For Indians in colonial East Africa, the primary unit of social belonging was the religious community, while the primary unit of political belonging was race. British officials happily consigned responsibility over ‘private’ matters of family, charity, and belief to organizations that represented local Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Goan, and other confessional groups and subgroups. Such groups in turn jealously guarded their jurisdictions, thereby helping to limit the nature of public colonial debate to matters of legal equality and economic regulation, broadly debated by non-sectarian ‘Indian Associations’ representing local, territorial, and regional levels. This public-private division has often been reproduced in academic scholarship. A new generation of work on East African Indians, more transnationally focused and better attuned to ‘sub-imperialist’ dynamics, has nonetheless replicated the secular nationalist bias of earlier scholarship that privileged the colonial public over the social community. Such work continues to stress the role of race and imperial inequalities while minimizing both the significance and constructiveness of religious politics. Indian Associations continue to occupy the historiographical center stage, with Hindu Mandals and Muslim Jamaats remaining obscured in their communal corners.Footnote 1
Yet colonial East Africa was also populated by ambitious and eccentric individuals who rejected the pluralist conventions that had created a public sphere to debate racial equality and a private sphere to protect communal religious activity. In particular, print intellectuals enjoyed freedom to make creative connections between multiple discursive registers in order to develop idiosyncratic and often conflicted notions of belonging. This article examines the career of one such Indian writer, organizer, and print entrepreneur – M. O. Abbasi – who emerged as the most visible Muslim print intellectual in colonial Tanganyika. The writings of Abbasi represent the critical space of a Muslim colonial public, which lies somewhere between the more specific forum of ‘ulamā expertise concerned with proper Islamic practice, and the more expansive realm of Western-dominated improvement rhetoric. Abbasi was the leading figure to usher into the capital of Dar es Salaam what Dietrich Reetz has termed the ‘Islamic sphere’ that emerged in the colonial India experience, which was ‘constituted by institutionalized activity, formalized public discourses, and booming associational life’.Footnote 2 The groups that Abbasi helped to form and sometimes lead were animated by the ‘so-called insurgent publics of Muslims and Muslim elites who, in a disadvantaged minority position, felt they had no significant voice in the colonial polity's decision-making’.Footnote 3 This voiced fear of political-religious marginalization, which lay at the heart of Pakistani nationalism in South Asia, drove the logic and spirit of Abbasi's public writings. The relationship between the Islamic spheres of colonial India and mainland Tanzania, however, was not simply one of parallel and comparison, but also one of deeply intertwined connection. The ideas and institutions of a colonial Muslim public that were first pioneered in British India were eagerly appropriated and translated to an East African environment, with Abbasi plainly standing as the most prolific and visible figure in this process.
Equally important to this article is the ‘booming associational life’ that typified not only British India but also British East Africa. In his study of Bombay and the Western Indian Ocean, Nile Green argues that organizational shifts in urban Islam were driven by the market-minded activities of various ‘religious firms’ that coordinated public aspects of worship, education, and charity. The most self-consciously modern form of these was the anjuman (‘association’), which was ‘typically governed by a board of directors and supported by subscriptions or other modes of formalized charity’, thus distinguishing itself from the jamāʽat (‘community’), more often a ‘customary form of an endogamous religious group’ in which leadership was frequently hereditary rather than elected.Footnote 4 Both these names and organizational forms flourished in colonial East Africa and became cockpits of contestation, often more racial than sectarian, over local religious and political authority. Abbasi co-founded the most significant of these bodies, the Anjuman Islamiyya, in Tanganyika in 1926, and his public career was largely tied to that organization's shifting fortunes.
This article uses the careers of Abbasi and the Anjuman Islamiyya to investigate the creativity and limits of forging alternative Islamic forms of belonging in a pluralist colonial society politically dominated by race and socially dominated by sect. The subsequent victory of a race-based, anticolonial nationalism in Tanganyika that vilified religious politics has rendered Abbasi and the country's many pan-Islamic institutions as orphans to nationalist narratives. Yet the language and possibilities that Abbasi and similar thinkers explored reveal a rich legacy of a modernist and reform-minded Islam that spanned the Western Indian Ocean and directly engaged with questions of universal rights, racial equality, citizenship, and territorial sovereignty, which continue to loom large in East Africa today.
