Habibia celebrates 100

Over the weekend the Habibia mosque in Cape Town celebrated the 100th  anniversary of Maulana Abdul Latief al-Chistiyyah (ra) the founder of the institution, which includes a mosque complex, an orphanage and a school. It started as a corrugated iron shack in a then desolate area of Cape Town called the Cape Flats.

The Maulana predicted that it would eventually become a "city", and today the mosque complex is situated in the flourishing suburb of Rylands Estate. His 100th anniversary also marked the renovation of his mazaar, which is in the mosque grounds. Guest speaker was Shaikh Ahmad Sa'ad al-Hasani, a descendant of the Holy Prophet who spoke about ihsan, or character excellence.

 

 

 

© Photos Shafiq Morton

 

The Ladies of Leliesfontein

Twenty-five years ago the community of Leliesfontein in Namaqualand won their birthright back after a successful court claim. To celebrate they had a church service and and showed the media their ancestral land taken from them at the height of apartheid.

 

 

© Shafiq Morton Photos

Syria: now a human tragedy beyond words

Pic: Mark Austin - www.mirror.uk


While the cold war that is Syria rages on with Iran and Russia on the one side, and Israel and the western axis on the other, Syrians witness their country self-destruct and their lives unravel in brutal fashion. It’s a human tragedy beyond words, beyond description.

The figures – over 70,000 dead, up to 60,000 missing, five million displaced, millions starving, thousands detained, thousands raped, thousands tortured and thousands massacred – have become meaningless.

They are numbers that cannot express the suffering that Syrian civilians now endure in their smashed cities and overcrowded refugee camps. For these people burying their dead, their cries are that the rest of the world has to wake up. Recently the UN Relief Agency said it was running out of funds for Syria.

But while President Bashar al-Asad – who is seen to be the stumbling block – is propped up by Iranian and Hezbollah forces and Russian-supplied arms, he will hang grimly onto power. He will last as long his Iranian and Russian masters find him useful, and as long as the Syrian opposition remains politically fractured.   

Called a ‘dead man walking’ by the US State Department last year, Asad is remarkably healthy for a political corpse. Iran, which regards Syria as its closest ally and supports Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, has much to lose in the region.

 Iran’s concern is a hostile Sunni-led government (Syrians are 80% Sunni) as opposed to the Shi’ah-aligned, but thoroughly secular ruling Alawite minority. There are Iranian officials who believe leaving Syria will break a ‘golden thread’ running through Tehran to Damascus.

They believe it will also bring Israel – itching to make a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s non-existent WMD programme – to within a shouting distance of Tehran. It’s hardly likely, either, that Iran will be happy to contemplate a sectarian homeland, which has been suggested as a last resort for the 10-15% Alawite minority.

For Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have financially supported certain Free Syrian Army groups, an Iranian withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon would prevent their bogey, a ‘Shi’ah crescent’ from sweeping deeper into the Middle East and the Gulf through neighbouring Iraq.

Russia’s presence in Syria is because Damascus has been a faithful ally for over 50 years. Russia’s last cold-war naval base is in Tartus. With Moscow not willing to forgo a regional presence, Russia’s (and China’s) Security Council veto checkmates the western axis on NATO intervention.

For once, the US – wary of another Iraq – has been forced to be something of a bit player, lobbying for sanctions and providing what is essentially small-scale financial support to the FSA. Turkey has had to play a cautious diplomatic role, allowing refugees and humanitarian aid to cross its southern border, as has Jordan – who now wants a US sponsored buffer zone between it and Syria.  

Russia, I believe, is now playing its ‘Iraq-Halliburton endgame’ in Syria, and like China and Iran, will probably want to benefit from deals to rebuild the country’s infrastructure once the conflict ends.

Since the Arab Spring, power vacuums have been created in the Middle East. Syria, for instance, has had little experience of political process. Asad’s few concessions to the uprising (which he blames on western-sponsored religious extremists) have all been geared to maintaining the status quo.

The point is that there has been no room for political discourse. Politics, and not religion, is at the core of the Syrian problem – and the Syrian mukhabarat, or security police, have clamped down on any opposition since 1970.

It’s unrealistic, therefore, to expect that the FSA – reflecting diverse viewpoints – would be able to coalesce overnight into a united political front. We all know how Egypt, Tunisia and Libya have struggled.

