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How to carry owls to Athens? Performing scriptural authenticity among Wahhabi Muslims in Mauritius

by Frank Donath

(#Folie1)The origin of intertextuality as theoretical concept is usually linked via Julia Kristeva and her writings in the 1960s and 70s to Bakhtin. It was developed into at least two distinct jet often interwoven theoretical strands, one sticking quite faithfully to Kristevas original idea and looking at how literary productions – often texts loaded with cultural meanings like fragments of Holy Scriptures – moving and migrating from text to text. Another strand developed the metaphorical potential of the concept by looked at other cultural material as texts and henceforth starting to ask how and why cultural texts travel between different social fields.1
I like to apply the concept to an example coming from Muslim Mauritius by looking at Friday Sermons (khutba),(#Folie2) which can be regarded as quite conventional texts in the literal sense.(#Folie3). Incorporated into the text of the Friday Sermon are intertextual references to Prophetic sayings (hadith). Another kind of text is inserted into the text of the khutba. They centre on what Silverstein2 has coined "linguistic ideologies", which are basically the set of beliefs and assumptions about a particular language. These texts however are best understood in the metaphorical sense. (#Folie4) In regarding linguistic ideologies as texts it is possible to speak for instance of an Arabic or French linguistic ideological text incorporated into the text of the Friday Sermon.

I will start my presentation by sketching the historical and contemporary development of the greater Mauritian society. At looking how the Muslim community developed on the island I will outline the theological landscape of Mauritian Islam with reference to Gros-Billot, the place of my 6-month field research in 2004/2005 with a population equally divided between Muslims and Hindus. I will take this observation as departure to argue that it is not by simple reference to unquestioned scriptural sources of religious authenticity, (#Folie5) by which notions of scriptural orthodoxy are produced. It is rather in skilfully arranged cultural performances that notions of scriptural authenticity are created; (#Folie 6) performances like the Friday Sermon I will present which tap on an intertextually interwoven complex corpus of linguistic ideological texts.

Mauritius is a formerly uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean approximately the size of Berlin. The French established successfully a colony in the 18th century(#Folie7) and started importing African slaves which they exploited in their sugar-cane plantations. The British took over in 1810 and soon started to bring Indian contract workers to Mauritius. When the so-called ’coolie-trade’ was brought to halt in 1912, two third of the Mauritian population was formed by ex-indentured labourers, consisting of Hindus and Muslims. (#Folie8) They were at the bottom of the colonial society, where they shared their lot with the majority of the descendants of the African slaves, which formed 28%. A handful of British colonial administrators at the top of the social ladder governed the island, while some great Franco- Mauritian families of sugar-barons exerted economical power. When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, most of the British left, while the French were allowed to keep their plantations. The Hindu-majority took over most of the political power and is prominent in the state-apparatus. Today, Mauritius lives on sugar and textile industries as well as tourism.