AN EAST AFRICAN JOURNALIST
Mohamad Omar Abbasi was born in Junagadh, Kathiawar around 1900. He graduated from Bombay University and studied law in London in 1917–18, came to East Africa in 1923, first working as a schoolteacher in Zanzibar and later Mombasa, and in 1925 moved to Dar es Salaam to take up employment as secretary to the Tanganyika Indian Association.Footnote 5 He was a Sunni Muslim, similar in confession to the town's African Muslim population but distinct from the town's overwhelmingly Shīʽa Indian Muslim population, and typically signed letters as ‘M. O. Abbasi, B. A. (Hons), Journalist, Dar es Salaam’.Footnote 6 He appears to have died in Dar es Salaam around 1961. He was a reputed ‘genius with languages’, having learned Russian fluently in six months by accompanying a group of Soviet researchers traveling the territory, and was known as someone who neither had a head for business nor appeared particularly interested in it.Footnote 7 A large and imposing man who wore a Jinnah-style hat and long jacket, Abbasi opened a shop in 1926 repairing typewriters and doing locksmith work, which would subsidize the pursuit of his journalist and political careers. His life was typified by daring polemics, occasional physical brawls, and unregistered paralegal work.Footnote 8 He gained local renown as a public poet, composing poems in Urdu, Gujarati, English, and Swahili languages, and performing them at public gatherings such as maulid and ʽīd festivals. Abbasi particularly distinguished himself from the town's larger Indian community by his outspokenness and confidence in using English, which enabled him to initiate public debates as few others could. Tanganyika's Special Branch observed that his ‘uncontrolled pen is a source of embarrassment to every society he has joined’.Footnote 9 Despite his enormous output as a writer, organizer, and political activist, he is, remarkably, almost invisible in Tanzania's historiography. Martha Honey identifies him as ‘one of the few Asians who attempted to cross the class/colour barrier’; John Iliffe describes him simply as ‘a journalist and Muslim extremist’.Footnote 10 Abbasi's life also represents a peculiar historical marginality. Commanding excellent English, pursuing wide-ranging intellectual interests, yet lacking material prosperity and happily leading an ascetic life: these qualities marked him as an eccentric in a larger Indian community dominated by pragmatic businessmen who tended to treat religion as a private communal affair.
Abbasi's public career was based on two skills – his command of English, which he leveraged into a several jobs as a quintessential ‘colonial intermediary’, and his command of print technologies. A British Secretariat official penned a short, snide, but revealing overview of his early career, in which he described Abbasi as:
once a lawyer's clerk [who] advertises for legal work but has no legal qualifications. He is a man of some education, fluent in English, who makes a little money as a letter-writer and now published a paper styled ‘Jolly Joker’. He is irresponsible but convincing; a fire-brand in his hatred of Hindus, and has always needed watching even though he exercises but little real influence. His knowledge of English has usually enabled him to find his way into political controversies.Footnote 11
After failing to qualify for a legal career, Abbasi became a professional letter writer, an unregulated trade in Tanganyika viewed by officials, as it was in the regulated context of West Africa, as consisting of ‘profiteers of personal misfortune, charlatans, and busybodies’.Footnote 12 Upon arriving in Dar es Salaam, Abbasi entered local Indian politics, which had been sharply energized in 1923 following the success of a territory-wide hartal or commercial strike that protested racial discrimination in retail regulation. His first employment in Tanganyika was as secretary to the territory's Indian Association, from which he launched attacks on the Hindu-owned Tanganyika Opinion for misreporting details about an ongoing strike between Indian workers and the Public Works Department.Footnote 13 In June 1926, he was dismissed ‘for alleged irregularities’; he would hold this classically ‘nationalist’ organization in contempt thereafter.Footnote 14
Fortunately, the world of colonial print culture produced opportunities for reinvention as well as influence. Colonial Dar es Salaam was a lively node within a wider Indian Ocean printing world of ‘small-scale jobbing presses run on a shoe-string and embedded in local communities’, but which operated ‘on transnational axes drawing together Africa, Indian, Muslim and Christian political worlds’.Footnote 15 Abbasi's career took firm root in Tanganyika's nascent newspaper scene, obtaining his first formal job as editor of the short-lived Dar es Salaam newspaper African Comrade (1925–7), a weekly which ran alongside a daily edition called the Jolly Joker, a single sheet of Abbasi's rhetorical questions touching on political items of the day.Footnote 16 Abbasi was fired from the African Comrade by its owner, Alerekhai Kheraj, a wealthy importer and president of the Ismaili Council, for his ‘dilatory methods’ which caused ‘unnecessary expense by making the compositors work overtime’, as well as for continuing to give ‘offence to various subscribers’.Footnote 17 Abbasi would later claim that he was dismissed for advocating open racial admission policies of the Anjuman Islamiyya (see below).Footnote 18 He revived the Jolly Joker in 1930–1, only to see it deregistered after he indirectly insulted a European Legislative Council member; the publication was characterized by one of Abbasi's Indian critics as ‘some unhappy lampoon against certain respectable people in the town’.Footnote 19 He launched yet another newspaper, Al Muslim, in 1932, ‘entirely for the service of Islam’.Footnote 20 His brother M. U. (Muhammad Usman) Abbasi applied for registration, but it was ‘M. O.’ who undoubtedly did all the writing. ‘I am no visionary, revolutionary, fanatic or somebody dynamic but a simple soul’, he averred, and explained why there was a need for a dedicated ‘Muslim’ paper in Tanganyika:
…to give expression to Muslim sentiments and to serve as a salubrious check on the riotous Hindu Press which spares no occasion to misrepresent Muslim cause and hurt Muslim sentiments stooping sometimes to scurrilous defamation of local Muslim leaders.Footnote 21
Tanganyika's two Indian newspapers, the Tanganyika Opinion and Tanganyika Herald, were both Hindu-owned and operated, and thus he reasoned that ‘the Muslim community remains inarticulate and events of the Muslim world unreported or unpublished’.Footnote 22 While critical of Hindu social practices, Al Muslim particularly targeted sectarian divisions among Indian Muslims, who more than Hindus ‘cling all the more tenaciously to castes’.Footnote 23 The police commissioner concluded that once his brother had secured sufficient subscribers, then ‘the editing will be done by M. O. Abbasi and an anti-Hindu policy will be started’.Footnote 24 Such was the newspaper's political sensitivity that the matter reached Tanganyika's Executive Council, which advised that Abbasi pay the maximum bond, and moreover that legislation be revised to make it obligatory for all future newspapers to execute a large bond.Footnote 25 Unable to afford the heightened registration bond, Abbasi renamed Al Muslim as The Tanganyika Affairs, which lasted only one issue.
