“The Inheritors of the Prophets”: Islamic Historical Memory along the Swahili Coast

Along the East African coast, ideas of Islam’s long presence in the region play an important role in animating coastal Muslims’ senses of historical intimacy with an Islamic past. The frequent claim that Islam arrived to the Swahili coast during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, or that other Prophets like Suleiman (Biblical Solomon) once ruled over the region, are but some among many common expressions of Islamic historical memory and authenticity in East Africa (Bashir 2009). Like in many Muslim societies, accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s life as well as critical events and personalities from Islamic history have pervaded Swahili intellectual and artistic production over the centuries (Topan 1997). Memories of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions along with other references to an Islamic past, like Muslim history in Spain, continue to be a notable feature of regular mosque sermons, lectures, and conferences along the coast. When conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar and Mombasa, it was not uncommon to hear interlocutors quote and employ stories from the various Prophets and figures of the Qur’an in everyday life as meaningful “social frameworks of memory” (Halbwachs 1992) from which to understand and make sense of their current contexts.

This paper explores visions and experiences of Islamic historical memory along the Swahili coast. In doing so, it puts forth an argument for the significance of Swahili-Islamic conceptions of inheritance (*urithi*) as a framework for articulating religious memory and senses of historical intimacy to an Islamic past in the region. Understood in relation to a tradition from the Prophet Muhammad in which he informs that “the scholars are the inheritors of the Prophets (*warathatul-anbiya*). The Prophets do not leave behind gold or silver coins to be inherited, rather they leave knowledge, so whoever takes from that has acquired an abundant share,” I engage the significance of this teaching in shaping Swahili religious memories of Islamic Prophets and significant religious scholars in the region. As such, this paper demonstrates how Swahili-Islamic ideas of inheritance in light of this tradition speak to both (1) Islamic epistemology, in that it posits that knowledge is a thing inherited, as well as (2) religious historical memory, in that it frames the historical legacy and memory of Prophets and pious scholars as passed down and carried through time as an intimate, meaningful, and living *inheritance*. Specifically focusing on the memories of two key pioneering reformist Islamic scholars in the region, Sheikh Al-Amin b. Ali Al-Mazrui (1891–1947) and Sheikh Abdullah Saleh Al-Farsy (1912–1982), I detail the significance of this concept in how contemporary Muslim intellectuals, scholars, students, and biographers understand their spiritual relations and meaningful ties to these scholarly figures and the depth of their legacies.

I engage memories of these scholars through analysis of two significant Swahili-language biographical accounts of their lives and legacies––*Maisha ya Sheikh Al-Amin bin Ali Mazrui* (Tamim 2006) and *Maisha ya Al-Imam Sheikh Abdulla Saleh Farsy katika Ulimwengu wa Kiislamu* (Musa 1986). In doing so, I probe how the biographers of these texts, as well as these Muslim scholars themselves, employ ideas of inheritance (*urithi*) in multiple and generative ways which gesture to the concept’s dynamism. This analysis reveals the ways in which inheritance can encompass diverse relationships to memory that have in the academic literature tended to be at odds, such as “individual” versus “collective” memory approaches (Olick 1999; Cole 2001) or national versus transnational frameworks (Erll 2011). By focusing on Swahili-language biographical material as my main source of data, this paper further anchors the concept of inheritance in an argument for the importance of attending to Islamic biography writing (*tarajim*) as a vehicle for expressing forms of religious memory in the broader Islamic intellectual tradition. Such forms of biography writing are importantly linked to broader traditions of “Muslim historiography” (Rosenthal 1968) and are thus steeped in wider Islamic epistemologies of the importance of intimate transmission and chains of narration (*isnad*) (Ahmed 2015), which this paper takes as a key theoretical basis for the kind of memory captured in notions of inheritance. My analysis is further situated and informed by insights from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar and Mombasa, as well as various interviews with the authors of these biographies, Ghalib Yusuf Tamim and Sheikh Saidi Musa. This paper also incorporates data collected from local religious conferences and lectures commemorating the lives and contributions of these scholars to highlight the ongoing significance of their legacies in the collective memory of everyday Muslims across Tanzania and Kenya. 

While these ideas of inheritance in the region are not exclusive to the reformist tradition in East Africa, I focus specifically on these two reformist scholars due to their widespread influence in shaping contemporary Islamic thought and practice in the region (Kresse 2018). More importantly, while global studies of contemporary Islamic reform and “Salafi” thought have tended to focus on debates over Islamic authority or on political movements, much less research has attended to how the projects of reform and revival––in looking back to and centering the early Muslims generations as pious ancestors (*salaf us-salihun*) and spiritual exemplars––involve a deep and meaningful engagement with the religious memory of spiritual predecessors and their legacies. Given the wider significance across the Muslim world of the Prophetic teaching that religious scholars and students of scared knowledge are “inheritors of the Prophets”––along with the importance of inheritance as a symbol of spiritual genealogy in the Islamic tradition (Shryock 1997)––it is hoped that this contribution will be generative toward new ways of approaching religious and historical memory within Islam and in Muslim societies.