South Asian Muslims in East Africa

This chapter ¹ aims to answer the question, how have Asian ² Muslims transformed the religious geography of East Africa ³ over the past two centuries? The history of Asian Muslims in East Africa is one of transition from traditional Indic religions to modern Islam through colonization. The place of Asians in East African society so drastically deteriorated with the end of colonization that many became dispossessed and were forced to migrate to Western Europe and North America. Their legacy in East Africa is the social institutions they have developed, such as the Aga Khan Hospital in Dar es Salaam, and their affect on religious demographics, such as the Bilal Muslim Mission’s conversion of thousands of Africans to Twelver Shiism. This chapter is organized sequentially, beginning with current scholarship, continuing on to mapping the demographics of the communities differentiated by creed and caste, highlighting the discontinuities of the postcolonial experience, and finally assessing the legacy and extrapolating future trajectories based on past experiences. The legacy of millennia of classical Asian contact with East Africa is sparse. ⁴ The current Asian communities of Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa originated with a trickle of permanent migration to the Swahili coast at the turn of the nineteenth century. By the 1830s there were established coastal settlements in Bagamoyo, Kilwa, Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Pangani, and Zanzibar among others (Ghai & Ghai, 1960:3). Zanzibar, part of the Omani empire, was the centre of East African trade and in 1840 Sultan Seyyid Said transferred the capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. The sultan understood the need for Asian mercantile skills and created an environment conducive to immigration from the Subcontinent. Asians formed an economic class which financed Arab plantations and trading caravans to the interior of the continent (Delf, 1963:1–4). By the turn of the twentieth century, there were 7,000 Asians in Zanzibar alone, 5% of the population (Appletons, 1903:225). For Asian Muslims, being in Sultanate territories brought these communities in contact with Arab forms of Islam, such as Sufism and Ibadism, that began to change their own understandings of an Islamic identity in praxis.