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THE ISLAMIC POLICY OF PORTUGUESE COLONIAL MOZAMBIQUE, 1960–1973*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2012

MÁRIO MACHAQUEIRO
MÁRIO MACHAQUEIRO*
Affiliation:
Centre for Research in Anthropology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
*
CRIA-Centre for Research in Anthropology, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1069–061 Lisboa, Portugalmaarma@fcsh.unl.pt
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Abstract

Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies towards Islam, focusing on the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war that broke out in 1965, when Muslims were perceived as the main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to an approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in order to align them with the Portuguese. The article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures, and the contributions made by several of those who were involved.

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Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 1097 - 1116
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

For a brief but intense period of its history, roughly corresponding to the years of colonial wars (1965–74), Portuguese colonialism developed an ‘Islamic policy’ in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the two colonies with significant Muslim communities. This involved a set of strategies specifically designed to frame the Muslim populations, based on a reading of Islam not only as a religion or culture but also as a transnational political system. This policy throws some light on the last stage of Portuguese colonialism, allowing us to assess the similarities as well as the differences between it and other colonial experiences in Africa, particularly in situations where the whole colonial structure was under threat.

There were distinctive patterns in the relations of Portuguese colonialism with Islam and Muslim populations. From the 1940s, and even earlier, until the first half of the colonial wars (1961–5), Muslims were basically conceived as threatening and unmanageable. Politicians, missionaries, military, political policemen, and colonial anthropologists described how Muslims, inspired by Arab pan-Islamism, were determined to undermine Portuguese power in Africa by allying with Soviet or Chinese communists.Footnote 1 On the other hand, ‘animist’ populations of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique were considered to be potential allies of Portuguese colonial interests. Unlike Islam, supposedly impervious to ‘Western’ values, African ‘native’ religions were not taken seriously and ‘animists’ were thought to be pliable to Catholic preaching and Portuguese propaganda.Footnote 2 In the 1950s, Islam became a focus of increasing concern because it was perceived as a main stem of the anti-colonial project emerging from the Bandung Conference, a project to which Portuguese ideologues associated Nasser as the ultimate symbol of an alleged Arab expansionism.Footnote 3

This vision was reflected in the literature produced by the academic staff linked to the colonial apparatus. Only in 1958 was the first study entirely dedicated to the impact of Islam on Portuguese colonies published in Portugal.Footnote 4 It was seriously flawed as a piece of scholarship, being mainly based on secondary sources, and tainted by prejudices about ‘pan-Islamism’ and ‘threatening Muslims’. Other texts, such as the confidential reports written by the well-known anthropologist Jorge Dias and his team during the research mission they were conducting in the early 1960s on the ethnic minorities of Angola and Mozambique, displayed the same stereotypes and anxieties about Islam and the Muslim populations.Footnote 5

The late 1960s witnessed a dramatic shift in this stance. First, the new ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council led some prelates of the Portuguese Catholic church to build bridges towards the Muslim communities at the same time as they renounced an aggressive proselytism. In Mozambique, this reorientation was assumed, in 1966, by the bishop of Vila Cabral (currently Lichinga), Don Eurico Dias Nogueira, who could count on the discreet support of the overseas ministry and the head of the dictatorship, Oliveira Salazar.Footnote 6 In turn, the Portuguese administration also embraced a new strategy regarding Muslims, basically as a reaction to the evolution of the colonial war. Thanks to figures such as General Spínola, governor and commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Guinea from May 1968 to November 1973, and those who worked within the intelligence services in Mozambique, a new doctrine of counterinsurgency war, influenced by French experience in Algeria, was being applied.Footnote 7 After earlier violent warfare, which often reinforced hostile and prejudiced feelings towards the ‘natives’, the new approach resorted to ‘psychological’ methods to attract and manipulate the local populations. Furthermore, due to better information, some members of the Portuguese intelligence and the overseas ministry were beginning to admit the strategic relevance of the Muslims living in the colonies, who in Mozambique exceeded one million,Footnote 8 and saw their leadership as a preferential ally of the colonizers. The assumption was that Muslims had become gradually aware of what they stood to lose in future African independent nations ruled by ‘atheist’ Marxist regimes. ‘Animists’, on the other hand, were now understood to have been recruited by the nationalist movements and served as their main supporters, thus becoming lost to the Portuguese cause.Footnote 9 Finally, there was also the pressure that Islamic groups exerted on Portuguese authorities, exploring to their advantage the propaganda about a ‘tolerant’ and ‘multi-racial’ society, and claiming for Muslims the social upgrading promised by the official rhetoric. An Islamic policy emerged from the intersection of all these factors.

Notwithstanding this evolution, the overall change in perception was not linear. Throughout the first period of war, the negative image of the Muslim was anything but one-dimensional. To begin with, the lenses through which it was perceived were the same race-tinted ones applied to black Africans. This view, however, transformed the cognitive map of Portuguese ideologues into something more complex, as they built two contrasting images to picture the Muslims in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique: the ‘Arab-Asian’, supposedly a major threat to the stability of the colonial system, and the ‘Islamized’, considered a hybrid or ‘syncretic’ product, unable to overcome ‘animist’ beliefs that adulterated Islam. Such a conception, spread among different authors and many reports issued by the colonial bureaucracy and the military,Footnote 10 replicated most of the theories conceived by French colonizers about the Islamic communities in West Africa. These theories were summarized in the famous notion of ‘black Islam’. Branded with the qualifiers of ‘superficial’, ‘ignorant’, and ‘syncretistic’, the African variety of Islam was opposed to an Arab/Asian one, construed as ‘truer’ or ‘deeper’ than its African counterpart.Footnote 11 The persistence of this vision, even when the Portuguese were trying to co-opt Muslim dignitaries in order to align them with their interests, is apparent in the fact that the Islamic Sufi brotherhoods in the north of Mozambique were chosen as the primary targets of such a strategy. According to an orientalist paradigm that opposed a ‘pure’ Islam to an ‘impure’ one, that choice was based on the idea that those brotherhoods were not ‘purely’ Islamic. Since Portuguese ‘experts’ deemed ‘impure’ Islam as more amenable to cultural influences from Portugal, it was considered the fittest to be put into use by the colonial authorities as a barrier against nationalist African movements.Footnote 12 Without fully assuming it, they were following the policy that France had used to rule the Muslims of Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta, the Ivory Coast, and Guinea around the start of the twentieth century.Footnote 13

This article addresses some of the issues raised by the strategies that the Portuguese colonial power developed to rule the Muslim communities in Mozambique. Close attention will be paid to the debate about the best strategy to handle the Mozambican Muslims, which hinged on the possibility of an Islamic centre that could be controlled by the Portuguese. Importantly, a certain level of theoretical discussion was not without consequences for policy making. One major actor, Fernando Amaro Monteiro, though in a secondary position within the hierarchy of the colonial staff, was able to circumvent the contradictions and power games that often plagued the Portuguese administration finally to impose his view on how to prevent Muslims from being enrolled by the anti-colonial movement.

Although still neglected among Portuguese historians, the topic of this article has been the focus of several studies, pioneered by Edward Alpers and Michel Cahen, who broke new ground and provided important insights, even though they were still unaware of significant details, especially the full extent of the role played by Amaro Monteiro as the ‘man behind the scenes’.Footnote 14 Monteiro had earlier assessed his own historical experience in texts that combined memoirs with some historiography, sometimes betraying the analytical constraints of an author too closely involved with his subject.Footnote 15 Recently, a long interview he gave to AbdoolKarim Vakil has deepened this memorialized approach.Footnote 16 Among Portuguese scholars, AbdoolKarim Vakil went further in analysing the colonial Islamic policy within a broader history that describes the way Portugal and Islam interacted to become imagined identities.Footnote 17 A thorough overview of that policy can also be found in the studies of Liazzat Bonate, whose field-work in Mozambique has provided a sharper view of the imprint that Portuguese Islamic policies left both on colonial and post-colonial contexts.Footnote 18 A more recent line of works closer to historical anthropology is trying to unravel the ambivalent stance of Portuguese colonial authorities in the face of Islam and the Muslim communities, relating that attitude to identity processes that were beneath the surface of the official rhetoric.Footnote 19 All this scholarship has opened up the path that is explored in this article.

I

In the mid-1960s, some key members of the army and the intelligence services operating in Mozambique had already begun paying attention to the strategic relevance of Muslims in a colonial war. A document produced in 1967 by the Services of Centralization and Coordination of Information in Mozambique (SCCIM) pointed to this new direction: ‘The importance of one million black Muslims among the population of the Province [Mozambique] cannot be denied, especially given the current situation; nor also the fact that they are concentrated in the north, near the foreign territories where the different Islamic and anti-colonial currents have free rein’.Footnote 20 This recognition concurred with the assessments of dangers inherent to the Islamic factor, as we can see in the conclusions drawn by a Technical Commission that worked within the SCCIM:

Proven, as it is, that the subversion has been finding support among Mohammedan dignitaries to achieve its purposes, and believing that it aims at a general use of those structures, the Commission has concluded that there is a pressing need to define the forms and the ways by which we can mobilize the Islamic masses in the province [of Mozambique].Footnote 21

Having failed in their attempts to compete with Islam in the religious arena, since Catholic missions did not show any significant progress, the time was ripe for another approach, one that accepted the irremovable presence of Islam and was able, at the same time, to use it to the advantage of the Portuguese. The new reasoning was even ready to discard decades of supposed expertise on Islamic politics: ‘Apparently, the belief that Islam is de-nationalizing has been proven false. Despite being under great pressure to become a sponsor of the political unity of the Muslim world, it has proved unable to destroy the sense of nationality.’Footnote 22 It seemed that, after all, Islam could be construed as an opportunity for shoring up the Portuguese rule over colonized populations.

To think such a strategy through, Portuguese intelligence resorted to the conceptual dichotomy of ‘polarization’ and ‘de-polarization’. It meant a choice between a setting where Muslims were concentrated (‘polarized’) around major influential or charismatic leaders and a background where they were much more scattered (‘de-polarized’), distributing their allegiance to different and smaller local centres. Strategists in the SCCIM were, in fact, divided between two alternatives: either to promote a ‘polarization’ of Muslims around centres that the authorities could easily control and take advantage of, or to empower the supposed trend of Mozambican Muslims towards ‘de-polarization’.

The second view was argued by Major Fernando da Costa Freire, one of SCCIM's several directors. He based his argument on the assumption that ‘de-polarization’ was the main attribute of the ‘Islamized’ Africans in Mozambique, who were considered to be the largest number there faithful to Islam. Costa Freire believed this prevented their unity or cohesion, thus hindering their mobilization by the anti-colonial movement.Footnote 23 He asserted that the recruitment of Muslims to ‘subversive’ anti-colonial activities in Mozambique was essentially done by those to whom a special dignity was ascribed because of their knowledge on Islamic matters. Locating in Tanzania the Islamic centres in which Mozambican Muslim dignitaries had been taught, he concluded that the ties formed during the teaching of a religious doctrine would easily put the former pupils under the guidance of their masters in all issues, religious as well as political. Tanzanian Islamic centres were therefore suspected of co-opting Muslims leaders in Mozambique against the Portuguese colonial rule.Footnote 24 With these premises – the second one being shared by most of the operatives in the SCCIM, the political police, and the armed forces – Costa Freire proposed two inter-related lines for an Islamic policy enforced by the Portuguese authorities: to isolate, as far as possible, Mozambican Muslims from foreign centres of Islamic education, and to encourage the trend to ‘de-polarization’. This latter approach will be considered first, before the former one.

Costa Freire believed that the black ‘Islamized’ would be ‘de-polarized’ inasmuch as they could free themselves from consulting Muslim figures conspicuous for their expertise on Islamic themes. Limited autonomy should be granted to Islamized people, though not to the extreme that they become completely emancipated:

In order to grant the elements of the Islamic hierarchy of the province sufficient preparation for fostering de-polarization, we do not think necessary that such preparation be high level but only that it be compatible with the cultural state of the ‘masses’. Left to their own crudeness, they will tend to polarization, will be more receptive to external influences and may become de-nationalizing factors.Footnote 25

The final purpose of this strategy was to co-opt Muslims as a barrier against foreign influences and a force to be mobilized in the war against the liberation movement. This double objective was to be attained with a little training on Islamic issues, tailored to elevate the knowledge of the Islamized to such a level that they did not have to ‘polarize’ around local guides. This way the power of external Islamic centres to which the latter could be attached would also be reduced.Footnote 26 Such a perspective pervaded Costa Freire's advice concerning the use of financial resources of the colonial state to sponsor a pilgrimage of carefully selected Mozambican Muslims to Mecca.Footnote 27 In response to a request made to that end, which had been presented to the overseas minister by self-appointed representatives of Islamic brotherhoods in Mozambique, Costa Freire employed the same dichotomous concepts and arguments he had previously developed. In his view, whereas ‘black Islam’ in Mozambique stood for a soft hierarchy and ‘de-polarization’, the Islamic brotherhoods (turuq) imposed ‘a rigid hierarchic discipline’ based on the ‘spiritual and temporal power’ of a xehe, a ruler ‘whose precepts and orders must be obeyed even against the commands of the established authority in the country where they live’Footnote 28 – in Freire's opinion, a typical example of a dangerous ‘polarization’. He believed that if the Islamic brotherhoods could mobilize thousands of people, Muslims who would profit from a visit to Mecca entirely sponsored by the Portuguese state should be chosen among a more ‘autonomous black sector’.