In order to understand the social dynamics of the ethnographic example about to be presented it is necessary to sketch the historical development of the Muslim community in Mauritius.(#Folie9) The great majority of Muslims came under the British as indentured labourers to work in the plantations. About one third off all so-called ’coolies’ were Muslims and like their fellow Hindus mostly illiterate peasants from East-India, notably Bihar. The huge number of Indians abroad attracted rich Indian merchants from Gujarat in West India. They had created a web of business-contacts, which span all over the Indian Ocean. In India, there developed Muslim casts; and the concurrence of two Gujarati casts in Mauritius has powered the engine of Muslim religious development until today. The first arriving Gujarati cast, the Meimons, built and still controls the highly influential central mosque in the capital Port-Louis. Slightly later the Surtees arrived, who started venturing into the countryside and helped there establishing the first mosques.
Mauritian Islam has been purged for at least 80 years from presumed un-Islamic practices by several successive waves of Islamic reformism, whose dynamics can only be understood with a small glimpse to Indian Islam.(#Folie10) Indian Muslims were traditionally divided in Ashraf and Aylaf. In India, the Ashraf formed the elite of the pre-colonial and early colonial society and invested much energy in refining their Islamic outlook along Persian cultural models. The Aylaf formed the great masses of superficially Islamised Indians with almost no access to scriptural expert discourses. A syncretistic religious culture developed, which fed heavily on joint Hindu and Muslim influences. The very real thread of re-conversion of Neo- Muslim Aylaf was the cause for the development of several currents of Islamic reformist movements, sweeping the Indian countryside since the early 19th century. All reformists strove to bring the superficially Islamised masses of Indian Aylaf firmly into the Muslim fold correcting their Islamic outlook along orthodox lines. This often happened by linking their behaviour to scriptural sources of Islamic authenticity.
Back to Mauritius: Islamic reformism reached the island by missionaries who were regularly invited by the Muslim merchant casts.(#Folie11) Since the 1920s the Sunna Jamaat movement was brought in by the Meimons. From the 1950s onward, the Surtees brought the Tablighi Jamaat into the country. They soon created an independent educational system with their own preacher seminary (dar al-ulum). The latest theological import was formed by Saudi-Arabian Wahhabism, which started arriving in the 1980s.
The Sunna Jamaat controls an estimate 50% of the some 150 Mauritian mosques, including the most influential ones in the big cities, the Tablighi Jamaat controls about one third of the mosques and the Tawheed, as the Mauritian adherents of Wahhabism prefer to be called, heads about 15 mosques, which means 10% almost all of them in the country-side. (#Folie12)

All reformist Islamic schools, who swept the Indian world including Mauritius since the 19th century fostered their claims to orthodoxy by linking up with scriptural foundations of Islamic theology, dismissing other orthodoxy-creating social devices like sticking to unquestioned tradition. The Sunna Jamaat, follows Hanafi Islamic law and leans on the rich corpus of medieval legal Hanafite reasoning and their way to interpret Koran and Sunna. (#Folie13)Their religious specialists supply the local religious authorities with theological weapons against their Islamic and non-Islamic adversaries.
The second great South Asian reformist movement is the Tablighi Jamaat. In their religious programmes, their adherents make heavy use of the books written by Muhammad Zachariya, the founder of the movement. "Fadail al-Amal" and "Tabligh-e Nisab" are collections of prophetic sayings (Hadith) and hagiographic material. Their religious specialists link the theological framework of the movement to scriptural sources of Islamic authenticity.

The third Islamic reformist current is formed by the wahhabite Tawheed, which follows some sort of hanbalite law. For them, the reformism of both the Tablighi Jamaat and the Sunna Jamaat doesn’t go far enough. They hold that local Islamic culture should be purged from all Indian traces and corrected along Arabian models.(#Folie14) They try to reconstruct the Muhammadan society of early Islam, which they see as a perfect model for all Muslim behaviour. In a classical Salafite position their local follower’s hold that they exclusively stick to Koran and Sunna as the only source of Islamic jurisprudence and claim to reject all other Islamic writings, notably the corpus of medieval Islamic legal literature.

All three theological currents of the Sunna Jamaat, Tablighi Jamaat and the Tawheed started as reformist movements.(#Folie15) They strove for long to either link local Muslim traditions to scriptural sources or to denigrate it as un-Islamic. Under the influence of this reformism, those behavioural patterns branded as un-Islamic were gradually replaced by orthodox ones.

In Gros-Billot the wahhabite Tawheed activists are the most energetic and fervent group in claiming being the sole Islamic orthodox current and denigrating their theological concurrence from both the Tablighi Jamaat and the Sunna Jamaat as followers of what they call as unlawful religious innovations (bid’a) and idolatry (shirk). Both accused currents, however, do not accept the label as heterodox Islamic groups and point to the scriptural foundations of their respective schools of thought. This leads to a situation where claims to orthodoxy cannot be successfully established by simply pointing to scriptural rooted-ness of a given Islamic position alone. Local Muslims cannot be convinced of the orthodoxy of one particular Islamic current by simply voicing their embedded-ness in the Holy Scriptures. Since all Mauritian Muslim groups have rectified their religious outlooks along scriptural lines, activists of the Tawheed ideology successfully use other cultural devices to reach their aim of convincing Muslims that they alone and exclusively are the Righteous Ones and follow the Straight Path (sirat al mustaqim) as every practicing Muslim supplicates his Lord several times a-day.(#Folie16)

