- Situating the Town of Bujumbura

Bujumbura, a commercial port town on the north-eastern tip of Lake Tanganyika and the present-day capital of Burundi, is in many ways a marginal town. Geographically, it is squeezed between Lake Tanganyika and the Congo-Nile divide mountain range. This position places Bujumbura outside the Burundian mainland, at the periphery of Burundian political influence during most of the pre-colonial era, but still within the Burundian cultural sphere of influence. On the eve of colonization, this coastal strip between the lake and mountains came under the control of the African-Arab commercial network in East and Central Africa, with Ujiji as most important nearby hub. The hills of the Burundian mainland were never subdued by these African-Arabs, which leaves the coastal strip along the lake at the fringe of African-Arab influence as well. Colonization, then, demarcated Congolese and German East African territories, including this area along the rim of the German protectorate. Bujumbura, which had already served as a marketplace since time immemorial, was officially founded in 1897 as a German colonial garrison town, meant to guard the border with the Congo Free State and to serve as a stepping stone towards “pacifying” Burundi and Rwanda, thus exploiting its multiple marginal positions. ^{Footnote 14}

Before the founding of Bujumbura, there were already urban settlements on the Burundian lakeshore, which were part of the Ujiji-centered sphere of influence and predominantly inhabited by an Islamized population. Rumonge was the most important of these centers and would remain so well into the twentieth century. Nyanza-Lac, nowadays close to the border with Tanzania, likewise was a significant Swahili urban center, with Ujiji, Nyanza-Lac, Rumonge, and Bujumbura at more or less at equal distances. The colonial and increasingly national role of Bujumbura as the administrative and economic capital of the country would tilt the hierarchical relation between these places in favor of Bujumbura in the two decades after the First World War.

As far as the religious evolutions of its Muslim inhabitants are concerned, however, the urban centers along the lake saw parallel evolutions and Ujiji remained the main reference in the religious domain. Nevertheless, especially towards the end of the colonial period, the religious and communal dynamics became more pronounced and more autonomous in Bujumbura. The decisive differential had to do with the colonial and national centrality of Bujumbura, which both led to a considerably larger Muslim community together with a more rapid minoritization of Muslims within a booming town. A detailed interpretation of this differentiation is at the heart of the fourth section of this article.

At the onset, the border position rather than the colonial or later national centrality defined the fate of Bujumbura. Being on the margins of political, cultural, economic, and ecological zones offered pivotal opportunities. As a meeting point, crossroads, and gatekeeper, Bujumbura combined urban functions in the military, commercial, administrative, and demographic fields. Planned as a military-strategic stronghold, Bujumbura witnessed the further development of its role as a local and regional commercial center, the establishment of a colonial administration serving the whole of Burundi and Rwanda, ^{Footnote 15} and the settlement of a new urban population predominantly coming from the broader Lake Tanganyika region. Three aspects are of crucial importance in order to situate the importance of Bujumbura and its – for long – predominantly Muslim population.

First, through commercial links the port and market of Bujumbura formed the connection between the local and national economy on the one hand and East and Central Africa and the world economy on the other. Thus, despite its eccentric position, Bujumbura became both Burundi’s main window to the world and the world’s main point of access to Burundi. Second, the colonial course of fixing borders, pursuing control, establishing an administration, and state formation turned Bujumbura into the capital of a country to which it only marginally belonged at first. Both its location on the other side of the Congo-Nile divide when seen from the Burundian heartlands, and its urban character in a predominantly rural country underscore this marginality. Third, the town was populated with people from around Lake Tanganyika, many of them with roots in what is today known as eastern Congo.

One part of the population was comprised of artisans and clerks with their families drafted in Ujiji and in other parts of German East Africa by the German colonial authorities. Furthermore, the new town attracted fishers and farmers as well as their families from around the northern part of Lake Tanganyika. Apart from the urban pull factor, the Belgian conquest war and the Batetela rebellion in eastern Congo in the 1890s as well as the sleeping sickness epidemic, which struck the northern Lake Tanganyika area particularly hard at the beginning of the twentieth century, caused large numbers of displaced people to settle in a space between the lake and mountains relatively depopulated by disease. ^{Footnote 16} Forced resettlement as part of the colonial campaign to fight sleeping sickness led to a further increase of the population of Bujumbura – as well as of Rumonge and Nyanza-Lac. By the time Rwanda and Burundi fell under Belgian rule as a consequence of the First World War, Bujumbura had become a predominantly Muslim town of between 2,500 and 3,000 inhabitants. The big questions, however, are why and how this new urban population came to identify with Islam, and what their being Muslim meant in the first place.

- Practicing Islam in Early Colonial Bujumbura

Islam is a religion of practice. The five religious obligations, or pillars, of Islam are its ritual, or outward, signs, in which believing and doing go hand in hand. ^{Footnote 17} Becoming Muslim, therefore, can develop out of emulation. In late nineteenth-century East and Central Africa, the emulation of Islamic practices, as part of Swahili culture, provided guidance, stability, and belonging in a context of social dislocation. Not unlike other towns around Lake Tanganyika and along the nineteenth-century caravan routes, Bujumbura was populated by people from very diverse origins, who found a common ground in Swahili culture. ^{Footnote 18} Most of these people were uprooted, be it as captured slaves, as auxiliaries of slave and ivory traders, as refugees of war, orphans due to epidemics, or persons excommunicated for sundry reasons, or simply as enterprising or venturesome people seeking opportunities. On top of that, they all arrived in a new urban living environment that they had to shape.

