The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast available in Paperback, eBook
The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast
- ISBN-10:
- 0822345099
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822345091
- Pub. Date:
- 07/29/2009
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822345099
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822345091
- Pub. Date:
- 07/29/2009
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast
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Overview
In this theoretically rich exploration of ethnic and religious tensions, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how the relationship between two ethnic groups in the bustling Kenyan town of Malindi is reflected in and shaped by the different ways the two groups relate to Islam. While Swahili and Giriama peoples are historically interdependent, today Giriama find themselves literally and metaphorically on the margins, peering in at a Swahili life of greater social and economic privilege. Giriama are frustrated to find their ethnic identity disparaged and their versions of Islam sometimes rejected by Swahili.
The Edge of Islam explores themes as wide-ranging as spirit possession, divination, healing rituals, madness, symbolic pollution, ideologies of money, linguistic code-switching, and syncretism and its alternatives. McIntosh shows how the differing versions of Islam practiced by Swahili and Giriama, and their differing understandings of personhood, have figured in the growing divisions between the two groups. Her ethnographic analysis helps to explain why Giriama view Islam, a supposedly universal religion, as belonging more deeply to certain ethnic groups than to others; why Giriama use Islam in their rituals despite the fact that so many do not consider the religion their own; and how Giriama appropriations of Islam subtly reinforce a distance between the religion and themselves. The Edge of Islam advances understanding of ethnic essentialism, religious plurality, spirit possession, local conceptions of personhood, and the many meanings of "Islam" across cultures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822345091 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/29/2009 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 342 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE EDGE of ISLAM
Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya CoastBy Janet McIntosh
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4496-4
Chapter One
ORIGIN STORIESThe Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast
In 1997 the Kenya coast was wracked by a series of violent, politically orchestrated clashes over land ownership and economic opportunity. The events that gained the most publicity from local media and scholars were the upheavals south of Mombasa between Digo, a Muslim Mijikenda group, and the wabara (Kisw.), or upcountry tribes, who in recent decades have laid claim to many economic advantages on the coast. But north of Mombasa, in the Malindi area, the ethnoreligious dynamics of resentment were somewhat different. Some Giriama (and, to a lesser extent, other Mijikenda represented in Malindi) arrayed themselves not only against wabara, but against Arabs and Swahili who had been living on the coast for centuries. Their grievances sounded old themes, ranging from the accusation that Muslims enslaved their ancestors in large numbers, to the furious charge that Arabs and Swahili maliciously grab the land of hapless Giriama squatters and rightful landowners. Many young Giriama men in Malindi joined a loosely organized underground movement dedicated to exacting some form of revenge on their oppressors, and though the violence in Malindi never reached the levels in the Likoni area to the south, it simmered just beneath the surface.
One Giriama elder named Samson, who helped administer oaths to Mijikenda youth to secure their allegiance to the cause of potential guerrilla warfare, told me that in early 1997 he went with another elder to seek the counsel of a powerful Giriama mganga diviner (singular of aganga, Kigir.), hoping to learn more about the origins and outcome of the ethnic tensions. The men asked the mganga the question that dogs so many citizens of the coast: Why are the Mijikenda so oppressed? The mganga told the men that long ago there was a fight between an ancestral Mijikenda and an Arab, who killed each other in the struggle. Their bodies were buried together in a configuration that would seal their destinies. First, the Mijikenda body was wrapped in a bui bui, the long covering that swathes the bodies of modest Muslim women, and was placed in the earth facing downward. Then the Arab body was laid to rest facing upward, its weight resting on the back of the Mijikenda.
