Origins of the Shirazi

The origins of the Shirazi people is a controversial issue in the historiography of East Africa. A number of Shirazi legends proliferated along the East African coast, most involving a named or unnamed Persian prince marrying a Swahili princess. Modern academics reject the authenticity of the primarily Iranian origin claim.[1][2] They point to the relative rarity of Iranian customs and speech, lack of documentary evidence of Shi'ism in the literature on the Swahili Coast, and instead a historic abundance of Sunni Arab-related evidence.[3] However, recent genetic evidence points towards noticeable Iranian admixture.[4]

Historical background

Islamic records

Arab geographers from the twelfth and later centuries historically divided the eastern coast of Africa into several regions based on each region's respective inhabitants.[5] According to the twelfth century geography of Al-Idrisi, completed in 1154 CE, there were four littoral zones: Barbar (Bilad al Barbar; "land of the Berbers") in the Horn of Africa, which was inhabited by Somalis and stretched southward to the Shebelle river; Zanj (Ard al-Zanj; "country of the blacks"), located immediately below that up to around Tanga or the southern part of Pemba island; Sofala (Ard Sufala), extending from Pemba to an unknown terminus, but probably around the Limpopo river; and Waq-Waq, a land south thereof whose precise location is unclear.

Islam was introduced to the northern Somalia coast early on from the Arabian peninsula, shortly after the hijra. Ibn al-Mujawir later wrote that, due to various battles in the Arabian peninsula, Banu Majid people from Yemen settled in the central Mogadishu area. Yaqut and Ibn Said described the city as another important center of Islam, which actively traded with the Swahili-speaking African region to the south of it. The thirteenth century texts also mention mosques and individuals with names such as "al-Shirazi" and "al-Sirafi" and a clan called "Sirafi at Merca", suggestive of an early Persian presence in the area.

To the south of the Barbar region, Al-Masudi mentions seaborne trade from Oman and Siraf port near Shiraz to the African Zanj coast, Sofala and Waq-Waq. Ibn Battuta would later visit the Kilwa Sultanate in the 14th century, which was at the time ruled by a Yemeni dynasty led by Sultan Hasan bin Sulayman.[6] Battuta described the majority of inhabitants as being "Zanj" and "jet-black" in color, many of whom had facial tattoos.

Another set of records are found in the Book of the Zanj (Kitab al-Zanuj), a likely compilation of mythical oral traditions and memories of settled traders on the Swahili coast. The late 19th-century document claims that Persians and Arabs were sent by governors of the Persian Gulf region to conquer and colonize the trading coast of East Africa. It also mentions the establishment of the Shirazi dynasty by Madagan and Halawani Arab merchants, whose identity and roots are unclear. Similarly, the Kilwa Chronicle, a medieval document surviving in both Arabic and Portuguese, indicates that the early Shirazi also settled in Hanzuan (Anjouan, in the Comoros Islands), the Green Island (Pemba), Mandakha, Shaugu and Yanbu.[7][8]

Theories of origin

Persian origins

There are two main stories about the origins of the Shirazi people. One thesis based on oral tradition and some written sources (such as the Kilwa Chronicle) state that immigrants from the Shiraz region in southwestern Iran directly settled various mainland ports and islands on the eastern Africa seaboard beginning in the tenth century, in an area between Zanzibar in the north and Sofala in the south.[9][10] According to Irving Kaplan, prior to the 7th century, the coastal areas frequented by the Persian migrants were inhabited by Africans. By the time of the Persian settlement in the area, these earlier occupants had been displaced by incoming Bantu and Nilotic populations.[11] More people from different parts of the Persian Gulf also continued to migrate to the Swahili coast in subsequent centuries, forming the modern Shirazi.[8]

The second theory on Shirazi origins posits that they came from Persia, but first settled on the Somali coast near Mogadishu.[9] In the twelfth century, as the gold trade with the distant entrepot of Sofala on the Mozambique seaboard grew, the settlers are then said to have moved southwards to various coastal towns in Kenya, Tanzania, northern Mozambique and the Indian Ocean islands. By 1200 AD, they had established local sultanates and mercantile networks on the islands of Kilwa, Mafia and Comoros along the Swahili coast, and in northwestern Madagascar.[12][13][14][15][7]

