The widespread conversion to Islam in East Africa during the colonial period is well known, but the reasons have remained obscure. This volume examines Muslim communities in Southeast Tanzania that originated in the early twentieth century and have recently become divided between radical Islamists and defenders of a local orthodoxy.
This volume asks why did Tanzanian converts turn to Islam under a Christian colonial regime? How did they learn how to live as Muslims in the isolation of rural villages, and how did they reconcile their Muslim allegiance with the continuation of local...

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people's resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely...