portuguese islamic policy - run.unl.pt islamic policy of... · web viewthe islamic policy of...

PORTUGUESE ISLAMIC POLICY

THE ISLAMIC POLICY OF PORTUGUESE COLONIAL MOZAMBIQUE, 1960-1973

MÁRIO MACHAQUEIRO

Centre for Research in Anthropology – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

5 July 2011

This is the accepted manuscript version of an article published in December 2012, in The

Historical Journal, 55 (4), pp. 1097-1116 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X12000258)

ABSTRACT. Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French

archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies regarding Islam,

focusing the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect

and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war, when Muslims were

perceived as main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to a

more nuanced approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in

order to align them with the Portuguese combat against the anti-colonial movement. The

article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures and the contributions

made by several actors that were engaged in this achievement: the Catholic Church, the core

of political power and its local ramifications in the colonies.

On 28 April 1954, R. Bogaers, Consul General of France in Lourenço Marques (currently

Maputo), sent the Minister for Foreign Affairs a dispatch on a topic that was seemingly not in

the frontline of political priorities: Islamism in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.1 His

main stance on such subject was that Islam did not raise any serious problem locally. Besides

the ‘natural factors’ that allegedly hindered the ‘active irradiation’ of that religion in

1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X12000258


Mozambique, there were also the human ones: the laws, the Catholic clergymen, and the local

Portuguese government, whose combined strength were able to ‘bar the external influences’

that could give Islam a ‘greater force of expansion’.

Bogaers’s report distinguished between three categories of Muslims living in that colony.

The first one was composed of ‘native Muslims’, roughly estimated at 600,000, settled

predominantly in the northern regions, some of them of Swahili origin and many presenting

an already ‘mitigated Islamic faith’ due to the prevailing influence of black elements. This

amounted to the famous and then-popular notion of ‘black Islam’, a branch of the Islamic

religion that the authors of the French colonial school wrote off as ‘superficial’, ‘ignorant’

and ‘syncretistic’.2 The other Muslim group that the Consul of France singled out, comprising

around 6,000 members, had come mostly from India and Pakistan and were established in

Mozambique Island (in the north) and the two main cities: Beira and Lourenço Marques.

Among these, the significant Ismaili community was of note. Finally, Muslims from the

Comoros Islands formed a third and smaller group, located in the same sites where ‘Asian’

Muslims prevailed. According to Bogaers, the latter were more consistent than the Africans in

their beliefs, but also more focused on commercial businesses, preferring to remain on good

terms with the Portuguese authorities than to invest their time in a religious proselytism that

could alienate them. Therefore, they seemed far from representing a threat to the colonial

order in Mozambique. The French Consul concluded with an overall assessment: ‘Too

scattered, too few in number and too different to raise a religious problem; too surveilled to

create a political problem, the Muslims of Mozambique, thanks to the Indian element, are

limited to playing a remarkable commercial role’.

This document ascribed to the ‘prevalent’ Catholic clergy the main responsibility for

putting a check on the spread of Islam in Mozambique, considering that it conducted ‘the only

2


really permanent struggle’ against Islam, the only one that could deliver ‘effective results’.

This was in line with the dominant perception among Catholics throughout the 1930s, at least

in the opinions voiced by some missionary periodicals, which asserted, without a shred of

diffidence, that in the struggle between two civilisations, the Islamic and the Christian, the

latter would ‘necessarily’ be the victor.3

And yet, in the 1950s such a view was already being challenged by a growing scepticism.

A detailed study of the Islamic presence in Mozambique, written in October 1957 by P. de

Beaumont, another French Consul General, pictured the power of Islam in terms much more

nuanced than those used by Bogaers, his predecessor.4 It is quite relevant that this dispatch

was a response to the following assignment from the French Minister for Foreign Affairs:

To study, in Mozambique, an Islam that is expanding throughout Africa, to measure its spread, its

progress, its sensitivity to foreign influences, its relations to neighbouring countries or the Middle

East, the role it plays in the Province [of Mozambique] and the attitude of the Portuguese

authorities as regarding the issues it raises.

P. de Beaumont complained about the complete lack of studies on Islam in the

Mozambican region, noticing the ‘amazing ignorance’ that characterised its state of the art,

which wavered between the utmost contradictory opinions: some authors declared that Islam

was expanding more and more, others thought it was experiencing an accentuated regression,

and others still asserted its total decomposition. In fact, only in 1958 was the first study

entirely dedicated to the impact of Islam on Portuguese colonies published in Portugal.5 It

was, to say the least, considerably flawed as a piece of scholarship, being mainly based on

secondary sources and tainted by the most pedestrian prejudices about ‘pan-Islamism’ and

‘threatening Muslims’. One had to wait for the mid-1960s, when the colonial wars were

3


already full-blown, to see the questions that the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs was

asking about Islam in Mozambique being addressed in a thorough manner by Portuguese

authorities.

In 1957, however, the knowledge available was depressively scarce, as P. de Beaumont

recognised. The Portuguese administration being solely interested in discriminating between

‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’ people, its statistics were imprecise and deceitful. Although

local governors suggested a number close to a million of Mozambican Muslims, the French

Consul preferred a more conservative estimate. He considered that if 400,000 to 600,000

natives were basically Muslim, there were 300,000 to 400,000 that cherry-picked from Islam

1CRIA-Centre for Research in Anthropology, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de

Lisboa, 1069–061 Lisboa, Portugal, [email protected]

? Archives Diplomatiques de la Courneuve (ADC), Afrique-Levant 1953-1959, Mozambique, Carton 6, Série

MO, Sous-Série V, Dossier XI, Politique intérieure – Questions religieuses, Avril 1953-Novembre 1957,

Dispatch no. 237/AL of R. Bogaers, Consul General of France in Lourenço Marques, to the Minister for Foreign

Affairs, 28 April 1954. The term ‘Islamism’ does not refer here to a fundamentalist branch of Islam. It simply

stands as a synonymous expression for Islam taken as a whole, following the use that expression was given in

the period covered by this article.

2 See P.-J. André, L’Islam Noir. Contribution à l’étude des confréries religieuses islamiques en Afrique

Occidentale suivie d’une étude sur l’Islam au Dahomey (Paris, 1924); A. Gouilly, L’Islam dans l’Afrique

Occidentale Française (Paris, 1952); H. Deschamps, Les religions de l’Afrique Noire (Paris, 1954); J. C.

Froelich, Les Musulmans d’Afrique Noire (Paris, 1962). For an exposure and criticism of this perspective, see L.

Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions: Islam and chiefship in Northern Mozambique ca. 1850–1974’ (D.Phil. thesis,

Cape Town, 2007), pp. 9–11.

3 See, for instance, Sílvio Ribeiro, ‘Islamismo e Cristianismo. Conversão dos Maometanos’, O Missionário

Católico, 95 (June 1932), pp. 104–7.

4 ADC, Afrique-Levant 1953-1959, Dispatch no. 317/AL of P. de Beaumont, Consul General of France in

Lourenço Marques, to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

5 J. J. Gonçalves, O mundo árabo-islâmico e o Ultramar português (Lisbon, 1958).4


what they thought fit to fulfil a psychic need that had barely a connection to the doctrinaire

core of such a religion.

