Journal articles on the topic 'Islam – Tanzania'

Abstract In this study of current trends in the socio-religious life of Muslim communities in major urban centres and cities of Tanzania – Morogoro, Mwanza, and Dar es Salaam – ‘Islamisation’ denotes the strategies and activities that have been key to the spreading practice of Islam over the past three decades (1985-2015). In this period, Islam has embraced new approaches to social, political and economic change. This can be seen reflected in tangible ways as an institutionalized awakening of Islam consolidates faith, unifies sects, and promotes Qur’anic and hadith teachings in everyday life during this the post-Ujamaa era of Tanzania’s history.

In post-colonial Tanzania, efforts to govern the relations between Christianity and Islam—the country’s largest religions—have been impacted by the growing potential for conflict between and among diverse strands of the two faiths from the mid-1990s onward. They have also been shaped by the highly unequal relations between various Christian and Muslim actors and the Tanzanian government in the context of globalization. This article describes how the governance of religious multiplicity in Tanzania has affected the domains of transnational development, the registration of new religious bodies, and the regulation of religious instruction in schools. It argues that a comprehensive understanding of ‘lived religion’ needs to focus on the way in which religious multiplicities are molded as socio-cultural realities through a wide range of governing interventions.

Abstract During the 2015 general election campaigns in Tanzania, a controversy arose between the ruling party and the opposition coalition, concerning the proposed constitution draft and the position of Zanzibar within the Union. Beyond this controversy, there have existed the impacts of Islamic revivalism on the one hand, and a fear for the perpetuation of Islam in Tanzania on the other – issues which have played a significant role in the country since Independence. In this paper, we focus in particular upon popular Muslim preachers, such as Ponda Issa Ponda, who complain that the National Muslim Council of Tanzania [BAKWATA] is just an extension of the mainstream government – an organisation which is unsympathetic to Muslims’ interests, which violates Muslims’ rights, and which functions contrary to its own purpose. This complaint draws on long-term memory, reaching back even further than the 1968 banning of the East African Muslims Welfare Society [EAMWS]. Two interesting questions are addressed here concerning a central state’s involvement in religious affairs under multi-party rule: How has the Tanzanian government managed religious diversity? And how should its management style be evaluated, given the perspective that has developed with the shift in focus from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ in policy and management sciences?

AbstractThis article explores the intellectual life and organizational work of an Indian Muslim activist and journalist, M. O. Abbasi, a largely forgotten figure who nonetheless stood at the center of colonial-era debates over the public role of Islam in mainland Tanzania. His greatest impact was made through the Anjuman Islamiyya, the territory's leading pan-Islamic organization that he co-founded and modeled on Indian modernist institutions. The successes and failures of Abbasi and the Anjuman Islamiyya demonstrate the vital role played by Western Indian Ocean intellectual networks, the adaptability of transoceanic, pan-Islamic organizational structures, and, ultimately, the limits imposed on pan-Islamic activism by racial politics in colonial Tanzania.

More often than not, Africans employed local religion and the seemingly antagonistic faith of Christianity and Islam, to respond to colonial exploitation, cruelty, and violence. Southern Tanzanians’ reaction during the Majimaji resistance presents a case in point where the application of local religion, Christianity, and Islam for both individual and community spiritual solace were vivid. Kinjekitile Ngwale—the prominent war ritualist—prophesied that a concoction (Maji) would turn the German’s bullets to water, which in turn would be the defeat of the colonial government. Equally, Christian and Islamic doctrines were used to motivate the resistance. How religion is used in the post-colonial context as a cure for maladies of early 20th-century colonialism and how local religion can inspire political change is the focus of this paper. The paper suggests that religion, as propagated by the Majimaji people for the restoration of social justice to the descendant’s communities, is a form of cultural heritage playing a social role of remedying colonial violence.

AbstractMost histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as ‘nominal’ Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the ‘nominal’ Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations’ conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges.