The disparate, if not rag-tag Free Syrian Army is unanimously resolute in removing Asad, but equally determined to guard its hard won turf. Many FSA commanders, for example, are said to be extremely unhappy about the extremism of Jabhat al-Nusra, the foreign-manned Al-Qaeda-linked unit said to be responsible for many of the bombings. 

Bashar al-Asad, however, has had to deal with much more than revolution and mercenary Salafists. It has hardly been noted that he has also had to face economic meltdown – partly caused by his own greed, and partly by climate change.  

With the economy moribund by the late 1990’s, the Asad regime resorted to privatisation. This resulted in wealth accumulating amongst the ruling elite, and it caused Syria’s already yawning poverty gap to widen even further.

A devastating drought in the north-east of the country saw an implosion of the agricultural sector, mass urbanisation, burgeoning youth unemployment and massive cost-of-living increases.  

So when teenagers scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a school blackboard in the city of Deraa, and were viciously beaten and tortured (this incident sparked the uprising) it was an equal measure of political and economic frustration that moved the Syrian cataclysm.

Asad’s response to peaceful demonstrations was to turn his guns upon the crowds and to unleash the shabihah (notorious paramilitary gangs).

The escalation of the conflict is well-known, and the extent of its violence, horrifying. Human Rights Watch in its April report, ‘Death from the Skies’, accuses the Syrian air force of ‘indiscriminate’ and sometimes ‘deliberate’ attacks on civilian targets such as bakeries and hospitals.

A UN panel earlier this year also found that ‘gross human rights violations’ had occurred at the hands of the Syrian government. It found that the Free Syrian Army had also committed abuses, but not on the same scale as Asad’s forces.

But the most disturbing development has been the assassination of religious leaders. The most notable has been Shaikh Ramadan al-Buti, an internationally renowned scholar who was politically cautious, but reportedly on the brink of speaking out against the regime. He met his demise in a suicide blast whilst delivering a lecture in his Damascus mosque.

In one of the darkest moments of the Middle East conflict, over 40 died. Who is responsible for such a despicable act is not the question here. For when sacred space becomes the battlefield, and we have forgotten how to disagree, we have surely entered the darkest domains of the human spirit, a detestable place where cruelty and hate rule over compassion and mercy.

South Africa seen as a model for Islamic minorities

A younger Ebrahim Rasool (right) with Mandela, April 1994.
© Shafiq Morton

Whilst we as South Africans face challenges such as poverty, crime, corruption, endemic political sleaze and the ghosts of apartheid, the pioneering work of our constitution builders in accommodating minorities within our post-apartheid society has stood the test.

Most South Africans know today that in principle they’re equal on the playing fields of civil liberties. Under the constitution – which is the overarching national mediator – every citizen is entitled to enjoy the same rights, regardless of who is in power.

Our democratic model guarantees in turn that every community is assured of its identity under the national umbrella. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Rastas, Hindus, African traditionalists, atheists, gays – and every group in between – stand on the same ground.

And whilst a few members of the above communities may sometimes whinge that the constitution is too ‘liberal’, they certainly can’t complain that it has marginalised them. Importantly, they enjoy freedom of association, freedom of speech and access to power.

There are also few countries in the world today where its leaders will happily visit mosques, temples, churches and synagogues, or identify with minority communities on public platforms as former President Nelson Mandela has done.

In Europe, for example, one will have a better chance of spotting a golden unicorn than witnessing the French President attending Ramadan prayers, or the German Chancellor cutting the ribbon for an ashram.

 South African community that has profoundly benefited from the post-1994 constitutional framework has been the Muslim one. Constituting no more than 5% of the national population, it has been empowered to contribute significantly to all tiers of government, the economy and society.

South African Muslims are not only free to exercise their dietary laws, build mosques and enjoy public gatherings such as festivals, but Islamic personal law has finally been recognised after over 350 years of non-recognition.

Recently, the South African situation was regarded as a ‘best practice’ model at a colloquium held in Paris entitled Living Where We Don’t Make the Rules. Hosted by the World for All Foundation (headed by SA’s ambassador to the US, Ebrahim Rasool) and the International Union of Muslim Scholars, experts from 22 nations gathered to discuss the lot of Muslim minorities around the globe.

According to Rasool, with 25% (half a billion) of the world’s 2.2 billion Muslims now living as minorities, it was time to reflect on ‘the anguish that minorities often experienced’. This anguish was a struggle to find synergy between the values of faith and the dominant culture on one hand, and social and political hostility on the other.

