Morality at the Margins

Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya

Sarah Hillewaert

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780823286508, 9780823286515
• eBook ISBN: 9780823286522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya's island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu's inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices—how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs—and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.

INTERLUDE 1

Mila Yetu Hufujika
(Our Traditions Are Being Destroyed)

MAHMOUD AHMED ABDULKADIR

Composed in December 2008, this poem captures the poet’s reflections on contemporary life in Lamu. It does so through the voices of an elder and a young man (indicated by E and Y respectively), who speak to each other through Swahili majibizano, or poetic dialogue.

The poem addresses young people’s growing forsaking of respectful conduct, as reflected in their language use and appearances, and speaks to the increasing substance abuse among Lamu youth, including the financial repercussions these addictions have. The poet subtly incorporated Qur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Half Title
• Introduction
• Interlude 1: Mila Yetu Hufujika (Our Traditions Are Being Destroyed), by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir
• 1. “This Is Lamu”: Belonging, Morality, and Materiality
• 2. Dialects of Morality
• Interlude 2: kiSwahili, by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir
• 3. “Youth” as a Discursive Construct
• 4. Reframing Morality through Youthful Voices
• Interlude 3: Tupijeni Makamama (Let’s Embrace), by Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir
• 5. Senses of Morality and Morality of the Senses
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author