Ivory pirates, slave traders, and naturalists alike have long sought out the Zanzibar archipelago, a biodiverse group of islands lying off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa. One of these islands, Misali, is surrounded by a six-mile coral reef. It teems with rare life: hawksbill turtles, flying foxes, coconuts crabs—and lots of octopuses. This island is special to Muslims, who form the vast majority of Zanzibar’s population.
According to a local myth, Misali was once visited by a pious man known as Hadhara. When he asked fishermen for a prayer mat, they had none to offer, but he said it didn’t matter: The teardrop-shaped island, whose northern beach faces Mecca, was like a prayer mat itself. In fact, “Misali,” in the local Kiswahili language, means “prayer mat.” Misali sustained generations of Muslims; the octopus catch, in particular, kept them fed for centuries. But overfishing, climate change, and oil exploration began in recent years to threaten the ecosystem. The octopus population dropped dramatically. Government regulations did little to curb the problem.
And so, some residents decided to try a different strategy: appealing to the community’s Islamic consciousness and using verses from the Quran to promote conservation.
“Whether you catch small-size fish, damage coral reefs, or use drag nets in seagrass areas … [it] is forbidden in the Islamic point of view,” said Ali Said Hamad, a field officer at local nonprofit Mwambao Coastal Community Network who began using the religious strategy in a few villages in 2016. “We should use our resources in a wise manner. That’s why there is mizan—an Arabic word which means balance, but balance in the sense of sustainability.”
Since 2016, Mwambao has been assisting villages’ shehia, or fishery committee, with closing 436 hectares of fishing grounds in intervals of three months per year, to allow the octopus population to regenerate. Some closures coincide with Ramadan, when fishermen will feel discouraged from entering the water, “because when water gets into your ears and nose it means that you’re breaking your fast,” said Ali Thani, the country coordinator at Mwambao. When the area re-opens toward the end of Ramadan, when celebrations require villagers to splurge, “they can sell the [bigger] octopus, get money for Eid, and buy clothes for their kids,” he added.
While foreign nonprofits and words like “sustainability” can evoke distrust in the population, the Quran does not: “We say, ‘It’s not from Europe—it is in your faith; it is in your religion; it has been there for a long time,’” Thani said. “[T]his is making the people to start trusting things.”
Although quantitative data is hard to come by, Thani said anecdotal evidence suggests these octopus regeneration efforts “got very good results.” The octopuses are heavier now, commonly growing to twice the size they used to attain before the religious strategy went into effect. “We left octopuses of 1kg and now they find ones of 2-2.5kg,” he said.
The Mwambao staff’s experience using Islamic environmental ethics to reinforce conservationist messages goes back several years. In the 1990s, when illegal fishing methods like poison and dynamite threatened Misali’s fish stocks, Hamad and Thani were employees of a nongovernmental organization called careInternational. They worked with clerics and fishermen to promote the Islamic concept of khalifa, or environmental stewardship, making Misali the site of the first documented example of a partnership between a secular NGO and Muslim clerics.
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