And Home Was Kariakoo (14 page)

The guide uses his cell phone to beckon the motorboat, which is ready for us when we arrive.

The sight of the ruins and the present state of this Isle has left many a visitor in a contemplative or depressive mood. “Such is the state of a settlement which in 1500 the Portuguese found prosperous in the highest degree,” wrote Richard Burton, who visited it in 1859. “Every grace save that of beauty has now passed from it and … we see the wild ‘smokes’ of the tropical coast, and we hear the scream of the seamew harshly invading the silence and solitude of a city in ruins.”

According to Krapf, who visited not long after, the Island should be turned into a place like Sierra Leone, a haven for freed slaves.

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Photo Caption 8.2
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B
Y THE TIME THE PRAYER STARTS
in the mosque this blazing Friday afternoon on Sikukuu Street, Dar es Salaam, the sidewalk is close-packed with worshippers, and more are arriving, converging from the neighbourhood, some wearing their kofias and kanzus, some bringing their own mats to pray on. Not to be taken as unbelievers, as we more or less are, we go down on protesting knees on a proffered mat on the hard pavement and follow the motions of those around us. No one spares a look at us. As the prayer proceeds, in a rich, throaty voice heard clearly over a loudspeaker, the people on the street, as though charmed by a mesmer, stop in their tracks, go down on their knees, and begin to perform the familiar motions of the Islamic prayer. Traffic has stopped.

We have come to see the Shadhiliyya Sufis at prayer. Is this a purely voyeuristic desire? Perhaps, but can you distinguish that from an intense curiosity about those amongst whom we lived, a desire to make amends for the sin of ignorance? I carry a tiny flame of resentment inside me at the fact that most of us, Africans and Asians, had grown up in such insular communities that we did not know how people down the street from us lived or worshipped. I had heard of
the mystical and unorthodox Sufi Muslims, but believed that they resided elsewhere, in the countries of the Middle East and South Asia. That they existed in East Africa, and moreover were important in the spread of Islam in these lands, I discovered only recently—much to my embarrassment—in the accounts of some western scholars. Soon after my arrival in Dar, therefore, I stood outside the city’s main Jama Mosque and as the men emerged from their prayers I inquired about these Sufis: where could I find them, the Shadhiliyyas and the Qadiriyyas? No one seemed to know of them. This was not too surprising, for the orthodox do not view the Sufis very positively; and one group of worshippers is not going to send you to the doors of another. (I discovered this also when inquiring about Hindu temples in Dar.) In Kilwa Kivinje, however, I had been shown a Qadiriyya mosque and its sheikh had sung to me. And on Kilwa Island, in the madrassa next to the stone ruins, I was informed that indeed the Shadhiliyya had their centre in Dar, on Sikukuu Street. And here it is, in the midst of the noon prayer, hardly a mile away from where I had made my fruitless inquiries; and hardly a mile away from where I grew up.

Sufis are intriguing for their oddball nonconformism. Their mysticism is manifest in expressions of devotion to God, either at the abstract level of meditation on the Absolute, or at a personal, devotional level. Sufi sects or orders have formed around hierarchies of spiritual teachers or masters. Devotion to God is often expressed through the dhikr (Swahili: dhikri), consisting of meditation or chanting, and sometimes singing and even dancing. The whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order who sometimes tour North American cities express their devotion by their dance. For such unorthodoxy, and their close fraternity, they have often been despised. The medieval Iranian Sufi, Mansur al Hallaj, for repeatedly uttering, I am the Truth,
implying We are all God, was—according to legend—hanged and decapitated, then burned and his ashes thrown in the Tigris; even then, it is said, they formed the words I am the Truth.