In many origin stories of ethnic groups around the world, some critical moment in the past is thought to fix the destiny of the group in question. In the burial configuration described by the mganga, the corporeal body of the dead Mijikenda man becomes a stand-in for the Mijikenda social body. Mijikenda and Arabs are bound together forever in a wretched and degrading hierarchy in which Mijikenda must bear the weight of Arab advantage on their backs for eternity. Pain is also encoded in the orientation of the Mijikenda corpse. Traditionally Giriama dead are buried on their right side, sometimes with their feet pointing to the west and their faces to Shungwaya, a mythical point of migratory origin to the north, and sometimes oriented toward the Kaya, the customary Mijikenda capitals in the hinterland forests. While the spatial arrangement varies according to regional differences and competing ideologies, the orientation of a corpse connotes "social and cosmological as well as physical direction" (Parkin 1992: 22). Every Giriama understands the claustrophobic and shameful symbolism of the collective Mijikenda body relegated to staring down, away from the comforting sites of social life and social identity, into the cold, lonely earth. And if the Mijikenda soul is stolen through such a gesture, the humiliation is further ground in as the male corpse is swathed in a bui bui, a Muslim woman's garment, forcing upon it a degrading feminization, as well as some kind of inchoate relationship to Islam.
Several issues invoked by this story set the stage for the discussion of ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic relations in the rest of this book. Aside from the theme of personhood, the force field behind current understandings of ethnicity among Swahili and Giriama in the Malindi area is made up of shifting contests over resources, prejudices and perceptions, and currents of ethnic essentialism that have a complex colonial and postcolonial history. In a partial hegemony of ethnoreligious distinction, numerous, albeit not all, Giriama and Swahili share the assumption that Giriama are categorically distinct ethnic and religious beings from Swahili. Their rationales range from essentialist presumptions about the deepest nature of ethnic groups to Giriama observations of Swahili prejudice that, they contend, makes it all but impossible for Giriama to assimilate.
There are ironies in these ethnoreligious divisions, for the very category "Swahili" is a historically flexible appellation that, at least in some contexts, has readily assimilated newcomers. Such permeability has led to much head scratching as some scholars have sifted through an immensely complex history of Indian Ocean migration and intermarriage while striving to answer the question once framed by Eastman (1971): "Who are the Swahili?" As mentioned in the introduction, scholars lately have shifted from attempting to pin down Swahili identity to emphasizing instead its "openness and permeability" (Askew 1999: 73). This approach captures some important truths about Swahili history and resonates with contemporary theoretical models of ethnicity, yet it also risks glossing over the quality of some of the current ethnic tensions on the coast. From an analytic standpoint Swahili identity is indeed historically contingent and dynamic, but we must also recognize that cultural insiders on the coast do not always regard their ethnicity in the same way. Indeed, I suggest that situations like that in Malindi present us with a tension between currently fashionable analytical models of ethnicity as fluid and negotiated and the more absolute ethnic boundaries represented and understood by those on the ground. Folk representations of ethnic fixity may hide the shifting and socially constructed qualities of ethnicity that contemporary scholars seek to unmask, but in Malindi the rise of essentialist models of ethnicity among some coastal players has had concrete and sometimes painful effects. And Malindi is hardly the only place where such concerns are pressing; numerous scholars have noted the rise of ethnic differentiation in the face of globalizing trends and political liberalization (see, for instance, Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 39; Meyer and Geschiere 1999). Indeed, Parkin (1991a: 161) regards new essentialisms on the Kenya coast as local versions of a global trend toward "cultural, ethnic, and linguistic separatism ... of a kind that in Europe was once called Balkanization."
Of course, as Comaroff and Comaroff (1989/1992: 50) remind us (and Parkin would undoubtedly agree), essentialist models of ethnicity "always [have their] genesis in specific historical forces, forces which are simultaneously structural and cultural." So too, I would argue, do more fluid models of identity. In fact, the structures of incentive for both ethnic fluidity and ethnic fixity deserve to be examined; arguably, neither should be taken for granted as the default state of affairs. In some contexts both can coexist, for elements of ethnic fluidity, such as shifting or ambiguous definitions of ethnic boundaries, may be overlaid by folk convictions that ethnic identity is nevertheless deep-seated and intractable, as is the case among some Giriama and Swahili in Malindi.
