“Prepare your life in this World as if you would live forever and prepare your life-hereafter as if you would die in the next minute.”—a saying circulating in Zanzibar and attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (Saleh Reference Saleh and Larsen2009, 198)
Between 1932 and 2020, East African Muslims produced many Swahili-language hortatory booklets (vijitabu) providing advice on weddings, marriage, sexuality, sexual health, divorce, and the relationship of all these to their potential afterlives. Whereas previous studies of marriage advice literature have focused mainly on advice for women in Western and Christian contexts, the Swahili booklets are distinctive in being by and for Muslim men (even while they are sometimes about women). While there is significant literature on how the Qur’an is learned and taught in diverse Muslim communities (e.g., Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009; Ware Reference Ware2014), we know much less about how other Islamic texts as well as how Muslim ideals about marriage—“one half of [the] religion,” according to the Prophet Muhammed—are learned and taught. A valuable resource for cultural, religious, and linguistic analysis, Swahili booklets on Islamic marriage provide a window into many facets of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Islam in East Africa. Over the almost century during which these booklets have been published, their content, linguistic style, authorship, and format have evolved due to changes in societal attitudes and values, technological advancements, the standardization of Swahili, and the influence of various cultural and religious trends, most notably the rise of reformist approaches to Islam (van de Bruinhorst Reference Bruinhorst2007; Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009). Swahili booklets that address Muslim marriage reveal reformist movements’ impact on ordinary people’s everyday lives, as well as competition among denominations, gender relations, and complex relationships to Western ideas and other “innovations.”
Four “chronotopic formulations” (Agha Reference Agha2015) are prominent in my corpus, which includes 71 such booklets written between 1932 and 2020: the here and now (East Africa in each author’s lifetime), the time and place of the Prophet Muhammad, the pre-Islamic world (jahiliya), and the modern West. A potential fifth formulation, the texts warn, results from how one approaches the first four: akhera, the afterlife, has two possible locations (peponi “heaven” and motoni “hell”) and is timeless or infinite. While the Prophet Muhammad’s spacetime is valorized nostalgically, the other three worldly formulations are heavily criticized, and only those who attempt to live as if they lived in the early Muslim world will find happiness in the afterlife.
Because these booklets focus on marriage, they have much to say about gender norms—a crucial aspect of personhood—in each of the four worldly chronotopic formulations I examine. Drawing not only on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope but also work that treats “nostalgia as a distinctively anthropological problem” (Bissell Reference Bissell2005, 216), I argue that the authors of marriage booklets mobilize what I call “Prophetic Spacetime” in the context of contemporary struggles around changing gender norms, the rise of reformist Islam, and increasing Westernization. As we will see, Prophetic Spacetime shapes links between marriage practices and religiopolitical ideologies.
Contextualizing Swahili-language Islamic marriage texts
Before turning to my analysis of the texts, I offer some context regarding their publication, readership, and relationship to other discourse.
Swahili is the first language of people along East Africa’s coast from Southern Somalia to Northern Mozambique, as well as the islands off the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts. The Swahili have been in contact with other Muslims through trade and travel since the seventh century (Parkin and Constantin Reference Parkin and Constantin1989), and today most Swahili are Muslims. In 2020, approximately 34 percent of Tanzanians and 10 percent of Kenyans were Muslims (Pew Research Center 2011); on the coast and islands, these percentages are much higher, with Muslims comprising the majority.
Before the late nineteenth century, print literacy among the Swahili was limited to the elite, and Islamic learning took place primarily orally. Educated Muslim men studied with individual scholars “representing a specific religious authority,” often Sufis (Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009, 156). Their engagement with Islamic texts was largely based on memorization and recitation in Arabic, a language most East Africans did not understand.
East African Muslims began to orient toward written religious texts in the late 1880s. By the 1930s, educational systems based on studying with an individual scholar began to decrease (Raia Reference Raia and Olave2022, 173; cf. Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009). Many elite scholars, like Sheikh Muhammed Saleh Abdulla Farsy, adopted a reformist agenda that opposed what they considered local “innovations” (bidaa) to the global Islamic tradition. By relying on the authority of texts and Swahili-language print media, they hoped to encourage East African Muslims to be less reliant on oral transmission and to incorporate Islamic texts into their daily reading habits. Thus, Swahili Muslim booklets became available cheaply or freely in East Africa in the 1930s and “flourished during the liberalization of the book market” in the 1990s (Raia Reference Raia and Olave2022, 174). In Kenya, religious presses dominated publishing until after World War II, and as late as the early 1980s, work translated from other languages into Swahili was mostly religious in nature (Chakava Reference Chakava1982, 1, 6). Religious publishers also had a marked influence on the population in Tanzania, and because most of them owned printing equipment, they had an edge over local commercial publishers who did not (Bgoya Reference Bgoya1986, 13). Today, more than 800 Swahili-language Islamic booklets (most not about marriage) are housed at the University of Leiden library (Raia Reference Raia and Olave2022; cf. van de Bruinhorst Reference Bruinhorst2007).