Illustrative of the different lenses with which Portuguese colonizers looked at Islam, Costa Freire's perspective on the ‘de-polarization’ trend was not as consensual as the idea of isolating Mozambican Muslims, particularly African or ‘black’ ones, from external Islamic centres. To reach this goal, the authorities were advised to cut all bridges that could connect Mozambican black Muslims to the foreign sphere, especially to ‘Asian Islam’.Footnote 29 As conceived by Portuguese colonial ideologues, the Asian had a superior identity in comparison to the African, and therefore measures should be taken to prevent the Muslim leadership in Mozambique from becoming ‘polarized’ around foreign (Asian) models.

But even this idea could bear various meanings for different actors within the Portuguese colonial apparatus. For Costa Freire, it basically signified a buttress of traditional or conservative behaviour to Sunni orthodoxy, believed to be the dominant branch of Mozambican Islam.Footnote 30 This aim was closely related to the need to preclude the infiltration of Islamic ‘progressive’ or ‘heretic’ trends, which was supposedly linked to the anti-colonial movement. Colonial authorities were haunted by these concerns even before the outbreak of war. In September 1963, for instance, the government of Mozambique district supported a request presented by an elderly mualimo, Amad Dulá Ismael, to build a mosque with a Qur'anic school attached. The petitioner was a perfect representative of a traditional Sunni Islam that abided by the Portuguese colonial order. The administration sided with him, not with Cassimo Tayob, a former disciple of Dulá Ismael who took the control over the latter's old school, turning it into a ‘de-nationalizing’ and ‘un-Portuguese’ focus.Footnote 31 At this point, Portuguese authorities seemed to be largely ignorant of wahhabism, the Islamic trend that Tayob stood for. They assumed that it conveyed a nasty ‘progressivism’, even though its demeanour was actually of a hyper-orthodox Islam.

And yet, it was exactly in 1963, even before his appointment as an assistant in the SCCIM, that Fernando Amaro Monteiro, who came to be recognized as the best Islamologist within the colonial staff, began bringing to the authorities' attention the threat of wahhabism to Portuguese rule.Footnote 32 Having emerged mainly in southern Mozambique in the late 1960s, around dignitaries who studied in Saudi Arabia, intolerant to any minor deviation from the Islamic norm, Wahhabism denounced the practices of Sufi brotherhoods as unacceptable ‘innovation’ (bid'a), branding them as ‘obscurantism’ in relation to true Islam.Footnote 33 Considering that the latter were precisely the kind of local Islam that Portuguese authorities were willing to privilege, it was easy to foresee the problems that the attacks and baiting led by major Wahhabi figures could introduce in the fragile balance of Mozambican cultures.Footnote 34

In July 1968, when he returned from his Islamic studies at the University of Aix-en-Provence, Amaro Monteiro wrote a report in which he underlined the importance of counteracting the expansion of ‘progressive’ currents in Islam. According to him, they could challenge the stability of the Portuguese colony as they were already spreading in countries like Sudan, Kenya, or Tanzania, disrupting what was supposed to be an old symbiosis of Islamism and fetishism.Footnote 35 However, the strategy directed at insulating ‘African Islam’ in Mozambique did not mean, in his view, the simple reinforcement of conservative orthodoxy as Costa Freire intended. The 1966 survey of Islam conceived by Monteiro mapped a heterodoxy that, peculiar as it was to Mozambican Muslims, would help ‘to isolate the Islamism of the province from the external context’ and avoid its subordination to any foreign centre of power – an objective that Amaro Monteiro placed at the heart of all the initiatives that the Portuguese administration should take regarding Islam.Footnote 36 Dozens of Muslim dignitaries, in regions as dispersed as Sofala, Quelimane, Nampula, Porto Amélia, and Montepuez, who had been questioned on some particular details of doctrine, showed their devotion for the Virgin Mary and the Prophet Issa (Jesus Christ), and accepted, in total departure from the Qur'an, the truth of Crucifixion. Amaro Monteiro was following the example set by a major figure of the Catholic church in Mozambique, Don Eurico Dias Nogueira, bishop of Vila Cabral, who in 1966 addressed a Fraternal letter to the Muslims of his diocese in which he explored shared points of doctrine between Christianity and Islam, namely the cult of the Virgin Mary.Footnote 37 Bolder than Dias Nogueira, Monteiro was willing to go beyond doctrinal boundaries, for he saw in some heterodox views an opportunity to explore politically a cultural convergence between ‘Islamized’ Mozambicans and Portuguese Christianity.

II

Another device to improve the segregation of colonized Islam from external influences was the establishment of a centre, duly controlled by the Portuguese administration, for the learning of Islamic religion.Footnote 38 Such an idea knew different versions, stimulating a kind of competition between projects for Islamic centres – a competition inevitably crossed by cultural and political rivalries.

To begin with, the authorities feared the void left by two major events: the death of the shaykh Sayyid Ba Hassan, head of the Qadiriyya Sadat and imam in Mozambique Island, and the deposition of the sultan of Zanzibar Seyyid Jamshid bin Abdulla by an armed insurgency in 1964. Since the latter's sway over northern Islamism in Mozambique had been overarching, extending his religious sovereignty as far as the districts of Niassa, Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, and even the region of Zambezia,Footnote 39 colonial authorities were afraid that, in his absence, new poles could emerge inside and outside Mozambique with a hostile attitude towards the Portuguese presence. Facing this prospect, Eugénio de Castro Spranger, assistant at the SCCIM, recommended the establishment in the colony of a centre for Islamic indoctrination that could dispense with foreign dependencies.Footnote 40 A version of this idea pointed to the creation of a learning centre in Mozambique dedicated to the teaching and certification of Islamic knowledge, one that could be directed by Sayyid Bakr, the prestigious khalifa that followed Ba Hassan as head of the Qadiriyya Sadat after a troublesome succession process,Footnote 41 and who was wrongly given the title of Mufti in the anonymous document that conceived such a possibility.Footnote 42

Major Costa Freire, in turn, true to his concept of ‘de-polarizing’ the Muslims, thought a single centre inconvenient and proposed instead several dispersed ones, possibly based on Qur'anic schools already existent, organized to integrate the future Islamic hierarchy in Mozambique – a perspective that the governor general, an air force officer called José Augusto da Costa Almeida, basically reproduced in a dispatch of December 1967, fearing that a single centre for the study of Islam could become a ‘source of supra-national influences’.Footnote 43