A third theory links the Shirazi people to the Lamu Archipelago, islands in the Indian Ocean close to north Kenya, which oral traditions claim were settled by seven brothers from the Iranian city of Shiraz.[16] The Lamu archipelago descendants then moved south in the 10th and 11th centuries. This is contested and the opposing view states that the Shirazi legend took on new importance in the 19th century, during the period of Omani domination. Claims of Persian Shirazi ancestry were used to distance locals from Arab newcomers. Thus, emphasis that the Shirazi came very long ago and intermarried with indigenous locals is revisionist politics that attempts to fuse the Shirazi origins theory with Swahili heritage according to this view.[17][18]

Bantu-speaking Africans

Dismissing the ancestral claims of the native people as fictions, some contemporary scholars assert that both the Swahili and Shirazi people are the descendants of Bantu-speaking farmers who migrated to the East African coast in the first millennium C.E. They adopted maritime tools and systems, including fishing and sailing, and developed a healthy regional trade network by the 8th century C.E. The upsurge in Indian Ocean trade after the 9th century C.E. brought an increase in Muslim traders and Islamic influence, and beginning in the 12th century, many elites converted. These elites constructed complex, often fictive, genealogies that connected them to the central Islamic lands. Since Persian traders were dominant in the early centuries of the second millennium, many Swahili patricians adopted Persian cultural motifs and claimed a distant common ancestry.[19][3]

According to the anthropologist Helena Jerman, the Shirazi identity (Washirazi) was born after the arrival of Islam, in the 17th century. Their traditional Bantu lineage names were gradually abandoned and substituted with Arabic family names (e.g. Wapate became Batawiyna), new origin legends and social structures were imagined into folklores, and the societal structures were adopted from Persian and Arab settlers from nearby societies in Asia.[20]

Contemporary demography

Contemporary identity

Some towns and islands have had a much larger concentration of Shirazi people. For example, in 1948, about 56% of the Zanzibar population reported Shirazi ancestry of Persian origins.[21][22]

Contemporary genetics

Genetic analysis by Msadie et al. (2010) indicates that the most common paternal lineages among the contemporary Comorian population, which includes Shirazi people, are clades that are frequent in sub-Saharan Africa (E1b1a1-M2 (41%) and E2-M90 (14%)).[23] The samples also contain some northern Y chromosomes, indicating possible paternal ancestry from South Iran (E1b1b-V22, E1b1b-M123, F*(xF2, GHIJK), G2a, I, J1, J2, L1, Q1a3, R1*, R1a*, R1a1, and R2 (29.7%)),[24] and Southeast Asia (O1 (6%)).[25] The Comorians also predominantly bear mitochondrial haplogroups linked with sub-Saharan East African populations in East and South East Africa (L0, L1, L2 and L3′4(xMN) (84.7%)), with the remaining maternal clades associated with Southeast Asia (B4a1a1-PM, F3b, and M7c1c (10.6%), and M(xD, E, M1, M2, M7) (4%)) but no Middle Eastern lineages.[26] According to Msadie et al., given that there are no common Middle Eastern maternal haplogroups on the Comoros, there is "striking evidence for male-biased gene flow from the Middle East to the Comoros", which is "entirely consistent with male-dominated trade and religious proselytisation being the forces that drove the Middle Eastern gene flow to the Comoros".[27]

