Muslim Politics and Resistance to Colonial Rule: Shaykh Uways B. Muhammad Al-Barawi and the Qadiriya Brotherhood in East Africa

Shaykh Uways b. Muxs1E25ammad al-Barawi (1847–1909) was an important leader of the Qadiriya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar, and along the East African coast from Kenya to Mozambique, and founded his own branch of Qadiriya, the Uwaysiya. Before his death in 1909 when he was assassinated by representatives of the rival Salihiya brotherhood (under the leadership of Muxs1E25ammxs0227d ' bdallah Hasan, the ‘Mad Mullah’), Uways missionary activities were very considerable. Uways' branch of the Qadiriya was probably behind certain episodes of Muslim resistance to European penetration into Buganda in the late 1880's, at the behest of Sayyid Barghash of Zanzibar. Indeed the relations between Shaykh Uways and successive rulers of Zanzibar, Barghash, Khalifa, and xs1E24amid b. Thuwayni were very close. In 90's, certain Muslim elements in Tanganyika, in conjunction with the xs1E6Dariqa, made trouble for the Germans in SE Tanganyika during the ‘Mecca Letters affair’ at Lindi in 1908. This episode revealed a division in the Tanganyika Muslim community. The Uwaysiya was responsible for massive conversions to Islam in the coastal region, in inner Tanganyika, and on the Eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning decades of the 20th centuries.