Another scheme dreamed of profiting from the sultan of Zanzibar himself, who had meanwhile been granted asylum in England. The idea was to persuade him to move to Mozambique, so that a former important centre of Islamic diffusion would be relocated in order to become an entirely Mozambican one, under the discrete guidance of Portuguese authorities.Footnote 44 For a while, news and rumours circulated heralding the materialization of such perspective – an event that was never to take place.Footnote 45

There was also the hidden agenda of Suleiman Valy Mamede, a Muslim born in northern Mozambique from an Indian family, founder and president of the Islamic Community of Lisbon (ICL), who acted simultaneously behind the scenes and in the forefront of public appearances. Resident in Lisbon and always surrounding himself with personalities that held some leverage over the state apparatus, Valy Mamede tried to persuade the overseas ministry to accord his ICL the status of an Islamic centre with power over all the Muslim communities of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau – a power to be used in total agreement and collusion with the colonial policy of the Portuguese state.Footnote 46

Valy Mamede's project is of particular interest because it illustrates the kind of intervention a member of an ethnic and religious minority could make to confront the official discourse. As this discourse insisted on portraying Portuguese colonialism as multi-racial and multi-cultural, it was to be expected that Islam and its representatives would be granted the same rights as Catholics. But the idea of an Islamic centre emerging from the initiative of a Muslim, with the ambition of having an extensive influence in the ‘Portuguese’ Islamic world, could only awaken fears and anxieties. Even before the establishment of the ICL in 1968, his ambitions were already disturbing some colonizers's minds. To Monsignor Paulo Machado, a priest in Mozambique who gave free rein to Islamophobic feelings in a letter sent to the governor general on 4 October 1967, the whole notion of creating an Islamic University in Mozambique, a project announced by the newspaper Diário de Moçambique in which he saw the signature of Valy Mamede, was nothing short of high treason to Portuguese interests.Footnote 47 Even some of the local Muslim communities looked upon Mamede's proposal disapprovingly, involved as they were in a dispute about the best place to establish the Islamic centre: in Lisbon, at the metropolitan heart of the ‘empire’, or in Mozambique? And, if in Mozambique, should it be installed in the north, where ‘black Islam’ prevailed through the Islamic brotherhoods, or in the south, where ‘Asians’ outnumbered ‘Africans’ in Muslim associations?Footnote 48

Besides these obstacles and contradictions, one can easily guess how Valy Mamede's intent would clash with the hyper-centralist format of the Portuguese dictatorship and its colonial system. As soon as his project and goals became plain and evident, a wall of impediments was raised by the government general of Mozambique, the SCCIM, and the Mozambican delegation of the political police. Behind that wall stood Fernando Amaro Monteiro.Footnote 49 It happened that he also possessed a plan for implementing an Islamic centre in Mozambique, a plan he had been working on since 1965. And he was in a much better position to assure its success, and at the same time wiping out all other rival projects.

In the first place, Monteiro knew that the Shafiiyya was the more disseminated school of Islamic law among most Mozambican Muslims. Taking into account that this school favoured the Ijma, the consensus attained by Muslim notables endowed with recognized authority in matters of faith as one of the sources of the Shari‘a (the Islamic law),Footnote 50 Amaro Monteiro advised that ‘any effort of the administration to act on the communities of Shafiiyya rite … should be based on the Ijma to be efficient’. From this notion, he extracted a whole plan to seduce the Muslim communities and align them with Portuguese power:

A council of notables, officially collaborating in the exegetic translation of the Hadiths and the Qur'an to Portuguese, would authenticate these versions before the eyes of the greatest majority of the believers; it would bond those notables to our administration and would help to segregate them from the foreign context, and would serve as an embryonic experimental nucleus … of what might be, later, a first centre of Islamic studies in Mozambique.Footnote 51

To be composed of some twenty-one to twenty-three prestigious figures chosen among local Muslim leaders with African roots, this state-sponsored Islamic centre, which Amaro Monteiro literally called ‘Ijma’, a designation later replaced by ‘council of notables’, would fulfil five multifarious and interconnected goals:

  1. (1) To assemble the main leadership of Mozambican Muslims in a single organ, small enough for the Portuguese authorities easily to supervise by monitoring its articulation with Muslim populations spread throughout the territory and Islamic centres outside Mozambique.

  2. (2) To encourage the more conservative or traditional elements of local Islam to preserve the supposedly ‘cultural narrowness’ of the Islamized, preventing them from being exposed to ‘subversive’ anti-colonial ideas.

  3. (3) To separate African from Asian Muslims and preventing the latter from providing leadership against the Portuguese regime.

  4. (4) To promote a delusional self-esteem experienced by Muslim dignitaries, expecting them to be grateful to the Portuguese administration for recognizing their relevance.

  5. (5) To identify Muslim leaders who would support publicly the Portuguese colonial cause, attracting them into a position where they could not refuse to call the faithful to align with the Portuguese side of the war against Frelimo, possibly by integrating a special armed corps or militia exclusively composed of Muslims.Footnote 52

As will be seen, although he was successful in ‘pacifying’ the northern Mozambican Muslims, the conditions under which Monteiro tried to implement his bold and ambitious plan of ‘psychological war’ summarized many of the contradictions and inefficiencies that would soon lead the Portuguese to a dead-end in what concerned their African colonial design.

III

Amaro Monteiro was perfectly aware that his plan needed a thorough and detailed knowledge of the Islamic panorama in Mozambique. In 1965–6, he designed a survey of Islam as a tool to circumvent the limitations of previous questionnaires, and even to compensate for the fact that its implementers would be local administrators, mostly unprepared for their job and often very unaware of the surrounding cultural landscape. It was the largest survey ever carried out in Mozambique, aimed at around 700 Muslim dignitaries previously identified throughout the region, who were supposed to answer a series of questions about family structure, religious behaviour, Islamic perceptions of Christianity, and so forth.Footnote 53 Although stuffed with ‘anthropological’ questions about the beliefs, traditions, and social structures of Muslim communities in Mozambique, the enquiry was essentially a cover to obtain three essential pieces of information: (1) who were the most important and influential leaders of Mozambican Muslim communities; (2) what were their liaisons to foreign centres of Islamic learning and counselling; (3) which Islamized groups disclosed stronger affinities with Christianity. Behind these goals stood the final purpose of establishing the Ijma. The third one, in particular, was materialized through a set of questions about the way Muslims perceived Jesus and the Virgin Mary, questions intended to track in greater detail deviations from the orthodox doctrine – which had already been noticed – that could be exploited by the Portuguese administration.