References

  1. ↑ Horton, Mark; Middleton, John (2000). The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Socieety. 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  2. ↑ Bakari, Mohammed (2001). The Democratisation Process in Zanzibar. Verbund Deutsches Übersee-Institut Neuer Jungfernstieg 21, 20354 Hamburg: Hamburg: Institut für Afirka-Kunde. ISBN 3-928049-71-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  3. 1 2 De V. Allen, J. (1982). "The "Shirazi" Problem in East African Coastal History". Paideuma. 28: 9–27. ISSN 0078-7809. JSTOR 41409871.
  4. ↑ Brielle, Esther S.; Fleisher, Jeffrey; Wynne-Jones, Stephanie; Sirak, Kendra; Broomandkhoshbacht, Nasreen; Callan, Kim; Curtis, Elizabeth; Iliev, Lora; Lawson, Ann Marie; Oppenheimer, Jonas; Qiu, Lijun; Stewardson, Kristin; Workman, J. Noah; Zalzala, Fatma; Ayodo, George (March 2023). "Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast". Nature. 615 (7954): 866–873. Bibcode:2023Natur.615..866B. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05754-w. ISSN 1476-4687. PMC 10060156. PMID 36991187.
  5. ↑ Fage, J. D.; Roland Oliver (1975). The Cambridge History of Africa. Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–192. ISBN 978-0-521-20981-6.
  6. ↑ Randall Lee Pouwels, African and Middle Eastern world, 600-1500, (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 156.
  7. 1 2 H.N. Chittick (1965), The Shirazi colonization of East Africa, Journal of African History, Volume 6, Number 3, pages 275-294
  8. 1 2 Fage, J. D.; Roland Oliver (1975). The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 3. Cambridge University Press. pp. 201–202. ISBN 0521209811. Retrieved 18 October 2016.
  9. 1 2 Anthony Appiah; Henry Louis Gates (2010). Encyclopedia of Africa. Oxford University Press. p. 379. ISBN 978-0-19-533770-9. According to oral tradition, beginning in the tenth century immigrants from the Shiraz region of Persia (now Iran) settled the islands and mainland ports of coastal East Africa, from Mogadishu, Somalia, in the north to the Sofala coast of Mozambique in the south. Many scholars, however, believe that the Shirazi actually began their settlement of the East Africa coast in the twelfth century and that they originated in Somalia.
  10. ↑ Derek Nurse; Thomas Spear; Thomas T. Spear (1985). The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 70–79. ISBN 0-8122-1207-X.
  11. ↑ Kaplan, Irving (1967). Area handbook for Kenya. American University (Washington, D.C.). Foreign Area Studies. pp. 38 & 42. Retrieved 28 November 2016. About 2,000 years ago Negroid Bantu and Nilotic groups pushed into the area of East Africa from the north and west in successive waves and displaced the Bushmanoid and other non-Negroid inhabitants of the area... The Shirazi, who were Islamized Persians, also arrived, and some towns, including Mombasa, came under Shirazi control for a time... Before the seventh century, non-Negroid people are thought to have inhabited the coastal areas visited by the early traders. After the seventh century, it is certain that the situation changed, for Negroid Africans were reported as inhabiting the coastal areas.
  12. ↑ Fage, J. D.; Roland Oliver (1975). The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 3. Cambridge University Press. pp. 201–202. ISBN 0521209811. Retrieved 18 October 2016. "In the twelfth century more foreigners emigrated from diverse parts of the Persian Gulf and settled in Mogadishu, Brava and elsewhere on the Benadir and the coast of the Shungwaya country, the southern hinterland of Somalia remembered as the homeland of the Kashur. These foreigners developed the trade of Mogadishu, which rapidly rose to a position of pre-eminence. In particular, they opened up the gold trade with the Sofala country, which until then can only have been on a minor scale. In furtherance of the trade with the south some of these merchants, ancestors of whom came from the Persian Gulf and who were remembered as of 'Shirazi' origin, settled on the islands of Mafia and Kilwa, rapidly, it appears, achieving a position of dominance. By about AD 1200 they had established themselves as rulers.
  13. ↑ Nimtz, August H. (1980). Islam and Politics in East Africa. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 3–11, 30–33, 39–47. ISBN 978-0-8166-0963-5., Quote: "The Shirazi were classified as native, that is, Africans, and this they were of low status. Prior to the colonial era, the Shirazi and Arabs saw themselves, for the most part, as one community. (...) Unlike the previous periods in which African captives were usually taken to Persian Gulf areas to work primarily as domestic laborers, by the nineteenth century, most slaves were being utilized on the vast clove and plantations on the East African coast and offshore islands. (...) Arab rule, from this period until its demise at the hands of the European powers, became virtually synonymous with slavery and slave ownership." (...) "Though Shirazi ownership of slaves was never as extensive as the Arabs, slaves were a major source of their wealth"