The following example is aimed to show how Tawheed activists use religious performances like the weekly Friday Sermon (khutba) to successfully establish claims to scriptural authenticity. It is taken from a Friday Sermon (khutba) of Imam Shafei.(#Folie17) He is from the neighbouring mosque in Rose-Belle and studied Islamic theology in the Saudi- Arabian University of Medina, where distinct wahhabi positions are taught. After returning to Mauritius, he found employment in a government run school as Arabic teacher, was entrusted with the office of the imam in the mosque and as teacher of the mosque-attached Coranic School (madrassah). He is the most fervent activist of tawheed-ideology in the South of the island and is regarded as one of the most able and efficient figures in disseminating the new creed. He is locally the most popular and appreciated religious specialists (Alim, pl. Ulama) of the Tawheed. (#Folie18)
Looking at the khutba, it comes to no surprise that Imam Shafei draws intertextual references to the deeds and sayings of the Islamic prophet (Hadith) and therefore fulfilling one precondition to fit into the intertextuality-framework. What is less visible is his skilful and among local Muslims highly appreciated use of intertextual references to other linguistic ideological texts; texts who for instance construct French as language of high esteem and educated-ness.

Contrary to the demands of the Tawheed, that the believers should be able to understand the language and therefore the message of the Friday Sermon, most local Muslims will face considerable difficulties in getting the sense of his message. This is partly due to the use of a heavily frenchizised Kreol, which is a language variety typical for those Mauritians who underline their claims to higher social status and their deep educated-ness. This linguistic fabric is the outcome of the lexical proximity between French and the Mauritian Creole, the mother tongue of almost all Mauritians. It is currently replacing Bhojpuri as mother-tongue of the Indian peasants in the country-side like in Gros-Billot. In the local context Mauritian Creole still carries the meaning of being a language associated with socio-economic emancipation and modernity. In Gros-Billot the language shift towards Creole as first language started when village boys married city girls, who only spoke Creole, when at the same time village life was regarded, as backward, Bhojpuri indexically linked to backwardness and life in the city as upmarket. A mastery of Creole was for long time precondition for better jobs in the colonial administration and on the national market, where it was the lingua franca of all Mauritians.
What holds for ordinary Creole is even more true for a refined Frenchizised Creole. Using this language variety Imam Shafei evokes notions of French, which is regarded as language of high culture. In Mauritius French is widely used in the national newspapers as well as in literary productions. Most films are dubbed in French. It is also associated with the Franco- Mauritian sugar-barons, who are at the top of the local cultural taxonomy. Here the Imam taps on linguistic ideological texts of French as language of refinery and high culture via the French based Mauritian creole.

Imam Shafei translates the Arabic original of the Hadith into English, reading from a Hadith collection.(#Folie19) Since he is very educated and intelligent, he could have translated the Arabic original directly into Mauritian Creole. Instead he decided to read the English aloud and only later paraphrase the content in Mauritian Creole. English is understood by the educated, in the country-side many will not. Therefore the mostly little educated mosquegoers (musalli) have considerable difficulties following his words.
The decision to read the Arabic hadith in its English translation and only after then paraphrase the content in Mauritian Kreole has to be seen in the light of local linguistic ideological texts. Whenever educated people try to make their point in a conversation they switch to English. When one teacher from Gros-Billot brought me to the airport the last day we were talking in French and remembering some pleasant events when he suddenly switched to English to announce that "we are really looking forward meeting you again". Here the switch to English underlined the new official role he adopted as he started to speak on behalf of the whole village.(#Folie20)
These linguistic ideological texts stem from a Mauritian particularity, where the use of English is mostly confined to the educational and legal sector. It is the language of the court and spoken by teachers to their pupils. Elsewhere it is of little practical use. It consequently has acquired the meaning of being the language carrying truth and social knowledge. Furthermore, a mastery of English is precondition for work in the national administration and for successful emigration to richer countries in the north. When Imam Shafei opted for English he tried to evoke notions of divine truth and religious knowledge using linguistic ideological texts.