Replies to the questionnaire were often slow to arrive, when they arrived at all. A memo issued by Major Costa Freire on 9 February 1967 indicated that twenty-eight administrative sectors of nine districts had still not sent the answers.Footnote 54 Freire suggested that Amaro Monteiro should travel to several districts to solve the delays there and to make his first contacts with major Muslim dignitaries already identified, so that he could deepen the questioning, identify the articulations of the Islamic leadership inside Mozambique and with external centres, and study Mozambique Island as the main ‘polarizing’ focus of Islam. But his urgency was to no avail. Only two years later, from January to August 1969, was Amaro Monteiro allowed to make his field-work visits to the most relevant Islamic districts of Mozambique where he finally became known as the first Portuguese really to engage with Muslim communities, something he is still remembered for in some northern regions of Mozambique.Footnote 55

Meanwhile, on 2 December 1968, Jacques Honoré, the French consul general in Lourenço Marques, in a dispatch to the ministry for foreign affairs, noted the kind of strategy that Governor General Baltazar Rebelo de Sousa was adopting towards the Islamic populations. Part of de Sousa's initiative was unveiled in a speech made on 30 November 1968 at the inauguration of the Ismaili House that he would soon address all Mozambican Muslims about ‘everything that unites Christians and Muslims and makes our fraternal entente easy in the cult of the one God and the service of Portugal for which all of us are fighting’.Footnote 56 The message was broadcast on local radio on 17 December 1968, during the Laylat ul-qadr. Always keeping a low profile and preferring to remain out of sight, it was Amaro Monteiro who stage-managed the whole process: he carefully chose the occasion, wrote the message, convinced Muslims leaders to invite the governor as well as several prominent figures of the Portuguese colonial staff, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the archbishop to a mosque in Lourenço Marques for the celebration of the end of Ramadan; he then instructed the Portuguese authorities on how they should behave, controlled the diffusion of the event in the local press, and so on.Footnote 57 Furthermore, after the outstanding impact the governor's message had on its target audience, Amaro Monteiro also advised that it should be translated so that its effect could be exploited in other Islamic regions. He suggested that the message be disseminated directly among the Islamic countries with which Portugal had diplomatic relations, and indirectly, through different diplomatic channels, to all other countries where Islam was the dominant religion.Footnote 58 Throughout this process, Amaro Monteiro had set in motion the ‘first measure to approach the Islamic communities of the province [of Mozambique]’.Footnote 59 He was also the author of all the subsequent messages to the Muslims of Mozambique that were delivered in November 1969, December 1970, and March 1972 by Rebelo de Sousa and the two governors who succeeded him, always investing those moments with the care of a stage director – a title that he still claims for himself.Footnote 60

Afterwards, Monteiro went even further, leading the governor general discretely to suggest, in some of his public speeches, that Mozambican Muslims, in their performance of the khutba (the public preaching on Friday), could invoke the head of the Portuguese state. Curiously, he argued as precedent that in the Islamic republics of the USSR Friday prayers already included a reference to public powers.Footnote 61 In his previous research expeditions, he had tried to unearth whether or not any specific name was invoked as imam, during the khutba, to replace the sultan of Zanzibar that used to be called for in several areas (namely in Niassa district).Footnote 62 To propose the head of the Portuguese state as a kind of surrogate imam was also a hint as how to solve the intricate problem of finding someone to fulfil the vacuum left by the last imam of Mozambique Island.

In a way, Amaro Monteiro was exceeding the initiative first taken by the Catholic church, which had mobilized some of its more progressive members to start an ecumenical dialogue with Muslim communities. Now the Portuguese strategy to Islam was being developed, at least in Mozambique, within a triangle that articulated three major players: the Catholic church, whose newly discovered ‘ecumenism’ towards Islam was receiving the explicit support of the Holy See,Footnote 63 the dictator Oliveira Salazar, who had conceded a long audience to the bishop of Vila Cabral during which he gave his blessing to Dias Nogueira's idea of publishing the Fraternal letter to the Muslims,Footnote 64 and the local initiatives Amaro Monteiro was launching. Bearing in mind the pressing demands of the colonial war, what Monteiro was really trying to do, even if deprived of certain details about the game that was being played, was to turn the triangle into a straight line, an axis consisting of the government general and the overseas ministry – which implied excluding the church as an undesirable nuisance, a gesture that ended up arousing hostile reactions on the part of the Catholic hierarchy.Footnote 65

Despite spending considerable effort on creating a ‘council of notables’, Amaro Monteiro was unable to get far with this. The only part of the original scheme that was accomplished had to do with engaging twenty-one Muslim dignitaries in the approval of the Portuguese translation of an Islamic sacred text, a selection from the Hadiths compiled by al-Bukhari. On 15 August 1972, the publication of the final version of that text provided the opportunity for a huge display of propaganda, with a public ceremony in which the dignitaries formally signed the recommendation to the faithful to read it, all covered in detail by the local press. Apparently, it was a great success for a policy committed to attract African Muslims, with the added gain of having a new instrument to spread the Portuguese language among the Islamized population, as Monteiro had proposed in one of his memos.Footnote 66

Nevertheless, besides the fact that such a ceremony hid the harsh conflict between the Sufi Muslims of the northern brotherhoods and the Wahhabis of the southFootnote 67 – a conflict Monteiro was barely able to manage – that impromptu Islamic ‘council’ did not produce any enduring effect. Due to administrative delays and a chronic lack of means, too much time had passed to implement a plan that had been first conceived in 1965. By 1973, Portuguese colonial aspirations were condemned because of a collapsing regime and a counterinsurgency that had lost its hold over the war, mostly so in Guinea and Mozambique.Footnote 68 In spite of having achieved what seemed to be a remarkable outcome in terms of handling a population that used to be perceived as a potential danger, Amaro Monteiro was increasingly sceptical. In July 1973, he conveyed to a reluctant Marcelo Caetano, who had replaced Salazar at the top of the dictatorship, how the Portuguese power in Mozambique was running to its doom. In the lively picture Monteiro gave of this encounter, Caetano reacted with a typical mixture of displeasure and impotence: ‘We are doing what we can.’Footnote 69

IV

In assessing the Portuguese Islamic policy in Mozambique, one has to stress its circumstantial nature. Contrary to the long-term vision that informed the French policy with respect to Muslim communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Portuguese policy was a short-term response to the pressures of warfare. As Bonate put it, it was ‘primarily dictated by a necessity to counteract the advancing liberation movements and prevent or delay as far as possible the independence of Mozambique’.Footnote 70 All efforts, particularly those aimed at improving the colonizers' knowledge of local Islam, were subordinated to that goal – which meant that detail and sophistication had to be sacrificed to a narrower purpose. In fact, ‘haste’ and ‘hastily’ are the expressions more often invoked by Amaro Monteiro when he recalls this page of Portuguese and Mozambican history.Footnote 71 Therefore, the administrative delay in accomplishing Monteiro's plan is a measure of its relative failure: though able to contain the enrolment of northern Mozambican Muslims by Frelimo – a result that even the Frelimo leadership acknowledgedFootnote 72 – the Portuguese could not avoid the outcome that was already looming in the horizon when the meeting of 15 August 1972 finally took place.