The "structural and cultural" history of these developments takes fine-grained form in various locales and historical moments along the East African coast, yet one can nevertheless trace a broad arc of developments in which earlier patron-client relationships that encouraged ethnic fluidity gave way in the colonial and postcolonial eras to political developments that have contributed to an increasing rigidification of ethnic categories on the Kenya coast (Cooper 1980; Glassman 1995; Willis 1993). This rigidity is not absolute; there are differences of opinion in Malindi about whether or not outsiders such as Giriama can become Swahili. But most important to my discussion is that by far the majority of Giriama in Malindi see "Swahili" as an exclusive category that is deeply, ontologically distinct from them and that would not welcome them if they attempted to assimilate. While some Swahili describe the category as relatively open, this ideology of fluidity is often contradicted by hegemonic patterns of compartmentalization and boundary making. In fact, the history of social fluidity that predated the arrival of Europeans gives the present situation a special piquancy, for Giriama are still mindful of their past kin relationships with Swahili, making their cynicism about their current predicament especially bitter. Paradoxically, these social memories coexist with currents of essentialist discourse about both Swahili and Giriama ethnic identity.
Religion plays an important role in this force field. If conversion to Islam is a sine qua non of Swahili assimilation, it is telling that the Islamic bui bui garment in the origin myth is equated not to the possibility of upward mobility, but to the loss of dignity of the Giriama person. Status and socioeconomic advantages are supposed to accrue to Islamic converts but, Giriama claim, rarely do. Furthermore, many Giriama seem to have internalized the hegemonic notion that although their customary religious ways are inadequate and conversion might redeem them, Islam nevertheless belongs in some deep ontological way to Arabs and Swahili and not to Giriama. Many Giriama thus find themselves caught between the promise of uplift and possible assimilation that attaches to Islamic conversion, and the flouting of that promise as they are rejected, in their view, by their Muslim neighbors. It is perhaps no wonder that in this origin story an index of Islam is treated not as a badge of status but as part of the overall humiliation of the Mijikenda.
Coastal Dynamics until the Nineteenth Century: Social Fluidity and the Importance of the Arab World
In his overview of Swahili culture, the anthropologist John Middleton (1992: 1) writes that Swahili and Mijikenda have been entirely distinct groups for a very long time: "[The Mijikenda are] closely related to the Swahili in language, live next to them, and indeed often intermingle with them on the ground, and have for centuries been linked to them by trade, clientage, and mutual military protection. Yet neither they nor anyone else have ever argued that they are Swahili, and intermarriage has been rare."
Intermarriage between Swahili and Mijikenda is indeed fairly rare in contemporary Malindi. Yet the work of scholars such as Cooper (1980), Glassman (1995), Parkin (1989), and Willis (1993) suggests that to extrapolate the past from the present pattern is to portray the groups as more discrete and homogeneous than they historically have been. Indeed, says Willis, before the twentieth century the unifying ethnic term Mijikenda did not even exist, being an invention of the 1930s that swept nine culturally related peoples under the same rubric as part of the British effort to classify all their subjects according to ethnicity. Before then, Swahili, Arabs, colonials, and others tended to refer to the population of Mombasa's and Malindi's hinterland as Nyika, a pejorative term that can be roughly translated as "people of the bush." Nyika referred to a "wider grouping of people than does the term Mijikenda," says Willis; it "connotes uncivilized life as against the life of the town, and is in a sense a definition of the peoples of the hinterland by what they are not rather than what they are" (19, 28). (Although Willis uses the term Nyika to refer to Mijikenda before they were so named, I prefer to avoid it because its connotations are so offensive to Giriama today. I therefore use the term Mijikenda to index the loosely related hinterland cultural groups, including Giriama ancestors, that in the nineteenth century were not yet called by that name. When I do invoke the term Nyika I am alluding to its use by some other group of coastal players.) Meanwhile oral histories have shown that the category "Giriama" was a permeable category in the nineteenth century, incorporating outsiders from other lineages who came from varied circumstances (Spear 1978; Willis and Miers 1997).