Swahili-language commentary on Islamic marriage is not unique; it exists within a multilingual and multimodal Islamic discursive tradition replete with examples of advice for men and women about to marry as well as those already married. Across the Islamic world, such advice ranges from straightforward statements of Islamic regulations about marriage and divorce to explicit advice about how married men should treat their wives and vice versa to explicit discussions of “different sexual positions, ways of delaying male orgasm, and the importance of pleasing women” (Wright Reference Wright2023, 263). It also exists alongside Swahili-language commentary on Christian marriage as well as secular marriage advice.Footnote 1
Among coastal Muslim women, such advice is usually oral, with the earliest recorded example being the 102-stanza Utendi wa Mwana Kupona (The Epic Poem of Mwana Kupona), dictated by Mwana Kupona binti Mshamu alBatawy (1810–1860) to and for her daughter, Mwana Hashima binti Sheikh (1841–1933) in 1858 in Lamu, Kenya (Timammy and Swaleh Reference Timammy and Swaleh2013, 8; Mwangi Reference Mwangi and George2021, 84; Werner Reference Werner1917, 147). The poem, composed in Swahili and originally transcribed in Arabic script (Allen Reference Allen1971, 55; Werner Reference Werner1917), circulated for many years in manuscript form and was recited in Mombasa as late as the 1930s (Allen Reference Allen1971, 55–57; Strobel Reference Strobel1975, 85–109). Swahili Muslim women still offer instruction on marriage and sex to young women a few days before their weddings (Thompson Reference Thompson2011, Reference Thompson2013, Reference Thompson, Erin and Thompson2015) and, according to Timammy and Swaleh (Reference Timammy and Swaleh2013, 9), the poem is still read to young women in some Swahili households just before marriage. Oral advice for both men and women is also shared in the form of Swahili poetry recited at weddings, in discussions on Islamic radio, and in recorded sermons on YouTube and other social media platforms, with some booklet authors producing Islamic commentary about marriage across multiple media (e.g., Fimbo Reference Fimbo2023).
Alongside oral advice and commentaries on marriage, published Swahili-language marital advice began to appear in the mid-twentieth century in booklet form. The type of booklet I examine here is known as vijitabu in Swahili, which means “little books” (Raia Reference Raia and Olave2022, 175). The sheer number of Swahili-language booklets on Islamic marriage that have been printed since the 1930s suggests broad interest among publishers and readers. My corpus includes 71 booklets written between 1932 and 2020. Some I purchased at Islamic bookshops in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, and Tanga between 2011 and 2024, some I received as gifts from my colleague Thomas Hinnebusch when he retired from UCLA in 2004, and others I found in libraries, including those of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Leiden, and the Library of Congress. Many of the booklets I collected have been reprinted multiple times, suggesting they sell well. Although, to my knowledge, there has been no ethnographic work on the reception of such marriage booklets, Muslims I’ve spoken with during summer research trips to Tanzania in 2009, 2011, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 have told me that the booklets are frequently purchased as gifts for young men about to marry. Some texts are also shared freely online, for example, in Swahili-language Facebook groups like Ndoa katika Islamu (Marriage in Islam).
Both oral and written Swahili texts about marriage are also interdiscursive and intertextual, with many allusions to or quotations from the Islamic discursive tradition, including not only the Qur’an and hadith but also the talk and texts of local religious leaders. While the Qur’an and hadith may be unchanging, authorial selection of which Qur’anic verses, hadith, or religious scholars to cite offers evidence of changing religious interpretations and gender norms over the decades during which Swahili booklets on marriage have circulated. A striking concern in the booklets, in contrast to Swahili women’s oral instruction on marriage (Thompson Reference Thompson2011, Reference Thompson2013, Reference Thompson, Erin and Thompson2015), is the critique of pre-Islamic marriage and gender norms and of contemporary Muslims’ failure to live up to what reformist authors see as Islamic ideals for gender and marriage.
Marriage and sex advice is a global phenomenon, offered orally in many cultures (including among Swahili Muslim women) and well-known in popular books and magazines in the West. Such advice is also often a religious phenomenon, though research on religious marriage advice has mostly focused on Christian and Western contexts (Frank Reference Frank2011; Ridgely Reference Ridgely2016; but see Renne Reference Renne2018). Gender historians have found marriage advice a rich source for understanding changing gender norms and ideals (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus2000; Celello Reference Celello2009). The pervasiveness of both published and oral marital advice in East Africa reflects this human need for advice about an important relationship in many people’s lives. Marriage advice booklets script a link between gendered daily practices and religiopolitical ideologies and offer a focused entry point for studying changing Muslim norms.
