personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

“multiple sites.” People in East Africa struggled to define what it meant to be a
Muslim and what it meant to be Swahili.
ENDNOTES
1 Ian Hacking, “Symposium Papers, Comments and an Abstract: The Sociology of Knowledge About
Child Abuse,” Noûs 22, no. 1 (1988): 57.
2 Jean-Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, trans. Claudia Royal
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 41.
3 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 34
4 J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in East Africa: The Report of a Survey Undertaken in 1961, Research
Pamphlets; No. 9 (London: Published for the World Council of Churches Commission on World
Mission and Evangelism by Edinburgh House Press, 1962), 1.
5 Ibid., 66.
6 Ibid., 53 – 56.
7 David Sperling, “The Coastal Hinterland and Interior of East Africa,” in The History of Islam in Africa,
ed. N. Levtzion and R. L. Pouwels (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 289.
8 Becker quoted in Ibid., 295.
9 Ibid.
10 John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 77 – 87.
11 Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India and Portugal in the Early Modern Era
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 86 – 100.
12 August H. Nimtz, Islam and Politics in East Africa: The Sufi Order in Tanzania (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1980), 13.
13 See below.
14Francois Constantin, “Charisma and the Crisis of Power in East Africa,” in Charisma and Brotherhood
in African Islam, ed. Donald. B. Cruise O'Brien and C. Coulon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 69.
15 Randall L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast,
800-1900, African Studies Series; 53 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Randall L.
Pouwels, “The East African Coast, C. 780 to 1900 C.E.,” in The History of Islam in Africa, ed. N.
Levtzion and R.L. Pouwels (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 265.
16T. O. Ranger, “Review,” The Journal of Religion in Africa Vol. III (1975), Patricia Romero, “The Sacred
Meadows: A Case Study of “Anthropologyland” Vs. “Historyland”,” History in Africa 9(1982) and
Patricia Romero, Lamu: History, Society and Family in an East African Port City (Princeton: Marcus Wiener,
1997), ix.
17 Romero seems quite oblivious to the complicated position Zein really occupied. See below.
18 Randall L. Pouwels, “Review,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 32, no. 1 (1999).
19 These are different sects of Islam.
20 It would have been useful to have some examples of how Romero “mishandles” the sources, but
Pouwels leaves us in suspense in this regard.
21 Romero, Lamu: History, Society and Family in an East African Port City, vii.
22 Zein died of a heart attack, but rumour has it that he was killed in a car accident at the moment a
curse was being pronounced on him by some of those he had offended on Lamu. Scott Reese, Email,
Tue, 05 Jun 2001.
23 Fallers quoted in Abdul Hamid Mohamed el Zein, The Sacred Meadows: A Structural Analysis of Religious
Symbolism in an East African Town (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), xvi.
24 For a description of the position of the scholar who bridges the East/West divide, my discussion of
Lila Abu Lughod below.
25 Zein reviews nearly the whole of the body of Geertz’s work to that time including his 1964 essay,
“Ideology as a Cultural System,” reprinted in Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973). For Crapanzano he references Vincent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan
Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). For Eickelman,Dale F. Eickelman,
Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).
Works by Bujra and Gilsenan are Abdalla S. Bujra, The Politics of Stratification, a Study of Political Change in
a South Arabian Town (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) and Michael Gilsenan, Saint and Sufi in Modern
Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). Gilsenan is one of
Constantin’s interlocutors in the debates about Sufism and charisma.
Vol. 5, Fall 2005, © 2005 The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies
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