BOOK REVIEW by: Ghalib Yusuf Tamim

African Studies Review, 2001

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC SOCIAL …

These are the first two volumes in a three-volume work dealing with the correspondence among Ali Mazrui and his opponents, as well as his supporters, on issues relating to Africa. Mazrui, a Kenyan scholar, is currently Albert Schweitzer professor in humanities and director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, State University of New York. An Oxford scholar, he is also Albert Luthuli professor-at-large in humanities and development studies at the University of Jos, Nigeria, as well as Andrew D. White professorat-large emeritus and senior scholar in Africana studies at Cornell University (www.islamonline.net). In addition, he has authored many publications and television and radio documentaries. Perhaps his best-known work in the West is his BBC radio and television documentary series "The Africans," which was co-produced by the BBC and the public television station WETA. Writing on Mazrui, Sulayman Nyang of Howard University states: Ali Mazrui is a controversial but independent and original thinker. He is a master word-monger and certainly does not belong to that class of men who lament that words fail them. …It is because of his conjurer's ability to negotiate between the realm of serious issues and the province of Paul Banahene Adjei is completing his M.A. program at the Ontario Institute of Education of the University of Toronto, Canada, and will begin his Ph.D. in September 2005 at this same institution. His research interest is decolonizing knowledge in Africa and anti-racism in education.

Prof Ali Al’Amin Mazrui (1933-2014) comes from a generation of eminent Scholars. His father, Sh. Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui (1891-1947) was the 25th scholar in the Mazrui family tree following in the footsteps of his father and forefathers. Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui was one of the great men of letters in East African History. He was a writer, an editor, a critic of Swahili and Arabic poetry, a theologian, a newspaperman, and a social reformer. Sh. Al-Amin has been the subject of research by so many scholars over the years. There are several research papers and thesis that are available in libraries and archives round the world about him. Prof Mazrui’s grandfather, Sheikh Ali bin Abdalla bin Naf’i Mazrui (1825-1894) was a central figure in the history of Islam in the East African Coast. He was a widely travelled Scholar (‘Ulamaa), a sort of visiting professor. He was a scholar par excellence whose legacy includes many of the modern day reformers among the East African religious leaders. This paper traces the scholarly path that Prof Mazrui followed in the footsteps of his forefathers.

Ali Mazrui has left his enormous intellectual footprint in Political Science in general and African Studies in particular. By the beginning of the 1990s, Mazrui’s outputs had been impressive and this resulted in Abdul Bemath’s 1998 compilation that was titled The Mazruiana Collection (1962-1997). However, as the years unfolded, Bemath saw the need to update his earlier compilation and this was renamed The Mazruiana Collection Revisited. The 2005 annotated bibliographical text that Bemath painstakingly put together has generously served and it continues to serve the Social Sciences and Humanities; and the latest edition of this compilation is about to be concluded to include all Mazrui’s publications between 2005 and 2014 as well as other edited texts that contain Mazrui’s writings that were compiled post-humously. The purpose of this essay is to essentially return to Bemath’s invaluable compilation as well as the updated curriculum vitae (CV); it does so to study and review from a bibliometric perspective Mazrui’s substantial contribution to the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Put differently, it sets itself the task to undertake a bibliometric approach that would help to map out Mazrui’s ‘mind’ reflecting upon the numbers of peer reviewed articles alongside his long list of books and book chapter publications. It graphically depicts and analyzes Mazrui’s outputs in order to show the extent of his contributions towards the knowledge production process that relates to the mentioned disciplines and in particular to that of African Studies.

Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, 2014

Re-incarnation in the Mazrui Family: Is Prof Ali Al'Amin Mazrui the Re-incarnation of his grandfather, Sh. Ali b. Abdalla Naf'i Mazrui (1825-1894)? Or is he the re-incarnation of his father, Sh. Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui (1891-1947)? Prof Mazrui was named after his grandfather, Sh. Ali b. Abdalla Naf'i, the Pioneering Role Model of East African Islamic Reformers. There are so many similarities in the life histories of Prof Ali Mazrui with both his father and grandfather. Is it a case of genetics or is it merely coincidences? All the three Mazruis left behind large legacies. They have become subjects of studies for researchers. This paper is a case study of Re-incarnation in the Mazrui Family.