Whilst he agreed that the context of minorities was broad – India has a population of 160 million and Iceland barely a thousand – he felt that questions such as globalisation, migration, secularism and extremism had affected all communities and the 90-plus countries in which Muslims now resided.

9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ had had an impact, and only now was the Muslim world beginning to ‘emerge out of a long night of hostility’. For minorities who had faced this hostility whenever extremist fringes had grabbed the headlines, it had been extremely difficult.

“Two top scholars at the colloquium, Prof Tariq Ramadan and Ingrid Matson, both agreed that Islamophobia and Islamic extremism were inextricably linked,” he said.

Rasool explained that the extremist vision of a jihad between Muslim-dominated territory and non-Muslim dominated territory was debunked as not representing mainstream thought. The colloquium had asserted that a Dar ul-Shahadah (a place of peace, free worship and association) was the orthodox model.

Shaikh Rashid Ghannouchi of Tunisia (and leader of its Islamic An-Nahda Party) had stated that democracy and human rights were germane to Islam. Muslim minorities, he said – citing South Africa as an example ­of how Muslims could integrate into a society without losing their values – had to participate in the affairs of their host countries.

Rasool said that discussion revealed that there were a number of issues common to all communities.

“Infrastructure deficit was the most prominent refrain where people said there weren’t enough mosques. There was also a strong call for judiciary institutions, particularly in post-communist Central Asia.”

Rasool added that right across the board there was agreement that countries should educate their own religious leaders on home soil, so that they wouldn’t reflect influences alien to the cultures they were sent to.

“The question was: how do we train our scholars locally for local needs? We need to develop indigenous scholars.”

On the question of Shari’ah (or Sacred Law) Rasool said that a Cape Town scholar, Shaikh Seraj Hendricks, had stated that Muslim minority communities were not here to subvert balanced constitutions, or even create a ‘sub-text’.

However, there had to be space for an application of personal law in matters such as marriage, inheritance and halal food. Muslims had to be allowed, like any other group, to live peacefully according to their principles.

Rasool said that misrepresentation of Shari’ah within a minority context had seen nine US states passing legislation that would in future deny Muslims personal law on the most basic of issues. In France, where secularism had turned ‘stifling’, lawmakers were talking of passing legislation forbidding any kind of religious wear in public.

 Rasool commented that gender bias and the empowerment of women was a critical discussion in the Living Where We Don’t Make the Rules colloquium. We had to be mindful that whilst in the US women are venturing to the moon, in Saudi Arabia they were not even allowed to drive.

 “In conclusion, we hope via a soon-to-be issued statement, the Paris Declaration, to move towards a programme of positive action and interfaith conversation. We want to move to defuse extremism and Islamophobia, to manage historical issues of concern to the West and to fully understand the application of Islam in a minority context.”

Ratiep

The Ratiep, where the participants stab and hit themselves without injury, has been a regular practice in Cape Town for over a century. It is said that the dhikr - the recitation of Allah's names - imbues the participant with protection against injury. This group was performing at the karamat - or tomb of Shaikh Yusuf of Makasar (the political exile and founding father of South African Islam in 1694) - over the Easter Weekend. The festival at the Karamat dates back 150 years when Muslim families would pack their belongings into donkey carts and camp for the weekend at the banks of the Kuils River where Sh Yusuf lies buried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pics © Shafiq Morton

The Halal of Hilal – South Africa’s secret moon sighting debacle

© Shafiq Morton

One of the most established traditions in the South African Muslim community has been the sighting of the new crescent to herald the Islamic lunar months. This is a tradition that was born over 350 years ago in Cape Town.

Sixty-seven years ago this community function was formalised with the founding of the Crescent Observer’s Society (COS) and the election of a Hakim, a qualified scholar to act as its legal arbiter.

The principle of sighting the new crescent with the naked eye (ruya in Arabic) is an act in conformity with Shari’ah, or Sacred Law. So is the ruling (the hukm) of the COS Hakim whether the moon has been sighted or not, and whether a new Islamic month will commence.

In this context the hukm is a juridicial ruling as opposed to a fatwa, which is a juridicial opinion.                                         

For more than six decades the COS has faithfully served the community. Each month its observers have gone to Three Anchor Bay, Signal Hill, Soetwater near Kommetjie and Stellenbosch to observe the crescent in the Western Cape region.

Today the observation footprint has expanded to South Africa’s major centres. KwaZulu Natal, Kimberly, the Eastern Cape and Gauteng go out to sight the crescent in conjunction with the COS.

