Marching for Palestine, Cape Town 11 November 2023

                                                     Photos copyright Shafiq Morton 2023, 

SEA POINT: THE THIN BLUE LINE

 

THIS PAST WEEKEND was historic. Hundreds of protests across the globe saw millions of people taking to the streets. “Shut it down, shut it down!” cried the world as the Israeli genocide in Gaza continued for the 30th consecutive day.

 While the world’s leaders may try to muddy the truth of a Palestinian Holocaust, people such as Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and the Arab leaders stick their heads in the sand. We can only imagine how history is going to judge their complicity in the 21st century’s biggest human rights catastrophe.

 Space precludes us from contextualizing all the dynamics of the Palestinian question, which embraces the political elephant of colonialism and apartheid.

 This is because the imposition of a so-called “Jewish state” inspired by a nationalist movement (Zionism) over an existing people in 1948 is nothing less than an enforced  occupation. The United Nations Partition Decision of 1947, already guaranteeing Zionists 52 percent of a land UN members didn’t own, was already an exception of international law.

 Yet the Zionists were not satisfied with this British-influenced “deal”. The Stern and Irgun gangs – regarded as terrorists by the New York Times – had already begun their ethnic cleansing pogrom. And so by 1948, almost half of the 750,000 Palestinians who would be displaced, had already been displaced. 

 And while the modern state of Israel is a political reality today, we have to note that the majority of the Palestinian resistance does not wish for an eradication of the state, but rather, of the toxic Zionism that drips into the veins of racist supremacists such as Benjamin Netanyahu.

 And let it be said – as it has been said so many times before – most discerning people make the critical distinction that Zionism is a political expression, not a faith. Zionism is not Judaism. No one has a problem with Judaism.  

 What most of us want is peace, many mooting a unitary state in Palestine where Jews, Muslims and Christians can live together. Jewish identity in the Middle East is constitutionally – as opposed to militarily – guaranteed with no more “security” issues.

 Interestingly, this concept of a unitary state is exactly what Hamas spokespeople have mentioned to me in interviews for more than 20 years, this very same Hamas that the west is so busy trying to demonise as terrorists.

 However, like all citizens of the world, Palestinians have the right to resist the illegal occupation and apartheid strictions they experience in places such as the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. These rights are embedded in Resolution 2625 of the UN.

 But let’s get to the weekend, where on the Saturday, Cape Town experienced its biggest ever march in support of Palestine. As over 150,000 chanted in the streets, Cape Town became one of the many cities around the world raising its voice for justice.

 On the Sunday, a group of pro-Israeli faith groups had applied for a permit to have a gathering (to pray for Netanyahu’s killers?) on the Sea Point promenade lawns near the icon of Madiba’s glasses. For several weekends before, the Palestine solidarity movement had been picketing on the promenade.

 The organisers had predicted a turnout of about 2,500, not even a fraction of what the pro-Palestinian march had attracted the day before. Nonetheless, South Africa is a democracy. Every voice has a right to be heard. But here is exactly where the Sea Point picket became, by default, a battle of white privilege and Cape Flats inequality.  

 When I arrived at the picket at about 12.30, I did not have a good feeling. I have covered protest for nearly 40 years. As with all those anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s, I could immediately see that a large, high profile (metro) police presence was the worst possible scenario.

 The police had been instructed to keep a blue line between about 1,000 placard holders and the venue for the prayer meeting, immediately creating hostility from an overwhelmingly peaceful and pleasant crowd. I could see that JP’s finest, like the SAPS of old, did not know the 101 of crowd control: if there are no threats – keep your distance.

 I say this, because in the 1980s on the very rare occasions the police kept a distance and did not interfere, the marches or protests would be peaceful. Unfortunately, people like Major Dolf Odendaal could never understand this. As a result, protestors would get seriously hurt, some even losing their lives.

 My other concern on Sunday was the presence of agents provocateurs, people planted in the crowd to stir things up, and to discredit the protest by causing chaos. Often, these agents infiltrate groups and pretend to be more radical than the radical. Our leaders need to understand that people do not need to attend protests in democratic South Africa with covered faces.

