Religious citizenship: the case of the globalised Khōjā

Abstract

The African Khōjā are an Indic Muslim caste, which began migrating from Sindh and Gujarat to East Africa in the late eighteenth century. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their economic success in an institutionally underdeveloped region coupled with a strong religious impetus allowed them to build communal municipal institutions throughout the region that both mimicked and replaced the absent state. The insecurity of postcolonial East Africa, such as the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar and the 1972 Ugandan Asian exodus, forced the Khōjā to further expand their bureaucratic apparatus towards foreign policy-migration to Western Europe and North America and requisite institutionalisation. In the twenty-first century, the Khōjā coordinate these communal networks from North America and Western Europe to Asia and Africa towards a religious-based economic development in emerging economies. Their primary identity is religious, defined from within and outwith, using the mechanisms of globalisation to further communal aims internationally within a framework of religious nationalism insensible to state nationalism.

Keywords:

• religious citizenship
• Khoja
• Ismaili
• Ithnasheri
• Tanzania

Acknowledgements

Constructive feedback on this research was generously provided by the 2014 conference organized by Dr. Ulrike Kirchberger at Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften Universität Kassel entitled ‘Global diasporas in the age of high imperialism’.

Funding

This research was funded through the Islamic Civilization Initiative by the U.S. Fulbright Commission.

Notes

1. The term ‘globalisation’ as employed in this study references what Held refers to as the ‘transformationalist perspective’, which ‘conceives globalisation as being a process whereby various forms of human activity are increasingly traversing the world and connecting people in differing parts of the world more densely and more quickly than in previous times.’ (Hudson & Slaughter, 2007, p. 2) From this perspective, there is no single cause or outcome of globalisation. For this study, the economic and intellectual effects of liberal economic policies in Tanzania beginning in the 1990s, affordable intercontinental human transportation, and the flow of identity discourses from South Asia and the Near East to East Africa are some of the specific impacts of globalisation that have helped to radically transform Khōjā identity in the twentieth century and continue to do so.

2. A full fifth of the total Gujarati and English archival correspondence housed in the Africa Federation Archives in Dar es Salaam deals with issues related to parliamentary procedure and constitutional matters of the Federation.

3. The proportional representation is one representative for each 100 members of the particular community (jamāt).

4. While the Ithnā ʿAsharī Khōjā have adopted a republican form of communal organisation, which has limited the remit of the chief and accountant, the Āgākhānī Khōjā have allowed the chief and accountant to retain their medieval power and authority within the caste hall.

5. Interview with Ithnā ʿAsharī Khōjā male professional and members of the Dar es Salaam Khōjā Higher Education Board in his early 60s, Dar es Salaam 7 February 2008.

6. Interview with Ithnā ʿAsharī Khōjā male merchant in his mid-40s, central Dar es Salaam 1 August 2008.

7. See Note 6.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This research was funded through the Islamic Civilization Initiative by the U.S. Fulbright Commission.