Chronotopes in the booklets
The earliest published Swahili-language booklet on Islamic marriage, Sheikh Muhammed Saleh Abdulla Farsy’s Ada za Harusi katika Unguja “Wedding Customs on Zanzibar,” opened with a long, nostalgic passage celebrating the many peoples, customs, and traditions from throughout the Indian Ocean World that contributed to Zanzibari culture and, as the booklet went on to show, to the development of East African Islamic marriage norms.
Before I have said what I want to say, I want to briefly explain the mixture of nations here on Unguja [the largest island in the Zanzibar archipelago]. Because Unguja is an island that was large, fertile, and with a pleasing climate, many people made settlements here on Unguja beginning long ago [zama za zama], and up to today [mpaka hii leo], people continue to make settlements here. Those who sing have sung that “Unguja is beautiful; those who want to [come] should come.” And many, Alhamdulillah, have come and are coming.
Because Unguja is very near the coast of Africa and is in the Indian Ocean, many foreigners have visited, ruled, and settled down here on Unguja. Undoubtedly, the first people to live here on Unguja were people of African origin, and they are the Bantu. When these people made their settlements here on Unguja, they came with the customs and traditions of their homelands.Footnote 2 (M. S. A. Farsy Reference Farsy1956, 1)
Farsy was a kadhi, or Islamic judge, in Zanzibar at the time, one of the earliest East African reformists and one of the first translators of the Qur’an into Swahili (Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009, 111). He would later become the Chief Kadhi of Kenya. In 1956, this booklet was the first Swahili publication on Muslim marriage (although at least two were written earlier and published later). It marked the beginning of a long tradition of Swahili booklets about marriage—written by and addressed mainly to men—that I consider through the lens of the chronotope in this article.
In the passage with which Farsy opened his booklet, we see an emphasis on both space and temporality. We enter the space of Unguja, “here” (hapa Unguja), its location both near the coast of Africa (karibu sana na pwani ya Afrika) and in the Indian Ocean (katika bahari ya Indian Ocean), and the island as a site of settlement (makazi, maskani) for people from many other homelands (makwao); and time, presented in the dichotomies of “long ago” (zama za zama) and “today” (hii leo). He demonstrates a positive attitude toward the many places from which Zanzibaris originated and the adequation of African and foreign customs from different times and places as playing an equal role in the construction of local contemporary ones. Moreover, his shift from the present perfect (-me-) tense in the first paragraph to the habitual tense (hu-) in the second also suggests that foreign settlements and cultural and religious mixing were not a thing of the past but were ongoing in Zanzibar in the 1950s (and perhaps would continue to be).
Although Farsy writes in a descriptive anthropological mode here, the booklet liberally offers commentary on those Zanzibari customs which were, in his view, “strictly prohibited by religion” (yanakatazwa sana na dini), “shirk” (ushirikina) or associating other powers with God’s, and “a great sin” (dhambi kubwa) strongly forbidden by “sheikhs” (mashekhe) (M. S. A.Farsy Reference Farsy1956, 7). Farsy’s translation of the Qur’an into Swahili and his authorship of numerous Swahili-language booklets about Islam were central to his reformist project, which sought to bring Islamic education to the masses (Loimeier Reference Loimeier2009, 115; Nabende Reference Nabende2016, 156–57). In this way, his work was a precursor to and set the tone for the many Swahili-language Islamic booklets about marriage that followed over the next six decades, some written by religious leaders and others by those with less Islamic education. Similar references to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1975, 84) are found in the Islamic marriage booklets that followed Farsy’s.
Although there are a variety of reformist groups in East Africa and various local names for them, in scholarship, reformists is a useful catchall for “those groups whose ideology pushes for a social re-instatement of what they regard as ‘pure Islam,’ as it was practised by the Prophet and his followers, and who are publicly visible in their activism against undue innovative practices” (Kresse Reference Kresse, Simpson and Kresse2008, 229). Thus, they constitute what many scholars would consider a “religiopolitical movement” (Gecaga Reference Gecaga, Murunga and Nasong’o2007, 61). While some East African reformists are active in critiquing the secular state (Loimeier Reference Loimeier2011), my focus here is on their critique of the West as a source of non-Islamic gender innovations.
Gender and marriage before Islam: Ujahilia “the age of ignorance”
The time before Islam is known as Ujahilia in Swahili, borrowing from the Arabic Jahiliyyah. While in Arabic, the term literally means “ignorance” but is used to refer to the pre-Islamic period (Esposito Reference Esposito2003, 154), in Swahili the term has taken only the latter meaning. While the Swahili borrowing ujahilia or simply jahilia (with variant spellings) is often used in Islamic booklets, some authors assume that not all Swahili-speakers will know this word, and thus translate it into Swahili as siku za ujinga “the days of ignorance/stupidity” (e.g., Sheikh Reference Sheikh and Shee1984, i). While chronotopes can refer either to “specific historical periods or to broad imaginary contexts closely tied to social ideologies” (Barrett Reference Barrett2017, 13), in the case of ujahilia, we are clearly in the latter realm.
