14 - Bringing ʿIlm to the Common People: Sufi Vernacular Poetry and Islamic Education in Brava, c. 1890–1959

Summary

In the small Indian Ocean port city of Brava, on the southern Benadir coast of Somalia, religious life at the turn of the twentieth century was characterized by the emergence of a new mode of religious instruction, namely Sufi religious poetry composed by Brava's ‘ulamā’ in the language of the town (Chimiini or Chimbalazi), a Bantu language related to Swahili with a substantial proportion of Arabic and Somali vocabulary. This kind of emphasis on religious instruction of the common people in their own vernaculars was a regional phenomenon in the period under study and coincided with the establishment (or intensification) of European rule in East Africa.

The Bravanese ‘ulamā’ who composed these teaching poems were an integral part of the regional network of religious scholars that connected Brava with Zanzibar, the Swahili coast, the Hadramawt, and the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina). They drew on their wide knowledge of Islamic scholarship and devotional texts in Arabic to fashion concise, vivid, accessible, and easy-to-memorize nuggets of religious instruction in the vernacular for the population of the town of Brava. Drawing from the recently published source publication of Brava's Sufi religious poetry in Chimiini, this paper's main focus is on the poems of three Bravanese ‘ulamā’: the female scholar-poet Mana Sitti Habib Jamaladdin or Dada Masiti (c. 1820–1919); the learned and prolific Shaykh Qasim b. Muhyidin al Wa’ili (1882– 1922), both affiliated with the Qādiriyya; and Ahmed Nur b. Haji Abdulqadir bin Abdio Hasan, better known as Mallim Nuri (1881–1959), who was affiliated with the Aḥmadiyya. The latter adopted the practice of versified religious instruction in Chimiini later than Shaykh Qasim and Dada Masiti, producing his vast opus in the period between the end of World War I and his death in 1959.

These steenzi (as these poems are called in Chimiini) offer insight into how the ‘ulamā’ engaged in a particular form of knowledge production and transmission that was meant to influence and transform local religious practice. Apart from the intellectual and didactic dimension of the ‘ulamā's writings, the steenzi also convey something about the lived religious experience of the people of Brava in this time-period, and about how they leveraged orality and writing in all aspects of creating, learning, using, and transmitting this corpus of Islamic learning and devotion.