Riyadha Mosque

Riyadha is a working mosque and a functioning centre of Islamic learning, and should be approached on those terms, not as a monument with an opening time. It stands in Lamu Old Town, it has taught students continuously for well over a century, and the town’s Maulidi is organised around it. UNESCO’s criterion six for the Lamu inscription, the one recognising the town’s continuing religious and educational function across East and Central Africa, is in large part about what happens here.

This is a place of worship in daily use, not a visitor attraction. Non-Muslim visitors are usually looking at the exterior and the square rather than entering the prayer hall, and access is a matter for the community that runs the mosque. Ask rather than assume, dress conservatively, and do not photograph people at prayer.

Habib Salih, the Scholar Who Founded It

The mosque was founded by Salih bin Alawi Jamal al-Layl, known throughout the region as Habib Salih or Habib Swaleh. He was born in 1852 at Singani in the Comoro Islands, into a family with connections to the Hadramaut in Yemen. He came to Lamu in 1870, at eighteen, to visit an uncle and to seek treatment for an illness affecting his legs, studied under the island’s leading scholars, and stayed. He became one of the most respected teachers on the coast and died in Lamu in 1935, aged eighty three.

His house still stands in the mosque compound, a modest mud walled building with a corrugated iron roof, about twelve metres by nine. It is opened to the public only during Maulidi, and as of 2019 the National Museums of Kenya was pursuing its gazettement as a national monument in its own right. The mosque itself was declared a national monument in 2018 under the National Museums and Heritage Act.

The Founding Year, and Why Sources Disagree

Riyadha was founded in the late nineteenth century. Beyond that the published dates do not agree, and it is more useful to say so than to pick one. Kenyan reporting, including coverage quoting the National Museums curator responsible for the Lamu sites, gives 1892. An academic account of the Lamu Maulid gives 1889. Scholarly work on the mosque’s manuscript collection says only that it was founded in the late nineteenth century, modelled on the Riyadha at Seiyun in the Hadramaut.

One date that circulates widely can be ruled out. A founding year of 1866 appears in a good deal of general travel writing and cannot be correct: Habib Salih was born in 1852 and did not arrive in Lamu until 1870. A fourteen year old in the Comoros did not found a mosque in Lamu.

A Teaching Institution Above All

Riyadha began as a madrassa and grew into what is now among the most influential Islamic teaching institutions in the Swahili world, locally spoken of as little Mecca. It teaches children from across the Lamu archipelago and takes advanced students from across East Africa, running basic religious education alongside higher study in fields such as Islamic law and Quranic exegesis, and Habib Salih’s descendants continued the teaching after his death.

The mosque also holds a manuscript collection of roughly a hundred and twenty items dating from the 1850s to the early 1920s, the period immediately before Islamic scriptural material in East Africa moved into print. As a record of how learning circulated here before printing, that collection is why academic interest in Riyadha is out of all proportion to the building’s size.

The Maulidi and the Habshi Tradition

Maulidi marks the birth of the Prophet, and the Lamu celebration in its present form was established at the beginning of the twentieth century by Habib Salih, modelled on the practice at the Riyadha in Seiyun. What he introduced was the Habshi maulid, a sung text by the scholar Ali bin Muhammad al-Habshi of Seiyun called the Simt al-Durar, the string of pearls, more musical than the maulid texts then in use in Lamu and including drumming.

That was contentious at first. Conservative opinion objected to music in the mosque, and Habib Salih defended the practice on precedent until it was accepted by the town’s leadership. The version that caused the argument is now the tradition Lamu is known for across the Indian Ocean world.

The festival draws visitors from the Hadramaut and from much further afield, including Europe, India, South Africa and the United States. For many who come, the purpose is a visit to the mosque and a ziara to the graves of Habib Salih and his family. On the final day men gather at the tomb in the town cemetery, and after prayers a procession known as the zefe moves from there into the town.

Maulidi follows the Islamic lunar calendar, so it falls about eleven days earlier in the Gregorian year each time and cannot be pinned to a season. It fills the island, and the Lamu guide covers the timing alongside the separate, secular Lamu Cultural Festival.

Finding Riyadha in the Old Town

The mosque and its square sit inside the World Heritage property and appear on most guided walks through the old town, alongside the older Pwani Mosque, Lamu Fort and the museums. A local guide is the sensible way to see it, because a guide knows what is appropriate on any given day.

Questions About Riyadha Mosque

Riyadha stands within Lamu Old Town, covered in full by the Lamu guide, and Lamu’s wider religious and cultural life is covered in Swahili cultural experiences. For the coast as a whole, start at Kenya Coast.