09/16/2026
In 1930 Shaykh al-Amin Mazrui started a newspaper called al-Sahifa. Swahili, printed in Arabic script, given away free. It lasted sixteen months.
In 1932 he started another, al-Islah. Swahili in Latin script with Arabic alongside it, weekly, religious and political. It lasted twelve.
Two failures, twenty-eight months of print — and out of them came the modernist movement in East African Islam.
He argued that girls should be educated, in a society that had not bothered. He argued that madrasas should teach modern subjects. He argued that Muslims had once been the masters of algebra, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, logic and philosophy, and that there was therefore no sin whatever in a Muslim studying the sciences. He warned in the same breath against swallowing European culture whole.
He was corresponding with al-Azhar in Cairo, with Hadramout and Oman, and writing for the Egyptian reformist journals al-Manar and al-'Urwa al-Wuthqa — from an office in Mombasa, while serving as Chief Kadhi of the Kenya Colony.
His last project was the largest. Christian missionaries and the Ahmadiyya had both put Swahili translations of the Qur'an into circulation with commentary he considered wrong, and he wanted Swahili Muslims reading a translation made by one of their own. He began it himself.
He died in 1947 before it was done.
His student finished it. Shaykh Abdulla Saleh al-Farsy, later Chief Kadhi himself, completed the work and published Qurani Takatifu in 1969. It has been reprinted ever since, because the demand never stopped.
Al-Amin wrote more than twelve books in Arabic and Swahili, produced the first religious textbooks this region had in Kiswahili, and founded Madrasatu al-Ghazali in Mombasa, which went on to supply Kadhis across East Africa. The historian Ahmed Idha Salim called him the most outstanding Muslim scholar and reformer Kenya has produced.
Every Swahili speaker who has read the Qur'an in their own language is holding the end of something a man in Mombasa started and did not live to finish.
