Abstract
This chapter explores how a little prayer book with origins in the southern Arabian Peninsula circulated on the southern tip of the African continent. The prayer was the Rātib al-Haddād, and it was arranged by a Sufi luminary in Yemen sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. It probably circulated orally at first, but its transformation into manuscript and then printed book form is what animates this chapter. Through it we trace the movements of ideas and people between Southeast Asia, Arabia, East Africa, and the Cape. This chapter is an exercise that combines book history with microhistory at a transcontinental level.
[…] a pile of humble little prayer-books. They may lie half buried by school-books and novels in a busy town, or stocked behind all manner of goods in a country grocer’s shop, or prominently displayed in a little bookshop by the entrance to some great mosque, or spread on the ground when a pedlar opens his pack. Through all the stresses today […] these little books still live their quiet life.
—Constance E. Padwick, Muslim Devotions, 1961
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Notes
- 1.
One has to be careful in trying to pin down a date or era for an intellectual trend, because one may only be looking at publications in a specific language or perhaps two or three European languages. Even at this stage of world history, one may easily privilege research and publications in English and forget what most of the world is doing.
- 2.
Except for two other books produced by the same compiler-cum-editor-cum-publisher. It is worth noting that the compiler is a medical doctor who worked closely with some of the city’s most prominent Islamic scholars in the compilation of this volume. He signs himself as follows: ‘Professor Ghoesain Mohamed (Editor), Visiting Professor of Chinese Medicine, Beijing , China: Western Medical Clinician and Practitioner of Chinese Medicine and Tibb al-Nabawi, Cape Town, South Africa’ (Mohamed 2010). This combination of expertise is itself fascinating and worthy of exploration, but this is not the place for such a discussion.
- 3.
Mawlid al-Barzanji of Ja’far b. Hasan b. Abd al-Karim al-Barzanji. He was a jurist in Medina, Arabia, and died there in 1764.
- 4.
Qasida al-Burda of Sharaf al-Din Muhammad b. Sa’id b. Hammad al-Busiri. He was an eminent thirteenth-century Sufi scholar from the Sanhaja-Berber tribe of Morocco, but later moved to Egypt.
- 5.
The mosque became famous for its distinctive and extensive annual celebrations of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (Mawlid). While the celebration has a long tradition in Cape Town , the investment of the Azzawiyya mosque in this event is probably rooted in its founder’s experiences in Zanzibar.
- 6.
A philological investigation is necessary into the earliest text /s of the Rātib, as composed by Imām ‘Abdullah al-‘Alawi al-Haddād, and later rearrangements or additions, everywhere it was localized. Prof Ghoesain Mohamed very briefly describes the content and origins of the text , including translations and commentaries (Mohamed 2010).
- 7.
The disinterment and exact place of his reburial is a contentious subject. In Cape Town, for example, it is a commonly held belief that a single digit was returned (Da Costa and Davids 1994).
- 8.
Hendricks describes Tuan Guru as a ‘prototypical traditionalist Ahli Sunni shaykh with a strongly punctuated Sufi tendency in an equally prototypical Ba Alawy mould’ (Hendricks 2005, p. 234).
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Jeppie, S. (2018). The Little and the Large: A Little Book and Connected History Between Asia and Africa. In: Cornelissen, S., Mine, Y. (eds) Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60205-3_2
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