After mapping the areas of Mozambique that presented a stronger Islamic hold, P. de

Beaumont assessed the degree of its ‘purity’, only to conclude that in the last twenty years of

the nineteenth century Mozambican Islam had been cut from Arab centres, becoming more

and more isolated and left to all kinds of hybridism with the ‘animist’ culture widespread

among the Makua, the largest Islamised ethnic group in Mozambique. For the French Consul,

the working system forced upon Africans under the Portuguese colonial order did nothing to

overcome their isolation as Muslims. As far as he could tell, no native had been able to travel

to Mecca or visit the El Azhar University in the years preceding the writing of his report. The

best a Mozambican Muslim could do to improve his Islamic knowledge was to attend a

Qur’anic school in Zanzibar.

It is not surprising that the traits of ‘black Islam’ made their appearance in P. de

Beaumont’s text: ‘An impure Islam, an Islam of calendar, of festivities, of dress-up, in which

animist and Islamic rituals, matriarchy and patriarchate, are closely intertwined’. These were

common-places derived from an orientalist view impervious to any kind of plurality that did

not conform to a unified and crystallised format imposed on Islamic religion and culture.

According to this approach, most of the forms Islam took in Africa could not be anything but

‘bastardised’, i.e. ‘non-authentic’. The Portuguese appropriation of this view, while using a

paternalistic tone typical of colonialist rhetoric, was all too happy to paint a caricature of an

African ‘false’ Islam entirely devoted to an artificial facade– an artificiality that seemed even

more ‘ludicrous’ as it was unable to hide the ‘true’ and ‘childish’ nature of the Negro.6 This

conception of African devotees to Islam, seen as not exactly Muslims but ‘Islamised’, had a

6 See the scornful descriptions of the Islamised natives by Gonçalves, Ultramar, p. 73. See also his O Islamismo

na Guiné Portuguesa (Ensaio Sociomissionológico) (Lisbon, 1961), p. 26.5


direct impact on some of the policies that were adopted to rule the Muslim communities in

Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, the two Portuguese colonies where Islam held a more

powerful presence.

The assessment P. de Beaumont made of the power displayed by the Catholic church in

Mozambique, compared to the strength of Islam, painted a picture not as unproblematic or

simple as the one delivered by Bogaers. In spite of the privileged position that Catholicism

enjoyed under Oliveira Salazar’s regime, the resources that the missionaries themselves

mustered were still insufficient, a handicap that mirrored the chronic logistical and financial

failure of the Portuguese state and its colonial ‘empire’. Besides this flaw, P. de Beaumont

also pointed to the low intellectual level of the Catholic clergymen and their utter ignorance of

everything that concerned the Islamic culture. Once again, only in the late 1960s was this

trend to know improvement. But even then the ‘reformers’ had to confront the hostility of

their conservative peers, when it was already too late for the Portuguese to preserve any

possible sway over African areas.

I

In the 1950s, a decade before the outbreak of colonial wars in the Portuguese territories in

Africa, Islamophobia was recurrent in official and non-official discourses among those

responsible for political and colonial affairs. Many thought that Muslims would be the main

actors in triggering the anti-colonial wave in ‘Portuguese Africa’. No wonder then that

Islamic communities stood out in the reports issued by the Portuguese Armed Forces, as well

as the intelligence service and the political police that operated in Mozambique. Immediately

before the beginning of the colonial war, local Muslims were seen as a cultural threat that

undermined any success Christianity could claim. In the early years of military struggle –

6


Frelimo having launched its first guerrilla attacks on 25 September 1964 –, the agents of the

colonial staff deemed Islam a major ‘subversive’ force. The Portuguese political police,

commonly known as PIDE (International Police for the Defence of the State) – a repressive

instrument that was crucial both for the Portuguese dictatorship and for the war effort against

nationalist movements –, arrested, questioned and sometimes brutally murdered several

Muslim dignitaries, mualimos and xehes.7 Their recorded depositions attested their

‘subversive’ activities. For instance, one xehe, supposedly under the orders of Megama,

described as ‘ruler of all rulers’, was accused of addressing the following speech to several

other Muslim dignitaries assembled after a religious ceremony: ‘This land shall be ours. Soon,

people will come from Tanganyika to expel the Portuguese whites. You, in your mosques,

must spread this news to our faithful, so that all of them will unite to that people in order for

us to win the victory’.8 The ‘ruler of all rulers’ was Abdul Kamal-Megama, who led a branch

of a very influential Islamic brotherhood, the Qadiriyya Sadat, in Mecufi, on the southern

coast of Cabo Delgado district. Curiously, a few years earlier he had been one of the first

Muslims to be chosen by the administration in a preliminary attempt at establishing friendly

ties to the Islamic leadership: by 1962, the authorities sponsored his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Later, however, given the accusations that were being raised against him, the Portuguese

political police suspected Megama of having a secret connection to the anticolonial

movement, which led to his imprisonment in 1965. Megama ended up being sent to the prison

at Ibo, one of the harshest in Mozambique, where he died in early 1966.9

Another mualimo was indicted for distributing Irisses – copies of the Qur’an that were

used as talismans –, alleging that he knew the day when Nyerere would arrive and that these

amulets would protect their bearers from bullets fired by Portuguese troops.10 It is interesting

to note the focus on Tanganyika (later Tanzania). Portuguese administration was growing

7


worried about the coming independence of this region, among other reasons because the

Islamic element there could jeopardize the overall stability of the colonial order in

Mozambique. At least this was the warning foreshadowed in a confidential report written in

1959 by the anthropologist Jorge Dias and his research team, during their mission to study the

ethnic minorities in Portuguese ‘overseas’ territories.11 The first months of combat, after the

upsurge of Frelimo action in the north, witnessed an intense circulation of messages and

people across the border that divided Mozambique and Tanganyika, suggesting ethnic ties that

were overcoming those borders and could coalesce into a united anti-colonial front.12

Be that as it may, by October-November 1964 Portuguese documents were almost

unanimous in stressing the commitment of the Islamic hierarchy to the anti-colonial

insurgency, particularly in the district of Cabo Delgado, around Porto Amélia and Montepuez,

not far from Mueda where the guerrillas had started the war.13 If we are to believe the

dramatic tone of a political police report, issued two years later, the circumstances had since

changed for the worse:

7 Mualimo is a Mozambican term built on the Swahili word mwalimu, which comes from the Arabic mu’allim,

meaning ‘teacher’ – within the Islamic culture, a teacher of the Qur’an. Xehe, also a common word among

Mozambican Muslims, designates an Islamic dignitary, respected for his knowledge of Islam, whom the

leadership of an Islamic brotherhood can be ascribed to. On the repressive methods of PIDE in the Portuguese

colonies, see D. C. Mateus, A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial (1961-1974) (Lisbon, 2004), pp. 103–22.

8 ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fo. 382, PIDE, R.I. no. 425/66-GAB, 30 July 1966, in Boletim de Difusão de

Informações, SCCIM, 521/66, 17 August 1966.

