Anne K Bang
Biographic Data
| ID | 183184 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anne K Bang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anne K |
| FAMILY NAME | Bang |
| SIGNATURE | BANG A K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8786-2353 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
African Literature in Transition: Print Cultures and African Literature, 1860–1960
This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it exp…
Double-Sided Print: Silent and Communal Reading during the Rise of Islamic Print in East Africa, c. 1880–1940
This chapter outlines the rise of Arabic Islamic print in the British-BuSaidi protectorate of Zanzibar c. 1880–1940. It argues that the availability of printed Arabic material set off two processes: The emergence of a new public of specialised readers who read primarily silently and alone (individual readers, often associated with modernist Islamic ideas) and mass distribution of texts primarily intended for communal reading and/or performance (o…
Modern Associations: Ethnic and Faith-Based Associations in Zanzibar
This chapter explores the rise of an unprecedented number of new associations in Zanzibar during the interwar years, particularly focusing on the Comorian Association. These represented a population that was ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse, and often took the form of smaller, community-based associations centered around ethnic and religious identity. The chapter argues that this "age of associations" was pivotal in shaping bot…
Wataniyya?: Towards a Modern Zanzibari Culture
This chapter goes beyond the efforts of Muslim moderns in Zanzibar to create a new ideal person, defined by self-awareness, to ask if this person indeed was envisioned as the new Zanzibari national. It discusses how the struggle to define a “Zanzibari modern” identity intersects with broader issues of culture, ethnicity, and nationalism, and with identities rooted in taifa (community), watan (homeland), and umma (the broader Islamic world). Were …
The Zanzibar Government Central School and “Modern Teaching Methods”
This chapter discusses the role of the Zanzibari Government Central School in forming the new generation of moral individuals, primed for progress. The school became a space where the question of how to educate Zanzibari young men, especially in terms of religion, moral character, and national identity, was hotly debated. In particular, the chapter discusses debates over teaching methods, and the shift from aural learning to modern syllabi that c…
Modern Jobs: The Zanzibari Civil Service
The rise of a British colonial civil service—including teachers, qadis, and clerks—also created a cohort of salaried men whose roles in society were different to that of their elders. This chapter discusses how a very multi-ethnic civil service voiced grievances vis-à-vis the colonial state and how it resulted in the formation of the “Non-European Civil Service Association”. The colonial civil service provided a platform for Zanzibari Muslims to …
In Search of the Zanzibari Muslim Modern: On Modernity, Progress and Development
This chapter introduces the modern context of Zanzibar and addresses the emergence of modernity in the Islamic context, and specifically the orientation towards progress and development. It introduces the rise of a new ideal, here referred to as the Muslim Modern. It argues that modernity can be viewed both as a culture and as a moral narrative and that voices of reform are built on both pre-existing cultural elements such as Sufism, ustaarabu an…
Prologue: The Magic and the Modern—Zanzibar, 1904
This prologue discusses the so-called “Zanzibari questions” posed from Zanzibar to the Egyptian modernist journal al-Manar in 1904. In these questions, a Zanzibari reader questioned the statement by al-Manar’s editor Rashid Rida that the Quran does not have any healing properties in and of itself. This debate reflects a broader intellectual shift in early 20th-century Zanzibari Islamic discourse, as modernist thinkers sought to align Islam with s…
Conclusions: The Beginnings of a Modern Muslim Zanzibari Culture
The chapter summarizes the efforts of the Muslim moderns in the interwar period and concludes that it had a lasting impact of the formation of Zanzibari modern culture, particularly the formation of a moral narrative of progress. The Muslim Moderns emphasized common cultural values and moral conduct while also recognizing through their associations, the legacies of multiple groups. In conclusion, the Muslim Moderns of Zanzibar strove to redefine …
Modern Islamic Practices: Zanzibar in the Age of Culture Wars
This chapter delves into the efforts of Zanzibari community leaders, including scholars, teachers, and association leaders, to shape and assert their views on proper Islamic practice within the evolving colonial and modern landscape. It explores several arenas to highlight a broad debate of reformist Islamic thought, echoing ideas promoted by Rashid Rida in 1904, the Wahhabi ideas emanating from the new state of Saudi Arabia, colonial modernity a…
