca de Amenidades Curiosas e Instructivas I, ed. Ignacio Cumplido, México City, 1843’, in J.A. Ortega y Medina, Á. Matute and E. Walerstein Meyer (eds), Polémicas y ensayos mexicanos en torno a la historia, México City, 20013, 89-98, p. 92. 35 López Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 1, p. 197. 36 López Portillo, Egipto y Palestina, vol. 1, pp. 258-9.
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referred to their opponents by Islamic labels such as ‘Muslims’, ‘Turks’, ‘Moors’, ‘Muḥammad’ or ‘sultan’, mixed in with the names of other ‘enemies’ of the Catholic world such as Protestants and Jacobins. Hernán Taboada remarks that Hispano-American patriots ‘repeated the old accusation (born in Italy and France) that Spaniards were part Moorish and part Jewish’.37 Cubans were also vilified because of their double Spanish and African heritage. Susannah Rodriguez Drissi notes that, in his novel Excursión a Vueltabajo, the Cuban Cirilo Villaverde rejects the derogatory legend about Cuban racial mixtures, and opposes another legend about the Moorish-Jewish ancestry of the Spaniards that had spread in the United States (a country to which Villaverde hoped Cuba would be annexed). Thus, in Excursión a Vueltabajo, the Muslim pirates who kidnap the Cuban family are capable of burning their victims as the Spanish Inquisition did.38 The Central American Cecilio del Valle argues that the Muslims and Jews who were expelled from Spain were the driving force of the country, while the native Spaniards were soldiers, monks or idlers, not producing any wealth.39 This evaluation is depicted in Safira, a tragedy by the AfroCuban manumitted slave, Juan Francisco Manzano. In this play, the protagonists Safira and Selim are Berbers who want to abandon the tribute that has to be paid to Spain, thus symbolising the Cuban ideal of independence. Their antagonists Barbarroja and Isaac represent Turkish power that frees them from the tribute but takes them under Ottoman control, symbolising the Criollos (American-born Spaniards) who support Spain. José Martí, the hero of Cuban independence, conceived of ‘the Oriental’ as the model of the anti-colonial rebel. Jardines del Cueto recognises that Martí ‘reuses and transforms orientalist imaginaries into a paradigm of freedom and independence through the figure of the Arab, thus contributing totally un-orientalist elements to the orientalised perspective that predominated the 19th century’.40 In fact, in his poem Abdalá (1869)41 Martí praises the fight for freedom from tyranny as well as equating the 37 Taboada, Un orientalismo periférico, p. 128. 38 S. Rodriguez Drissi, ‘Between Orientalism and affective identification. A paradigm and four case studies towards the inclusion of the Moor in Cuban literary and cultural studies’, Los Angeles CA, 2012 (PhD Diss. University of California Los Angeles), pp. 31-2, 52 and 67. Villaverde’s Excursión first appeared in El Album in 1838 and El Faro Industrial in 1842, and was published in Havana in 1891. 39 Taboada, Un orientalismo periférico, pp. 96, 131. 40 L. Jardines, ‘La problemática orientalista en el modernismo hispanoamericano. José Martí’, Contra|Relatos desde el Sur 13 (2016) 89-98, p. 97. 41 J. Martí, ‘Abdala’, La patria libre, Havana, 23 January 1869, 20-2.
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resistance of a Nubian warrior to the revolt of Spartacus, most likely thinking of the Cuban cause. Martí also admired the Algerian resistance leader Abdelkader42 and sympathised with the Egyptian revolt of Aḥmad ʿUrābī, in addition to advocating ‘the expulsion of powers from Europe’.43 However, like other Hispanic Americans of his time, he recognised the value of the civilising mission of Europeans, though he considered that Egypt ‘has paid too much for it’.44 Concerning the Spanish invasion of the Rif region of Morocco in 1912, he said that ‘The honest heart, Spanish with [King] Pelayo in Covadonga, is today Moor with the Rif against the unjust possession of Spain. […] Let’s be Moors.’45 Despite reassessments through the 19th century, the Muslim continued to be looked on as a polluting agent and an embodiment of fanaticism, despotism and corruption. In the novel Un hereje y un musulmán46 by the Mexican José Pascual Almazán, the antagonist José Alavez is a sinister, fanatical, corrupt, greedy, lustful and disloyal crypto-Muslim, who seeks to establish a Moorish colony in New Spain by using the guise of a ‘familiar’ (informant) of the Holy Office. This reassessment was associated with a reconsideration of the HispanoAmerican’s own identity. However, although the Arab cultural heritage of Latin America cannot be denied, it has been over-emphasised. The conquerors and first settlers of Spanish America were Andalusians and Extremadurans; although they did not identify with Islam, their direct ancestors had fought against it. In any case, the imaginary relationship with al-Andalus that 19th-century Hispano-Americans constructed is mainly a consequence of a romantic outlook, paradoxically fed by European Orientalism, which also orientalised Spain.47 Influenced by Théophile Gautier’s trip to Spain, Hispanic American poets visited alAndalus in search of their Spanish-Arabic roots. For instance, in Seville and Malaga (Tierras solares, 1904) and in his native Nicaragua (El viaje a
42 J. Martí, ‘Cuaderno núm. 18’, in Obras completas, Havana, 2011, vol. 21, p. 409; ‘otros fragmentos’, in Obras completas, vol. 22, p. 315. 43 J. Martí, ‘La revuelta en Egipto’, in Obras completas, vol. 14, pp. 113-16. 44 J. Martí, ‘La opinión nacional’, in Obras completas, vol. 23, p. 158. 45 J. Martí, ‘Los moros en España’, in Obras completas, vol. 5, p. 334. 46 J.P. Almazán [pseudonym Natal del Pomar], Un hereje y un musulmán. México hace trescientos años, México City, 1870. 47 J. Colmeiro, ‘El Oriente comienza en los Pirineos. La construcción orientalista de Carmen’, Revista de Occidente 264 (2003) 57-83; C. de Odriozola Collantes de Terán, ‘La creación del estereotipo de la España pintoresca a través de los viajeros románticos franceses’ (final degree project), Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Madrid, 2015.
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Nicaragua, 1907), Rubén Darío locates the Arab heritage in women, in the urban layout, in the houses and in the hawkers’ cries.48 In this regard, admitting and incorporating elements of the Arab heritage (real or fictitious) into the Hispanic American identity and culture does not imply equating it with the much more influential SpanishEuropean heritage. In fact, the cultural heritage ideal maintained by Eurocriollismo49 (a ‘Latin American version of Eurocentrism’) prevailed. This ideology considers Latin American cultural heritage mainly as Hispanic, Western European, Hellenic-Roman, and Christian-Catholic,50 relegating the Arab-Islamic and indigenous heritage to folklore. Likewise, the core of the Eurocentric thesis of Islamic backwardness persisted. Conclusion The Egyptian Gihane Amin, in addition to appealing to a supposed Arab heritage as a link between the Arab world and Hispanic America, states that the Hispano-American version is the ‘most affable face of Orientalism’51 because it is not affected by a colonial relationship with the Islamic world. This cannot be correct, because the Hispanic world’s intellectual dependence on other countries during the 19th century must mean that, rather than being leaders in thinking, they must be characterised as followers and peripheral. Poets, novelists, travellers and all those who have spoken about the Islamic East, have adapted and even made their own the themes, styles, arguments and tropes of French, English and Spanish literature. This meant that Muslims were not portrayed in religious terms. They were conceived as Easterners rather than as heretics or unbelievers.
48 S. Macías, ‘Imagen del islam en la literatura iberoamericana’, in M. Abumalhan (ed.), Comunidades islámicas en Europa, Madrid, 1995, 87-102, p. 89. 49 The term criollo should not be confused with creole, which in Spanish is mestizo (a person of combined European and indigenous ancestry). Criollo refers to people of Spanish ancestry born in the colonies. 50 H. Taboada and C. Tur, ‘Eurocentrismo y Eurocriollismo’, in H. Taboada and S. Reding Blase (eds), Debates contemporáneos en torno a una ética intercultural, México City, 2011, p. 219. 51 G. Amín, ‘Latinoamérica. La cara más afable del orientalismo’, in N. Achiri, Á. Baraidar and F.K.E. Schmelzer (eds), Actas del III Congreso ibero-africano de hispanistas, Pamplona, 2015, 87-98, p. 88.
Works on Christian-Muslim relations 1800-1914
José María Guzmán Date of Birth About 1800 Place of Birth Probably Zacatecas, Mexico Date of Death Uncertain; probably between 1873 and 1875 Place of Death Zacatecas, Mexico
Biography
José María Guzmán was a Franciscan friar from the Apostolic College of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the city of Zacatecas, Mexico. He was an apostolic preacher, a synodal examiner for the Catholic diocese of Guadalajara and Durango, an arts teacher, tutor and chronicler. Not much is known about his activities and religious missions. José Francisco Sotomayor refers to Guzmán’s activities from 1816 onwards, including his visit to Rome in March 1834 as a postulator in the case for the beatification of Friar Antonio Margil de Jesús (Sotomayor, Historia, p. 501). Sotomayor praises him as a man blessed with a great soul, sound knowledge, and many virtues (Historia, p. 492). In 1835, while he was waiting for the outcome of the case, Guzmán decided to visit the Holy Land. The following year he wrote Breve y sencilla narración del camino que hizo visitar los lugares de Jerusalén (‘Brief and simple account of a trip to visit the holy places of Jerusalem’). Back in Rome in 1836 Guzmán managed to obtain a papal decree from Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831-46) declaring that Antonio Margil had shown heroic virtues. Augustín Rivera refers to Guzmán as the Guardian Father of Guadalupe and a traveller to Rome and the Holy Land (Anales mexicanos, p. 203). Around 1873-5, Guzmán fell seriously ill in Aguacalientes. He died at the College of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary M. Tellechea, Compendio gramatical para la inteligencia del idioma tarahumara: oraciones, doctrina cristiana, pláticas y otras cosas necesarias para la recta administración de los Santos Sacramentos en el mismo idioma, México City, 1826
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José María Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del camino que hizo visitar los lugares de Jerusalén, Rome, 1836 F. Sotomayor, Historia del Apostólico Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Zacatecas, 1874 Secondary A. Rubial García, La santidad controvertida. Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva España, México City, 1999 A. Rivera, Anales mexicanos. La reforma y el segundo imperio, México City, 1994 J.B. Iguíniz Vizcaíno, art. ‘Fray José María Guzmán, primer peregrino mexicano en Tierra Santa’, in J.B. Iguíniz Vizcaíno, Disquisiciones bibliográficas. Autores, libros, bibliotecas, artes gráficas, México City, 1943, 65-70
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Breve y sencilla narración del viage (viaje) que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén ‘Brief and simple account of a trip made to visit the holy places of Jerusalem’ Date 1836 Original Language Spanish Description José María Guzmán wrote this work during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was first published in Rome in 1836 and then in México City in 1837. It is 62 pages long. Guzmán travelled for religious reasons, but he also wrote about the social, cultural and economic conditions of Lebanon and Palestine under Ottoman rule. Divided into two parts, the work is simple in its language without literary affectation. Since it reflects the religious purpose of his journey, it includes many biblical references. The first part of the work (about 30 pages) covers the journey to the Holy Land, and the second is an account of the Holy Land (17 pages). Guzmán tells of his misfortunes on his way to Palestine, which took him from Veracruz to New York, then from Paris to Rome, from Corsica to Beirut and at last to Nazareth. He writes in detail about the dangers and difficulties he encountered, such as the plague in Jerusalem and the pouring rain in Nazareth. In the Holy Land itself, he follows in the footsteps of Jesus to Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre. He records visits to places connected with biblical figures and events, such as the fountain where the Virgin Mary drew water and the tomb of John the Baptist.
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In the second part he concentrates on flora, fauna and the customs of the people. He regards Turks as cruel and lazy people who do not practise religion seriously, but drink coffee and smoke their pipes. He contrasts civilised Europe with the Holy Land, which under Turkish rule is plagued by manufacture in paralysis with its inhabitants living in poverty. As he sees the Christian holy sites turned into mosques, camel pens or dung heaps, Guzmán reveals the differences between his idealised image of the Holy Land and its pitiful reality. He is incited by his visit to Jerusalem, where he sees the holy sites in decay, to write about Palestine as a land that Christianity must reconquer, following the ongoing spirit of crusade against Islam. Here, he shows his underlying anti-Islamic sentiments. Significance Breve y sencilla narración was the first of many works written by Mexican travellers to the Holy Land, and it became well-known in Guzmán’s lifetime. It was quoted by Carlos Maria Bustamante (d. 1848), who published the second edition (published in Mexico), and also by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (d. 1893), who wrote about Guzmán being homesick when he heard someone speaking Spanish in the monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Taboada, ‘Un orientalismo periférico’). Publications J.M. Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del viage que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén, Rome, 1836 J.M. Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del viage que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén, México City, 18372; 0000049152 (digitised version available through Biblioteca Digital Hispánica) J.M. Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del viage que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén, México City, 18373 J.M. Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del viage que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén, Guatemala, 18424 J.M. Guzmán, Breve y sencilla narración del viage que hizo a visitar los santos lugares de Jerusalén, Zacetacas, 18485 Studies A. Mohssine, ‘La Terre Sainte dans le récit d´un voyageur mexicain du XIXe siècle. Révélation ou lieu commun?’, in V. Lavou and M. Bueno (eds), Sociocritique et conscience, Perpignan, 2014, 333-49 A. Mohssine, ‘El relato de viaje de José María Guzmán por Oriente (1837) entre costrucción identitaria y palabra panfletaria’, Cuadernos del CILHA 13 (2012) 65-79
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V. Quirarte, Jerusalén a la vista. Tres viajeros mexicanos en Tierra Santa, México City, 2003 H. Taboada, ‘Un orientalismo periférico. Viajeros latinoamericanos, 1786-1920’, Estudios de Asia y Africa 33 (1998) 285-305 E. de la Torre Villar and R. Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, México City, 1982, pp. 1014, 1210 J.B. Iguiniz, ‘Bibliografia de viajeros mexicanos en el extranjero’, Memorias de la Sociedad Antonio Alzate 52 (1929-30) 17-72 Lorenza Petit
Juan Bustamante Juan Bustamante Dueñas Date of Birth 24 June 1808 Place of Birth Vilque, Peru Date of Death 3 January 1868 Place of Death Pusi, Peru
Biography
Juan Bustamante Dueñas was born on 24 June 1808 in the district of Vilque, near Lake Titicaca in the south Andean department of Puno, Peru. He was the son of Mariano Bustamante y Jiménez and Agustina Dueñas y Vera. He was born into a relatively wealthy family, in a region whose population was composed of 90 per cent of indigenous peasants who worked on the haciendas. He received primary instruction in the parish of Cabanilla, in the province of Lampa, Puno, and did not finish his secondary studies or attend college. This was his entire formal education, and for the rest Bustamante was an autodidact. He became a businessman, trading in wool along the routes of the southern Andes, which secured for him a comfortable lifestyle. He was the elected representative of the province of Lampa in Congress from 1845 to 1848, and in 1864 he was appointed civil governor of Cusco. In 1867, he founded the Sociedad amiga de los Indios (‘Association of friends of the Indians’), the first indigenista organisation in Peru. His desire to end the exploitation of the indigenous populations motivated him to publish Los indios en el Perú (‘The Indians in Peru’) in 1867. In December 1867, he participated in the Huancané Rebellion, which sought to oppose the government’s decree to reinstate the indigenous tax. He was captured in January 1868 and publicly executed for his role in the uprising. Bustamante was known for two trips he made outside Peru. The first (3 May 1841-1 February 1844) took him to China via North America and Europe, and included what he refers to as ‘European Turkey’ as well as the Near and Middle East. The second trip (1848) was to Europe alone, and included countries he had not visited in his first trip, such as Norway, Russia and Poland. After each of these journeys, he published a book to share his experiences with Peruvian readers. These also made way for reflections on his own country, particularly its limitations and potential.
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In 1845, he published Viaje al antiguo mundo (twice reprinted) and in 1849, Apuntes y observaciones civiles, políticas y religiosas con las noticias adquiridas en este segundo viaje a la Europa. His cosmopolitan interests and his desire to show his fellow-Peruvians how a traveller can interact with strangers and learn from other cultures, earned him the nickname Mundo purikuj, which in Quechua means ‘globetrotter’ or ‘world traveller’.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Juan Bustamante, Viaje al viejo mundo, Lima, 1845 Juan Bustamante, Viaje al antiguo mundo, 2nd edition, Lima, 1845 Juan Bustamante, Apuntes y observaciones civiles, políticas y religiosas con las noticias adquiridas en este segundo viaje a la Europa, Paris, 1849 Secondary E. Vázquez, La rebelión de Juan Bustamante, Puno, Peru, 2013 N. Jacobsen, Juan Bustamante y los límites del liberalismo en el Altiplano. La rebelión de Huancané (1866-1868), Lima, 2011 M.A. García, De peruanos e indios. La figura del indígena en la intelectualidad y política criollas (Perú: siglos XVIII- XIX), Lima, 2007 J. Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú (1822-1933), vol. 6, Lima, 2005, pp. 138-40 M.G. Orellana, ‘Entre las guerras civiles y las demandas indígenas. Juan Bustamante en el levantamiento de Huancané (Perú), 1866-1868’, Revista de Historia Indígena 7 (2003) 159-83 C. McEvoy, ‘Indio y nación. Una lectura política de la rebelión de Huancané (1866-1868)’, in C. McEvoy (ed.), Forjando la Nación. Ensayos sobre historia republicana, Lima, 1999, 61-118 J. Ossio, Los indios del Perú, Madrid, 1992, pp. 219-34 A. Torres Luna, Biografía de Juan Bustamante, Lima, 1941
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Viaje al antiguo mundo ‘Journey to the ancient world’ Date 1845 Original Language Spanish Description Bustamante published Viaje al viejo mundo in 1845. In the second corrected and enlarged edition, which was published the same year, this is changed to Viaje al antiguo mundo. It comprises 18 chapters in 230 pages,
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and is written in an accessible style. He explains in the introduction that he wants to show his Peruvian readers that the only way to acquire the spirit of tolerance is through meetings with foreign people, and that travel teaches one to respect one’s fellow men and women. This idea is key to understanding his observations of the Islamic world. After visiting Trieste and Vienna, Bustamante goes on to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire. As he travels, he notes differences in the dress of the people he sees, principally in the use of the turban instead of the hat. He is surprised at some similarities with Peru, such as the beautiful fabrics and rugs whose remarkable quality reminds him of Andean cumbi-style fabrics. When he reaches Constantinople he is astonished by the port, the walled city, the great church of Hagia Sophia (converted into a mosque), the Turkish baths, the more than 300 mosques with verses of the Qur’an on their inner walls, and the great numbers of people moving through the city each day. He is surprised at how kindly Muslims treat stray dogs, never killing or injuring them, but rather nursing their wounds and leaving food for them. Similarly, he observes in the nave of Hagia Sophia many young students with their teachers, gathered to study the Qur’an. He notes the times of prayer and that, after they hear the call to prayer, Muslims pray out loud wherever they are: ‘God is great, I confess that there is only one God, that Muḥammad is his prophet, God is great and one’. Perhaps what is most surprising to Bustamante is the openly cosmopolitan character of Constantinople, which distinguishes it from the European cities he has visited earlier. He notes that the city is home to Muslims, Christians, Jews, Greeks and Armenians, all living together despite their religious differences, in addition to palaces for the use of ambassadors from nearly all the nations of the world. He goes on to talk about Muslim religious observances, which are belief in a merciful God, ablution (which he compares to Christian baptism), prayer, fasting, hospitality, charity and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The journey continues and, after visiting Mount Lebanon where Bustamante observes the presence of convents of various religious sects, he reaches Damascus at the end of an arduous five-day trip. There, he learns that the authorities used to prohibit entry to Europeans due to the memory of the violence of the Crusades for which Europeans were called ‘unknown beasts’. After comparing Damascus and its people to his recent stay in Europe, he observes that the inhabitants of this city are more sincere and have better manners than the Neapolitans or the Romans, and remarks that he would prefer to live in Damascus than in any of the European cities he has previously visited. He reports that, in
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addition to the many mosques, there are also nine Jewish synagogues and two Catholic churches, revealing once again how this region is characterised by genuine cohabitation despite the existence of religious differences among its people. He also takes note of this cohabitation in Nazareth, singling out how adherents of five different faiths can be found among its population of 5,000 people. In Jerusalem, Bustamante observes that the population is comprised of Muslims, Jews, and Christians whose paths often cross as they make their way to their respective holy sites. He recounts that what he calls the Temple of Solomon is among the most beautiful and important such sites and that it is the object of much devotion among Muslims. He also notes the presence of a large number of hospices for pilgrims irrespective of their religion or sect, as such places aspire to welcome strangers and foreigners at no cost. What most impresses him is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He stays in Jerusalem three days and is named Knight of the Holy Sepulchre before he departs for Alexandria and Cairo. Over the course of this last part of his journey, which presents difficulties because of the terrain and the extreme weather, he becomes better acquainted with his fellow travellers, which leads him to declare that all Turks are good-hearted people, very affable and virtuous. In Alexandria, he notices that there is a considerable number of Europeans (mostly Italian and French) and that Italian is the cultured language (lengua culta). He also asserts that Alexandria is by far the best Turkish city that he has visited. In Cairo, he registers the number of mosques (a total of 600), among them those of Sultan Hassan and Al-Azhar for their architecture and marvellous atmosphere. In October 1842, Bustamante travelled on to Arabia. He remarks that Arabs are all very hospitable, in keeping with the precepts of their own religion, and in addition to welcoming all foreigners with the utmost hospitality (even the Bedouins who are errant Arabs) they consider all guests to be sacred and seek to protect them always. His experience of this hospitality prompts a meditation on the value of the Qur’an and the Muslim religion, leading to the conclusion that some of its features are utterly useful and its laws very wise. From Arabia he continued on to India and China, returning to Peru across the Pacific Ocean. Throughout the book, Bustamante considers that travelling abroad contributes to a greater and much better understanding of the human condition, because of the similarities, differences, and difficulties the traveller encounters on his path (he remarks that even difficult experiences teach
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something valuable). Consequently, his encounter with Muslim culture allows him to make a comparison with the Western and Christian world and to arrive at a true appreciation of hospitality as a key value within the Muslim religion. Consequently, Bustamante ends by advising his fellow Peruvians to appreciate honest travellers because each one of them is like ‘a brother’, a lesson learned in his contact with the Islamic world. Significance The book was initially well received among readers of travel literature. In 1847, it was reprinted in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and was reprinted in Lima in 1959 and Puno, Peru, in 2015. Bustamante’s significant reflections on travel, tolerance, and hospitality, found in the pages that depict the Islamic world, are what secure the value of his work. Apart from its being an important example of the travelogue genre’s relevance to Christian-Muslim relations, it is significant for its recommendations of practical measures, key among them the recognition of the commonalities in Muslim and Western culture that can lead towards intercommunal harmony. Publications Juan Bustamante, Viaje al viejo mundo, Lima, 1845; 48319042 (digitised version available through Harvard Mirador Viewer) Juan Bustamante, Viaje al antiguo mundo, segunda edición corregida y aumentada por su autor, Lima, 1845; 001876500 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Juan Bustamante, Viaje al antiguo mundo, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1847 Juan Bustamante, Viaje al antiguo mundo, Lima, 1959 Juan Bustamante, Viaje al antiguo mundo, Puno, Peru, 2015 Studies S. Tejada Galindo, Tras los pasos de Juan Bustamante: apuntes biográficos y politicos, Lima, 2019 J.A. Bustamante, El viajero Bustamante. Primer viajero sudamericano alrededor del mundo, Lima, 1956 J. Belisario Soto, El viajero Bustamante. Apuntes para una biografía, Puno, Peru, n.d. (early 20th century) José Eduardo Cornelio
José Maria Rufino Date of Birth 1815 Place of Birth Oyo, present day Nigeria Date of Death 1853 Place of Death Recife, Brazil
Biography
Rufino José Maria was an enslaved Yoruba Muslim cleric from the kingdom of Oyo in present day Nigeria, who purchased his freedom in Brazil and then travelled back to West Africa to further his religious knowledge before returning to Brazil. He also bore the name Abuncaré (possibly derived from Abdul Karim) from his homeland. Rufino grew up in a devout Muslim family, the son of an alufá (spiritual leader). He attended a Qur’an school. During a war between Fulani Muslims and Yoruba traditionalists, being a Yoruba he was taken prisoner by the Hausa Muslims. He was then acquired by Portuguese slave traffickers and taken across the Atlantic to Brazil. He arrived in Salvador da Bahia, in the north-east of the country, in 1823, when he was only seven years old, and spent eight years there as a slave. He was then taken south by his young slave master to the province of Rio Grande do Sul and sold to a merchant. The merchant kept him for less than two years before falling bankrupt, and Rufino was then auctioned and bought by a high court judge, José Maria Peçanha. Rufino lived in Rio Grande do Sul until late 1835, and also spent a considerable amount of time in Porto Alegre, the provincial capital. Many of the enslaved Africans at the time were committed to resisting their owners and obtaining their freedom. African Muslims, in particular, actively fought against enslavement and met in secret to perform their prayers. By working as a slave-for-hire, Rufino was able to gain his freedom in November 1835 for 600,000 réis (approximately 210 pounds sterling). He adopted his former master’s name to become Rufino José Maria. He left Rio Grande do Sul for Rio de Janeiro, capital of the Brazilian Empire, between late December 1835 and January 1836 and after a while he became a cook aboard a slave ship called Emelinda and travelled widely between Brazil and Africa, including Angola and Sierra Leone. He also
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worked as a small-time merchant and made amulets containing passages of the Qur’an. While he was in Sierra Leone, Rufino attended Qur’an classes and furthered his religious knowledge. In total, he spent a year and seven months in West Africa, where he completed learning to read and write Arabic. On his return to Brazil, he spent three months in Rio de Janeiro before proceeding to Recife with a stop in Bahia. In Bahia, he fathered a son called Nicolau, whom he took with him to Pernambuco. Rufino was arrested by British and Brazilian authorities twice, in 1841 and 1853, though he was never prosecuted. A short time after being released in 1853, he died in Recife.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary The primary sources on Rufino consist of newspaper articles from 1853, and a police report cited in J.J. Reis, F. dos Santos Gomes, and M.J. de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino. Tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro, São Paulo, 2010, pp. 10-11, 18, 68, 77, 88, 91, 168, 238, 305-6, 310, 312, 317, 335, 371. ‘O alufá’, Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 25 September 1853 Correio Mercantil (Recife), 21 September 1853 Correio Mercantil (Salvador), September 1853 Diario de Pernambuco (Recife), 1853 The Illustrated London News (London), 1853 Le Magasin Pittoresque (Rio de Janeiro), 1853 O Mensageiro (Porto Alegre), 1853 O Noticiador Catholico (Salvador), 1853 O Riograndense (Rio Grande), 1853 O Tribuno (Recife), 1853 Secondary H. Akande, Illuminating the blackness. Blacks and African Muslims in Brazil, London, 2016 Reis, dos Santos Gomes, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino J.J. Reis, F. dos Santos Gomes, and M.J. de Carvalho, ‘Rufino José Maria (1820s-1850s). A Muslim in the nineteenth-century Brazilian slave trade circuit’, in B.G. Mamigonian and K. Racine (eds), The human tradition in the Black Atlantic, 1500-2000, Lanham MD, 2010, 65-75
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Rufino, a 19th-century African Muslim preacher in Brazil. From two sources Date 1853 Original Language Portuguese Description Details about Rufino can be found in a police interrogation report and newspaper articles published across Brazil and Europe after his interrogation in 1853. These sources on his extraordinary life are collected together in Reis, dos Santos Gomes and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino. Following the publication of his story in the Jornal do Commercio in Rio de Janeiro, other newspapers across Brazil and Europe published articles about him. These are listed above under the Secondary Sources for his biography. The official transcript of the police interrogation includes the signatures of three witnesses and the judge. Rufino himself also signed it. The Jornal article was written by a witness to the interrogation. In the interrogation Rufino explains that he was ‘a son of the kingdom of Oyo’ in the Bight of Benin, where he was born. He was enslaved as a ‘prisoner of war of Hausa Muslims’ and then transported to Bahia, in north-eastern Brazil. He was purchased by an apothecary, Joao Gomes da Silva, a light-skinned mulatto (pardo) man. Although he was living in a predominately Catholic Christian country, he nevertheless maintained his Islamic faith and continued to practise his religion. The police report and articles of interrogation reflect Rufino’s resilience in adhering to his religion despite being in a country that demonised his faith and where Muslims were a minority among enslaved Africans. His Christian masters noticed his strong work ethic and were impressed by his entrepreneurial skills, including becoming a small investor in the transatlantic trade. He was modestly successful in business and might have done even better had he so desired. He was a multilingual and cosmopolitan figure who experienced living in different parts of Brazil and Africa. Rufino’s life and travels demonstrate the active exchange of cultural interactions between Christians and Muslims in both Africa and Brazil (Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino). In 1841, Rufino was arrested by the British while working as a cook on board the Ermelinda. He was not intimidated by the aggressive tactics they employed and even insulted his interrogator, calling him a dog. Given
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the lack of evidence that the ship was engaged in the slave trade, Rufino was released after the police concluded that he was not a threat (Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino, pp. 178-89). In 1853, a number of freedmen in Recife, including Rufino, were arrested on suspicion of involvement in a slave conspiracy. The authorities feared that the conspirators were secretly teaching enslaved people how to read and write Arabic, which could lead to an uprising. During his second interrogation by the authorities, Rufino was described as a ‘fat old man’. He had a respectable and intelligent demeanour and spoke Portuguese fluently, albeit with a strong African accent. He was very calm during his interrogation, but frowned at remarks made against his religion and smiled wryly as he answered some of the questions, showing that he had nothing to hide or fear. Rufino had been arrested because he kept numerous Islamic manuscripts in his home. The police found an old manuscript of the Qur’an that he had brought from Sierra Leone, prayer books, Arabic language manuals, and a notebook that he declared ‘teaches the medicines’. According to the article in the Jornal do Commercio, he explained that ‘his religion was the one practised by [the Prophet] Muḥammad and included in the Qur’an, and explained with great knowledge and intelligence the full doctrine of that religion, which […] he said he would not give up even if he were to be sent to the gallows’ (Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino, pp. 68-72). When the Brazilian judge told Rufino that Catholicism was the ‘true religion’, he answered that ‘some learn one religion when they are born, others [learn] others, and as for which was the best that was a question to be decided only when the world ends’ (‘O alufá’). Asked why he did not use his supposed religious power as a healer to improve his own lot, Rufino said that he was satisfied with what he owned because ‘some people asked God for wealth, but he only asked for knowledge, and the two precepts did not fit in the same bag’ (‘O alufá’; Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino, pp. 83-96). According to the Jornal article, although he was part of a Muslim minority, Rufino demonstrated great knowledge and intelligence about the Muslim religion in Brazil. Despite being under intense pressure during his interrogation, he was not cowed by the authorities’ threats and taunts, both veiled and explicit, though he was distressed by the inquisitors’ disrespectful comments about his religion. For Rufino, Islam was a way of life. As a Muslim preacher, he would use every opportunity to spread his religion and worship God, writing passages from the Qur’an and prayers in Arabic for people. Rufino’s religious writings were neither politically nor
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socially subversive, but they were far removed from Catholicism, the official state religion of the Empire of Brazil (‘O alufá’). When it was published, Rufino’s story drew the attention of the Brazilian authorities and the press across Brazil, because he was suspected of conspiracy. For the Brazilian elite, his story raised terrifying memories of the 1835 Muslim slave rebellion in Bahia decades earlier. They feared another uprising and the chaos it would cause to the Brazilian economy, which was built on African enslavement. While the majority of enslaved African Muslims were non-violent, the Christian Brazilian authorities were concerned about Islam spreading among non-Muslim Africans, and discouraged Muslims from speaking openly about their faith (Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino, pp. 305-19). Whilst Rufino was not a militant Muslim, he represented a threat in the eyes of the white Brazilian establishment because he was an educated black Muslim who took pride in his faith – a different kind of threat, a sort of cultural and even psychological affront to the world of white Brazilian Christians. Rufino was charismatic, well-travelled and intelligent, which made him outstanding amongst the enslaved and free Africans of Recife. Even more important, he was an African who could read and write, thereby mastering a fundamental symbol of civilisation for those times. He was feared because he could influence the lives and mindsets of many Africans, but he practised his faith peacefully and was not afraid to tell his detractors about his beliefs. For Rufino, it was his faith in the one God and the Prophet Muḥammad that made him superior to others (‘O alufá’; Reis, dos Santos, and de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino). Significance The extraordinary life of Rufino gives a glimpse of the range of possibilities open to Africans, in spite of the heavy burden of slavery. His story is even more fascinating because his experience was that of a slave who obtained his freedom and then participated in the transatlantic slave trade before travelling back to Africa to study his religion, and then returning to Brazil. The story demonstrates that Muslims co-existed and lived peacefully with Christians in 19th-century Brazil. Reading the Jornal article about the African Muslim cleric who was interrogated by the police would have been the first time that many Brazilians had heard of a Muslim who was openly committed to his religion. He was a man of faith who was admired for his religiosity and intelligence. His adventurous life reflects the struggles, complexities and accomplishments of a formerly enslaved man in the South Atlantic.