9 See Alpers, ‘Islam’, p. 175, and M. Cahen, ‘L’État Nouveau et la diversification religieuse au Mozambique,

1930–74. II. La portugalisation désespérée (1959–74)’, Cahiers d’Études africaines, 159, XL-3 (2000), p. 573.8


The enemy had no trouble in establishing a prior contact with the traditional, civil and religious

authorities and, through them, launching the subversion among the greater masses, workers and

believers, which are easily fettered.

Following the example of the so-called ‘great native rulers [régulos]’, xehes and mualimos, open

and explicit apologists of the expulsion of whites and the independence of Mozambique, the enemy

coming from abroad infiltrated the area of Montepuez council, spreading its propaganda …

indoctrinated followers and promoted the rebellion in the native environment.14

A document produced by the Services for Centralisation and Coordination of Information

in Mozambique (SCCIM), in October 1966, summarised this perception, stating that ‘the

subversion, in the districts of Cabo Delgado and Niassa, has been supported by the

overwhelming majority of the Islamic leadership’.15 The explanations supplied by the

authorities differed in the weight assigned to the Islamic variable in this process. Some of

them thought the involvement of Muslim dignitaries was simply due to the social relevance

10 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 30, Note no. 233/A/27, 30 November 1964, Circumscription of Imala, included in

a dispatch of the Governor of the district of Mozambique, sent to Director of the SCCIM on 7 December 1964.

11 J. Dias, M. V. Guerreiro & M. Dias, Relatório de campanha de 1959 (Moçambique, Angola, Tanganhica e

União Sul Africana) (Lisbon, 1960).

12 See, for instance, ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 36, Report of the Police for Public Security of the Province of

Mozambique, 25 November 1964. See also Melo Branquinho’s report on the traditional and religious leadership

in Mozambique district, issued in April 1969, quoted in Alpers, ‘Islam’, p. 174.

13 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 47, Project of telegram from the SCCIM, 26 October 1964; ANTT, SCCIM no.

408, fos. 42–4, Information from the District Cabinet of the SCCIM in Porto Amélia, 10 November 1964.

14 ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fo. 272, PIDE, Report no. 574/66/GAB, 20 September 1966, quoted in SCCIM,

Report of Information no. 146.

15 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 815, Information no. 60/66, 27 October 1966, signed by Eugénio José de Castro

Spranger.9


they enjoyed among the populations, which the nationalist movement was taking advantage

of, and not to any specific aspect of the Islamic religion per se.16 Others, on the contrary,

suggested a special affinity between Islam and the anti-colonialist drive. Their argument was

based on a theory subscribed by other European Islamologists, especially those belonging to

the aforementioned French school. They identified Islam not with the traits of rigidity that are

nowadays so commonly assigned to Islamic culture, but with a specific fluidity – as if Islam

was a kind of plasticine religion ready to adapt itself to any cultural or political mould:

‘Islamism integrates an extraordinary plasticity, unheard of in other great religions, [a

plasticity that] moulds itself perfectly to the ethnic conditions of African peoples, thus

allowing for an almost perfect co-existence’.17 Thanks to this alleged ability, Islam was

deemed able to provide a synthesis between different African traditional creeds, reinforcing

their ‘otherness’ in contrast with ‘Western values’ and making them a powerful weapon

against European colonial domination: ‘Islamism provides the ideal conditions to produce the

symbiosis of tribalism and fetishism, attributing a sacred dimension to all the atavistic

features of the local indigenous masses, which raises the possibility that they will be

enthralled by the ideas preached by the enemy’.18

As we will see, this plasticity was double-edged and therefore ambivalent: it meant that

Islam could be easily adjusted to fit the subversive movements, but on the other hand it

provided an opening for manipulations in favour of Portuguese interests.

16 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 42, Information, 10 November 1964.

17 ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), file 1, fos. 51–2, PIDE, Delegation of Mozambique, Secret Report

no. 559/66-GAB, 14 September 1966. Both this report and the other I am about to quote resorted to the language

and concepts developed in the following SCCIM’s report: ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 308–9, Relatório de

situação no. 13, District of Cabo Delgado, 13 September 1966.

18 ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), file 1, fo. 14, PIDE, Information no. 686 – SC / CI (2), 26 June

1967.10


II

Before and after the onset of the struggle for independence in Mozambique, different control

devices were being applied to individuals and communities specifically targeted for their

Islamic affiliation. Detailed lists of mosques and mu’allims were kept; Islamic associations

and brotherhoods were under surveillance; itinerant preachers were checked in their moves

and speeches; correspondence between Muslims was often violated, translated and transcribed

to confidential documents; and travels to other territories or returns from neighbouring

countries were also subject to the surveillance mechanisms set up by the Portuguese

administration.19 To implement these procedures, the intelligence services counted on a web

of informants maintained by the political police, mostly recruited among the local population.

All this showcased a continuum from the dictatorial repression practiced in the metropolitan

Portugal and the repression applied to colonised populations. The brutality of

straightforwardly repressive methods in dealing with ‘subversive’ Muslims was particularly

blatant in the early years of the struggle for independence.20

Colonial authorities also seemed ready to exert coercion in the symbolic field whenever the

visibility of Islam became too striking an object for power competition. In January 1964, an

official bulletin of Milange, in Mozambique, reported that ‘the Ossemane Chief Assumane

19 The archive funds of the SCCIM have many documents to illustrate all this. I will only mention some

examples: for the control of Islamic Sufi brotherhoods, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fos. 334–7; for the control

of Islamic religious meetings, carried out or not in mosques, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fo. 522, SCCIM no.

413, fos. 174–9; for the mapping of the locations of mosques and mu’allims, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fos.

24, 29, 46, 50, 74, 80–3, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 601–2; for the interception and violation of mail exchanged

between Muslims, see SCCIM no. 408, fos. 43–6, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 461–512.

20 Several examples of Muslims who fell victims of the repressive backlash can be found in Alpers, ‘Islam’, pp.

175–6. 11


Cubualo requested authorization to display two flags of the Mohammedan religion in his

village where he intended to perform his cult. Permission was denied’.21 A Muslim who took

refuge in Tanganyika complained about the harassment that he and his peers suffered at the

hands of the Portuguese government in Mozambique just for being ‘catechists’ of Islam.22

Language policy was an issue that frequently surfaced in the strategies that were being

worked out. Many colonisers thought that the struggle for cultural hegemony should be fought

in such domain. They were trying to cope with a problem whose roots, being old, reflected the

precariousness of Portuguese rule in Africa. Complaints about the preponderance of Arabic

were common among the Portuguese colonial staff since, at least, the 1930s, and Jorge Dias,

in the first report he produced during his field-work in Mozambique, also stressed his concern

about the spread of eastern languages in comparison to the retreat of the Portuguese tongue.23

In such a context, one can understand that, in April 1963, the Governor of the district of

Mozambique commanded that teaching in ‘Mohammedan schools’, even of catechism,

‘should be exclusively carried out in the Portuguese language’.24 A note of the Educational

Services of Mozambique, on 6 June 1964, suggested that mualimos should be required to have

qualifications allowing them to teach Portuguese.25 Other official documents, emanating from

both central powers in Lisbon and from local authorities in the colonies, including the

21 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 259, Informative Bulletin no. 2/64, 10 January 1964, from the Circumscription of

Milange.

22 ANTT, SCCIM no. 419, fos. 71–2, Declaration transcribed in a confidential letter of the Governor General

Sarmento Rodrigues to the Minister of the Overseas, in June 1962.

