http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2510196,00.html
A relaxed region that was converted to radicalism
Jonathan Clayton, Africa Correspondent
The Times December 18, 2006
The dusty alleyways of Mombasa's old Arab quarter have barely changed for
centuries. Young African boys push their wares through teeming crowds. Asian
merchants sell everything from cut-price underwear to colourful traditional
robes.
Black Africans, many wearing the distinctive bou-bous - small cotton hats
worn by East African Muslims - sit and chat at the entrances to dozens of
tiny mosques while drinking tea or juice made from freshly squeezed sugar
cane. Above the near-constant hubbub comes the regular call to prayer of the
muezzin.
The same scene is repeated up and down the length of "Swahili Africa" - a
vast area that today comprises the entire coasts of modern-day Kenya,
Tanzania, a good chunk of Mozambique, part of southern Somalia and Zanzibar,
its former island capital.
However, in recent years that has begun to change. Inter-marriage, heat,
history - even the area's renowned pole pole (roughly translated as "take it
easy") - have combined to make the Swahili Islam of East Africa's coast
barely recognisable to the radical versions now seen elsewhere in the world.
Perhaps because of its roots in the mix of Europeans, Arabs, Asians and
Africans thrown together by the 19th-century East African slave trade,
Swahili Islam has always been a relaxed affair. Yet there are growing fears
that the West's perceived crusade against Islam could ignite this area.
War in Somalia, particularly one seen to be engineered by the US, could be
the match that finally ignites a tinder-box fuelled by poverty, inequality
and an upsurge in prostitution and drug peddling blamed on Westerners.
Radicals make no bones about the fact that, so far, American politicians
have done what years of Islamic proselytising in the region failed to do:
turn the laid-back, rare mosque-goers into fervent believers. Abu Mansur
Robou, the radical Somali cleric, said recently: "America gave us all a
second wind. It did what we failed to do - it woke up the sleeping Muslim."
A regional expert cautioned that if war broke out in Somalia, support for
the Islamists would rocket from "20 per cent to 100 per cent and be felt
across this entire area".
Demonstrations against the US after Friday prayers started a few years ago
and, though still sporadic, they are now regular enough occurrences not to
draw much attention. Recent attacks on tourists, though condemned, were
blamed on Western policies in the Arab world and not on fellow Muslims, who
used the area's well-known laxness to infiltrate and set up local cells.
Posters of Osama bin Laden appeared on the streets of Mombasa for the first
time four years ago. Residents, terrified of the effect that they might have
had on Mombasa's tourist trade, quickly tore them down. Overnight, "Vote for
Osama" graffiti appeared instead. A Kenyan teenager then told The Times: "I
love that man, he makes people listen. I don't like violence, but people
must do something."
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