“The Inheritors of the Prophets”: Islamic Historical Memory along the Swahili Coast

This paper engages Islamic frameworks of historical memory along the Swahili coast. It argues that Swahili ideas of inheritance (*urithi*) formulate a dynamic and generative way in which Muslim scholars and biographers articulate and live with Islamic pasts and religious memory along the coast. Building on anthropological approaches to history and memory as well as work concerning Islamic historiography, I explore *urithi*’s significance as a Swahili-Islamic ordering of the past based in a spiritual tradition that posits knowledge as a meaningful historical inheritance and Islamic scholars as “inheritors of the Prophets” and thus bearers of religious memory. These arguments are based on analysis of two biographical texts covering the lives of pioneering reformist Swahili-Muslim scholars, Sheikh Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui (d. 1947) and Sheikh Abdulla Saleh Al-Farsy (d. 1982). My analysis is further informed by insights gathered from various interviews with the authors of these biographies.