What is it about?

This article examines Swahili-language Islamic marriage advice booklets (vijitabu) written between 1932 and 2020 in East Africa. These small books, written primarily by and for Muslim men, offer guidance on marriage, sexuality, divorce, and related topics. While scholars have studied marriage advice literature in Western and Christian contexts, much less attention has been paid to Islamic advice texts, especially those directed at men rather than women. Using chronotope analysis—a method that examines how texts represent the relationship between time and space—the article identifies how these booklets construct four main temporal-spatial contexts: contemporary East Africa, the time of Prophet Muhammad, the pre-Islamic world (jahiliya, or "age of ignorance"), and the modern West. A potential fifth chronotope, the afterlife (akhera), depends on how readers navigate the first four. The booklets idealize Prophet Muhammad's era while criticizing other time periods and places, particularly the contemporary West. This study bridges African studies, linguistic anthropology, religious studies, and gender studies to show how marriage advice literature serves as more than personal guidance. These booklets reveal the influence of reformist Islam (religious movements seeking to return to "pure" early Islamic practices) on ordinary people's daily lives in East Africa. They also document a significant shift in Swahili Muslim identity: from an earlier cosmopolitan worldview connected to diverse Indian Ocean cultures to a narrower religiopolitical identity focused on emulating seventh-century Arabian practices. The booklets explicitly link proper gender behavior in marriage to religiopolitical ideology, making gendered daily practices a matter of religious correctness and eternal salvation.

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Why is it important?

This article makes several significant contributions to understanding Islam, gender, and identity in East Africa. First, it addresses a major gap in scholarship on Islamic advice literature. While researchers have extensively studied marriage advice for women in various contexts, we know much less about advice literature by and for Muslim men, despite marriage being described as "one half of the religion" in the Islamic tradition. These booklets provide crucial insight into how East African Muslim men understand marriage, gender relations, and religious practice—perspectives that have been difficult to access through ethnographic research due to gender segregation in Muslim communities. Second, the article demonstrates how religious nostalgia functions in contemporary politics of gender and modernity. By analyzing nearly a century of marriage booklets, it reveals how reformist movements mobilize idealized visions of early Islam (what the article calls "Prophetic Spacetime") to critique both local customs and Western influences. This nostalgic orientation has real consequences for available forms of personhood, progressively narrowing what it means to be a properly Muslim man or woman in coastal East Africa. Third, the research documents a profound transformation in Swahili Muslim identity. The earliest booklet (1956) celebrated the multicultural influences from throughout the Indian Ocean world that shaped Zanzibari marriage customs. Later booklets increasingly reject this cosmopolitan heritage, instead advocating strict adherence to practices from seventh-century Arabia. This shift from "Indian Ocean spacetime" to "Prophetic Spacetime" represents a significant constriction of Swahili Muslim identity and its relationship to regional history. Finally, the article offers a methodological model for studying how religious movements shape everyday life through print media. The chronotope analysis reveals how booklets construct competing temporal and spatial frameworks that readers must navigate, linking intimate marital practices to broader religiopolitical ideologies. This approach is applicable to studying religious advice literature in other contexts and demonstrates how linguistic anthropology can illuminate the workings of religious authority and social change.

Perspectives

This project grew from an unexpected encounter with these little booklets during my research on Swahili weddings in Zanzibar. I was initially studying women's oral marriage instruction, but male colleagues and friends kept giving me these Islamic marriage booklets—clearly an important genre I hadn't anticipated. What struck me immediately was how different they were from the women's oral advice: the booklets were obsessed with critiquing the West and the pre-Islamic past, topics that simply didn't come up in women's instruction to brides. The most surprising discovery was the dramatic shift between the 1950s booklets and later ones. Sheikh Farsy's 1956 book opened with this beautiful celebration of Zanzibar's multicultural heritage—all the different peoples from across the Indian Ocean who contributed to local marriage customs. But by the 1980s and 1990s, booklets were condemning those same diverse influences as innovations (bidaa) to be rejected. Watching that cosmopolitan identity narrow over the decades was both intellectually fascinating and somewhat heartbreaking. The methodological challenge was finding a way to analyze these texts that could reveal their ideological work without simply extracting sexist quotations to shock readers. Chronotope analysis gave me a framework to understand how the booklets construct entire spacetimes—not just gender rules but complete worlds with their own temporalities, geographies, and moral logics. This helped me see patterns across decades of texts: how jahiliya (the pre-Islamic "age of ignorance") gets used as a chronotope to critique both ancient Arabia and contemporary East Africa, or how "the West" functions as a spatial-temporal threat always encroaching on proper Muslim practice. The hardest part has been writing about patriarchal religious texts in a way that takes them seriously as cultural artifacts without feeding into Islamophobic narratives about Muslim women needing to be saved. These booklets do promote restrictive gender norms, but so does much marriage advice in Christian and secular Western contexts—yet somehow Islamic texts get treated as uniquely oppressive. I've tried to be clear that Swahili Muslim women themselves often share similar views about marriage (as evidenced by comparing men's written advice to women's oral instruction), complicating any simple narrative of male religious authorities oppressing women. The goal is to understand how religious movements mobilize nostalgia to shape intimate life, not to position Islam as especially problematic. Working across archives in Madison, Leiden, Washington D.C., and various bookshops in Tanzania has been essential. Many of these booklets have been reprinted numerous times, suggesting they genuinely resonate with readers—they're not just elite religious discourse but popular texts shaping how ordinary Muslims think about marriage and gender. That popularity makes them all the more important to study seriously.

Dr KD Thompson
University of Wisconsin Madison

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This page is a summary of: From the Time of Ignorance to the Afterlife: Gendered Chronotopes and Religious Nostalgia in Swahili-Language Islamic Marital Booklets, Signs and Society, September 2025, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/sas.2025.10025.
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