Hells Corner

Brief Summary There have been several scholarly studies of the Ulama in East Africa in the past three decades. These studies are by both local and international scholars and they are either an attempt to document the leading ulama over a period of time, or analyse their scholarly and social contribution in the shaping of the intellectual landscape in East Africa. The local ulama themselves spearheaded this interest by researching on the most influential of the ulama over the past two centuries. This is the inevitable consequence of a tradition that recognizes individuals as ultimately shaping the nature of local scholarship through the transmission of knowledge, rather than the actual creation of that knowledge. In this regard, the East African intellectual tradition is essentially a derivative of the Hadhrami scholarly tradition centred around Tarim and Sewn in present day southern Yemen. This accounts for the preponderance of the Shafi' School of jurisprudence that goes back several centuries. Sayyid Omar Abdallah is one such a'lim. Though born on the island of Zanzibar, for all practical purposes, he lived the life of his equally distinguished ancestors, who devoted their lives to the propagation of Islam along the East African Coast, and beyond. The Comorian ulama, and the Comorian Sayyids have their antecedents in both Africa and the Hadhramaut, as is the case of the ulama along the Eastern African Coast, stretching from the Banadir Coast in the north, to Mozambique and South Africa, for this is a homogeneous cultural zone, despite the political demarcations that abstractly separate one region from another. This biography looks at his exposure to western education, and his earlier initiation into the local intellectual tradition, and how these helped him structure his life and mind. It charts out his life in Uganda and later in the UK and finally back in East Africa. This biography charts the life of a man who has helped shape the discourse of Islam and whose influence has gone beyond the East African isles. ISBN:B07JQXY3GT Author:Mohamed Bakari