  14. ↑ Sellström, Tor (27 May 2015). Africa in the Indian Ocean: Islands in Ebb and Flow. BRILL Academic. pp. 142–144. ISBN 978-90-04-29249-9.
  15. ↑ Joan Maw; David J. Parkin (1984). Swahili Language and Society. School of Oriental and African Studies. New Africa Press, Afro-Pub (Veröffentlichungen der Institute für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien). pp. 279–281. OCLC 600457662.
  16. ↑ Finbarr Barry Flood; Gulru Necipoglu (2017). A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture. Wiley. pp. 262–264. ISBN 978-1-119-06857-0.
  17. ↑ Horton, Mark & Middleton, John. "The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society." (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000) Pg. 59- 61.
  18. ↑ Meier, Prita. "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere." (Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University press, 2016) Pg. 99-101.
  19. ↑ Horton, Mark & Middleton, John. "The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society." (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000)
  20. ↑ Jerman, Helena (1997). Between Five Lines: The Development of Ethnicity in Tanzania with Special Reference to the Western Bagamoyo District. Nordic Africa Institute. pp. 101–102. ISBN 978-91-7106-408-0.
  21. ↑ Piga, Adriana (2014). Anna Irene Del Monaco (ed.). Rivista L'architettura delle città: The Journal of the Scientific Society Ludovico Quaroni no. 3-4-5/2014. Edizioni Nuova Cultura, Sapienza Universita di Roma. pp. 132–134. ISBN 978-88-6812-355-0.
  22. ↑ Skinner, Annabel (2005). Tanzania & Zanzibar. New Holland Publishers. pp. 15–17. ISBN 978-1-86011-216-4.
  23. ↑ Msaidie, Said; et al. (2011). "Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (1): 89–94. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.128. PMC 3039498. PMID 20700146. The most common Comorian haplogroups, E1b1-M2 (41%) and E2-M90 (14%), are those that are frequent in sub-Saharan Africa.[...] The Lemba have high frequencies of the Middle Eastern Y chromosome HgJ-12f2a (25%), a potentially SEA Y, Hg-K(xPQR) (32%) and a Bantu Y, E-PN1 (30%) (similar to E-M2), raising the possibility that the Lemba and Comorian populations are consequences of similar demographic processes.
  24. ↑ Msaidie, Said; et al. (2011). "Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (1): 89–94. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.128. PMC 3039498. PMID 20700146. The northern Y chromosomes on the Comoros, E-V22, E-M123, F*(xF2, GHIJK), G2a, I, J1, J2, L1, Q1a3, R1*, R1a*, R1a1, and R2 (29.7%), make up a diverse group.[...] A possible source of the Northern Y chromosomes is therefore the Shirazi traders from Southern Iran who established trading posts on the Comoros by 800 YBP.
  25. ↑ Msaidie, Said; et al. (2011). "Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (1): 89–94. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.128. PMC 3039498. PMID 20700146. We found the O1 lineage (6%) in the Comoros sample, providing genetic evidence for an SEA influence.
  26. ↑ Msaidie, Said; et al. (2011). "Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (1): 89–94. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.128. PMC 3039498. PMID 20700146. the majority of mitochondrial haplogroups on the Comoros, are of African origin. The haplogroups L0, L1, L2 and L3'4(xMN) compose 84.7% of the mitochondria in the Comoros sample, and their relative proportions, are most similar to profiles found in East and South East Africa. 20,54 The higher affinity with sub-Saharan East African populations is also evident in the MDS analysis (Figure 4a and b). The remaining 15.3% of the Comoros sample is composed almost exclusively of haplogroups that can either be unambiguously identified as SEA (B4a1a1-PM, F3b, and M7c1c - 10.6%), 25 or fall into the paragroup M(xD,E,M1,M2,M7) (4%) (Figure 3). The latter haplogroups are probably also originally from Southeast Asia, but of the 12 different M* HVS-I sequences on the Comoros, only two match published sequences: two M(xM7) mitochondria found on Madagascar. 8 We found no haplogroups that could be assigned to the Middle East.
  27. ↑ Msaidie, Said; et al. (2011). "Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 19 (1): 89–94. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.128. PMC 3039498. PMID 20700146. There are no mitochondrial lineages on the Comoros that are frequent in the Middle East (Figure 3). We have tested for, but did not find, the R haplogroups, H, J, T, U and V, or N(xR) that represent 80% of the mitochondria in Iran. There is therefore striking evidence for male-biased gene flow from the Middle East to the Comoros, even if the unassigned mt-Hg M* and R* are designated as western Asian: 103/381 Y vs 27/577 mitochondria – Fisher's exact test, one-sided, Po10 22. This is entirely consistent with male-dominated trade and religious proselytisation being the forces that drove the Middle Eastern gene flow to the Comoros.
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