 The other aspect of Sunday, more a subliminal one, was the implicit racism that pro-Palestinian protestors, predominantly Muslim, were an “other” – a boogeyman of sorts, not helped by the governing party’s inability to outrightly condemn the Gaza genocide, thus hurting the people who had voted for it.

 WhatsApp messages I’d heard prior to the Sunday had been dismissively referring to us as “them” – a distinct Bush-type otherism – like our community did not belong on the Sea Point lawns. As one of the protestors told me, “we are also here to populate these spaces our grandparents were denied.”

 The underlying tension, exacerbated by the heavy police presence, was increased when a group of about eight masked youths with a black banner appeared. About 30 metres from the blue line, and next to a van, three Israeli flags were fluttering in the breeze.

 This group took the police by surprise, and approached the Star of David flag bearers, unfurling the banner. One person (unmasked) snatched the one flag and ran away with it. It was after this that the chaos ensued, in which stun grenades were fired. We all know what transpired after that. Police action. Water canons.  

Watching this unfold, I had to ask myself, who was protecting who? And from whom? The prayer meeting – with its imminent promise of whiteness – from “them”, the Muslims?  Of course, all life is sacred – but one life can’t be more sacred than the other.

 Some of the protestors would have loved to have seen so many shiny Ratels and blue lines in Manenberg, Bishop Lavis or Bonteheuwel where gangsters shoot their children daily.

 And finally, a word to the youths who approached the Zionist flag bearers. Yes, you are our beloved brothers, and yes, we do understand and appreciate your passion and commitment to the cause of Palestinian justice. But the Qur’an does say, be just…”but don’t let the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice (to others)”.

 We need to understand that your actions, while sincere and well-intended, might just have had the opposite effect. Indeed, we have to remind ourselves that the Prophet Muhammad [pbuh] once said that we should try to help our brother, no matter what, lest he become the oppressed one, and us the oppressor.  

 However, we are not saying capitulation or deviation from the Qur’anic middle way of justice, peace and truth. It is the enthusiasm of the youth that should feed from the wisdom of the elderly.

Historical lessons from Spanish Flu’s Black October

Spanish Flu emergency ward, 1918.

COVID 19, a virus with a crown of protein spikes, has been categorised by a number of politically dramatic metaphors that have served little purpose in helping us to understand it. For example, Britain’s Health minister saying we are “in a war against an invisible killer”.

Like George Bush in the war on terror, it is a philological absurdity. We are dealing with a medical question, not an army of invaders in military camouflage. No-one can shoot and kill abstract nouns, let alone a highly infectious virus. In this “war”, the response of world leaders has varied from lockdowns to Donald Trump’s, “I see the disinfectant .” 

Since Covid’s unwelcome appearance, social media conspiracy theorists – the one-eyed fundamentalists of our digital age – have run amok on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, becoming epidemiological professors at a mouse-click, and sowing the seeds of mischief and malfeasance wherever they go. 

Recently, a well-cycled WhatsApp asserted that SAAF helicopters were spraying the virus over Mitchell’s Plain. And even if – a big remote if – if Covid 19 was cooked up in some lab in Wuhan or at a Bilderberg Conference, it is not the point right now. Our priority is not to chase the bolted horse, but to deal with what’s left in the stable. 

For indeed, what can’t be posted away by our WhatsApp naysayers is the shock and grief of South Africans who have lost their loved ones. Their tears cannot be wiped away by David Ickes claiming Fauci is a lizard. What the naysayers can’t ignore either, is the exhaustion and stress of doctors, nurses, paramedics and public officials. Their fatigue cannot be lifted by blaming Bill Gates. 

In South Africa, in less than a year, we have recorded over one million positive cases and over 35, 000 deaths. Globally, we have seen near 100 million positive cases and some two million fatalities. These are sobering figures.

However, if we zoom out for a moment and take a wider perspective by travelling back 100 years to the last major worldwide pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, we can spot some interesting parallels to Covid, and perhaps learn a few historical lessons. 

Described as a strain of the avian H1N1 virus, Spanish Flu was said to be “universally deadly”, infecting 500 million (about a third of the world’s population at the time) and killing up to 50 million (10 per cent of the total) in two years. What is staggering is that more people died from Spanish Flu than all the civilians and combatants in World War One combined. 