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Publications ‘O alufá’, Jornal do Commercio (Rio de Janeiro), 25 September 1853, p. 1, cols 5-6; Edição 00266 (digitised version available through memoria.bn.br) J.J. Reis, F. dos Santos Gomes, and M.J. de Carvalho, O Alufá Rufino. Tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro, São Paulo, 2010 J.J. Reis, F. dos Santos Gomes, and M.J.M. de Carvalho, The story of Rufino. Slavery, freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic, trans. S. Gledhill, New York, 2020 (English trans.) Studies Reis, dos Santos Gomes, and de Carvalho, The story of Rufino Habeeb Akande
Rafael Sabás Camacho y García Date of Birth 5 December 1826 Place of Birth Etzatlán, Jalisco, Mexico Date of Death 11 May 1908 Place of Death Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico
Biography
Rafael Sabás Camacho belonged to a family whose members often chose religious vocations: his brother was bishop of the diocese of Querétaro, and his sister a Capuchin nun. In 1841, he began his own clerical career at the age of 15 at the Guadalajara Seminary. He earned high marks in examinations and was appointed to teach philosophy classes from 1850 to 1857. He was awarded the title of Doctor of Canons and was ordained a priest. This trajectory was interrupted by the triumph of the Liberals after the Guerra de Reforma, which caused him to go into exile in the United States in 1861. After serving for a brief time in California, Camacho travelled to Rome in 1862 to attend the ceremony for the canonisation of San Felipe de Jesús. Taking advantage of being in Europe, he joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, about which he later wrote. The French occupation of Mexico and the proclamation of Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor of Mexico in 1863 led Camacho to return from exile. Before leaving Rome, he was appointed Apostolic Protonotary by Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-78). In 1864, he returned to Guadalajara and rose in his ecclesiastical career until in 1884 Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903) appointed him bishop of Querétaro. Having been impressed by Gregorian chants during services in Rome, in 1892 Camacho founded the Escuela de Música Sacra de México to support the celebrations for the coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His trip to the Holy Land may have prompted him to organise pilgrimages from Querétaro to the Sanctuary of Tepeyac. He also promoted devotion to the Virgin of Pátzcuaro and the Virgen del Carmen. In 1900, he supported the construction of a chapel on the spot where Maximilian of Habsburg was shot, which led to his being decorated by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. His last project before his death was the construction of the Cathedral of Querétaro.
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary El Tiempo 25/8265 (13 May 1908) p. 2 (notice of death) ‘El Illmo. Sr. Camacho’, La Voz de México 39/20 (13 May 1908) p. 2 (obituary) Secondary Art. ‘Camacho y García, Rafael Sabás’, Encicopedia histórica y biográfica de la Universidad de Guadalajara; http://enciclopedia.udg.mx/articulos/ camacho-y-garcia-rafael-sabas ‘Obispo Rafael Sabás Camacho y García’, 2013; https://muchosdocpr.blogspot. com/2013/09/obispo-rafael-sabas-camacho-y-garcia.html
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén ‘Itinerary from Rome to Jerusalem’ Date 1862 Original Language Spanish Description Completed in 1862, Rafael Camacho’s travelogue was first published in 1865, and again in 1873. Beyond recounting his travel experiences, the objective of his book was to communicate to a Mexican audience the experiences of Roman Catholics who lived in the Holy Land. The book includes footnotes, illustrations, biblical passages, poetry and hymns related to the places Camacho visited. It is divided into seven chapters, dealing respectively with his journey from Rome to Alexandria, his arrival at the port of Jaffa, the streets of Jerusalem, his journey to Bethlehem, the lament of the Jews, his journey to Nazareth, and his return through the port of Haifa. References here are to the 1873 edition. Camacho’s encounters with Arab and Islamic culture create various impressions. His first full contact with the ‘Mohammedan people’ begins after he and his companions arrive in Alexandria. He notices people’s clothes: wide breeches, turbans, red and curly-toed shoes and embroidered jackets; also, the white ‘canvas’ that covers the women from head to toe, its ghost-like appearance making his party laugh. He is also surprised by the city’s streets, whose walls lack windows and balconies, and by the shops outside the houses, and men smoking or drinking coffee (pp. 10-12).
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His second impression is in the port of Jaffa, where he notices the local population, whom he calls ‘Turks’, approaching all foreign visitors to offer them services, from the provision of water to basic directions. Fortunately for Camacho and his companions, Jaffa was home to Franciscan monks, who receive the Catholic pilgrims and provide interpreters and horses for the journey to Jerusalem. During this journey, Camacho witnesses Muslim religious practices for the first time: prayers and songs at the tombs located on the outskirts of the city. He finds them strange and unpleasant (pp. 18, 19). On arriving in Jerusalem, Camacho highlights the layout of the city and its very narrow alleys and tall buildings, which give the sensation of darkness in broad daylight. In addition to visiting holy sites and observing the religious practices of other Christians, he is able to experience the flavours of oriental cuisine such as coffee, which he describes as ‘excellent and aromatic’ (p. 32). This cultural diversity is noticeable in the processions, which are guarded by the Janissaries, soldiers of European origin who had converted to Islam. However, Camacho also refers to the Muslim occupation of Christian sites, noting an old Christian church that had been turned into a mosque (p. 44). Although Camacho describes Islamic practices as ‘Mohammedan superstitions’, in Bethlehem he observes that a cave called ‘de la Leche’, so named because Mary supposedly hid there with the baby Jesus, is venerated by Roman Catholics and Orthodox, but also Muslims (p. 80). He also sees Catholics who are making rosaries and crucifixes apparently behaving like Turks (p. 82). During his stay in Nazareth, he sees a Muslim wedding procession heading to a mosque. The solemnity and festive spirit he witnesses make him recognise the importance that Muslims give to religious marriage and he compares it with the civil marriage that has been decreed in Mexico (p. 83). Camacho also notices Muslims’ attitude towards their religious obligations, particularly prayer and abstinence from alcohol. He sees these believers, without stopping for anything, prostrate themselves in the direction of Mecca and pray. He notices that the Muslim servants who accompany them on their journeys do not drink wine, even if he offers it. These examples kindle within him a certain respect for Islam, even if it is not the ‘true’ religion, and lead him to comment: ‘The Mohammedans give us an example of scrupulousness in the fulfilment of their duties, and if Catholics imitated them we would be good Catholics’ (p. 164). When Camacho and the other pilgrims return to Alexandria, they have the opportunity to travel to Cairo. In Egypt, they witness the inhabitants’
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veneration for the River Nile, which they call ‘generous’, ‘kind’ and ‘holy’ (p. 222). With the help of an interpreter from a Franciscan convent, they are able to visit a mosque, which Camacho describes as the most sumptuous he has ever seen, made of marble and with fine matting, golden lamps and with two minarets. This visit enables him to witness the treatment of women, who are not allowed to enter the mosque, leading him to think that women in Islam are considered as mere objects of pleasure in the service of men (p. 224). The last Islamic event he witnesses is a dhikr ceremony, in which about 30 men shout and dance around in a circle to the rhythm of a flute and a drum. Camacho considers this an extravagant farce even though he knows it was a form of prayer, but it does not deter him from liking oriental culture and he even wants to buy some Turkish clothes in a bazaar in Cairo (p. 234). Far from limiting himself simply to recounting his travel experiences in the Middle East, Camacho seeks to defend Catholicism against both Islam and other forms of Christianity. The state in which he finds the holy places of Christianity and seeing the self-denial of the Franciscans who protect the places in their care, make him realise the importance of pilgrimage. Significance Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén circulated widely. In 1886 the Catholic newspaper El Tiempo (10 July, p. 3) reported that the 1873 edition had sold out, but that a third printing (it appeared in 1885) was also already on sale at the price of one peso per copy. Camacho gave all the income from the 1873 edition to support an orphanage in Bethlehem, the Obra de la Santa Familia or Obra de Belén, which cared for Christian, Jewish and Muslim children. The orphanage was approved by Pope Pius IX in 1873, and received support from the prelates of France, Belgium, Italy and the United Kingdom, and in Mexico from the archbishops of the states of Mexico, Michoacán and Guadalajara, and the bishops of León, Zacatecas, Puebla and Queretaro. The establishment of this orphanage made it possible to give Catholic instruction to young people, which was much easier than trying to convert the adult population. In 1888, it was reported that the orphanage had succeeded in converting 62 ‘schismatic’ children and 24 Protestant children back to Catholicism, and in baptising four ‘Mohammedan’ children (La Voz de México, 30 May 1889, p. 1).
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Publications R.S. Camacho y García, Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén, Guadalajara, 1865; 2836688 (digitised version available through University of Harvard Library) R.S. Camacho y García, Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén, Guadalajara, 18732; 100411666 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) R.S. Camacho y García, Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén, Guadalajara, 18853, repr. n.p., 2018 Studies A. Tolentino Garcia, ‘Los viajeros mexicanos del siglo XIX y sus musulmanes’, Revista de Historia de América 158 (2020) 105-43 Carlos Enrique Torres Monroy
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī Date of Birth Unknown Place of Birth Baghdad Date of Death 1881 Place of Death Mecca
Biography
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Baghdādī was a 19th-century Ottoman scholar and traveller. Although he was originally from Baghdad, as the nisba in his name indicates, he eventually settled in Damascus, where he studied, set up home and raised a family. For reasons that are as yet unclear, he arrived in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, sometime in the first five years of the 1860s. Here, he befriended the sea captain Muḥammad Ansh Pāshā, who assigned him the task of directing the prayers of the sailors under the pāshā’s command. Thereafter al-Baghdādī served as an imam in the Ottoman navy. His desire to discover new territories was stimulated when Sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 1861-76) ordered two steamships to be sent to Basra. On learning that the route was to skirt the African continent (there being as yet no Suez Canal), al-Baghdādī decided to join one of these, called the Bursa. The two steamers left Istanbul in September 1865, but storms in the Mediterranean separated them. The Bursa anchored for a few months in Algiers and then for a few more in Cádiz. After these delays, which lasted more than half a year, the ship continued its journey but, once again, this time in the Atlantic, winds and storms blew it off course. Eventually, in June 1866 the crew found themselves off the coast of Brazil. Although the Ottoman Empire and Brazil had established diplomatic relations through various treaties since 1850, this appears to have been the first Ottoman vessel to anchor in Brazilian waters. The Bursa lay off the Brazilian coast for approximately two months and then set sail again round Africa for Basra. However, al-Baghdādī decided to remain in Brazil after noticing the presence of Muslim communities. Approximately three years later, in 1869, he set sail to return to Ottoman lands. During this second voyage, he took the opportunity to visit Lisbon, Córdoba, Gibraltar, Tangier, Algeria, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo and Jeddah, and then made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Finally, at the end of his journey, he
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returned to Damascus, where he was reunited with his wife and children. Sometime later, he became ill and travelled to Istanbul to find a cure. He died in Mecca in 1881.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī, Deleite do estrangeiro em tudo o que é espantoso e maravilhoso. Estudo de um relato de viagem Bagdali / El deleite del extranjero en todo lo que es asombroso y maravilloso. Estudio de un relato de viajes Bagdadí, trans. P.D. Elias Farah, Rio de Janeiro, 2007 Secondary R. Marín Guzmán, El viaje del imam ʿAbd al Rahman ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Baghdadi a Brasil en el siglo XIX, México City, 2011
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Musalliyyat al-gharīb bi-kull amr ʿajīb ‘The amusement of the foreigner in every wonderful thing’ Date 1865 Original Language Arabic Description ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī’s Musalliyyat al-gharīb bi-kull amr ʿajīb (‘The amusement of the foreigner in every wonderful thing’) is 66 pages long in Arabic, 56 pages in the German translation – not very long if one considers that it was written in the Arab tradition of the riḥla, or travel account. Descriptions are given of the Muslim slave communities of West African origin that were established in Rio de Janeiro, at that time the Brazilian capital; in the city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia; and in the city of Recife, in the state of Pernambuco. The work focuses on the social conditions in which these Muslims lived, the particularities of their Islamic religious practices, and the work of religious instruction that al-Baghdādī himself carried out among them during his stay of approximately three years. In addition to this information, the work offers a concise historical, geographical, natural and social description of Brazil. Al-Baghdādī mentions political events in the period since the Portuguese conquest, emphasises the great expanses of forests and jungles as well as the importance of
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the River Amazon, notes the ways in which trade was developed and the main goods that were exchanged, describes particular fruits and animals that caught his attention, offers a glimpse of the way in which justice was meted out, and refers to the lawless towns that lay beyond the control of the cities. Al-Baghdādī obtained most of the information directly by way of observation, though he also includes some stories and curious reports that he heard from the local population. The work contains brief descriptions of what caught al-Baghdādī’s attention as he passed through various countries that he visited as he made his return journey to Ottoman lands. The narrative is quite concise and limited, including descriptions of different fruits in Portugal, the architecture of Córdoba, the history of a local Gibraltar diplomat and the social poverty and filth of Tangier’s public baths. As for other cities, only their names are mentioned. Al-Baghdādī’s real interest was to report on Brazil, which, unlike the Muslim cities, was still a distant and unknown territory for the majority of the Ottoman readership. One of the key aspects of the work concerns enslaved Muslims and their struggle to preserve their religious beliefs and practices. These Muslims were in fact black slaves, brought from Islamised territories bordering the River Niger. They had to practise their religion clandestinely, because Islam had been prohibited in Brazil after the 1835 Malê rebellion, when Muslim slaves (malê was the local term for Muslim) in Bahia had attempted to overthrow the government. It seems that the forms of Islam they followed preserved elements of traditional religions from their African area of origin as well as elements from elsewhere, such as echoes of certain Christian and Jewish customs. Modified practices included fasting in the eighth Islamic month of Shaʿbān instead of the ninth month of Ramaḍān; idiosyncratic elements in prayers; writing qur’anic phrases on small pieces of paper as amulets; participation in Roman Catholic mass and seeking baptism for their infants, and performing the funeral rites of their deceased in churches. There was also clear ignorance of the Arabic language, which exacerbated some of the modifications and changes to practice. Clearly, some of these practices were useful in a Christian context that was otherwise hostile to Islam. Al-Baghdādī attempted to correct, instruct these Muslims and introduce them into a religious setting that was closer to the Sunna, and even attempted to obtain copies of the Qur’an to help his work by contacting a book seller.
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Significance Al-Baghdādī’s work offers a fleeting glimpse of Brazil in the mid-19th century and of Muslims in the country. It is important for understanding the presence of Islam not only in Brazil but in the wider Latin American context. This is something that has been scarcely considered, and has only been studied in recent decades. Brazil in the 19th century was not a context for any intentional ChristianMuslim engagement in a manner that was suggestive of some sort of relationship between the faiths or their communities. However, what is said in this book may help to explain the absence of Christian–Muslim relations as such, or at least provide a background against which to assess any such evidence of relationship that might emerge from other sources. Publications MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz – Hs. or. 4522 (Musalliyyat al-gharīb bi-kull amr ʿajīb, fols 1r-34r; 1865) R. Quiring-Zoche, ‘Bei den Malé in Brasilien. Das Reisebuch des ʿAbdarraḥmān al-Baġdādī’, Die Welt Des Islams 40 (2000) 196-334 (Introduction, 196-240; German trans., 241-97; facsimile of Arabic text, 301-34) ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī, The amusement of the foreigner, trans. Y. Daddi Addoun and R. Soulodre-La France, Toronto, 2001 (English trans.) ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī, Deleite do estrangeiro em tudo o que é espantoso e maravilhoso. Estudo de um relato de viagem Bagdali/ El deleite del extranjero en todo lo que es asombroso y maravilloso. Estudio de un relato de viajes Bagdadí, trans. P.D. Elias Farah, Rio de Janeiro, 2007 (Portuguese and Spanish trans.) Studies J. Tofik Karam, ‘African rebellion and refuge on the edge of empire’, in M. del Mar Logroño et al. (eds), Crescent over another horizon. Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latino USA, Austin TX, 2015, 46-62 Guzmán, El viaje del imam ʿAbd al Rahman ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Baghdadi a Brasil P.G. Hilu da Rocha Pinto, ‘El Islam en Brasil elementos para una antropología histórica’, Istor. Revista de Historia Internacional 45 (2011) 3-21 A. da Costa Silva, ‘Comprando e vendendo alcorões no Rio de Janeiro do século XIX’, Estudos Avançados 18/50 (2004) 284-94
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J. José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil. A história do levante dos malês, São Paulo, 2003 Quiring-Zoche, ‘Bei den Malé in Brasilien’, pp. 196-240 Jorge Armando Andrade García
Leonardo Márquez Araujo Date of Birth 8 January 1820 Place of Birth México City Date of Death 5 July 1913 Place of Death Havana, Cuba
Biography
Leonardo Márquez Araujo was a Mexican general, politician and diplomat who fought against Texas-American rebels in the Texas Revolution (1835-6) and against Americans in the Mexican-American War (1847). He also fought against the – liberal – revolution of Ayutla (1855) although, he had to go into exile after being defeated. During the Reform War (185860) he returned to Mexico to join the conservatives and was appointed commander and governor of the State of Jalisco (1859). Formally, the war ended with a liberal triumph. However, like other conservatives, he continued to recognise the conservative presidency of Félix María Zuloaga until the beginning of the second French intervention in México (1862-7), when he joined the French expedition. As a result of the French advance, the republican and liberal government of Benito Juárez was exiled close to the United States border. In the capital, the conservatives declared the Second Mexican Empire (1863) and offered the crown to Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who arrived in Mexico in 1864. However, during his first two years in office, Maximilian surrounded himself with moderate liberals. Before endorsing the liberal Reform Laws, specifically the law on the nationalisation of ecclesiastical assets and the freedom of religion, fearing a rebellion, he sent the popular conservative generals Miguel Miramón and Márquez on missions abroad in a disguised exile, in the case of Márquez on a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire. Before Márquez, Maximilian had sent the Mexican-Panamanian monarchist physician Pablo Martínez del Río to the court of Sultan Abdulaziz (r. 1861-76), who granted Maximilian the Medjidie order. Under the pretext of returning the compliment, Maximilian sent Márquez to Istanbul with two objectives: to award the Imperial Order of the Mexican Eagle to the sultan and to arrange the establishment of Mexican consulates in Alexandria and Jerusalem as well as a Mexican monastery in Jerusalem (in the Abbey of the Dormition).
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Márquez returned to Mexico in 1866 and re-joined the imperial army. After the withdrawal of the French army (1867), Maximilian refused to leave Mexico and, together with the conservatives, focused on defending the Empire. In Querétaro, the Empire’s last redoubt, Maximilian named Márquez commander in chief of the Empire. Besieged by the republicans, the Empire war council agreed that Márquez would break the siege to raise funds and arms and to recruit men in the capital. He managed to get out of Querétaro but the fall of Querétaro and México City prevented him from returning. After the republican triumph, he fled the country disguised as a muleteer. Exiled in Havana, Cuba, he was granted amnesty and returned to Mexico in 1895. However, the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution (1910) forced him to return to Cuba where he died three years later.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Leonardo Márquez Araujo, Refutación hecha por el Gral. de división Leonardo Márquez al-libelo del general de brigada, don Manuel Ramírez de Arellano, publicado en París el 30 de diciembre de 1868, bajo el epígrafe de ‘Últimas Horas del Imperio’, New York, 1869 Leonardo Márquez Araujo, Manifiestos (El Imperio y los Imperiales) por Leonardo Márquez. Lugarteniente del Imperio, ed. F. Vázquez, México City, 1904 Secondary E. Rodríguez Baca, ‘Leonardo Márquez, el hombre que nació para la guerra. La vida del tigre de Tacubaya’, Relatos e Historias en México 110 (2019) 44-53 F. Díaz Reyes Retana, Vida militar y política del señor general de división don Leonardo Márquez Araujo, México City, 1978
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Diplomatic reports in Diario del Imperio and La Sociedad Date 1865-6 Original Language Spanish Description Parts of the diplomatic reports that Leonardo Márquez Araujo sent to his friend and fellow party member, Ignacio Aguilar y Marocho, Mexico’s ambassador to Rome, were published in the official gazette Diario del Imperio and in the Catholic newspaper La Sociedad.
