Cape Town Sunrise

LOW cloud cover and an open piece of sky on the horizon led to an interesting sunrise this morning over the Durbanville hills seen from Walmer Estate.

Copyright Shafiq Morton

South Africa's contribution to Middle East peace should not be belittled

Marius Fransman addresses community on Palestine.

THE op-ed (Cape Argus, 17 August) by Ben Levitas, chairman of the Cape Council of the South African Zionist Federation, alleges that South Africa’s foreign policy is now unfairly, if not irrationally, singling out Israel as an international pariah state.

However, his argument for “balance” on the question of Israel, especially with regards to sanctions, is a partisan cry. It betrays his sense of political equilibrium as being an uncritical support for the Zionist state.

His first point, which marries inference to political hyperbole, claims that “SA has allowed local politics (read the Muslim community) and the anti-Israel agenda of Deputy Minister of International Relations Ebrahim Ebrahim (a member of the community) to determine foreign policy…”

Mr Levitas ignores the fact that the idea of economic sanctions against Israel was adopted at the ANC policy conference at Gallagher Estate earlier this year, and not by the Muslim community. He neglects to say that the ANC policy document on Palestine specifically talks about a “credible inclusive dialogue” within a two-state framework.

He also forgets to notice that the Foreign Policy document included a focus on – amongst other nations – Somalia, Sudan, Cuba, the Western Sahara, Zimbabwe, the DRC, Syria, Swaziland and Haiti. In other words, within the framework of international relations, Israel was not an exclusive target of the ANC.

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies’ notice 379 of 2012 – stating that goods manufactured by Israeli settlers on territory (deemed illegally occupied by international law) should not be labelled Israeli – is within the aegis of policy, as inconsistent as it may seem to Mr Levitas.

Therefore, Mr Levitas’ tacked-on assertion in his article that ANC policy on the Middle East could be “antithetical to SA’s national interest” actually means the direct opposite – it could be antithetical to Israel’s national interest.

South Africa calling for sanctions against Israel recalls an uncomfortable déjà vu of the 1980’s apartheid boycott era, especially if one considers that Israel – having promulgated more than 40 laws discriminating against indigenous Israeli-Arabs in the past five years – fits the legal definition of an apartheid state.

The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign is an international drive to peacefully remind Israel of its moral obligations to observe human rights, and the decent mores of international law – which it so frequently and flagrantly violates.  

To this effect Alon Liel, a former Director General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, has acknowledged that the BDS campaign is a “non-violent wake-up call”. Avrum Burg, a former Speaker at the Knesset, was quoted in The Independent as saying it wouldn’t be “anti-Semitic” to say that settlement goods (produced on Palestinian land) were not kosher.

Mr Levitas makes a thoroughly disingenuous tilt at the government with regards to a quote made by the Muslim Judicial Council on the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Islamic law expressly forbids extra-judicial killings (even if it is Bin Laden) but this seems to bother him. Interpreting his argument it is Bin Laden, and by extension Palestinians, who are “legitimate” targets of state-sponsored murder.

Deputy Minister Marius Fransman, whose sin it was to explain ANC policy formulations on Israel to the Cape Flats community (which is not exclusively Muslim), is mischievously asked whether he disagrees with the extra-judicial killing of Bin Laden. I think that it is Mr Levitas, and not the Minister, who has to answer the question.

Mr Levitas then descends into conspiracy when he asserts that the ANC has thrown its lot in with the Cape Town Muslim community on Palestine to win cheap votes. His argument loses all shape when Mr Levitas argues that the Jews – a smaller demographic group – can be sacrificed and sidelined.

Again, facts are ignored. This statement belies the well-known turmoil within the local Jewish community on the issue of Palestine, and forgets that pro-Palestinian organisations such as Open Shuhada Street and the PSG have very active Jewish members.

Mr Levitas’ naivety about foreign policy is revealed by his unsubtle inference that South Africa has marginalised human lives in places such as South Sudan in deference to Palestine.  He forgets it was our former President, Thabo Mbeki, who recently brokered peace in the strife-torn Southern Sudan.

A further suggestion in Mr Levitas’ article that Israel, unconditionally supported by South Africa, could contribute to solving some our “most pressing problems” is a vacuous cliché. To borrow from Israel Shahak: what on earth could a warmongering nation run by the generals, but dressed up as a democracy, offer South Africa?

One could go on scoring cheap points, but after a while, debunking the bluff of hasbara becomes a tedious, if not fruitless process. Crying sheep when you’ve been fingered as the wolf – as the Zionist lobby so famously does whenever Israel is criticised – has become a predictable response.

