“A Leading Muslim of Aden”: Social Capital, Religious Institutions, and the Construction of Community in Colonial Aden

“A Leading Muslim of Aden”: Social capital, religious institutions and the construction of community in colonial Aden
Scott Reese
Zakaria Muhammad al-Hindi was a man of prominence and influence in colonial Aden. A landlord and merchant from the early 1920s, “Zakoo” was a pillar of the Muslim community and an increasingly prominent leader of social and religious reform efforts. He was, in the words of one official, a “notable Muslim of Aden.” Yet, not only was al-Hindi not a native of Aden, he was a relatively recent, and only part-time, resident who divided his time between the British settlement and his natal home of Gujarat in India.
Zakaria al-Hindi’s rise to prominence was hardly unusual. This paper explores how religious institutions and spiritual ideas served as parameters for the creation of community and the kinds of symbolic and cultural capital an individual needed to attain influence as a “leading Muslim.” After its occupation by British forces in 1839, the port of Aden emerged as one of the preeminent commercial hubs in the Indian Ocean, and its population exploded. Not only were Aden’s Arab, Indian, and African Muslims ethnically diverse and confessionally varied (including Sunnis, Shi’is, Isma’ilis and others), but they were also extremely transient. As late as the 1920s, many of the city’s Muslims were recent immigrants and even those born there could rarely point to roots in the Settlement that extended more than one or two generations into the past. Despite this, the Muslim inhabitants of Aden regularly portrayed themselves as a community, “the Muslims of Aden,” led by men of means like Zakaria al-Hindi. This paper seeks to unpack the dynamics of this process within the dual contexts of Muslim social interactions and the British imperial Indian Ocean.