The Exemplary Muslim Modern: Burhan Mkelle (1884–1949) in Zanzibar
The poet, teacher and activist Burhan Mkelle is here introduced as a typical Muslim modern, active on several arenas that emerged in the interwar period. His biography, as a first-generation Comorian brought up in Zanzibar, is also discussed as representative of the multi-ethnic Zanzibari society. His Sufi affiliations are also considered as part of his reformist orientation. Finally, this chapter discusses Burhan Mkelle as a “constant” among edu…
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar years. This was a period marked by rapid intellectual and social change in the Muslim world, when ideas of Islamic progress and development were hotly debated. How did this process play out in Zanzibar? Based on a wide range of sources—Islamic and colonial, private and public—Anne K. Bang examines how these concepts were received and promoted on the island, arguing tha…
Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania
Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; tim…
Arabic‐language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case of East Africa
In the Indian Ocean Islamic world, Arabic‐language texts have been the foundation of what has been called an Arabic cosmopolis and a Sunni Islamic ecumene. In East Africa, this historical material can be found in extant collections in manuscript and printed form, and has formed the basis of research over the past decades that investigate local, regional and trans‐oceanic Islamic histories. The nature of this corpus means that it is spread across …
Tore Linné Eriksen: Afrika. Fra de første mennesker til i dag
Dette skrev historikeren Toby Green i januar 2020 under tittelen «Africa, in its fullness». Tore Linné Eriksen har våget seg på utfordringen det er å skrive «Africa in its fullness», fra det første mennesket vandret tobeint på savannen til dagens megabyer på kontinentet og på basis av kunnskap generert via ulike vitenskaper og fra ulike perspektiv. Han har også lykkes, ikke bare i å gi en informativ og grundig innføring i kontinentets historie, m…
Islamic Incantations in a Colonial Notebook: A Case from Interwar Zanzibar
This article examines an esoteric text entitled Duʿāʾ al-Sabāsib al-Sabʿa (Prayer of the Seven Deserts/Wastelands) copied onto a colonial notebook in Zanzibar, probably sometime in the 1930s. The content of the text itself is examined and placed in the tradition of Islamic esotericism and occult writing, as well as against the backdrop of emerging Islamic modernism at the time. Three potential readings are offered of this particular copy of the S…
Islam in the Swahili world
Islam in the Swahili world - 1 - Connected authorities
From Middle Eastern to African to African Islamic history
The Riyadha Mosque Manuscript collection in Lamu, Kenya
Pondering the Text as Change Maker
This article discusses Isabel Hofmeyr's Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. It highlights the many ways in which the rise of the printing press, and the increasingly important role of both the editor and the reader, was also pivotal in creating an Islamic public sphere in the Indian Ocean. The essay discusses the efforts of Gandhi to create a “reading public” as well as the reformist orientation, the importance of translation, t…
Preliminary Material
Ritual of Reform – Reform of a Ritual: Rātib al-Ḥaddād in the Southwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1880–1940
This chapter focuses entirely on the text known as Rātib al-Ḥaddād composed by the -Ḥaḍramī poet and SufiʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād (1634-1719). Rātib al-Ḥaddād is a dhikr, a remembrance of God performed by Muslims in large parts of the Islamic world, but it is particularly widespread in the Indian Ocean region. It is recited by men and women, in mosques or private homes, to express devotion and to seek blessing. It is thus a ritual that in t…
Introduction
Travelling Texts: Arabic Literate Learning in Coastal East Africa, c. 1860–1930
This chapter addresses something more fleeting but also the most concrete aspect of reformist thought: its words. It also discusses the fabric underpinning the networks formed by travel, trade and teacher-scholar relationships; the printed books, manuscripts, large and small, texts and commentaries that were part of the making of Sufi reformism in the western Indian Ocean. The chapter also addresses text in the most concrete terms. It discusses b…
The Cape Town Muslim Community and East African Sufi Networks: Beyond the Monsoon
