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Janet McIntosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

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"A fascinating account of the rewards and costs of Muslim identity for a multiethnic African community. "The Edge of Islam" will be of great use in Ethnic Studies, Linguistic Anthropology, Islamic Studies, African Studies, and Religious Studies, especially insofar as it challenges top-heavy studies of Muslim reform with insights into ritual performance, personhood, and language. With attention to the shifting stakes of modern religious affiliation, Janet McIntosh provides a fresh account of the power of ethnicity and economic inequality to shape religious practice."--Flagg Miller, Religious Studies, University of California, Davis

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THE EDGE of ISLAM

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................................................ixNOTE ON LANGUAGE.................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION The Edge of Islam..................................................................................................1CHAPTER 1 Origin Stories: The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast............................................................45CHAPTER 2 Blood Money in Motion: Profit, Personhood, and the Jini Narratives....................................................89CHAPTER 3 Toxic Bodies and Intentional Minds: Hegemony and Ideology in Giriama Conversion Experiences...........................127CHAPTER 4 Rethinking Syncretism: Religious Pluralism and Code Choice in a Context of Ethnoreligious Tension.....................177CHAPTER 5 Divination and Madness: The Powers and Dangers of Arabic..............................................................221EPILOGUE.........................................................................................................................257NOTES............................................................................................................................263BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................289INDEX............................................................................................................................313

Chapter One

The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast

In 1997 the Kenya coast was wracked by a series of violent, politically orchestrated clashes over land ownership and economic opportunity. The events that gained the most publicity from local media and scholars were the upheavals south of Mombasa between Digo, a Muslim Mijikenda group, and the wabara (Kisw.), or upcountry tribes, who in recent decades have laid claim to many economic advantages on the coast. But north of Mombasa, in the Malindi area, the ethnoreligious dynamics of resentment were somewhat different. Some Giriama (and, to a lesser extent, other Mijikenda represented in Malindi) arrayed themselves not only against wabara, but against Arabs and Swahili who had been living on the coast for centuries. Their grievances sounded old themes, ranging from the accusation that Muslims enslaved their ancestors in large numbers, to the furious charge that Arabs and Swahili maliciously grab the land of hapless Giriama squatters and rightful landowners. Many young Giriama men in Malindi joined a loosely organized underground movement dedicated to exacting some form of revenge on their oppressors, and though the violence in Malindi never reached the levels in the Likoni area to the south, it simmered just beneath the surface.

One Giriama elder named Samson, who helped administer oaths to Mijikenda youth to secure their allegiance to the cause of potential guerrilla warfare, told me that in early 1997 he went with another elder to seek the counsel of a powerful Giriama mganga diviner (singular of aganga, Kigir.), hoping to learn more about the origins and outcome of the ethnic tensions. The men asked the mganga the question that dogs so many citizens of the coast: Why are the Mijikenda so oppressed? The mganga told the men that long ago there was a fight between an ancestral Mijikenda and an Arab, who killed each other in the struggle. Their bodies were buried together in a configuration that would seal their destinies. First, the Mijikenda body was wrapped in a bui bui, the long covering that swathes the bodies of modest Muslim women, and was placed in the earth facing downward. Then the Arab body was laid to rest facing upward, its weight resting on the back of the Mijikenda.

In many origin stories of ethnic groups around the world, some critical moment in the past is thought to fix the destiny of the group in question. In the burial configuration described by the mganga, the corporeal body of the dead Mijikenda man becomes a stand-in for the Mijikenda social body. Mijikenda and Arabs are bound together forever in a wretched and degrading hierarchy in which Mijikenda must bear the weight of Arab advantage on their backs for eternity. Pain is also encoded in the orientation of the Mijikenda corpse. Traditionally Giriama dead are buried on their right side, sometimes with their feet pointing to the west and their faces to Shungwaya, a mythical point of migratory origin to the north, and sometimes oriented toward the Kaya, the customary Mijikenda capitals in the hinterland forests. While the spatial arrangement varies according to regional differences and competing ideologies, the orientation of a corpse connotes "social and cosmological as well as physical direction" (Parkin 1992: 22). Every Giriama understands the claustrophobic and shameful symbolism of the collective Mijikenda body relegated to staring down, away from the comforting sites of social life and social identity, into the cold, lonely earth. And if the Mijikenda soul is stolen through such a gesture, the humiliation is further ground in as the male corpse is swathed in a bui bui, a Muslim woman's garment, forcing upon it a degrading feminization, as well as some kind of inchoate relationship to Islam.

Several issues invoked by this story set the stage for the discussion of ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic relations in the rest of this book. Aside from the theme of personhood, the force field behind current understandings of ethnicity among Swahili and Giriama in the Malindi area is made up of shifting contests over resources, prejudices and perceptions, and currents of ethnic essentialism that have a complex colonial and postcolonial history. In a partial hegemony of ethnoreligious distinction, numerous, albeit not all, Giriama and Swahili share the assumption that Giriama are categorically distinct ethnic and religious beings from Swahili. Their rationales range from essentialist presumptions about the deepest nature of ethnic groups to Giriama observations of Swahili prejudice that, they contend, makes it all but impossible for Giriama to assimilate.

There are ironies in these ethnoreligious divisions, for the very category "Swahili" is a historically flexible appellation that, at least in some contexts, has readily assimilated newcomers. Such permeability has led to much head scratching as some scholars have sifted through an immensely complex history of Indian Ocean migration and intermarriage while striving to answer the question once framed by Eastman (1971): "Who are the Swahili?" As mentioned in the introduction, scholars lately have shifted from attempting to pin down Swahili identity to emphasizing instead its "openness and permeability" (Askew 1999: 73). This approach captures some important truths about Swahili history and resonates with contemporary theoretical models of ethnicity, yet it also risks glossing over the quality of some of the current ethnic tensions on the coast. From an analytic standpoint Swahili identity is indeed historically contingent and dynamic, but we must also recognize that cultural insiders on the coast do not always regard their ethnicity in the same way. Indeed,...