For decades, the sighting of the crescent has been strictly governed by national consensus. If during the winter months the Cape was occluded, and the crescent visible in the north, sightings from the north would be taken into consideration by the Hakim. The same would apply in the summer months, when the chances of the rest of the country being clouded over were high.

In addition, all parties working with the COS had agreed that in order to avoid chaos, 10.30 pm in summer and 9.30 pm in winter would be the cut-off times for moon-sighting testimonies.

Whilst minority communities in Great Britain and the United States have been stricken with bitter conflict on hilal matters, South Africa has – until very recently – been a shining exception.

However, this was tested earlier this year when the United Ulama Council of South Africa (UUCSA) was accused of undermining the integrity of the COS and in so doing, threatening to divide the community.

This led from events on the 29th Rabi ul-Awwal (February 11) when the COS reported that the crescent had not been visible in the sky, and that the lunar month would extend to a final 30th day.

It was an interesting scenario – if not a minor anomaly – because the crescent was 34 hours old (an observable age) with a viewing time of 29 minutes. The problem was that the moon had an extremely low trajectory – its position was in the light orange of the sunset, as opposed to the deeper-coloured higher layer.

Consequently, COS observers did not see the crescent anywhere in the country. After hearing nation-wide testimony from certified witnesses, the Hakim ruled that the following day would be the 30th Rabi ul-Awwal. This would mean that the next month, Rabi ul-Thani, would begin on the 13th February.

As for the past 1,000 or so months the COS has viewed the crescent, the decision was unanimously accepted. The judgement was broadcast over the airwaves of the Muslim radio stations.

Five days later, Islamic broadcasters received a press release on the letterhead of UUCSA on behalf of its Hilal Committee. The statement said that the hukm of the COS Hakim had been abrogated, and that the calendar now had to be reversed. Rabi ul-Thani had started on the 12th February and not the 13^th.

According to the UUCSA official, a maulana in the north had seen the crescent on the night of 29th Rabi ul-Awwal, but had only reported it three days later. I discovered that the maulana (not identified by UUCSA) hailed from a community in Venda.

I also found out that UUCSA’s ‘Hilal Committee’ was a somewhat vacuous entity of undetermined members. Investigation also revealed that this decision had been unilateral, conducted without consultation, and agreed to by two officials from UUCSA – one from the Gauteng Jami’at and one from the Cape-based Muslim Judicial Council.  

According to MJC sources even its President had not been informed, only learning about the calendar reversal via other means.

The COS responded by sending a letter to UUCSA in which it accused UUCSA of failing to consult with it on the matter, and having ignored decades of protocol and procedure. It also said that UUCSA had flagrantly violated the agreement of cut-off times for crescent-sighting testimonies.

In its brief COS said that the shart – or foundational condition of any ruling – preceded everything else in basic Islamic jurisprudence, specifically if it complements the tenets of Shari’ah.  In other words, UUCSA had no legal Islamic right to mandatorily reverse the original Shari’ decision.

The only exception, said the COS, would be a re-deliberation on the matter by a consensual majority and full consultation with all role players – something that had clearly not occurred.

The COS had also posed the question of what would have happened had UUCSA made its decision during important dates such as Ramadan, and speculated on the pandemonium that could have ensued.

Shortly after the letter was sent, the COS was asked to attend a meeting at the MJC offices in Cape Town. This meeting was postponed. It has remained postponed ever since, begging the serious question of which tail is wagging which dog in the netherworld of scholarly politics.

Real men brush their teeth

 

© Shafiq Morton

Discourse with fundamentalists of any ilk can be frustrating. Perhaps that’s why the great 12th century scholar, Imam al-Ghazali, wrote that engaging with those unable to listen was like competing with the braying of an ass.

He suggested that it was a waste of time – those who didn’t know that they didn’t know were beyond help. I can only agree with him. When you can only listen to the sound of your own voice, it’s difficult to hear others.

 
I had this kind of experience the other day in cyberspace when trying to explain that Muslims were not pathological wife beaters. The main protagonist was an evangelical, born-again pastor.

I do not mean to demean Christianity. But I do think we have to be honest: there are extremes in all faiths on this earth, and we always have to guard against the centre being judged by its fringes.

That is where the fallacy comes from that Muslims are wife bashers – from the patriarchal fringes of Islamic extremism. Wife-beating is an old chestnut, triumphally presented by ignorant Islamophobes to the world as a theological absolute.