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In a report on Istanbul, Márquez relates that he attended a ceremony ‘with all the grandeur, pomp and magnificence that characterise the Oriental Court’ (‘Recepción del Exmo. Sr. General Márquez’, p. 66-7). The sultan arranged a luxurious boat to take him to the palace, where he was received by high officials including the Grand Vizier, Mehmed Fuat Paşa and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mehmed Emin Âli Paşa. Finally, he was led before the sultan, to whom he delivered a speech and handed over the Great Collar of the Mexican Eagle. Whilst he was in Istanbul to arrange for the establishment of a consulate and a monastery in Jerusalem, Márquez had to sign a Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation with the Ottoman Empire. While he waited, he visited the Topkapi Palace, the Sultan’s Treasury, the Imperial Arsenal, Hagia Sophia, the Süleymaniye Mosque and the Galata tower, among other places, and also attended the celebration to mark the anniversary of Sultan Abdulaziz’s accession. Márquez’s record is the first by a Mexican about Istanbul and its court. He describes the beauty of the city, the official ceremony, the sumptuous banquet, and the joy of the dancing crowds, among other details, revealing the diversity of the empire and therefore of Muslim society. In the style of an imaginary ‘Thousand and One Nights’, Márquez produces a vivid description of one of the great imperial cities and ceremonies: It has been a celebration in which the government of Turkey has flaunted [...] all its greatness, with all its luxury, and […] its exquisite taste. […] The mosques with their tall minarets forming whimsical ornaments looked exquisite. The buildings […] were also illuminated. […] The whole part of the city […] reflected its lights in the water, which portrayed them beautifully. […] To see these boats illuminated in this way, and wearing their finery, to sail the waters of the Bosphorus in that immense sea of lights, and amidst a multitude of small boats, is a spectacle that can only be witnessed, but not described, and that you cannot believe except by looking at it. […] The eyesight was fatigued when seeing so much; and when one believed that there was nothing left to see, a small door, placed at the bottom of the first garden, presented the entrance to the upper part of the gardens […]: one entered there, and then a pleasant surprise came to show that you had not seen anything compared to what you had to see. […] But what is most to be admired in this is the good order that reigned everywhere, because all attending were devoted to joy, no one thought about more than having fun. (‘Fiestas en Constantinopla’, p. 3)
During this celebration, he was able to see ʿAbd al-Qādir (Abdel Kader), the former leader of the Algerian resistance against the French invasion,
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and a respected figure in both the Islamic world and the West (mainly after interceding for Christians during the Damascus massacre of 1860), who was visiting Istanbul. Márquez refers to him as a ‘bizarre warrior who has been given awards by the sovereigns of Europe …[and] who astonished the world with his deeds of courage and patriotism, as he has later amazed with his loyalty and decency’ (‘Fiestas en Constantinopla’, p. 3). Márquez also travelled to Egypt and Palestine to install the Mexican consuls in Alexandria and Jerusalem. After the formalities in Alexandria, he visited Cairo, the pyramids of Giza, the Red Sea and the Isthmus of Suez, from where he sailed to the Holy Land. On 9 December 1865, the Mexican delegation was formally received by the governor of Jerusalem, İzzet Paşa. Márquez bestowed on the Catholic patriarch the Cross of Guadalupe, as well as the monstrance chalice and paten that had been given by the Mexican emperors. In return, Márquez and his secretary Celestino Araujo were made Knights of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He went on to visit the Dead Sea, the River Jordan and Bethlehem, where he spent Christmas Eve. There his account ends, with no description of his journey through Egypt and the Holy Land. Significance Before concluding his mission, Márquez returned to Istanbul to sign the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation with the Ottoman Empire on behalf of the Mexican Empire. This was the first signed by Mexico with an Islamic country, and it laid the foundation for treaties with Greece and Persia, although these were not carried through. After the collapse of the Mexican Empire, the Treaty remained a dead letter and in practice was not acted upon. It was not until 1927, once the Republic of Turkey was established, that a new Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation was signed. Whereas the treaty signed by Márquez was an agreement between empires, the new one was between revolutionary republics. Márquez’s reports show how amazed he was by Istanbul, the Ottoman court and the jubilee celebrations he witnessed. He does not make any comment about doctrinal or ritual aspects of Islam, though in his description of Istanbul and the Ottoman court he conveys a personal approach that is rather different from the usual views of Islam at this time. He shows appreciation of aspects of daily life in Istanbul and of the character of its inhabitants, not least their festivities – a feature with which Mexicans would certainly identify. While Márquez does not refer to Muslims as strange Oriental subjects, he does refer to the harem as something typical of Muslim religious
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culture and exhibits the deep curiosity shown by many travellers. A point that deserves note is that, contrary to Western writers who typically characterised Muslim societies as inclined to barbarism and anarchy, Márquez sees Ottoman rule as characterised by imperial magnificence and order. Both these qualities were admired by Mexico, which that the time was impoverished and mired in civil war. In short, these reports signal accommodation with respect to Christian– Muslim relations. Although this was driven by political and economic concerns, it nonetheless reflects an unusually neutral, if not active, appreciation of Islam and Muslims by this Christian author. To the extent that Márquez’s reports were circulating in the public domain in Mexico, their influence was not insignificant, and they deserve further attention in the study of relations between Hispanic America and Islam in the mid19th century. Publications Leonardo Márquez Araujo, ‘Recepción del Exmo. Sr. General Márquez por el Gran Sultán’, Diario del Imperio, 19 July 1865, pp. 66-7; 25843 (digitised version available through Center for Research Libraries) Leonardo Márquez Araujo, ‘Fiestas en Constantinopla’, La Sociedad, 17 August 1865, pp. 2-3 Leonardo Márquez Araujo, ‘Los representantes de México en Jerusalén (Comunicación recibida de Jerusalén con fecha 13 de diciembre de 1865)’, El Diario del Imperio, 3 February 1866, p. 149 Studies F.A. Cobos Alfaro, ‘Orientalismo y diplomacia. La misión a Tierra Santa en el II Imperio’, paper submitted to Coloquio de Doctorandos del Programa de Posgrado en Historia, México City, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, October 2019 (forthcoming) Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro
Vicente Cuesta Date of Birth 1830 Place of Birth Ecuador Date of Death 1883 Place of Death Ecuador
Biography
Little is known of the early life of Vicente Cuesta. He was an Ecuadorian Roman Catholic priest living in the neighbouring country of Colombia and acting as head of the church in the Ecuadorian city of Riobamba. He was imprisoned and exiled at a time when political disputes between liberals and conservatives were rife. In the 19th century, Latin America was in the process of nation-building, and prominent members of the clergy like him were as much political figures as they were religious. Because of this, their letters were of significant interest, so much so that they were even published in the Ecuadorian press.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION C. Alzate, ‘¿Comunidad de fieles o comunidad de ciudadanos? Dos relatos de viaje del siglo xix colombiano’, Revista Chilena de Literatura 77 (2010) 5-27; https://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-22952010000200001
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Cartas del Dr. Don Vicente Cuesta sobre su viaje a la Tierra Santa ‘The letters of Dr Don Vicente Cuesta on his journey to the Holy Land’ Date 1873 Original Language Spanish Description This collection of letters logs one priest’s pilgrimage to the holy sites. His accounts, consisting of 31 letters, totalling 242 pages, were first published
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in the city of Cuenca in the Ecuadorian newspaper El Provenir. As far as is known these are the author’s only writings, and they constitute the first written testimony by an Ecuadorian of interreligious contact in the East. For the most part, they portray Muslims, Bedouins and Arabs in a negative light: Cuesta fears the Bedouins, considers Muslims uncivilised, and attributes lawlessness to the Arabs. Despite the attitude prevalent in the letters, in descriptions of places such as mosques a certain understanding of the Muslim faith begins to emerge. Cuesta’s attitude towards Islam is not entirely negative and he does open up to the idea of learning about it. However, the traditional tropes of Orientalism are evident as he refers to ‘Oriental luxury’, the ‘violence of Muslims’, the ‘veiled woman’, the ‘closed off nature of Muslims’, and so on. It would seem that he set off on his journey with an Orientalist mindset that persisted throughout his voyage, albeit a little modified. Significance It was not at all common for Latin Americans in the 19th century to travel to the East, and so Cuesta’s letters are of considerable historical importance when it comes to the perception of Islam and the likely impact of this perception on Christian-Muslim relations in a Latin-American context. The collection circulated widely in Ecuador, though not in other Latin American countries, nor did it retain its popularity into later years. Cuesta never published any further works, dedicating himself instead to his work within the clergy. By the 20th century, new technologies had begun to improve communication. This meant that it was easier to gain more direct knowledge about the East and Islam, which may explain the book’s later decline into insignificance. Publications V. Cuesta, Cartas del Dr. Don Vicente Cuesta sobre su viaje a la Tierra Santa, Quito, 1873; 00297328621 (digitised version available through Library of Congress) V. Cuesta, Cartas del Dr. Don Vicente Cuesta sobre su viaje a la Tierra Santa, Valparaiso, 1879, repr. 2016: https://www.amazon.com/Cartas -Vicente-Cuesta-Tierra-Spanish/dp/1360932933; and 2018: https:// www.amazon.com/Cartas-Vicente-Classic-Reprint-Spanish/ dp/0364728914 Studies N.B. Ayad (ed.), La tradición orientalista en América Latina, Viña del Mar, 2015
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M. Bergel, El Oriente desplazado los intelectuales y los orígenes del tercermundismo en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, 2015 M. del Mar Logroño Narbona, P.G. Pinto and J.T. Karam (eds), Crescent over another horizon. Islam in Latin America, the Caribbean and Latino USA, Austin TX, 2015 Alzate, ‘¿Comunidad de fieles o comunidad de ciudadanos?’ Pablo Álvarez Cabello
José Lopez Portillo y Rojas Date of Birth 26 May 1850 Place of Birth Guadalajara, Jalisco State Date of Death 26 May 1923 Place of Death México City
Biography
José Lopez Portillo y Rojas was born in 1850. His father, Jesús López Portillo y Serrano, was governor of the State of Jalisco, imperial prefect, commissioner and state councillor to Emperor Maximilian (r. 1864-7), and his mother, María Rojas y Flores de la Torre, was lady-in-waiting to the Empress Carlota. José studied law, and when he qualified as a lawyer his parents rewarded him with a trip to Europe and the Middle East. He departed in 1871, on what was effectively a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Christian holy sites. Shortly after his return to Mexico, he was appointed to the Congress of the Union as representative for the State of Jalisco (1875-7). In 1882, he was elected as senator for the state. He was a prominent activist for the cause led by General Bernardo Reyes to prevent the re-election of the dictator Porfirio Diaz. When the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, he was forced to live as a fugitive until an amnesty was decreed. During Francisco León de la Barra’s short period as president in 1911 he served as Undersecretary of Public Education, and following the elections of 1911 he was appointed Governor of Jalisco, where he remained until 1913. Although his sympathies were democratic, in 1914 he accepted the position of Foreign Secretary in Victoriano Huerta’s coup-led government. He then dedicated himself to academic life and literature and was rewarded with various distinctions throughout the course of his life. He occupied the fourth seat of the Academia de la Lengua (‘Academy of Language’), of which he was director until his death on 26 April 1923.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary José López Portillo y Rojas, Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje, México City, 1874
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Secondary C. Martínez Assad, Cruzar el umbral al Medio Oriente, México City, 2018 A.M.C [A.M. Carreño] and J.L.M. [J. Luis Martínez], art. ‘José López Portillo y Rojas’, in J. Luis Martínez (ed.), Semblanzas de académicos. Antiguas, México City, 2004, 302-7
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje ‘Egypt and Palestine. Travel notes’ Date 1874 Original Language Spanish Description While José López Portillo y Rojas was not the first Mexican to visit the Holy Land, he was the first to give a full account of his experiences. Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje was published in two parts (259 and 326 pages respectively) in 1874, not long after he returned home. In vol. 1, Egypt, López Portillo describes his experience of arriving in Alexandria as ‘entering another world’ (vol. 1, p. 66). In Cairo, he is impressed by the many mosques and particularly the Khan el-Khalili market with its vast array of offerings. He records his dislike for the local monophysite Christians, ‘who confused the two natures of Jesus Christ and continue to do so even now’ (vol. 1, p. 88), but has little to say about any Muslims he sees. In vol. 2, Palestine, he shows his excitement at being so close to his destination. About his arrival in Jerusalem he says: ‘Nothing can compare to the emotion that came over me in that moment. It was as if I had found myself before a city suspended in the air, raised above the surface of the ground, between the world of men and that of God’ (vol. 2, p. 39). He immediately sets off to tour the sites that played a part in Christ’s passion. Reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ‘most venerated temple in the civilised world’, he resentfully notes the presence of the Turkish guards as an offence to his ‘Christian dignity’, and observes that Armenian pilgrims take off their shoes to enter the Holy Sepulchre just like ‘Mohammedans’. When he sees Greek Orthodox pilgrims he laments the rift in Christianity that brought about ‘the anarchy of Protestantism’ (vol. 2, p. 308).
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López Portillo also writes about Jewish religious sites. The Kotel Hamaaravi is ‘a very high wall’ formed of large square stones where Jews go every Friday at 3.00 pm, ‘the same time and day that the Saviour died’ (vol. 2, p. 361). This leads him (mistakenly) to draw links between the two religions. He sums up his stay in the city with a remark that would be just as relevant a hundred years later: ‘Jerusalem is at once a place of God and a city that will never see peace rule within its walls’ (vol. 2, p. 117). Again, very little is said about Muslims or Islam. Significance José López Portillo y Rojas was the first Mexican traveller in the Middle East to leave a written account of his travels. His work became an influence on the handful of writers who followed him, among them the priest Luis Malanco (Viaje a Oriente, México City, 1882) and the historian Felipe Teixidor (Viajeros mexicanos (siglo XIX y XX), México City, 2002 [‘Sepan cuántos…’]).. As his account shifts from tour journal to pilgrimage description once he arrives in the Holy land, it is clear that the dominant focus is on Christianity, with some limited remarks on Judaism but very little directly on Islam. Significantly, he refers to the Muslims he encounters as Turks, without reference to their religious identity. Given his openly Catholic judgements on different forms of Christianity, this suggests that López Portillo had no interest in either Islam or Christian-Muslim relations. His attitude is indicative of the attitudes prevailing at the time in staunchly Catholic Mexico. Publications José López Portillo y Rojas, Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje, 2 vols, México City, 1874; 100652586 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) V. Quirarte (ed.), Jerusalén a la vista. Tres viajeros mexicanos en Tierra Santa (José María Guzmán, José López-Portillo y Rojas, Luis Malanco), Toluca, Mexico, 2003 (includes edited extracts on Jerusalem) Carlos Martínez Assad
Luis Malanco Vargas Date of Birth 1831 Place of Birth Zumpango de la Laguna, Mexico Date of Death 1888 Place of Death Tlalpan, Mexico
Biography
Luis Malanco Vargas was born in Zumpango de la Laguna in south-central Mexico. He studied at the Colegio de San Gregorio in México City, which was known for its liberal outlook and for the prominent political and cultural figures who had studied there. During his life, he held a number of political positions, including alderman president of México City Council, private secretary to President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (in office 1872-6), secretary to the Mexican legation in Italy and magistrate of the Superior Court of Justice of Tlalpan. He was a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística and of the French Société de Géographie. In 1873, when he was alderman president of México City Council, and despite being a devout member of the Roman Catholic Church, Malanco launched a project together with Ignacio Ramírez to reform elementary public education in order to adapt it to the secular and liberal values that were being promoted by the government. In 1876, during his time as secretary to the Mexican legation in Italy, following a medical recommendation to avoid the cold winter, which had affected his health, Malanco travelled to the Holy Land and Egypt. His account of this journey was published in 1883. He died in 1888 while he was writing a book about his time in Europe.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Luis Malanco, Escritos sobre diversas materias, México City, 1875 (100 copies printed for his friends) H. Frías y Soto, ‘Viaje a Oriente. Juicio crítico’, in El diario del hogar, México City, 31 August 1884, 3-6 V. Riva Palacio, art. ‘Luis Malanco’, in Cero (Vicente Riva Palacio), Los ceros. Galería de contemporáneos, México City, 1882, 11-20
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Viaje á Oriente ‘A journey to the East’ Date 1882 Original Language Spanish Description Viaje á Oriente was published in 1883. Comprising two volumes, 494 and 682 pages long respectively, it recounts Malanco’s 1876 journey to the Holy Land via Egypt, and his visits to biblical sites in Jerusalem and the surrounding area, as well as the Dome of the Rock, al-Aqṣā Mosque and other Muslim shrines. As a liberal Catholic influenced by both the Enlightenment and Orientalism, Malanco conceived of Muslims as Easterners rather than as heretics or unbelievers. That is, he recognised that, as followers of one of the Abrahamic religions, they worshipped the same God as Christians, although they had not evolved as far in their beliefs as their fellowbelievers. Thus, while he is impressed by the 300 mosques in Cairo, his interpretation of mosque architecture leads him to infer that Islam lies somewhere between paganism and Christianity: Christianity is spiritual and therefore its architecture is ‘light […] it has harmonious towers and spires […] everything has the purpose of lifting the heart to reach towards heaven.’ By contrast, the mosque ‘breathes some materialism and some spirituality […] it has spires and slender towers [… but also] substantial walls, vaults and powerful solids that show attachment to the earth […] it is a prayer room [...], not a true temple where God dwells’ (Viaje, vol. 1, pp. 288-90). Repeating themes familiar from other Western authors, Malanco argues that in Muslim society ‘many vices are observed in men, much of slavery in women […], corruption and general debasement of the people’ (vol. 1, p. 244). He considers that Muslim marriage is not really marriage, since women are not wives but ‘slaves’, ‘a piece of furniture in the house [and] a machine that helps [men] have children’ (vol. 1, pp. 343-4). Similarly, he maintains that ‘Muḥammad legitimised the polygamy that finishes off the family, as he established the tyranny that finishes off society, as well as authorising fatalism that finishes off the individual’ (vol. 1, p. 363), and also holds him responsible for imposing the ḥijāb. He maintains that,
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although the reason for introducing polygamy in Islam was to inhibit prostitution, the latter is nevertheless tolerated. However, he does concede that ‘Egyptian women are beginning to have the same rights as European women; there is no longer a public market [for the sale] of women, […] and they can prevent their husbands from having other [women]’ (vol. 1, p. 371). Malanco recognises Islam as a strong influence on culture and personal identity. About the travellers and merchants from various places in Asia and Africa who gather in the markets of Cairo, he comments that ‘the different nationalities are placed on a level by the Mohammedan cult: [...] they have the same customs and habits, fears and enthusiasms, identical beliefs and hopes’ (vol. 1, pp. 261-2). Despite this, he sees that rich Muslims tend to be casual in matters of faith, giving up their days to recreation and pleasure, whether in the baths, in the harem, or resting and eating, smoking a shisha and drinking coffee and alcohol, and less to praying, business and family. In addition, Muslims daydream and believe in legends, myths and wondrous beings such as jinn. Malanco divides the Muslims of the Holy Land into three categories: ‘the Turks […] the Arabs and […] the lepers. The first two […] own the country, […] impious tyrants who exercise [authority] according to [… bribes] offered them, who absorb public revenues, neglect the demands of the city and oppress [even] their fellow-countrymen as […] vile slaves’ (vol. 2, p. 113). He marvels at the Dome of the Rock, and unlike other Mexican travellers, he does not scoff at legends such as that of the nails placed by Muḥammad in the slab that covers Solomon’s tomb, or that of the Well of Souls. However, he repeats the widely circulated account of the fanaticism of dervishes, such as those at the shrine of Nabī Mūsā who forbid Christians from visiting it and harass those who try to (vol. 2, p. 222). In the same vein, he describes sanctuaries shared by the faiths, such as the Grotto of the Milk in Bethlehem, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim women all pray for milk to feed their babies (vol. 2, p. 389). In the Christian chapel and Muslim oratory of the Ascension he emphasises that Muslims believe in Jesus as a prophet even if they deny the crucifixion (vol. 2, pp. 310-11), an important detail for most Mexicans who have no knowledge of this. In the same way, he points out that it was among the Arabs that the four major religions and civilisations of the world emerged: those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus Christ and Muḥammad. With an unusually ecumenical attitude, he says that, while these religions are ‘different
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ways of ascending to heaven, they all recognise the same point of origin and all move towards the common Father, the supreme omnipotent merciful Being’ (vol. 1, p. 320). Malanco suggests that Muslims, as ‘Easterners’, are incapable of modernising their societies by themselves. Modernisation in Mexico was the result of local efforts, but modernisation in Egypt was carried out by outside agents. He says the same about ‘poorly developed’ Palestine (vol. 2, p. 112). Although certain Orientalist stereotypes about Muslims can be discerned in the work, Malanco, like few other observers of his time, was able to see the Islamic world not as alien but as part of a universal whole. Regardless of cultural differences, he was able to recognise the similarities and meeting points between the Islamic world, Europe and Mexico. Significance Malanco’s Viaje a Oriente is one of a number of accounts of journeys to Egypt and the Holy Land published in Mexico in the course of the 19th century. What distinguishes it from others is the erudition it shows. Seeing himself as part of a wider literary tradition, Malanco refers to other travellers such as François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Lord Byron, the Comte de Volney, Ernest Renan and many more. Although most of his impressions about Muslims reflect views that were common in his day, he gives clear hints that he sees Islam as related to Judaism and Christianity, and even suggests that it provides some means to salvation. A number of Mexican contemporaries recognised the value of the work. Prefaces were written by José de Jesús Cuevas, president of the religiousscientific-literary association La Sociedad Católica, and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, leader of the liberal intelligentsia and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Valley of Mexico. Hilarión Frías y Soto compared Malanco to Walter Scott, and said of the work that ‘one day it will be considered one of the best productions in our national literature’ (El diario del hogar, p. 6). Nevertheless, Malanco’s Viaje fell into oblivion, and it is only in recent times that interest in it has been shown. Publications Luis Malanco, Viaje a Oriente, México City, 1882, repr. 1883; 28707552 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
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Studies J. Ricardo Chaves, ‘Viajeros latinoamericanos a Oriente en el siglo XIX. Los casos del argentino Lucio V. Mansilla y del mexicano Luis Malanco’, in D. Chávez, V. Quirarte and F. Curiel (eds), Mester de nomadia. Viajeros hispanoamericanos (1795-2011), México City, 2019, 145-56 C. Martínez Assad, Cruzar el umbral al Medio Oriente, México City, 2018 A. Mohssine, ‘Viajeros mexicanos en Tierra Santa’, Al-Irfán 1 (2015) 175-80 V. Quirarte, Jerusalén a la vista. Tres viajeros mexicanos en Tierra Santa, Toluca, 2003 H. Taboada, ‘Un Orientalismo periférico. Viajeros latinoamericanos a Tierra Santa (1786-1920)’, Estudios de Asia y África 33 (1999) 285-305 H. Frías y Soto, ‘Viaje a Oriente. Juicio crítico’, in El diario del hogar, pp. 3-6 Felipe Amalio Cobos Alfaro
Ignacio Martínez Elizondo Date of Birth 1842 Place of Birth Sierra de San Carlos, Tamaulipas Date of Death 1891 Place of Death Laredo, Texas
Biography
Ignacio Martínez Elizondo was born in 1842 in San Carlos, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and studied medicine in the city of Monterrey from 1859 to 1865. His passion for medicine was accompanied by enthusiastic literary interests, reflected in his fondness for French authors and poetry, and also a military interest, shown in his steady advancement in the armed forces to the rank of general. However, in time he became caught up in the politics of Mexico, which was in the process of establishing its identity after gaining independence from Spain. Martínez Elizondo participated with General Porfirio Díaz in the famous Plan de la Noria of 1871 to oust President Benito Juárez, and in the Tuxtepec revolution of 1876. However, he later opposed Díaz’s actions, and resigned in 1878 when Diaz came to power as President of Mexico. The consequences of his tumultuous political engagements finally led to exile to Brownsville, Texas, where in 1884 he edited the newspaper El Mundo, a publication that clearly reflected his political and cultural interests at the time. In addition to his military and medical work, Martínez Elizondo is recognised for his accounts of trips overseas in 1875 and 1883. Two works are extant, Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África (‘Memories of a trip to America, Europe and Africa’; Paris, 1884) and Viaje universal. Visita a las cinco partes del mundo (‘Universal journey. Visit to the five parts of the world’; New York, 1886). Both have a literary, political and ethnographic character and include descriptions of customs, monuments, people, socio-political situations and social differences in the countries he visited, and also testimony to the troubled times in Mexico that arose from the seemingly incessant struggles for power. Martínez Elizondo’s ongoing involvement in politics and the influence of enemies in Mexico – which even though he was in exile, delayed the publication of Recuerdos de un
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viaje, as noted in the preface (p. vii) – led to his assassination in Laredo, Texas, on 5 February 1891.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary I. Martínez Elizondo, Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África, Paris, 1884 Secondary A. Tolentino García, ‘Los viajeros mexicanos del siglo XIX y sus musulmanes’, Revista de Historia de América 158 (2020) 105-43 R. Hernández Alvarado, ‘Rebeliones y turismo al modo de Ignacio Martínez Elizondo’, Vuelo. Revista Universitaria de Cultura (2016) 35-41 R.M. Talavera Aldana, ‘Ignacio Martínez Elizondo, viajero y liberal heterodoxo’, México City, 2006 (MA Diss. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) H. Taboada, ‘Un orientalismo periférico. Viajeros latinoamericanos 1786-1920’, Revista de Estudios de Asia y África 33 (1999) 285-305
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África ‘Memories of a trip to America, Europe and Africa’ Date 1884 Original Language Spanish Description Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África is the record of Martínez Elizondo’s trip in 1875 to North Africa, Spain and elsewhere. Published in Paris in 1884, it is 528 pages long, divided into 55 chapters and illustrated with 354 engravings and a map. It reveals nostalgia for the greatness of the Moors (or Arabs – he uses these terms interchangeably), reflected in his observations on the architecture and people he encounters. He remarks on what he regards as the strange customs and the diversity of the people he meets, at times recalling the constant power struggles between the Spanish, Portuguese and Moors in the 16th and 17th centuries. One recurrent theme is the beauty of the Muslim women he sees, reflecting an orientalist stereotype of the time. At one point, he is told that Muslim men show great prowess in battle because when they die, ‘they go to a paradise populated by this kind of women who, with a glance, with a
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smile, are capable of making a revolution’ (Recuerdos, 1884, p. 256). He also remarks positively on the Arabic language, which he finds ‘musical and melodious’, and on the delights of ‘Arab hospitality’ (p. 260). Such favourable comments contrast with other impressions, which inspire negative remarks. Of Muslim life in North Africa Martínez Elizondo notes that architectural monuments to the past glories of the Arab presence such as those in Spain are not found here. Rather, he encounters ‘narrow streets [...] full of filth’ and Muslim inhabitants that ‘for the most part […] look like beggars’ (p. 261). His views on Islam and Muslims are very mixed. Although he finds much to criticise in the culture and life of Moroccan towns, including veiling, Martínez Elizondo persists in his dreamlike descriptions of Arab women, one of whom he surprised in the ‘act of putting on the mask to go out in the street’ (p. 265). When he visits Spain, he notes evidence and allusions to the Arab past that he appreciates, especially in Córdoba. However, in Granada, a ‘pearl surrounded by emeralds’ (p. 280), he finds Christian buildings, such as the cathedral, which was originally the main mosque, to be ‘in bad taste’ (p. 282). The Alhambra, he notes, is ‘the main object that foreigners and tourists admire’ (p. 283), and he regrets the construction of Charles V’s palace there, a ‘building with which this superb monarch wanted to surpass the artistic and graceful constructions of the Moors’, but really a crime against humanity (pp. 284-5). Martínez Elizondo gives detailed descriptions of legends, such as that of the Abencerrajes, who were murdered by Boabdil, the last Nasrid sultan, at the instigation of his mother. Boabdil lost Granada to the Catholic Monarchs, and when he wept as he went into exile his mother said: ‘Cry like a woman (over) what you could not defend as a man.’ The sultan’s melancholy reminds Martínez Elizondo of the popular song ‘La Golondrina’ (or ‘Las Golondrinas’), which is usually sung at the saddest of farewells. He comments that he cannot help but reflect on the current situation in Granada, and laments that ‘The splendid capital of a kingdom is a simple provincial city’, and ‘The conquest of Granada cannot be a glory for Fernando and Isabel’ (p. 292). His references to ‘Moors’ continue with his visits to Valencia and Barcelona. In Valencia, he recalls some of the battles of the 11th and 13th centuries, and in Barcelona he accuses the Inquisition of depopulating the nation, and laments ‘the mass and successive expatriations of the Jews, Moors and Moriscos’ (p. 307).
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Significance Although Martínez Elizondo openly declares himself an atheist, this work is valuable for its observations and judgements about Islam and Muslims made by a 19th-century Latin American brought up in a Catholic and Spanish-language culture. Martínez Elizondo repeatedly highlights the poverty and what he describes as the ‘semi-savagery’ of Arab Muslims, though on the one hand he also reflects on the beauty of Muslim women, and on the other recognises almost wistfully that in Spain something admirable has been lost for which the overlay of Christianity on Islam is to be deplored. Perhaps there can be seen in this work something of the emergence of an almost post-Christian, and certainly ‘Christian-secular’, perspective on Islam and Muslims. Publications I. Martínez Elizondo, Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África, Paris, 1884, repr. 1923; 008869040 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) I. Martínez Elizondo, Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África, ed. R.M. Talavera Aldana, México City, 2008 Studies Hernández Alvarado, ‘Rebeliones y turismo’ Talavera Aldana, ‘Ignacio Martínez Elizondo’ E. Young, ‘Imaginando alternativas de modernidades. Ignacio Martínez travel narratives’, in S. Truett and E. Young (eds), Continental crossroads. Remapping US-Mexico borderlands history, Durham NC, 2004, 151-79 Sandra Rojo Flores
Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux Date of Birth 1860 Place of Birth Guayacán, Coquimbo, Chile Date of Death 1930 Place of Death Barcelona
Biography
Amalia Errázuriz Urmeneta was born on 31 May 1860 in Guayacán, Coquimbo region, Chile. Her father was Maximiano Errázuriz Valdivieso, a conservative politician and member of a wealthy landowning family, and her mother, Amalia Urmeneta Quiroga, was the daughter of José Tomás Urmeneta, a miner of noble Basque origin who made a fortune thanks to the discovery in northern Chile of one of the richest copper mines in the world. Following the early death of her mother, she was brought up and educated by her grandmother, and then from the age of ten she attended the Maestranza boarding school, run by the nuns of the Sacred Heart. In 1871, when she was 11, Amalia made her first trip across the Atlantic. Her father travelled constantly to establish businesses around mining, and on one of his long tours he decided to take his second wife and children with him. As recounted by one of Amalia’s daughters, Rome was her favourite place on this trip, because it was the capital of Catholicism (Subercaseaux, Amalia Errázuriz, p. 29). While they were in England, Maximiano hired a governess from whom Amalia learned English and French. During her adolescence, Amalia expressed interest in a religious vocation and had intentions to enter the order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, but she eventually abandoned that idea and in 1879 she married Ramón Subercaseaux. Ramón was from a wealthy French business family based in Valparaíso, Chile’s main port at the time. In 1879, the couple set out for Europe, where their first son was born in 1880. After spending some years in Chile, where five more children were born, Ramón’s diplomatic and political work took the family to Europe and they settled in Paris. It was during this long stay that Amalia first visited the Middle East at Christmas 1893, and again the following year, this time accompanied by her older children. After this, she wrote about her impressions of Ottoman and Islamic customs in a diary published under the title Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente (‘My days of pilgrimage in the East’).