Another remarkable feature of his Khutba is the absence of any religious expression in Urdu. Linguistic ideological texts of local Muslims regard Urdu as being identical with Bhojpuri, while Bhojpuri is regarded as the language of poor and illiterate peasants. Urdu therefore links local Muslims to their unwanted past as unskilled labourers in the sugar cane fields – a past they increasingly strife to leave behind. Urdu is locally linked to Pakistan, a country where no prestige whatsoever is derived from. Furthermore Urdu is seen as identical with Hindi and Hindi as indexically linked to the Hindu community. By distancing from Urdu as carrier of religious meanings, local Muslims underline their religious distance to the Hindus, which in the local logic is precondition to acquire Islamic orthodoxy.

Imam Shafei has decided to leave the hadith in the Arabic original. It is of course the sacred language of all Muslims. Besides, in local context the use of Arabic has acquired another meaning. Its mastery opens new job opportunities in the highly appreciated white-collar sector of the Mauritian economy. Those with Arabic knowledge are recruited as Arabic teachers in the educational system.
Arabic linguistic ideological texts have long been linked to the Arab world, which is seen as a centre of incredible riches, modernity and economic development. In the 1980s some Muslims from Gros-Billot had the opportunity to work in the oil-rich Arabian states and spread this image after they returned to the village. The early arriving activists of the Tawheed ideology could activate this particular linguistic ideological text in their endeavour to propagate Arabic as the sole language of religious authenticity and therefore kicking out Urdu.

It comes to no surprise that religious ideological texts in Gros-Billot are decisively shaped by national ideologies.(#Folie21) Mauritian nationalism officially acknowledges the existence of distinct ethnic groups, which are expected to see their presumed diasporic origin as religious, aesthetical and cultural model. So-called "ancestral cultures" and "ancestral languages" are fostered in cultural centres, which also serve to represent the respective community on state level and to form artists to perform in state-sponsored national ceremonies. The Muslim community is linked to the Islamic Cultural Centre, who helps organizing cultural shows for Independence Day. There, the Muslim community is represented in cultural programms by artists who sing Qawwalis, Islamic songs of Indian origin sung in Urdu.
The national ideology that link Muslims culturally and religiously to their Indian past was decisively shaped by the rich traditional Indian Gujarati merchant class, who see their past as a time of glory.(#Folie22) They threw their religious heavy-weight behind the dominant Sunna Jamaat. The leader of the Gujarati merchants was head of a Muslim political party, which was part of the Mauritian government in the formative years of Mauritian nationalism after independence in 1968.
Rural Muslims have no reason to see their Indian past with glory, which they lived as illiterate, marginal indentured labourers. It is part of their economic and cultural emancipation to forget this past. Instead they increasingly regard the mythical period of the "Salaf" the companions of the Islamic Prophet in the Arabian world, as the model for their culture.

To conclude: By looking at the local linguistic ideologies as distinct texts, we can fruitfully apply the intertextuality-lense to the Mauritian material.(#Folie23) Within the text of the Friday Sermon, Imam Shafei skilfully interweaves other linguistic ideological texts that are linked to their respective linguistic culture. He taps on texts of English and French as carriers of social truth and cultural superiority. Consequently he avoids making use of Urdu, which is seen as linked to religious heterodoxy and prefers Arabic for being the carrier of religious authenticity. Furthermore it is not enough to state that scriptural sources are used to create notions of orthodoxy. In a highly scripturalized Islamic discourse like in Mauritius it is important to ask how these notions are constructed. Imam Shafei uses public religious performances like the Friday Sermon to create scriptural authenticity.

1 For an insightful overview over how intertextuality has been used see Meinhof. Ulrike H. and Jonathan Smith, The media and their audience: intertextuality as paradigm, in Meinhof, Ulrike H. and Jonathan Smith (eds.) 2000 Intertextuality and the media. From genre to everyday life, Manchester, Manchester University Press

2 1979

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