ABSTRACT
Al-Bahla¯nı¯’s death in 1920 signaled the death of a generation of Ibadi ↪ulama↩ who were the pillars of fin-de-siècle Ibadi renaissance, advocates of pan-Islamism, and critics of colonialism. Al-Bahla¯nı¯ in Zanzibar, al-Sa¯limı¯ in Oman, and At.fiyyash in Algeria represented the generation who fostered religious renewal, both in its literary and political forms, and were drawn into wider movements of Salafi reform. The death of these scholars, however, neither altered the Ibadi discourse of Islamic renewal nor put an end to Ibadi involvement in Arabism and pan-Islamism. To the contrary, these scholars were followed by a generation of Ibadi ↪ulama↩, writers, and journalists, especially in Mzab and Zanzibar, who not only followed in their footsteps in advocating Islamic reform and Islamic unity but were also increasingly sacrificing their sectarian identity at the altar of pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and national identities drawing on the former two. They were either students of the first generation, as with At.fiyyash’s pupils, such as his nephew Ibra¯hı¯m and Sulayma¯n al-Ba¯ru¯nı¯, or were lay persons such as Ha¯shil al-Maskarı¯ in Zanzibar. Their identities were molded by Islam as a system of beliefs, as a historical legacy and as an anticolonial ideology.
