Distant pathways: cape muslims of South Africa
In 1990, the international community welcomed the release from 27 years of captivity of Nelson Mandela (1918 - 2013), the figurehead of the struggle against apartheid (racial segregation) in South Africa. “The Father of the Nation”, as he became affectionately known, became its first black President and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He had spent 18 years of his political imprisonment on Robben Island in Cape Town’s Table Bay at the southernmost tip of Africa.
In 1792, almost 200 years before, another influential political prisoner, the exiled Indonesian religious leader Imam Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam (1712-1807), was released from Robben Island after 12 years of incarceration by the Dutch rulers, who then ruled the Cape. Imam Abdullah was a learned Muslim scholar and a leader in the resistance against the Dutch colonial authorities in the eastern Indonesian archipelago.
After being captured and before being shipped to the Cape in 1770, the Dutch removed from his possession all religious texts to restrict his ability to propagate Islam. However, Imam Abdullah was a hafiz who had committed the whole Koran to memory and during his imprisonment wrote several copies of the Holy Book as well as a text book on Islamic worship for local Muslims, ‘Ma’rifah al-Islam al-Iman’ (Knowledge of Islam and of Faith). After his release, he remained in Cape Town where he became known as Tuan Guru (Master Teacher) for his dedication to Islamic education and conversion. In 1793, he established South Africa’s first madrasa and its first mosque (Auwal Mosque) in 1798.
In 1497, the Portuguese seafarer, Vasco da Gama, was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope, thus opening a new chapter in global history as European powers gained maritime access to the rich lands bordering the Indian Ocean and East Asia beyond. It was, however, not until 1652 that Europeans settled there, when the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie - VOC) established a small refreshment station for its vessels sailing between Europe and Asia. The Dutch then controlled parts of India and Ceylon and much of the East Indies (as the Indonesian archipelago was known to Europeans).
In 1658, the first sizable group of Muslims was brought to work at the Cape from the Moluccan island of Ambon. Although prohibited from public worship on the pain of death, the Muslim Mardyckers were officially permitted to do so privately: “No one shall trouble the Amboinese about their religion or annoy them, as long as they do not practice in public or venture to propagate it amongst Christians and heathens.” Although the Mardyckers were free, from its early days the viability of European settlement at the Cape depended on forced slave or convict labour.
The VOC brought its slaves mainly from East Africa, Madagascar and South and South East, regions with a high concentration of Muslims in their populations. The 17th and early 18th centuries was a time of intense struggle for the control of territory in the East Indies between the Dutch colonialists and the rulers of powerful local states, many of whom were recent – and fervent - converts to Islam.
Many indigenous Muslims undertook the Hajj pilgrimage, some spending lengthy periods of study in Mecca and Medina and other Muslim centres. In the East Indies, as elsewhere in Islam, this was an era of widespread engagement in tasawuf (Sufism) as a higher dimension of Islamic devotion. Learned sheikhs who had received formal authority (istaj) to guide others from recognised religious mentors (Malay - ustaz) in the Middle East, played leading community roles on their return. As trusted advisors of local Muslim rulers, they often had substantial temporal as well as spiritual influence and were often in the forefront of struggles against the Dutch.
The VOC found a solution to threats to their authority by deporting commoners to their Cape colony as convicts or slaves, or, in the case of those with superior authority amongst the local populations, as religious and political exiles. Most prominent amongst the exiles was Sheikh Yusuf al-Taj al-Khalwati al-Maqassari (1626- 1699), one of Indonesia’s most revered historical figures. Born in Makassar ,the capital of the newly Islamicised Sultanate of Gowa in South Sulawesi (eastern Indonesia), Sheikh Yusuf spent years studying in Mecca and the teaching circles of the Middle East, joining the Naqshbandi and Khalwati tarikats, being initiated into the latter in Damascus by its founder, Ayyub al-Khalwati (1586-1661).
This was a period when heterodox local Sufi doctrines in the archipelago were being replaced by more normative forms of Sunni Islam as articulated in the writings of al-Ghazali (c. 1058- 1111) to whose ideas Sheikh Yusuf subscribed. On his return to the East Indies Sheikh Yusuf became an influential religious teacher and a key supporter of Sultan Ageng of Banten (1631- 1695) in his armed opposition to the Dutch.
He was captured in 1683 and exiled first to Ceylon and then in 1694 to the Cape colony with a retinue of family members, imams, friends and servants. To isolate these influential Muslims from the slave population, they were housed in Zandvliet some distance from Cape Town.
Nevertheless, the little settlement became a refuge for fugitive slaves and the nucleus of the Muslim community in South Africa. After the sheikh’s demise in 1699 and his initial burial in a tomb overlooking the settlement of Macassar (as it became known), his remains were repatriated to South Sulawesi. Although his tomb at the Cape is empty, it is especially revered as a holy place or kramat – one of more than 25 tombs of revered exiled sheikhs and other exemplary Muslims who are considered by local Muslims to protect the entire Cape peninsula in a holy chain.
The periodical transfer to the Cape of religious exiles and convicts from South and South East Asia, who had absorbed deep levels of education in the heartlands of Islam, played a remarkable role in maintaining the character of the South African Muslim community in harmony with orthodox beliefs (predominantly Shafi’i Sunni).
In the late 18th century there was a relaxing of attitudes on the part of Cape authorities towards Islamic worship, firstly among the Dutch and then by the British, who in 1795 took control of the Cape. By the 1770s Muslims were regularly holding openair services just beyond the urban limits. After the first British governor allowed Tuan Guru to establish a madrasa and mosque, another large mosque (Palm Tree) was built in 1807, followed by 1834 by five smaller ones as well as two more madrasas, the largest with an enrollment of 491 children and adults.
Muslims welcomed all with kindness. Converts found a new life in Islam: if slavery and racial discrimination were social death, conversion was both social and spiritual resurrection. A person who converted to Islam became, in the words of a local Christian observer, “a real, not a nominal member of an extensive society. It is not in the mosque alone that he feels himself a social being; in every house inhabited by a Musselman he finds a home and a brother.”
From this foundation, the Muslim community in South Africa continued to grow. From the late 19th century onwards it was severe impacted by segregationist government policies but determinedly sustained its essential character and played a significant role in constructively partnering with other oppressed religious and ethnic groups in the struggle against apartheid.
Today some 900,000 South Africans are Muslims of whom some 160,000 live in Cape Town. There are more than 500 mosques, 408 educational institutes and colleges, Muslim private schools, centres of religious instruction and colleges of Islamic sciences. Muslims occupy many key posts in government. In a challenging economic environment ‘halal’ tourism is playing an exemplary part and is a focus of private sector and governmental development strategies.
On the eve of the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, Muslims in Cape Town celebrated 300 years of Islam in South Africa. The high point of the national celebration was a mass encampment around Sheikh Yusuf’s tomb as the Father of Islam in South Africa. In an address to Oxford University’s Centre of Islamic Studies that year, President Mandela reflected on the historical and potential relationships of Islam with other religious confessions in Africa:
“When the Prophet Muhammad sent his oppressed followers to the African Christian King Negus of Abyssinia for safety and they received his protection, was that not an example of tolerance and co-operation to be emulated today? Is that not a profound pointer to the role that religion can play, and the spiritual leadership it can provide, in bringing about social renewal on our continent today and in the world?”