It begs the question: surely the time has come for Zionists to realise that they cannot go on defending the indefensible? Surely the time has come to challenge Israeli leaders who suffer paralysis whenever they have to talk peace, or recognise a Palestinian state.

Surely the time has come for Israel to realise that its future does not lie in demonising the Arab world and Iran? Surely the time has come for Jews to understand that by recognising Palestinian rights they will not suffer a second holocaust, or lose their identity.

Of course, the truism is that the leap of faith currently required by Israel will never be easy. Treaties are hardly ever negotiated between parties who like each other.  

And in South Africa, aspirations by South Africans to contribute constructively to peace in the Middle East should not be belittled by the uninformed cynicism, or the strident political brinkmanship of those who should know better.

Moon Sighting PhotoEssay

About 5,000 people gathered to look for the moon at
Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town, for the end of Ramadan 2012.



Crescent observer Hakim Shaikh Seraj Hendricks
makes announcement.

WP Premier and the Mayor with VOC staffers Jamiel Wallace
and Goolam Fakier

                                      
                                                                 
                                     
                                                               

                                                            

                                                             
                                                                      

                                                  Final Tarawih, Azzawia, Cape Town.               

                                    
                                     
                                     
                                     

The Cape of Storms

OVER the weekend Cape Town was hit by a massive cold front that brought north-westerly gales and driving rain. These frontal systems rumble in from the south Atlantic and have been the cause of many a shipwreck.

The Sea Point beachfront has claimed many wrecks in the past 300 years and these pics show why Cape Town is sometimes known as the Cape of Storms. Out to sea the swells were 4-5 metres.

A lonely ship fights a raging swell and gale in Table Bay.

Sea Point Pavilion, a popular summer spot is hammeered
by a series of angry waves.

The force of the Atlantic explodes in a ball of energy.

The Sea Point promenade gets smashed.

A ship crashes into the the swells, Table Bay.





In the rain and gale force winds, the sea gathers energy.





Animal moods...

Cape Baboon shows pearlies.

Waiters on the beach?

Cat on a hot green roof.

Cats on a cold floor.

A live handbag.

Into the ether.

Now where do I land?



Humans are weird.



Flying rats, no way. Birds of Paradise.

The Faith of Interfaith

Muslims and Christians worked together against Apartheid.
Bishop Desmond Tutu and Shaikh Nazeem Mohamed, 1989.

THE other day a listener rebuked me on the station’s SMS line for expressing disgust that a local nashid group had been pulled off stage at a festival in Gauteng, in spite of the group having a contract from a Muslim impresario to perform at the event.

Apparently it was the old chestnut of music being forbidden, and some Mother Grundy’s raising enough of a ruckus to intimidate the event organisers into cancelling the performance.

However, the SMS message bearer had tackled me on another matter: didn’t I know, he said in the way of conspiracy, that these people (the nashid group) encouraged inter-faith marriages?  Didn’t I know that I was associating with haraam?

I must admit that I was perturbed, not about the personal criticism, but rather the gross insensitivity of the comment. The nashid group’s vocalist’s wife – a classical musician of international renown – has a Christian name, and I felt that the SMS was in extraordinary bad taste.

I can vouch for this person’s integrity and could only assume that the message bearer had, for some reason, been too angry to reason with himself. Had he realised, that as he had hammered out his SMS, how harsh and hostile his words were?

I feel I have to rebuke my detractor, not only on the issue of his rank bad manners, but on the fact that I’ve seen the nashid group’s subtle arrangements soften many hearts towards Allah – many more than those who scream haraam in SMS’s.  

One just has to wonder when we’ll fully realise the impact of such outbursts; unconsidered statements that ignore the vast body of Islamic studies on the issues concerned. It’s precisely this narrow-mindedness  that gives fruit to Islamophobic stereotype.

Part of the SMS correspondent’s beef could also have been that the nashid group has performed on interfaith platforms, another issue that gets up the noses of our ghetto Orientalists. For them interfaith is a necessary evil at best, and a crisis of unbelief at worst.

I always think it’s a great pity that our contemporary ills of ignorance and fundamentalism have blinded us to the inclusive – as opposed to exclusive – compassion of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), and the fact that he is, as Qur’an says, “a mercy for all …”.   

This is further reinforced by the Qur’anic verses that are preceded by: “O mankind!” This imperative is a Merciful God talking to all of humanity, a human collective that He loves. His concern is for everybody, for all living beings.

And this is why I would venture that Islam is logically a faith of interfaith. Jibril, the Messenger Angel, carried the message of the Divine Pen to a prophet called Muhammad (SAW) for all peoples, for all beings and for all times. 