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After the death of one of her daughters in Paris, Amalia and her family returned to Chile for a short time, and then in 1898 moved to Berlin for five years. In the middle of the First World War, Amalia crossed the Atlantic again to visit one of her sons, who was in Rome and about to be ordained a priest. She avoided the Spanish flu and the dangers of Europe at war, and lived with her brother Rafael, a diplomat to the Holy See. Her stay in Rome was prolonged, and Ramón travelled with the rest of the family to meet her in Europe. There, another of her sons decided to enter the Benedictine Order. The rest of the family returned to Chile in 1920, but four years later Ramón was appointed ambassador to the Holy See, replacing his brother-in-law, who had died. Amalia accompanied him, and this allowed her to make strong links in the curia. On a visit to Assisi, she met her compatriot, the poet Gabriela Mistral, who wrote a biography of her after her death. In 1929, she returned to Chile and then accompanied her husband on a diplomatic mission to Rome in 1930. She died that same year in Barcelona.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Amalia Errázuriz, Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente; see Biblioteca Nacional de Chile: http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-85415.html Secondary Blanca Subercaseaux, Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux, Santiago, 1934 Gabriela Mistral, Doña Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux, Caracas, 1932
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente ‘My days of pilgrimage in the East’ Date Around 1900 Original Language Spanish Description This work of 447 pages comprises accounts of the two trips Amalia made to the Middle East at the end of 1893 and in 1894. Each of its two parts is arranged chronologically. The only surviving copy of the one known edition includes several illustrations made by Amalia’s eldest son, Pedro
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Illustration 17. The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem
Subercaseaux, the Benedictine monk. As far as is known, this was the only edition of the work. While it contains no information about a publisher, or place and year of publication, it would appear that it was in circulation between 1900 and 1930. It may have been published in Santiago, Chile, and it could have been financed by the Subercaseaux-Errázuriz family itself. Another possibility is that it was promoted by the Buena Prensa publishing house, the manager of which, the Salesian priest Bernardo Gentilini, had a close relationship with the League of Chilean Ladies, which had been founded by Amalia Errázuriz. The account begins with Amalia’s arrival in Jerusalem on 23 December 1893. She immediately goes on to Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas and visits a series of sacred sites. On her return journey, she goes to Beirut and places in Greece. The itinerary of her second trip follows that of the first, except that the return includes a visit to Egypt. While the main focus is on Christian pilgrimage, Amalia’s accounts contain descriptions of the Arab populations she encountered and of Islamic practices she witnessed. From her first contacts with Muslims, which occured in Jaffa, she concludes that their rude and rough demeanour derives not from any inherent nature, which she generally admires, but from their religion.
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An Arab, in a fit of fury, threw a woman to the ground in the middle of the street and beat her with his feet and hands until she was almost dead. [...] This makes clear what those poor people ruled by the Koran are like. Such incidents are witnessed constantly when touring the countries subjected to the regime and prescriptions of Muhammad. Such cultural backwardness and debasement! (pp. 378-9)
She regards Islam, for which she uses the term ‘Mahometismo’, as an obstacle to the development of its people, leading them to a state of barbarism. Christianity, on the other hand, leads to progress and civilisation. This attitude recalls sentiments that were circulating at the time in the nascent Latin American republics, among both conservatives like Amalia and liberals. They seem to have first been expressed in Civilización y barbarie (1845) by the Argentinian intellectual Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-88). Throughout her account Amalia depicts Islam as the opposite of Christianity. Significance Amalia’s work was part of a series of travel diaries by upper class Roman Catholic Chileans who visited the Middle East as pilgrims to Jerusalem. It is possible that they were her intended readers. The vision of Islam as an oppressive religion and culture is shared by all of them, not least because they regarded it as the opposite of Catholic Christianity. In contrast, Chilean artists and writers who were open to influences from France and the modernist movement at the end of the 19th century felt a strong attraction to the East, often related to an interest in theosophy, Buddhism and spiritual explorations beyond Christianity. This put the Catholic Church on alert, which is why it launched a campaign to discredit other religions and forms of spirituality. Publications Amalia Errázuriz, Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente, Santiago, n.d.; w3-article-85415 (digitised version available through Memoriachilena.gob.cl) Studies L. Amaro and A. Mayne-Nicholls, ‘Una travesía diferente. Peregrinaje religioso y escritura de mujeres en Chile’, Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos 3 (2014) 131-52 V. Ramírez, ‘Ficción y creación del mundo oriental en relatos de viajeros chilenos del siglo XIX’, Santiago, 2014 (PhD Diss. Universidad de Chile)
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V. Ramírez, ‘Hegemonía occidental sobre el mundo. Los relatos de dos viajeras chilenas en Oriente’, Revista Chilena de Literatura 77 (2010) 1-13; https://revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/view/ 9131/9133 B. Subercaseaux, Historia de las ideas y de la cultura en Chile, vol. 3, Santiago, 2004 Verónica Ramírez Errázuriz
Francisco J. Herboso España Date of Birth 1861 Place of Birth Quillota Date of Death 1915 Place of Death Tokyo
Biography
Francisco Javier Herboso España was a Chilean writer, diplomat and politician. He was born in the city of Quillota, in the Valparaiso region. He married Doña María Correa y Sanfuentes, a descendant of Don Mateo y Toro Zambrano (1727-1811), first Count of the Conquest. Herboso began his political activities at the age of 25 in 1886, when he was elected deputy for Cachapoal, a town in the region of Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins. However, he did not take up his responsibilities, but instead made a series of journeys through Europe, Africa and Asia for the next two years. His account of these journeys later became Reminiscencias de viajes (1905-6), first published in Venezuela and Chile. On his return to Chile, he joined the Liberal Party and was appointed deputy again, this time for Rancagua, and held this seat during the Constituent Congress of 1891 and then through 1894-7 and 1897-1900. With the help of his family fortune and inherited social status, he was appointed Minister of Justice and Public Instruction between 1899 and 1901. Herboso’s best known work is usually thought to be Estudios penitenciarios (1892), a pamphlet he presented to the Chilean government about a study of prisons and the European prison system. It was highly praised by Agustín de Vedia (1843-1910), an influential Uruguayan journalist and writer living in Argentina. From 1901 to 1915, Herboso followed a diplomatic career. During this period, he was minister plenipotentiary to Brazil, on a mission to Venezuela for the celebration of its centenary as an independent Republic, to Ecuador, to Colombia, to Central America and to Japan. He struck up a particularly special relationship with the Japanese emperor, so that following his death at the Kyoto Hotel on 17 November 1915, representatives of the Japanese court attended his funeral, which was carried out with state honours.
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MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION G. Cid, ‘Miradas ambiguas. Visiones latinoamericanas de Tierra Santa en el siglo XIX’, in R.P. Lavis et al. (eds), Seminario Simon Collier, 2008, Santiago, 2009, 97-128 J. Krejner and M. Wolman-Krejner, Tierra Santa y el Nuevo Mundo durante el Imperio Otomano. Viaje a través de los testimonios de autores españoles, portugueses y latinoamericanos, Jerusalem, 2007 H.G.H. Taboada, ‘Un orientalismo periférico. Viajeros latinoamericanos, 17861920’, Revista Estudios de Asia y África 33 (1998) 285-305 M. Jara, ‘Chile y Japón en la decada de los ’10. Un homenaje, un negocio y una discriminación’, Revista Notas Históricas y Geográficas (1997) 89-99 V. Figueroa, art. ‘Herboso España Francisco’, Diccionario histórico, biográfico y bibliográfico de Chile, vol. 3, Santiago, 1929, 442-3 F.J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vol. 1 (Paris and Italy), vol. 2 (Egypt), vol. 3 (the Holy Land), vol. 4 (Still in the Orient), vol. 5 (Spain), vol. 6 (Excursions through Europe), vol. 7 (Colombia), Yokohama, 1915-16 F.J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vol. 1 (Paris and Italy), vol. 2 (Egypt), vol. 3 (The Holy Land), vol. 4 (Still in the Orient), Caracas, 1905-6; 006799320 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library)
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Reminiscencias de viajes ‘Reminiscences of travels’ Date 1905-6 Original Language Spanish Description Reminisencias de viajes (‘Reminiscences of travels’) is a travelogue, a comparatively rare genre in Latin America, and Chile in particular, during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Herboso wrote it at his wife’s request as a memento of the couple’s travels between 1886 and 1888. It is mostly made up of anecdotes, commentaries and views on local customs and religious practices, as well as containing historical and architectural notes about the places they visited. Vol. 1, covering France and Italy, appears to have been part of the original idea, while vols 2, 3 and 4, covering Egypt, the Holy Land, and the East, respectively, were the outcome of a later plan. These three volumes form a thematic unit, and it is from them that Herboso’s view of the Islamic world can be constructed.
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Vol. 2 begins with the couple’s arrival in Alexandria on 30 January 1888, and their onward journey to Cairo, the pyramids at Giza, Saqqara and Memphis, the Suez Canal and Port Said. Throughout the volume, Herboso compares the European Christian world, which he sees as modern, beautiful and clean, with the Arab-Muslim world, which is the precise opposite. Three topics are worth noting. First, Herboso expresses a pejorative and disillusioned view of Egypt in general, including both the poor state of its buildings and the people’s habits. Second, he makes a relatively positive assessment of Cairo, which he compares favourably with cities in Europe (second edition, vol. 2, pp. 29-151). It emerges that the values he associates with European culture, such as the cleanliness or beauty of the cities, are what he values in Cairo, while the features he associates with the Arab world impoverish and disfigure it. Third, he examines the mosques of Cairo in detail (vol. 2, pp. 44-55). Vol. 3 focuses on the couple’s stay in the Holy Land. It starts with their arrival in Jaffa on 11 February 1888, and continues with visits to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Bethany, Jericho, the Jordan and the Dead Sea, Samaria and Galilee. Herboso expresses a Christian vision of the history of the places he sees, as though he is on a pilgrimage. He is quite clear in his attitude: ‘The Holy Land should be the unique and privileged place of the Christian faith, and the Muslim world should be banished’ (vol. 3, p. 40). As well as accounts of the geography of places such as Jaffa, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Galilee, Nazareth, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, the volume contains remarks about the rights of Muslims, Christians and Jews to the Holy Places. In Jerusalem, he observes that, even though there is freedom of worship, Christian clergy are the objects of Muslim hatred or indifference (vol. 3, p. 51). By comparison with these three narrative volumes, vol. 4, which appeared after an interval, is more reflective. It starts with the couple’s arrival in Damascus, which for Herboso is the ideal Muslim city (p. 28), though marked by a history of conflict. He explains that it is a place of confrontation between Muslims and Christians because of the way the different faith communities are geographically separated and also because of the Muslim sense of inferiority to the West (pp. 29-30). Herboso argues that this sense of inferiority explains the whole history of Muslim reprisals against Christians and the destruction of Christian property. The last section, on Herboso’s continuing stay in Syria (vol. 4, pp. 66-93), is devoted to a historical and theological study of Islam as a
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confirmation of his negative views. It is divided as follows: a short biography of Muḥammad (pp. 66-8); the main features of Muḥammad’s religious thought, which Herboso summarises as rejection of polytheism and of certain Jewish and Christian beliefs (p. 69); the principles of Islam: belief in God and angels, scriptures, prophets, resurrection and the last judgement. Here he stresses that Islam is derived from Christianity, particularly the account of creation in the Qur’an (p. 70), the importance of angels (p. 72), the mode of revelation of the Qur’an to Muḥammad (pp. 73-5), and the Qur’an as a set of ethics and law (p. 79), in which Herboso particularly criticises the treatment of women in Islam (pp. 82-4). Significance Reminiscencias de viajes vols 2, 3 and 4 were among the most widely distributed works by a Latin American Christian traveller in the East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have the value of containing a firsthand account, without reliance on other travellers’ works or translations. The volumes were reviewed soon after their publication in both Latin America and European newspapers and journals, and were read mainly by Roman Catholic Christians. There is no evidence that they were read by Muslims, or of any rebuttal or refutation of the views contained in them. The importance of Reminiscencias de viajes was identified by Latin American researchers during the second half of the 20th century, when scholars such as Hernán Taboada, Jaime Krejner and Gabriel Cid saw its significance for Latin American Orientalism. Publications F.J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vol. 1 (Paris and Italy), vol. 2 (Egypt), vol. 3 (The Holy Land), vol. 4 (Still in the Orient), Caracas, 1905-6; 006799320 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F.J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vol. 5 (Spain), Santiago de Chile, 1915; 006799320 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F. J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vol. 6 (Excursions through Europe), Santiago de Chile, 1915; 006799320 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) F. J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, vols 1-7, Yokohama, 1915-16 Studies Cid, ‘Miradas ambiguas’ Taboada, ‘Un orientalismo periférico’ Krejner and Wolman-Krejner, Tierra Santa y el Nuevo Mundo
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The following reviews of the first edition are included in the second edition, F. J. Herboso, Reminiscencias de viajes, Yokohama, 1915-16, vol. 1, pp. 5-38 (omitting the original issue and page numbers): J. Holguín, ‘Reminiscences de voyages’, The New York Herald (1905) (pp. 5-7) C. Taveras Navas, ‘Un libro interesante’, El Correo Latino-Americano (1905) (pp. 11-14) E. Rodríguez Mendoza, ‘Reminiscencias de viajes’, El Ferrocarril (1906) (pp. 15-20) L.R.L. Pbo, ‘Bibliografía’, La Revista Católica (1906) (pp. 21-5) R. Henry, ‘Reminiscencias de viajes’, Revue Internationale des Sciences Politiques et Sociales, Arts et Belles-Lettres (1914) (pp. 35-8) Gonzalo Maire
Abbé Ignace Etienne Ignace Etienne Brasil, Ignace Etienne Brazil Date of Birth 25 December 1882 Place of Birth Ottoman Empire Date of Death 15 March 1955 Place of Death Rio de Janeiro
Biography
The life of Abbé Ignace Etienne can only be traced from his published works. Scattered over Brazilian newspapers and some European journals, these publications not only shed light on his private life, but also provide insight into his intellectual reading and his political engagement, which included relations with the Ottoman Empire and issues concerning it. Ignace Etienne was born on 25 December 1882 in an unidentified place in the Ottoman Empire. His name, which is possibly French, also appears as Iknadios Etian and Et. Iknadossian. After being a pupil at the French Saint-Benoît High School in Constantinople, he eventually emigrated to France. There, he became a priest and obtained a degree in pharmacy and a PhD in philosophy. For unknown reasons, he travelled to Brazil sometime in 1907 or 1908. After a short stay in Rio de Janeiro, he was sent to teach in the Episcopal Seminary in Bahia. It was during this period that he wrote La secte musulmane des Malês du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835 (1909). In 1910, back in Rio de Janeiro, he took charge of the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem in Niterói. Under the name of Etienne Ignace Brasil, he was also active at the Instituto Histórico Geográfico Fluminense (Niterói) and contributed to the newspaper O Fluminense. In addition, he was the head of the educational institute Atheneu Fluminense, and taught at the Faculdade de Farmácia e Odontologia do Estado do Rio. In the first decade of the 20th century, having permanently adopted the name Etienne Brasil, he acknowledged his Armenian origins and began signing himself as ‘Dr. Etienne Brasil, the Armenian’. In mid-1915, he qualified as a lawyer. From then onwards, his essays began to take on a political character, addressing the conflicts within the Ottoman Empire during the First World War (1914-18) and in particular the crisis between Turks and Armenians. He left the priesthood in 1918 and married Maria Emilia Gonçalves da Mota. In 1925, he finally obtained the right to become a
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Illustration 18. Etienne Brasil
Brazilian citizen, 13 years after his first application was denied. Etienne Brasil died in Rio de Janeiro on 15 March 1955.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary O Fluminense, Niterói, 1909-39 I.E. Brasil, ‘Naturalização’, Correio da Manhã, Rio de Janeiro, 6 June 1911 I.E. Brasil, ‘Instrução pública. Faculdade de Direito’, Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 4 July 1911 I.E. Brasil, ‘Naturalização’, Correio da Manhã, Rio de Janeiro, 12 May 1912 I.E. Brasil, ‘A guerra no Oriente e o padre Etienne Brasil’, A Rua, Rio de Janeiro, 3 December 1914 Archives Rio de Janeiro, Arquivo Nacional – file number NE 3.925, year 1925, number 24391, not. 713 (Naturalização de Etienne Ignace Brasil ou Etienne Brasil) Secondary H. de Andrade Carvalho Loureiro, ‘Pragmatismo e humanitarismo. A política externa brasileira e a causa Armênia (1912-1922)’, Franca, São Paulo, 2016 (PhD Diss. Universidade Estadual Paulista) P. Leal Mello, ‘Leitura, encantamento e rebelião. O Islã negro no Brasil século XIX’, Niterói, 2009 (PhD Diss. Universidade Federal Fluminense) M. Sochaczweski Goldfeld, ‘O Brasil, o Império Otomano e a Sociedade Internacional. Contrastes e conexões (1850-1919)’, Rio de Janeiro, 2012 (PhD diss. Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, CPDOC) A. Sapsezian, Cristianismo Armênio, São Paulo, 1997 A. Ter Minassian, La République d’Arménie. 1918-1920, Brussels, 1989
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations La secte musulmane des Males du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835 ‘The Brazilian Muslim sect of Malês and their revolt in 1835’ Date 1909 Original Language French and Portuguese Description ‘La secte musulmane’ is an essay in French published in 1909 in Anthropos, a recognised international journal specialising in ethnology and linguistics. It was translated into Portuguese later in the same year, apparently partly by Ignace Etienne himself and partly by an unknown translator with the initials A.S. The original version, which is 18 pages long, is divided into two chapters and six subdivisions, each with a separate title, while the Portuguese translation is divided into two parts entitled ‘A revolta dos Malês (24 para 25 de janeiro de 1835)’ and ‘Os Malês’, the first published in the journal of the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia and the second in the journal of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. Etienne’s sources included the State of Bahia archives and the collections of legal acts that discussed the Malês’ revolt, and he carefully lists all the documents he cites in footnotes. He also gives explanations of Arabic words and words used by Muslims in their religious rituals. These features suggest that Etienne sought to give his essay an academic character. Its central subject is the Muslim presence in Brazil and Muslim involvement in the Malê revolt in Bahia in the 19th century. The first chapter of the French version, which serves as a general introduction, gives explanations that Etienne considers essential for understanding the revolt. These include a definition of ‘Malê’ and an analysis of Muslim religious practice among the slaves. On this last issue, he states in an explanatory note that he is indebted to the religious leader of all Muslims in Brazil and some of his followers for this information (pp. 99-100). Referring to the Malês as ‘musulmis’, Etienne explains that they are a group of Muslim men and women from various African ethnic backgrounds who were enslaved and brought to Brazil. Many of them knew how to read and write Arabic, while those who did not but wished to follow
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Islamic precepts were taught some passages of the Qur’an in Portuguese. Etienne gives a long description of the theology and liturgical rites of the Malês, focusing particularly on explanations about morality and respect for hierarchy. When he refers to the slaves and their religious practices, he frequently uses the words ‘fetishism’ and ‘mysticism’, choosing these because some slaves also practised the rites of the candomblé, a secretive Afro-Brazilian syncretic religious movement. The second chapter focuses on the events of the Malê uprising and is based entirely on reports written by the police and judges who participated in the trials that followed. It follows the actions of the slaves and the police on the night of 24 January and the morning of 25 January, 1835. The revolt occurred because Brazil was in a state of anarchy. Between 1831 and 1837, the political groups in charge of establishing a provisional regency following the abdication of Dom Pedro I, the first Emperor of Brazil, in favour of his son, were not able to come to an agreement. In consequence, the country fragmented into small polities, prompting numerous revolts to break out, including that of the Malês. Etienne describes the uprising hour by hour as though he had personally been present. In order to underscore the reliability of what he writes, he reproduces parts of archive documents, occasionally adding some details of his own. The city is described as ‘littered with bodies’ and ‘covered in blood’ (pp. 412-13), highlighting both the violence of the Muslim slaves against the white Christians and also the idea that this was a holy war. He ends his account by saying that the revolt was contained thanks to denunciations by other slaves and that those involved were severely punished, thus emphasising the role of the public authorities in protecting the white Christians and guaranteeing order. Apparently translated by Etienne himself, the Portuguese text entitled ‘Os Malês’ seems to be a faithful rendition of the French. However, in the preface Etienne makes a somewhat misplaced comparison between the acts of violence that occurred during the Malê revolt and the Armenian massacre of 1895-6, suggesting that violence and misunderstanding were inherent among Muslims. This is directly linked to his personal history: he was of Armenian origin and all his studies took place in Catholic European institutions, a milieu in which anti-Islamic attitudes were widespread. The second part of the Portuguese version, ‘A revolta dos Malês’, includes numerous phrases and expressions that do not appear in the French version, making the translation even more pointedly critical than the original. That said, it is important to note that in both versions Etienne describes the Muslim slaves as ‘full of hatred against whites and
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Christians, of a gross and supine ignorance’ (pp. 99-100). He is clearly biased, suggesting the idea of a Muslim conspiracy in Bahia that aimed to exterminate white Christians. In the Portuguese translation, this notion of the protection of white Christians is reinforced, making clear that Etienne’s research was intended to support the elite in Brazilian society, who followed a white Christian tradition. This support, very common in contemporary documents and political speeches in Brazil, was also used to suppress other slave riots and even separatist agitations that arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and challenged the privileges of the Bahian and Brazilian elite. The revolt in Saint-Domingue, Haiti (1791), in which slaves took power, had made a deep impression on Latin societies. Somehow, the local implications of a new but Muslim Haiti seem to have haunted the 19th century Bahian elite. In the opening decade of the 20th century Brazilians were celebrating almost 20 years of separation between Church and State. Slavery had been abolished in 1888, and the country stood out as an attractive destination for European immigrants. Intellectuals and politicians sought to identify symbols that could represent the new Brazilian nation as modern and republican. Writing about the events and revolts that had taken place in Brazil during the period of the monarchy was one way to contribute to such debates by reinforcing the significance of the new 20th-century order. So it was no coincidence that Etienne’s research appeared on the pages of Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro soon after the French version had been published in Anthropos. Significance Abbé Ignace Etienne’s essay and its translations appeared at a singular moment in the history of the First Brazilian Republic. His French and Portuguese works should be considered as an important interpretation of the Malê Revolt in Bahia, projecting it as a typical example of Muslim violence that endangered Christian communities. Publications Ignace Etienne, ‘La secte musulmane des Malês du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835. Chapitre premier’, Anthropos 4/1 (1909) 99-105; 40442545 (digitised version available through JSTOR) Ignace Etienne, ‘La secte musulmane des Malês du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835. Chapitre second’, Anthropos 4/2 (1909) 405-15; 40442409 (digitised version available through JSTOR)
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Etienne Ignace Brazil, ‘Os Malês’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 72 (1909) 67-126; 107813 (digitised version available through Revista IHGB) I.E. Brasil, ‘A revolta dos Malês (24 para 25 de janeiro de 1835)’, Revista do Instituto Geográfico e Historio da Bahia 14 (1909); repr. in AfroÁsia 10-11 (1970), DOI: 10.9771/aa.v0i10-11.20764 Studies E.M. de Souza Dianna, ‘Salvador em revolta. Lugares olhares para a revolta islâmica na Bahia em 1835’, Revista Trilhas da História 5 (2016) 145-61 Carvalho Loureiro, ‘Pragmatismo e humanitarismo’ L. Meyer Pinto Ribeiro, ‘Negros islâmicos no Brasil escravocrata’, Cadernos CERU 22 (2011) 287-303 Leal Mello, ‘Leitura, encantamento e rebelião’ S.B. Schwartz, ‘Cantos e quilombos numa conspiração de escravos haussas-Bahia, 1814’, in J.J. Reis and F.S. Gomes (eds), Liberdade por um fio. História dos quilombos no Brasil, São Paulo, 1999, 373-406 J.J. Reis, ‘Quilombos e revoltas escravas no Brasil’, Revista Univesidade de São Paulo 28 (1995-96) 14-39 C.M. Azevedo, Onda negra medo branco. O negro no imaginário das elites século XIX, Rio de Janeiro, 1987 J.J. Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil. A história do levante dos Malês 1835, São Paulo, 1986 (20022) G. Le Gentil, ‘Manual bibliográfico de estudos brasileiros’, Bulletin Hispanique 52 (1950) 277-83 R. Ricard, L’Islam noir à Bahia d’après les travaux de l’Ecole ethnologie brésilienne, Paris, 1948 Carina Sartori
Emin Arslan Date of Birth 13 July 1868 Place of Birth Choueifat, Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon Date of Death 9 January 1943 Place of Death Buenos Aires
Biography
Emin Majid Arslan was born into a long-established Druze family with political influence. He studied at St Joseph University, Beirut, then recently founded by Jesuits. He later wrote articles for the popular Arabic periodicals Al-Muqtaṭaf and Lisān al-Ḥāl. In 1892, Arslan was appointed mudīr (‘overseer’) of a district of Mt Lebanon, but in 1893 he was forced to resign and flee the country after being denounced as a revolutionary. He went to Paris, where he joined other political exiles demanding equal rights and freedoms for all nations and individuals in the Ottoman Empire, and calling for the reinstatement of the 1876 Constitution and the reopening of the parliament. In 1894, Arslan co-founded the ‘Turkish-Syrian Committee’ along with two Arabic newspapers, Kashf al-Niqāb (‘Lifting the veil’) and Turkiyā al-Fatāh (‘Young Turkey’). These were soon closed by the French authorities, following pressure from the Ottomans. Arslan also wrote for European outlets, including magazines such as Gil Blas, La Revue Blanche and Le Temps. In 1897, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909) sent an emissary to Paris with a mission to contact the leading opposition exiles and offer some liberalisation measures, such as a general pardon for political prisoners. After key members of the reformist opposition accepted this, Arslan was appointed consul-general of the Ottoman Empire in Brussels. But despite belonging to the Ottoman consular service, he continued to publish articles that criticised aspects of the Ottoman administration. In 1908, shortly after the Young Turks’ revolution, Arslan resigned as consul-general and travelled to Constantinople. The new regime then sent him as consul-general to Paris and, very soon after, to Buenos Aires, where he arrived on 29 October 1910. Aware of negative stereotype of Syrian-Ottoman immigrants, he promptly gained command of Spanish and started writing for the magazine Caras y Caretas, presenting aspects of Islamic and Arab history and culture in a positive light.
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In 1914, Arslan’s opposition to the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War forced him to resign as consul-general to Argentina. The Sublime Porte then entrusted its relations with Argentina to the German consul. However, because of Arslan’s refusal to surrender the consular documentation to the German consul, and his failure to go to Istanbul when summoned by the Ottoman government, he was sentenced to death in absentia. This was the first of a series of incidents that prevented Arslan from returning to his homeland. He never went back. In 1915, Arslan founded his own literary magazine La Nota, to which the main Argentine writers of the time contributed. It was discontinued in 1921. In 1925 he founded another Spanish literary magazine, El Lápiz Azul (‘The blue pencil’), and in 1926 a political magazine in Arabic, Al-Istiqlāl. La Independencia (‘Independence’). Apart from these, he regularly wrote for La Nación and El Mundo dailies, among other newspapers and magazines. Some of his articles dealt with events of historical or social interest, while others addressed the increasing political tensions related to British and French mandates on the Middle East. After showing initial support for the mandates, which were expected to last only a short time until a new local government could be set up, Arslan criticised the actions of the French administration of Syria and Lebanon, which he called an outright colonial regime. Arslan became an Argentine citizen in 1921. In 1926, Arslan published The Syrian revolution against the French mandate to support the armed revolt commanded by the Druze leader Sultan al-Aṭrash, in which members of the Arslan family took part, and in 1934 he wrote and published in Arabic Mudhakkirāt, a short book of memoirs. In 1941, he presided over the Arab Congress in Buenos Aires, a conference of Arab expatriates from North and South America. Its final communique called for the unity of the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and criticised the projected partition of Palestine. Emin Arslan died in his flat in the Palermo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires in 1943.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Emin Arslan, ‘Las relaciones con la Sublime Puerta’, Caras y Caretas 631 (5 November 1910) 80-1 Emin Arslan, ‘Joaquín V. González, íntimo’, Revista Nosotros 46/177 (1924) 201-6, p. 201 Emin Arslan, ‘Oriente contra Occidente’, La Nación, Supplement ‘Letras, Artes’ (23 October 1927) 14-15
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Emin Arslan, Mudhakkirāt, Buenos Aires, 1934 Emin Arslan, Los árabes. Reseña histórica – literaria y leyendas, Buenos Aires, 1941 Emin Arslan, Recuerdos de Oriente (1918), ed. P. Tornielli, Buenos Aires, 2019 Secondary P. Tornielli, ‘Hombre de tres mundos. Para una biografía política e intelectual del emir Emín Arslán’, Dirāsāt Hispānicas. Revista Tunecina de Estudios Hispánicos 2 (2015) 157-81 H. Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918, Berkeley CA, 1997 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in opposition, New York, 1995
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations La verdad sobre el harem ‘The truth about the harem’ Date 1916 Original Language Spanish Description In this book, Arslan’s intention is to counter several of the deepest-rooted Western stereotypes of the day about Islamic societies. Misunderstanding the harem was one of the most persistent. Despite belonging to an influential Druze family, whose religious doctrine did not condone polygamy, and being secular and single, he found himself frequently interrogated about this question. As he records, ‘Since that time when I left my oriental country, the question of harem became a real obsession, sometimes a nightmare. I could not show up socially without being questioned: What about the harem? How many women are you entitled to?’ (Verdad, p. 5). Arslan undertakes a rebuttal of the established set of misperceptions about the Islamic world and particularly Ottoman society. He does not undertake a full rebuttal of orientalism (which had to wait six decades more, until Edward Saïd’s Orientalism). Rather, he rebuffs a series of misconceptions, one by one. The book’s index shows a group of topics mainly related to sex and gender that are still prevalent in Orientalist attitudes: the general situation of women in the East; polygamy; the harem; the veil; castration; marriage; divorce. Other chapters deal with issues related to the Ottoman era: concubines; courtesans; slaves; eunuchs (famous eunuchs, various methods of castration); the last harem (i.e. Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s harem), its organisation and ceremonial dimensions.