Sufis exist everywhere, often in small numbers, practising innocuously. In the old city of Jerusalem I once came across a Sufi; he ran a tiny general store and when I made my inquiry agreed to take me to the local centre, which was on the first-floor terrace of a building nearby. It was Thursday, sacred to Sufis, and that evening the group was to meet and performed the dhikr, but much to my regret I had to be elsewhere and therefore missed it. For the moment, I could only peep through the grille door into the long, dark, silent hall laid with carpet. And in Toronto, on a winter morning, the ground covered in snow, my friend Munir took me to a Sufi meeting in a modest suburban home. This group was defined by its devotion to a master of Sri Lankan origin, now dead, who has a shrine in Philadelphia. This day the group, seated on the carpeted floor of the modest living room, spoke with veneration about their master—his demeanour, his simplicity, his wisdom. A visitor from Philadelphia was present. Towards the end of the meeting the devotees sat in silent meditation, after which a discussion took place, and then a simple meal was served. A far cry from the whirling dervishes, but these were also Sufis.

Why my own interest in Sufis? The act of human devotion to the sacred intrigues me and draws me as an observer; perhaps there lies here a nostalgia for the simplicity and humility of devotion that I knew and saw around me in our prayer house as a child. I was brought up in the syncretistic Khoja tradition, containing the elements of both esoteric Ismailism and the Indian Upanishads, as well as devotional mysticism of the kind demonstrated in the songs of Kabir and Mira. I could add that the quest of fundamental physics,
which became my specialty for a while, is also a quest for absolute truth.

The African variety of Sufism—more often known as the tarika, or “path”—is little known, and most books on Sufism completely ignore it. Unlike in Iran or South Asia, there are no major Sufi shrines in East Africa, where people from all backgrounds and faiths can go and pay respects and ask for blessings.

The Shadhiliyya path is North African in origin and named after Abul Hassan Ali ash-Shadhili (d. 1258), a Moroccan mystic. In the nineteenth century the Shadhiliyya movement had found a footing in the Indian Ocean islands of the Comores through a connection to Palestine. From the Comores the movement spread to the old settlement of Kilwa in Tanganyika, which became a local centre.

What is in my mind as I go through the motions of Islamic prayer, up and down, both hands to the ears and back to the sides, mimicking my neighbours to the right and left and the man in front, is memory—fleeting visions of this street, Sikukuu Street, as it once was. It ran all the way down to Uhuru Street, where I lived at the intersection, and for several years it was the first leg of my long trek to school. The houses were of mud and wattle. As I passed, early in the morning at seven, elderly men in kanzus and kofias might be sitting outside playing bao; on the ground at some of the doorways there would be bottles of togwa, a light porridgelike drink, for sale. Across from where I now perform this ritual like a nervous robot was a rudimentary store of the poorest sort belonging to a friend’s family; sometimes I would stop and pick him up—he was always late—and we would then hurry off as I was regaled to a catalogue of dirty stories. The street was unpaved, and often we removed our shoes, not to pray but to wade through rainwater and mud. If there was a mosque at this location, a simple one, I didn’t know. Now the street
is paved, there are one- and two-storey brick buildings, many motor vehicles. At the end of the street, a block away on this side, is the Fire Station, which had in those days a wall clock in a front room. Viewed from a distance through the window the clock was my timekeeper: How many minutes to bell? Should I run or keep walking? The vice-principal, Mr. Duarte, delighted in greeting latecomers with a swinging cane.

And on the way back from school down this street in the hot afternoon I would stop at some shop and beg for water. At one of the shops the owners were especially generous, and some Thursdays, which were holy days, they would even hand out sweets to passing schoolchildren. A few days ago, while I was walking outside the Khoja khano, an Asian woman came to beg me for money. It was an unusual and embarrassing experience; Asians never begged in public. Only when I had walked away did I realize, recalling the name she had given me, that she was from the shop on Sikukuu Street that had so generously given me water to drink and even some sweet on special Thursdays. Perhaps she had been sitting in the shop watching as I stood outside dripping with sweat and gulping down water.