There was also a gap between what was idealized in official documents and what was really achieved. It appears that Monteiro's advice for using the diplomatic channels in order to disseminate the first governor's message throughout the Muslim countries was not followed. In October 1969, when João Pereira Bastos, representative of Portugal in Cairo, requested the ministry for foreign affairs to be sent materials that could be used to impress some Egyptian politicians about the Islamic achievements of Portugal, he seemed completely unaware of what was happening in Mozambique.Footnote 73 During his conversations with the director general of political affairs of the United Arab Republic, the Portuguese diplomat displayed several examples of friendly policies regarding the Muslim populations of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. But not a single word was uttered about the message that Baltazar Rebelo de Sousa had addressed to Muslims, which was at the time the most relevant gesture that the Portuguese state made towards them. Only in June 1972 were the French, English, and Swahili translations of the last governor's message sent to the Portuguese embassies and consulates of cities such as Beirut, Rabat, Teheran, Ankara, Islamabad, and Cairo.Footnote 74 Once again, the delay deprived this initiative of all efficiency.

Another aspect to be mentioned is the centralist drive that underlay the project of an Islamic ‘council of notables’. It seems that the Portuguese administration had second thoughts about giving to Muslims even a largely incomplete central institution. As can be seen from an assessment written by a director of the SCCIM, Lieutenant-Colonel José de Vilhena Ramos, there remained concerns about the possibility that such a centralized structure could escape the control exerted by colonial powers: ‘The creation of the “Ijma”, without a guarantee of continuous support and control, can be the source of great danger!’Footnote 75 The idea was accepted, but with strong reservations: among other cautionary conditions, Amaro Monteiro himself should take over the supervision of the whole process. This episode gives credence to a comparative hypothesis: considering two different colonial paradigms, the British indirect rule, which entrusted local powers of jurisdiction to Islamic dignitaries in Muslim areas, and the French model, centralizing and unwilling to grant real authority to any religious leadership,Footnote 76 I would suggest that the Portuguese branch of colonialism seems to have been closer to the French model – at least on the symbolic level, as Portugal always lacked the material means to enforce a full-fledged centralist policy.

Significantly enough, the way colonialism settled the dichotomies of Mozambican Islam was extended to post-colonial times, albeit in a reversed form. When the Frelimo government finally awoke to the Muslim issue in the 1980s, it simply inverted the policy of the Portuguese. Whereas the colonizers had looked for a partnership with the Sufi brotherhoods against the Wahhabis, Frelimo privileged the latter against the Sufi orders: the Islamic Council of Mozambique, established in a meeting between the government and a group of Maputo imams in January 1981, was dominated by Wahhabis, whereas the Sufi brotherhoods did not have any chance but to launch their own organization, the Islamic Sunni Congress of Mozambique, without government support.Footnote 77 Therefore, post-colonial policy still mirrored the Portuguese one, with many common facets. By the 1990s, the Frelimo government, through the prime minister Pascoal Mucumbi, went as far as to ask Amaro Monteiro to return to Mozambique.Footnote 78 The idea was that he would propose ways of building bridges with those Muslim populations that the new power had estranged after independence, due to a Marxist drive against religion and to resentment against populations who had been allies of the colonial administration. For reasons that remain unexplained, this astonishing invitation made to someone who had previously been responsible for ‘counterinsurgency’ war had no sequel. Even so, it speaks volumes about continuities between colonial and post-colonial frameworks, something that demands from historians and other scholars a challenge to common ideas about post-coloniality as rupture with the colonial past. This one is proving to be more persistent, sometimes unexpectedly, than our intellectual maps seemed ready to admit.

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Prof. Fernando Amaro Monteiro for his well-known generosity in sharing his vast experiences, and also for his advice on the research project ‘Muslims under pressure’. I am also grateful to Sandra Araújo for her work in the Portuguese archives.

References

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3 These fears were pervasive in an anonymous article, ‘O perigo do Islão em África’, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 378 (1956), pp. 105–6. From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, the intelligence and the political police in Portuguese colonies paid close attention to the situation in the Middle East as well as the possible connections between Islam, anti-colonialism, and communism: see ‘Bulletin for diffusion of information’, 21 Dec. 1965, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), SCCIM no. 412, fos. 940–7; information no. 686-SC/CI (2), ‘A problemática religiosa na Província – O islamismo’, 26 July 1967, ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), pt 1, fos. 13–14; and ‘O islamismo: factor político em África’, Mar. 1971, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 193–213.

4 Gonçalves, O mundo árabo-islâmico.

5 J. Dias, Minorias étnicas nas Províncias Ultramarinas, confidential report of 1956, ANTT, AOS/CO/UL-37, 1; Dias, J. and Guerreiro, M. V., Missão de estudos das minorias étnicas do Ultramar Português – relatório da campanha de 1958 (Moçambique e Angola) (Lisbon, 1959)Google Scholar; Dias, J., Guerreiro, M. V., and Dias, M., Relatório de campanha de 1959 (Moçambique, Angola, Tanganhica e União Sul Africana) (Lisbon, 1960)Google Scholar.

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11 Among many examples of theorists of Islam Noir, some of whom held high positions in the administration of French Senegambia, see André, P.-J., L'Islam Noir: contribution à l’étude des confréries religieuses islamiques en Afrique Occidentale suivie d'une étude sur l'Islam au Dahomey (Paris, 1924)Google Scholar; Gouilly, A., L'Islam dans l'Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris, 1952)Google Scholar; Deschamps, H., Les religions de l'Afrique noire (Paris, 1954)Google Scholar; and Froelich, J. C., Les Musulmans d'Afrique Noire (Paris, 1962)Google Scholar. On the history of the articulation between the ‘scientific’ theories of ‘black Islam’ and the governance policies regarding Muslim populations in French sub-Saharian possessions, see Harrison, C., France and Islam in West Africa (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, and Robinson, D., ‘France as a Muslim power in West Africa’, Africa Today, 46 (1999), pp. 105–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a criticism of the orientalist prejudices inherent to the French conception of African Islam and their influence on the Portuguese perception, see L. Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions: Islam and chiefship in northern Mozambique, ca. 1850–1974’ (D.Phil. thesis, Cape Town, 2007), pp. 9–12.