The combination of having to reinvent themselves personally, to build a way of life that could accommodate people of myriad stock, and to face new challenges in new surroundings led people to adopt a common urban life style. Forging a common living environment in which new urbanites could all feel at home included the adoption of common culinary and clothing habits, dance and music, building styles, the organization of time, the use of the Swahili language, and an identification with Islam. The motivations as well as the agency for this urbanity were local, and they should be understood and explained locally rather than as a diffusion of Swahili culture from the East African coast. All the same, the only urban culture they had all encountered before was the coastal culture of the caravan traders, with whom they all had – for better or for worse – been confronted over the past couple of decades. ^{Footnote 19} The local need for communication, belonging, and meeting everyday challenges in towns like Bujumbura; the availability of an East African coastal culture in Central Africa; as well as a line of communication and mobility into Central Africa and up to the Indian Ocean coast provided the constellation in which solutions for local problems were carved out throughout the colonial period. These solutions were neither strictly local nor urban, neither Burundian national nor Great Lakes regional, neither East nor Central African, but genuinely translocal.

The majority became “at least nominal Muslims” ^{Footnote 20} with “a minimum of religious practice.” ^{Footnote 21} Especially the uprooted and dislocated Muslims, who had their roots in the area west of Lake Tanganyika but were highly mobile throughout East and Central Africa, became the actual carriers of the further spread of Islam in this part of Africa. Integration into a community rather than proselytization were the engines of this spread. Initially, Islam in this area was primarily lived or practiced rather than contemplated or consecrated. ^{Footnote 22} Moreover, Muslims continued to combine their Islamic practices with several other ritual or healing practices and habits stemming from their places of origin. ^{Footnote 23}

As far as Bujumbura is concerned, the German and Belgian colonial administrations helped in perpetuating an Islamic imprint that was still weak at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they did so despite – or perhaps because of – their hostility to anything that had to do with slavery, “Arabs,” and Islam, which were their economic, political, and religious rivals. In the Congo, and later in the mandate territory of Ruanda-Urundi, the Belgian colonial authorities assumed that former allies of the “Arabs,” former slaves, as well as people making a living in these surroundings were all Muslims. I do not want to suggest that this assumption was essentially false. However, by treating people with diverse and even opposed origins as one group – and by reducing them to their presupposed religion – the colonial government reinforced early Swahili community formation and if not caused, then at least facilitated, a self-fulfilling Islamization process. ^{Footnote 24}

By making the Swahili language the language of administration in German East Africa, the German colonial policy likewise contributed to the spread of Islam, which is one of the attributes of Swahili culture. This policy did not reach into the Burundian and Rwandan heartlands, which held a high degree of autonomy, but it did apply to the lacustrine strip between the mountains and Lake Tanganyika, where Bujumbura is situated. In so doing, they made Swahili askaris and artisans of diverse cultural and social backgrounds spread throughout the colony and settle in urban centers, another feature of Swahiliness. Albeit unintendedly, these colonial policies strengthened internal dynamics leading to Swahilization.

A translocal process of identity and community building explains how Bujumbura became an almost entirely Muslim town, from its foundation at the end of the nineteenth century until around 1930. The town’s Muslims soon built the basic infrastructures of Islam. The first mosque, which was to remain the town’s Friday mosque until the segregating urban planning measures in the 1930s (which is discussed later), was built around 1900 in the Mbugani quarter, the central Swahili, Arab, and Indian neighborhood between the German fortress and the lake where the city developed during the first three decades of its urban existence. Within the first decade, a Muslim of Congolese descent, Idi Asumani, became the most important imam of the Friday mosque.

Parallel to the religious institutions, the community shared a “force for cohesiveness” ^{Footnote 25} and a “capacité d’accueil” ^{Footnote 26} (“a disposition towards hospitality”), which refer to their willingness to absorb or integrate the socially weak and needy as well as to their capacity to stand as a cohesive and translocally connected group vis-à-vis their colonial and Burundian contexts. Once a core Muslim community in town was established, further newcomers were integrated and assisted in finding housing and work. Solidarity and hospitality deeply impressed newcomers in the community, ^{Footnote 27} who were in later years mostly orphans, women or girls threatened with abduction, or otherwise vulnerable people, much like the initial members of the community, who also had backgrounds of displacement and vulnerability. ^{Footnote 28} The experience of hospitality and the process of integration in the community was tantamount to their integration in the city and the religion. ^{Footnote 29} For the early colonial period, it actually makes the distinction between urbanization, Swahilization, and Islamization needless. Until the 1930s, integration in the city had been virtually synonymous with integration in the Swahili community and conversion to Islam.

