Zanzibar under Colonial Rule and the Revolution of 1964

Like Senegal, Mali, northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Tanganyika, Zanzibar saw the development of several distinct traditions of reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in 1964 it experienced a revolution that led to the almost complete collapse of existing Islamic scholarship. As a result, Islamic learning had to restart from scratch in the 1970s, and was characterised by the emergence of a state-controlled elite of Saudi- and Sudan-trained Muslim functionaries, as well as an activist Islamic opposition to the government of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) (Party of the Revolution). Due to the importance of the revolution for the reconfiguration of Islamic learning and the development of Islamic reform in Zanzibar, I will discuss the revolution and its impact in some detail.

Zanzibar's history was characterised in the nineteenth century by the expansion of the Sultanate of Zanzibar and its politics of economic and political transformation (see Loimeier 2009). Led by the Bū Saʿīdī family, the Sultanate of Oman gained control over most coastal settlements in the 1820s and 1830s. In his policy of expansion, Sultan Saʿīd b. Sulṭān (r. 1806–56) was supported by local allies, such as Lamu, which had managed to defeat a coalition of Mombasa and Pate forces in 1812 (Fuglesang 1994: 47). In 1822, the Omani fleet conquered Brawa and Pate, in 1823 Pemba and in 1824 the rest of the Lamu archipelago. Finally, Mombasa, which had been ruled by the Mazrūʿī family since 1730, was forced to accept Omani overrule in 1837. With her fleet of originally 70–80 warships, the Sultanate was able not only to effectively protect her trading connections in the Indian Ocean but also to exert effective control over the East African coast north of Mozambique. As a consequence, Oman was not forced to occupy the coastal strip and to maintain costly fortresses and bases there: the Sultanate was capable of cutting off the seaborne communication and trade of any coastal settlement at any time (Bennett 1978: 44).