Islam and the Swahili world

A gradual Islamisation

Islam arrived with merchants and scholars from the Swahili coast and the Persian Gulf. The oldest Muslim tombs (Bagamoyo, Acoua) and the first excavated mosques, at Sima and Domoni (Anjouan), date from the 11th–12th centuries. Conversion was gradual: at Acoua, archaeologists observe in the 12th century a mixture of Muslim and older funerary practices.

By the 15th century, Sunni Islam of the Shafi'i school, the same as on the Swahili coast, had become the religion of the whole archipelago. It remains so today, on all four islands.

Mtswa Mwindza, the memory of a beginning

The tradition of Grande Comore tells that a notable from Mbude, Mtswa Mwindza, travelled to Arabia with merchants, learned the new religion there and came back to teach it at Ntsaweni, where his tomb is still shown. The tale places him in the 7th century, in the time of the Prophet or his companions.

A test excavation in the Ntsaweni mosque (2010) gave dates in the 11th–12th centuries, without confirming the hypothesis of a 7th-century building. The tale nonetheless remains essential: it makes Ntsaweni the cradle of Comorian Islam and links the archipelago directly to the origins of the religion. Read the tale: Mtswa Mwindza.

The “Shirazi”: myth and history

As all along the Swahili coast, many noble families of the Comoros claim descent from princes who came from Shiraz, in Persia. The Kilwa Chronicle tells that seven ships set out from Shiraz; six sons founded cities on the coast, and the father landed at “Hanzuan”, that is, Anjouan.

Most historians see this as a prestigious origin myth, adopted by merchant elites who were partly African, rather than the memory of a mass migration. It nonetheless reflects very real links with the Persian Gulf. In the Comoros, so-called Shirazi lineages allied themselves with local chiefs through marriage and, from the 13th–15th centuries, founded the first dynasties of sultans.

Cities of stone

With Islam and trade came an architecture of coral stone: mosques, houses with inner courtyards, ramparts. Domoni, founded in the 12th century according to archaeology, was for a long time the capital of Anjouan. Tradition dates the founding of Mutsamudu to the late 15th century.

In Mayotte, the sultanate took shape around 1460–1470 around Tsingoni. Two Arabic inscriptions, discovered in 2006 on coral slabs, date the mihrab of the royal mosque to the year 944 AH, that is, 1538. It is the oldest mosque still in use on French territory.

The islands on Arab maps

At the end of the 15th century, the great navigator Ahmad Ibn Mâjid, whose treatises guided the sailors of the Indian Ocean, described Anjouan and the port of Domoni, and mentioned Mayotte for the first time around 1490. The very name of the archipelago is thought to come from the Arabic Djazaïr al-Qamar, “the islands of the Moon”.

These texts show islands well integrated into the monsoon routes, where ships called between the African coast, Madagascar, Arabia and India.

A learned, mixed society

Koranic schools, mosques and links with Zanzibar, Hadhramaut or Oman trained generations of scholars. Arabic script was also used to write Comorian and Swahili.

The civilisation born at that time is deeply mixed: African in its language and part of its custom (on Grande Comore, the house and part of the family property pass down through women), Arab and Muslim in its religion and writing, open to Persia, India and Madagascar through trade.