Tracing the development of Islam in East Africa, Medina Whiteman explores the role played by Sufi orders in popularizing and “Africanizing” religious knowledge during the time of the slave trade

There is none in the heavens and the earth but cometh unto for more than 10 centuries the Beneficent as a slave.  (Qur’an 19:93)

Islam has been present along the east African coast since about the 8th century, when Persian traders, princes and economic migrants first sailed by dhow to Lamu, Mombasa, Zanzibar and Kilwa, at first for trade and later to live. Although they often took local wives and concubines, marking the birth of an ethnically and linguistically mixed population—the “Waswahili”1—Islam remained for more than 10 centuries the preserve of merchants and land-owners. Caravans carrying ivory and animal skins brought slaves and porters from the inland to the coast, where they were excluded from mainstream Muslim society but simultaneously were attracted to its intellectual and spiritual heritage. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, tariqas such as the Qadiriyya, Shadhiliyya and Ba ‘Alawi began to emerge in Africa, teaching an Islam that sought to accommodate marginalized people, particularly migrants from the African mainland, women and freed slaves. But what was it the tariqas offered that attracted so many?

SLAVERY IN EAST AFRICA

The trade in slaves in East Africa at this time was intense. Demand for ivory reached its peak as the industrial revolution in the west made luxury items, such as billiard balls and piano keys, more popular. In 1856 alone, Zanzibar exported a quarter of a million pounds of ivory.  Slaves were needed for the arduous caravan journeys upcountry, where diseases such as sleeping sickness killed horses and donkeys. However, burgeoning clove plantations in Zanzibar and Pemba began to create such a high demand for slaves that by the 1860s, more than two-fifths of the 22,000 slaves exported from Kilwa yearly remained in Zanzibar and Pemba. Although British colonial documents described the East African slave trade as “Arab,” less than a fifth of these slaves were transported to the Arabian Peninsula, India and Indian Ocean Islands.