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Arslan states that the true problem in Oriental society is the separation between the adult male public space, called the selamlik, and the haremlik or harem, which is segregated and reserved for women, family and minors. His point is that Western preconceptions about Islamic societies – particularly those belonging to the main Islamic state of that time, the Ottoman Empire – were misinformed and wrong, but that the situation of women was nevertheless unacceptable. Arslan cites the grand vizier Fuad Pasha (1814-69) during the Tanzimat era (1839-76): ‘The Turkish Empire will not take a place among the great civilised nations until the wall separating the selamlik from the harem disappears’, and Arslan adds: ‘I share the same opinion’ (Verdad, p. 140). Significance A sign that the importance of La verdad sobre el harem was quickly appreciated is that it was reprinted seven times immediately following its publication. A whole century after the book was published, the topics it deals with have hardly changed. The Ottoman Empire fell, and after a 20-year AngloFrench mandate new nation states were set up in the Middle East, wars and revolutions occurred and intercultural relations have been extensively researched, but the kind of questions Arslan tackled have remained prevalent. The significance of the work is both in illustrating a dimension of Christian-Muslim relations at the time, and in articulating what still remain live issues that continue to affect some perceptions of Muslims. Publications Emin Arslan, La verdad sobre el harem, Buenos Aires, 1916, repr. 1916 (five times), 1917 Studies A. Gasquet, El llamado de oriente. Historia cultural del orientalismo argentino (1900-1950), Buenos Aires, 2016, pp. 14-15 C. Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs. Argentine Orientalism, Arab immigrants, and the writing of identity, Albany NY, 2006, pp. 116-22 Pablo Tornielli
Antonio Letayf Date of Birth 1868 Place of Birth Deir al-Qamar, Lebanon Date of Death 1941 Place of Death México City
Biography
Not much is known about Antonio Letayf’s childhood. He moved to Mexico in 1890, when he was in his early 20s, and settled in Veracruz, where he married Guadalupe Bourge Fuentes Espinosa, the daughter of a wealthy Frenchman, in 1893. This marriage introduced him to aristocratic circles, which enabled him to obtain naturalisation in 1897, along with his two brothers George and Latiyf, and to establish various businesses that quickly succeeded. Almost from his arrival in Mexico, Letayf supported organisations within the Lebanese-Syrian community and, in light of events in the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire, he began to meet with leading members. This led to the creation of the newspaper Al-Jawater in 1909, edited by the journalist José Helú, which favoured change and constitutional reform in the Ottoman Empire, though it supported the existing government in Istanbul. For the celebrations of the centenary of Mexican independence, Letayf established the Ottoman Centennial Committee, which raised funds to build a commemorative clock tower. In 1912, he started the Arab newspaper Al-Etedal, though this lasted only a few months. It had a clear proGerman bent, but, contrary to German wishes and to those of many in the Mexican Syrian-Lebanese community, Letayf insisted that the territories of Syria and Lebanon should not be granted independence from the Ottoman Empire. He was a great defender of the alliance between the Sublime Porte and Germany, and came to know the German defender of Ottoman subjects in Mexico and the German ambassador, Heinrich von Eckardt, who favoured him in various commercial matters and with bank loans. As the risk of world war increased, he advised his compatriots to place themselves under the protection of Germany. During the revolutionary period, Letayf was involved in commerce and the movement of contraband. He found favour under President
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Venustiano Carranza (1916-20), but when Carranza fell Letayf’s businesses suffered great losses, and he was accused of a list of crimes, including espionage, counterfeiting, fraud and arms smuggling. In 1925, President Plutarco Elías Calles signed an order expelling him from the country as a pernicious foreigner, but friends interceded for him. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Letayf’s political activities decreased. He continued to attend meetings of the Syrian-Lebanese community, but no longer appeared as a political leader. For the rest of his life, he helped Syrian and Lebanese immigrants to settle in Mexico, using friends in the administration to obtain visas and naturalisation certificates. He died in México City in 1941.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Archives México City, Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (AHSRE) Archives Bogotá, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN)é Antonio Letayf, Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe, México City, 1918 Pedro Domingo Murillo, Memorias y biografia, México City, 1957 Secondary C. Pastor, The Mexican mahjar. Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate, Austin, 2017, ch. 4 C. Carranza Trinidad, ‘Corrupción y extranjería en el México posrevolucionario. El caso de la Colonia Libanesa (1920-1940)’, México City, 2017 (Licenciado en Historia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) J. Andrade García, ‘La migración árabe y el Otomanismo en México (18741918)’, México City, 2012 (Licenciado en Historia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) C. de María y Campos, ‘The mashreq in Mexico. Patronage, property and class in the postcolonial global’, Los Angeles CA, 2009 (PhD Diss. University of California, Los Angeles) C. de María y Campos, ‘Invisible hand(s). The colonial organization of SyrioLebanese institutions in Mexico’, Palma Journal 11 (2009) 31-72 C. Ruiz Bravo-Villasante, ‘Amin al-Rihani en México. Aravistas y Otomanistas en lucha’, in Universidad de Granada, Departamento de Estudios Semíticos (eds), Homenaje al profesor Darío Cabanelas Rodriguez, O.F.M., con motivo de su LXX aniversario, vol. 1, Granada, 1987, 463-76
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe ‘Unmasked Syrians and Arab culture’ Date 1918 Original Language Spanish Description This book resulted from lectures given by Antonio Letayf in México City, which were published in Al-Jawater newspaper in 1918. At the suggestion of the German ambassador, Heinrich von Eckardt, they were made into a book. As the title shows, this was a fairly controversial publication among the Syrian-Lebanese community in Mexico, as it was written during World War I when the future of the Ottoman Empire was at stake. Letayf’s position was always to defend the empire and to oppose nationalist positions that were beginning to take hold. In the prologue, he explains the reasons for publication, and refers to the difficulties his position had caused him with nationalist groups in Mexico. Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe comprises two parts. In the first, Letayf explains why he thinks some of his Lebanese compatriots in Mexico are wrong in wanting to remove their homeland from Ottoman control and bring it under France and Britain because they believe that, as Christians, the people would be safer under Christian governments. His counter argument is that, although there have been conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Greater Syria under Ottoman rule, these have been political in nature, not religious, and that the intergrity of the Ottoman Empire should be maintained. This is surprising, because at this time religious differences were paramount for Lebanese Syrian nationalists and European powers in their arguments for independence from the Ottoman Empire. In the second part, Letayf gives a succinct history of the rise of Arab civilisation from the origins of Islam onwards, and describes Arab contributions to medicine, astronomy, science and literature. He argues that European advances took place under the influence of Arab science, which reached the rest of the world through al-Andalus. This point was often repeated by Arab intellectuals in Latin America, who praised al-Andalus as the symbol of the enlightenment brought by the Arabs to Europe in order to make known the their great cultural history. For Letayf, this explanation served to break down the stereotype of the Turk as ignorant and
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interested only in commerce, and instead to show the glorious Arab past in which Christians and Muslims both played a part. As a Christian, he shows that he is not antagonistic towards Islam but a strong advocate for unity among all the inhabitants of Greater Syria. Thus, he sees support for the Ottoman Empire as the key to coexistence between all the religions and cultures of the Middle East. In his view, identity is no longer located in religion but in a shared socio-political future. Significance The work exemplifies a two-fold dynamic of Christian-Muslim interaction, on the one hand that of a Lebanese Christian supporting the Muslim Ottoman Empire as the appropriate context for social harmony and unity within the Middle East and, on the other, the impact of that support within a predominantly Christian country such as Mexico. While it does not directly address relations between Christians and Muslims, it nonetheless provides insight into the complexities of Christian-Muslim interaction in the Ottoman Empire and their repercussions as far away as Mexico in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Publications Antonio Letayf, Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe, México City, 1918 Studies H.G.H. Taboada, ‘Aliados y enemigos en América Latina. Otomanistas, arabistas y francófilos’, in J.F. Navarro (ed.), 1915. El año más largo del Imperio Otomano, Bogotá, 2015, 403-17 Andrade García, ‘La migración árabe’ de María y Campos, ‘Invisible hand(s)’ Yolotl Valadez Betancourt
Habib Estefano Date of Birth 9 March 1888 Place of Birth Btater, Lebanon Date of Death 3 April 1946 Place of Death Petropolis, Brazil
Biography
Habib Estefano grew up in a humble family in Btater, a mountain town in Lebanon. At the age of 14, he moved to Beirut to study at the Sagesse school and, a few years later, with the support of a Maronite archbishop, he was sent to Rome to study philosophy and theology at the Pontifical University Propaganda Fidei. In 1913, now ordained a priest, he returned to Lebanon and devoted himself to teaching at the Sagesse school. With the outbreak of the First World War, and with feverish political upheaval at home, the young cleric began to sympathise with people in the Arab villages seeking independence from Ottoman rule. His skills in oratory led to his transfer to the cathedral in Beirut, but his political concerns generated problems with the ecclesiastical authorities and resulted in Estefano separating from the church. According to Habib Estefano’s wife, the poet Mary Morandeyra, whom he married in 1941, King Faisal during his brief reign in Syria in 1920 summoned him to head the Arab Academy in Damascus. His educational work also included a professorship in rhetoric at the Faculty of Law and History of Civilisation at the Military School. In 1920, he moved to Egypt and later travelled through Italy and Spain, the latter leading to a connection with the New World. Throughout the 1920s, Estefano travelled between the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, articulating his growing ideas of Hispanicism and Arabism. He was active in promoting these principles during his trips to Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua. In 1925, he gave numerous speeches in Spain, including at conferences at the Ibero-American Union in Madrid, Seville and Granada. In 1929, at the Hispano-American Exhibition in Seville, he was also named honorary representative by the dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera. During the 1930s and 1940s, Estefano alternated between Cuba, Mexico and Argentina. He continued his lectures and cultural activities aimed at both the Arab emigre communities and political, diplomatic and
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academic circles, not only in Hispanic America, but also in Haiti, Brazil, Curaçao and Jamaica. In this context, in 1931 he published his book Los pueblos hispano-americanos. Su presente y su porvenir, a text that esteems the resources, ideals and future of this region, while examining the situation of Arab immigrants, whose wishes and ambitions he promoted as they built their own identity on a new stage. The recognition and identification he received from his peers made him a prominent and popular character. Estafano died on 3 April 1946 in Petrópolis, Brazil. After his death, schools, libraries and cultural centres were named in his honour, with medals and commemorative busts created throughout the Americas.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary H. Estéfano, Los pueblos hispanoamericanos. Su presente y su porvenir, México, 1931 M. Morandeyra, Habib Estéfano en mi vida. Ante la conciencia de las colectividades de habla árabe en América, Buenos Aires, 1946 Comisión Americana de Homenajes al Dr. Habib Estéfano, Boletín Informativo, no. 2, junio, Futuro órgano del Ateneo Filosófico Dr. Habib Estéfano, Buenos Aires, Círculo Militar, 1951 Secondary J.J. Vagni, ‘En el espejo de Oriente. América Latina y la visión en “contrapunto” de Habib Estéfano en las primeras décadas del siglo XX’, Revista de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos 19 (2015) 147-58 C. Pastor de María y Campos, ‘La creación de un ámbito público transnacional (segunda parte)’, Estudios de Asia y África 48 (2013) 99-134, pp. 100-1 GBS [G.B. Sánchez], art. ‘Habib Estéfano’, Filosofía en Español, 2010; http://www. filosofia.org/ave/001/a347.htm C. Pacha, ‘Los pensadores árabes en la diáspora’ (conferencia), Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Islámico Custodio de las Dos Sagradas Mezquitas Rey Fahd en Argentina, 2009 C. Civantos, Between Argentines and Arabs. Argentine Orientalism, Arab immigrants, and the writing of identity, Albany NY, 2006, pp. 232-3 E. Azize, ‘La recuperación de la tradición literaria árabe. José Guraieb, Habib Estéfano y Ahmed Abboud’, in H. Noufouri (ed.), Sirios, libaneses y argentinos. Fragmentos de una historia de la diversidad cultural argentina, Buenos Aires, 2004, 493-500 R. Gil Benumeya, Hispanidad y arabidad, Madrid, 1952, pp. 10-11 R. Gil Benumeya (Benomar), ‘Temas islámicos. América árabe’, Revista de Tropas Coloniales 27 (1927) 62-3
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Los pueblos hispano-americanos. Su presente y su porvenir ‘The Hispanic-American peoples. Their present and future’ Date 1931 Original Language Spanish Description This book is a conceptual journey that aims to link Arabism and Hispanidad through the celebration of their common past in al-Andalus. Other authors in various parts of Latin America were pursuing similar initiatives, though here the main purpose is to interpret the current situation in America. It is 295 pages long, consisting of three parts divided into 27 chapters. First, Estefano declares that Spanish identity is more Asian and African than European, and that the eight centuries of struggle against Arab rulers formed a particular psychology. As he sees it, the history of interaction between Spaniards and Arabs and Christians and Muslims, to which Moors, Mozarabs and Mudejars all contributed, remains to be written. Just as in Spain, in Hispanic America numerous elements of the SpanishCreole tradition are derived from al-Andalus, from architectural styles to linguistic and gastronomic elements (p. 290). Estefano regards the conquest and colonisation of America, together with the glories of imperial Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the continuity of the epic spirit inherited from the Arabs, and he sees Spanish imperial expansion as equal to Arab and Islamic expansion in the 7th century. Both were made possible by the force of religion and a strong culture that continues to exert its influence. In contrast, when he assesses the contemporary performance of Spain and its ambitions in the Arab-Islamic world, he questions its colonial role in the north of Africa. To him, the Protectorate in Morocco is a sad imitation of the conquests of the past (p. 174). On the other hand, Estefano backs away from exaggerated nationalism and the differences that arise from race, blood or geographical origin. In this sense and against the dominant powers of northern countries on the international scene, he insists on highlighting the cultural contributions
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and civil developments that emerged in such places as South America, the Middle East, ancient Egypt, Phoenician trading settlements, the ʿAbbasid dynasty of Baghdad and the Mayans of Yucatan (p. 202). Finally, Estefano devotes one last chapter (ch. 27, ‘Palabras de justicia y amor’) to the Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians who had settled in Hispanic-American countries. He argues that little is known about them or their history. He seeks to combat the prejudices and accusations that confront them and presents them as organised and hardworking people who deserve to be treated like ‘brothers of race and life partners’ (p. 290). Given that most of the Arab immigrants were Christians of various denominations, along with a proportion of Muslims and Jews, it is noteworthy that Estefano does not explore their religious affiliations. Estefano seeks to promote the integration of his fellow Arabs into Latin American society, and the recognition of the part they have played in it. He suggests that the affirmation of their identity and the full development of the Arab personality in the public life of the countries of the region would help to counteract the prejudice and ignorance that affects them. Pointing out the confluence between the two cultural traditions of Arabism and Hispanidad would bring out a sense of identity and empathy and, at the same time, give Arab culture a stronger presence in American intellectual and political circles. Significance At a moment in history when scientific and political currents were consolidated around racial homogeneity, Estefano was determined to highlight the value of interaction between races and the multiplicity of cultural contributions in Latin America. Los pueblos hispano-americanos reveals the incipient circulation and dissemination of ideas in a variety of geographical spaces. Estefano’s proposals had a particular impact on the developing identity of Arabs in America for decades, establishing a kind of ‘myth of origin’ that was enriched by new elaborations. This is particularly evident in the works of Rodolfo Gil Benumeya, especially his Hispanidad y Arabidad (1952). Publications H. Estéfano, Los pueblos hispano-americanos. Su presente y su porvenir, México City, 1931; 006687409 (digitised version available through Hathi Trust Digital Library) Juan José Vagni
Vicente Álamos Igualt Date of Birth 1908 Place of Birth Viña del Mar, Chile Date of Death Unknown; mid-20th century Place of Death Unknown
Biography
Vicente Álamos Igualt’s father was a mining entrepreneur and a member of the Chilean elite. His family were prominent art collectors and built a palace in the centre of Santiago, which still exists as a cultural centre to this day. They were an old land-owning family and had owned large tracts of land between Chile and Argentina since the colonial era. In the 20th century, their land was expropriated by the Argentine State, though in Chile they remained an upper-class family for much of the 20th century until their lineage eventually died out. Vincente devoted himself to studying genealogy, and published a book about his family lineage, although this had no major impact on the Chilean cultural landscape. Apart this book, Vincente accomplished nothing of note. The family palace was abandoned in the 1940s and eventually restored and repurposed in the 1980s. As a member of the Santiago elite, he subscribed to the principle of nationalism that flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century. His and others’ reflections on the Chilean people and its ethnically mixed nature gave rise to a racial and cultural awakening that flooded the country with new ideas about these issues.
MAIN SOURCES OF INFORMATION Primary Vicente Álamos Igualt, Linaje de los Álamos y sus alianzas en Chile, Santiago, 1979 Secondary V. Maino, Trashumancia en el Valle del Choapa, Santiago, 2015 M. Ureta Álamos, ‘La familia álamos y el origen del pueblo de barreal, en San Juan, Argentina’, Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía Santiago de Chile (2015) 67-96
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Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Memorias de un viaje por Oriente y Occidente ‘Memoir of a journey through the East and the West’ Date 1938 Original Language Spanish Description This is an account of Vicente Álamos’s travels, detailing his impressions of the places he encountered in the various countries he visited. It consists of 396 pages in which he narrates his travels and reflects on the cultures he witnesses. It was written in Spanish, intended for a Chilean readership. The 1930s were a particularly difficult time for Chile, thanks to the worldwide recession and the country’s own political instability. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a stage of Álamos’s journey. Ch. 5 includes the Balkans and the Near East and covers his travels through Turkey. Ch. 6 is on the Holy Land, and ch. 7 on Egypt and Somalia. From there, he leaves for India. The book’s final chapter (22) recounts his journey through Scandinavia. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 contain descriptions and reflections on Islam and Muslims. It is important to note that, as a member of the Chilean elite, Vicente Álamos had a predilection for Christianity, albeit a secular and liberal one. His impressions are not theological but rather cultural: for example, he refers to the alleged dirtiness of the Muslim people. Significance Memorias de un viaje never enjoyed a wide circulation, nor did it make an impact on Chile’s national culture. However, it was unique in being the only relevant travel memoir published in Chile at that time. Knowledge of Islam and Muslims was very limited in Chile’s conservative culture and little was known about non-Christian religions. The few Muslims living in the country practised their religion in private. Therefore, although the direct impact of Memorias was limited, it and works like it were important in introducing the first snippets of knowledge about Islam to Chile. Publications Vicente Álamos, Memorias de un viaje por Oriente y Occidente, Santiago, 1938
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Vicente Álamos Igualt
Studies N. Ben Ayad (ed.), La tradición orientalista en América Latina, Viña del Mar, 2015 M. Bergel, El Oriente desplazado los intelectuales y los orígenes del tercermundismo en la Argentina, Buenos Aires, 2015 B. Subercaseux, Historia de las ideas y de la cultura en Chile, vol. 2, Santiago, 2011 Pablo Álvarez Cabello
Contributors Contributor Habeeb Akande R. Kirtie Algoe
Pablo Álvarez Cabello Jorge Armando Andrade García Andrew E. Barnes
Leland C. Barrows
Avishai Ben-Dror
Affiliation Independent Researcher Researcher, Institute for Graduate Studies and Research, Anton de Kom University of Suriname, Paramaribo, Suriname Lecturer, Escuela de Historia, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile Master’s student, Colegio de México, México City Professor of History, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ, USA Professor of History, School of Humanities, Education, and Social Science, Voorhees College, Denmark SC, USA Researcher, Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies, The Open University of Israel, Israel
Entries José Maria Rufino Christian-Muslim Relations in the Caribbean 1600-1900
Vicente Cuesta; Vicente Álamos Igualt ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī Karl Kumm
Frédéric-Jean Carrère and Eloi-Paul Holle; Louis Faidherbe
Arthur Rimbaud
582
Contributors
Contributor Jaco Beyers
Affiliation Associate Professor, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Pretoria, South Africa
John Chesworth
Researcher, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, UK
Felipe Amalio Cobos Graduate Program Alfaro in History, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City José Eduardo Cornelio
Ebrahim Damtew Alyou
Entries Introduction: ChristianMuslim relations in 19th century sub-Saharan Africa; Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam; George Champion; European travellers to Ethiopia in the 19th century; Robert Percival The CMS in East Africa; Godfrey Dale; European travellers to Ethiopia in the 19th century; Ludwig Krapf; W.E. Taylor; Universities’ Mission to Central Africa; The White Fathers Leonardo Márquez Araujo; The ‘Islamic Orient’ in Latin American reading and writing culture. Mexico, Central America and Cuba (1808-1914); Luis Malanco Vargas Juan Bustamante
Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Ursinus College, Collegeville PA, USA Researcher, Shaykh Ali Gondar; Department of Shaykh Hussein Jibril History and Heritage Management, University of Gondar, Ethiopia
Contributors Contributor Affiliation Alison Research Fellow, Fitchett-Climenhaga Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia Mauro Forno Professor, Department of Historical Studies, University of Turin, Italy Martha T. Frederiks Professor of the Study of World Christianity, Vice-Dean Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Musa Ahmadu Barnabas Gaiya
Solomon Gebreyes Beyene
Professor of Church History, Department of Religion and Philosophy, University of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria Research Fellow, Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany
583 Entries Samuel Crowther
Lorenzo Antonio Massaia Charles August Blackburn; David Boilat; Henry Brunton; CMS policy regarding Islam and Muslims in Africa; European travellers to Central-West Africa in the 19th century; Travellers to Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries; The Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in the 19th century, the Gambia; The White Fathers Walter Miller
Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse
584 Contributor Klaus Hock
Valerie J. Hoffman
Georgina Jardim
Paul Kollman
Michelle Liebst
Klas Lundström
Gonzalo Maire
Contributors Affiliation Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Rostock, Germany Professor Emerita, Department of Religion, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign IL, USA Research Associate, Department of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, University of Gloucestershire, UK Associate Professor, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame IN, USA Postdoctoral Research Fellow, History Department, University College London, UK Högskolelektor i historisk-praktisk teologi, docent i missionsvetenskap, Johannelund School of Theology, Uppsala, Sweden Professor and Postdoctoral researcher, Liberal Arts Faculty, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
Entries Nigerian Muslim responses to the British colonisation of Northern Nigeria ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī l-Mundhirī
David Livingstone
The Holy Ghost Fathers
Universities’ Mission to Central Africa Karl Winqvist
Francisco J. Herboso España
Contributors Contributor Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner
Carlos Martínez Assad
Johnson A. Mbillah
Alexander Meckelburg Arely Medina
Diego Melo Carrasco
Affiliation Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio (Incipit), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid, Spain Investigador emérito, Seminario Universitario de Culturas del Medio Oriente, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Research Fellow, Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, Akropong-Akwapem, Ghana Research Fellow, History Department, University College London, UK Professor, Centro Universitario de Ciencias Económico y Administrativas, University of Guadalajara, Mexico Director of Research, Department of History and Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile
585 Entries William Cornwallis Harris; Nathaniel Pearce
José Lopez Portillo y Rojas
Lord Lugard
Juan Maria Schuver
Islamophobia in Latin America in the 19th century
Islamophobia in Latin America in the 19th century
586 Contributor Ibrahim Mouiche
Contributors
Affiliation Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Yaounde II, Yaounde, Cameroon David Owusu-Ansah Professor, Department of History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg VA, USA Michael Pesek Research Associate, IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Lorenza Petit Postdoctoral researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico Verónica Ramírez Assistant Professor, Errázuriz Faculty of Liberal Arts, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile Sandra Rojo Flores Researcher, Department of Social Anthrology, University of Granada, Spain Bernard Salvaing Professor, Centre de Recherches en Histoire Internationale et Atlantique (CRHIA), University of Nantes, France
Entries Ibrahim Njoya
Joseph Dupuis
German Protestant Mission in East Africa
José María Guzmán
Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux Ignacio Martínez Elizondo French colonial policy on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914
Contributors Contributor Carina Sartori Shobana Shankar
Abdul Kabir Hussain Solihu
Makafui Tayviah
Carlos Enrique Torres Monroy Pablo Tornielli
Juan José Vagni
Affiliation Department of History, University of Nantes, France Associate Professor, Department of History, Stony Brook, State University of New York, USA Professor, Department of Religions, History and Heritage Studies, Kwara State University, Malete, Nigeria Lecturer, Department of Religious Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana Doctoral candidate, Ibero-American University, Mexico Doctoral candidate, Cultural Diversity Department, Tres de Febrero National University, Buenos Aires, Brazil Professor, Advanced Studies Centre, National University of Córdoba, Argentina
587 Entries Abbé Ignace Etienne British colonial policy towards Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, 1800-1914 M.S. Cole
Thomas Bowdich; Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi
Rafael Sabás Camacho y García Emin Arslan
Habib Estefano
588 Contributor Yolotl Valadez Betancourt
Philip Zachernuk
Contributors Affiliation Profesora, Facultad de Estudios Superiores Acatlán, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico Associate Professor, Department of History, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Entries Antonio Letayf
Edward Blyden
Index of Names Numbers in italics indicate a main entry. d’Abbadie, Antoine Thomson 9, 117, 167, 169 ʿAbbasid dynasty 183, 257, 577 Abbé Ignace Etienne 560-5 ʿAbd Allāh ibn Aḥmad ibn Abī Bakr 426-7 ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī 256-63, 445 ʿAbd al-Qādir, see also Abdelkader 139, 229, 501, 532 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Baghdādī 525-9 Abd el-Kerim, see Heinrich Barth 179, 180, 182-5, 187-9, 426 ʿAbdallāh ibn Muḥammad Fūdī/Fodiye, see also Usman dan Fodio 425 Abdelkader, Abdel Kader, see also ʿAbd al-Qādir 139, 229, 501, 532 Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman sultan 7, 475, 566, 568 Abdul Majid Tafida, Nigerian boy 462, 463, 468, 470 Abdulaziz, Ottoman sultan 530, 532 Abdelgader, Nigerian Muslim 186 Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam 11, 51-4 Abdullah Susi 146, 149 Abeokuta, in Nigeria 220, 302, 325-6, 349 abolition of slavery and abolitionists 12, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 32, 39, 100, 107, 144, 146, 153, 154, 162, 163, 182, 188, 189, 216, 219, 340, 345, 349, 395, 487, 491, 498 Abraham, OT figure 259-61, 543 Abū Bakr ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿd ibn Muḥammad al-Amīn 429 Abyssinia and Abyssinians 87, 115, 116, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 207, 270, 273 Adam, first human 57, 170, 260, 263, 282 Addis Ababa 457-8, 459 Aden 112, 114, 196, 250, 251, 265, 359 African Committee 73, 77 African Company of Merchants 71, 73, 77, 80 African traditional religion(s) 24, 121, 122, 216, 221, 223, 305-6, 307, 308, 313, 314, 329, 330, 332, 334, 335, 337-9, 350, 352, 379, 396, 399, 400, 421, 422-3, 424, 514, 527
Afrique équatoriale française (AEF), French Equatorial Africa 34, 35, 38 Afrique occidentale française (AOF), French West Africa 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 142, 247 Ahab, OT figure 152, 261 ahl al-kitāb, see also People of the Book 282, 429 ajami texts 124, 311, 312, 344, 427 Akale Wold 294, 295 Akan tribe 74, 487 Alazar Hemmed, convert 275 Alexander Mackay 20, 167, 362, 395, 397, 410 Alexandria 88, 250, 265, 497, 512, 521, 522, 525, 530, 533, 539, 557 Algeria and Algerians 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 69, 134, 139, 229-31, 234-5, 237-8, 241-6, 381, 395, 496, 501, 525, 532 ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mūsā, known as Aliyu dan Sidi 429-30 ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī l-Mundhirī 256-64 Ali Mazrui, see also Shaykh al-Amin ibn Ali Mazrui 283-4, 391, 454-5 Alkoran, see also Qur’an 282 Allen, May 387 Almazán, José Pascual 501 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel 507, 544 ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Bello, Sultan of Sokoto 182, 186, 426, 431 Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux 550-4 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) 19, 20, 94 Amiens, Treaty of 11, 56 Al-Amin bin Aly (al-Mazruʿi), see also al-Amin ibn Ali Mazrui 283-4, 391, 454-5 al-Andalus 183, 496, 501, 572, 576 Anglican Church, see also Church of England 16, 19, 23, 24, 219, 220, 223, 290, 326, 340, 344, 362, 398, 483, 489 Annesley, George, see also Viscount Valentia 8-9, 86-7, 91-2, 167-8 Antonio Letayf 570-3 Araujo, Leonardo Márquez 530-4
590
Index of names
Arragon, Stanislas 376-7 Arslan, Emin Majid 566-9 Arthur Rimbaud 250-5 Asante, Ashantee 71, 73-5, 78, 80, 82-4 Asantehene, ruler of the Asante 73, 84 Axenfeld, Karl 408, 410, 411, 412 Azikiwe, Nnamdi 215 Bahia 483, 515, 516, 518, 526, 527, 560, 562, 564 de Balzac, Honoré 499 Bamum people and ‘Bamum Islam’ 418, 419, 421-3 Bantu-Swahili version of the Bible 414 Bargery, George Percy 463-4 Baring, Evelyn, Lord Cromer 29 Barth, Heinrich 179, 180, 182-5, 187-9, 426 Basel Mission 74, 195, 196, 355, 356, 418 Bathurst 71, 301, 304, 307 Bauchi 184, 185, 466 Bavarian Lutheran mission 202 Bazett, Sibella 358-9 Becker, Carl 411 Bedouins 275, 495, 512, 536 Belgium and Belgians 6, 523 Bell, John 9, 167, 169 Benedictine Order 551, 552 Bennett, James G. 161 Berlin I, see also Berlin Mission 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 412 Berlin III, see also Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für DeutschOstafrika (EMS); Protestant Mission for East Africa 405-6, 407-9 Berlin Conference 6, 28, 345, 355 Berlin Mission, Berlin I 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 412 Bernatz, Johann Martin 113, 115 Bethel Mission 407, 408 Bethlehem 521-3, 533, 543, 552, 557 Bin Juma, Suleiman 153-4, 157 Blackburn, Charles August 290-3 Blyden, Edward 12, 210-18, 314, 344 Boilat, David 119-26, 142, 143 Bolivia 513, 574 Bombay 26, 112, 113, 115, 154, 356, 357 le Bon, Gustave 495 Bône 231, 245 Bordeaux 33, 127, 141, 230, 239 Bornu Empire 28-9, 180-5, 187-8 Bou el Mogdad 37, 240 Bouët-Willaumez, Louis Édouard, Governor of Senegal 35, 119, 128, 230 Bouniol, Joseph 399, 400
Bourdon-Gramont, Ernest, Governor of Senegal 135 Bowdich, Thomas 71-6, 80, 82 Brakna Emirate 36, 230 Brazil and Brazilians 476, 483, 487, 488, 514-15, 516, 517-18, 525, 526-8, 555, 560-1, 562-4, 575 Brazil, Ignace Etienne, Abbé 560-5 Breklum or Breklumer Mission 406, 407 Brian O’Beirne 101, 104-8 Bridgart, John 306-7 Briggs, John 367-9 Bright, Richard 102, 104-8 British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) 88, 312, 329, 369, 462, 465, 471 British Committee on the East African Slave Trade 26 Brooke, Wilmot 350 Broomfield, Gerald 389 Bruce, James 74, 90, 92, 170, 195 Brunton, Henry 59-66, 348 Buenos Aires 566-7 Buganda 16, 355, 361-3, 364-5, 370, 395-8 Buléon, Joachim-Pierre 378 Bundu 124, 128, 230 Burgin, Richard 462-3 Burt, Frederick 360 Burton, Sir Richard 164, 167, 200, 344, 494, 499 Bushiri bin Salim al-Hatthy 365, 367 Bustamante, Juan 509-13 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 495, 498, 544 Caillié, René 179-80, 185, 187-9 Cain, OT figure 170 Cairo 7, 20, 88, 196, 200, 205, 265, 266, 279, 328, 345, 408, 496, 512, 522, 523, 525, 533, 539, 542, 543, 557 Camacho y García, Rafael Sabás 520-4 Camacho, Sebastián 496 Cameron, Captain Charles 8, 167, 171-2 Cameroon 13, 381, 418, 424 Cape Coast Castle 73, 78, 80 Cape Colony 10, 11, 51, 55, 98 Cape Dutch Reformed Church Mission to Nyasaland 18-19 Cape Town 11, 22, 51-2, 55, 94-5, 96-7 Caribbean 210, 213, 481-91 Caribbean traditional religion 482, 486 Carlyle, Thomas 444 Carrère, Frédéric-Jean 127-43, 239 Casely-Hayford, Joseph 215
Index of names
Cayor 44, 124, 133, 136, 236, 240-1 Central Africa 19, 25, 26, 144, 145, 162, 180, 182-3, 188, 366, 385 Central African Republic 34, 336, 381 Central America 492, 498, 500, 555 Central West Africa 179-94 Cerno Amadou Mukhtar Sakho 45 Chad 8, 34, 38, 183, 336, 424 Champion, George 20, 94-9 Charles August Blackburn 290-3 Charles D. Cameron 8, 167, 171-2 Chateaubriand, François-René 544, 594 le Châtelier, Alfred 39 Chile and Chileans 476-9, 550-1, 552-3, 555, 556, 574, 578, 579 China and Chinese 86, 290, 302, 340, 476, 509, 512 Christ, see also Jesus 62, 155, 162, 199, 201, 258, 259, 262, 285, 288, 291, 302, 305, 306, 313, 314, 342, 358, 360, 369, 370, 441, 444, 448, 449, 452, 496, 539, 543 Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar 385, 442 Christian Ethiopia 86-7, 90-1, 92, 117, 209 Chuma, James 146, 149 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 15-16, 18-20, 23, 24, 26, 61, 167, 179, 184, 196, 198, 219, 221, 223, 227-9, 278, 280-1, 283, 285-6, 288-92, 325, 327, 329-30, 340-73, 391, 395-7, 405-6, 426, 462-3, 465, 466-7, 469, 470 Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East 59, 61-3 Church of England East Indian Mission 490 Church of Scotland Mission 18 Church of the Holy Sepulchre 512, 539 Churchill, Winston 28 Clapperton, Hugh 179-94, 426, 431 Clement, York 308 Code de l’indigénat 33 Coffin, William 89-91 Coke, Thomas 300 Cole, Alfred 97-8 Cole, Michael Samuel 227, 325-31, 351-2 Colombia 535, 555 colonisation 5-6, 10, 35, 36, 42, 46, 59, 108, 114, 125, 168, 172, 337-8, 350, 355, 425, 430, 431, 576 Combes, Edmund 9, 167-8 Comboni Fathers 18, 380 Conde, José Antonio 494 Congo Treaty 410
591
Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary 374 Constantinople, see also Istanbul 170, 171, 205, 213, 496, 511, 525-6, 530, 532-3, 560, 566, 567, 570 Conversion to Christianity 16-18, 20, 23, 32, 65, 92, 95, 123, 124, 162, 171, 173, 174, 189, 196, 199, 224, 225, 268, 295-6, 300, 305-8, 311, 314-15, 332, 334, 335, 338-9, 341-2, 343, 345, 351, 353, 356, 361, 366, 370, 374, 377-80, 387, 389-90, 396, 400, 405, 408, 410, 414-15, 421, 431, 447, 451, 462, 464, 466-8, 479, 485-6, 489-90, 523 Conversion to Islam 11-12, 82, 87, 92, 97, 105, 149, 168, 173, 180, 188, 236, 282, 291, 311, 314, 332, 337, 342, 363, 366, 370, 389, 399, 400, 413, 418, 421, 469, 470, 522 Cook, Albert 364 Coppolani, Xavier 39, 41-2 Córdoba 525, 527, 548 de Courmont, Raoul 379 Crawford, Alice 361 Crawford, Edmund 360-1 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi 15, 19, 24-5, 219-28, 326, 329-30, 348-52, 425-6 crucifixion of Jesus Christ 62, 310, 441, 444, 452, 543 Crusades 499, 511 Cuba and Cubans 478, 483, 493, 498, 500-1, 531, 574 Cuesta, Vicente 535-7 Cuffy (Kofi), protest leader 487 Culverwell, Minnie Isabella 359-60 Cupidon, John 308 Dakar 33, 34, 41, 133, 138, 236, 241, 377 Dale, Godfrey 20, 283, 284, 330, 352, 388-91, 440-56 Damascus 158-9, 213, 511, 525-6, 533, 557, 574 Daniel, OT figure 261 Dar es Salaam 283, 367, 406, 408, 412-13, 446, 453 David, OT figure 106, 445 David Boilat 119-26, 142, 143 David Livingstone 7, 9, 19, 25-6, 144-66, 172, 197, 335, 361, 384, 410, 494 Dawit Amanuel, convert 275 Denham, Dixon 179, 182-5, 187, 431 Depont, Octave 39 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 488 Deutsch-Ostafrika, see also German East Africa 355, 406, 408-9, 411-13
592
Index of names
Diagne, Blaise 33 Diaz, Porfirio 478, 538, 546 Digo, see also Wanyika 199, 361 Dihigo, Juan Miguel 493 Diouka Samballa 141 Dixon Denham 179, 182-5, 187, 431 Dome of the Rock 497, 542, 543 Dominican Order 10, 18 Dréano, Hillaire 378 ‘drinking the Qur’an’ 185 Druze 566-7, 568 Dudu Seck 37 Dufton, Henry 9, 167, 172-4 Dumerque, William 344-5 Dupuis, Joseph 75, 77-85 Dutch Reformed Church 482-3 Dye, William McEntyre 9, 167, 174 Dyula people 36, 46 East India Company 86-8, 112, 340 Ecuador and Ecuadorians 535-6, 555, 574 Edinburgh Missionary Society (EMS) 59, 62, 65, 102, 348 Edinburgh World Mission Conference 20, 448 Edmund Combes 9, 167-8 Edmund Dene Morel 428-9 Edward Blyden 12, 210-18, 314, 344 Edward Stanley 102, 104, 106 Egypt and Egyptians 7-8, 27, 29, 35, 67, 69, 88, 90, 92, 124, 168, 170-1, 205-6, 207, 251-4, 265, 267, 279, 301-2, 309, 332, 336, 341, 362, 364, 370, 462-3, 492, 497, 501, 502, 522, 533, 541, 542-4, 552, 556-7, 574, 577, 579 El Salvador 492 El-Hadj Malik Sy 44 Elijah, OT figure 261 Eloi-Paul Holle 127-43, 239 Emin Majid Arslan 566-9 Émin-Bey, faithful Muslim 169 Enlightenment 21, 129, 144, 145, 345, 542, 572 Erhardt, John 356 Eritrea and Eritreans 90, 92, 273-4 Errázuriz de Subercaseaux, Amalia 550-4 Estefano, Habib 574-80 Ethiopia 8, 9, 12, 16, 19, 67, 68-70, 86-8, 90-1, 92, 93, 112-13, 115-16, 117, 167-78, 195-6, 200, 206, 207-9, 250, 254, 265, 267, 269, 273, 294, 296, 298, 340, 355, 356, 405, 457, 459, 460 Ethiopian Orthodox Church 92, 173 Euler-Ajayi, M.T. 325, 351
Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für Deutsch-Ostafrika (EMS), see also Protestant mission for East Africa (Berlin III) 405-6, 407-9 Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS), see also Swedish Evangelical Mission (SEM) 273, 275, 457 Eve, first woman 149, 170 Faidherbe, Louis Léon César 36-7, 41, 127-8, 130, 133-42, 229-49 false prophet, Muḥammad as a 19, 97, 155, 301, 306, 314, 361, 365, 367 Farler, J.P. 390 Fez 180, 496 Fieldhouse, James 305 final judgement, see also Judgement Day 225, 282, 422, 558 Findlay, George 301-2 Findlay, Mary 302 First Brazilian Republic 564 First Vatican Council 18 First World War, see also World War I 10, 30, 35, 46, 48, 319, 333, 334, 355, 370, 384, 389, 390, 412, 413, 415, 419, 420, 457, 551, 560, 567, 572, 574 Fitzgerald, Edward 495 Fjellstedt, Peter 195 Flaubert, Gustave 499 Flügel, Gustav 327-8 Fodiawa treatises 425 forced conversion to Christianity 92, 295, 486, 488 forced conversion to Islam 188, 470 Forster, George 10 Forsyth, Elizabeth 367-8, 370 de Foucauld, Charles 125, 400 Fourah Bay College 219, 325, 342-3, 351-2 Fouta Toro 230, 240 Fox, William 301-2 Francis of Assisi 124 Franciscans 124-5, 505, 522-3 Francisco J. Herboso España 555-9 Frédéric-Jean Carrère 127-43, 239 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, First Baron Lugard 15, 29, 351, 397, 425-6, 436-9, 463 freed slaves 19, 22-3, 26-7, 31-2, 197, 344, 352, 356-7, 384, 447 Freeman, Thomas B. 73-4 Freemasonry 492 Freetown, Sierra Leone 15, 22-4, 59, 100-2, 104-5, 211, 238, 302, 314, 325, 340, 348
Index of names
French Civil Code 243, 245 French Equatorial Africa, see also Afrique équatoriale française (AEF) 34, 35, 38 French Guinea (later GuineaConakry) 231, 380 French Somaliland (later Djibouti) 34 French West Africa, see also Afrique occidentale française (AOF) 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 142, 247 Frendenburgh, Joseph 180 Frere Town (Freretown) 278, 357, 361, 366 Frere, Sir Henry Bartle Edwards 26, 356 Friedrich Hornemann 179-80, 183, 185, 187-9 Fula or Fulani people, language and state 13, 74, 100, 101, 105, 107, 108, 121, 162, 180, 181, 183-4, 187, 219, 309, 310-11, 343, 344, 345, 348, 349, 352, 418, 424-5, 466, 469, 470-1, 484, 514 Futa Jallon 43, 100, 104, 105, 107, 108, 183, 238, 310, 349 Gabon 34, 35, 44, 48, 230 Gabriel, archangel 116, 225-6, 261, 452 Gagnier, Jean 62 Gairdner, William Henry Temple 20, 448, 449 Galla, see also Oromo 87, 116, 171-2, 195, 196, 197, 200, 206, 207, 208, 250, 252, 265, 273, 355, 459, 460 Gambia 71, 123, 133, 231, 238, 300-17, 378-9 George Champion 20, 94-9 de Géramb, Ferdinand 497 German Committee for Missions 405 German East Africa, see also DeutschOstafrika 355, 406, 408-9, 411-13 German Society for Islamic Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islamkunde) 408 Ghana, see also Gold Coast 22, 30, 71, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 101, 215, 302, 313, 319, 321-2, 399-400, 427, 430, 438, 463, 487 Gobat, Samuel 19, 169 de Gobineau, Arthur 495 Gojje Aligaz, convert 92 Gold Coast, see also Ghana 22, 30, 71, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 101, 215, 302, 313, 319, 321-2, 399-400, 427, 430, 438, 463, 487 Gollmer, Carl Anders 342-3 Gómez Carrillo, Enrique 496, 499 Gondar 16, 67-8, 69-70, 90-1, 116, 200 Good Samaritan, parable of the 152-3 Gordon, Charles 27-8, 174, 362
593
Gorée Island 33, 119, 121, 133, 236, 241, 243, 375 Gospel of John 195, 259, 262, 283, 288, 312, 440, 443, 468 Gospel of Luke 152, 259, 260, 262, 283, 359 Gospel of Mark 262 Gospel of Matthew 64, 195, 259, 262-3 Granados, Ricardo García 497 Greeks and Greek language 88, 210, 369, 498, 511, 539 Gregory XVI, pope 265, 505 Grieve, Annie Isabel 359 Grotto of the milk 522, 543 Guadalajara 505, 520, 523 Guadalupe 229, 505, 520, 533 Guatemala 492, 496 Guglielmo Massaja, see also Lorenzo Antonio Massaia 265-72 Guinea and Guinea Conakry 14, 32, 34, 43, 47, 82-3, 231, 348, 375, 377, 380, 483, 488 Gustav Nachtigal 179, 183, 184-5, 187-8, 189 Guyana 481, 482-4, 486-7, 488-90, 491 Guzmán, José María 496-8, 505-8 Habib Estefano 574-80 Hacquard, Prosper-Augustine 399 Hagia Sophia 511, 532 Haiti 488, 564, 575 Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi 318-24, 427 Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Tal 14-15, 37, 38, 45-6, 133, 136, 231 Halls, J.J. 88, 89, 93 Ham, OT figure 108 Hamasen 92 Hamat Ndiaye Anne 239-40 Hannington, Bishop James 278, 357, 364 harem 498-9, 533, 543, 568-9 Harris, William Cornwallis 112-18 Hartwig, Peter 63, 348-9 Hausa 13, 74, 180, 183-4, 318, 322, 343, 350, 352, 422, 424, 427, 429, 462-5, 466, 468-9, 470-2, 483, 514, 516 Hausa Bible 465, 468 Hausa states 13, 180, 183, 350 Hausaland 20, 107, 318, 427 Ḫāyla Śǝllāse I, King of Ethiopia 457-8 heathenism 25, 213, 361, 367 Hebrews, NT book 259, 312 Heinrich Barth 179, 180, 182-5, 187-9, 426 Henry Brunton 59-66, 348 Henry Aaron Stern 9, 167, 171-2, 174 Henry Dufton 9, 167, 172-4
594
Index of names
d’Herbelot, Barthélemy 78, 494 Herboso España, Francisco J. 555-9 d’Hericourt, Charles X. Rochet 9, 117, 167 Herrera, Alfonso 497 Herrnhuter, see also Moravians 406, 407-8, 413, 482-3, 485, 486 Ḫǝruy Walda Śǝllāse 457-61 hijra 15, 45, 46, 426-8, 431-2, 451 Hine, John 442-3 Hofmeyr, A.L. 19 Holland, Trevenen James 9, 167, 172 Holle, Eloi-Paul 127-43, 239 Holy Ghost Fathers, see also Spiritans 18-19, 26, 138, 306, 374-83 Holy Land 497, 505, 506-7, 520, 521, 533, 539-41, 542-4, 556-7, 579 Holy Sepulchre, church, order and monastery of the 506, 507, 512, 533, 539 Holy Spirit 224-5, 400, 444, 448, 452 Honduras 492, 493, 574 Hope Smith, Governor of Cape Coast Castle 78, 84 Hornemann, Friedrich 179-80, 183, 185, 187-9 Horner, Antoine 378 Hosay, festival of 489 Hostage School 37, 243 Hozier, Henry Montague 9, 167, 172 Hugh Clapperton 179-94, 426, 431 Hughes, Thomas 443 Ibāḍī Muslims 198, 202, 256, 384 Ibn Khaldūn 337 Ibrāhīm, Qur’an figure 327 Ibrahim Njoya 418-23 Ignace Etienne Brazil, Abbé 560-5 Ignacio Martínez Elizondo 546-9 Igualt, Vicente Álamos 578-80 Ilorin 24, 221, 224, 329 India and Indians 10, 25-7, 31-2, 57, 86, 112-13, 145, 152, 160, 186, 268, 290, 292, 302, 340, 345, 356-7, 360, 365, 378, 387, 414, 420, 424, 436, 455, 482, 483-4, 489-90, 512, 579 Inquisition (Spanish) 492, 494, 500, 548 Irving, Washington 494 ʿĪsā al-Masīḥ (Isa Masiya, in Swahili) 369 ʿĪsà de Ŷābir (Içe de Gebir) 494 Isawa or Ansa, followers of Isa 464, 466-8 Isenberg, Carl Wilhelm 93, 113 Isert, Paul 74 Isḥāq Kano 430 Ishmael, OT figure 259
Islamisation 104-5, 133, 189, 242, 330, 424 Islamophobia 475-80 Israelite and Israelites 225, 261, 466 Istanbul, see also Constantinople 170, 171, 205, 213, 496, 511, 525-6, 530, 532-3, 560, 566, 567, 570 Ittameier, Max 405 Jacob, OT figure 259 Jaffa 521-2, 552, 557 Jagga (Chagga) 200, 201 Jahn, Johann 494 Jalisco, state of 520, 530, 538 Jamaica 100, 486-8, 575 James, Henry 93 James Peet 305-6 James Watt 101, 104, 106-8, 179, 187 Java and Javanese 69, 483, 484, 489 Javouhey, Sr Anne-Marie 119, 375 Jerusalem 19, 153, 159-60, 169, 200, 445, 457, 486, 506-7, 512, 520, 521-2, 530, 532-3, 538, 539-40, 542, 552-3, 557 Jesuits 18, 161, 566 Jesus, see also Christ 69, 141, 161, 162, 186, 224-6, 259-63, 283, 285-6, 291, 305, 310, 311, 314, 328, 358-60, 362, 365, 369, 400, 443-5, 452, 464, 466, 468-9, 506, 522, 539, 543 Jesus’s miraculous birth 225 Jews and Judaism 68, 69, 151, 159, 171-2, 173, 225, 257, 261, 273, 301, 329, 363, 374, 443, 452, 476, 482, 492, 497, 500, 511-12, 521, 523, 527, 540, 543, 544, 548, 557-8, 577 jihad 8, 13-15, 17, 27, 43, 44, 46, 82, 101, 128, 133, 135-6, 180, 183, 187, 231, 237-8, 244, 250, 268, 302, 304, 345, 413, 415, 424, 432, 436, 446 jihadists and jihadist movements 13-14, 45, 133, 183, 236, 243, 307 Johann Ludwig Krapf 9, 18-19, 21, 93, 112-13, 167, 195-204, 285, 355, 356, 370, 405 John, Gospel of 195, 259, 262, 283, 288, 312, 440, 443, 468 John Morgan 304, 305 John the Baptist 225, 506 Johnson, James 325, 330, 343, 351 Johnson, William P. 19 Johnston, Henry Hamilton 325, 330, 343, 351 Jones, William 357 José Lopez Portillo y Rojas 495, 497-9, 538-40 José María Guzmán 496-8, 505-8