This chapter traces the late nineteenth and early twentieth century daʿwa based, ocean-borne Islamic reform beyond the orbit of dhow shipping to its southernmost point, that is to the Muslim community of Cape Town. It focuses on the links between Cape Town and the Indian Ocean networks of Islamic scholarship. The first influx of Sufi teachings in the Cape region came from the Dutch possessions in south-east Asia, notably in the form of exiles who…
Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860-1925
Anne Bang focuses on the ways in which a particular Islamic brotherhood, or 'tariqa', the tariqa Alawiyya, spread, maintained and propagated their particular brand of the Islamic faith. Originating in the South-Yemeni region of Hadramawt, the Alawi tariqa mainly spread along the coast of the Indian Ocean. The Alawis are here portrayed as one of many cultural mediators in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Indian Ocean world in the era of European …
Authority and Piety, Writing and Print: A Preliminary Study of the Circulation of Islamic Texts in Late Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century Zanzibar
This article is a preliminary discussion of the circulation of textual material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Zanzibar. Three main contentions are made in the article. First, that this corpus of texts constituted a public sphere that was intimately connected with the western Indian Ocean, primarily Arabia, but with branches to Egypt where much of the material was printed. Second, that the transition from manuscript mode of trans…
Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform
In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwa…
Reflections on the History of the Indian Ocean: The sources and their relation to local practices and global connectivities
This paper discusses the interpretation of sources for Indian Ocean history, from the point of view of translocal interpretations beyond the locality of the source. The article presents three cases, all deriving from the Muslim South-Western Indian Ocean. The argument is made that the ambiguity of the sources, and the interrelationship between the various locations related to the source, affect not only the historians interpretation but also the …
The Riyadha Mosque Manuscript Collection in Lamu: A Ḥaḍramī Tradition in Kenya
This article focuses on the manuscript collection currently located in the Riyadha Mosque in Lamu, Kenya. From its foundation in the late nineteenth century, the Riyadha has had a close connection to the Ḥaḍramī-ʿAlawī scholarly network of the Indian Ocean, through family and intellectual links. The article investigates the impact of the ʿAlawī devotional, Sufi and genealogical traditions, as reflected in the manuscript collection of the Riyadha
Zanzibari Islamic knowledge transmission revisited: Loss, Lament, Legacy, Transmission - And Transformation
This article revisits aspects of knowledge transmission within the 20th century Islamic scholarly community in Zanzibar. It particularly adresses the rituals and texts connected to death and commemoration, and views these as mechanisms for knowledge transmission. Finally, the article discusses the transition of these texts into the realm of cultural heritage, and discusses how this affects knowledge transmission
Pondering the Text as Change Maker
This article discusses Isabel Hofmeyr's Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. It highlights the many ways in which the rise of the printing press, and the increasingly important role of both the editor and the reader, was also pivotal in creating an Islamic public sphere in the Indian Ocean. The essay discusses the efforts of Gandhi to create a “reading public” as well as the reformist orientation, the importance of translation, t…
Arabic‐language manuscript and print as a source for Indian Ocean Islamic history: The case of East Africa
In the Indian Ocean Islamic world, Arabic‐language texts have been the foundation of what has been called an Arabic cosmopolis and a Sunni Islamic ecumene. In East Africa, this historical material can be found in extant collections in manuscript and printed form, and has formed the basis of research over the past decades that investigate local, regional and trans‐oceanic Islamic histories. The nature of this corpus means that it is spread across …
Teachers, Scholars and Educationists: The Impact of Hadrami-'Alawi Teachers and Teachings on Islamic Education in Zanzibar ca. 1870–1930
Hadrami scholars have long been recognized as well as been influential teachers of East African Islam, especially in the late 18th and early 19th century. is article traces the role of Hadrami teachers and scholars on Islamic education in Zanzibar between c. 1870 and 1930. The article analyses different levels of Islamic education and traces the texts and teachers who came to influence generations of Muslims in the British-Bū Saīdī protectorate
Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860-1925