On 27-28 March 2006, Pennsylvania State University hosted an internationalconference on “Islam and Bioethics: Concerns, Challenges, and Responses.”Cosponsored by several academic units in the College of Liberal Arts, theconference brought in historians, health care professionals, theologians, and social scientists from ten different countries. Twenty-four papers were presented,along with Maren Grainger-Monsen’s documentary about an Afghaniimmigrant seeking cancer treatment in California.After opening remarks by Susan Welch (dean, College of Liberal Arts)and Nancy Tuana (director, Rock Ethics Institute), panelists analyzed“Critical Perspectives on Islamic Medical Ethics.” Hamada Hamid’s (NewYork University Medical School) “Negotiating Autonomy and Religion inthe Clinical Setting: Case Studies of American Muslim Doctors andPatients,” showed that few doctors explore the role of religion in a patient’sdecision-making process. She suggested that they rethink this practice.Hassan Bella (College of Medicine, King Faisal University, Dammam)spoke on “Islamic Medical Ethics: What and How to Teach.” His survey, conductedin Saudi Arabia among medical practitioners, revealed that most practitionersapproved of courses on Islamic ethics but did not know if suchcourses would improve the doctor-patient relationship. Sherine Hamdy’s(Brown University) “Bodies That Belong to God: Organ Transplants andMuslim Ethics in Egypt” maintained that one cannot easily classify transplantpatients’ arguments as “religious” or “secular,” for religious values are fusedtogether with a patient’s social, political, and/or economic concerns.The second panel, “Ethical Decision-Making in Local and InternationalContexts,” provoked a great deal of discussion. Susi Krehbiel (Brown University)led off with “‘Women Do What They Want’: Islam and FamilyPlanning in Tanzania.” This ethnographic study was followed by Abul FadlMohsin Ebrahim’s (KwaZulu University, Durban) “Human Rights andRights of the Unborn.” Although Islamic law is commonly perceived asantagonistic to the UN’s charter on human rights, Ebrahim argues that bothmay be used to protect those who can and cannot fight for their right to dignity,including the foetus. Thomas Eich (Bochum University) asserted in“The Process of Decision Making among Contemporary Muslim ReligiousScholars in the Case of ‘Surplus’ Embryos” that decisions reached by internationalMuslim councils were heavily influenced by local politics and contentiousdecisions in such countries as Germany and Australia.The afternoon panel, “The Fetus and the Value of Fetal Life,” focusedon specific issues raised by artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs).Vardit Rispler-Chaim (Haifa University) presented “Contemporary Muftisbetween Bioethics and Social Reality: Pre-Selection of the Sex of a Fetus asParadigm.” After summarizing social customs and religious literature fromaround the world, she claimed that muftis generally favor pre-selection techniquesand suggested that their reasoning is guided by a general social ...

Muslim radicalism in Tanzania has tended to be perceived as a political problem, and as part of a trans-regional wave of Islamist movements. The present article instead seeks to demonstrate the connections between current debates among Tanzanian Muslims and long-standing ritual and social concerns, by highlighting debates on funerary practice. While these debates focus on the correct ritual process of burial (with reformists decrying elements of traditional practice as inappropriate innovation), their underlying concern is with the ability of the living to safeguard the well-being of the deceased. This concern, in turn, can be connected both to long-term social change and to the interaction between Muslim and indigenous religious notions. As propitiation of God supplants that of ancestors, the fate of the dead is increasingly construed as depending on the supplication of the living. Ultimately this religious debate is as concerned with society as with doctrine or ritual, and the opposing sides share some common ground. They do not, however, construe this as ‘Africanizing’ Islam, but as part of a necessary intellectual debate.

The use and management of sacred sites that are still in use provide challenges to site managers since visitors fail to abide by rules established for the sacred area. In this study, it was revealed that there are ritual practices, strict taboos and customary laws put in place to control access to cave areas which are regarded as sacred to the locals. The habit of visitors not adhering to the established regulations when visiting caves and their areas have created a disconnection between people and their traditional religions and actually caused some of them to join mainstream religions such as Islam. The article proposes measures to be adopted by the antiquities authority, and other heritage managers in Zanzibar and Tanzania, in general, to provide the best practice for cave visitors and enable the communities to continue using the caves as a crucial part of their religious life without any molestations.

The Gülen Movement (GM) is one of the most dynamic religiously inspired movements in the world today. Constituting a globally active, translocal community with a strong center in Turkey, GM-affiliated actors are primary players in shaping the educational landscapes of countries around the world. The emergence of Gülen-inspired schools (GISs) in urban Tanzania is reflective of the GM’s global reach. Different from other faith-based educational institutions, GISs like Feza Schools in Dar es Salaam do not explicitly promote Islam. However, an Islamic belief and conduct is the base on which actors of the Gülen Movement shape their lives as teachers or administrators in school, as well as the background for founding and supporting them. Hizmet teachers at the Feza Girls’ Secondary and High School (FGSHS) are translating the Islamic background of the GM’s educational engagement into a moral formation of the students that is framed in universal terms. Looking at the teachers’ translocal practices and motivations, it becomes clear that at GISs religion, ethics, and education are closely intertwined.