In fact, the historical evidence is so overwhelming that Islam is a Deen – a way of being that acknowledges the cross-pollination of Adam, Abraham, Isma’il, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Jesus (as)  – that to deny it would be foolish.

Those who so loudly disparage interfaith need to remind find themselves, that on serious investigation, they will find themselves from the DNA of those who embraced Islam from other cultures and beliefs.

Madinah, the city to which the Prophet (SAW) migrated to escape Quraish oppression in Makkah, became the classical locus of faith drawing numbers into Islam from interfaith. For if people of other faiths had not embraced the Deen at the at the hands of the Prophet (SAW), there would have been no Islam.

Even before then, interfaith interaction had come into play. A group of Muslims had fled to Abyssinia where a Christian king, the Negus, had sheltered them. And the great Sayyidina ‘Umar, destined to be a Caliph, had been a polytheist when he’d set out to confront the Prophet (SAW).

If there’d been no interfaith tolerance in Madinah the Prophet (SAW) would not have attracted giants of Islam such as Suhail the Roman (a polytheist), Salman al-Farsi (a Persian Zoroastrian) and Ka’b al-Ahbar (an Arab Jew).

Even Islam’s concept of communal endowment, or waqf, has its origins in interfaith association. The Rabbi Mukhairiq from the Tha’alaba tribe, who fought with the Muslims at Uhud, made the Prophet (SAW) his heir. He died in battle and his property was made waqf.

Tamim ad-Dari, who as a Christian on his way to Madinah sold his camel to buy seven lamps for the mosque, was granted the lands of Hebron. Ad-Dari, who became Muslim, was only one of a handful of scholars (together with Imam Abu Hanifah) who could recite the 114 chapters of the Qur’an in one prayer cycle.

The point is that the Prophet (SAW) never spurned anyone who sought his company, dining at the tables of Christians and Jews, meeting their delegations and discussing important matters with them. A pillar in Madinah’s mosque, the Pillar of the Delegates, even commemorates this.

The Prophet (SAW) also married women of other faiths. How many of us remember that the Prophet’s (SAW) wife, Safiyyah, was a Jewess and that his son Ibrahim was born to Maria the Copt?

This supports the injunction that Muslim men can marry women of the Torah and Gospel. Arguing the greater sanctity of previous eras to oppose this, as some do, is baseless nonsense.

Of course, there will be those who will argue that the Qur’an warns about association and describes, in detail, the categories of those who try to subvert belief. But that is not to understand the specificity (khass) of those verses, which deal expressly with those who are antagonistic.

That is why Islam was the first civilisation to develop legislation dealing with the rights of those minorities under rule its rule. These people, the dhimmi, would enjoy the rights to worship, the rights to property and the rights to be self-governed on matters such as marriage and inheritance.

But to decry and debase those who are friendly to us, as my SMS critic has done through his misguided anger, is to deny our very own humanity. Those not hostile to Islam, as the Prophet (SAW) showed throughout his life, have to enjoy dignity and honour.

On the Wings of an Angel



The horizons to which Jibril's wings stretched on the night of the Revelation.



JABL NUR – the Mount of Light on which the Rasullulah (SAW) received his first Revelation on 27 Ramadan – is a sweaty climb for the modern pilgrim. For the hardy Arabs of the pre-Islamic Hijaz, it was a gentle walk.

Before Islam, Ramadan was not a holy month. But it was when the Quraish would practice tahannuth, a spiritual retreat. The Makkan patriarch, Abdul Muttalib, used to practice tahannuth. It is presumed that his grandson, Muhammad (SAW), learnt it from him.

Climbing this noble mountain in the early dawn light there is a breathless silence that blankets the landscape. It’s this awe-inspiring emptiness that was the grist for Islam’s first words.

As one stands on Jabl Nur’s topmost peak, the grand design becomes apparent. Below, the Cave of Hira – where the Prophet (SAW) would seclude himself – seems to have been the result of the mountain praying:

“O Allah, one day I will host a great Prophet. Please Allah; allow my rocks to crack open and shelter him.”

So merciful was this “natural” occurrence that one rock fell to provide a bench, upon which the Prophet (SAW) must have sat.

As the vista lightens, and the sun rises over Makkah’s wrinkled peaks and valleys, the enormity of the first Revelation takes shape. One can see from horizon to horizon, and it’s to these horizons that Jibril’s wings extended when he showed himself to the Prophet (SAW).

It’s a truly enchanting moment, when the pilgrim – rewarded for his effort – feels as if he’s sitting on the wings of an Angel.