The booklet Mwanamke katika Uislamu “Woman in Islam” contrasts the oppressive treatment of women during the pre-Islamic era of ujahilia with the respect and rights granted to them in Prophetic Spacetime. Published by the Tanga branch of Umoja wa Vijana Kiislamu “Union of Muslim Youth,” which is affiliated with the Salafist Ansaar Muslim Youth Organisation, its first chapter is titled Mwanamke Katika Zama za Ujahiliya “Woman in the Ages of Ignorance.” According to the booklet authors, before Islam,
Woman was absolutely nothing [si lolote si chochote] in terms of how she was despised and denied her rights. Woman suffered for a long time, but when islam [uislamu] came and with it the prophet Muhammad (PBUHFootnote 3), it gave woman the respect that she was not given by any [other] religion, and islam [uislam] was able to remove all the injustices and bad customs that Arabs and non-Arabs had. (Umoja Wa Vijana Wa Kiislamu 1989, 5)
The authors present jahilia in sharp contrast to Prophetic Spacetime, the former a time of suffering for women and the latter of salvation. The same booklet criticizes both pre-Islamic Arabs and Africans for practicing wife inheritance, marrying one’s father’s widow, and unlimited polygyny, and Arabs in particular for forcing women to abort female fetuses (Umoja Wa Vijana Wa Kiislamu 1989, 28, 55; see also Qaradawi Reference Qaradawi1995, 8). Another claims that pre-Islamic widows were forced to marry their deceased husband’s relatives without regard for a widow’s wishes, simply so that her property could be inherited, and that it was common for men to be estranged from their wives while also not divorcing them, leaving a woman unable to remarry (L-Hatimy Reference L-Hatimy1994 (1994), 32, 68; see also Mbyana Reference Mbyana(1968) 1995, 30). Notably, although the booklet is ostensibly about women and not specifically marriage, most of the critiques about how pre-Islamic women were treated are about their marital relationships or kinship they acquired through marriage.
For the most part, the booklets’ references to the time before Islam are much more clearly based on time than on space. The authors draw largely on widely circulating discourses about the pre-Islamic world rather than, for example, scholarly knowledge of what East Africa was like before the arrival of Muslim traders and immigrants. This is in keeping with reformist Islam’s tendency to be “disconnected from the regional past” (Kresse Reference Kresse, Simpson and Kresse2008, 224). However, some booklets associate the jahilia period specifically with the pre-Islamic Arab world, cautioning readers that some customs taken to be Islamic are, in fact, Arab and should be rejected as stemming from the jahilia period. Critiquing a widespread system of waliyi “guardianship” that dictates Muslim women cannot marry without the permission of a paternally related male guardian, in his booklet Hishima ya Wanawake katika Mila na Dini “The Respect of Women in Custom and Religion,” Ali Muhammad Shee (Reference Shee1984) wrote,
As I have explained, this system is derived from an Arab Custom [Mila ya Kiarabu] from the ancient era (Jahiliya), which has influenced Islamic Law. This tradition is based on the idea of despising Woman, which means not valuing the Kinship that comes from the Mother’s side; this is what the Guardians have arranged in a system that shuns relatives who come from the Mother’s side. (Shee Reference Shee1984, 26)
In both examples, the jahilia period—whether simply “the time before Islam” or specifically “Arab society before Islam”—is a “chronotopic formulation” (Agha Reference Agha2015) in which women were disrespected, mistreated, and seen as beneath men and from which, the authors claim, the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad, and Islam itself rescued them.
Gender and marriage in Prophetic Spacetime
Prophetic Spacetime is presented mostly through quotations from the Qur’an and hadith rather than in booklet authors’ own words. The booklets are filled with such quotations, sometimes in Arabic followed by Swahili translation and sometimes only in translation. Although the Prophet Muhammad lived in an actual time and place—seventh-century Arabia—this specific spacetime is rarely, if ever, mentioned explicitly. Through this omission, the spacetime of the early Muslims is formulated as timeless and universal, a kind of ideal model or utopia to which present-day Muslims, regardless of location, should aspire to return. The repeated invocation of Prophetic Spacetime through what anthropologist Jan Blommaert (Reference Blommaert2015, 105) called “invokable chunks of history” is a foil to the other chronotopic formulations, buttressing the booklets’ critique of them.
One way in which this timelessness is indexed is through verb tense. When introducing Qur’anic quotations, booklet authors more often use present tense or present perfect than the past, i.e., Mwenyezi Mungu anasema “Almighty God says,” or Mungu amesema “God has said” rather than Mungu alisema “God said.” Similarly, many texts use the present perfect tense to refer to the coming of Islam, e.g., Uislamu umekuja “Islam has come” rather than Uislamu ulikuja “Islam came.” These uses echo how God’s speech and actions are referred to in Swahili translations of the Qur’an (e.g., A. S. Farsy Reference Farsy(1974) 1987), situating Islam’s arrival and God’s speaking as occurring in an ongoing and proximal time and place rather than as completed in the past in a distant locale.
