Liazzat Bonate

Historian focusing on Islam in Mozambique

Liazzat Bonate is currently a Principal Researcher on Cabo Delgado crisis of the Research project “God, grievance, and greed? Understanding Northern Mozambique’s new Islamist war”, Christen Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway, funded by the National Research Fund of Norway.

She has researched Islam in Northern Mozambique in colonial and post-colonial periods by focusing on Islamic Law, ajami, gender relations, land and matriliny, Islamic education, Islamic NGOs, Salafism, Sufi Orders, Muslim relationships with colonial and post-colonial states, governments and institutions, Indian Ocean and Swahili networks, Muslims and liberation movements, Muslim women's access to resources and power.

She is a lecturer in African History at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago (since August, 2016). Previously she taught at Seoul National University in South Korea (2011-2015), and at the Centre for African Studies and the Department of History at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique (1993-2016, on and off). In 2009-2010 she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies and the Centre for Contemporary Islam of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where I researched contemporary Muslim publics and international Islamic NGOs in Mozambique.

She has a PhD in Historical Studies from the University of Cape Town (2007), MA in African History from Northwestern University, USA (2002) and MA in Islamic Societies and Cultures from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, UK (1998). She obtained her BA and first MA in World History from the al-Farabi University in Kazakhstan (USSR, 1990). She was a short term visiting scholar at ZMO (Das Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany), University of Coimbra (Centro de Estudos Sociais -CES, Portugal) and University of Bergen (UNiFob Global Research Centre, Norway).  I was also a short-term consultant to UNICEF, WCRP, Oxfam-America, Care International, and the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Mozambique.