ABSTRACT
The history of Islam in the Swahili world is one of connectivity, from the religion’s first arrival on the eastern African coast to the present-day array of theological and ideological debates. Islam on the coast has been formed by long-standing connections both across the ocean to the lands of the Red Sea, the Arabian Peninsula and India, and also to the interior, to neighbouring peoples and further into what is today eastern Congo. These networks of Islamic scholarship extending in both directions can in many ways be understood as a socio-religious arena in its own right – a vibrant Shāfiʿī-Sunni ecumene that has been constituted by varying and at times intertwined systems of authority. However, this arena has never been permanent, either in extent or content. On the contrary, religious authority has been lived and enacted differently at different points in time, thus constituting different subsets of Islamic doctrine and practice, which in turn impacted on how Islam was localised.
