Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74 by Sandra Araújo

Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74 by Sandra Araújo

Shortlisted for the Polly Corrigan Book Prize 2025

Revealing Portugal’s counterinsurgent spying on Muslims during Mozambique’s liberation struggle, this book uses archival and field work to study Muslim responses to counterinsurgency and armed nationalism that led to Mozambique’s freedom from colonial rule. Paying particular attention to the intricate set of realities Muslims faced during the colonial war, and their responses to Portuguese efforts to woo them against armed nationalism, Araújo shows how some elements of the Muslim community supported Portuguese counterinsurgency, while others defied it.

Exploring complex interconnections between Muslim culture, Portuguese intelligence-gathering practices, and colonial and nationalist propaganda, Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique brings a novel insight to the study of colonial counterinsurgency. Drawing scholarly attention to view this period of Portuguese colonisation as a matrix of lived realities pushing and pulling Muslim communities in opposite directions, this study enhances our understanding of colonial security strategies in Mozambique during the liberation war and their legacies in the post-colonial era.

As Araújo writes in this illuminating study of late colonial Mozambique, 'history is the craft of the possible' (p9). Readers learn how the Salazar and successor Caetano regimes securitized Islam and Sunni Muslims in northern Mozambique from 1964 to 1974, concerned that Indian and African Muslims might support FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, whose members were mostly Africans. Araújo acknowledges that her narrative is shaped by FRELIMO's silence and the gaps in the archival records about Salazar, Caetano, and the various Portuguese security forces active in the north. What she finds is nevertheless remarkable... Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Sandra Araújo is Associate Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her post-doctoral work focuses on the role of Portuguese intelligence during the liberation wars.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350378704
ISBN 10	1350378704
Title	Spying on Muslims in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-74
Author	Sandra Arajo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2026-08-20
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.