Yet opportunities to influence local print culture went beyond editorships of registered newspapers. In his capacity as a printing press merchant and repairman, Abbasi maintained an important role in Dar es Salaam's ramshackle publishing world, particularly nearer the bottom end of what Isabel Hofmeyr has termed the ‘colonial-born’ presses that adorned the East African littoral, which had always ‘to rely on extemporization and ad hockery’.Footnote 26 He sold a secondhand, manually operated Japanese press in 1937 to the Ganda immigrant Erica Fiah, who used the press to publish his Swahili newspaper Kwetu (1937–51), the first independent African newspaper in Tanganyika, which is arguably the country's richest source of colonial African thought.Footnote 27 Fiah indulged Abbasi with space for articles, which he used to decry the ‘rumbling of racial acrimony and animosity’ in Dar es Salaam; Abbasi paid him back by calling on Indians to provide ‘economic redemption of the Natives through Islam’ by investing in African businesses such as Kwetu.Footnote 28 Free of editorial responsibility, Abbasi reinvented himself as a freelance journalist, and launched a remarkable career as Tanganyika's most prolific letter-writer to European-owned newspapers, which he maintained during a five-year period (1937–42) away in Kenya and Uganda.Footnote 29 He never hid behind pen names, as did most correspondents. Through his writings, the ‘letters to the editor’ space was transformed into a venue to introduce modernist Islamic thought into public debate over local, territorial, and global politics.
Abbasi's intellectual interests in Islam, the basis of his political and social views, did not accord with conventional lines of debate set by local ‘ulamā. For most Muslim writers and debaters in colonial East Africa, Islam was firstly a question of correct practice: what was the appropriate form and timing of public ritual; how and when an individual should pray, fast, feast, and be buried.Footnote 30 Abbasi's global and modernist perspectives on Islam stemmed partly from views he shared with Indian immigrants who found local Islamic institutions in East Africa largely derivative from a superior cultural center, echoing what Green has termed the ‘imperial-Islamicate’ model of development, which was not simply a mirror image of British imperialism, but rather one in which ‘some Indians felt able to participate as Muslim imperial citizens’.Footnote 31 Abbasi was visibly impatient with the insularity of local Islamic authorities who drew their status from what he viewed as parochial and inadequate religious training schools, mastery of obscurant Sufi practices, or simple privilege of birth, rather than through cosmopolitan-minded print activity and public argument. In sharp contrast, Abbasi's point of departure for debating Islam began with the work of the Punjabi-born philosopher, poet, and lawyer Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938). For Iqbal, Islam stood not only as a religion but also a political and legal philosophy wholly suitable for the modern age. The power of Iqbal's philosophical and poetic approach to Islam was to acknowledge the widely felt impotence Muslims shared under colonial rule, while also reminding them of Islam's past glories and its future possibilities as a source of liberation, particularly as Islam had already equipped its followers with the requisites of modern life such as legal concepts and civic mores without requiring worship to the ‘false idol’ of the nation-state.Footnote 32 Just as Fiah's Kwetu served to popularize and domesticate the pan-Africanist thought of Aggrey, Padmore, and Garvey, Abbasi's many journalistic forums would similarly propagate the modernist Islam of Iqbal: he translated Iqbal's poetry for English and Gujarati readers, adding his own glosses to underline Islam's universal values and its leveling of social status.Footnote 33
But as has been already seen in his hostility toward Hindu politics, Abbasi often pursued reckless polemics that alienated potential allies and partners. His ecumenical work was expressly Sunni in content, grounded in significant if episodic hostility toward Shīʽa Islam and, more generally, toward the global encroachments of non-Muslims into Islamic lands. One local Shīʽa of Dar es Salaam remembered Abbasi as brilliant but also an indulger in fitina (strife).Footnote 34 Abbasi wrote a series of inflammatory articles about Shīʽa in Gujarati-language circulars that argued Sunni Islam was the only legitimate path. He took a leading role in the bitter dispute between Shīʽa Indians and the town's quite small Indian Sunni community in 1948 over the veracity of Peshawar Nights, a printed transcript of dialogues then circulating among Shīʽa Ithnasheri in Dar es Salaam that defended Shīʽa beliefs through reference to Sunni tradition. Abbasi was enraged by India's 1948 invasion of Hyderabad, and apoplectic at the creation of Israel, which led him to uncharacteristically violent remarks, such as in his denouncement of American ‘Gangsterism’ in recognizing Israel, which would be ultimately corrected by God, ‘the best Chess-player as was instanced by Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in India, and the end of Hitler’.Footnote 35 Such polemics often led to press censorship, and exacerbated his marginal status among an Indian community that tended toward political quietism after the nationalist confrontations of the 1920s.Footnote 36
ANJUMAN ISLAMIYYA AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING
Muslim religious life in Dar es Salaam was segmented by mosque. In 1910 there were mosques for each of the four Indian Muslim sects (Sunni, Shīʽa Ismaili, Shīʽa Ithnasheri, and Shīʽa Bohora), one for Ibāḍī Arabs, one for Comorians, and two other Sunni mosques. The earliest mention of mosques notes that they were separated by community, and their ownership and attendance remained so throughout the colonial period.Footnote 37 Indians, Arabs, and Africans would pray together at the ijumaa or Friday mosque, but Indians rarely if ever prayed at African mosques and vice versa. Such social segmentation structured the reproduction of inequalities. The most pressing issue for the town's interwar Muslim communities was the quality and availability of education. Ismailis and Bohoras had formed communal schools in the 1920s, and other Indian Muslims attended either those schools or the pan-communal Lok Tilak School, later incorporated into the government-run Indian Central School. Unlike these Indian schools, Africans could only obtain advanced secular education either in non-religious and highly selective government schools, or in Christian mission schools. Islamic schools for Africans were limited in scope to elementary religious instruction.Footnote 38
The Anjuman Islamiyya (Islamic Association) was founded in 1926 by Kachchhi and Punjabi Sunnis in Dar es Salaam to overcome this segmentation, in order to produce a single public voice on matters of Islam, and to address general issues of Islamic welfare. Like its Bombay namesake, this Anjuman Islamiyya can be viewed as a cultural improvement project of the middle class, mainly mercantile and bureaucratic, that sought to unite urban Muslims through coordination of philanthropy by subscription, fundraising, and government grants.Footnote 39 Its founding writ was to safeguard and promote ‘the interests of Tanganyika Muslims in all directions (economic, social, moral and spiritual)’.Footnote 40 Although expressly Sunni in leadership and orientation, the Dar es Salaam Anjuman was not sectarian in outlook, and gladly accepted funds from a wealthy Shīʽa Ithnasheri merchant, Abdulrasul Satchu Pira, to construct its headquarters.Footnote 41 More explicitly political pan-Islamic projects, such as the Federated Muslim Union (1930) and the Tanganyika Muslim League (1932) – both also co-founded by M. O. Abbasi – quickly came and went, leaving the Anjuman Islamiyya as colonial Tanganyika's most enduring and important pan-Islamic organization.Footnote 42
The organization's longevity grew out of its early success in coordinating Dar es Salaam's Islamic festivals between 1926 and 1934. The annual Islamic calendar centered on three major festival dates – 'īd al-aḍḥā, the ‘major feast’ during the month of pilgrimage; 'īd al-fiṭr to celebrate the end of Ramadhan, and the vigorously competitive maulid or celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. Maulid was the most popular of these three in terms of public participation, and is best interpreted, according to Anne Bang, as a ritual ‘designated to bring the expression of orthodox devotion out from the private houses and into public space’.Footnote 43 During the interwar period, Tanga, Bagamoyo, and Dar es Salaam each came to conduct a first maulid as an official event on the Prophet's birthday, which enjoyed the imprimatur and presence of high-ranking colonial officials. Yet public maulid were grafted onto patterns of competitive dance societies, widening popular participation while rendering elite control over the festivity more elusive.Footnote 44 Thus the stakes of maintaining town unity at the first official celebration were high, for it gave opportunity to rival madrassas to boast superior training. Celebrations were vulnerable to competition between rival processions, which could spin out of control.
Being seen to exercise influence and control over such potentially fraught occasions thus promised the coordinators a wide legitimacy and prestige. The stylized format of Dar es Salaam's first coordinated 'īd fetes organized by the Anjuman Islamiyya were expressly Indian – ‘a diminutive edition of Id Fairs and Orasis held at places like Ajmere, Lahore and Bombay in India … [s]hops and restaurants were symmetrically arranged round the quadrangle which was enclosed for sports, speeches, and music’.Footnote 45 These early festivals were ambitiously inclusive and cosmopolitan. The ‘Orasis’ mentioned in the description above is an awkward Anglicization of ‘urs (wedding), an Indian Sufi ritual that commemorated the death anniversary of Sufi saints by drawing on early Islamic matrimonial traditions. The presence of saintly ‘urs celebrations suggests not only robust participation among Indian Sufis in local Islamic life, but also a wider skein of ritual that tied East Africa not only to India but also to Natal, where, according to Green, ‘urs festivals formed a major feature of Muslim urban life in early twentieth-century Durban.Footnote 46 Exercising influence also meant being seen to defend legitimate Muslim practice against an interfering colonial state. When false rumors spread that the government wanted to prohibit Muslims from sacrificing goats in their homes on the eve of ʽīd al-aḍḥā, the Anjuman loudly protested this unjust encroachment into ‘Islamic Law and Society’, and successfully elicited a formal denial.Footnote 47 Yet the main festival site that the Anjuman chose was the product of a racial urban policy that underscored the social chasm between Indians and Africans. A ‘neutral zone’ had been created over the 1920s to separate the town's Indian and African populations with a cordon sanitaire, ostensibly on public health grounds to protect each community from ‘endemic’ diseases of the other.Footnote 48 The public space that emerged was termed Mnazi Mmoja, and its lower section, just opposite the Anjuman Islamiyya building on Sultan Street, became a rare thing in Dar es Salaam, a sacralized public space, albeit one created from and bound by racial zoning.