Whilst the notion of locating a Patient Zero in any pandemic is difficult, it is believed that the first recorded instance of Spanish Flu was in a Kansas military camp. The movement of over 200, 000 troops during the latter stages of World War One from the US to Europe, and the homecoming of infected soldiers, caused a massive spread of the virus. 

The flu earned the moniker “Spanish Flu” because Spain had remained neutral during the war, and unlike the allied countries, did not have wartime media censorship.

Whilst soldiers travelling from different parts of the world fuelled Spanish Flu, the swift spread of Covid a century later is attributed to our high mobility, air travel shrinking the world, and making it fertile ground for viruses to spread rapidly across oceans and continents. 

When the Spanish Flu broke out, the world was ill-prepared. A great war was ending and for those suffering from Spanish Flu’s blistering fevers, nasal haemorrhaging and fluid filled lungs, few pharmaceutical interventions were available. In 1918, there were no anti-virals, no antibiotics, no mechanical ventilators and no flu vaccines. 

The only clinical medication was aspirin, which did more harm than good – as was reported in the Science Daily of 3 October 2009. This was because 30 grammes of aspirin a day was used, as opposed to a safer daily dose. It caused excessive bleeding and what some scientists believe, pulmonary oedema.

What has been common between Spanish Flu and Covid, so far, has been their mutation (scientifically normal), and their waves of super infection. We are well into a second Covid wave, which has proved some 50 percent more infectious than the first. Spanish Flu dropped off after its first summer, but afterwards it mutated, setting off a deadly second wave.

Social measures taken to mitigate the effects of the Spanish Flu were not dissimilar to Covid today: quarantine, mask wearing, hygiene, lockdowns and a restriction on public gatherings. However, their applications like today, were notedly uneven.  

For instance, the New York Health Commissioner ordered businesses to open and to close at staggered times to avoid overcrowding on the subway, but the city fathers of Philadelphia went on to hold a well-attended Liberty Loan Parade on 28 September. 

In 10 days, there were over 1, 000 dead after an estimated 200, 000 infections. In Saint Louis, Missouri, schools and movie theatres were closed and public gatherings banned. Saint Louis went on to have a peak mortality rate that was only 12 percent of Philadelphia’s. 

South Africa was rated as the fifth hardest hit country with regards to the Spanish Flu (and last year we were ranked in the top ten of total Covid infections). According to local historian Howard Philips, in his book In a Time of Plague, Memories of the “Spanish” flu epidemic of 1918 in South Africa, our Spanish flu spread in two waves. 

The first was via the port of Durban where returning troops and auxiliaries disembarked, spreading it to the rest of Natal and the Witwatersrand.  The second was when two ships, also carrying demobilised troops, docked in Cape Town. 

From September to October 1918, 60 percent of the South African population contracted the virus, killing upwards of 200,000 nationwide in six weeks. Philips, using eyewitness accounts, writes that by 7 October the virus had engulfed Cape Town, with dead bodies lying uncovered on pavements from Sea Point into the CBD. An eyewitness, Stan Stone, remembered: 

“It was like a city of the dead, yes – it was awesome (horrible), it was quiet, you’d never hear a horse-and-cart, very, very, few motor cars, and, you know, you’d miss the horses’ hoofs going round and the rumbling of the wheels on these gravel roads. It was really, really bad, very bad…” 

That October, an infamous black south-easter – a chilly, spring wind that brings in dark clouds and squalls of horizontal of rain – raged through the streets of Cape Town. The worst affected in the city, in what came to be known as “Black October”, were the poor – especially its non-white citizens. Nontombi Mawu reported from Ndabeni:

“Somebody coming from somewhere fell dead in the street, but I know that in the houses there were 20 or 30 in one house. And in the morning when you come there early everybody’s dead. During the time … there were no dogs barking, there were no fowls crowing, no trains running, everything was at a standstill. Everything was quiet.”

Not unlike Covid, the Spanish Flu had a “longer version”, characterised by strange symptoms. An account by Edith Goring says that after the flu, apart from a general weakness that endured for weeks on end, it was also was very difficult to remember any simple thing, even for five minutes: 

“People whose temperature was very high for days on end, lost all their hair, two or three months later. Fortunately, it grew again.” 