2017

Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui's writings from the Uwongozi collection are a rich resource for students, researchers and anyone generally interested in social and historical aspects of Islam in East Africa. This bilingual edition seeks to make accessible the significant and unique commentaries by Sheikh al-Amin, who was a partial observer of, and an active participant in, the affairs of coastal Muslims. These texts have already fed into research projects in the past (particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, informing for instance the works of Margret Strobel, Ahmed Idha Salim, and Randal Pouwels). Still, much more can be taken up and commented upon-from historical, anthropological, linguistic, and religious studies perspectives; and in comparative perspective too, with a view to related Indian Ocean littorals, similar projects of Islamic reform, and more. There is a precedent sample of a bilingual edition of an important historical source for the study of Swahili society and especially Islam in East Africa, namely Sheikh Abdallah Saleh Farsy's account of East Africa's Shafiʾi ulama at the turn of the twentieth century (Farsy 1972),2 translated and published by Randall Pouwels (Farsy and Pouwels 1989). This has been a rich and much used resource by researchers over the decades, opening up local Swahili Islamic texts-and regional intellectual history-to a wider Anglophone readership. It is our hope that our translation, similarly, will be useful to a broad range of readers within and outside East Africa, within and far beyond Swahili Studies, broadly conceived. Here, we present the first academic English translations of these texts, so that they can be accessible to a wider audience beyond Swahilophone readers. And even for them, one might add, reading Sheikh al-Amin's old texts based on 1 A note on spelling: we are following the common local Swahili spellings of Islamic scholars and people from the region, and of some Islamic terms that are used in the English text here (like e.g. sheikh, maulidi, bidaa, dhikri, etc.)-and not standardized Arabic versions of these terms. But standardized transcriptions have been used for the names of scholars and newspapers from the Middle East in the Introduction (following the guidelines by ijmes, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies). 2 Note that the spelling of his first name varies, even in his own publications. Here and in the Introduction, 'Abdallah' is used, following his spelling in this book that was also a main source for us here. xiv kresse and mwakimako Kimvita (Mombasan dialect) with a number of now antiquated terms, many typos and hardly any punctuation, is not always easy-as they can see in the Swahili original version provided here. In our translation efforts, we have been fortunate to be able to build on an earlier and relatively free translation by Muhammad bin Yusuf, a grandson of Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui. He is based in Canada and generously shared his translation with us (Yusuf 2006). This was published between March and June 2009, in chapter sequences in the weekly Friday Bulletin, the main bulletin for Kenyan Muslims, which is edited from Jamia Mosque in central Nairobi. His is a very readable translation, but at times a bit far from the original. It linked the critical modernizing spirit of Sheikh al-Amin's writings to the contemporary world, using idioms and expressions from current Anglophone Muslim discourse familiar to readers in and beyond Kenya. For us, however, from an academic perspective, it was important to provide a translation closer to the original texts (written between 1930 and 1932), so that a sense of the historical contexts and invocations would become an inherent part of the readings in translation. If we have succeeded in this to some extent, this is in no small measure due to the helpful and corrective eyes of our two wazee and distinguished senior Swahili scholars who also originate from Mombasa, Professor Alamin Mazrui (based in the usa, at Rutgers University) and Mkubwa wetu (our elder) Abdilatif Abdalla (based in Germany, retired from the University of Leipzig), both true mabingwa (champions) of Kiswahili. As well-known poets, scholars, and Kivita speakers with immense translational and editorial experiences, and as members of long-standing intellectual families in Mombasa (one, of course, even related to our author), they have the ideal qualifications for the project that we, with our more limited abilities, undertook. We are grateful that they supported our project from the beginning, and that they went over our drafts with careful eyes and a rich sense for the local meanings and connotations that matter. It is thanks to their involvement that a publishable version of this translation could emerge. We would also like to acknowledge the help of Sharif Abdulrahman Saggaf Alawy, who was readily available for many conversations and interviews, also about his former teacher and guardian (mlezi) Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui, over the years since 1998, for which we (Kai Kresse in particular) are especially grateful. Some related conversations were also held with Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir, and we are grateful for the opportunity such conversations gave us to gain understanding of the perspective of social insiders who were close to Sheikh al-Amin and his students. The efforts that have gone into the realization of this translation project have, after all, been collaborative efforts across continents, oceans, and time-preface and acknowledgments xv zones, which were at times challenging to cross. We are grateful to the Mazrui family, especially Professor Alamin Mazrui and Sheikh Hammad Muhammad Kasim Mazrui (in Mombasa) who granted us permission to work with the materials and supported us in going ahead with the publication, and who supplied such a thoughtful foreword. Without their readiness to make the sources accessible, this book would not have been possible. We thank Muhammad Yusuf for providing us with his translation and being supportive of the project (which took much longer than we all initially thought), and we thank our research assistants and language editors who were involved, during different stages of the process of production: Stephanie Zöllner (at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin) for fundamental editorial assistance to get the project on its way; Sara Weschler (at Columbia University) for inspired critical work and immensely helpful feedback on draft translations; Brianna Alston (also at Columbia) for reliable editorial and formatting work; Olly Akkerman (at the Berlin Graduate School for the Study of Muslim Cultures and Societies, Free University Berlin) for qualified Islamic Studies related editorial assistance and final editing work; Liese Hoffmann and Jasmin Mahazi, for their work on translation and transcription of the sample Sahifa text presented in the appendix, and last but not least, Joy Adapon for feedback and proofreading. Furthermore, for their feedback on the Introduction and/or parts of the translations, and for the discussions of specific aspects or the substance of this work, we wish to thank Muhammad bin Yusuf, Mahmoud A