23 See Alpers, ‘Islam’, p. 168; J. Dias, Minorias étnicas nas províncias ultramarinas (Lisbon, 1956), pp. 10–12.

24 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 330, Copy of the dispatch no. 1416, on 29 April 1963, by A. Ivens-Ferraz de

Freitas, Director of the SCCIM, quoting a communication issued by the Council of Nampula in which the

Governor of the District of Mozambique had written an instruction.

25 ANNT, SCCIM no. 408, fo. 212.12


intelligence services, insisted on the mandatory learning of Portuguese as a strategy to bring

colonised populations under Portuguese guidance and to avoid their being attracted to anti-

colonial propaganda. The latter was supposed to be intimately connected to Islamic

indoctrination. Despite all this advice and orders, we must conclude from a report of July

1968 that the compulsory use of Portuguese was conspicuous for its failure, as Swahili was,

by then, spreading even beyond the boundaries of ‘black Islam’, causing ‘serious problems to

the dissemination of Portuguese language and culture’.26

Repressive responses towards Islam on the part of the authorities were nothing new, and

reflected an ingrained attitude that we can trace back to the 1930s.27 Most of the Portuguese

colonial authorities, however, was well aware of their own structural inefficiencies, and knew

that force was not a suitable solution to tackle with the ‘Muslim problem’. Thus an option for

a cautionary strategy was hatched. In the official discourse, both in public speeches and

classified documents, we find numerous instances of a circumspect approach to Muslim

populations. A few years before the outbreak of the colonial wars, the Ministry of the

Overseas acknowledged that it was wise not to openly confront them:

This situation seems to urge the greatest caution as concerns the religious policy to be enforced in

Guinea, because the Islamised population has a higher cultural level and better fighting abilities. It

thus becomes essential to try to attract the Islamised population while avoiding exerting any

religious pressure upon them, a pressure that, until now, has been ineffective in respect to the goal

of converting them to Christianity.28

26 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 441, F. A. Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’, 26 July 1968.

27 Alpers, ‘Islam’, p. 167.

28 ANTT, SCCIM no. 408, fos. 414–15, General Government of Mozambique, Information from the Ministry of

the Overseas, 16 February 1960.13


The emergence of colonial wars in three different settings, two of them with important

Muslim populations, needed this careful approach to acquire an additional depth in order to

respond to a plight that was becoming more and more complex, both in the Portuguese

domains and in the international field.

III

In the mid-1960s, some key members of the army and the intelligence services operating in

Mozambique had already begun paying attention to the strategic relevance of Muslims in the

context of a colonial war that was still incipient. A document produced in 1967 by the SCCIM

pointed to this new direction: ‘The importance of one million black Muslims among the

population of the Province [Mozambique] cannot be denied, especially given the current

situation; nor also the fact that they are concentrated in the north, near the foreign territories

where the different Islamic and anti-colonial currents have free rein’.29 This recognition

concurred with the assessments of dangers inherent to the Islamic factor, as we can see in the

conclusions drawn by a Technical Commission that worked within the SCCIM:

Proven, as it is, that the subversion has been finding support among Mohammedan dignitaries to

achieve its purposes, having we all reasons to admit that it aims at a general use of those structures,

the Commission has concluded that there is a pressing need to define the forms and the ways by

which we can mobilise the Islamic masses in the province [of Mozambique]…30

Having failed in their attempts to compete with Islam in the religious arena, since Catholic

missions did not show any significant progress, the time was ripe for another approach, one

29 ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100, Information no. 24/67, 17 November 1967.

30 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 813, Information no. 60/66, 27 October 1966.14


that accepted the irremovable presence of Islam and was able, at the same time, to use it to the

advantage of the Portuguese. The new reasoning was even ready to discard decades of

supposed expertise on Islam: ‘Apparently, the belief that Islam is de-nationalising has been

proven false. Despite being under great pressure to become a sponsor of the political unity of

the Muslim world, it has proved unable to destroy the sense of nationality’.31 It seemed that,

after all, Islam could be construed as an opportunity for shoring up the Portuguese rule over

colonised populations.

To think such a strategy through, Portuguese intelligence resorted to the conceptual

dichotomy of ‘polarisation’ and ‘de-polarisation’. It meant a choice between a setting where

Muslims (and other communities) were concentrated (‘polarised’) around major influential or

charismatic leaders and a background where populations were much more scattered (‘de-

polarised’), distributing their allegiance to different and smaller local centres. Strategists in

the SCCIM were, in fact, divided between two alternatives: either to promote a ‘polarisation’

of Muslims around centres that the authorities could easily control and take advantage from,

or to empower the supposed trend of Mozambican Muslims towards ‘de-polarisation’.

The second view was argued by Major Fernando da Costa Freire, one of the several

directors that the SCCIM had since its inception, in 1961, until its demise in 1974. He based

his argument on the assumption that the so called ‘de-polarisation’ was the main attribute of

black or African ‘Islamised’ in Mozambique, who were considered to be the largest number

there of faithful to Islam. Costa Freire believed this scenario hindered their unity or cohesion,

raising obstacles to their mobilisation by the anticolonial movement: ‘The absence of a formal

hierarchic subordination turns each element of the hierarchy into an autonomous entity, which

… hampers the uprising, through subversion, of the Islamised black “masses”’.32 This

31 SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100, Information no. 24/67.

32 ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 98, Information no. 24/67.15


document clearly asserted that the recruitment of Muslims to ‘subversive’ anti-colonial

activities in Mozambique was basically done by those to whom a special dignity was ascribed

because of their knowledge on Islamic matters. Costa Freire located in Tanzania the Islamic

centres in which Mozambican Muslim dignitaries had been taught, and concluded that the ties

formed during the teaching of a religious doctrine would easily put the former pupils under

the guidance of their masters in all issues, religious as well as political. Tanzanian Islamic

centres were therefore suspected of co-opting Muslims leaders in Mozambique against the

Portuguese colonial rule.33 With these assumptions – the second one being shared by most of

the operatives in the SCCIM, the political police and the armed forces –, Costa Freire

proposed two inter-related lines for an Islamic policy enforced by the Portuguese authorities.

The first one was to isolate, as much as it was possible, Mozambican Muslims from foreign

centres of Islamic education. The second one was to encourage the trend to ‘de-polarisation’. I

will begin by assessing this latter approach before turning my attention to the former one.

The Director of SCCIM believed that black Islamised would be as much ‘de-polarised’ as

they could free themselves from consulting Muslim figures conspicuous for their expertise on

Islamic themes. Autonomy should be granted to Islamised people, though not too much, lest

they become emancipated not only from Muslim masters, but also from patronising

colonialism:

In order to grant the elements of the Islamic hierarchy of the province sufficient preparation for

fostering de-polarisation, we do not think necessary that such preparation be high level but only

that compatible with the cultural state of the ‘masses’. Left to their own crudeness, they will tend to

polarisation, will be more receptive to external influences and may become de-nationalising

factors.34

33 Ibid., fos. 98–9.16


The final purpose was to co-opt Muslims as a barrier against foreign influences and a force

to be mobilised in the war against the liberation movement. This double objective would be

attained with no more than a soft training on Islamic issues, tailored to elevate the knowledge

of the Islamised to such a level that they could do without being ‘polarised’ around local

guides. This way the power of external Islamic centres to which the latter could be attached

would also be reduced.35 Such a perspective pervaded Costa Freire’s advice concerning the

idea of using the financial resources of the colonial state to sponsor a pilgrimage of carefully

selected Mozambican Muslims to Mecca.36 In response to a request made with that intent,

which had been presented to the Minister of the Overseas by self-appointed representatives of

Islamic brotherhoods in Mozambique, Costa Freire employed the same dichotomous concepts

and arguments he had previously developed. In his views, whereas ‘black Islam’ in

Mozambique stood for a soft hierarchy and ‘de-polarisation’, the Islamic brotherhoods (turuq)

imposed ‘a rigid hierarchic discipline’ based on the ‘spiritual and temporal power’ of a xehe, a

ruler ‘whose precepts and orders must be obeyed even against the commands of the

established authority in the country where they live’ – in Freire’s view, a typical example of a

dangerous ‘polarisation’. One can guess the conclusion: if the Islamic brotherhoods, due to

their subordination mechanisms, were structures invested with an ability to mobilise (or

‘activate’) thousands of people, Muslims that would profit from a visit to Mecca entirely

sponsored by the Portuguese state should be chosen among a more ‘autonomous black sector’,

in accordance to a policy geared to reinforcing ‘de-polarisation’.

34 Ibid., fo. 101.

35 Ibid.

36 For the following argument, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 111–13, Information no. 26/67, 23 November

1967. 17


Illustrative of the different lenses with which Portuguese colonisers looked at Islam, Costa

Freire’s perspective on the ‘de-polarisation’ trend was not as consensual as the idea of

isolating Mozambican Muslims, particularly African or ‘black’ ones, from external Islamic

centres. To reach this goal, the authorities were advised to cut all bridges that could connect

Mozambican black Muslims to the foreign sphere, especially to ‘Asian Islam’: ‘It is necessary

to distinguish black Islam from Asian Islam, known as “monhé”, and avoid that they identify

with each other’.37 As conceived by the colonial ideologues, the Asian had a superior identity

in comparison to the African, and therefore measures should be taken to prevent the Muslim

leadership in Mozambique from becoming ‘polarised’ around foreign (Asian) models. @

But even this idea could bear various meanings for different actors within the Portuguese

colonial apparatus. For Costa Freire it basically signified a buttress of traditional or

conservative behaviour of Sunni orthodoxy, believed to be the dominant branch of

Mozambican Islam.38 This aim was closely related to the need of precluding the infiltration of

Islamic progressive or heretic trends, which were ridden by the anti-colonial grassroots surge.

Colonial authorities were haunted by these concerns even before the outbreak of war. In

September 1963, for instance, the Government of Mozambique district supported a request

presented by an elderly mualimo, Amad Dulá Ismael, who asked for permission to build a

mosque with a Qur’anic school attached. The petitioner was a perfect representative of a

traditional Sunni Islam that abided by the Portuguese colonial order. The administration sided

with him in detriment of Cassimo Tayob, a former disciple of Dulá Ismael who took the

control over the latter’s old school, turning it into a ‘de-nationalising’ and ‘un-Portuguese’

focus.39 At this point, Portuguese authorities seemed to be all but ignorant of wahhabism, the

37 ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 100, Information no. 24/67.18


Islamic trend that Tayob stood for. They assumed that it conveyed a nasty ‘progressivism’,

even though its stance was actually of a hyper-orthodox Islam.

And yet, it was exactly in 1963, even before his appointment as an assistant in the SCCIM,

that Fernando Amaro Monteiro, recognised as the best Islamologist within the colonial staff,

began bringing to the authorities attention the perils that wahhabism could signify to

Portuguese rule.40 Having emerged mainly in southern Mozambique in the late 1960s, around

dignitaries who studied in Saudi Arabia, intolerant to any minor deviation from the Islamic

norm, wahhabism denounced the practices of Sufi brotherhoods as unacceptable ‘innovation’

(bid’a), branding them as ‘obscurantism’ in relation to true Islam.41 Considering that the latter

were precisely the kind of local Islam that Portuguese authorities were willing to privilege, it

was easy to foresee the problems that the attacks and baiting led by major Wahhabi figures

could introduce in the fragile balance of Mozambican cultures.42

In July 1968, when he returned from his Islamic studies at the University of Aix-en-

Provence, Amaro Monteiro wrote a report in which he underlined the importance of counter-

acting the progressivism’s expansion in Islam, a tendency that had already conquered

neighbouring regions such as Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania, disrupting the old symbiosis of

Islamism and fetishism, and that sooner or later would reach Mozambique.43 However, the

strategy directed at insulating African Islam in Mozambique did not mean, in Amaro

Monteiro’s view, the simple reinforcement of conservative orthodoxy as Costa Freire

intended. The 1966 survey on Islam that Monteiro conceived to fill in the gaps of knowledge

38 Ibid.

39 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 410, fos. 542–3, 550–3, Copy of a memo of the Government General of Mozambique,

14 August 1963; Note of the Government General of Mozambique to the Director of the SCCIM, 17 October

1963, transcribing the note no. 108/E/7/3 issued by the Government of the District of Mozambique on 24

September 1963.19


denounced by the French Consul General in 1957 allowed him to map a heterodoxy that,

peculiar as it was to Mozambican Muslims, would help ‘to isolate the Islamism of the

province from the external context’ and avoid its subordination to any foreign centre of power

– an objective that Amaro Monteiro placed at the heart of all the initiatives that the

Portuguese administration should take regarding Islam.44 Dozens of Muslim dignitaries, in

regions as dispersed as Sofala, Quelimane, Nampula, Porto Amélia and Montepuez, who had

been questioned on some particular details of doctrine, showed their devotion for the Virgin

Mary and the Prophet Issa (Jesus Christ), and accepted, in total departure from the Qur’an, the

truth of Crucifixion. Amaro Monteiro was following the example set by a major figure of the

Catholic Church in Mozambique, Don Eurico Dias Nogueira, Bishop of Vila Cabral

(currently Lichinga), who in 1966 addressed a Fraternal Letter to the Muslims of his diocese

in which he explored shared points of doctrine between Christianity and Islam, namely the

cult of the Virgin Mary.45 Bolder than Dias Nogueira, Monteiro was willing to go beyond

doctrinal boundaries, for he saw in some heterodox deviances an opportunity to politically

explore a cultural convergence between Islamised Mozambicans and Portuguese Christianity.

40 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo. 261, handwritten note signed by Amaro Monteiro, 21 May 1967, in which he

refers to a memo on the Wahhabi current that he sent to the Governor General in 1963, a document that the

administration completely neglected.

41 F. A. Monteiro, ‘Moçambique, a década de 1970 e a corrente wahhabita: uma diagonal’, in O Islão na África

Subsariana (Porto, 2004), pp. 110–11; Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 177–80. See also ANTT, PIDE-

DGS, SC, Proc. 6037 CI (2), file 2, ‘Wahhabi or Unitary movement’, in Secret Information of the General-

Direction of Security, Delegation of Mozambique, ‘Islamic activities in Mozambique’, Proc. P-57-A/SR-1,

exemplar no. 2437/72/DI/2/SC, 31 July 1972.