Phillips notes that one of the outcomes of the flu was nearly one million children being orphaned nationwide, Cape Town experiencing a big increase in street children. Other social factors that arose were quackery (no WhatsApp then), witch hunts and religious fervour, leading to “prophets” and even the establishment of the Zionist church.

Reading through Phillip’s work, and the comments of those affected by the Spanish Flu, it indicates there are critical issues that will have to be addressed beyond the immediate urgencies. This is because most of the survivors of the Spanish Flu appeared to have displayed classic signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – depression , hopelessness and despair. 

Anna Heimbold remembers that after the flu had departed there was “a cloud, a dreadful depression over one all the time”. Popema Mhlungu talks of people just crying.

Some survivors spoke of associations that haunted them for the rest of their days, such as the smell of the fever. Many did not want to remember what had happened.

And as our government moves towards its ambitious programme of vaccinating 40 million people in 2021, healing will definitely not just be in the double jab of a syringe. We will be a broken nation, not only ravaged by the deadly aftermath of the disease and its socio-economic devastation, but by societal PTSD.

Despite the bleakness  now, there is a light in the dark vortex. Had it not been for modern medical science, the death rate from Covid would have been much higher. Vaccines were developed in record time – less than 12 months – when previously two years for vaccine development was the conventional minimum.

At the end of the bumpy Covid journey, many challenges will have to be faced: children without parents, hunger, homelessness, public health, employment, psychological trauma and the realisation that compassion, and not capitalism, will help solve our problems. 

The fact is, that like the Spanish Flu, Covid 19 will leave us. For in 1919, Ted Jones woke up one day and noticed that a white cloth had settled on Table Mountain. The south easter was blowing, but this time – thankfully – it was carrying away the cursed germs.

Stephen McGown, Six Years with Al Qaeda book interview

 https://dl.iono.fm/epi/prov_134/epi_967441_medium.m4a?did=6510330d355b7952881883e3f34921ff3ea20e08&p=web&download=1

Seeking a port in a storm: my thoughts on Covid

Rebuilding from Covid's most grievous moments. Copyright Shafiq Morton.

AS someone who has worked in media for 45 years, I have learnt several important lessons. One: life is never predictable. Two: as human beings we have feet of clay, so governments will never be perfect. And three: in the face of adversity, we can be truly heroic, or lamentably corrupt.

These times have certainly brought out the best and the worst in us – the latter being conspiracy-pundits claiming that Covid 19 has been caused by the minions of the Digital World Order, and that we in the media are driving a secret agenda.  

Fueled by YouTube clowns such as Alex Jones, WhatsApp professors, instant Google doctors, conspiratorial trolls and cut-and-paste preachers, the social media world has proved to be as toxic and as viral as Covid itself.

Then there has been the saga of a “mufti alliance” trying to undermine the edicts of the MJC and UUCSA. Apart from deeming us all kafir, their chief contribution to Covid was to embarrass us in the High Court. Claiming (via proxies) that the lockdown was discriminatory, their lawyers bizarrely used secular instruments to try to justify the religious – or was it the other way round?

Admittedly, the lockdowns have been inconsistent at times. But at least we’ve had a government that has tried to save our lives – this juxtaposed against the populist denialism of people such as Trump and Bolsonaro, who have condemned thousands in the Americas to untimely deaths.

Unfortunately, we’ve had our very own Trumps and Bolsonaros. They have cited blind tawakkul as the ultimate panacea to Covid without the prerequisite camel tethering, or applications of intellect. One particular dolt, in a widely distributed WhatsApp posting, even pronounced that he did not wear a mask as his coughing was “not contagious”.

“Everything is due to Allah,” he said, in true Kharijite fashion. And if stricken by Covid, he was confident he would die a martyr – despite his lack of social distancing, his refusal to wear a mask and the potential of him becoming a “super spreader”.

On the other end of the spectrum, a rasping Covid patient, intimately familiar with the ravages of the virus, gave me some simple advice: Shafiq, just keep Covid out of your house! Beware, once it enters your home, you can’t get it out! Indeed, an innocent family function attended by less than 20 – but two of them Covid careless – had seen 10 people positive in less than 48 hours.

