Governance and Islam in East Africa - (Exploring Muslim Contexts) by Farouk Topan & Kai Kresse & Erin E Stiles & Hassan Mwakimako (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores the relationship between Muslim communities and the State in East Africa in political, institutional and legal contexts.

Book Synopsis

Recent studies of Muslims in Kenya and Tanzania have tended either to examine governance of Muslims in relation to security issues, or to discuss the reforms attempted within communities and their implications for Muslim theology, rituals and general welfare. Both these approaches are covered in this book, and a third is added - the study of Muslims as citizens or residents of their respective countries, looking at their activities and attitudes in relation to the various challenges they face together with their fellow compatriots and citizens.

Review Quotes

This volume focuses on politics, institutions and law in Islamic East Africa. By adopting a broad and multidisciplinary approach at both the macro and micro level, we are given new and sometimes surprising insights into changing relations between the state and Islam. A very welcome addition to the literature.

--Pat Caplan, Goldsmiths, University of London

This volume unites contributions by both Western academics as well as Kenyan/Tanzanian academics and bridges the North-South-divide in academic research. It is far ahead of current scholarship and will add considerably to the established wisdom.

--Roman Loimeier, University of Göttingen

About the Author

Farouk Topan is Professor Emeritus at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London. He has taught at the universities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Riyad and the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London. He is also a writer of Swahili fiction and has published several short stories and two of his plays have been part of the school curriculum in Tanzania.

Kai Kresse is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, and Vice Director for Research at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork on the Swahili coast, working on local thinkers (poets, scholars, activists), the transmission and negotiation of knowledge, and the production and interpretation of texts, with a focus largely on internal debates among coastal Muslims in post-colonial Kenya. He is the author of Philosophising in Mombasa(2007; shortlisted for the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association) and Past Present Continuous: Swahili Muslim Publics and Post-colonial Experience (2018).

Erin Stiles is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, where she also chairs the programme in Religious Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, law and gender, and she conducts fieldwork in Zanzibar, where she has done extensive ethnographic research on Islamic family law and dispute resolution.

Hassan Mwakimako is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Pwani University, Kenya. His research focuses on the interface between colonial and postcolonial state policy and practice towards Islam, religion and politics and contemporary Islam. He has been Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, (ZMO) Berlin, Germany and African Studies Visiting Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge.