Population Movements in Dar-es-Salaam: Islamic Migrations, 1450-1770
Omar H. Ali, Ph.D.
World History Encyclopedia, Fred Nadis, ed. (ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2009)
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One of the remarkable features of the age of first global contact was the spread of Islam through the Umma, or community of practitioners: merchants, missionaries, soldiers, military leaders, royalty, slaves, artisans, and scholars, expanding the boundaries of Dar-es-Salaam. The migration of Muslims, which began with the outreach of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula during the seventh century, took on global proportions with the opening of the New World in the late fifteenth century. By the early seventh century, Muslims had already established settled communities from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, which included millions of adherents. However, the three centuries following European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere also saw hundreds of thousands of Muslims enslaved in West Africa and forcibly transported to South America, the Caribbean, and North America, where they worked on plantations, in mines, as domestic servants, and as artisans. Tens of thousands of Muslims in the Americas gained their freedom through force of arms, manumission, and flight, forming elements of the first free black communities in the West, but the vast majority of Muslims in the world were free subjects under one or another imperial rule.
Traveling by sea via the southwest monsoon wind currents, and predating the spread of Islam to the New World via the Atlantic slave trade, was the Indian Ocean slave trade of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The trade fueled the migration of war captives and indebted persons to central and southern India, Sri Lanka, and further to the East. Extensive trade networks established by North African and Middle Eastern Muslim merchants in the Eastern Hemisphere further developed overland routes westward and to the East, bringing Islamic scholars, Sufi teachers, and skilled workers to the farthest reaches of Eurasia and Africa. As a result, between the tenth and eighteenth centuries Islamic communities, comprised of old and new converts, nearly doubled in size. The Chinese Admiral Zheng He (1371-1433) exemplified the important role of Muslims in Eastern imperial realms. During the early fifteenth century, the Muslim admiral led seven seafaring expeditions from Ming China, one of which reached the East African coast.
As they spread, Muslim populations absorbed traditions of the two other major monotheistic religions of the Old World, Judaism and Christianity, as well as assimilating practices and beliefs from Buddhist, Hindu, and other polytheistic and animistic faiths. The cultural synthesis produced by the resulting mixture of people and their traditions was reflected in the increasingly multicultural and multiracial communities from Europe to China. By the sixteenth century, several Islamic empires—the Songhai, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires —would come to command far-reaching influence in North and West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the Muslim-based Ottoman Empire took over Constantinople (located in modern-day Turkey) in 1453, renaming the city Istanbul and ending the reign of the Christian-based Byzantine Empire; by the eighteenth century, Ottoman rulers controlled much of the Balkan Peninsula, the Arabian world, and North Africa. Beginning five hundred years earlier in sub-Saharan western Africa, the Islamized state of Mali ruled over populations that largely practiced indigenous forms of religion, but were nevertheless tied to the wider Muslim world through culture and commerce, driven by the trade in gold and salt. The Mali King Mansa Musa, known for his extraordinary wealth in gold, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 and returned with dozens of architects, scholars, and artists to western Africa. Consequently, a flourishing of Muslim culture in West Africa centered at Timbuktu soon followed. During the sixteenth century, Mali would be overtaken by the distinctly Muslim Sohnghai Empire, which established itself as the dominant political and economic force in the region, converting ever-larger numbers of West and Central West Africans to Islam.
Several centuries earlier, Mongols from across the Asian Steppe swept into the Middle East, destroying Muslim societies while in the process introducing their own traditions into the region. Mongols would rule the area from the Sinai Desert to northeastern India through the early fourteenth century. However, they, too, eventually converted to Islam, becoming known as the Il-Khanids, one of four subdivisions of the Mongol Empire. Muslims initially entered South Asia (modern-day Pakistan and India) through the Indus River Valley and began to gain political power in the early thirteenth century. Islamic sultanates of the era were in turn supplanted by the Mughal Empire beginning in 1526, which dominated much of northern and central India into the eighteenth century, mixing Hindu and Jain traditions into their architecture and arts. In Agra, the Taj Mahal, completed in 1648, stood as one of hundreds of monuments exemplifying the splendor of Muslim imperial rule across Eurasia and North Africa with meticulously built mosques, mausoleums, palaces, and commercial centers. Further to the east, beginning in the twelfth century, Islam would also spread to the Malay world. Starting in northern Sumatra, Muslim kingdoms were established in Java and mainland Malaysia, making Islam the majority religion in many of these areas as well.
In 1502, Persia (modern-day Iran), long an important part of the Sunni world with a Shia minority, was overtaken by a popular group called the Safavids. The Safavid Empire attracted Shia scholars from the Arab world, creating a lasting Shia influence in this part of the Middle East. The Safavids would establish a powerful state for over two centuries and ushered a flowering of the arts and sciences in the region. Their capital, Isfahan, became one of the most exquisite cities in the world, known for its blue-tiled mosques. In 1736, an invasion by the Afghani put an end to Safavid rule; Islam, as in other parts, nevertheless continued as the primary religious and cultural influence in the region.
Muslims entered East Africa in the eighth century, but their social and economic influence remained largely confined to coastal communities, where trading ships traveled back and forth from the Arabian Peninsula. Over the course of several centuries, the Sudan and Somaliland became Islamized in eastern Africa, with Harar becoming a seat of Muslim scholarship. Gradually, Islam as a cultural, economic, and political force made its way further inland and southward with conversion to Islam being led by those who communicated with local rulers; many who converted were also family members of Arab and Swahili merchants. In some parts of East Africa matrilineal social principles – for instance among the Yao and Makuea – created tensions with Islam’s patrilineal order. But whether in West, Central West, or East Africa, pre-Islamic religious elements would persist as Islam was largely incorporated into existing societies.
To the West and across the Atlantic, by the eighteenth century there were many thousands of African Muslims from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and coastal Benin, working as slaves on plantations in the Americas. Distanced from their multiple heritage and places of origin, most enslaved Muslims in the New World lost a great deal of their Islamic identity. Many were forced to assimilate the dominant religious and social practices of Protestant Christian British North America and Catholic Spanish and Portuguese South America. Yet, many Muslims were able to maintain ties to their faith. One of several extraordinary cases is that of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job Ben Solomon (1701-1773). Ayuba, who arrived in Annapolis, Maryland as a slave in 1731, was the son of a king in the Senegal River region. His Arabic writing abilities so impressed a lawyer passing through the colony that he purchased the princely slave’s freedom. The now freedman would go on to write all 6,321 verses of the Quran three times from memory. He traveled to England where he became a renowned linguist before returning to his native West Africa.
Although the degree to which Muslims were able to practice their religion varied from place to place, creating a range of cultures in the process, by the late eighteenth century, settled and migrant communities of Islamic faith formed vibrant parts of virtually every major urban community in the world outside of Christian-dominated Europe, including large swaths of rural areas in Africa and Asia.
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