Outside Contacts and Community Importance

Despite the continuation of virtual community endogamy, there is more rather close contact with non-Swahili Mombasans than there was in the past. The secularization of the community increased under the British as the Swahili became a smaller and smaller proportion of the city's population and were increasingly integrated into an economic system where most of the employed men (very few women worked for wages outside the home until the last few years when a small number got paying jobs) spent their days working with mainly Christian members of other ethnic groups.

This has not led to any movement away from Islam. Almost any conversation, even a brief one, leads to at least one reference to the Koran, or to God, or to the holy laws. Religious courts with Swahili judges (kadhi ) learned in Koranic law are invariably used by community members for difficult

domestic problems and civil disputes among themselves. Civil courts are involved only when there are serious crimes. The boundaries of the community, in fact, can be traced by examining the court—religious or secular—that disputants use (Swartz 1978).

The Swahili have always insisted on Islamic education for their children of both sexes, and I know of no one in the community who did not learn to read the Koran and to pray in the chuo (religious school for children). Secular schools in the area were initially, in the nineteenth century, mission operated, Christian oriented, and designed to produce converts, so it is little wonder that the Swahili (and other Muslims) avoided them. Eventually, however, by the 1930s, the economic importance of a secular education together with concessions to Muslim interests (including teaching the Koran and Arabic to students in the schools the Swahili attended) led to a substantial proportion of the community sending their sons and, later, even some of their daughters to government-run schools including secondary schools (Salim 1973:146–156) despite the high cost of tuition.