During this period, Bujumbura saw a demographic evolution from a population of less than 2,000 inhabitants around 1910 to close to 4,000 in 1930, which was almost homogeneously Muslim. Over the next five years, the Muslim population grew by a further 1,500, which was the most rapid growth so far. During those same years, however, the entire population of Bujumbura grew by 3,000 inhabitants, which means that for the first time a substantial share of the urban population was not Muslim. This divergence continued, leading to a demographic situation of 12,000 to 14,500 Muslims within a total urban population of around 50,000 at the time of independence in 1962. This simultaneous absolute growth and relative decline of the Muslim population of Bujumbura can be explained from outside and from inside the community. Externally, this evolution was the result of a combination of Belgian anti-Islamic policies, the fact that the influx of rural Burundians was too rapid for the Muslim community to absorb every newcomer, and eventually the arrival of a new national elite. ^{Footnote 30} At the same time, however, the Muslim community of Bujumbura addressed these challenges by connecting in a multitude of ways to a Great Lakes context, Central Africa, East Africa, and the wider Islamic world (as will be shown in the next section).

- Anti-Islamic Policies

Because of the anti-Islamic policy of the Belgian colonial government, however, the Qadiriyya in Bujumbura could not attract newcomers in the same way as elsewhere in East Africa. Through measures of urban planning the colonial administration largely managed to segregate the African Muslim community from the rest of the urban or Burundian population by the 1930s. Upon the forced resettlement of the town’s Swahili community, the historical heart of the town where they used to live, between the administrative center of town and the lake, became the Quartier asiatique (Asian quarter), being reserved for – primarily Muslim – Indians and Arabs. Thus different groups of Muslims were spatially separated from one another. Furthermore, the new Swahili quarter, Buyenzi, was physically isolated from the rest of town, being squeezed between the Ntahangwa river, the industrial and port area, a buffer zone (gradually occupied by a market, a hospital, an equestrian center, the old football stadium, tennis grounds, a swimming pool, and a golf course), and an easily controllable straight and wide avenue separating Buyenzi from Belge (today called Bwiza). This spatial isolation was complemented by limitations on settlement, mobility, employment, and education for the Swahili urban population. ^{Footnote 41} Belge, in turn, was the neighborhood for the African (initially mainly Congolese, later increasingly Burundian and Rwandan) staff of the Belgian colonizers, and thus the first non-Swahili African neighborhood in town – or rather non-Muslim, as in fact the mostly eastern Congolese colonial employees did speak Kiswahili as well, albeit in its Congolese “Central African” manner contrary to the Muslims in town who fancied an “East African” coastal accent.

In short, the rapid growth of town coincided with the forced resettlement, isolation, and discrimination of its original Swahili population and the establishment of new non-Swahili neighborhoods, which means that newcomers for the first time had alternatives to Swahilization in order to integrate into urban life. This is the moment when the history of the Muslim community of Bujumbura starts to diverge from that of Rumonge or Nyanza-Lac, which were not only much smaller, but remained primarily Swahili, or at least not spatially segregated, for the rest of the colonial period. Although the religious developments in each of these towns was still in line with and connected to what happened in Ujiji and beyond, the peculiar bearing in Bujumbura requires a specific local and intracommunity interpretation as well.

In the given context, the impact of Qadiriyya was largely limited to those people who were already Islamized before, together with only a comparatively small number of newcomers. Nevertheless, the demographic figures do show a marked increase in the number of Muslims in Bujumbura during the first half of the 1930s, albeit within a wider urban population that grew even more rapidly. The colonial government actually felt deeply concerned about the continuing appeal of Islam in Bujumbura. ^{Footnote 42} However, by the middle of the 1930s the growth of the Muslim population had diminished and by the end of the next decade they had become a minority in town. Qadiriyya’s success in attracting converts had been ephemeral; however, it had a more thorough and long-lasting impact inside the Muslim community of Bujumbura.

Both in terms of the social and of the ceremonial organization of community life, the Sufi way was omnipresent. Qadiriyya was relatively accessible and had a potential to strengthen solidarity and cohesion within a community, which was all the more needed because of colonial segregation policy. The shift from a primarily practical living of Islam as part of urban Swahili culture, to a more pious Qadiriyya Sufism, thus also meant a gradual move from a de facto very open community to a more closed in-group solidarity. This move can be understood in Belgian colonial and Great Lakes contexts as a way of coping with isolation and segregation measures against them, whereas this move was in line with a shift from an expansive to an intensive phase in Sufi Islam across East Africa. Internal communal leadership was a crucial factor in this transition.

- Authority beyond Ethnicity

As mentioned before, Abel highlights the double character of the tariqa: “popular” and “magisterial.” Seen from inside the community, authority or leadership fulfilled an important role in the organization of the Islamic community life but, at the same time, the togetherness and the primacy of the group prevailed. In this, religious and community leadership followed different logics, but were complementary and, in practice, there was no clear line between both. Religious leadership within the Qadiriyya was based on piety, knowledge, charisma, and the silsila (chain of succession) within the tariqa. Leadership could thus be passed on to a follower who was considered capable of teaching – that is to say, having the piety, knowledge, and charisma to do so. Parallel to this, community leadership was institutionalized in a committee that was alternately called Comité ya Wazee (Council of Elders/Sages), ^{Footnote 43} Comité zao za Waisilamu (their Committee of Muslims), ^{Footnote 44} Wakubwa wa Kabila (the big men of the tribes), ^{Footnote 45} or the Comité Musulman de Buyenzi (Islamic Committee Buyenzi), ^{Footnote 46} which together refer to religion, age, respectability, status, ethnicity, and neighborhood. The committee was both the interlocutor for the colonial administration and responsible organ for the management of religious festivals, hosting visitors, or assignments in prayer or other rituals.