Anne Bang focuses on the ways in which a particular Islamic brotherhood, or 'tariqa', the tariqa Alawiyya, spread, maintained and propagated their particular brand of the Islamic faith. Originating in the South-Yemeni region of Hadramawt, the Alawi tariqa mainly spread along the coast of the Indian Ocean. The Alawis are here portrayed as one of many cultural mediators in the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Indian Ocean world in the era of European …
Teachers, Scholars and Educationists: The Impact of Hadrami-'Alawi Teachers and Teachings on Islamic Education in Zanzibar ca. 1870–1930
Hadrami scholars have long been recognized as well as been influential teachers of East African Islam, especially in the late 18th and early 19th century. is article traces the role of Hadrami teachers and scholars on Islamic education in Zanzibar between c. 1870 and 1930. The article analyses different levels of Islamic education and traces the texts and teachers who came to influence generations of Muslims in the British-Bū Saīdī protectorate
Reflections on the History of the Indian Ocean: The sources and their relation to local practices and global connectivities
This paper discusses the interpretation of sources for Indian Ocean history, from the point of view of translocal interpretations beyond the locality of the source. The article presents three cases, all deriving from the Muslim South-Western Indian Ocean. The argument is made that the ambiguity of the sources, and the interrelationship between the various locations related to the source, affect not only the historians interpretation but also the …
Authority and Piety, Writing and Print: A Preliminary Study of the Circulation of Islamic Texts in Late Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century Zanzibar
This article is a preliminary discussion of the circulation of textual material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Zanzibar. Three main contentions are made in the article. First, that this corpus of texts constituted a public sphere that was intimately connected with the western Indian Ocean, primarily Arabia, but with branches to Egypt where much of the material was printed. Second, that the transition from manuscript mode of trans…
Remembrance of Muhammad Idris Muhammad Saleh (Maalim Idris), 1934–2012
Zanzibari Islamic knowledge transmission revisited: Loss, Lament, Legacy, Transmission - And Transformation
This article revisits aspects of knowledge transmission within the 20th century Islamic scholarly community in Zanzibar. It particularly adresses the rituals and texts connected to death and commemoration, and views these as mechanisms for knowledge transmission. Finally, the article discusses the transition of these texts into the realm of cultural heritage, and discusses how this affects knowledge transmission
Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism. Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s-1930s) * By Amal N. GHAZAL.
Researchers of East African Islamic history of the nineteenth and twentieth century are instantly faced with a dilemma: To what should one relate religious, intellectual or ideological shifts? To local concerns and changes, to regional (East African) developments, or to the wider Middle East—and if so, which parts of the Middle East, geographically, and not least, in terms of what religious dividing lines? Amal Ghazal places her excellent study s…
Preliminary Material
Ritual of Reform – Reform of a Ritual: Rātib al-Ḥaddād in the Southwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1880–1940
This chapter focuses entirely on the text known as Rātib al-Ḥaddād composed by the -Ḥaḍramī poet and SufiʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād (1634-1719). Rātib al-Ḥaddād is a dhikr, a remembrance of God performed by Muslims in large parts of the Islamic world, but it is particularly widespread in the Indian Ocean region. It is recited by men and women, in mosques or private homes, to express devotion and to seek blessing. It is thus a ritual that in t…
Introduction
Travelling Texts: Arabic Literate Learning in Coastal East Africa, c. 1860–1930
This chapter addresses something more fleeting but also the most concrete aspect of reformist thought: its words. It also discusses the fabric underpinning the networks formed by travel, trade and teacher-scholar relationships; the printed books, manuscripts, large and small, texts and commentaries that were part of the making of Sufi reformism in the western Indian Ocean. The chapter also addresses text in the most concrete terms. It discusses b…
The Cape Town Muslim Community and East African Sufi Networks: Beyond the Monsoon