Marital and gender relations during Prophetic Spacetime are described primarily through hadith, which are selected to offer evidence of the Prophet’s interactions with women—his wives and women who came to him for advice—as well as what he taught men about appropriate gendered behavior. The booklet Mwongozo wa Mwanamke wa Kiislamu “A Muslim Woman’s Guide” by Muhammad Abdalla al-Riday offers several examples.
Although the booklet is for women generally, it includes a section specifically on “The Responsibilities of a Woman with a Husband” that offers a page in Riday’s own words followed by a page of hadiths that support his claims. According to Riday, a woman should love her husband sincerely, help him in his duties, and encourage him. When he is tired after work, she should comfort him and give him joy to reduce his worries. She should keep the family secrets and obey her husband in matters that are not sinful. She should respect herself, protect the family property, and avoid doing things that offend her husband, such as wearing clothes that he does not like (while taking care not to wear clothes that violate religious rules). According to the hadith Riday selects, the Prophet also said that if it were permissible to prostrate to another person, women would be commanded to prostrate to their husbands, but in fact, prostration is made to Allah alone. The best woman in these hadith is the one who pleases her husband, obeys him, and respects him. Assuming she also performs her religious obligations, a woman who obeys her husband will enter Paradise through any gate she wishes. If a woman rejects her husband sexually, angels will curse her until morning (Riday Reference Riday1995, 48–50). Moreover, a Muslim woman who aspires to be like the Prophet’s wives is meant to accept polygyny even though it “is a very painful thing in her life.” While the Prophet had nine wives simultaneously, he “taught them good lessons about cooperation and he himself was just and treated them all equally, so that his wives were peaceful and loved each other” (Riday Reference Riday1995, 58). The primary means for a Swahili woman to be a “good Muslim wife,” in the eyes of most booklet authors, is to live as if she lived in the time and space of the Prophet Muhammad and his wives, a time that male authors view with nostalgia.
Gender and marriage in the here and now
Despite the reforms that Islam brought to gender norms and marriage customs in the Arab world and in other communities where Islam took hold, many booklet authors imagine Swahili Muslim society, including the gender norms and marriage customs they hold dear, as disintegrating. This may be the raison d’etre of these booklets: to offer a jeremiad against what they see as a decline of Qur’anic and Prophetic values.
In the 1950s, Farsy criticized his contemporaries for consulting with waganga (traditional healers) about the best wedding date. Addressing his readers, he wrote, “Family [Jamaa], let’s stop this perverse custom; let’s follow the Prophet Muhammad P.BU.H. so that we can be set straight and guided in our affairs in this world and the hereafter” (M. S. A. Farsy Reference Farsy1956, 8). While consulting waganga evidences a desire to know something about the future, Farsy emphasizes that Muslims should rely on the Prophet Muhammad both in the present (“in this world”) and the future (“the hereafter”); Prophetic Spacetime extends across 13 centuries and beyond.
Like Farsy, Hamed Bin Saleh El-Busaidy was also concerned about societal disintegration. El-Busaidy, who had been appointed the liwali (governor) of Dar es Salaam by the British (Burton Reference Burton2010), warned readers of his booklet Ndoa na Talaka “Marriage and Divorce” that many “teachers … do not know the laws of marriage in our era” and “corruption is increasing every day” (El-Busaidy Reference El-Busaidy(1958) 1962, 11). He criticized the many societal ills he saw around him, “katika zama zetu hizi” (in these times of ours; 19), such as men thinking that paying a dower gives them the right to treat their wives however they like, giving their wives poorer food and clothing than they buy for themselves, and seeking out wealthy wives to improve their own financial situation (El-Busaidy Reference El-Busaidy(1958) 1962, 14, 18, 19).
But many of the authors reserved the bulk of their criticism for women who violated what they saw as Islamic gender and marital norms, presenting these in terms of common patriarchal tropes: women claim to be too tired for sex (El-Busaidy Reference El-Busaidy(1958) 1962, 36), and they dress immodestly in public, which one author described as “walking around naked like an animal” (Kazuba Reference Kazuba2002, 9). El-Busaidy—whose booklet was reprinted four times between 1958 and 1977—claimed that, whereas the Qur’an instructs women to hide their “ornaments” from all but their husbands,
Our women are now doing the opposite. They don’t adorn themselves or wear perfume except when they want to go out for a walk, like to the market, meeting places, dances, the cinema, [or] whenever they want to go somewhere else. When they stay home, in front of their husbands, they are dirty and wear frumpy clothes. (Reference El-Busaidy[1958] 1962, 22–23)
This shift in behavior, according to El-Busaidy, starkly contrasts with Qur’anic directives for women.