Index of names
José Maria Rufino 514-19 Joseph (Yūsuf), OT and Qur’an figure 170, 327 Joseph Dupuis 75, 77-85 Joshua, OT figure 261 Juan Bustamante 509-13 Juan Maria Schuver 205-9 Judgement Day, see also final judgment 225, 282, 422, 558 Juma bin Saide 154 Juma Musjid Trust 31 Kaarta 133, 136, 231, 237 Kamba mission 202, 405 Kano 180, 183-4, 187, 318, 350, 427-8, 430, 462-5, 466, 470-2 Karamoko Sankoun 47-8 Karass 59, 60, 64, 65 Karl Kumm 9, 332-9 Karl Winqvist 273-7 Katsina 180-1, 430, 462 Kazimirski, Albert de Biberstein 494 Keable, Robert 386 Kenya 10, 18, 196, 202-3, 355, 356, 361, 365, 370, 381, 406 Kete-Krachi 318-19 Khartoum 27, 174, 206, 362 al-Kindī, ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq 256-63, 445 Kirk, John 157 Kitchener, Herbert 28-9 Klamroth, Martin 408, 410-11, 413-14 Koran, Korân, Kôran, Kurán, see also Qur’an 62, 83, 105, 107, 149, 151, 157, 159-61, 169, 173, 199, 201, 286, 311, 327, 359-60, 362-3, 389, 396, 453, 553 Koren, Henry 375, 380 Korhogo 46 Kota Kota, see also Nkhotakota 18, 154 Krapf, Johan Ludwig 9, 18-19, 21, 93, 112-13, 167, 195-204, 285, 355, 356, 370, 405 Kugler, Christian 19 Kuhne, Johannes 73-4 Kukawa 181-3, 185, 187 Kumm, Karl 9, 332-9 Labé 43, 101, 106-7 Lacunza, José María 499 Lagos 182, 210-11, 219, 221, 325-6, 327, 349-51, 462-3 Lahore 291-2, 449 Laing, Alexander Gordon 101, 104, 179, 180 Lake Chad 182
595
Lake Ngami 144 Lake Nyasa 18, 154 384, 406 Lake Tanganyika 200, 398, 406 Lake Victoria-Nyanza 200, 364, 367, 396 de Lamartine, Alphonse 494, 544 Lamido of Bauchi 184, 188 Lamu 200-1, 286, 406 Land of Prester John for Ethiopia 167 Lander, Richard 179, 182 Lane, Edward William 499 Lang, Robert 278, 426 Laval, Jacques 379 Lavigerie, Charles, Archbishop of Algiers 18, 35, 125, 395-6, 398-9 ‘Layla’ 69 Lǝbna Dǝngǝl, Šawā king 116, 459 Lefevbre, Thêophile 9, 167, 170 Leipzig Mission 405, 408 Leo Africanus, Joannes 180 Leo XIII, pope 266, 268, 395, 520 Leonardo Márquez Araujo 530-4 Leontiev, Nikolay Stepanovich 9, 167 Letayf, Antonio 570-3 Leviticus, OT book 263 liberated Africans 23, 31-2, 100, 124-5, 303, 349, 352 Liberia 210, 212, 214 Libermann, Jacob (Francis) 374-5, 376-7, 379 Libreville 35, 230 Lindley, Daniel 20, 94-5 Livingstone, David 7, 9, 19, 25-6, 144-66, 172, 197, 335, 361, 384, 410, 494 Livingstonia Mission (Free Church of Scotland) 18 Livinhac, Auguste Simon Léon 395-8 de Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernánde 479-80 London Missionary Society (LMS) 17, 19, 144, 300, 340, 406 Lopez Portillo y Rojas, José 495, 497-9, 538-40 Lord Lugard 15, 29, 351, 397, 425-6, 436-9, 463 Lord Stanley, Edward 102, 104, 106 Lorenzo Antonio Massaia, see also Guglielmo Massaja 265-72 Louis Faidherbe, Governor of Senegal 36-7, 41, 127-8, 130, 133-42, 229-49 Lourdel, Siméon 167, 363, 395-8 Lower Guinea 483, 488 Ludolf, Hiob 195
596
Index of names
Ludwig Krapf 9, 18-19, 21, 93, 112-13, 167, 195-204, 285, 355, 356, 370, 405 Lugard, Frederick, Baron 15, 29, 351, 397, 425-6, 436-9, 463 Luis Malanco Vargas 496, 497, 540, 541-5 Luke, Gospel of 152, 259-60, 262, 283, 359 Lutheran Church 16, 19, 195, 202, 273, 276, 283, 340, 405-6, 413 M.S. Cole 227, 325-31, 351-2 Maba Diakhou 142, 236 Mabundo, Manfred 389 Macaulay, Zachary 61 MacBrair, Robert Maxwell 301, 303, 308-12, 315 Macintyre, J.L. 20 Mackay, Alexander 20, 167, 362, 395, 397, 410 Madagascar 17, 34, 151, 292, 375 Mahdī, see also Muḥammad Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh 27-8, 208-9, 409 Mahdists and Mahdism 27, 28, 29, 208, 273, 296, 467 Mahdist uprising 207, 209, 252 Mahomaden for Muslim 199 Mahomadenism for Islam 199 Mahomedan for Muslim 91-2, 96-7, 123, 169, 186, 199 Mahomedanism for Islam 123, 185 Mahomet for Muḥammad 65, 122, 151, 201, 305, 314, 360 Mahometan for Muslim 61-2, 65, 91, 149, 152, 186, 301, 310-12 Mahometanism for Islam 145, 310, 312 Mahometismo 553 Maji-Maji rebellion 410-11 Malam Ibrahim, founder of the Isawa sect 464, 467 Malanco, Luis 541-5 Malawi, see also Nyasaland 18, 146, 441, 452 Malês and Malê rebellion 527, 562-5 Mali 14, 34, 47, 398 Malik Sy, El-Hadj 44 Mande people 23, 82, 483 Mandingo people and language 107, 184, 311-12, 348, 484 Mandinka 14, 105, 121, 309-11, 343, 349 Manzano, Juan Francisco 500 marabouts 40, 42, 45, 48, 123-4, 238, 245, 304, 306-7, 308, 324, 377 Marchal, Henri 399-400 Mark, Gospel of 262 Markham, Clements Robert 88, 92, 117
Marno, Ernst 206, 209 maroons 100, 486-7 Martí, José 500-1 Martínez Elizondo, Ignacio 546-9 Marty, Paul 40, 41, 46-7 Martyn, Henry 145 Massaia, Lorenzo Antonio, see also Guglielmo Massaja 265-72 Massawa, Massaua 87, 91-2, 171, 273 Matteucchi, Pellegrino 206 Matthew, Gospel of 64, 195, 259, 262-3 Maude, William 303, 307, 309, 313-15 Maurel and Prom Company 127, 142, 230 Mauritania and Mauritanians 15, 34, 36, 41-2, 44, 133-5, 230-1, 237-8, 240, 243, 381 Mauritius 278, 290, 291-2, 379 Maximilian of Habsburg, Emperor of Mexico 520, 530-1, 538 McCarthy, Charles 23 Meadows, George 306-7 Mecca 8, 14, 107, 158, 169, 238, 240, 261, 267, 318, 336, 361, 422, 445, 451, 462-3, 468, 486, 511, 522, 525-6 ‘Mecca letter affair’ 411 Medhen, Twoldo, Bible translator 274 Medina 47, 444, 451, 486, 525 Médine (in present-day Mali) 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 140-1, 237 Mengo (present-day Kampala) 355, 361-3 Menelik, Menilek (Mǝnilǝk) II, Emperor of Ethiopia 17, 252, 254, 265-6, 294, 296, 297, 298, 457, 459 Meredith, Henry 74 Merensky, Alexander 408, 409 Messiah for Jesus 283, 291, 311, 443 Mestro, Henri-Joseph 127, 136-9, 142 Metemma, Battle of 208, 296 Methodists 19, 123, 300-17, 489-90 métis community 128-9, 140, 143, 239 Mexican Revolution 531, 538 Mexican-American War 530 Mexico 476-80, 492-3, 494-5, 498, 505, 507, 520, 522-3, 530-1, 533-4, 538, 540, 541, 544, 546, 570-1, 572-3, 574 México City 506, 531, 541, 571, 572 Michael Samuel Cole 227, 325-31, 351-2 Michael, Archangel 115 Michaud, Joseph-François 494 Middle East 67, 168, 341-2, 477, 480, 493, 509, 523, 538, 540, 550, 551, 553, 567, 569, 573, 577 mihadhara, see also public debates 288, 290, 310, 377 Mill Hill Fathers 398
Index of names
Millar, Ernest 363 Miller, Ethel 335 Miller, Walter 350, 462-72 Missionaries of Africa, see also White Fathers 16, 18, 167, 362, 370, 380, 395-403 Mitchell, John Murray 360 Mohamad for Muḥammad 152-3, 159, 161 Mohamad Bogharib or Mohammed ibn Gharib 155-7, 163-4 Mohamadan for Muslim 149, 155, 159-60 Mohamedan for Muslim 171-2 Mohammadan for Muslim 116 Mohammed for Muḥammad 62, 173, 208, 268, 286, 358-63, 451, 467 Mohammedan for Muslim 62, 96, 149, 161-2, 168, 171, 173-4, 184, 188, 200-1, 208, 285-7, 290, 302, 305-6, 313, 327, 340-5, 349, 351-2, 356-61, 364-8, 387, 390, 400, 441, 448, 451, 498-9, 521-3, 539, 543 Mohammedanism for Islam 62, 64, 134, 173-4, 301, 307, 313, 341-2, 344-5, 360-1, 364-7, 387, 399-400, 448-9 Mombasa 196-7, 198-9, 200-2, 278-9, 280-1, 283, 285-8, 355, 356-61, 368, 370, 391, 405, 454 Monrovia 210 Moors for Muslims 37-8, 56, 73-4, 82, 121, 139, 480, 496, 498, 500-1, 547-8, 576 Moravian(s), see also Unitas Fratrum 406, 407-8, 413, 482-3, 485, 486 Morel, Edmund Dene 428-9 Morgan, John 304, 305 Moria, Susu Muslim state 100-1, 105-7, 108 Moriscos 492, 548 Mormonism 161 Morocco 15, 41, 77, 496, 501, 576 Moses, OT figure 69, 150, 158, 259, 261-2, 543 Moslem for Muslim 81, 83, 149, 150, 152-4, 157-61, 173, 257, 283, 305, 307, 336, 364, 368, 389, 390, 448, 449, 452, 453, 467, 470 Mouride Brotherhood 44 Mozambique 18, 97, 287 Mozarabs 576 Mpwapwa, Mpuapua 197, 355, 364-6 Mudejars 576 Muhamad(i) for Muḥammad 156, 158, 282 Muhametans for Muslims 164 Muḥammad Aḥmad ʿAbd Allāh, see also the Mahdī 27-8, 208-9
597
Muḥammad Bello ibn ʿUthmān 182, 184, 186, 424, 425-6, 430 Muḥammad al-Bukhārī ibn Aḥmad 428, 430, 432 Muhammad Dikko 430-1 Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī l-Mundhirī 256-64 Muḥammad, the Prophet 8, 14, 51, 62, 64, 68, 69, 108, 123, 158, 163, 168, 187, 199, 225, 258, 259, 261, 262, 267, 282-4, 291, 296, 301, 302, 314, 321, 322, 327, 328-9, 339, 351, 370, 377, 387, 427, 441, 444-5, 448, 451-3, 454, 464, 480, 484, 486, 489, 500, 511, 517, 518, 525, 542, 543, 553, 558 Muhammadanism for Islam 302, 308, 440, 443, 445, 447, 449 Muḥammadan for Muslim 157-8, 235, 258, 443-4, 447 Muir, Sir William 257-8, 494 Murray, John 155, 162 Musselmen, Mussleman, Mussulmans, Musulmans, Mussulmaun, Musulmis for Muslim(s) 37, 168, 169, 310, 363, 562 Mutesa, African ruler 362-3, 396-7 Mwanga, African ruler 362, 363, 397-8 Nachtigal, Gustav 179, 183, 184-5, 187-8, 189 Nathaniel Pearce 86-93 Nazareth 506, 512, 521, 522, 557 de Nerval, Gérard 499 Nestorians 186, 257 Neukirchen Mission 286, 406 New Testament 60, 62-4, 186, 258, 274, 310, 312, 466, 467 Nicaragua 492, 496, 501, 574 Niger 13, 15, 34, 424-5, 431, 464 Niger expedition 219, 425-6 Niger river 24, 74, 181-3, 219, 220, 224, 226, 232, 333, 349, 527 Niger mission 220-1, 349, 350 Nigeria, see also Northern Nigeria 15, 20, 24, 29, 30, 215, 219, 221, 227, 302, 321, 325, 327, 332-3, 335, 336-7, 342, 348-51, 380, 381, 436, 438, 462-3, 465, 466-8, 470, 471-2, 514 Nile river, see also Blue Nile and White Nile 34, 69, 91, 117, 145, 167, 200, 205, 207-8, 265, 332-3, 336, 362, 398, 523 Nile Mission Press 279, 360, 408 Nkhotakhota, see also Kota Kota 18, 154 Nkrumah, Kwame 215 Noah, OT figure 108 North African Mission 332
598
Index of names
Northern Nigeria 10, 15, 28-9, 32, 180, 302, 318, 332, 337, 350-1, 353, 424-35, 436, 438, 462, 464-5, 466, 468, 471-2 Norwegian Missionary Society 17 Numbers, OT book 158, 261 Nyangwe massacre 157 Nyasa, Lake 18, 154, 384, 406 Nyasaland, see also Malawi 18, 146, 441, 452 O’Beirne, Brian 101, 104-8 O’Flaherty, Philip 362-3 Ogunbiyi, T.A.J. 325, 351 Old Testament 170, 259 Omar Khayyam 495 Orientalists and Orientalism 212, 254, 415, 494-502, 536, 542, 544, 547, 558, 568 Oromo, Ethiopian people and language, see also Galla 87, 116, 171-2, 195, 196, 197, 200, 206, 207, 208, 250, 252, 265, 273, 355, 459, 460 Ortiz de la Puebla, Vincente 494, 523 Ottoman Empire 7, 26, 145, 160, 206-9, 267, 269, 342, 345, 410, 413, 475-7, 498, 500, 506, 511, 525, 530, 532, 533-4, 560, 566-7, 568-9, 570-1, 572-3, 574 Ouagadougou (in present-day Burkina Faso) 33, 399 Oxford and Cambridge Mission to Central Africa, see Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 384 Oyo (in present day Nigeria) 219, 514, 516 Palestine 171, 205, 340, 498, 506-7, 533, 539-40, 544, 567 Palgrave, William 446 Palmer, Henry 443, 445 Paris, Treaty of 33 Parkyns, Mansfield 170-1 Paul, apostle 64, 158, 263 Paul, Charles 426 Paul Marty 40, 41, 46-7 Pearce, Nathaniel 86-93 Dom Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil 563 Peel, William, Bishop of Mombasa 368, 369 Peet, James 305-6 People of the Book, see also ahl al-kitāb 282, 429 Percival, Robert 10-11, 55-8 Peter, apostle 261 Pfander, Karl Gottlieb 225, 285 Philip O’Flaherty 362-3
Pinet-Laprade, Governor of Senegal 1412, 242, 244 Pittway, Alfred 283, 288, 370 Pius IX, pope 395, 520, 523 Plowden, Walter Chichele 8, 117, 167, 171 polygamy 245-6, 291, 305, 314, 368, 448, 478, 542-3, 568 Pongo river 101, 102, 231 Ponty, William 39-41 Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico 478, 538, 546 Portillo y Rojas, José Lopez 495, 497-9, 538-40 Portuguese people and language 6, 8, 17, 18, 24, 158, 200, 219, 231, 514, 517, 526, 547, 562-4 Portuguese Guinea 231 Presbyterians 19, 59, 210, 215, 483, 489-90, 497 Price, William Salter 344, 357 Propaganda Fide 378, 379, 395 The Prophet for Muḥammad 8, 14, 46-7, 51, 53, 68-9, 82, 158, 160, 168, 173, 199, 208, 225, 258, 267, 282, 286, 296-7, 328, 358, 359, 370, 444, 451, 464, 467, 489, 511, 517-18 proselytising by Christians 29, 140, 335, 337, 351, 447, 489 proselytising by Muslims 158, 161, 199, 268, 363, 389 Protestant mission for East Africa (Berlin III), see also Evangelische Missiongesellschaft für DeutschOstafrika (EMS) 405-6, 407-9 Province of Freedom, Sierra Leone 100 Pruen, Septimus 365-7 Psalms, OT book 88, 201, 225, 259, 260, 279, 442 public debates, see also mihadhara 288, 290, 310, 377 de la Puebla, Vincente Ortiz 494, 523 Puerto Rico 498 Pullen, William Titcombe 305, 307 pyramids of Giza 533, 557 Qāḍiriyya, Sufi order 16, 41-2, 43, 45, 67, 135, 238, 318 Querétaro 520, 523, 531 Quinet, Edgar 495 Qur’an 35, 62, 63, 81, 83, 105, 107, 108, 122, 123, 149, 151, 157, 159-61, 163, 169, 173, 188, 199, 201, 202, 226, 227, 243, 258, 260, 262-3, 276, 282, 286, 291, 301, 310, 311, 312,
Index of names 314, 319, 325, 326, 327-31, 338, 339, 343, 352, 359-60, 362-3, 370, 389, 396, 411, 432, 441, 443-6, 447, 448, 449, 450-6, 463, 467, 468, 487, 488, 494, 497, 511, 512, 517, 527, 553, 558, 563
Rafael Sabás Camacho y García 520-4 Raffenel, Anne 142 Ramseyer, Fritz Augustus 73, 74 Räthling, A.H. 486 Rattray, Robert S. 74, 319 Rebmann, Johann 196, 198, 199-201, 356, 370, 405 Recife 515, 517, 518, 526 Red Sea 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 112-14, 115, 268, 533 Renan, Ernest 495, 544 René Caillié 179-80, 185, 187-9 Renner, Melchior 63, 348-9 resurrection of Christ 225, 444, 452 resurrection, general 82, 422, 451, 558 Rheinische Mission 405 Richard Bright 102, 104-8 Richter, Julius 408, 411 Rimbaud, Arthur 250-5 Rinn, Louis 38-9 Rio de Janeiro 488, 515, 516, 526, 560-1 Rio Pongas 59, 61, 101-2, 349 Robben Island 51, 53 Robert Percival 10-11, 55-8 Robinson, Canon Charles 10, 462, 466 Rodwell, John Medows 327, 328, 443, 445 Rohlfs, Friedrich Gerhard 179, 182-5, 187, 189 Romans, NT book 263 Royal African Company 80 Ruelas, Julio 499 Rufino, José Maria 514-19 Rüppell, Eduard 9, 93, 167, 169 Russell, Michael 93 du Ryer, André 494 Saad Bouh 41-2 Sacleux, Charles 202, 379 Sahara desert 46, 182-3, 334, 337, 400, 462 Śahlä Śǝllase (Sellase), Nǝguś of Šawā 112-13, 115, 116, 195, 459 Saʿīd ibn Sulṭān, ruler of Zanzibar 196, 198, 200, 356 Said, Edward 254, 568 Saidna Mohammed for Muḥammad 187 Saint-Hilaire, Jules Barthélemy 494
599
Saint-Louis 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 119, 127-9, 132-5, 138-41, 230, 236-44, 305, 375 Saint-Simonianism, doctrine of 37 Salaga 318, 321, 427 Sale, George 225, 226, 328, 443, 445, 494 Saleh al-Farsy 455 Salgary, Emilio 495 Salt, Henry 9, 87-8, 89-91, 93, 167, 168 Salvador da Bahia 488, 514 Samuel Ajayi Crowther 15, 19, 24-5, 219-28, 326, 329-30, 348-52, 425-6 Santiago, Chile 552, 578 Santo Domingo 483, 498 al-Sanūsī, Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf 53-4 Sardoc Abdalla 92 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 553 Satan 150, 159, 225, 263, 422 Satiru revolt 29, 429 Savile, Hugh 363 Saviour for Jesus 312, 358, 360, 363, 444, 451, 452, 467, 540 Šawā, see also Shewa 92, 112-13, 115-16, 250, 252, 265, 458, 459-60 Schön, James Frederick 342-3, 348, 349, 425, 426 Schulze, Erich 413 Schuver, Juan Maria 205-9 Scott, Sir Walter 495, 544 Sǝbastyānos, Šawā king 25, 32, 202, 405, 410 Ségou 38, 46-7, 133, 231, 237 Sell, Edward 443 Semler, Ishmael 357 Senegal and Senegalese 14-15, 33-4, 35, 36-8, 40, 42, 44-5, 119-25, 127-8, 132-43, 215, 229-32, 236-47, 375-9, 486 Senegal river 33, 34, 37, 132-3, 230-1, 236, 237-8 Senegambia 133, 135, 240, 247, 378 Senghor, Leopold 215 Septimus Pruen 365-7 Sergius, Christian monk 258 Service des affaires musulmanes 39, 41 Seyyid Ali Bin Said, sultan of Zanzibar 366 Seyyid Barghash, sultan of Zanzibar 447 Shaykh al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui, see also Ali Mazrui 283-4, 391, 454-5 Shaykh Ali Gondar 16, 67-70 Shaykh Hussein Jibril 17, 294-9 Shewa, see also Šawā 92, 112-13, 115-16, 250, 252, 265, 458, 459-60
600
Index of names
Sibella Bazett 358-9 Sidiya Baba 42 Sierra Leone 15, 23-4, 31, 32, 59, 61, 63, 65, 100-11, 125, 187, 197, 210, 214, 219-20, 224, 231, 238, 241, 243, 302, 313, 325, 340, 342, 348-9, 352, 375, 462, 514-15, 517 Slatin, Rudolph 174 slave trade and enslavement 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 13, 15, 19, 22-8, 30, 31, 32, 35, 39-40, 51, 53, 56, 78, 81, 92, 97, 98, 100, 102, 107-8, 117, 125, 145-6, 148, 153, 154-7, 159, 161, 164, 168, 174, 183, 187-9, 197, 209, 210, 213, 214, 219-20, 229, 250, 268, 279, 305, 325, 334, 336-7, 338, 340, 344-5, 349, 356-7, 365-6, 374, 379, 380, 384, 389, 390, 395, 397, 398, 399, 410, 425, 446, 447, 448, 463, 471, 482, 483-4, 485-8, 489, 490, 491, 492, 498, 499, 500, 514, 516-17, 518, 526-7, 542, 543, 562-4, 564, 568 slave-raiding 183, 187-8, 208, 334, 339 Slavery Emancipation Act 12 Smith, Reginald Bosworth 213, 216 Smythies, Charles, bishop 387, 390 Société de Géographie de Paris 119, 179, 230, 252, 541 Society for Missions to Africa and the East (later Church Missionary Society) 102, 340 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 223, 227, 257, 258, 340, 360, 369 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) 340, 349, 385 Sokoto 47, 180, 181-2, 183-4, 186, 322, 351, 426, 428, 429, 431 Sokoto Caliphate 13-14, 15, 24, 28, 181, 182, 188, 214, 330, 424-5, 428, 432, 436 Solomon, king of Israel 106, 116, 171, 363, 543 Somalis and Somaliland 34, 116, 250, 252, 253, 254, 265, 579 Soninke-Marabout wars 303, 304, 306, 307, 308, 314 South Africa 31, 51, 94, 96, 98, 144, 340 Southern Nigerian Protectorate 29, 436, 438 Spain and the Spanish 205, 477, 478, 480, 492, 493, 494, 498, 500-1, 502, 546, 547, 548, 549, 574, 576 Spanish language 267, 269, 477, 493, 494, 495, 502, 507, 549, 566, 567, 579 Speke, John 167, 494 Spencer, Herbert 495
Spiritans, see also Holy Ghost Fathers 18-19, 26, 138, 306, 374-83 St Clair, Thomas Staunton 487 Stanley, Edward, Lord 102, 104, 106 Stanley, Henry Morton 16, 145, 361, 396, 494 Steere, Edward 202, 258, 387, 390, 447 Stern, Henry Aaron 9, 167, 171-2, 174 Stewart, James 18 Stock, Eugene 290, 365 Sudan 9, 14-15, 20, 27-8, 29, 30, 34, 67, 206, 207, 209, 232, 241, 245, 247, 252, 268, 273, 279, 296, 334, 336-8, 339, 341, 364, 399, 436, 438 Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) 463, 465 Sudan Pioneer Mission (SPM) 332 Sudan United Mission (SUM) 332, 334 Sunter, Metcalfe 342, 343, 349 Suriname 481-4, 485-7, 488-90, 491 Susu 23, 24, 59, 61-3, 64, 100-1, 105-6, 108, 348-9 Suwarian tradition 46, 82 Swahili, Suaheli people 18, 25, 31, 150, 158, 159, 160, 199, 279, 287, 345, 364, 370, 405, 414 Swahili, Suáheli, Suahili language 149, 197, 201, 202, 258, 278-9, 280-3, 285, 287, 330, 352, 360, 369, 388-9, 408, 412, 414, 440, 441, 447, 450, 453, 454-5 Swedish Evangelical Mission (SEM), see also Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS) 273, 275, 457 Sy, El-Hadj Malik 44 Tabora 367, 398, 401 Tadjoura, Tağūra 115, 116, 117, 250 taḥrīf 259, 310 Taita 199, 360 Talmud 363, 445 Tamisier, Maurice 9, 167, 168 Tanganyika, see also Tanzania 355, 362, 364, 367, 389, 415, 438 Tanganyika, Lake 200, 398, 406 Tangier 496, 525, 527 Tanzania 18, 370, 380, 384, 401, 438, 455 Tanzimat 475, 569 taqiyya 47, 428, 429, 431, 432, 476 Tasso, Torquato 495 Taylor, Isaac 344, 352 Taylor, Catherine 279, 285, 358 Taylor, William Ernest 278-89, 358, 360, 369, 370, 391, 454
Index of names
Temple Gairdner, see Gairdner, William Henry Temple 20, 448, 449 Ten Commandments 268, 351, 422, 489 Tetary, Janey 490 Tewodros II, Theodore, Emperor of Ethiopia 167, 171-2, 174, 196, 294, 459 Thomas Bowdich 71-6, 80, 82 Thompson, W.A. 468 Thomson, William Cooper 101-2, 104, 106 Thunberg, Carl 10 Tijāniyya, Sufi order 14, 43, 44, 45, 48, 135, 237, 238, 319 Timbo (Sierra Leone) 100, 101-2, 104, 106-7, 187, 238 Timbuktu 38, 40, 77-8, 101, 107, 180, 182, 232, 399 Tisdall, William St Clair 345 Toucouleur, Tukulor 14, 36, 37, 121, 123-4, 128-9, 135, 136, 231, 236 Tours, Battle of 338 Tozer, William 384 traditional African religion 24, 121, 122, 216, 221, 223, 305-6, 307, 308, 313, 314, 329, 330, 332, 334, 335, 337-9, 350, 352, 379, 396, 399, 400, 421, 422-3, 424, 514, 527 traditional Caribbean religion 482, 486 Trarza 34, 36, 121, 134-6, 139, 230 Treaty of Amiens 11, 56 Treaty of Paris 33 Tregaskis, Benjamin 306 Trevenen James Holland 9, 167, 172 Trinidad and Tobago 481-2, 483, 484-5, 487, 488-90, 491 Trinity 24, 53, 116, 186, 225, 258-60, 342, 377, 441, 444, 447, 449 Tripoli, North Africa 78, 182, 462, 463, 470 Truffet, Benoît, bishop 377, 379 Tuan Guru, see Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam 11, 51-4 Tuaregs 47, 398, 399 Tucker, Alfred Robert, bishop 279, 369 Tugwell, Herbert, bishop 350, 462, 463 Turks 91, 159, 173, 476, 478, 497, 500, 507, 512, 522, 540, 543, 560, 566 Twoldo Medhen, Bible translator 274 Uganda 16, 20, 197, 355, 361-4, 365, 370, 395-8, 436 Ugogo (in present-day Tanzania) 368, 370 ‘Umar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ‘Uthmān al-Kabawī, see Al-Hajj Umar KeteKrachi 318-24, 427
601
ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, caliph 497 Umar Kete-Krachi, Al-Hajj, see also ‘Umar ibn Abī Bakr ibn ‘Uthmān al-Kabawī 318-24, 427 ʿUmar Tal, al-Ḥājj, Toucouleur Islamic reformer 14, 15, 37, 38, 45, 46, 133, 231 Umarian movement 45, 135, 141, 245 Unitas Fratrum, see also Moravians 406, 407-8, 413, 482-3, 485, 486 United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) 201, 385, 446, 453 Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) 18, 19, 20, 26-7, 201, 283, 357, 365, 369, 384-94, 413, 440, 441, 442, 446, 447, 449-50, 453 Upson, Thomas 279, 360 Usman dan Fodio, ʿUthmān ibn Muḥammad Fūdī 13-14, 180, 214, 318, 330, 424, 425-6, 428, 432, 436 Valentia, Viscount, see also George Annesley 8-9, 86-7, 91-2, 167-8 del Valle, José Cecilio Díaz 498, 500 Valparaíso 550, 555 Vargas, Luis Malanco 496, 497, 540, 541-5 Venezuela 476, 555 Veracruz 506, 570 Vicente Álamos Igualt 578-80 Vicente Cuesta 535-7 Victoria-Nyanza, Lake 200, 364, 367, 396 Villaverde, Cirilo 500 Virgin Mary 374, 506, 520 Wadai, sultanate of 183, 184, 185, 187 Waller, Horace 9, 146, 148, 162 Wällo in Ethiopia 16, 67, 68, 294-6, 298 Walo, Senegal 36, 124-5, 230 Walter Chichele Plowden 8, 117, 167, 171 Watt, James 101, 104, 106-8, 179, 187 Welde Sillase 88, 90-1, 92 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) 74, 300-17 West Indies 162, 340, 483 Weston, Frank, bishop of Zanzibar 384, 386, 389, 390-1, 453 White Fathers, see also Missionaries of Africa 16, 18, 167, 362, 370, 380, 395-403 White Nile 34, 167, 205, 207, 208 William Cornwallis Harris 112-18 William Titcombe Pullen 305, 307 William Ernest Taylor (W.E.) 278-89, 358, 360, 369, 370, 391, 454 William Ponty 39-41 Willis, John J. 364
602
Index of names
Winqvist, Karl 273-7 Winterbottom, Matthew 101, 104-6 Wolof tribe and language 44, 121-2, 128, 133, 230, 236, 241, 242-3, 305, 308, 377 Wood, Arthur 365 World War I, see also First World War 10, 30, 35, 46, 48, 319, 333, 334, 355, 370, 384, 389, 390, 412, 413, 415, 419, 420, 457, 551, 560, 567, 572, 574 Wray, Joseph 360 Yarima Inusa 431 Yesu Kristo (Swahili, Jesus Christ) 369, 452 Yesu Masihi (Swahili, Jesus the Messiah) 283 Yohannes IV, Emperor of Ethiopia 17, 266, 295-8 Yoruba and Yorubaland 15, 24, 180, 185, 187, 219, 220, 221, 327, 329, 330, 331, 343, 348, 349, 351-2, 426, 483, 514
Yoruba language 227, 325, 343, 348, 349, 350-2, 426, 483, 514 Yūsuf (Joseph), Qur’an and OT figure 170, 327 Zanzibar 18-19, 20, 25, 26-7, 30-2, 149, 154, 160, 167, 168, 196, 199-201, 202, 256, 257, 258, 263, 279, 281, 345, 355, 356-7, 359, 365, 366, 370, 378, 380, 384-5, 387-8, 390, 438, 440-1, 442-4, 447-9, 454-5 Zanzibaris (freed slaves in Natal) 30-1 Zaria 350, 462-4, 466, 468, 469, 471-2 Zaylaʿ, Zeila 250, 252, 265 Zaynab, wife of Muḥammad 291 Zigua people 389 Zulkifli Ag Mufleh, Tuareg author 47 Zulus and Zululand 10, 28, 94-5, 96-8 Zumʿa ibn Muḥammad al-Fullānī, scholar and poet 430 Zwemer, Samuel 390, 448
Index of Titles Numbers in italics indicate a main entry. Abdalá 500 Abessinien, das Alpenland unter den Tropen und seine Grenzländer 117 An account of the Cape of Good Hope 10, 11, 55, 56-8 An account of the island of Ceylon 55, 57 An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone 104-6 ‘An account of the principal customs and habits of the natives inhabiting the Bondei country’ 440 ‘Acts of the Synod of 1884’ (UMCA) 387 An address to a Mussulman from a friend on the subject of religion, see Bir dostun Gelamy Mosslemaneh 64-6 On the advice of a friend to a Mohammadan 65 The African Committee, by T.E. Bowdich, conductor of the mission to Ashantee 71 An African David and Jonathan 389 African Mail 428 ʿAjāʾib al-asfār wa-mtiḥān al-bilād wa-l-aqṭār 430 L’Alcoran de Mahomet (du Ryer) 494 Allgemeine Missions-Nachrichten 408 Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift 408 ‘O alufá’ 516-19 ‘The amusement of the foreigner in every wonderful thing’, see Musalliyyat al-gharīb bi-kull amr ʿajīb 526-9 Anjili kwa Yohana 440 ‘The Anniversary’ 388 Annuaire du Sénégal et Dépendances 236, 241-4, 245 Annual Letters (CMS), see Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries 278, 279, 283, 285-9, 346, 355, 357-61, 363-8 Annual Reports (Lugard) 426 Anthropos 562, 564 ‘An appeal to Mohammedans in Arabic’ 292 The Apology of Al Kindy, see Risālat al-Kindī 256, 257, 258, 263, 285 Apuntes y observaciones civiles, políticas y religiosas con las noticias adquiridas en este segundo viaje a la Europa 510