AbstractMany societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape the religious allegiances of commoners. In fact, studies of contemporary Islamic societies demonstrate the relative autonomy of commoners’ religious observance, and the tendency of elites towards accommodation. Evidence from a recently Islamized region in East Africa shows that, rather than following elite converts, ordinary villagers initiated rural Islamization. They learned from coastal Muslim ritual rather than scripture, and evoked Islam to challenge social hierarchies and assert a more egalitarian social ethos. The possibility of similar processes also exists in other sites of gradual Islamization.

ABSTRACTThe emergence of the Indian Ocean region as an important geo-political arena is being studied across a range of disciplines. Yet while the Indian Ocean has figured in Swahili studies and analyses of East and Southern African diasporic communities, it has remained outside the mainstream of African Studies. This introduction provides an overview of emerging trends in the rich field of Indian Ocean studies and draws out their implications for scholars of Africa. The focus of the articles is on one strand in the study of the Indian Ocean, namely the role of print and visual culture in constituting public spheres and nationalisms in, across and between the societies around the Ocean.The themes addressed unfold between Southern and East Africa and India as well as along the African coast from KwaZulu-Natal through Zanzibar and Tanzania to the Arab world. This introduction surveys debates on print culture, newspapers and nationalism in African Studies and demonstrates how the articles in the volume support and extend these areas of study. It draws out the broader implications of these debates for the historiographies of East African studies, Southern African studies, debates on Indian nationalism and Islam.

The article examines the role that mentoring, a critical relational leadership process would have in preventing and countering violent extremism by first examining the contexts of radicalization into violent extremism and past violent extremist attacks. Youths and adolescents in Kenya have been radicalized into violent extremism with resultant acts of terror that have resulted in; mass fatalities, casualties, destruction of facilities, disruption of livelihoods and business, and creation of immense fear within the public. The first major attack that seemed to have opened this cycle of al Qaeda and al Shabaab-led Jihadist attacks was the August, 1998 twin-bombing of the USA embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Since then, we have had the advent of; al Qaeda, its affiliate al Shabaab, and ISIS attacks rising within the African continent with heavy impacts of death trails, casualties, and destruction. This year, Kenya has suffered a number of attacks targeting both soft and hard targets. Among the soft targets was the attack targeting Dusit Hotel in the upmarket 14 Riverside Complex, which left 21 Kenyans and foreigners dead. By extension there have been a number of IED attacks targeting the security services of Kenya many fatalities and casualties. All these attacks have been executed by violent extremists among who are Kenyan youth who have been recruited and radicalized into violent extremism as an ideology that is leveraged on the Islam religion. This ideology of Jihadism is skewed but uses narratives that easily appeal to those targeted for radicalization. Consequently there is an urgent need to have in place relevant mentoring leadership practice to enhance worldviews and perspectives among youth and adolescents which are in tandem with what a sane world subscribes to. It then becomes imperative to have a faith-based mentoring approach that is devoid of extremism and which gives the pool of those targeted a leadership component. This deliver a countering and preventive relational leadership model enhancing resilience of individuals and communities, while countering narratives and propaganda inherent in the recruitment and radicalization to violent extremism. Following literature review and conceptualization of the variables, this article concludes that preventive and countering violent extremism measures are best deployed first amongst the youth, who form the largest and most vulnerable pool of those targeted for radicalization due to; their crave for an identity, promises of a utopian caliphate on earth and life upon death, poverty, joblessness, presence of ungoverned spaces such as the complex cyber space, and dysfunctional social systems including families.