American Journal of Islam and Society , 2024

The Islamic presence in East Africa goes back to the Umayyad Caliphate, when the Omani al-Julandi family moved from Oman to East Africa for political and economic reasons. This movement was followed by other migrations from Southern Arabia. This led to the appearance of Muslim settlements and dynasties along the East African coastal region, which played a pivotal role in preaching Islam and introducing Arabian culture to the local communities. One of the Omani dynasties that established themselves along the East African coast was the Mazrui Dynasty, which ruled East Africa between 1741 and 1837. Though a number of studies have been conducted on the history of Islam in East Africa, the Swahili people, the Mazrui Dynasty and its descendants’ prominent scholars, there is still a further need to discuss the Mazrui Dynasty in particular and their efforts on spreading Islam in East Africa. This study demonstrates the contributions of the Mazrui Dynasty to the spreading of Islam in East Africa by shedding light on the origins of Mazrui family, why they immigrated to East Africa, how the Dynasty was established in Mombasa while also examining some of the most important aspects of the promotion Islam in East Africa. The study demonstrates the significant interactions between Islamic civilization and East African societies throughout the era of the Mazrui Dynasty, which promoted the expansion of Islam and Arabian culture across the region.

American Journal of Islam and Society

This editorial is dedicated to paying a tribute to Professor Ali A. Mazrui, whopassed away in Binghamton, New York, on October 13, 2014. From 2009(AJISS 26:1) until his passing, Professor Mazrui was the editor-in-chief forthis journal. In years to come, we may consider dedicating a special issue tohim and his general intellectual contributions. But for now, we present the followingtribute penned by his friend and colleague, Professor Sulayman S.Nyang (Howard University, Washington, DC), as published in IIIT “SpecialIssue: Farewell Professor Ali Mazrui” (October 2014).Professor Ali A. Mazrui, the celebrated scholar, author, and public intellectualfrom Kenya came, performed, and departed gracefully. Certainly, those whoknew him well gladly fared him well, knowing beyond reasonable doubt thathe had the nerve and the verve to represent both Islam and Africa faithfullyand effectively. It is against this background that one can examine a profile ofthe man and his legacies within many doma...