The prayers over, the men on the sidewalk get up and, without ceremony, except pausing to shake hands with familiars, disperse up and down the street to where they came from. They do this every Friday, of course, if not every day. The mosque begins to empty as a tide of men emerges from the two entrances. But now something strange happens: a number of men are conspicuous, easily discernible in crisp, extra-white kanzus and kofias, and against the emerging tide they are going
up
the steps and inside. Something is going on there. I inquire of a man beside me, and he replies, “They’re doing dhikri inside.”

I walk up the steps, remove my laced shoes outside the door, and enter the cool shade of the interior. I go and stand against the back wall. Elderly men come to shake my hand, put their right hand to their breast in the Islamic greeting, very happy to see a stranger among them.

At the front end of the hall a small tight circle of men forms, and then expands as they take a few steps back. And they begin swaying back and forth, back and forth, chanting, “Allahoo, Allahoo.” The name of God. Such is the absorption, such is the collective murmur, a humming and a buzzing, that it holds me spellbound. Against the front wall before them stands an ancient-looking, frail man with two companions. He is, I guess, the khalifah, the master of the order here. Occasionally someone comes and kisses his hand. The chanting gets louder, the swaying energetic. It becomes apparent in time that one of the men is leading the dhikri, and soon he enters the circle and is joined by another, and the two conduct the chanting and swaying, gliding in long strides from one end of the circle to the other. A group of young boys, perhaps eight years old, have meanwhile formed a smaller circle of their own.

These are the Shadhiliyya, then.

I lived in this city, at the end of this street, yet never saw or dreamt anything like it, was never aware that prayers of this sort went on in our midst. Now after many years I have returned, and connect this ritual prayer to a larger history, to the world, see it as a part of a global mystical fraternity.

Politics have not been far from the life of these tarikas or Sufi orders, which is not surprising, because they are both populist and non-conforming and reach out to the simple and less privileged. In India and Africa, many believe, it is the Sufis and mystics who have been
largely responsible for the spread of Islam among the masses. The following is cultish and centres around the spiritual master, in much the same way that among many Indians worship often centres around a guru like Sai Baba. The language used is the vernacular and accessible, and joint worship and song are the expressions of devotion to God. It is the opposing, judgemental orthodox faith, Arabic- and scripture-based, that has the ear of the sultan—or whatever ruler is in place. If everyone were to declare, like the Iranian mystic Mansur, “I am the Truth,” where would government be? Where would orthodoxy be?

In 1905 in Tanganyika, a massive insurrection against German rule erupted and spread out in a good swath of the country, involving many ethnic groups. The war was inspired by a medicine man called Kinjikitile, whose village, Ngarambe, was close to Kilwa. Kinjikitile introduced blessed water to his followers, instructing them that if they took it (drank it or sprinkled themselves with it, the ritual is not quite clearly described in the texts) and followed certain rules of abstention, then any German bullets shot at them would turn to water and be rendered harmless. Thus began the Maji Maji War. The blessed water (maji) spread, taking the war with it. It has been conjectured that members of Sufi orders were among those who initiated the warriors with the water ceremony. There is no hard evidence for this, but it would not be surprising. People of many beliefs resented the Germans, and the Muslims had special grievance against the European domination of the Muslim areas of the world. The Germans in turn were wary of the Muslims, wavering between policies of tolerance and hostility. They even considered encouraging natives to raise pigs, in the hope that a liking for pork would discourage them from adopting Islam.

Following the Maji Maji War, the Germans remained nervous about the Sufis. In 1908 a pamphlet called the Mecca Letter began
circulating in many parts of the country and caused much excitement; written in Arabic, it was read in the mosques and discussed by the sheikhs. Millenarian in content, it warned Muslims against deviation from the true faith. And furthermore, those who did not pass the letter on would face dire consequences. Implicitly anti-European, it put the scare into the government that it could instigate another uprising, along the lines of Maji Maji. A number of people were arrested, and in 1909 the colonial government banned the practice of dhikri, the collective Sufi chanting. It was allowed again two years later.