This book is a collection of essays written by a variety of experts on Turkey and social movements and provides a critical analysis of the role of the Gülen Movement (GM)—or Hizmet (“service”), as it is referred to by its adherents—in the coup attempt which was undertaken by one or more factions of the Turkish armed forces in July 2016. Edited and contributed to by M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balci, this work began at a conference in October of 2016, where these experts gathered to discuss the coup itself as well as its implications and ramifications. The chapters in the book all build off of each other to some degree, with earlier chapters covering the history of the GM and the ways in which it has acquired influence both in Turkey and abroad; the coup and structural factors both within Turkish society; and the GM alliance with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current president of Turkey. Later chapters expand in scope, covering the foreign policy implications of the coup both for Turkey and the United States, where Fethullah Gülen, the eponymous leader of the movement, resides today. Several chapters engage the state of the scholarship on the GM itself, effectively unpacking the ways in which the organization has actively co-opted academia by offering paid trips to Turkey, publishing non-peer-reviewed material, and funding conferences which avoid critical analysis of the GM. In the introduction Balci and Yavuz discuss the history of the Turkish state, giving particular focus to the place of religion under Kemal Atatürk; the pair discusses how the Turkish concept of secularism hews much more closely to the Jacobin tradition than the Anglo-American understanding. This is quite important as the alliance between the AKP and the GM (following Turkish elections in 2002 wherein the AKP swept to power) rested on a shared desire to overthrow the Kemalist conception of secularism, which seeks to dominate religion and prevent its expression in the public sphere. The book’s first chapter, written by Yavuz, charts the GM’s development over time, enumerating three key stages in its history. The first was that of a loosely bound religious network, encouraged by their leader to do good works; the second marked the expansion of the GM both within and outside of Turkey as an education-providing and media powerhouse; the third saw the GM create a parallel state structure in Turkey, which was mobilized to further increase the movement’s power throughout the 2000s and this current decade, most famously during the coup itself, though a variety of other incidents are discussed here and throughout the book. The next chapter details the coup itself, giving background which is necessary to understand the rest of the work and underlining four key junctures which put Turkey on the path to the July 15th event. The chapter’s author, Mujeeb R. Khan, notes that the structure of Turkish institutions (particularly its version of secularism), the continued domination of the Turkish deep state following the introduction of multi-party elections several decades ago, the neo-liberal opening Turkey experienced in the 1980s, and the rise of the AKP in the early 2000s all played integral roles in the rise of the GM and, eventually, the coup. Yavuz collaborated with Rasim Koç to write the third chapter, which examines the relationship between the GM and Erdoğan’s AKP (beginning with the unspoken alliance between the two which started after AKP’s 2002 electoral victory and whose disintegration led to the coup) as well as foreign policy consequences it had for Turkey. Chapters 4 and 5, written by Michael A. Reynolds and Kiliç Kanat, examine the coup, including the factors and events which led to both its occurrence and its failure. Kanat’s examination of why the coup failed is particularly interesting; he compares and contrasts the failure with previous successful coups which occurred in Turkey during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The next chapter, written by Caroline Tee, returns specifically to the topic of the AKP-GM relationship, digging deeply into the events which caused what on the surface seemed like a natural alliance to fracture and, during 2016, turn upon itself. Sabine Dreher’s chapter follows Tee’s, and is one of the most theoretical in the book, as it places the GM in the contexts of neoliberal and globalist theory, and notes internal contradictions within the movement itself. She considers how the global goals of the organization—the eradication of ignorance through educational work, the alleviation of poverty through private enterprise run by movement members, and the hosting of intercultural and interfaith dialogue— stand at odds with the nationalist project of the GM in Turkey, where movement members attempted to seize control of the state they had been infiltrating for some time as opposed to working outside of it. Balci wrote the eighth chapter, which deals with the GM movement’s presence in former Soviet satellites, namely Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Following the coup attempt in 2016, the Turkish government pressured all of these states to shut down any GM movement activities within their countries, which was difficult as the GM provided excellent education to the children of elites in these nations. He then charts the differing reactions of the states mentioned above. The ninth chapter, by David Tittensor, turns to the structure of the GM and how secrecy and hierarchy play crucial roles in it, a reality which is often denied by the majority of scholarship—though he and other contributors to the work might dispute the use of the term “scholarship”, or at least qualify it. He does end his chapter with a criticism of the theory that GM members were key leaders of the coup, a conclusion which is at odds with that of most other contributors to the volume. The tenth chapter, by Yavuz Çobanoĝlu, provides insight into the role of women in the GM, criticizing some of Gülen’s writings and detailing the experiences of female students living in GM dormitories in Turkey, an experience that many of the women surveyed found to be repressive. Kristina Dohrn’s contribution outlines the activities and role of the GM movement in Tanzania, which, similar to Balci’s chapter, deals with repercussions of the coup and examines potential paths forward for the GM outside of Turkey. The work’s final chapter, written by Joshua Hendrick, is about how the GM presented itself as a “good” Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, during a period in which the West writ large was searching for a “modern” version of the religion which it could champion in opposition to extremism. He effectively critiques the idea that religion itself can be good or bad, and rightly puts the onus on the actors themselves. The book ends with a postscript which examines the four major theories about how the coup may have come to pass, and comes to the conclusion that GM members were central and sole actors in the coup, which was in all likelihood approved by Gülen himself. This work does an excellent job of unpacking the GM and its various religious and political facets, even for the relatively uninitiated reader, and pushes back strongly against what it identifies as the prevailing anti-Erdoĝan Western narratives about the coup, which try to shift blame away from the GM and onto the shoulders of other actors, including the AKP leader. Particularly interesting is the book’s criticism of GM-sponsored scholarship, which is cited as one of the primary ways in which the GM has ingratiated itself worldwide, as it frames the group as “good” Islam. The work refrains from being speculative but does examine possible futures for the GM, mostly outside of Turkey, as the country’s government has gone to extreme lengths to uproot the movement in its homeland—lengths that the authors do rightly criticize as going too far, if somewhat tepidly at times. The US-Turkey relationship as it relates to the GM issue, specifically hisresidence in the US, is also examined in some depth and leads a student of either Islam in the US or the country’s politics to wonder if the GM has successfully insinuated itself into any institutions here, as it has done in Turkey. The author of this review once believed that Erdoĝan may have permitted or even been behind the coup attempt as a vehicle to consolidate power, but the evidence and arguments presented by the authors of this work have swayed his point of view; the GM was almost certainly responsible for the coup attempt, and it seems likely that Gülen himself gave his blessing to the members of his movement who carried it out. Grant MarthinsenMA, Center for Contemporary Arab StudiesGeorgetown University

