In 2006, Islamists strengthened their hold on Somalia, after capturing the southern port of Kismayo. Although they have no intention of crossing into neighbouring Kenya, the question is what effect their ascendancy will have on that country’s predominantly Muslim coast.
Although Somalia’s Islamists say that their aim is nothing more threatening than to remake the country as a peaceful and tolerant Islamic state, Somalia’s internationally recognised (but dreadfully weak) transitional government insists that they are an “al-Qaeda network”. A recent suicide bombing which narrowly missed the transitional president, Abdullahi Yusuf, and the killing of an elderly Italian nun working at a Mogadishu hospital, probably in retaliation for Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on violence and Islam, confirmed the worst fears of some, including the United States. The Kenyan coast already has direct experience of al-Qaeda’s brand of violence—in 2002 it bombed a hotel full of Israelis in Mombasa, killing 16, and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner—and the Nairobi-based intelligence community expects more. So people are nervous.
Kenya’s Muslims feel disenfranchised. They have had little access to national power, in contrast to neighbouring Tanzania, where Islamist rhetoric has been blunted by socialism and Muslims have held most of the high offices of state (see article). So far, however, Muslims on the Kenyan coast have usually been repulsed by jihadist rhetoric. But a revival of Arabic and access to Arab satellite television, linking local backwaters to a sometimes inflammatory message of Islam under siege, could change that.
Malindi is a case in point. The Muslim community there is taking steps to recover itself from what it calls the “corrosive” influence of tourism. The town’s beaches have been a tidy earner since 1498, when Vasco da Gama was welcomed ashore. Things have got out of hand since. “The Italians have ruined this town,” says a Muslim elder. Several thousand Italians now live in Malindi and it is not just the Italian women wandering half-naked through conservative bits of the town that upsets local Muslims. It is the drugs and the sex tourism that the Italians have brought with them since taking over the tourism industry in the 1980s. Most of the drug users in the town are Muslim boys. Some become donkeys for cocaine traffickers; Malindi has become a shipment point for Colombian cocaine. Underage Muslim girls are lured into prostitution. Tourists pay a premium for conservative girls: corruption is part of the thrill.
One reaction to this has been a growing opposition among the small but more Islamist Wahhabi community in Malindi. A more lasting reaction is what the more moderate Sunni elders call “awareness”—a renewed effort to raise up a generation of “pure” Muslims. Tahdhib school, in the centre of town, is pioneering a programme of “integrated education” which could spread along the coast. Children study the national curriculum in the morning and receive a Koranic education in the afternoon. No child can advance without passing exams in both secular and religious studies, and instruction is in English and Arabic. The teachers hope to produce both “good citizens of Kenya” and believers who will “close their eyes” to tourist excesses. Political discussion is avoided, although in 2006 the children were marched out to protest against Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
Tourism is a soft target for jihadists and it has still has not recovered to pre-2002 levels. With its new mosques bristling against new casinos, Malindi feels vulnerable. “One bomb and it’s over for us for another five years,” says a hotel owner. Maybe, but the real losers would be local Muslims who already struggle to get by in the long tourist off-season.