42 For a criticism of the cleavage drawn by the Portuguese authorities between the ‘traditional African Islam’ of

Mozambique and the ‘reformist or progressive Wahhabi Islam’, of ‘Asian’ brand, see L. Macagno, Outros

muçulmanos. Islão e narrativas coloniais (Lisbon, 2006), pp. 169, 180–2.20


Another device to improve the segregation of colonised Islam from external influences was

the establishment of a centre, duly controlled by the Portuguese administration, for the

learning of Islamic religion.46 Such an idea knew different versions, stimulating a kind of

competition between projects for Islamic centres – a competition inevitably crossed by

cultural and political rivalries.

To begin with, the authorities feared the void left by two major events: the death of the

Shaykh Sayyid Ba Hassan, head of the Qadiriyya Sadat and Imam in Mozambique Island; and

the deposition of the Sultan of Zanzibar Seyyid Jamshid bin Abdulla by an armed insurgency

in 1964. Since the latter’s sway over northern Islamism in Mozambique had been structural,

extending his religious sovereignty as far as the districts of Niassa, Cabo Delgado,

Mozambique and even the region of Zambezia,47 colonial authorities were afraid that, in his

absence, new poles could emerge inside and outside Mozambique with a hostile attitude

towards the Portuguese presence. Facing this prospect, Eugénio de Castro Spranger, assistant

at the SCCIM, recommended the establishment in the colony of a centre for Islamic

indoctrination that could dispense with foreign dependencies.48 A version of this idea pointed

43 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 440, F. A. Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’.

44 Ibid., fos. 445–6.

45 See E. D. Nogueira, Carta Fraterna do Bispo de Vila Cabral (Moçambique) Eurico Dias Nogueira aos

Muçulmanos da sua Diocese – Cikalata ca Ulongo Askovo jwa Vila Cabral Eurico Dias Nogueira kwa

Wacinasala wa Cilambo Cakwe (Vila Cabral, 1966).

46 The process that I am going to analyse in the following paragraphs is summarised in L. Bonate, ‘Traditions

and transitions’, pp. 196–202. See also the work in which Amaro Monteiro visited his former activities, a

mixture of memorial and historiography: O Islão, o poder e a guerra (Moçambique 1964–1974) (Porto, 1993).

47 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 814–5, Information no. 60/66, 27 October 1966; ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fo.

92, Information no. 24/67.

48 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 814–5.21


to the creation of a learning centre in Mozambique dedicated to the teaching and certification

of Islamic knowledge, one that could be directed by Sayyid Bakr, the prestigious khalifa that

followed Ba Hassan as head of the Qadiriyya Sadat after a troublesome succession process,49

and who was wrongly given the title of Mufti in the anonymous document that conceived such

possibility.50

Major Costa Freire, in turn, true to his concept of ‘de-polarising’ the Muslims, thought a

single centre inconvenient and proposed instead several dispersed ones, possibly based on

Qur’anic schools already existent, organised to prepare those that would integrate the future

Islamic hierarchy in Mozambique – a perspective that the Governor General, an Air Force

officer called José Augusto da Costa Almeida, basically reproduced in a dispatch of

December 1967, fearing that a single centre for the study of Islam could become a ‘source of

supra-national influences’.51

Another scheme dreamed of profiting from the Sultan of Zanzibar himself, who had

meanwhile been granted asylum in England. The idea was to persuade him to move to

Mozambique, thus giving rise to a situation where a former important centre of Islamic

diffusion in the neighbouring region, built upon the prestige of the Sultan, would be relocated

so that it became an entirely Mozambican one, under the discrete guidance of Portuguese

authorities.52 For a while, news and rumours circulated heralding the materialisation of such

perspective – an event that was never to take place.53

49 See Bonate, ‘Traditions and transitions’, pp. 103–6.

50 SCCIM no. 413, fo. 106, Dispatch no. 5029/K–6–23, 29 September 1967, from the Director of the Cabinet of

Political Affairs of the Ministry of the Overseas to the Governor General of Mozambique, to which was attached

a copy of an anonymous and not dated document, giving several advices on policies to be followed as regarding

the Muslims.

51 ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 101–2, Information no. 24/67. For the Dispatch of the Governor General, dated

11 December 1967, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 88–9.22


There was also the hidden agenda of Suleiman Valy Mamede, a Muslim born in northern

Mozambique from an Indian family, founder and president of the Islamic Community of

Lisbon (ICL), who acted simultaneously behind the scenes and in the forefront of public

appearances. Resident in Lisbon and always surrounding himself with personalities that held

some leverage over the state apparatus, Valy Mamede tried to persuade the Ministry of the

Overseas to accord his ICL the status of an Islamic centre with power over all the Muslim

communities of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau – a power to be used in total agreement and

collusion with the colonial policy of the Portuguese state.54

Valy Mamede’s project is of particular interest because it illustrates the kind of

intervention a member of an ethnic and religious minority could perform in order to confront

the official discourse with its never-fulfilled promises. As this discourse insisted on

portraying Portuguese colonialism as a multiracial and multicultural harmony, it was to be

expected that Islam and its representatives would be granted the same rights as Catholics. But

the idea of an Islamic centre emerging from the initiative of a Muslim, with the ambition of

having an overarching influence in the ‘Portuguese’ Islamic world, could only awoken fears

and anxieties. To Monsignor Paulo Machado, a priest in Mozambique who gave free rein to

Islamophobic feelings in a letter sent to the Governor General on 4 October 1967, the whole

notion of creating an Islamic University in Mozambique, a project announced by the

newspaper Diário de Moçambique in which he saw the signature of Valy Mamede, was

nothing short of high treason to Portuguese interests.55 Even some of the local Muslim 52 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 105–8, Dispatch no. 5029/K–6–23.

53 See Macagno, Outros Muçulmanos, pp. 98–9.

54 The PIDE, the Portuguese political police, kept a detailed file on Suleiman Valy Mamede, whose documents

allow us to reconstruct his trajectory before the military coup that overthrew the dictatorship on 25 April 1974.

See ANTT, PIDE-DGS, SC, Proc. 13.890-SC/CI(2), NT-7700.

55 See ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 708–12. 23


communities looked upon Mamede’s proposal disapprovingly, involved as they were in a

dispute about the best place to establish the Islamic centre: in Lisbon, at the metropolitan

heart of the ‘empire’, or in Mozambique? And, if in Mozambique, should it be installed in the

north, where ‘black Islam’ prevailed through the Islamic brotherhoods, or in the south, where

‘Asians’ outnumbered ‘Africans’ in Muslim associations?56

Besides these obstacles and contradictions, one can easily guess how Valy Mamede’s

intent would clash with the hyper-centralist format of the Portuguese dictatorship and its

colonial system. As soon as his project and goals became plain and evident, a wall of

impediments was raised by the Government General of Mozambique, the SCCIM and the

Mozambican delegation of the political police. Behind that wall stood a man I have already

mentioned: Fernando Amaro Monteiro.57

It happened that Amaro Monteiro also possessed a plan for implementing an Islamic centre

in Mozambique, a plan he had been working on since 1965. And he was in a much better

position to assure its success, and at the same time wiping out all other rival projects.