Some booklets did not single out men or women but instead spoke of society-wide concerns. For example, one author wrote that marriages today don’t last because people no longer follow Islamic teachings about choosing a marriage partner (Ali Reference Ali(1987) 1996, 1:17). In a booklet titled Mmonyoko wa Ndoa na Tiba Yake “The Erosion of Marriage and its Treatment,” Said Khamis Mkama, a self-identified Salafi author from Lindi, Tanzania, wrote that extramarital sex “has become the normal state of affairs” (Mkama Reference Mkama2006, 7). A few authors also singled out homosexuality as the cause of society’s devolution (e.g., Al-Hatimy Reference Al-Hatimy1993, 72, 73), a theme that has become prominent in contemporary conversations in East Africa.
Some authors went so far as to refer to the here and now as the “new Jahiliyya” (Ujahilia mpya; Al Hatimy Reference Al Hatimy(1982) 1995; L-Hatimy Reference L-Hatimy1994 (1994) or “the modern Jahiliyya” (Ujahiliya wa Kisasa; Umoja Wa Vijana Wa Kiislamu 1989). This usage collapses both time and space by adequating the contemporary Muslim world with that of sixth-century Arabia, a chronotope described in heavily negative terms in the Qur’an and, as we have seen, in these booklets. As Bucholtz and Hall explain in their tactics of intersubjectivity framework, adequation relies on “the erasure of ideologically discordant elements” (Bucholtz and Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004, 495)—in this case, by erasing the differences between modern East Africa and the early Medieval period in Arabia. Through such erasure, the authors construct what Agha calls “cross-chronotope alignments” between Muslims in the here and now who have gone astray and those who lived before Islam (Agha Reference Agha2007, 324). Salafist booklet authors who use this phrase also create a cross-chronotope alignment among themselves, the Salaf (the first three generations of Muslims), and other Salafists in the Muslim world, both earlier ones and their contemporaries (Becker Reference Becker2011, 1187). The idea of the “new jahiliya” was introduced in the fourteenth century by Hanbali scholar Ibn Taymiyya, whose work had a strong influence on twentieth-century Salafists, who looked back nostalgically to the first centuries of Islam for guidance and, like the Salafist Swahili booklet authors, associated the modern West with Jahiliya (Turner Reference Turner2010, 547).
Gender and marriage elsewhere
Many of the booklets in my corpus present a real fear of and disgust for places outside the Muslim world, especially the West, confirming Svetlana Boym’s (Reference Boym2001, 43) argument that nostalgia often goes hand-in-hand with conspiracy theories about the present or the “other” in the form of cultural or religious nationalism. The West is villainized in both the past and present, but always in contrast to the Muslim world. In a section titled, Hishima ya Mwanamke katika Dini ya Ukiristo “Respect for Woman in the Christian Religion,” Shee writes,
The total injustice that was going on in the Western European countries was that British law allowed a husband to sell his wife for the amount of /50 (half a shilling). This law was repealed in 1805. It is said that, in 1931, an Englishman once sold his Wife for five hundred pounds (*500). When he was charged in Court for this offense, his Lawyer defended him by saying that British Law was allowing a Husband to sell his Wife. The Court replied that the Law was repealed in 1805. Therefore, he was sentenced to imprisonment for the offense of selling his Wife, and he was imprisoned for ten (10) days. (Shee Reference Shee1984, 17)
Women in the Muslim world, according to Shee, have for centuries had it much better than women in the Christian West.
Writing about the present, Said bin Abdulla Seif Al-Hatimy, a prolific author of Islamic booklets, offered a classic example of a conspiracy theory about the West’s role in spreading AIDS:
Look at how scary AIDS (UKIMWI) is today [leo], and it has become a weapon in the hands of our enemies. They [an unnamed “they”] choose girls with these terminal diseases that have no cure so far and send them to certain countries to attract the young men of those countries to do dirty things with them and infect them with these diseases. (Al-Hatimy Reference Al-Hatimy1993, 9)
In a later edition of an earlier book, Adabu Njema “Good Manners”, Al-Hatimy argued that AIDS began in America among those who commit sodomy with one another (72). He blamed Freud for introducing the world to liberating ideas about sex:
Sigmund Freud and his idea of free gender (Sex) has destroyed our entire World. Today, in the West, there is unprecedented filth because of this thinking. It has come to the point that they don’t even have jealousy there. Some have groups to exchange husbands and wives.… What animality! The worst thing is to see very young children who have not yet reached puberty selling themselves to men, especially in some parts of America. There are also NUDE clubs. (Al Hatimy Reference Al Hatimy(1982) 1995, 17)
Although the booklet Dini ya Islamu “The Religion of Islam,” was not chiefly concerned with marriage, Al-Amin bin Aly Mazrui, the Chief Kadhi of Kenya, wrote in it that having extramarital affairs is common in Europe “these days” (Aly Reference Aly(1939) 1962). The danger is that Muslims, Mkama wrote, imitate Western gender norms, like letting women become the head of the household, travel alone, or wear Western clothing (mavazi ya kimagharibi), mistaking these ways for “progress” (Mkama Reference Mkama2006, 14, 28). Some Muslim women even “think that Islamic laws are oppressing them due to the influence implanted by people in the West” (Mkama Reference Mkama2006, 43). Some Muslim men, the same author claimed, are afraid to practice polygyny because they will not achieve the “Westernness” (Uzungu) they desire (Mkama Reference Mkama2006, 47). Here, Western-ness indexes not only the space of the West (magharibi) but also the time of modernity (sasa). While some East African Muslims may aspire to live in a modern, Westernized society, in the eyes of these booklet authors, doing so actually returns them to jahiliya and equates them with non-Muslims.
