Muslims in Kenyan Politics: Political Involvement, Marginalization, and Minority Status
Muslims in Kenyan Politics explores the changing relationship between Muslims and the state in Kenya from precolonial times to the present, culminating in the radicalization of a section of the Muslim population in recent decades. The politicization of Islam in Kenya is deeply connected with the sense of marginalization that shapes Muslims' understanding of Kenyan politics and government policies. Kenya's Muslim population comprises ethnic Arabs, Indians, and black Africans, and its status has varied historically. Under British rule, an imposed racial hierarchy affected Muslims particularly, thwarting the development of a united political voice. Drawing on a broad range of interviews and historical research, Ndzovu presents a nuanced picture of political associations during the postcolonial period and explores the role of Kenyan Muslims as political actors.
What Stymies Action on Climate Change? Religious Institutions, Marginalization, and Efficacy in Kenya
Addressing climate change requires coordinated policy responses that incorporate the needs of the most impacted populations. Yet even communities that are greatly concerned about climate change may remain on the sidelines. We examine what stymies some citizens’ mobilization in Kenya, a country with a long history of environmental activism and high vulnerability to climate change. We foreground efficacy—a belief that one’s actions can create change—as a critical link transforming concern into action. However, that link is often missing for marginalized ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups. Analyzing interviews, focus groups, and survey data, we find that Muslims express much lower efficacy to address climate change than other religious groups; the gap cannot be explained by differences in science beliefs, issue concern, ethnicity, or demographics. Instead, we attribute it to understandings of marginalization vis-à-vis the Kenyan state—understandings socialized within the local institutions of Muslim communities affected by state repression.
The Religious Composition of the Population of the Coast Province of Kenya
The Coast Province of Kenya is an administrative unit 82,500 square kilometres in area. 1) It lies along the whole seaboard of the republic of Kenya from the boundary with Tanzania in the south to that with Somalia in the north. Irregular in shape, it extends up to 250 kilometres inland in most places, except along the Tana River, where it reaches the Equator, 350 kilometres from the sea. The province includes all those parts of Kenya whose written history reaches back earlier than the nineteenth century, and with its background of early Arab settlement and Portuguese occupation, the religious composition of the present population is of particular interest. The Province is divided into six administrative districts, namely, Kwale, Mombasa, Kilifi-Malindi, 2) Tana River and Lamu Districts, lying in this order from south to north along the coast, and Taita District situated in the hinterland one hundred kilometres from Mom-