As Louis Brenner has observed, projects of Islamic universalism often become points of contention that reveal major divisions within Muslim communities.Footnote 49 The modernist organizational forms of anjuman and jamāʽat had a franchise-like quality that facilitated their far-flung export across the Indian Ocean, but such modular bodies were more decisively shaped by stubbornly local dynamics. The Jamiatul al-Islamiyya (Islamic Society), according to Roman Loimeier, was ‘probably the first Salafī organization in Zanzibar’. It was established in 1922 by an Ibāḍī convert, Sālim b. Saʽīd b. Sayf al-Shuhaybī, student of the influential Zanzibari scholar ʽAbdallāh Bā Kathīr.Footnote 50 A Dar es Salaam branch of the Zanzibar Jamiatul al-Islamiyya was established around 1930–1 by the town's African Muslim elite, most notably Kleist Sykes, a government clerk and successful businessman.Footnote 51 Members, overwhelmingly residents of the town's main African neighborhood of Kariakoo, proudly affixed unsigned membership cards outside their houses.Footnote 52 The Jamiatul's growth bespoke the failure of the Anjuman Islamiyya to meet African demands. Sykes had implored the wealthier Muslims at the town's 1930 maulid audience ‘to provide facilities for the education and enlightenment of the Swahili brethern [sic] who needd [sic] schools for Koranic teachings and a Central School for Islamic Theology’.Footnote 53 Subsequent inaction moved him to work instead through the Jamiatul al-Islamiyya, which in 1936 founded an Islamic school for African Muslim children. The location of the school building was significant – situated directly opposite the Anjuman Islamiyya, across the Islamic festival grounds on the ‘African’ side of Mnazi Mmoja. Purchased with funds raised through membership fees, public subscription, and a gift from the Aga Khan, the school offered primary education to African Muslim boys and girls to prepare for competition to enter government secondary school.Footnote 54 Sykes later complained that the Jamiatul al-Islamiyya had approached Indian Muslims about education, but ‘no one appeared to be interested on the subject as most of the Muslim Communities had schools of their own’. Indian disinterest had only grown by 1938, when Sykes bitterly reported that financial aid requests went unanswered, and enrollment, which had risen to 800, had fallen to 358. Sykes concluded that the Anjuman Islamiyya's newly-launched Muslim school should rightly call itself the ‘Punjab Muslims School’.Footnote 55 Later entreaties to secure Indian Muslim financial support, with the exception of a significant donation by Karimjee Jivanjee, fell on deaf ears.Footnote 56 Collapse of cooperation over education precipitated a larger collapse in unity over Islamic festivals. Already in 1934, the Anjuman Islamiyya had apparently lost its control over organizing maulid to another group of influential Indians at odds with its leadership. African and Arab Muslims, who had sat on the maulid committee but with little effective power, formally broke with Indian leaders entirely to form a completely separate maulid committee under the auspices of the Arab Association by 1938.Footnote 57
The Anjuman Islamiyya proved more nimble in its role as the cosmopolitan gatekeeper of Islam in Tanganyika. It served as a well-connected forum for the surprisingly large and constant traffic of international figures passing through Dar es Salaam, owing largely to its position as a port of call on the interwar shipping circuit between Bombay and Durban. Abbasi organized public speeches of touring Islamic speakers, such as the Indian Khilafat movement leader Maulana Mohammed Ali Jouhar and his brother Shaukat Ali.Footnote 58 He also hosted Heneina Khoury, the Egyptian poet, on her visit to Dar es Salaam in 1931, and kept in touch with her during her subsequent travels in the Middle East, publicizing her work in Tanganyika.Footnote 59 Particularly influential and long remembered was a visit by the itinerant, Meerut-born Muslim reformer Maulana Mohammed Abdul Alim Siddiqui, who in his 1935 visit to Dar es Salaam declared Islam the only religion that can ‘deliver its votaries from the illusory temptations and grip of foreign imperialism’.Footnote 60 The Anjuman Islamiyya also vigorously pursued its self-appointed role as gatekeeper of global Islamic orthodoxy. When a small Ahmadiyya mission originating from Punjab arrived in Tanganyika and began to circulate its newspaper Mapenzi ya Mungu (Love of God) in the 1930s, the Anjuman Islamiyya demanded that they be stopped, arguing that the ‘integrity of the Muslims over the world is secured by the idea of the finality of prophethood alone’, which the Ahmadiyya, by recognizing another prophet (Mirza Ghulam Ahmad) after Muhammad, ‘must be regarded by every Muslim as a serious danger to the solidarity of Islam’.Footnote 61 The government chose not to intervene, but would later accept Anjuman demands that the Ahmadiyya not be allowed a physical presence in the African neighborhood of Kariakoo; it would, rather ironically, instead safely zone Ahmadiyya headquarters in the Indian neighborhood, in close proximity to the Anjuman Islamiyya building.Footnote 62