The composition of the committee tells us something about the translocal functioning of the community. It consisted of representatives of kabila or ethnic groups. Twelve kabila each delegated two men. Although the delegates were all wazee (elders or sages) with some religious and societal prestige, this composition seems to indicate that ethnicity was of utmost importance. However, this composition also helps to overcome ethnic division. Giving each ethnic group equal weight prevented an ethnic group or ethnic criteria from dominating the whole community or religious life. The most important kabila in Bujumbura’s Muslim community were the Bembe, Bwari, Masanze, and Vira, all of them originating in the Congo. Towards the end of the colonial period, the share of the Rwanda and especially the Rundi ethnic groups grew significantly, but even then the four aforementioned Congolese ethnic groups still accounted for half of the Swahili community of Bujumbura. The Rundi came close to a third and the Rwanda almost a tenth of the community in the final years of the colonial period. ^{Footnote 47} As latecomers in the community, however, they were generally less well-off, less educated, and younger and would therefore usually be less represented among the most prestigious or respected men of the community. Taken together, the remaining ethnic groups (Goma, Bangubangu, Nyamwezi, etc.) added up to less than 10%; however, they had as many representatives in the committee as the six big ones. In practice, the functioning of this Swahili “parliament” rather neutralized than strengthened the predominance of the largest ethnic groups and thus prioritized the general interest of the community. It also indicates that the people remained very aware of their ethnic identity, thus maintaining their connections, mentally, and materially, with their Congolese roots as much as with friends and family across East and Central Africa. ^{Footnote 48}

The fact that the committee was composed according to ethnic grounds does not mean that in practice every member was equally influential. Through knowledge, prestige, wealth, or experience some individuals had greater authority than others. In the actual functioning of the committee, the ethnic factor was clearly subordinate to the qualities of individual members. What the most influential members all had in common was some degree of religious merit, which could be based on knowledge as well as on wealth, on ‘ilm, as well as on sadaka, and which could be cause as well as result of social prestige.

- Religious Underpinnings of Communal Leadership

Huseni Msozerwa, the mwalimu of the main madrasa of Buyenzi and one of the imams for Friday prayers, has been identified as the most important person for religious issues in the colonial period. Hilali Hamisi, Mahamudu Kaburwe, Rajabu Sudi, and Ramazani Shabani were also recognized as religious authorities within the community during the period under scrutiny. ^{Footnote 49} All five were mwalimu (teacher) and their prestige was at least partly based on their religious knowledge. Moreover, all of them were of Congolese descent (Bembe, Bwari, and Masanze). Ramazani Shabani was the only one born in Bujumbura, from a father who immigrated from Ubembe. ^{Footnote 50} The other four were born in what was by then the Congo, in Kigoma-Ujiji (Tanganyika) or in Nyanza-Lac (Burundi), and had already gained religious knowledge before coming to Bujumbura. This first generation, who arrived in Bujumbura during German colonial times, had mainly received their religious learning in Ujiji, and it was still limited to some practical knowledge about rituals and the ability to recite the Quran. ^{Footnote 51} Yet, they were the community leaders who underpinned the Qadiriyya way of living Islam in the interwar period.

Within the Muslim community of Bujumbura, there were not yet full-fledged Islamic scholars (‘ulama or sheikh) before the Second World War. The religious input came from visiting sheikhs who would stay in Bujumbura for a few months or a few years and were provided with housing and livelihood from the prominent members of the community. These sheikhs provided religious teaching during their stay and in particular provided religious training for the walimu in Bujumbura. Sheikh Abdul Muhsin Kitumba from Kigoma-Ujiji and the already mentioned Sheikh Mohamed Kibaraka (alias Kijungute) from Kitega visited Bujumbura repeatedly. ^{Footnote 52} Both sheikhs were mentioned by August Nimtz as major khalifa who played an important role in spreading the Qadiriyya tariqa around Lake Tanganyika and in Ruanda-Urundi by the late 1920s. ^{Footnote 53} The most important “visiting” sheikh in Bujumbura during the first half of the century was Sheikh Salih bin Muhammed. He was of mixed African-Arab origin and first came to Bujumbura via Kigoma-Ujiji in the 1920s. His importance to the Muslim community of Bujumbura was based not only on his great knowledge but also on the fact that he stayed long and often in Bujumbura, where he had a wife and child. Everyone having some religious function or ambition in town would learn with him. Although he belonged to none of the kabila, he was involved in all religious or community matters. He as well was khalifa of the Qadiriyya tariqa, albeit from another branch than Abdul Muhsin and Kijungute. ^{Footnote 54}

All of this shows that Qadiriyya influences, both coming from outside and developing inside the Swahili community, permeated the Islamic life in Bujumbura. Hilali Hamisi, for instance, was murshid (guide) and later also khalifa (successor) and was the local leader of the Qadiriyya. He taught in the community center with the same name and organized zikr sessions. Ramazani Shabani, who thanks to his good knowledge of Arabic became the main imam of Bujumbura towards the end of the colonial period, was also murshid. He had his own madrasa, where he had as many as two hundred pupils. ^{Footnote 55} He was both an imam and a tax officer, collecting taxes needed for the colonially instituted administration of the Buyenzi neighborhood.

