After the abolition of slavery in 1897, Islamic courts in Zanzibar (East Africa) became central institutions where former slaves negotiated socioeconomic participation. By using difficult-to-read ...Islamic court records in Arabic, Elke Stockreiter reassesses the workings of these courts as well as gender and social relations in Zanzibar Town during British colonial rule (1890–1963). She shows how Muslim judges maintained their autonomy within the sphere of family law and describes how they helped advance the rights of women, ex-slaves, and other marginalised groups. As was common in other parts of the Muslim world, women usually had to buy their divorce. Thus, Muslim judges played important roles as litigants negotiated moving up the social hierarchy, with ethnicisation increasingly influencing all actors. Drawing on these previously unexplored sources, this study investigates how Muslim judges both mediated and generated discourses of inclusion and exclusion based on social status rather than gender.
Focusing on Islamic manuscript cultures, The Trans-Saharan Book Trade and The Arts and Crafts of Literacy contribute considerably to our understanding not only of the provenance, use, and authority ...of book manuscripts, but also their materiality in trans-Saharan Africa and various regions in sub-Saharan Africa respectively. A major concern of the editors is to move toward a more integrative approach in collecting, preserving, and studying these cultur...
Omani and British reforms of Zanzibar's judiciary date back to the 1820s, when the abolition of the slave trade justified Western control of the sultanate's political economy. The sultan enacted the ...abolition of slavery as a legal status in 1897, seven years after Zanzibar had become a British protectorate. Through the lens of a 1948 inheritance case, I analyze how colonial judicial reforms shaped the negotiation of grievances and the judges' interpretations of social equality. As members of the colonial elite, both Muslim and British judges were embedded in a racialized social hierarchy. Their reasoning not only exposes the continuous marginalization of former slaves but also attests to ex-slaves' ability to assert material power. While a Muslim and a British judge used different hermeneutics, both validated the marriage of a Hadrami water carrier to a former slave, thereby affirming his entitlement to a share of his wife's estate.
This article explores the reluctant manumission of concubines in the British protectorate of Zanzibar. Informed by the sultan and the Arab oligarchy, the British regarded concubinage as a most common ...practice and concubines as central figures in the Arab household. Considering concubines who gave birth to children by their owners as wives, they surmised that the patriarchal Muslim family would disintegrate if concubines left their owners and children. The legal status of slavery was abolished in 1897, yet the colonial government postponed the inclusion of concubines in the abolition decree until 1909 because of concerns about social stability and the ambiguous legal status of freed concubines and their children.
Contextualising the creation of Zanzibar's colonial judiciary within the British Empire, this article explores contradictions in the British approach towards the application of Islamic law in this ...protectorate. The British upheld the existing legal system, shari'a, as the fundamental law yet, striving towards uniformity, impartiality and cost effectiveness, they restricted the scope of jurisdiction of kadhis, or Muslim judges, introduced Indian codes and provided for the application of Islamic law by British judges. Although the British may not have consciously embarked on merging the roles of judges and kadhis, one of the outcomes of their interference with the judicial system was to combine in the one person a secularly trained judge and a religiously educated kadhi. Notes of various colonial officials on the alleged irrationality and arbitrariness of Islamic law suggest that kadhis' accommodation in the colonial judiciary was shaped by continuous British doubt about their suitability as colonial officers, while kadhis implemented colonial decrees, albeit inconsistently. This article argues that underlying differences between judges and kadhis prevailed during the colonial period, while their attempts at a role reversal show adaptation to the colonial legal system, which accommodated shari'a by supervising its application. As the arguments are based on evidence scattered from 1890 until independence in 1963, this paper outlines the scope of colonial views of shari'a rather than provides a chronological overview of changes in these views.
This article explores the reluctant manumission of concubines in the British protectorate of Zanzibar. Informed by the sultan and the Arab oligarchy, the British regarded concubinage as a most common ...practice and concubines as central figures in the Arab household. Considering concubines who gave birth to children by their owners as wives, they surmised that the patriarchal Muslim family would disintegrate if concubines left their owners and children. The legal status of slavery was abolished in 1897, yet the colonial government postponed the inclusion of concubines in the abolition decree until 1909 because of concerns about social stability and the ambiguous legal status of freed concubines and their children. (Author abstract)
Paroles de papier Bang, Anne K; Bruzzi, Silvia; Carbonnel, Laure ...
Cahiers d'études africaines,
11/2019
Journal Article
Open access
L’objet, au sens le plus concret, de ce numéro, est le papier en tant que surface matérielle d’expression et d’impression. Il s’agit de questionner les interactions produites entre les messages ...textuels et leur forme, par la mise en page, les styles d’écritures, les figurations. Des mains de l’artisan à celles du chercheur, la lettre, le document d’identité ou le Coran personnel se sont chargés de la mémoire et de l’expérience de nombreux intermédiaires. Croisé avec l’étude textuelle des documents, l’objet écrit peut mettre en lumière des messages contradictoires, des sous-textes et des histoires qui seraient restés silencieux autrement. La prise en compte du matériau de l’écrit questionne le rôle de l’artefact scripturaire dans des sociétés largement orales, et son analyse rend leur voix à de nombreux acteurs présents et passés en Afrique. Fruit d’une collaboration scientifique entre l’Institut des Mondes Africains à Paris et le Centre for Middle Eastern Studies de l’Université de Bergen, ce numéro réunit des historiens, des archéologues et des anthropologues de l’Afrique du Nord et de l’Afrique subsaharienne, unis par la volonté de redonner leur parole aux papiers et aux agents qui les manipulèrent en Afrique, du haut Moyen-Âge à aujourd’hui. The aim of this special issue is to highlight the role of paper as a material surface of expression and impression. It is a matter of questioning the interactions produced between textual messages and their form, through the layout, writing styles, and figurations on paper. From the hands of the craftsman to those of the researcher, the letter, the identity document or the personal Koran have taken care of the memory and experience of many intermediaries. When combined with the textual study of the documents, the written object can highlight conflicting messages, subtexts and stories that would otherwise have remained silent. Taking into account the material of the written word leads to questioning the role of the scriptural artifact in largely oral societies, and its analysis gives voice to many actors, present and past, in Africa. The result of a scientific collaboration between the Institut des Mondes Africains in Paris and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bergen, this special issue brings together historians, archaeologists and anthropologists of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, united by the desire to give voice to the papers and agents who manipulated them in Africa, from the early Middle Ages to today.
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