The Arab and the African. Experiences in Eastern Equatorial Africa during a residence of three years 366-7 Arabische Chrestomathie 494 ‘Are our foreign missions a success?’ 184, 188 Aṣaro Kukuru 325, 351 L’atlas, see Illustrations des esquisses sénégalaises 120-6 Aventuras del célebre califa de Bagdad Harun-Alrachid 495 Awọn Imale 325, 351 Awọn Ọrọ Ọlọrun 325, 351 Bailarinas 499 ‘Balance of truth’, see Mizān al-ḥaqq 2256, 285 Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā l-ʿibād 425, 428, 432 Begen yaskin shuhadar Hadejia 429 Beiträge zur Missionskunde 408 ‘Les berbères et les arabes des bords du Sénégal’ 230 Berliner Missionsberichte 408 Beth-El 408 Bibeli Mimọ tabi majeṃu Lailai Ati Titun 329 Bibliothèque orientale 78, 494 Bir dostun Gelamy Mosslemaneh 64-6 ‘The Brazilian Muslim sect of Malês and their revolt in 1835’, see La secte musulmane des Malês du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835 560, 562-5 Breve y sencilla narración del camino que hizo visitor los lugares de Jerusalén 496, 497, 498, 505, 506-8 Breviario sunní 494 ‘Brief and simple account of a trip made to visit the holy places of Jerusalem’, see Breve y sencilla narración del camino que hizo visitor los lugares de Jerusalén 496, 497, 498, 505, 506-8 A brief history of the Wesleyan missions on the western coast of Africa 301-2 Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 169, 230
604
Index of Titles
Bulletin Général (Holy Ghost Fathers) 375-6 ‘Canon Dale at Holborn Town Hall’ 388 The Cape and the Kafirs. Notes of five years’ residence in South Africa 97 Cape Monthly Magazine 98 The captive missionary 171-2 Caras y Caretas 566 Cartas del Dr. Don Vicente Cuesta sobre su viaje a la Tierra Santa 535-7 The centenary volume of the Church Missionary Society 340-1 Central Africa 19, 386, 387, 388-9, 441, 447, 449 Central African Mission 387 Christ Church Cathedral Magazine (Lagos) 326 Christian literature in Moslem lands 453 Christianity, Islam and the Negro race 13, 212-18 ‘Christianity or Mohammedanism in the Uganda Diocese’ 364 Christus oder Mohammed? 408 Chronique de la Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique 396 Chronique Trimestrielle 396-7 Church Missionary Atlas 179, 188 Church Missionary Gleaner 179, 184, 188, 346 Church Missionary Intelligencer 346, 357-9, 361, 363, 364, 365 Church Missionary Society Annual Report, see also Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East 196, 197, 198-9, 285, 346, 356, 368 Church Missionary Society Gazette 346, 361, 364, 367-9 Church Times 388, 440, 441 Civilización y barbarie 553 A compendious history of the principal Protestant missions to the heathen 65 Conference on missions to the Mohammedans held at the Church Missionary House 342-3, 348 Les confréries religieuses musulmanes 39 The contrast between Christianity and Muhammadanism 388, 440, 442-6 ‘Controversia. La Biblia y la civilización’ 497 El Corán: ó Biblia mahometana 494 Correo Semanario de México 480 ‘Los cosmopolitas de Turquía’ 496 ‘Cuaderno núm. 18’ 501
Daily Telegraph 16, 361, 395 Dalāʾil al-Mahdī, see also Qaṣīda dāliyya 430 In Darfur. An account of the sultanate and its people 184 Darkness or light 386, 441 Deutsches Kolonialblatt 408 Deutschlands pflicht gegenüber den Heiden 408 El diario del hogar 544 Diario del Imperio 531-4 Dictionary of Islam 443 Dictionary of the Suahili language 197, 201-2 Dictionary of the Yoruba language 329 ‘Discurso de M. Renan’ 495 The dual mandate in British tropical Africa 15, 437-9 ‘East-Africa Mission’ 196 Eddowes’s Shrewsbury Journal and Salopian Journal 387 ‘Editor’s notes. The Swahili Koran’ 389 Egipto y Palestina. Apuntes de viaje 495, 497-9, 539-40 ‘Egypt and Palestine. Travel notes’ 495, 497-9, 539-40 Eine neue Missionsstation im Innern von Ostafrika 409 Ek likcar: jo Pādrī Blaik’baran […] ne jazīrah-yi Mārīshis ke Muḥammadīyon ko diyā 291-3 The epidemics of Mauritius 292 ‘An epistle and advice to contemporaries’, see Risāla wa-naṣīḥa ilā l-muʿāṣirīn 426-8 Esquisses sénégalaises 119, 120-6, 142, 143 An essay on the geography of north-western Africa 71 An essay on the superstitions, customs and arts, common to the ancient Egyptians, Abyssinians, and Ashantees 71 Estudios penitenciarios 555 Al-Etedal 570 ‘Les étrennes des orphelins’ 250 Études sur l’islam maure 41 Études sur l’islam au Sénégal 41 Études sur l’islam et les tribus du Soudan 41 Evidences of the Christian religion, together with a short examination of Muhammadanism 360 Excursión a Vueltabajo 500
Index of Titles
Experiences with heathens and Mohammedans in West Africa 223-8, 329 ‘Explanation of the requirement for migration on servants of God’, see Bayān wujūb al-hijra ʿalā l-ʿibād 425, 428, 432 ‘Extract from a journal of travels in Abyssinia 1842’ 169 Extracts from the Annual Letters of the Missionaries, see also Annual Letters (CMS) 278, 279, 283, 285-9, 346, 355, 357-61, 363-8 Faidherbe’s personal letters 234-6 Faidherbe’s official correspondence 236-41 Faith of Islam (Sell) 443 Feuille Officielle du Sénégal et Dépendances, see also Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances 38, 236, 241-4 Field diary (Livingstone) 145, 149-50, 154, 157-8, 161-2 ‘Fiestas en Constantinopla’ 531-4 O Fluminense 560 Foreign Service List 79 The Fortnightly Review 184, 188 Four years in Ashantee 73-4 Frank, Bishop of Zanzibar 386 ‘Frank Weston’s biography’ 386 ‘French Senegal’, see De la Sénégambie française 130, 132-43, 239, 240 From Hausaland to Egypt, through the Sudan 336-8, 339 Führer (Guide) 283, 408 Géographie de l’Ethiopie 117 La Gerusalemme liberata 495 Gil Blas 566 Gospel on the banks of the Niger 425 Grammaire de la langue woloffe 119, 122 A grammar and vocabulary of the Susoo language 59, 61-2 Guinea journals 101-2, 105-8 Habari ya Waarabu na Islamu 360 Habari za Muhammadi 408 Handelsblad 205 Un hereje y un musulmán 501 On heroes and hero worship 444 The highlands of Æthiopia 113-14, 115-18 ‘The Hispanic-American peoples. Their present and future’, see Los pueblos hispano-americanos. Su presente y su porvenir 575, 576-7
605
Histoire des croisades 494 Histoire politique et religieuse d’Abyssinie 270 La historia de la dominación de los árabes en España 494 Historia del Apostólico Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe 505 ‘Historical memoirs of the Apostolic Vicariate of Galla’, see Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla 267, 268, 269, 270 History of Ethiopia (Ludolf) 195 A history of the Abyssinian expedition 88, 92-3, 117 ‘History of the Christians’, see Lābārin Naṣārā 322-3, 427-8 The history of the Church Missionary Society 290, 365 ‘History of the kings’, see Tārika nagaśt 17, 458-61 The history of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 384, 385, 386, 387-8 A history of Wesleyan missions in all parts of the world 301 Holy Ghost Fathers correspondence 376-83 I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia 266-72 Ikhtiṣār al-adyān li-taʿlīm al-ṣibyān 256 Illustrations des esquisses sénégalaises 120-6 ‘In Zigualand’ 389 La Independencia 567 Los indios en el Perú 509 Inkishafi 279 A la insurrección de Grecia en 1821 498 International Review of Mission 388, 448, 450 ‘Interpretation of the Arabic Qur’an’, see Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu 330, 352, 388, 441, 450-6 ‘Introduction à la relation d’un voyage en Abyssinie’ 170 Irshād al-ḥayārā fī muʿāmalat aʾimmatinā bi-l-Naṣārā 429 Islam and Africa. An introduction to the study of Islam for African Christians 441, 452 Islam and Christianity (Arnold) 443 ‘Islam and race distinctions’ 213 L’islam dans l’Afrique occidentale 39 L’islam en Côte d’Ivoire 41, 46 L’islam en Guinée. Fouta-Djallon 41, 47
606
Index of Titles
Der Islam in Deutsch-Ostafrika 408 Islam in Nyasaland 19 ‘Islam in the Western Soudan’ 214 al-istiqāma, Kitāb 256 Al-Istiqlāl 567 Itan Mọmọdu 325, 351 Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem 494 Itinerario de Roma a Jerusalén 497, 521-4 ‘Itinerary from Rome to Jerusalem’ 497, 521-4 Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-mansūba ilā ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī l-Naṣrānī (al-Mundhirī), see Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā 256, 257-64 Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya (al-Mundhirī), see Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā 256, 257-64 Jawāhir al-muṣaffā fī mawlid al-nabī l-muṣṭafā 68-70 Al-Jawater 570, 572 Jornal de Commercio 516, 517, 518 Journal d’un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l’Afrique centrale 180, 187 Journal of a residence in Ashantee 78, 79-85 Journal of a second expedition into the interior of Africa 182 Journal of James Watt. Expedition to Timbo, capital of the Fula Empire, in 1794 101, 104-11, 187 Journal of the Rev. George Champion 94, 96-9 Journal of the Royal African Society 214 Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 104 Journal of three years’ residence in Ethiopia 19 Journal of two visits to the Kingdom of Ashanti 73 Journals of the Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther 221, 425-6 Journals of the Rev. Messrs. Isenberg and Krapf, missionaries of the Church Missionary Society 93, 113, 195 ‘Journey to the ancient world’, see Viaje al antiguo mundo 510-13 ‘A journey to the East’, see Viaje á Oriente 496, 497, 540, 542-5 ‘Joy without alloy’, see Raha isiyo karaha 279, 280-4, 360, 391, 454 Kashf al-Niqāb 566 Khabari za dini ya kiislamu 388, 441, 450-6
Khont-hon-Nofer. The lands of Ethiopia 9, 338-9 King Mtesa of U-ganda 362-3 Kitāb al-istiqāma 256 Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā (al-Mundhirī) 256, 257-64 ‘Knowledge of Islam and faith’, see Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān 11, 52, 53-4 El-Ḳor’ân; or The Ḳorân (Rodwell) 327, 328, 443, 445 The Koran (Sale) 225, 226, 328, 443, 445, 494 Kreuz-Zeitung 411 Al-Kurani ni ede Yoruba, also Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba 227, 327-31, 351-2 Lābārin Naṣārā, see also Wākar al-Naṣārā 322-3, 427-8 Land und Volk in Afrika 183 ‘The language question in German East Africa’ 411 El Lápiz Azul 567 The last journals of David Livingstone in central Africa 9, 146, 148-66 The last will and testament of Cecil John Rhodes 7 Leben Mohammeds 408 ‘A lecture that Rev. Blackburn gave to the Muslims of the Island of Mauritius’, see Ek likcar: jo Pādrī Blaik’baran […] ne jazīrah-yi Mārīshis ke Muḥammadīyon ko diyā 291-3 ‘Legislation with information for newcomers, its devotions and vows’, see Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduha bi-l-naẓar 321-4 ‘Letter’ (H.M. Stanley) 16, 361, 395 ‘Letter from Aden’ 252 ‘Letter from Harär’, see Lettres du Harar 251-5 ‘Letter from Isabelle Rimbaud to her mother’ 250 Lettere e scritti minori (Lorenzo Massaia) 267, 268, 270 Letters from David Livingstone 153, 154, 157, 158 Letters from Karl Winquist 275-7 ‘Letters in defense of St. Paul’s apostleship’ 64 ‘The letters of Dr Don Vicente Cuesta on his journey to the Holy Land’, see Cartas del Dr. Don Vicente Cuesta sobre su viaje a la Tierra Santa 535-7 ‘Letters to CMS’ 278, 343, 362 ‘Letters to WMMS’ 300, 303, 305-8
Index of Titles
‘Letters to UMCA’ 386-94 Lettres du Harar 251-5 Liberia’s offering 213 The life and adventures of Nathaniel Pearce 86, 87, 88, 89-93 Life in Abyssinia 170-1 The life of Mahomet (William Muir) 494 Likita Mila (‘Dr. Miller’) 465 Lisān al-Ḥāl 566 ‘The Lord Bishop’s Zanzibar Carrier-Corps’ 384 A.M. MacKay. Pioneer missionary of the Church Missionary Society to Uganda 363, 379 Mahomet and his successors (Washington Irving) 494 Mahomet et le Coran (Jules Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire) 494 Mahomet et le koran comparés au Christ et à l’évangile. Réponse aux musulmans 291-3 Maisha ya Muhammad: life of Muhammad (Godfrey Dale) 390, 441, 450-6 Marabouts et Kouans 39 Maʿrifat al-Islām wa-l-īmān 11, 52, 53-4 Mashraʿ māʾ al-khabar li-wārid wāriduha bi-l-naẓar 321-4, 427 Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék 61-4, 65 ‘Memoir of a journey through the East and the West’, see Memorias de un viaje por Oriente y Occidente 579-80 A memoir of Edward Steere 258 ‘Mémoire sur la colonie du Sénégal’ 237, 240 Memorandum on Mohammedanism and Christianity in West Africa 309, 313-14 Memorial of the agents of the CMS respecting the spread of Mahomedanism among the Liberated Africans 349 Memorias de un viaje por Oriente y Occidente 579-80 Memorie storiche del vicariato apostolico dei Galla 267, 268, 269, 270 ‘Memories of a trip to America, Europe and Africa’, see Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África 546, 547-9 Methodist Review 179 Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente 550, 551-4 The mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee 71, 73-6, 80
607
‘Mission-Magazine’, see Missions-Tidning 275-7 ‘Mission of Sir Bartle Frere to the East Coast of Africa’ 357 ‘Missionary News’ (Moslem World) 364 Missionary Notices (Wesleyan Methodists) 300 Missionary travels (Livingstone) 144 Missionsblatt der Brüdergemeinde 408 Missions-Tidning 275-7 Mizān al-ḥaqq 225-6, 285 ‘Mohammed and Mohammedanism’ 213 ‘Mohammedanism and slave-trade in Africa’, Science 410 ‘Mohammedanism and the Negro race’ 213 ‘Mohammedanism and the Yaos’ 19 ‘Mohammedanism in Africa’ 352 ‘Mohammedanism in Western Africa’ 213 ‘The Mohammedans of Nigritia’ 213 Moniteur du Sénégal et Dépendances, see also Feuille Officielle du Sénégal et Dépendances 38, 236, 241-4 Moniteur universel 136, 138 ‘Los moros en España’ 501 Moslem Egypt and Christian Abyssinia 174 The Moslem World 330, 368, 408, 453 Mudhakkirāt 567 ‘Muḥammad, his life’ (Arthur Madan) 387 ‘Muhammadanism in Zanzibar’ 388, 447-50 Muhammadi, maisha yake 387 Al-mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar 62 El Mundo 546, 567 Al-Muqtaṭaf 566 Musalliyyat al-gharīb bi-kull amr ʿajīb 526-9 ‘The Musgu people of Central Africa’ 188 ‘The Muslims’, see Awọn Imale 325, 351 ‘My days of pilgrimage in the East’, see Mis días de peregrinación en Oriente 550, 551-4 ‘My 35 years of mission in high Ethiopia’, see I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’alta Etiopia 266-72 La Nación 567 Nahj al-ḥaqāʾiq 256 Narrative of a journey through Abyssinia in 1862-3 172-4 Narrative of an expedition in southern Africa 112
608
Index of Titles
‘Narrative of Mr. William Cooper Thomson’s journey from Sierra Leone to Tímbo, Capital of Fúta Jállo, in Western Africa’ 102, 104-6 The narrative of Robert Adams 77-8 Narrative of travels and discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822-1823 and 1824 182, 183-94, 431 Naẓm al-laʾālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām 321-4, 427 Nigeria. Its peoples and problems 429 Nostalgias 496 La Nota 567 ‘Note sur Maba’ 236 ‘Notes du Fouta Toro’ 119, 124 ‘Notes on Mohammedanism’, see Khabari za dini ya kiislamu 388, 441, 450-6 ‘Notice sur la colonie du Sénégal et sur les pays qui sont en relation avec elle’ 236, 244 Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres 142 Nubia and Abyssinia 93 Nuot nkoueto 420, 421-3 Nūr al-tawḥīd 256 ‘Obituary’ (Godfrey Dale) 388, 441 Œuvres complètes (Arthur Rimbaud) 250, 252, 254 On heroes and hero worship 444 On the advice of a friend to a Mohammadan 65 On the best method of disseminating the scripture in north-western Africa 309, 310-12 ‘La opinión nacional’ 501 Orlando furioso 495 L’Ouganda et les agissements de la Compagnie Anglaise ‘East Africa’ 397 ‘Our attitude and responsibility to Islam’ (Martin Klamroth) 414 De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation 495 El Pensador Mexicano 480 The peoples of Zanzibar. Their customs and religious beliefs 441 Petermann’s Geographische Mitteilungen 206, 207, 209 ‘Philip and the eunuch’ 213 ‘The poem on going to Kano’, see Wakar zuwa birnin Kano 429-30 ‘Poem rhyming in ʿayn’, see Qaṣīda l-ʿayniyya 69-70
‘Poem rhyming on the letter dāl’, see Qaṣīda dāliyya 430 ‘Poems’ (Shaykh Hussein Jibril) 295-9 A popular account of Dr. Livingstone’s expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries 149, 155, 161-6 Precis Book (CMS) 369 Précis de politique musulmane 39 ‘The principles of the New Testament’ 64 ‘Proceedings of societies’ 78 Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, see also Church Missionary Society Annual Report 196, 197, 198-9, 285, 346, 356, 368 De la propagande musulmane en Afrique et dans les Indes 267 El Provenir 536 Los pueblos hispano-americanos. Su presente y su porvenir 575, 576-7 ‘Purified jewels, on the birth of the chosen Prophet’, see Jawāhir al-muṣaffā fī mawlid al-nabī l-muṣṭafā 68-70 ‘Pursue and achieve’, see Nuot nkoueto 420, 421-3 ‘Pursue to attain’, see Nuot nkoueto 420, 421-3 Qaṣīda dāliyya, see also Dalāʾil al-Mahdī 430 Qaṣīda l-ʿayniyya 69-70 Quer durch Afrika (Rohlfs) 182-7 ‘The Qur’an in the Yoruba language’, see Al-Kurani ni ede Yoruba 227, 327-31, 351-2 ‘The Qur’an translated into Yoruba’, see Al-Kurani ti a yipada si ede Yoruba 227, 327-31, 351-2 l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā, Kitāb fī (al-Mundhirī) 256, 257-64 Raha isiyo karaha 279, 280-4, 360, 391, 454 ‘Rapport sur l’Ogadine’ 253, 254 ‘Recepción del Exmo. Sr. General Márquez por el Gran Sultán’ 531-4 Record of the expedition to Abyssinia 172 Records of Captain Clapperton’s last expedition to Africa 182, 185 Recuerdos de un viaje en América, Europa y África 546, 547-9 Reflections of a pioneer 466-70 Register of Missionaries (CMS) 278, 346, 357 Reise in Abyssinien 93, 169
Index of Titles
‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet’ 206, 207-9 Reisen in Ost-Afrika, see also Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa 197, 200-4 Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855, see also Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa 185, 187-94 ‘De Reizen van Juan Maria Schuver in het gebied van den Blauwen Nijl’ 206 Religions of the world (F.D. Maurice) 444 ‘Religionsgespräche mit einem Führer der Daresalamer Mohammedaner’ 408 Reminiscences of the founding of a Christian mission on The Gambia 305 ‘Reminiscences of travels’ 555, 556-9 Reminiscencias de viajes 555, 556-9 ‘Report of UMCA anniversary meeting’ 442 ‘Los representantes de México en Jerusalén’ 531-4 The reproach of Islam 20, 448, 449, 450 ‘Response to the Nestorian treatise’, see Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-Nasṭūriyya (al-Mundhirī) 256, 257-64 ‘Response to the treatise attributed to ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī the Christian’, see Jawāb ʿalā l-risāla l-mansūba ilā ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī l-Naṣrānī (al-Mundhirī) 256, 257-64 ‘Revd. Dr. Krapf’s additional remarks on the island of Zanzibar or Ongoodja (January-June 1844)’ 199 Rev. George Champion, pioneer missionary to the Zulus 96-9 Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 562, 564 Revista Moderna 499 La Revue Blanche 566 Revue Coloniale 136, 138-9, 141 Revue du Monde Musulman 39 ‘La revuelta en Egipto’ 501 Risāla wa-naṣīḥa ilā l-muʿāṣirīn al-muʿtanīn bi-mā yudkhiluhum fī zumrat al-muslimīn al-nājīn 426-8 Risālat al-Kindī, see also The Apology of Al Kindy 256, 257, 258, 263, 285 Risālat al-wazīr ilā ahl al-ʿilm wa-l-tadabbur 428 Routes in Abyssinia 93 Royal Gazette 78
609
Rubaiyat 495 Safira 500 Sahărâ und Sûdân 183-9 ‘The Scottish shorter catechism’ 64 Second voyage sur les deux rives de la Mer Rouge 117 ‘Secret Memorandum on the evangelisation of Equatorial Africa’ 395 La secte musulmane des Malês du Brésil et leur révolte en 1835 560, 562-5 Le Sénégal et son avenir 141-2 Le Sénégal. La France dans l’Afrique occidentale 139, 244-9 ‘Senegalese sketches’, see Esquisses sénégalaises 119, 120-6, 142, 143 De la Sénégambie française 130, 132-43, 239, 240 ‘Shall German East Africa be Christian or Muslim?’, see Soll Deutsch-Ostafrika christlich oder mohammedanisch werden? 413 Shuhuda za dini ya kimasihia Pamoja na kupeleza kidogo dini ya Isilamu 360 Le siège par Alaghi du fort de Médine au pays de Kasson 141 El Siglo diez y nueve 495 ‘The signs of the Mahdī’, see Dalāʾil al-Mahdī 430 Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe 572-3 ‘Sixth catechism for Susoo children’, see Mawhoring fe shéni Susu dimédiék 61-4, 65 Sketches of a missionary’s travels in Egypt, Syria and Western Africa 308-17 La Sociedad 531 ‘The Society’s missions’ (CMS) 184 A soldier’s sojourn in British Guiana, 1806-1808 487 Soll Deutsch-Ostafrika christlich oder mohammedanisch werden? 413 Some account of the town of Zanzibar 387 ‘The song of the Christians’, see Wākar al-Naṣārā (Al-Hajj Umar KeteKrachi) 321-4, 427-8 ‘The song of the Christians’, see Wakar Nasara (anon.) 427, 428 La sonrisa de la esfinge 496 St. John’s Gospel in Swahili 279 Story of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa 386
610
Index of Titles
‘A string of pearls, for informing and warning the noble’, see Naẓm al-laʾālī bi-akhbār wa-tanbīh al-kirām 321-4, 427 The Sudan. A short compendium of fact and figures about the land of darkness 333, 334-5, 338 Sufferings in Africa. Captain Riley’s narrative 77 ‘A Swahili translation of the Koran’ (Godfrey Dale) 453 ‘Synod Minutes’ (WMMS) 306, 308 The Syrian revolution against the French mandate 567 Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu 330, 352, 388, 441, 450-6 Tārika nagaśt 17, 458-61 Taʿziyat al-ikhwān 430 Le Temps 566 ‘The Thirty-Second Anniversary’ (UMCA) 388 The thousand and one nights 495, 532 ‘Through German East Africa’ 365 El Tiempo 523 Tierras solares 496, 501 ‘Tracts for Muhammadans’, see Aṣaro Kukuru 325, 351 ‘Translation of the Arabic Qur’an into the Swahili language’, see Tafsiri ya Kurani ya Kiarabu 330, 352, 388, 441, 450-6 Travels and discoveries in North and Central Africa, see also Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855 185, 187-94 Travels in Abyssinia and the Galla country 117, 171 Travels in Arabia 446 Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima countries in Western Africa 104 Travels into the interior of southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798 5, 10 ‘Travels on the Upper Nile’, see ‘Reisen im oberen Nilgebiet’ 206, 207-9 Travels, researches, and missionary labours during an eighteen years’ residence in Eastern Africa, see Reisen in OstAfrika 197, 200-4 Travels to discover the source of the Nile (Bruce) 74, 90, 92, 170, 195 ‘Treatise in rebuttal of the Christians’, see Kitāb fī l-radd ʿalā l-Naṣārā 256, 257-64
‘The treatise of the vizier to the people of knowledge and reflection’, see Risālat al-wazīr ilā ahl al-ʿilm wa-l-tadabbur 428 ‘The truth about the harem’, see La verdad sobre el harem 568-9 Turkiyā al-Fatāh 566 Twenty years in Central Africa 386 ‘Ueber Sclaverei und die jüngsten Vorgänge im Egyptischen Sudan. Die Nilfrage’, 209 ‘Uganda a test of faith’ 363 Unabii 279, 360 ‘Unhampered happiness’, see Raha isiyo karaha 279, 280-4, 360, 391, 454 ‘Unmasked Syrians and Arab culture’, see Sirios desenmascarados y cultura árabe 572-3 Unyanyembe journal (Livingstone) 156 La verdad sobre el harem 568-9 El viaje a Nicaragua 501-2 Viaje á Oriente 496, 497, 540, 542-5 ‘Viaje a Oriente. Juicio crítico’ 544 Viaje al antiguo mundo 510-13 Viaje universal. Visita a las cinco partes del mundo 546 Vie du Vénérable Père Siméon Lourdel 396 ‘The vital forces of Christianity and Islam’ 388, 448-50 Vocabulary of the Yoruba language 329 Vom Kampf des Christentums 408 ‘Voyage à Joal’ 119 ‘Voyage en Abyssinie’ (Antoine d’Abbadie) 169 ‘Voyage en Abyssinie’ (Guillaume LeJean) 93 Voyage en Abyssinie, dans le pays des Gallas de Choa and d’Ifat (Edmund Combes and Maurice Tamisier) 168-9 Voyage en Orient 494 A voyage to Abyssinia and travels into the interior of that country (Henry Salt) 88, 168 A voyage to the river Sierra Leone on the coast of Africa 104 Voyages and travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt 86-7, 91, 92, 93, 168 Voyages en Abyssinie et en Nubie (Henri Lebrun) 93 La Voz de México 523
Index of Titles
Wakar batu 430 Wakar diga 430 Wakar Nasara (anon.) 427, 428 Wākar al-Naṣārā, see also Lābārin Naṣārā (Al-Hajj Umar Kete-Krachi) 321-4, 427-8 Wakar zuwa birnin Kano 429-30 Walter Miller, 1872-1952. An autobiography 463, 470-2 Wanderings among the Falashas in Abyssinia 171-2, 174 Wāzemā-bamāgǝstu ya-ʾItyoṗyan nagastāt 459
611
Die Welt des Islams 408 Wesleyan Missionary Notices 300 Wesley’s world parish 302 The White Fathers and their missions 399, 400 ‘Women missionaries in East Africa’ 359 ‘The words of God’, see Awọn Ọrọ Ọlọrun 325, 351 Zaburi za David 279 ‘Zanzibar Mission: Mkunazini, Zanzibar 9 September, 1881’ 387