This combination of community leadership, religious authority, and semi-colonial offices occurred more often. ^{Footnote 56} Also Rajabu Sudi, one of the town’s religious leaders most often mentioned by my informants, worked for the colonial administration. The same is true for Simba Idi Ndume, the son of the first imam of Bujumbura. ^{Footnote 57} Rajabu Sudi had a remarkably modern profile and in 1952 he was the first Muslim in Ruanda-Urundi to receive the Carte du mérite civique, a colonial recognition of advancement and merit – or évolué status as it was called in colonial parlance. ^{Footnote 58} Upon his retirement in 1957, he opened a bookstore in Buyenzi, where he sold both newspapers and religious books. He had taken both his modern and his religious education serious, and propagated this modern religious combination as the way forward for the community. ^{Footnote 59} In 1946, Rajabu Sudi and Simba Idi joined forces to build a school in the Buyenzi neighborhood, the Jumuiyya Islamiyya. ^{Footnote 60} In the morning, the school would provide religious teaching, and in the afternoon modern education. ^{Footnote 61} It is striking that many prominent Waswahili worked in the public service and were on the vanguard of both modernizing and religious developments. It is equally remarkable that the individual and/or family prestige always preceded their public service jobs and that their prestige was either directly or indirectly based on religious merits.

Mahamudu Kaburwe in turn belonged to what could be called a local dynasty. The Kaburwe were an influential family, not only in Bujumbura but also in Rumonge and along the Burundian shores of Lake Tanganyika. ^{Footnote 62} He represented the Masanze kabila, of Congolese origin, in the Muslim Committee. ^{Footnote 63} In the German period, he had been able to accumulate a lot of land in and near Bujumbura, ^{Footnote 64} which gave him both wealth and influence through lease and loan relationships. ^{Footnote 65} He himself was mwalimu and muridi (member or follower of the Qadiriyya) and has taught a lot in the time before Ramazani Shabani became the main teacher. He thus combined religious knowledge, wealth, influential family ties, and a respectable age. On top of that, he was a long-time resident of Bujumbura and his family had a long track record in the region, which further reinforced his status as mzee (elderly sage). He is a prime example of someone who was respected in all domains. Although not really surprising, it is noteworthy that status and authority often remained within the family. ^{Footnote 66} By the middle of the century, his “son” Amrani Juma would become Bujumbura’s first homegrown sheikh. We will learn more about him in the next section.

So far, I only mentioned Swahili men whose prominence was, directly or indirectly, based on religious learning. Yet, even without significant religious knowledge, wealth, and generosity could be used to earn respect. Ibrahim Kibombo was one of the largest landowners of Bujumbura. ^{Footnote 67} After the forced relocation of the Swahili community to the Buyenzi district in the 1930s, he used his wealth to build the first mosque in their new neighborhood. This mosque on 13^th Avenue, in the heart of the district, became the city’s new Friday mosque. ^{Footnote 68} Ibrahim Kibombe became imam as well as mwalimu in the adjacent madrasa. However, these religious offices were attributed to him more out of gratitude than religious knowledge. He had not studied extensively and was, for instance, not considered able to lead the Friday prayers. ^{Footnote 69} It is significant that his esteem within the community was still based on religious merit, albeit here in a material form. The family wealth and status would allow his son Yahya to study and become a respected mwalimu. ^{Footnote 70}

Being well-off without proper religious formation did not preclude obtaining prestige. By giving sadaka in the form of investment in religious infrastructure, in the form of gifts to the needy, or in the form of funding hajj pilgrimages or religious ceremonies, one could still gain respect within the community. ^{Footnote 71} The primacy of religion, including the community aspect that is inherent to it, also becomes clear from the reverse example of a rich family who did not invest in religion. Makangira Kasongo and his son Ramazani Makangira should, in theory, have been the most influential figures in the community. Makangira was head of the Swahili community from the Belgian takeover until 1948, and he had the largest estate of the whole community. In 1948, he was succeeded as chief by his son Ramazani, who previously was already deputy chief and judge. As most of the leading figures in the community, they were of Congolese descent and Muslim. However, contrary to most longtime residents, Makangira had only arrived in town with the Belgian occupation in 1916. Despite their theoretical power as official leaders of the Swahili community and despite their great wealth, they were feared at most but hardly respected. Makangira still enjoyed the respect of old age, but Ramazani lacked even that. What they both lacked was religious merit. Neither of them had religious knowledge, nor did they compensate this lack with sadaka or solidarity. The only example that could somehow be seen as sadaka is the fact that Makangira provided a small plot of land to mwalimu Huseni Msozerwa, but that did not suffice for a respected or prominent status, and instead he was seen as a collaborator of the Belgians. ^{Footnote 72}

In conclusion, we can say that authority in the Swahili community of Bujumbura was indeed based on wisdom, kinship, wealth, and age, but these assets would only translate into esteem or respect if they were put into the service of Islam or the community. Since religion literally means connectedness and Islamu umoja (Islam is unity), ^{Footnote 73} serving Islam and serving the community is de facto the same. As we have seen in the previous section, until the 1930s, integration into the city had been virtually synonymous with integration into the Swahili community and conversion to Islam. ^{Footnote 74} During the height of the colonial period, roughly the decades between 1930 and 1955, Islam in Bujumbura was strongly influenced by the Sufi Qadiriyya, which even more than Islam in general has charity and solidarity as core characteristics. ^{Footnote 75} It is therefore at least ironic that the rise of Qadiriyya coincided with an increasing segregation of the Swahili community. It would be highly speculative to ask what could have happened without this anti-Islamic segregation policy. What we do know, is that the Qadiriyya has mainly functioned in a relatively closed Swahili community, where newcomers were still efficiently integrated, but not very numerous.