Membership access became the principal issue to upset and ultimately undermine the Anjuman Islamiyya. Abbasi, a man of little wealth but of pan-racial outlook, had been displaced in terms of influence by Dr Sultan Bax Malik, a Punjabi-born physician who by the 1940s had become the most influential Indian politician in colonial Dar es Salaam. Malik, a Sunni like Abbasi, had been formally invited to take over the financially struggling Anjuman Islamiyya in 1945, and under his leadership it became a sort of Pakistan Society, coordinating elaborate annual celebrations of Pakistan's independence as well as directing the organization towards the more narrow interests of Dar es Salaam's Punjabi Sunni community.Footnote 63 Malik, who also chaired the town's Landlord and Property Owners Association – just as Abbasi chaired its Renters Association – successfully restricted voting membership in the Anjuman Islamiyya to dues-paying members. He also suggested that African self-rule should be delayed for between fifty and a hundred years – a position which thoroughly alienated the town's African Muslim population.Footnote 64 The organization was further beset by internal squabbles between Kachchhi Sunnis and Punjabi Sunnis, the latter of whom were mainly Railway Department workers who lived nearby the Anjuman Islamiyya and viewed it as a social club. Matters came to a head in 1952 when Abbasi launched a series of blistering attacks on Malik, reviving his ‘Jolly Joker’ rhetorical question format to ask the Anjuman Islamiyya ‘[w]hat have you done to foster brotherhood amongst various sections of the Muslim Community? How many Arab members have you enlisted? How many Ismailis, Ithnasheris, Bohoras, Cutchis and Baluchis? Any Africans at all? If not, why not?’ After accusing its trustees of enriching themselves by renting out waqf premises and pocketing public subscriptions, he challenged them to a public election, ‘in a Mass Meeting of Muslim without distinction of caste, colour, race or country’.Footnote 65 An influential African Muslim and newspaper editor, R. M. Plantan, joined Abbasi in leading a procession of African Muslims to conduct a mass demonstration demanding that Anjuman Islamiyya be made a public body and open its doors ‘to all Muslims without distinction or discrimination’. Abbasi sarcastically asked the organization to change its name to ‘The Punjabi Association’.Footnote 66
Malik died suddenly before an election could be held, and the remaining Anjuman Islamiyya leadership apparently retreated and locked its doors, declining even to organize the year's maulid. By maintaining prohibitively high membership rates – a five-shilling joining fee plus two shillings per month, or roughly quadruple what one would need to acquire a TANU card – and exercising the managing committee's prerogative to reject any application, Malik's supporters successfully deterred subsequent leadership challenges, and would ultimately kill African Muslim interest in the organization.Footnote 67 The Bombay-modeled, middle-class reformist origins of the Anjuman had severely withered, replaced by a core constituency of Punjabi Indian railway workers who were also busily defending their privileged workplace positions in the face of a growing African challenge to acquire skilled jobs.Footnote 68 African Muslims did for a time continue to demand that the Anjuman Islamiyya open itself to poorer members, but even a staunch African supporter of Abbasi explained that Abbasi's formulation of ‘Muslim first, one's country afterwards’ amounted to ‘putting the cart before the horse’. He elaborated:
No African will agree that one's religion comes first before his mother country. Religion, according to us, should be practised inside the four walls of one's house, or a temple, a mosque, a church or any other place suitable for worshipping and never to be used as a means to gain political status. We all know the consequences that resulted in India after the partition as well as before, due to this ‘religion first and country after’ and any efforts to promote and pave the way for such policies in our Territory should be discouraged.Footnote 69
For African Muslims, the sectarian violence of partition recommended not only a greater emphasis on secular-minded nationalist unity, but also a more cautious and selective appropriation of India's exported Islamic institutions. Abbasi nonetheless enjoyed a growing if distant sort of respect from the town's African Muslims and leading ‘ulamā. Mzee bin Ali Comorian, a leading sheikh in Dar es Salaam, described Abbasi as ‘a famous Theologist [sic], one amongst the East African Moslem Leaders who needs no introduction to our readers as to his capability and capacity in the Islamic Theology’.Footnote 70 Yet the social distance of race proved more enduring. Abbasi participated in a last-gasp pan-Islamic effort to form the Central Society of Tanganyika Muslims in 1955, launched by wealthy Ismaili supporters with the intent of founding an Islamic teacher training college in Tanganyika.Footnote 71 By this time, the public exercise of religious leadership by Asian and Arab Muslims had become politically fraught. Thousands of TANU-supporting African Muslims led a dramatic walkout at the maulidi celebrations at Mnazi Mmoja in 1957 to protest the organizing roles played by the Central Society's Asian and pro-United Tanganyika Party (UTP) figures, ending the year's festival and effectively crippling the body.Footnote 72 Following the meteoric rise of TANU, which viewed even vaguely rival associations with deep hostility, such projects entailed sharply diminishing returns. The Anjuman Islamiyya rapidly faded from local African consciousness. Based on oral research she carried out in the late 1960s, Daisy Sykes Buruku reports, incorrectly but revealingly, that the Anjuman Islamiyya was founded by Indians in the 1930s in order ‘to detach themselves from Africans’.Footnote 73 More recently, African Muslims in Kariakoo recalled the Anjuman Islamiyya simply as an Indian social club.Footnote 74
ISLAM, RACE, AND TERRITORIAL CITIZENSHIP IN LATE COLONIAL TANGANYIKA
If the Anjuman Islamiyya proved a cul-de-sac, then the rapidly changing political and discursive landscape of postwar Tanganyika offered new venues for Indian Islamic activism. For East African Indians, the independence of India and Pakistan and its violent partition, Nehru's call for diaspora nationalists to identify with local populations, and the quick constitutional move toward self-government across British Africa collectively put paid to the patronizing civilizational arguments of the ‘imperial-Islamicate’ and other forms of sub-imperial political engagement. Anticipating this shift, Abbasi had earlier posed rhetorical questions to underscore the underlying political conundrum:
May I know whether the Indians exist as a race or not? And if they do, have they any vested rights in East Africa or are they legitimate residents of this shore opposite to their Motherland and as such a geographical outlet for their colonization? Poor Indians – they boast of looking upon East Africa, as ‘Greater India’.Footnote 75
He despaired at postwar efforts to make Tanganyika a United Nations mandated territory of India, denouncing this sub-imperialist strain of Indian nationalism, which Abbasi now considered ‘the clog in the wheel of Indian progress’.Footnote 76
Plainly at odds with organizational politics, Abbasi became an increasingly effective issue activist. Together with another Sunni Muslim, G. H. Hemani, a bookstore owner and similarly industrious letter writer, Abbasi co-founded the humanitarian Indian Social Service League in 1945 to offer free night instruction in English literacy and religion to adults, as well as present public lectures and help beggars, widows, and orphans. Dar es Salaam's Social Service League was similarly inspired by its Bombay namesake, founded in 1911 by ‘some of the most prominent professional middle-class men in Bombay's public life’ to pursue a non-sectarian goals such as night-school based mass education and Toynbee Hall-style social work.Footnote 77 Membership in Tanganyika was restricted to Asians but its field of service was open to all, and the vast majority of its students were African.Footnote 78 Abbasi also enmeshed himself in the great class question of urban colonial East Africa, the divide between property renters and owners. As chairman of the town's Renters Association, he became Tanganyika's most outspoken advocate of renters' rights, declaring himself ‘neither a capitalist nor a communist but a firm believer in private capital like a true Muslim or Pakistani’, who believed that ‘usury, blackmarket and abnormal avidity are repugnant to Islam and equity’.Footnote 79 He protested the criminalization of renters who had agreed to pay ‘key money’, an illegal upfront fee to acquire rental property, and asked the police department to turn its attention to the landlords who created this ‘epidemic of brigandage’.Footnote 80
The postwar years were characterized by a normative discursive shift toward territorial sovereignty and debates over the forms and meaning of citizenship. Abbasi attempted to marry the broader ‘Islamic sphere’ of insurgent Muslim political claims with an embrace of territorial nationalism, which neatly harmonized with his persistently color-blind politics and consistent public voice for non-racial citizenship. This view was grounded, to his mind, firstly in Islam – in which color had been ‘nailed to the coffin thirteen centuries ago’ – and presently in the universal human rights movement, whose 1948 declaration he declared as evidence that the world was ‘advancing towards the ideal of human Brotherhood’.Footnote 81 Citizenship, however, was not an issue of abstract debate but, particularly for East African Indians, a pressing matter of individual choice. On advice of the Aga Khan and other communal leaders, several thousand South Asians in Tanganyika applied for British nationality after 1948. The ensuing scramble not only for British but also for Indian and Pakistani citizenship was great, and Abbasi prophetically explained the stakes for Indians in Tanganyika:
Be a citizen of Tanganyika, like the children of the soil, and sleep in peace. And give up casting nostalgic eyes across the Ocean. You have to burn your boats if you want to stay here. The policy of being in Darius' army and dreaming of Alexander's help will prove a dead-sea-fruit, indeed! ‘Be Tanganyikans, pure and simple,’ is all I say.Footnote 82
Postwar Tanganyika's overriding problem of political thought had become the relationship between racial community and territorial homeland. Despairing at the exclusionary loyalties encouraged by racial politics, which explicitly challenged Indians' belonging to African land, Abbasi repeated, mantra-like, the formula of territorial sovereignty, that ‘[t]he objective should be: “I am a Tanganyikan first and a European, Asian or African afterwards.”’Footnote 83 For him, though territorial sovereignty might risk the full development of an Islamic sphere, it could at least dispense with the noxious racial hierarchies of empire and colonial diaspora. Territorial sovereignty provided the best available means to pursue the cosmopolitan and antiracialist interpretation of Islam that he shared with Moulana Abdul Aleem Siddiqui, which is that a Muslim is ‘a citizen of the world – Islam knows no barriers of race or country or geographical limitations’.Footnote 84 During the creation of Tanganyika's 1951 constitutional report, Abbasi elaborated his vision of ‘Tanganyika Nationality’, which included non-racial citizenship and Swahili as the official national language.Footnote 85 An open-air meeting of the Tanganyika African Association held in Dar es Salaam in January 1952 passed formal recommendations to the ongoing Constitutional Development Committee. Several prominent Asians were also invited, including Abbasi, who stated that their political objective should be primarily to become Tanganyikans, ‘not black or white Tanganyikans but simply Tanganyikans’.Footnote 86 He reluctantly joined the pro-TANU Asian Association in 1955 after seeing that ‘multi-racialism’ was ensconced in Tanganyika's constitutional development, acknowledging the practical failure of earlier pan-Islamic organizations.Footnote 87
