British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 2005
26 April 2005
Abstracts
Dr Felicitas Becker
Why now? Points Towards an Understanding of the Spread of Islam from Coast to Interior in Twentieth-Century East Africa
It has often been noted that although Islam had been present on the East African coast since at least the tenth century, it did not begin to spread beyond the realm of the Swahili culture of the coast until the end of the nineteenth century, and has done so most quickly during the twentieth. This means that the spread of Islam occurred in large measure under Christian colonial administrations, at a time when the Muslim coast had lost the political and commercial pre-eminence it had during the nineteenth century.
My talk will consider several issues that are important in addressing this apparent paradox. They include the ambiguous role of Islam as a means for social separation or social integration, the role of former slaves in developing the latter role over the former; the timing of the arrival of Christian missions on one hand and African Muslim pioneers on the other in different parts of the East African interior, and the role of Islam as a socially relevant form of knowledge in societies that felt a strong need for reform. I intend to use frequent examples from my interview records, so as to illustrate the importance of oral research in understanding this historical process.
Dr Becker studied Modern History and African Studies in Berlin and Zanzibar as an undergraduate and completed her PhD in 2002 in African History at the University of Cambridge, with a thesis entitled ‘A social history of Southeast Tanzania, 1890-1950’. She took up the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002 and her research has involved a great deal of travel to remote locations in Tanzania, in order to conduct interviews.