Gender and marriage in the afterlife
Concern with the afterlife has long been a feature of Swahili discourse on gender and marriage. As early as the nineteenth-century epic poem Utendi wa Mwana Kupona (1858), we see instructions to a young bride that meeting societal gender expectations will affect her even after death. For example, in verse 11, Mwana Kupona tells her daughter:
When you grasp my (advice)
my child, you will not be troubled
you will cross over Earth
and enter the afterlife (Allen Reference Allen1971, 58; Werner Reference Werner1917, 151)
And in verse 75:
Look at them with compassion
lead them on a good path
Remove for them the filth
of the hereafter and the world (Allen Reference Allen1971, 66)
The phrase “the afterlife and the world” (akhera na dunia) or “the world and the afterlife” (dunia na akhera) occurs repeatedly in the booklets, just as in Mwana Kupona’s poem. For example, Farsy’s (Reference Farsy1956) booklet contains this very interesting passage, which refers to several of the chronotopic formulations at hand:
There is no good example for us Muslims and the World like our Prophet Muhammad PBUH. This man did not choose the hour, time, or month in marrying [women] or marrying off his children. This man married [women] and married off [his children] in all the months of the year. So, looking at this, who are we following? There is none other than the devil; may God save us from his mischief: Amen. Folks, let’s stop this tradition of perversion; let’s follow the Prophet Muhammad PBUH so that we can be made straight and prosperous in our affairs in this world and the hereafter (duniani na akhera). The age of ignorance and waste, of worshiping spirits and believing in traditional healers, is over. People [were] doing this when they did not know religion and could not distinguish between right and wrong. Now, Alhamdulillah, we can recognize this. (M. S. A. Farsy Reference Farsy1956, 7–8)
Here not only does Farsy refer to “this world and the hereafter” (as spacetimes in which following the Prophet Muhammad’s example will lead to benefit) but also to the spacetime of the Prophet Muhammad as the best example (ruaza) for Farsy’s contemporaries—including non-Muslims (“the world”)—which is contrasted with “the age of ignorance” (zama za ujinga) before people “knew religion” (-jua dini). Here, “the age of ignorance” refers not to the spacetime before Islam was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad but rather to before Islam became widespread on the island of Zanzibar, which Farsy contrasts with “now” (sasa), a time when Zanzibari Muslims should be able to recognize (kufafanua) the difference between “right and wrong” (haki na batili).
References to “this world and the hereafter” are also used to describe negative consequences, such as those associated with forbidden forms of heterosexual sex (sex with a woman one has not married, penetrative sex with one’s wife while she is menstruating, and anal sex with one’s wife). In his 2002 book Muongozo wa Maisha ya Ndoa kwa Misingi ya Dini ya Ki-Islam “A Guide to Married Life Based on the Islamic Religion,” which was reprinted in 2014, popular preacher Amiri Ramadhani Fimbo writes that, for those who commit such forbidden sexual acts, “their pleasure turns into pain, suffering, and regret in the World and the Hereafter” (Fimbo Reference Fimbo(2002) 2014, 6). Regret in the hereafter, of course, refers to Hell (motoni), the space and endless time inhabited by those who cross God’s limits, as in this poem, “Mwongozo” (Guidance) with which H.H. Mbyana (Reference Mbyana(1968) 1995, 3) introduced his book Ndoa ya Kiislam “Islamic Marriage”:
He [Almighty God] put down limits,
Brother, you should hold on to them,
And if you cross them,
You will enter Hell.
Some authors use the promises or perils of “the World and the Hereafter” with some degree of self-interest, explicitly claiming that their booklets will help the reader succeed in the afterlife. For example, Fimbo wrote: “Swear to God, any Muslim woman who follows this guide and applies it to her husband without deceit or betrayal will be very successful in the World and the Hereafter, if she has good Deeds and Tawheed [belief in the Oneness of God]” (Fimbo Reference Fimbo(2002) 2014, 17).
