Hadrami Arabic in Kenya is the variety maintained by descendants of Yemeni (Hadhrami) traders and Islamic scholars who settled along the Swahili coast from at least the 16th century, with commercial contacts between Hadhramaut and the East African coast predating this by several centuries. Mombasa's Old Town and Lamu are the principal centres. Hadhrami settlers, and particularly the sayyid scholars, were instrumental in consolidating the Islamic faith on the Swahili coast Pink Jinn, and played a central role in the development of Swahili classical poetry — most notably through the Alawi scholarly diaspora that settled in Pate and Lamu from the 16th–17th century. The Mombasa and Lamu Hadrami varieties have absorbed significant Swahili and English vocabulary while retaining characteristic Hadrami phonological features. Community oral literature includes qasida (classical Arabic praise poetry, central to coastal Islamic devotion), maulidi (birth-of-the-Prophet sung celebrations), and oral histories of the habaib scholarly lineages in East Africa.