Dismissed Simply as “<i>Wahhabi</i>”: Reform Ideas and Constructions of Racial Difference along the Kenyan Coast, 1900–1990

Abstract Existing at the intersection of continental Africa and the Indian Ocean world, Islamic reform along the Kenyan coast has often involved an insertion in local religious discourse of intellectual traditions prevalent in the Middle East. Less emphasized in examinations of the theological foundations of Islamic reform are the “civilizational” imperatives—especially in the contexts of ambiguous but powerful racial thinking—that intersect with the reformist agenda. Read in this context, a local brand of Islam along the coast was cast as undesirably tainted by cultural practices termed bid'a (heretical Islamic innovation) as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. The majority of these practices could be traced to the coast's immediate hinterland, that is, the world of African traditions (or in local, implicitly racialized language, the world of barbarism, ushenzi). A group of Islamic reformers active in the 1980s, and whose status had been questioned by the colonial experience as lower than that of Arabs, inserted their project within such civilizational discourses, implicitly activating extant ideas about racial difference. While the overzealous nature of their opposition to bid'a led to their denunciation by the vast majority of their audiences simply as Wahhabists, that is, as gullible upstarts, their primary motivation, this article illustrates, was a need to assert themselves as people of high status within a hierarchy marked by racial difference.