This chapter traces the late nineteenth and early twentieth century daʿwa based, ocean-borne Islamic reform beyond the orbit of dhow shipping to its southernmost point, that is to the Muslim community of Cape Town. It focuses on the links between Cape Town and the Indian Ocean networks of Islamic scholarship. The first influx of Sufi teachings in the Cape region came from the Dutch possessions in south-east Asia, notably in the form of exiles who…
Consolidating the Network: Waqf Distribution and New Organizations in Zanzibar, c. 1900–1930
This chapter focuses on one particular link in what was probably a dense grid of financial transactions, namely the long-standing of waqf funds from Zanzibar to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It shows that connections between East Africa and Mecca were long standing and binding, and that the religious and intellectual network that underpinned much of the reformist drive also had a function as a transfer network where funds could flow within…
Sources and Bibliography
This bibliography presents a list of sources and reference books and articles relevant to the study of Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean. On the most general level, the diffusion of a specific type of Islamic knowledge in the Southwestern Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the ways in which it came to be appropriated in different locations, addresses the question of the social and political conseq…
Conclusions
The Branches of the Qādiriyya and the Shādhiliyya in Northern Mozambique: Silsilas to the South
This chapter traces some of the routes of the Qādiriyya and Shādhiliyya from Zanzibar to Mozambique, and identifies networks that, in different ways, took southwards the reformist impulses embedded in the ṭarīqas. The purpose is thus to contextualize and nuance earlier research, to point to parallel paths of knowledge transmission, and indicate corresponding processes of localization. The introduction of the Qādiriyya to Mozambique by Shaykh ʿĪsā…
Index
Appendix 1
The Luminescent Sun and Brilliant Rays of Light: Towards a Geography of Reform
The immediate family history of Ṣāhib al-Ṭuyūr illustrates a pattern of migration starting in the seventeenth century that was to expand the Jamal al-Layl family- and religious networks southwards from the Swahili coast, via the Comoro Islands to Madagascar and Mozambique. By the nineteenth century, reformist impulses were to be transmitted along the same routes, generating a geography of reform that was both multi-local and interconnected. This …
The Shādhiliyya in Northern Madagascar c. 1890–1940: The Planting of a Garden and the Growing of Malagasy Roots
The diffusion of the ṭarīqa Shādhiliyya in northern Madagascar is closely connected to the general Islamization of the Antankarana people (the people of the [coral] stones, meaning the Ankarana mountains with its remarkable tsingy rock formations) and with Comorian migration to the region. The spread of the Shādhiliyya to Madagascar is also closely connected to religious change taking place in Zanzibar and the Comoros, propagated by existing and …
The Riyadha Mosque Manuscript Collection in Lamu: A Ḥaḍramī Tradition in Kenya
This article focuses on the manuscript collection currently located in the Riyadha Mosque in Lamu, Kenya. From its foundation in the late nineteenth century, the Riyadha has had a close connection to the Ḥaḍramī-ʿAlawī scholarly network of the Indian Ocean, through family and intellectual links. The article investigates the impact of the ʿAlawī devotional, Sufi and genealogical traditions, as reflected in the manuscript collection of the Riyadha
Islamic Sufi Networks in the Western Indian Ocean (c.1880-1940): Ripples of Reform
In the period c. 1880-1940, organized Sufism spread rapidly in the western Indian Ocean. New communities turned to Islam, and Muslim communities turned to new texts, practices and religious leaders. On the East African coast, the orders were both a vehicle for conversion to Islam and for reform of Islamic practice. The impact of Sufism on local communities is here traced geographically as a ripple reaching beyond the Swahili cultural zone southwa…
The Riyadha Mosque Manuscript collection in Lamu, Kenya
Pondering the Text as Change Maker
This article discusses Isabel Hofmeyr's Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. It highlights the many ways in which the rise of the printing press, and the increasingly important role of both the editor and the reader, was also pivotal in creating an Islamic public sphere in the Indian Ocean. The essay discusses the efforts of Gandhi to create a “reading public” as well as the reformist orientation, the importance of translation, t…
From Middle Eastern to African to African Islamic history
Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (36 works) · History (32 works) · African history and culture analysis (25 works) · Islam (23 works) · Archaeology (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Geography (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · History (16 works)