12 See, for example, the document produced by the Working Group on Islamic Issues, ‘Breve esquemática do pensamento muçulmano, com vista à inserção e caracterização do movimento wahhabita’, which was attached to a secret memo issued by the delegation in Mozambique of the direction general of security, the new name the Portuguese political police received in 1969: ‘Movimento “Wahhabita” ou “Unitários”’, in secret information of the direction general of security, delegation of Mozambique, ‘Actividades islâmicas em Moçambique’, Proc. P-57-A/SR-1, exemplar no. 2437/72/DI/2/SC, 31 July 1972, ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), file 2.

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15 His writings were expanded in his Ph.D. dissertation, whose appendixes provide several documents previously unpublished: Monteiro, F. A., O Islão, o Poder e a Guerra: Moçambique, 1964–1974 (Porto, 1993)Google Scholar.

16 Vakil, A., Monteiro, F. A., and Machaqueiro, M., Moçambique: memória falada do Islão e da guerra (Coimbra, 2011)Google Scholar.

17 Vakil, A., ‘From the Reconquista to Portugal islâmico: Islamic heritage in the shifting discourses of Portuguese historiography and national identity’, Arqueologia Medieval, 8 (2003), pp. 5–15Google Scholar; idem, ‘Questões inacabadas: colonialismo, Islão e portugalidade’, in M. C. Ribeiro and A. P. Ferreira, eds., Fantasmas e fantasias imperiais no imaginário português contemporâneo (Porto, 2003), pp. 255–94; idem, ‘Pensar o Islão: questões coloniais, interrogações pós-coloniais’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 69 (2004), pp. 17–52Google Scholar; and idem, ‘Do outro ao diverso: Islão e muçulmanos em Portugal: história, discursos, identidades’, Revista Lusófona de Ciência das Religiões, 5–6 (2004), pp. 283–312Google Scholar.

18 Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, especially pp. 183–211. From this author, see also ‘The ascendance of Angoche: the politics of kinship and territory in nineteenth century northern Mozambique’, Lusotopie (2003), pp. 115–40, and ‘Roots of diversity in Mozambican Islam’, Lusotopie, 14 (2007), pp. 129–49.

19 See Bastos, S., ‘Ambivalence and phantasm in the Portuguese colonial discourse production on Indians’, Lusotopie, 15 (2008), pp. 77–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Machaqueiro, M., ‘Ambivalent Islam: the identity construction of Muslims under Portuguese colonial rule’, Social Identities, 18 (2012), pp. 39–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Information no. 24/67, 17 Nov. 1967, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100. All the translations are mine. I also translated the designations of the official documents to make their identification easier for readers unfamiliar with Portuguese.

21 Information no. 60/66, 27 Oct. 1966, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 813.

22 Information no. 24/67, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100.

23 Ibid., fo. 98.

24 Ibid., fos. 98–9.

25 Ibid., fo. 101.

26 Ibid.

27 For the following argument, see information no. 26/67, 23 Nov. 1967, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 111–13.

28 Xehe, a common word among Mozambican Muslims, designates an Islamic dignitary, respected for his knowledge of Islam, whom the leadership of an Islamic brotherhood can be ascribed to.

29 Information no. 24/67, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100.

30 Ibid.

31 See the copy of a memo of the government general of Mozambique, 14 Aug. 1963, and the note of the government general of Mozambique to the director of the SCCIM, 17 Oct. 1963, transcribing the note no. 108/E/7/3 issued by the government of Mozambique district on 24 Sept. 1963, ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 542–3, 550–3.

32 See the handwritten note signed by Amaro Monteiro, 21 May 1967, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 261, in which he refers to a memo on the Wahhabi current that he sent to the governor general in 1963, a document that the administration completely neglected.

33 F. A. Monteiro, ‘Moçambique, a década de 1970 e a corrente wahhabita: uma diagonal’, in O Islão na África Subsaariana (Porto, 2004), pp. 110–11; Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 177–80. See also ‘Movimento “Wahhabita” ou “Unitários”’, ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), file 2.

34 For a criticism of the cleavage drawn by the Portuguese authorities between the ‘traditional African Islam’ of Mozambique and the ‘reformist or progressive Wahhabi Islam’, of ‘Asian’ brand, see Macagno, L., Outros muçulmanos: Islão e narrativas coloniais (Lisbon, 2006), pp. 169, 180–2Google Scholar.

35 F. A. Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’, 26 July 1968, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 440.

36 Ibid., fos. 445–6.

37 See Nogueira, E. D., Carta fraterna do bispo de Vila Cabral (Moçambique) Eurico Dias Nogueira aos muçulmanos da sua diocese – Cikalata ca Ulongo askovo jwa Vila Cabral Eurico Dias Nogueira kwa wacinasala wa cilambo cakwe (Vila Cabral, 1966)Google Scholar.

38 The process that I analyse in the following paragraphs is summarized in Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 196–202.

39 See information no. 60/66, 27 Oct. 1966, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 813–15, and information no. 24/67, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 92.

40 Information no. 60/66, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412.

41 See Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 103–6, and Macagno, Outros muçulmanos, pp. 171–5.

42 Dispatch no. 5029/K–6–23, 29 Sept. 1967, from the director of the cabinet of political affairs of the overseas ministry to the governor general of Mozambique, to which a copy of an anonymous and non-dated document was attached, giving several advices on policies to be followed regarding the Muslims, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 106.

43 Information no. 24/67, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 101–2. For the dispatch of the governor general, dated 11 Dec. 1967, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 88–9.

44 See dispatch no. 5029/K–6–23, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 105–8.

45 See Macagno, Outros Muçulmanos, pp. 98–9.

46 See M. Machaqueiro, ‘Portuguese colonialism and the Islamic community of Lisbon’, in V. Bader, M. Maussen, and A. Moors, eds., Colonial and post-colonial governance of Islam: continuities and ruptures (Amsterdam, 2011), pp. 220–5. The PIDE, the Portuguese political police, kept a detailed file on Suleiman Valy Mamede, whose documents allow us to reconstruct his trajectory before the military coup that overthrew the dictatorship on 25 Apr. 1974. See ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 13.890-SC/CI(2), NT-7700.

47 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 708–12.

48 Information no. 928/70/DI/2/SC, PIDE/delegation of Mozambique, P.° 58/SR-1, 14 May 1970, ANTT, Proc. 13.890-SC/CI(2), NT-7700, fos. 28–9. We may also find a copy of this document in ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 87–8.

49 Amaro Monteiro wrote several memos about Valy Mamede in an effort to curtail the latter's initiatives that might collide against the Islamic policy Monteiro was trying to implement: see information no. 7/696, 4 Mar. 1969, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fo. 55; information no. 15/970, 4 June 1970, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 40–2; and information no. 19/70, 31 July 1970, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 16–23.

50 Monteiro, F. A., Traços fundamentais da evolução do Islamismo, com vista à sua incidência em Moçambique (Lourenço Marques, 1972), p. 18Google Scholar.