Not only was "Giriama" a relatively permeable identity and the category "Mijikenda" a twentieth-century invention, but careful histories of coastal relations have also demonstrated that the interdependence between coastal groups prior to European colonialism often translated into fluidity of group membership. Mijikenda enjoyed incorporation into Swahili life by way of several idioms, including patronage, intermarriage, the forging of putative descent ties, and affiliation with Islam.
To begin to understand the intersection of Swahili and Giriama lives, we need to go back to the tenth century or earlier. The first Arabs apparently arrived on the coast to consolidate trade routes for the commodities of the African interior, including ivory and slaves. Arab caravan routes ranged from north of what is now Mombasa, down through the Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam area, and as far south as Mkindani (Bennett 1968). Arab settlers intermarried with Africans and built towns of various sizes, and over the centuries a loose category known as "Swahili" emerged on the coast, assimilating people of African, Arab, Persian, and Indian origins. In medieval times the term Swahili was fluidly applied, and even those deemed Swahili had important other tribal or clan affiliations, such as Wafamao and Watikuu (Tolmacheva 1991, cited in Eastman 1994). In the nineteenth century Omani and Hadrami Arab immigrants flocked to the coast, resulting in a second major infusion of Arab influence into Swahili culture and politics. Arab power was consolidated in formal structures of Omani sultanate rule, governed alternately by Mazrui and Busaidi lineages, in Mombasa and Zanzibar. In 1887 the Busaidi sultan leased Mombasa to the East Africa Company (which in 1888 became the Imperial British East African Company), and in 1895 the coast became a British protectorate under the nominal authority of the sultan of Zanzibar. According to Willis (1993: 63), governors from the Mazrui and Busaidi lineages left most administration in the hands of Arabs and Swahili living on the coast, reserving for themselves a mediating role. Meanwhile Arab-owned plantations and business ventures enlisted Swahili, Mijikenda from further upcountry, and other African groups, some of them as slaves and, later, as wage laborers. These events, which locate Arabs as governors, extractors of resources, and negotiators with colonial powers, broadly indicate the importance of Arab prestige on the coast, a prestige that has lived on in various forms with implications for ethnic self-identification.
From an early date, acquired markers of Arabness carried unmistakable status in Swahili culture. Constantin (1989) contends that from the tenth century onward, during the formation of Swahili settlements, the material, symbolic, and military resources of Arab immigrants impressed their local hosts. Arabization was "feverishly sought among the subordinate groups, who engaged in various kinds of mythical construction in order to integrate with the power elite" (148). Sometimes this amounted to a kind of ethnic remodeling as Swahili attempted to "become-or be considered as-Arabs" (145). These attempts at integration included taking on the markers of high Islam, claiming access to Arabian forms of magic, and purporting to have Arab blood and ancestry. Conscious of the strategic nature of these alignments, Allen (1993: 118) casts a skeptical eye on many Swahili origin stories, contending that the number of immigrants from Arabia was originally so small that before the eighteenth century or the nineteenth, most Swahili claims to Arab lineage were designed primarily to create a mystique around Swahili business, enabling patricians to bolster their power through such means as withholding magical Islamic items for their exclusive use.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixNote on Language xiii
Introduction. The Edge of Islam 1
1. Origin Stories: The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast 45
2. Blood Money in Motion: Profit, Personhood, and the Jini Narratives 89
3. Toxic Bodies and Intentional Minds: Hegemony and Ideology in Giriama Conversion Experiences 127
4. Rethinking Syncretism: Religious Pluralism and Code Choice in a Context of Ethnoreligious Tension 177
5. Divination and Madness: The Powers and Dangers of Arabic 221
Epilogue 257
Notes 263
Bibliography 289
Index 313
What People are Saying About This
“An impeccable study. It is work of the highest order, a meticulous analysis, and a mine of insights and information that will serve generations to come.”
“The Edge of Islam is a very significant contribution to the anthropology of religion and ethnicity in an area of East Africa that is quite under-represented in the literature, given how enormously important Swahili society is to all of East African, and global, history. The literature on ethnicity is desperate for a work like this.”