Though events were outpacing Abbasi's own political development, he neatly identified TANU's core paradox: it confined ‘nationalism to Africans alone, although the declared policy is to let the non-Africans live in the land after self-government, rather a contradiction in terms’.Footnote 88 His final comments on TANU in early 1958 grew increasingly bitter and despairing regarding its racial exclusivity: it privileged ‘African’ interests over Tanganyikan ones, and was ‘avowedly racial and not Patriotic in the sense of serving Tanganyika’.Footnote 89 Special Branch, which had viewed Abbasi with alarm in the 1920s and 1930s, now dismissed him as ‘a harmless crank’.Footnote 90 But this ‘crank’ retained an important print presence with the ability to engage powerful interlocutors. Julius Nyerere, a close reader of the Tanganyika Standard, responded to Abbasi's provocation by soliciting the support of ‘small Gandhis and Nehrus’ throughout Tanganyika to support TANU, asking Europeans and Asians to become ‘Tanganyikans’, and promised them equal rights of citizenship.Footnote 91 Having just weathered a close-run internal revolt by agreeing to participate in multiracial elections, Nyerere would over the next four years ably navigate populist demands for racial leveling on the one hand, and institutional pressures and his own ideological preferences for a race-blind territorial form of citizenship on the other, in finding TANU's path to power and independence.Footnote 92
With power in sight, the looming political question was less how to transform Tanganyika from a geographical expression into a political community, and more how the fruits of independence would be distributed. For African Muslim activists, the diverging educational results between Christian and Muslim pupils was growing ever clearer, and would plainly result in unequal access to bureaucratic offices, but this was suddenly forbidden as a subject for public debate, after the long-thriving colonial-era ‘Islamic sphere’ was deliberately shut down by TANU as a form of destructive disunity in 1958.Footnote 93 Muslim education would become the future core issue of pan-Islamic activism, as well as form the basis of confrontational politics against TANU and the late colonial and early postcolonial state.Footnote 94 In the meantime, deeply entrenched and conspicuous patterns of social distance between Indian and African Muslims continued to prevail. An African resident of Kariakoo recalled that while Indian Muslims helped in construction of African-attended mosques, they did not themselves worship there, but rather went to jamatini (place of jamāʽat) instead of msikitini (place of mosque) – this in plain reference to the well-known Shīʽa worship and community centers, rather than the somewhat forgotten, African-run Jamiatul Islamiyya.Footnote 95 Others similarly distinguished Indian Muslims as wajamati or people who worshipped at jamats, Islamic places of worship implicitly closed to Africans.Footnote 96
CONCLUSION
M. O. Abbasi became a less frequent correspondent through 1958, and appears to have died around 1961.Footnote 97 In several dozen interviews conducted by the author, only one African could easily recall him – in that case fondly, as a result of his assistance in 1960 in allowing the East African Muslim Students Association to use the Anjuman Islamiyya premises.Footnote 98 For its part, the Anjuman Islamiyya withered into what Abbasi had feared it would become, a Punjabi social club whose chief function was to circulate Pakistani state propaganda.Footnote 99 The printed thought and idiosyncratic life of Abbasi plays no role in the conventional nationalist narratives of Tanzanian history, though this has not deterred others from subsequently attempting to squeeze him in. According to one friend of Abbasi, Julius Nyerere frequently passed by Abbasi's typewriter repair shop, where Abbasi imparted his gifts of political rhetoric and political thought that enabled Nyerere to subsequently become so effective.Footnote 100 But Abbasi's print legacy offers little succor to those who seek to integrate his nationalist ‘contributions’ into a singular anticolonial movement. Rather, he appended his own idiosyncratic notions of community to elaborate a loose form of political belonging that was ultimately defined by adherence to commonsensical Islamic virtues of colorblindness, cosmopolitanism, and individual restraint. Such language, however, found itself badly out of step with the racialized terminology of citizenship (African wananchi versus non-African wageni) and national unity that would envelope Tanzania's print sphere over the 1960s.Footnote 101
Recent influential studies of South Asia's historical engagement with the Indian Ocean world have productively shifted analytical focus from peoples and products to ideas and institutions. But the models remain diffusionist, the ‘Indian Ocean Arena’ providing an uncrowded stage on which the dramas of the Raj and its subjects get played.Footnote 102 Indian historical actors would have happily shared this conceit in the 1920s, but by mid-century could not plausibly ignore the crowding of East Africa's public stage with pan-Africanist thought and organizations. Tanganyika's Muslim colonial public or ‘Islamic sphere’ was constructed in significant part out of Indian Ocean material – the domestication of pan-Islamist thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal and modular associations of India's Muslim urban reformers – but struggled to transcend the social segmentation of sect and race that stubbornly structured colonial life. If a ramshackle print culture and Islamic associational life could not collectively form a politically meaningful public, then a non-racial vision of territorial citizenship would have to suffice as the best possible alternative – an ironic end to a project born out of an earlier confidence in an expansive Indian Ocean world.