Conclusion
In contrast to marital advice in the West over the past century (Cancian and Gordon Reference Cancian and Gordon1988), men remain the primary audience of written marital advice for Swahili-speaking Muslims. Since most of the research on Swahili marriage and gender has been conducted by women and gender segregation makes it difficult for women to conduct research on this topic with Swahili men (see, e.g., Le Guennec-Coppens Reference Le Guennec-Coppens1980, 7), booklets on Islamic marriage represent a crucial source of information about Muslim men’s understandings of marriage, sexuality, gender, and gender relations.
In analyzing booklets about Muslim marriage written for and by Swahili Muslim men, one must be wary of feeding into Islamophobic tropes that present Muslim women as in need of saving (cf. Abu‐Lughod Reference Abu‐Lughod2002). It is important to note that, as patriarchal as it may be, the advice that Muslim men give to one another and their claims about Muslim women do not differ significantly from the advice in Utendi wa Mwana Kupona and the oral advice given by contemporary Swahili Muslim women to a bride (Thompson Reference Thompson2011, Reference Thompson2013, Reference Thompson, Erin and Thompson2015a; Timammy Reference Timammy2023). In an essay on Mwana Kupona’s poem, Farouk Topan (Reference Topan, Caplan and Topan2004, 217) notes that many male scholars of Swahili literature have criticized the marital advice Mwana Kupona offered women, arguing that it encouraged women to be near-slaves to their husbands and not to contribute to society beyond the home (Khatib Reference Khatib1985, 47, 52). But what Topan and others who have countered this argument have neglected is the degree to which such critiques are grounded in Islamophobia.
Looking across the four chronotopic formulations I have examined, there is a striking difference between the earliest marriage booklet with which I began and the more recent ones. Whereas Farsy’s book was set in his immediate spacetime, 1950s Zanzibar, it referred—in favorable terms—to other places throughout the Indian Ocean world from which Zanzibaris originally came. In sharp contrast, later booklets refer to the author’s space and time in general terms—“here” and “now”—but rarely name their location. Both pre-Islamic Arab and present-day East African spacetime are depicted negatively, with only the Prophet Muhammad’s spacetime portrayed positively, yet treated as if it is timeless, able to be recreated in every Swahili Muslim home. The Swahili-speaking umma in these texts is no longer influenced by the Indian Ocean World and is instead shown as subject primarily to the highly negative influence of the contemporary non-Islamic West. (In reality, there is also a great deal of conservative influence from the Arab world, but that is never discussed in these texts.)
Swahili booklets that address Islamic marriage confirm that nostalgia is often a response to what others might present as “progress” or “development.” If progress is “not only a narrative of temporal progression but also of spatial expansion,” then it makes sense that we see a temporal move to the past and a spatial contraction in response to this supposed progress (Boym Reference Boym2001, 10). Indeed, these booklets evidence a narrowing from a previously capacious understanding of coastal East African identity as linked to a multicultural and historical “Indian Ocean spacetime” to one linked primarily to a nostalgia for what I have called “Prophetic Spacetime” (cf. Agha Reference Agha2007, 322). But unlike secular nostalgia—“the longing for something that cannot be restored, something dead and gone” (Bissell Reference Bissell2005, 225; see also Boym Reference Boym2001)—the authors of Swahili booklets on Islamic marriage seem to believe that the mores of the Prophet Muhammad can and should be restored, if not in the here and now, then in the afterlife. Unfortunately, what this entails is a narrowing of what it means to be a Swahili Muslim man or woman, husband or wife—a constriction of marriage norms and thus available forms of Swahili Muslim personhood.
The four chronotopes we have seen here are constructed through a complex interplay of nostalgia, religious authority, and East Africa’s sociopolitical context. The Prophet Muhammad’s time is idealized as a period of perfect adherence to Islamic principles, serving as a timeless model for contemporary Muslims. This idealization legitimizes and reinforces normative Muslim gender roles by presenting them as divinely ordained and historically validated. These negative portrayals of the pre-Islamic period and the modern West emphasize moral and social decay, highlighting the superiority of Prophetic Spacetime and justifying the strict gender roles and marital norms promoted in the booklets. By constructing these chronotopes, Swahili Islamic marriage booklet authors create a clear dichotomy between the ideal Islamic past and the flawed present, urging readers to emulate the former to achieve social harmony today and spiritual harmony in the afterlife.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Tom Hinnebusch for the many books he gifted me and for our friendship. Susan Gal provided useful feedback on an early version of this article. I thank Elise Kramer and Catherine Tebaldi for inviting me to include my work in this special issue.
Funding statement
Research at the University of Leiden’s library was supported by the Evjue-Bascom Professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A generous Lilly Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship at the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress enabled me to expand my collection of booklets.
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