51 Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 445.

52 There are several documents on this project in the SCCIM archive, all of them signed by Amaro Monteiro. See e.g. information no. 28/968, 28 Dec. 1968, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 332–4; information no. 19/70, 31 July 1970, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 16–23; appendix to information no. 22/70, 26 Sept. 1970, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 96–100; and information no. 11/971, 29 May 1971, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 118–24.

53 The bulk of the enquiry, with all the answers gathered and sent by local administrators, can be found in ANTT, SCCIM nos. 409, 411, and 415–18.

54 Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 442; information no. 3/967, 9 Feb. 1967, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 804–6.

55 For the bureaucratic steps that preceded the travels of Amaro Monteiro, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 138–47, 327–31; for the reports Amaro Monteiro wrote after his field-work expeditions, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 153–66, 318–22. Mohamad Amadá, a Muslim who was living in northern Mozambique in the late 1960s, asserted that today the elderly Mozambican Muslims of that region still treasure Amaro Monteiro's behaviour (interview on 5 May 2010).

56 Dispatch no. 150 of Jacques Honoré, consul general of France in Lourenço Marques, to the ministry for foreign affairs, 2 Dec. 1968, Archives Diplomatiques de La Courneuve (ADC), Afrique-Levant, Mozambique 1966–72, Politique intérieure – Questions religieuses, 59QO/34, Apr. – Dec. 1972.

57 For the preparation of the governor general's message to the Muslims of Mozambique and the instructions Amaro Monteiro gave for the ceremony, see information no. 18/68, 30 Oct. 1968, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 229–31. A draft of the message can be found in ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 224–5. In the articles they dedicated to this topic, neither Alpers nor Cahen noticed the fact that it was Amaro Monteiro who wrote the governor's message and prepared the whole event: see Alpers, ‘Islam’, p. 177, and Cahen, ‘L’État Nouveau’, p. 575.

58 Information no. 26/968, 28 Dec. 1968, ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 48–9. Booklets with the message in Portuguese and its Swahili translation (written in Arabic characters) are kept in ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 256–82.

59 This sentence was actually the title of the information no. 18/68.

60 See Vakil, Monteiro, and Machaqueiro, Moçambique, pp. 72–3.

61 See note no. 207 by Jacques Honoré, consul general of France in Lourenço Marques, to the ambassador of France in Portugal, 13 Dec. 1969, Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Lisbonne, Ambassade, Série B, n.° 734, PP 7–5: Mozambique – Affaires culturelles et sociales – Enseignement.

62 ‘Relatório de serviço nos distritos do Niassa, Moçambique, Zambézia, Tete e Manica e Sofala, de 1 de Julho a 2 de Agosto 69’, 9 Aug. 1969, ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 155.

63 On 8 Oct. 1966 the newspaper Diário de Moçambique reported the public praise that the Apostolic Nuncio addressed to the bishop of Vila Cabral for his initiative of the Fraternal letter to the Muslims.

64 This amazing revelation was confided to Jacques Honoré by Eurico Dias Nogueira himself. See dispatch no. 152 by Jacques Honoré, consul general of France in Lourenço Marques, to the ambassador of France in Portugal, 21 Dec. 1967, ADC, Afrique-Levant, Mozambique 1966–72.

65 For the backlash of the conservative factions within the Catholic church against a state approach to Muslims see the report of a priest, P. G. Moreira, sent to the Portuguese army in Mozambique, ‘Apontamentos sobre o Islamismo’, Sept. 1967, ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 49–138, and the letter he sent to Amaro Monteiro on 22 Aug. 1970 in which he declared: ‘I am absolutely opposed to those who have been … mollycoddling Muslims, while ignoring and mistreating Christians, or, in any way, putting them in an inferior condition to the faithful of Mohammed’ (quoted by F. A. Monteiro, ‘Postscript’, in F. P. Garcia, Moçambique: análise global de uma guerra, 1964–1974 (Lisbon, 2003), p. 305).

66 For analysis of several aspects of Amaro Monteiro's plan to attract the Muslim leadership of Mozambique, see Alpers, ‘Islam’, pp. 173, 177, 179; Cahen, ‘L’État Nouveau’, pp. 575–7; Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 196–202; and Machaqueiro, ‘Ambivalent Islam’, pp. 52–5.

67 On the events that triggered this conflict and the way it affected the negotiations that preceded the public approval of the Portuguese version of the Hadiths, see Monteiro, O Islão, p. 284; Alpers, ‘Islam’, pp. 181–2; Cahen, ‘L’État Nouveau’, pp. 582–3; and Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 207–8.

68 See Newitt, M., Portugal in Africa (London, 1981), pp. 241–5Google Scholar, and Afonso, A. and Gomes, C. M., Os anos da guerra colonial, 1961–1975 (Lisbon, 2010), pp. 654–761Google Scholar.

69 The encounter is reported in an autobiographical short story by F. A. Monteiro: ‘Depois do fim’, in Um certo gosto a tamarindo: estórias de Angola (colectânea de contos) (Braga, 1979), pp. 199–227.

70 Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, p. 211.

71 See Vakil, Monteiro, and Machaqueiro, Moçambique, pp. 122, 128, 136, 144, 155, 170, 180, 216, 235.

72 According to Amaro Monteiro, Frelimo's department of information and propaganda recognized in 1972 that Portuguese psychological actions upon northern Muslims had been able to deter the effects of Frelimo's propaganda in the ‘Islamized’ areas. See Monteiro, A., ‘As comunidades islâmicas de Moçambique: mecanismos de comunicação’, Revista Africana, 4 (1989), pp. 81–2Google Scholar.

73 Aerogram no. A-68, sent by the embassy of Portugal in Cairo to the ministry for foreign affairs, 9 Oct. 1969, Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático (AHD).

74 Letters dated 11 and 14 June 1972, AHD, ministry for foreign affairs, direction general of political affairs, section of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, Proc. 945, Cota AB 1322 PAA.

75 Assessment of the information no. 19/70, 4 Aug. 1970, ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 14–15.

76 J.-L. Triaud, ‘Politiques musulmanes de la France en Afrique subsaharienne à l’époque coloniale’, in P.-J. Luizard, ed., Le choc colonial et l'islam: les politiques religieuses des puissances coloniales en terres d'islam (Paris, 2006), p. 272.

77 See L. Bonate, ‘Colonial and post-colonial policies of Islam in Mozambique’, paper presented at the workshop on Changes in colonial and cost-colonial governance of Islam: continuities and ruptures, organized by IMISCOE and ISIM, Leiden, 29–30 Aug. 2008.

78 See Vakil, Monteiro, and Machaqueiro, Moçambique, pp. 300–2.