In the first place, Monteiro knew that the Shafiiyya was the more disseminated school of

Islamic law among most Mozambican Muslims. Taking into account that this school favoured

the Ijma, the consensus attained by Muslim notables endowed with recognised authority in

matters of faith as one of the sources of the Shari‘a (the Islamic law),58 Amaro Monteiro

advised that ‘any effort of the administration to act on the communities of Shafiiyya rite …

56 Information (confidential) no. 928/70/DI/2/SC, PIDE/Delegation of Mozambique, P.º 58/SR-1, in Proc.

13.890-SC/CI(2), NT-7700, fos. 28–29. We may also find a copy of this document in ANTT, SCCIM no. 420,

fos. 87–88.

57 Fernando Amaro Monteiro wrote several memos about Valy Mamede in an effort to curtail the latter’s

initiatives that might collide against the Islamic policy Monteiro was trying to implement: see ANTT, SCCIM

no. 420, fo. 55, Information no. 7/696, 4 March 1969; ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 40–2, Information no.

15/970, 4 June 1970; ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, fos. 16–23, Information no. 19/70, 31 July 1970.24


should be based on the Ijma to be efficient’. From this notion he extracted a whole plan to

seduce the Muslim communities and align them with the Portuguese power:

‘A council of notables, officially collaborating in the exegetic translation of the Hadiths and the

Qur’an to Portuguese, would authenticate these versions before the eyes of the greatest majority of

the believers; it would bond those notables to our administration and would help to segregate them

from the foreign context, and would serve as an embryonic experimental nucleus … of what might

be, later, a first centre of Islamic studies in Mozambique…’59

Devised to be composed of some 21 to 23 prestigious figures chosen among local Muslim

leaders with African roots, this state-sponsored Islamic centre, which Amaro Monteiro

literally called ‘Ijma’, a designation later replaced by ‘Council of Notables’, would fulfil a set

of multifarious and interconnected goals:

(1) To assemble the main leadership of Mozambican Muslims in a single organ, small

enough for the Portuguese authorities to easily supervise by monitoring its articulation with

Muslim populations spread throughout the territory and Islamic centres outside Mozambique.

(2) To favour and back up the more conservative or traditional elements of local Islam, as

the support given to those elements would preserve the supposedly ‘cultural narrowness’ of

the Islamised, preventing them to be exposed to ‘subversive’ anticolonial ideas.

(3) To separate African from Asian Muslims, avoiding that the latter, perceived as ‘more

advanced’ within a racialised hierarchy, were in a position to lead the former against the

Portuguese colonial grip.

58 F. A. Monteiro, Traços fundamentais da evolução do Islamismo, com vista à sua incidência em Moçambique

(Lourenço Marques, 1972), p. 18.

59 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 445, F. A. Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’.25


(4) To promote a delusional self-esteem experience by Muslim dignitaries, expecting them

to be grateful to the Portuguese administration for recognising their relevance.

(5) To publicly commit Muslims leaders in the support for the Portuguese colonial cause,

attracting them into a position where they could not refuse to call the faithful to arms, i.e., a

call to align with the Portuguese side of the war against Frelimo, possibly by integrating a

special armed corps or militia exclusively composed of Muslims.60

As we will see, although he was successful in pacifying the northern Mozambican

Muslims, the conditions under which Monteiro tried to implement his bold and ambitious plan

of ‘psychological war’ summarised many of the contradictions and inefficiencies that would

soon lead the Portuguese to a dead-end in what concerned their African colonial design.

IV

Amaro Monteiro was perfectly aware that his plan needed a thorough and detailed knowledge

of the Islamic panorama in Mozambique. It was politically imperative to overcome the

shortcomings described in P. de Beaumont’s report. The 1966 survey on Islam, entirely

designed by Monteiro, was a tool devised to circumvent the limitations of previous

questionnaires, and even to compensate the fact that its implementers would be local

administrators, mostly unprepared for their job and often disclosing an appalling unawareness

of the cultural landscape that surrounded them. It was the largest survey ever carried out in

Mozambique, destined to cover around 700 Muslim dignitaries previously identified

throughout the region, who were supposed to answer a series of questions about family

60 There are several documents on this project in the SCCIM archive, all of them signed by Amaro Monteiro. See

e.g. ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, Information no. 28/968, 28 December 1968, fos. 332–4; ANTT, SCCIM no. 420,

Information no. 19/70, 31 July 1970, fos. 16–23; ANTT, SCCIM no. 420, Appendix to Information no. 22/70, 26

September 1970; fos. 96–100; ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, Information no. 11/971, 29 May 1971, fos. 118–24.26


structure, religious behaviour, Islamic perceptions of Christianity, and so forth.61 Although

stuffed with ‘anthropological’ questions, which can actually provide a wealth of valuable

information about the beliefs, traditions and social structures of Muslim communities in

Mozambique at the time it was applied, the enquiry was essentially a smoke-screen to sound

for three essential pieces of information: (1) who were the most important and influential

leaders of Mozambican Muslim communities; (2) what were their liaisons to foreign centres

of Islamic learning and counselling; (3) what Islamised groups disclosed stronger affinities

with Christianity. Behind these goals, stood the final purpose of establishing the Ijma.

The insufficiencies of the Portuguese administrative apparatus immediately manifested in a

context where swiftness was a key factor. Amaro Monteiro complained that a year and seven

months after the distribution of the questionnaire many answers were still missing due to lack

of personnel capable of collecting and sending them to the central services. A memo issued by

Major Costa Freire on 9 February 1967 indicated that 28 administrative sectors of nine

districts had still not sent the answers.62 Freire also suggested to higher instances that Amaro

Monteiro should travel, in person, to several districts in order to solve the delays there and to

make his first contacts with major Muslim dignitaries already identified, so that he could

deepen the questioning, identify the articulations of the Islamic leadership inside Mozambique

and with external centres, and study Mozambique Island as the main ‘polarising’ focus of

Islam. But the sense of urgency he put in his words was to no avail. Only two years later,

from January to August 1969, was Amaro Monteiro allowed to make his field-work visits to

the most relevant Islamic districts of Mozambique where he finally became known as the first

61 The bulk of the enquiry, with all the answers gathered and sent by local administrators, can be found in ANTT,

SCCIM nos. 409, 411, and 415–18.

62 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 442, F. A. Monteiro, ‘Relatório de serviço no estrangeiro’; ANTT, SCCIM no.

412, fos. 804–6, Information no. 3/967, 9 February 1967. 27


Portuguese to really engage with Muslim communities, something he is still remembered for,

nowadays, in some northern regions of Mozambique.63

Meanwhile, on 2 December 1968, Jacques Honoré, another French Consul General in

Lourenço Marques, mentioned in one of his dispatches to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs the

kind of strategy that Baltazar Rebelo de Sousa was adopting towards the Islamic populations.