El virus Zika se detectó en 1947 en Uganda, África, en un mico Macaccus Rhesus. Es parte de la familia Flaviviridae (género Flavivirus). En humanos la infección se demostró por serología en 1952 en Uganda y Tanzania; el virus se aisló en 1968 en Nigeria. La enfermedad consistía en fiebre de pocos grados, mialgias, artralgias, conjuntivitis serosa y un exantema morbiliforme parecido al del dengue clásico. Hasta 2006 hubo casos aislados en África y sudeste Asiático en viajeros. En 2007 en la Isla de Yap (Micronesia) se notificaron 185 casos y se identificó como posible vector al Aedes hensilii. En la Polinesia Francesa en 2013 hubo 10.000 casos y 70 fueron graves con complicaciones neurológicas y autoinmunes. Los vectores relacionados fueron Ae. aegypti y Ae. polynesiensis. En el 2014 hubo casos en Nueva Caledonia y en Islas Cook de Australia. En los siguientes siete años en viajeros en Thailandia, Camboya, Indonesia y Nueva Caledonia. No se informaron muertes. En América se había registrado casos en viajeros que se infectaron en África y las otras áreas ya mencionadas, con solo un caso autóctono en USA, por transmisión sexual. En febrero de 2014, hubo un caso confirmado en la isla de Pascua (Chile) y por lo menos otros 40 en Valparaíso; hubo nuevos casos hasta Junio en Pascua. Después de esto apareció la más grande epidemia registrada hasta ahora en la historia, en Brasil. Hasta la fecha se han detectado más de 84.931 casos (subrregistro más de 80 %), 40 muertes y una epidemia de microcefalia asociada a infecciones en embarazadas que se infectaron en los tres primeros meses. Ya hay casos en El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana Francesa, Honduras, Martinica, México, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, Surinam y Venezuela. En Colombia no se había informado casos hasta octubre de 2015, cuando el MSP confirmó nueve casos autóctonos en Cartagena (Bolívar), sin ninguna complicación. Hasta la semana epidemiológica 51 (diciembre 20-26, 2015), había un total de 736 casos confirmados en el Instituto Nacional de Salud (INS) y se había notificado 9.280 casos sospechosos. Procedían de 34/36 (94.44 %) de los Departamentos. No se han notificado muertes. Tampoco complicaciones, ni casos de microcefalia, aunque hubo 236 casos en embarazadas.