I know social distancing is an anathema to us. But life is the supreme motif of the Shari’ah, and if our scholars deem that absenteeism from the mosque or large gatherings in the time of a plague can save lives, then we do it.

Of course, the best in us has been the overwhelming generosity and personal sacrifice of so many people, quietly and unconditionally serving fellow South Africans, be they NGO officials, imams, mosque committees, businesses or individuals. Together with our heroic health workers these people are our backbone, not the reactionary muftis refusing to wear masks.

In the light of all this, I think we can all agree that there is no-one amongst us who has not been affected by Covid. According to Muslim Stats SA in early January, over 1, 500 of us had already fallen to the virus.

For us survivors, insha-Allah, many challenges face us as we deal with the detritus of what is left behind. For us going into an uncertain future, it can no longer be a world for the selfish. It has to be a world for the compassionate.

Neither capitalism (nor our decrepit political parties) will be able to resolve the issues of ongoing rich-poor divides, the socio-economic consequences of Covid and the consistently despoiled environment. What we need is a social contract transcending conventional power relationships, something to systematically transform the post Covid world.

As Muslims, I believe we have the means to play a significant role. But there are many lessons to be learnt first. In his book on European Islam, Travelling Home, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad points to tanfir, the repelling of souls by our repugnant behaviour.

He points out that the paradigmatic word for Islam is “Mercy”, and then asks how many times have we allowed our world view to be governed by excessive anger and fear? If our soul is misshapen by these attributes it will only manifest the unapproachable and extremist ones via stress, discord and ill-controlled desires.

“Nothing is more subversive and obstructive of God’s cause than offering an ugly manifestation of the self and claiming it to be Islamic,” he says.

Tirmidhi reminds us: “Allah loves the beautiful”, and the supreme qualifier is that Islam is of beauty – morally, physically and spiritually. Authentic Muslims love beauty and are people of beauty.

Through this beauty comes the characteristic of wasatiyya, the middle-reasonable way, which must not be confused with capitulation to questionable matters. And through wasatiyya we see the values of hilm, a Prophetic softness – again not a weakness – that embodies compassion for the underdog without arrogance, or any sense of ego.

With the means of the heart – and our hearts have to be in “right place” – we can proceed to the Islamic instruments designed to imbue society with equilibrium, and which could significantly reduce poverty post-Covid.  

We might have heard it before, yes, but there can be no more a critical juncture right now than for the long-term benefits of Zakah and Waqf to be realised. The World Bank, for instance, announced in 2016 that the potential reach of Zakah is a trillion dollars per annum.

If this could be invested in the poorest every 12 months without political corruption, it would not take long to reduce the Gini-Co-efficient. Zakah, a pillar of Islam and an act of worship, is linked to another vital mechanism, the Waqf.

Based on a sustainable investment for the benefit of others in the name of Allah, the Awqaf were so efficient in the Ottoman era that the Caliph in Istanbul had no municipal accounts – everything from water supplies, to schools, to mosques and roads to street lamps were run by self-sustaining Awqaf Trusts.

We could argue that the ideal was reached when there were Awqaf even for the stray cats of the city and for the man “who leaned against the pillar in the mosque”.

And this is where the good, reinforced by our beauty of outlook and hilm, should surely emerge…imagine the day when there could be Awqaf dedicated to the homeless in our cities, the hungry, the orphans and our schools with a continuous stream of Zakah transforming the lives of the most vulnerable.

Shaykh Seraj Hendricks: tribute to a dear friend

THIS is the one obituary I have never wanted to write, that of Shaykh Seraj Hendricks al-Marhum, my closest friend, my teacher and my confidante. I was three years older than him, and I was supposed to pass on before him – but as we always say, Allah knows best.

We became close friends 31 years ago. The Shaykh, then just in his post-Afro-bell-bottom days, was studying to be an ‘alim at Umm ul-Qura’ University in Makkah and sitting at the feet of the great sage, Sayyid Muhammad ‘Alawi al-Maliki. I was a long-haired surfer, photojournalist, magazine editor and eclectic activist.