The first of the last three Governors Generals of colonised Mozambique, all of them civilians,

Rebelo de Sousa was expecting to perform an action of great relevance regarding the

Muslims. An atmosphere of suspense was deliberately created. Part of that initiative was,

however, unveiled when he advertised, in a speech made on 30 November 1968 at the

inauguration of the Ismaili House, that soon he would address a message to all Mozambican

Muslims, whose content was supposed to extol ‘everything that unites Christians and

Muslims and makes our fraternal entente easy in the cult of the one God and the service of

Portugal for which all of us are fighting’.64 He accomplished this on 17 December 1968,

during the Laylat ul-qadr, in a message broadcast through local radio. Always keeping a low

profile and preferring to remain out of sight, it was Amaro Monteiro who stage-managed the

whole process: he carefully chose the occasion, wrote the message, convinced Muslims

leaders to invite the Governor as well as several prominent figures of the Portuguese colonial

staff, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the Archbishop to a mosque in

Lourenço Marques for the celebration of the end of Ramadan; he then instructed the

63 For the bureaucratic steps that preceded the travels of Amaro Monteiro, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 138–

47, 327–31; for the reports Amaro Monteiro wrote after his field-work expeditions, see ANTT, SCCIM no. 412,

fos. 153–66, 318–22; for the way Mozambican Muslims still treasure Amaro Monteiro’s action, see my

interview to Mohamad Amadá on 5 May 2010.

64 ADC, Afrique-Levant, Mozambique 1966-1972, Politique intérieure – Questions religieuses, 59QO/34, avril

1966-décembre 1972, Dispatch no. 150 of Jacques Honoré, Consul General of France in Lourenço Marques, to

the Minister for Foreign Affairs, 2 December 1968.28


Portuguese authorities on how they should behave, controlled the diffusion of the event in the

local press, etc. Furthermore, after the outstanding impact the Governor’s message had on its

addressees, Amaro Monteiro also advised that it should be translated so that its effect could be

exploited in other Islamic regions. He suggested that the message be disseminated directly

among the Islamic countries with which Portugal had diplomatic relations, and indirectly,

through different diplomatic channels, to all other countries where Islam was the dominant

religion. Throughout this process, Amaro Monteiro had staged what he called the ‘first

measure to approach the Islamic communities of the province [of Mozambique]’65.

Afterwards, Monteiro went even further, leading the Governor General to discretely

suggest, in some of his public deliveries, that Mozambican Muslims, in their performance of

the khutba (Friday prayer), could invoke the Head of the Portuguese state. Curiously, he

argued as precedent that in the Islamic republics of the USSR Friday prayers already included

a reference to public powers.66 In his previous research expeditions, he tried to unearth

whether or not any specific name was invoked as Imam, during the khutba, to replace the

Sultan of Zanzibar that used to be called for in several areas (namely in Niassa district).67 To

propose the Head of the Portuguese state as a kind of surrogate ‘Imam’ was also a hint as how

65 ANTT, SCCIM no. 413, fos. 229–31, Information no. 18/68, 30 October 1968. All the documents used to

prepare the Governor General’s Message to the Muslims of Mozambique and its ulterior diffusion, as well as the

booklets with the message in Portuguese and its Swahili translation (written in Arabic characters), are kept in

ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fos. 256–82, and no. 413, fos. 48–9, 218–37.

66 Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Lisbonne, Ambassade, Série B, n.º 734,

PP 7-5: Mozambique – Affaires culturelles et sociales – Enseignement, Note no. 207 by Jacques Honoré, Consul

General of France in Lourenço Marques, to the Ambassador, 13 December 1969.

67 ANTT, SCCIM no. 412, fo. 155, ‘Relatório de serviço nos distritos do Niassa, Moçambique, Zambézia, Tete e

Manica e Sofala, de 1 de Julho a 2 de Agosto 69’, 9 August 1969.29


to solve the intricate problem of finding someone to fulfil the vacuum left by the last Imam of

Mozambique Island.

In a way, Amaro Monteiro overpassed the initiative first taken by the Catholic Church,

which had mobilised some of its more progressive members, such as the Bishop of Vila

Cabral, to start an ecumenical dialogue with Muslim communities. Now the Portuguese

strategy related to Islam was being developed, at least in Mozambique, within a triangle that

articulated three major players. One was precisely the Catholic Church, whose newly

discovered ‘ecumenism’ towards Islam was receiving the explicit support of the Holy See.68

The second player occupied the very core of the Portuguese political dictatorship, in the

person of its head, Oliveira Salazar, who had conceded a long audience to the Bishop of Vila

Cabral during which he gave his blessing to Dias Nogueira’s idea of publishing the Fraternal

Letter to the Muslims.69 Finally, the third corner of the triangle corresponded to local

initiatives as those Amaro Monteiro was launching. Bearing in mind the pressing demands of

the colonial war, what Monteiro was really trying to do, even if deprived of certain details

about the game that was being played, was to turn the triangle into a straight line, an axis

consisting of the Government General and the Ministry of the Overseas – which implied

excluding the Church as an undesirable nuisance, a gesture that ended up arousing hostile

reactions on the part of the Catholic hierarchy.

Despite spending all these efforts with the idea of creating the aforementioned ‘Council of

Notables’, Amaro Monteiro was unable to achieve this beyond the project stage. The only part

68 On 8 October 1966, the newspaper Diário de Moçambique reported the public praise that the Apostolic

Nuncio addressed to the Bishop of Vila Cabral for his initiative of the Fraternal Letter to the Muslims.

69 This amazing revelation was confided to Jacques Honoré by Eurico Dias Nogueira himself. See ADC,

Afrique-Levant, Mozambique 1966-1972, Dispatch no. 152 by Jacques Honoré, Consul General of France in

Lourenço Marques, to the Ambassador of France in Portugal, 21 December 1967.30


of the original scheme that was accomplished had to do with engaging 21 Muslim dignitaries

in the approval of the Portuguese translation of an Islamic sacred text, a selection from the

Hadiths compiled by al-Bukhari. On 15 August 1972, the publication of the final version of

that text provided the opportunity for a huge display of propaganda, with a public ceremony

in which the dignitaries formally signed the declaration of endorsement and recommendation

to the faithful to read it, all covered in detail by the local press. Apparently, it was a great

success for a policy committed to attract African Muslims, with the added gain of having a

new instrument to spread the Portuguese language among the Islamized population, as

Monteiro had proposed in one of his memos.

Nevertheless, besides the fact that such a ceremony hid a harsh conflict between the Sufi

Muslims of the northern Brotherhoods and the Wahhabis of the south – a conflict Monteiro

was barely able to manage –,70 it was already too late for that impromptu Islamic ‘council’ to

produce its expected fruits. Portuguese colonial delusions did not have any feasible future and

the war was irredeemably lost to the colonizer. In spite of having achieved what was

unquestionably a remarkable outcome in terms of handling a population that used to be

perceived as a potential danger, Amaro Monteiro felt he did not have any choice, in July

1973, but to announce the growing degradation of Portuguese power in Mozambique to a

reluctant Marcelo Caetano, the wavering dictator that had replaced Salazar.71

70 Monteiro, O Islão, p. 284.

71 This encounter is reported in an autobiographical short-story by F. A. Monteiro: ‘Depois do fim’ in Um certo

gosto a tamarindo. Estórias de Angola (colectânea de contos) (Braga 1979), pp. 199–227.31

portuguese islamic policy - run.unl.pt islamic policy of... · web viewthe islamic policy of...

Documents