By the end of the colonial period, the influence of the Qadiriyya was already waning. The causes and consequences of this evolution, and in particular the introduction of an Islamic Reform in Bujumbura from the last decade of the colonial period onwards, will be discussed in the remainder of this article.

- Globalization of Islam in Bujumbura

Firstly, and more important as a catalyst than as a direct influence, in the 1940s and 1950s, the Indian Ismaili Shiites in East Africa answered the call of their spiritual leader, the Sultan Mohamed Shah Aga Khan, to invest in social services. In 1936 and 1937, his followers had given him his weight in gold and diamonds on the occasion of his golden jubilee as Aga Khan, which he then distributed again via the Jubilee Cooperating Society, the Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust, the Ismailia Building Society, and the East African Muslim Welfare Society. In Bujumbura there were also sections of these societies and trusts, with the merchants Ali Rawji and Fidaali Abdul Hussein Talib as local leaders. They built the Jamatkhana, an Ismaili mosque that was inaugurated in 1943, and furthermore gave credits to Ismaili traders or entrepreneurs in the city. Although the Ismaili especially take care of their own relatively closed community, ^{Footnote 76} in the 1950s they also started supporting social services for the African Muslim communities in Ruanda-Urundi, which yielded some degree of sympathy and rapprochement. ^{Footnote 77} Reaching or converting African Muslims was not their primary concern, but the Qadiriyya in Bujumbura did feel threatened by these initiatives on what they considered to be their domain. ^{Footnote 78} The activities by the Ismaili were probably more an irritation than a cause for the sense of threat that the Qadiriyya felt. The Sufi pious and popular form of Islam was also under attack from other angles.

Secondly, a reformist movement of Islamic missionaries came to persuade the Muslim population of the city that their Sufi Islam was not in accordance with Islamic orthodoxy. This missionary initiative came from Saudi Arabia, and the first recalled envoy to Bujumbura was the Sudanese ‘Assir Kamal ud-Din, who twice spent two years in the city, where he acted as imam and mwalimu. After Burundian independence, the Saudi missionary efforts would continue unabatedly, and under this continuing influence many Waswahili left the Qadiriyya tariqa in the 1960s and 1970s. ^{Footnote 79} This is considerably earlier than in neighboring Ujiji, despite the fact that in religious matters this town had always been the main point of reference for Bujumbura’s Muslims. The different historical and political contexts reveal why Muslims in both towns responded differently to the appeal of these “orthodox” missionaries. Ujiji was the stronghold of Qadiriyya in East Central Africa and was part of a state in which Islam was recognized – albeit in some regards disadvantaged. In Ujiji, there was no immediate sense of crisis or need for change. For Bujumbura’s Muslims, against the backdrop of a forced exclusion on the national level (see below), Islamic Reform did offer a positive choice to accommodate and appropriate exclusion on the local level, while at the same time linking up translocally and transcendentally with the promise of a global and universal Islam.

Thirdly, and fully in line with this local appeal and sense of crisis, some people from Bujumbura itself also started to criticize the way Islam was lived and community life was organized. At the end of the 1950s, Sheikh Amrani Juma, the “son” of Mahamudu Kaburwe, returned from several Islamic study stays abroad with a religious knowledge that was not inferior to that of the aforementioned Arab missionaries. Sefu Asumani, the son of the neighborhood judge Asumani Katembo, and Yahya Ibrahim Kibombo, mentioned before, likewise supported Islamic reform. ^{Footnote 80} It is noteworthy that all three were “sons” from the big families and better educated than most of the local religious leaders of the time. ^{Footnote 81} This reflects the fact that the protest came from inside the community elite. A change of generations was taking place, where the young elite seemingly acted against the authority or religious convictions of their fathers. Armand Abel, writing at the time, correctly observes what was going on:

The colonial intelligence service had also noted that a rift had emerged within the African Muslim community of Bujumbura during the last years of the colonial period, but they wrongly – though significantly – assumed that the older generation adhered to “orthodox” Islam. It, of course, all depends on the perspective. The move towards more “orthodoxy” has been understood as a movement of Islamic Reform, ^{Footnote 83} and in fact it was the young generation that was calling for Reform. However, there was more to it than a generation conflict or youthful resentment. The same intelligence service established a link with the ongoing decolonization process and political objectives. ^{Footnote 84} Other colonial sources tellingly presupposed that a division inside the Muslim community ipso facto had to be due to a Sunni-Shiite opposition. ^{Footnote 85} These colonial observations were clearly one-sided and based on their own biases, but they were nevertheless to some extent accurate: there was a Shiite, more specifically Ismaili, movement underway; there was a change of generations taking place; and the political background had an important influence on what was going on. The reality, however, was more complex than any of these aspects could explain in isolation.

To start with, the Ismaili Indian, Saudi Arab, and insider religious impulses in the 1950s at least had their international dimension in common: either by being plugged into the international network of the Aga Khan, or by a Saudi pan-Islamic missionary initiative, or by the foreign studies of the sons of the local community leaders. The range of the Qadiriyya a few decades before had also already been border crossing and long distance, spanning from eastern Congo to the Swahili coast and back, but each of the three cases at work in the 1950s reached beyond East and Central Africa. After the scale of operation had expanded from translocal sociocultural imitation to an East and Central African Sufi Islam, the scope of operation and of connections now further enlarged, stretching beyond Africa, across the Islamic world at large.

Equally important is the fact that these religious initiatives took place in a global and a local context of decolonization. The particular situation of the Swahili community of Bujumbura is crucial to understand the coincidence between these global initiatives and their local effects. We have already pointed out that the core of the urban population comprised people of Congolese descent who were or became Swahili and Muslim. They remained in touch with Ujiji and the rest of Tanganyika. This contact consisted not only of family ties and trade relations but also of ideas, such as those brought through the spread of the Qadiriyya in earlier times. Given that people with roots in eastern Congo played a prominent role in the Tanganyikan decolonization process and were well represented among the founders and militants of the Tanganyika African Association and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), ^{Footnote 86} it should not come as a surprise that the winds of change accompanying the decolonization process reached the Swahili population of Bujumbura quite early on. The first Burundian political party, the Union Nationale Africaine du Ruanda-Urundi (UNARU), was at least in part a Swahili initiative and was a de facto duplicate of TANU, albeit functioning autonomously and rooted locally. The main Burundian nationalist party that would lead the country to independence, the Unité et Progrès National (UPRONA), as well as its leader Louis Rwagasore, had strong Swahili connections and maintained close ties to TANU. ^{Footnote 87} The course of the Burundian independence struggle, however, would lead to the exclusion of these pioneering Swahili.

Having been increasingly segregated in the town and country, having become a minority in the town of which they were the first inhabitants, and having always been an urban minority in a rural Burundi, these urban Muslims of Congolese descent were labeled foreigners by the new nationalist elite and were excluded from the political struggle they had helped to initiate. ^{Footnote 88} Within the Muslim community of Bujumbura, this situation led to some paradoxes. Pioneers of the national political struggle did not attain political rights; internal Swahili community leaders, who were almost exclusively of Congolese descent, were denied a political voice; and the most recent newcomers to the community, usually of Rundi descent, turned out to have more political rights than their hosts, leaders, and mentors. The new political order was at odds with the social order within the Swahili community. A kind of social inversion took place in the domain of formal politics, making the first inhabitants politically inferior to the recently arrived newcomers, the rich rulers politically inferior to the poor, the learned inferior to the uneducated, and the – internal – majority politically subjugated to the minority.

- Sheikh Amrani Juma Kaburwe

Against this background, Sheikh Amrani Juma played the card of Islamic reform. His life history illustrates the importance of both his position in town and his connections across East and Central Africa – and beyond – to take up the role of a religious reform leader. He was born in 1920 in the town of Rumonge (Burundi), where his father, Juma Kaburwe, was mwalimu. ^{Footnote 89} In 1937, he studied abroad for the first time, namely in Zanzibar. After his return, he settled in Bujumbura with his uncle Mahamudu Kaburwe, whom we introduced earlier. From 1952 to 1954, he was the first African Muslim from Bujumbura, who went to Yemen for Quranic studies. In 1957 and 1958, he specialized at the Islamic University of Lahore (Pakistan). Amrani Juma traveled to learn, and in the end it is hard to say whether it is the acquired knowledge or the long journeys in themselves that were most conducive to the respect he received. The fact is that upon return from his studies in Yemen, he was granted the honorary title of sheikh. His reputation reached into Indian and Arab circles in Bujumbura and beyond. In 1972, he became the first chairman of the Communauté islamique en République du Zaïre (COMIZA). This, in itself, is indicative of connections going both eastward, where he acquired his knowledge, and westward, where his prestige was based not only on his Islamic learning but also on his Congolese origin. Already when he still lived in Bujumbura, he received visiting sheikhs while Muslims came from far and wide to study with him; he also financed studies abroad of young Muslims from Bujumbura and from his place of birth, Rumonge. ^{Footnote 90} This huge recognition was surely based on his great religious knowledge, but it is by no means a coincidence that the first local sheikh came from a rich and prestigious family of walimu, who had both the financial means and the intellectual-religious predisposition to make several long study trips abroad. Joined by people like Sefu Asumani and Yahya Ibrahim Kibombo, his internal inclination towards Islamic Reform was more decisive for the Muslim community of Bujumbura than Ismaili, Saudi, or other missionary activities. Yet, even this inclination was premised on connections and mobility, hence translocal rather than local.

The significance of his turn towards Islamic Reform in the late 1950s and early 1960s is threefold. First and foremost, his Islamic radicalism transcended ethnic or national divisions. If religion is of a higher order than politics, the intrigue around political rights ipso facto becomes of minor importance. Second, by transcending politics he also imposed a separation between religion and politics. This is actually to some extent un-Islamic or unorthodox, since in principle Islam covers and fulfills the entire life of the believers, entirely including politics and society. Nevertheless, Amrani Juma strove for a depoliticization of religion, which can be justified by the fact that Muslims – as a group – were excluded from national politics anyway as well as a growing mutual contempt or even hostility between religiously oriented and politically active members of the community. ^{Footnote 91} The third point – the promotion of education – follows after a first going deeper into the depolitization of Islam.

