Islam, Ulamaa and Community Development in Tanzania

Islam in Tanga, Tanzania is a carefully documented study which presents the history of an East African coastal Swahili-speaking Muslim town from its inception about five or six centuries ago to the present period. It is without doubt the first and the most detailed treatment of Islam and Islamic leadership in Tanga. Chande has explored various aspects of the Tangan Muslim community, framing the issues in the local and national contexts, with the result that the Muslim communities' responses to the Challenges of modernity are explored. The main focus of Chande's study is, in fact, with the contemporary period. The documentation of the argument with respect to religious/madrasa competition in the Tangan Muslim community, is quite sustained and wide-ranging, deriving for the most part from travel accounts, colonial records, manuscript collections in Tanzania, and the author's field notes. Factionalism, which plagues Muslim organizations (Tangan ones in particular) has been an obstacle to their collective efforts to forge ahead in the educational field. This is a field in which Muslims are lagging behind Tanzania's Christian communities which have benefited from the Christian-mission domination of the educational system.