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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the broader connections of German East African Islam in the examples of a popular religious revival and of legal scholarship. It contrasts these wider flows with the false alternative between “local Islam” and “outside influence” proposed by the nascent German Islamic Studies.

Paper long abstract:

German colonialism in East Africa was marked by volatile discourses on Islam with a tendency toward insular interpretations of Muslim agency and politics. This led to remarkable misinterpretations of Islamic scholarship and popular movements alike, with the nascent German Islamic Studies contributing to the confusion. Here, a shift from the normative lens of Orientalism to an emphasis on local diversity led to a hyper-focus on difference and a wilful dismissal of broader connections and flows. The paper will discuss these misreadings and the broader connections of German East African Islam via two examples: 1) the popular religious revival sparked by the so-called “Mecca letters” of 1908, and 2) the fiqh erudition of ʿUmār bin Ṣṭambūl in Tanga. In both cases German scholars – first among them Carl Heinrich Becker, who is often seen as the founder of Islamic Studies in Germany – only managed to construct East African Islam as local divergence from “orthodox” Islam, ignoring evidence of broader flows at their disposal. Where wider connections were acknowledged, these were interpreted through a narrow political lens that sought to map and contain the “outside disturbance” of “local” Islam. Based on a forthcoming book on Islam in German East Africa, the paper will endeavour to deconstruct this false alternative between the global and the local in a careful analysis of its sources, showing how the colonial archive can still yield hitherto undiscovered traces of connectivity buried under a long history of European interpretation.