Uways al-Barawi

Sheikh Uways al-Barawi (1847–1909) was a Somali scholar credited with reviving Islam in 19th-century East Africa, a leader of the Qadiriyya brotherhood in southern Somalia, on Zanzibar and along the East African coast, and the founder of its Uwaysiyya branch. ^{1 2}

Uways was born at Barawa on the Benadir coast of Somalia in the Geledi Sultanate period, the son of a local religious teacher, al-Hajj Muhammad b. Bashiir, and Fatima b. Bahra, and was of the Tunni sub-group of the Rahanweyn. ¹ He obtained a simple elementary education in the basic theological sciences, and studied Qur'an, exegesis, syntax and grammar, legal principles and basic Sufism under Sheikh al-Shashi in his own vicinity. ¹

His devotion caught his teacher's attention, who introduced him to the Qadiriyya doctrines and, about 1870, took him to Baghdad, the birthplace of the tariqa. He studied with the well-known Qadiri Sayyid Mustafa b. Salman al-Jilani and later claimed to have received an ijaza from him, and he also made the Hajj to Mecca and Medina during this period, a journey that greatly raised his spiritual standing and religious credibility. ¹

In 1883 Uways returned home to settle for good. On the way he passed through the Hejaz, Yemen and Somaliland, where oral tradition and modern scholarship differ over whether he met the renowned Qadiri Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Zayla'i before his death and received full charge of the Qadiriyya, or merely visited al-Zayla'i's tomb and received a symbolic ijaza. ¹ He was elevated as leader of the Qadiriyya in Somalia, which later became a sub-branch named after him, the Uwaysiyya, and began missionary work throughout East Africa, a prominence that drew the envy of the rival Ahmadiyya and Salihiyya brotherhoods. ¹ He founded the inland agricultural town of Beled al-Amin, to which nomads and farmers flocked, and his relations with the Sultans of Zanzibar were so close that two of them became his khalifas. ¹

Uways composed numerous religious poems, collected in the Majumu'a Qasa'id fi Madh Sayyid al-Anbiya, and he improved the wadaad writing of Somali in Arabic script, applying it to the Maay dialect of southern Somalia on the model of the Bravanese Swahili transcription. ¹ His influence ran from the islands around Zanzibar west to the eastern Congo and south to Tanganyika, and the Uwaysiyya was responsible for large-scale conversions to Islam on the coast, in inner Tanganyika and on the eastern fringes of the Congo at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. ²

The rivalry between the Uwaysiyya and the Salihiyya of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan sharpened into an exchange of polemical poems and mutual accusations of apostasy, and in 1909 the Dervishes killed Uways at Biyoole, together with all but one of his disciples, who carried the Uwaysiyya legacy on. ^{1 2}

Martin (1969) describes Uways as an important leader of the Qadiriyya who founded his own branch, the Uwaysiyya, and his article records his Qadiri training in Baghdad, his ijaza and his leadership of the order in Somalia; his faith is therefore recorded as documented sufi on those two independent sources, about the man personally. ^{2 1} His article's infobox line giving his jurisprudence as Shafi'i is a single attestation, so no legal school is recorded for him in the data, as his faith note states.

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.