![]() ![]() Chronicles ( khabari) of Swahili towns commonly include reference to incoming traders from Middle Eastern ports and kingdoms, Muslim Arabs and/or Shirazi, who brought their merchandise (above all cloth) and came to settle converting the ruling families to Islam, founding new local dynasties (e.g. ![]() (Nurse & Hinnebusch, 1993), and this coincides with the first archaeological evidence of stone mosques in Swahili port towns (Horton & Middleton, 2000) between Southern Somalia and Northern Mozambique. Kiswahili, an African language of the Bantu-family came into being from 800 to 1000 A.D. The term Swahili already echoes oceanic orientation: it comes from the Arabic sawahil, meaning ‘coastlands’ or ‘lands of the edge’. This includes, a view as to how this relates or is integral to the larger Indian Ocean world. Our common point of convergence as an anthropologist and a literary scholar is to see Swahili language, literature and other texts as interwoven with the depth, scope, and complex dynamics of human experience and social life on the East Africa coast, with its long history of Islam. 1 INTRODUCING THE DYNAMIC HISTORICAL CONTEXT ![]()
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