The Stone Town of Kilwa

Along the East African coast, from the Horn down to the lands south of the equator, there grew up from early Islamic times a string of Muslim trading city-states, the Swahili coast, where African peoples, in long contact and intermarriage with Arab and Persian traders who came on the monsoon winds, formed a distinctive Islamic civilisation with its own Bantu language, Swahili, written in the Arabic script, and its own architecture of coral-stone. The greatest of these cities in the fourteenth century was Kilwa, on an island off the coast of what is now Tanzania, which had risen to wealth and pre-eminence as the chief clearing-house for the gold that was carried up the coast from the mines of the far south, around Sofala, and traded on to Arabia, Persia, India and beyond. Kilwa was a city of coral-stone and lime, with a great domed congregational mosque, one of the finest on the coast, and a large palace, the Husuni Kubwa, above the sea. When the traveller Ibn Battuta came down the coast by ship about 1331, he visited Kilwa and judged it one of the most beautiful and best-built of towns; he praised the devotion of its people, who were Muslims of the Shafi'i school, and the humility and the open-handed generosity of its sultan, who gave freely to the poor, to visiting scholars and to the descendants of the Prophet. The Swahili sultanates were a flourishing far-southern frontier of the Muslim world, linked to it by faith and by the sea-trade of the Indian Ocean. This scene depicts the stone town of Kilwa. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.