The difficult relationship between religion and politics occurred elsewhere as well and is probably inherent to all processes of state formation based on the European nation-state model. In the Belgian Congo, Muslims even did not play a significant political role at all and Islam was reduced to

In Tanganyika, the situation was somewhat different. Unlike in the Congo, Muslims did contribute to the leading political movements, and unlike in Ruanda-Urundi, Muslims were and still are considered a constitutive element of the Tanganyikan/Tanzanian nation – albeit in certain regards disadvantaged. ^{Footnote 93} The different political context explains why, despite continued close contacts, the Muslims of Ujiji and Bujumbura followed different trajectories in the 1960s and 1970s, the former remaining a translocally entrenched Qadiriyya stronghold for several more decades and the latter turning towards a more outward-looking and transcendent Islamic reform. Yet, division among Muslims also manifested itself in Tanganyika, between those who pursued immediate independence and those who first sought equal social status for Muslims, and in particular an end to discrimination in education and public employment. For this purpose, the pressure group All Muslim National Union of Tanganyika (Amnut) was founded in 1957. ^{Footnote 94}

The situation of the Muslim community of Bujumbura was more or less halfway between the Congolese and the Tanganyikan one. Individual Muslims had been prominent in politics, but as a group they were forced to withdraw from the political arena. The few individual Muslims who remained politically active, such as Juma Muhehe and Juma Idi, did so as ethnic Rundi who happened to be Islamic, and not the other way around. ^{Footnote 95} The historical fact that the Swahili, regardless of ethnic origin, had formed the original population of the city of Bujumbura did not prevent them, as a group, from being reduced to the status of foreigners. ^{Footnote 96} When the ethnic factor could no longer be held in check, the result was not a fragmentation along the manifold ethnic lines mentioned above but a polarization within the Muslim community: Rundi and strangers, insiders and outsiders, citizens and stateless. However, the depoliticized religious stance of Amrani Juma surpassed the exclusive logic of the state. The separation between religion and (formal) politics allowed him to take initiatives for the betterment of Muslims as well as against their exclusion. The depoliticization of religion was not a political surrender but a path towards political action and political relevance outside of formal politics.

This brings us, at last, to the third point, to the fact that Amrani Juma did indeed try to forge a way out of the marginalized situation in which Muslims had been pushed by the Belgian segregation policy and in which Burundian nationalist politics now pinned them down. The man was plugged into East Africa and the Islamic world as much as he remained connected and respected in the Congo, he had studied more than anyone else in his community and knew very well that education was the primary condition for getting Muslims out of their disadvantaged position. As early as 1958, before the creation of the first political parties and before the exclusion of the Swahili as a group from the Burundian nation, he founded the Association Scolaire Musulmane Africaine du Ruanda-Urundi (Asmaru), making it somehow the Burundian version of Amnut. The association called for the intellectual development of its members, the establishment of schools, the provision of scholarships, and ultimately the emancipation and the creation of opportunities for African Muslims. The target group consisted of “all students of both sexes, Muslims, Africans and inhabitants of Ruanda-Urundi.” ^{Footnote 97} The emancipatory project of Asmaru resembled the initiative Rajabu Sudi and Simba Idi Ndume had taken more than a decade earlier, when they built the Jumuiyya school. Not surprisingly, these two men had themselves been able to study. By the same token, these initiatives reversely corroborate the analysis that underpinned both the German and Belgian policy towards Islam, namely that control over education would be the most effective measure against Islamization. ^{Footnote 98}

By the end of the colonial period, a coincidence of global and local developments had led to a substantial change in the living of Islam in Bujumbura. The global Islamic impulses of Ismaili initiatives, more importantly Saudi missionary activities, and above all study stays abroad by community members – in combination with the global and local political impact of decolonization and the local dynamics of polarization and exclusion – had led to a formal depoliticization of Islam, a more orthodox and knowledge-based living of Islam, and an enlargement of the scope of operation and the frame of reference that embedded religious life within East Africa and the wider Islamic world. It is worth noting that on top of these external or global influences, the initiative for a religious revitalization came from within the community, from the well-educated, young generation of local leading families. Rather than entailing a generational conflict, this can be understood as a changing of the guard, where members of the young generation took on responsibility to address the challenges of their times, and they did so with clear religious underpinnings. Understood in this way, there is more continuity than rupture in the way the leading families of the community acted. Yet, both the historical actors and the historians need the shifting of scales between Bujumbura, Burundi, East, and Central Africa, and the Islamic world in order to grasp these dynamics and escape the master narrative of national or regional historiographies.

Nevertheless, the actions of the new generation of religious and community leaders have not been able to prevent the cohesion of the local community and the close relationship between religion and society from gradually disintegrating. The large or wealthy families as well as the criteria for leadership could only be maintained within the religious sphere and for a more contained group. Religious merit became less a collective issue serving cohesion, integration, and solidarity, and more based on individual learning and devotion. Developments on the global level of the Islamic world thus served very particular local needs. At the same time, although the Swahili community of Bujumbura continued to show cohesion, at least compared to the divided surrounding society, it nevertheless gradually lost its “force for cohesiveness” and its “capacité d’accueil.” It was only a matter of time before the collectivist Qadiriyya would lose its prominence. ^{Footnote 99}