I was introduced to him by my late wife, Nur, who was his first cousin, and who had grown up in the Azzawia in Walmer Estate, Cape Town, with him. She was his first cousin. He was the nephew of my late father-in-law, Shaykh Ebrahim Hendricks.

Nur always referred to her cousin as “Serajie”, and later as “die Shegh” (the Shaykh).

She would blow into the room and ask him: “hoevaar die Shegh?” (How is the Shaykh?) And he would laugh, and say, “niggie, djy is altyd stout, maar gee my ‘n soentjie.” (My dear cousin, you are always naughty, but come and greet me).

I met Shaykh Seraj for the first time, in the late 1980s, after he had come back to Cape Town for the annual summer recess. In those days, he was staying in Salt River at the house of his late father-in-law, Boeta “Rashiedjie” Abrahams, one of the Azzawia’s imams.

People must have thought us an odd couple. Here was a Shaykh-to-be, imbued with Fiqh and Tasawwuf reflecting a classical tradition, and a salt-stained nobody filled with the stuff of nonsense. But we seemed to click, and I certainly met my match in debate, something we would do for hours on end.

Shaykh Seraj was the one person who had read more books than me. And as his intellectual inferior, I have to confess I was always amazed at how effortlessly, he could bat my philosophical googlies away. He would stylishly out-quote me, and like Brian Lara in his prime, dispatch my argument to the ropes.

Whilst a passion for Deen was our rallying point, our love of literature, the arts and the esoteric was our academic playground. I would come in with ideas about UFOs, he would counter with theories on jinn; I would come in with words of Omar Khayyam and he would quote me Shakespeare or Imam Ghazali.

We were both obsessive about history, and he actively supported my writings on Makkah, Palestine and Tuan Guru – as he supported so many others in their creative endeavours over the years.

As a friend, I tried many times to get the Shaykh to surf, as he tried to get me into computer gaming (one of his recreational passions). He got me as far as admiring the graphics of Warcraft, and I got him as far as fish and chips.

Over the years, we found ourselves sharing many projects and experiences: the United Democratic Front anti-apartheid movement, Voice of the Cape, Dome Publications, the Islamic Unity Conference in Washington, the Imam Ghazali Conference in Cape Town, the soap operas of Muslim Personal Law, the politics of the lunar calendar, TV productions and the hosting of international guests.

However, ours was a friendship that could never be a selfish, or exclusive one. He was an important public figure, a community leader – and he had to be a man for all people at all times.

And although I was in the public eye too (for more frivolous reasons), I could see from a bird’s eye view that people really looked up to him. In three decades, I never saw him giving anything less than 100 per cent in whatever he did.

As media colleague, Mahmood Sanglay, so aptly puts it: “…he always displayed compassion, humility and a genuine recognition of the humanity of the other.”

In other words, his warmth of welcome would transcend the artificial, stilted social mores usually associated with figures of status. He would foreground his own weaknesses in showing himself to others in a rare combination of humble heart and superior intellect.

What I so admired about my dear friend was this bigheartedness. He would so often interrupt his own lectures to acknowledge those sitting in front of him, and lavishly praise their qualities before his.

If the Shaykh had a weakness, it was his inability to say “no” and his inborn innocence about the goodness of human nature. He loved people unconditionally, but there were admittedly times when the demands would become too much, and it would seriously affect his health.

I harbour strong feelings about the “commoditisation”, or exploitation, of scholars such as Shaykh Seraj. I would see this happening at the hands of agenda driven people, and express my concerns, but the Shaykh – despite the inevitable knocks – had too many good thoughts to ever listen to me, a cynical journalist.

As I write, still numb at his passing, I realise just how much I will miss my dearest friend. I will miss the tea we would have after the Tuesday classes, the random discussions we would have from Terrabytes to Tawhid – and of course – the banter at the Friday lunch table.

It reminds me that our friendship was about laughter, aspiration, hope and good things. It was about our families, about the future, the things we still had to do.

What I console myself with is that the name “Seraj” means a “lamp”. My dear friend, Shaykh Seraj, was a lamp – not only just for me – but unselfishly for the thousands of people whose hearts he so lovingly touched.

District Six Mawlud