“You beat your wives, your Prophet allows wife-bashing,” your Qur’an says it,” the pastor would crow, referring to Surat un-Nisaa (the Chapter of the Women) and its famous verse 34 – which we will examine later.

In the tradition of true-blue fundamentalism, his was a literalist reading, and no amount of argument could convince him otherwise. He entertained no room for nuance, metaphor or qualifiers of meaning – such as Prophetic Traditions or other Qur’anic verses.

When I told him that the Qur’an could only be interpreted through its core language, Arabic, he would say he could understand the Qur’an perfectly in English! Why would he have to study Arabic? And so it went. I was an apologist. I felt Mullah Nasruddin had a better chance of persuading Chuck Norris to wear a turban.

But it did get me to thinking.  Violence against women is endemic in South Africa. Our community is not exempt from it. Who can forget the ‘Gadaffi’ killing in Mitchell’s Plain, for example?

Cultural aberrations aside, can Muslim men lift their hands against their wives? What is verse 34 in Surat un-Nisaa verse 34 really saying?

To answer we have to first examine what I would call the ‘qualifiers’, other Qur’anic verses and Prophetic Traditions dealing with the treatment of women. I’m not a Qur’anic scholar, but it doesn’t take much to realise that the Holy Book is a complex tapestry of many threads of meaning.

For example, when we are told that Ibrahim (as) is a ‘hanifan musliman’ (a sound monotheist) we immediately understand this because of other verses extolling his virtues. In fact, the Qur’an itself – which is the Creator’s voice – says that it has many paths.

But back to Surat un-Nisaa, verse 34, which says that should a wife indulge in disloyalty and misconduct, a husband should first admonish her. Failing that, he should withdraw from the marital bed, and failing that – the last resort – he should ‘beat’ her (lightly).

Taken out of context, as they are here, these verses appear bleakly patriarchal.  But if we add context – Surat ul-Baqarah saying in verse 228 that men and women enjoy rights over each other – the picture begins to change dramatically.

If one considers that this is a statement made in the 7^th century, it is ground-breaking – for just before the Prophetic era, the Quraish were burying their newly-born daughters alive in the graveyard.  

In Surat un-Nisaa one quickly observes that preceding verse 34, issues such as who can marry, dowries, fair treatment of slaves and self-restraint are revealed. Verse 34 opens with men ‘standing firmly with’ or being the ‘protectors’ of women. This is hardly a chauvinistic discourse.

The second half of verse 34 deals with a worst case scenario of marital discord, and even then, verse 35 exhorts serious reconciliation before any kind of parting.  If one adds Hadith to the context, the books of Bukhari and Muslim reveal overwhelmingly that the Prophet (SAW) ordered that women be treated kindly.

So how do we reconcile ourselves to verse 34 that uses the word ‘wa-dribuhunna’, which literally means, ‘beat them’? A look in any serious Arabic lexicon will reveal that the root word ‘daraba’ has a primary meaning followed by a myriad of other secondary meanings such as ‘shun’ and ‘separate from’.

In fact, there are over 50 different applications – and meanings – attributed to this one word. Like all Arabic verbs they are given context by their prepositions. But herein lies a problem. In the Qur’an there is no preposition.

Evidence points towards the Prophetic generation comprehending verse 34 as ‘beat’ or ‘strike’. However, their tafsir (or exegesis) reflects the softness and subtlety of the Prophet’s (SAW) character – something forgotten in our hard age.

Imam Hasan al-Basri, one of the greatest early scholars, echoes Hadith that – if forced to – one should tap one’s spouse very lightly with a miswak, or toothbrush. Furthermore, no harm could be done or marks left.

Other scholars assert that the miswak could only be picked up with a Qur’an under each armpit! And according to some reports, Imam Shafi’i (ra) was even against the lifting of a miswak.

So why the word ‘beat’? Of course, Allah knows best, but surely the emphasis here is on the very seriousness of marital discord? And, naturally, what our evangelical pastor – and the modern Shari’ah-ists ­– have profoundly failed to understand is that ‘beat’ in this Qur’anic verse is wholly symbolic.

For without its symbolic aspects to emphasise the very seriousness of marital conflict, verse 34 would contradict Prophetic Tradition and Qur’an, which enjoins gender justice. 

Yusuf ‘Ali in his Qur’anic translation bases a lot of his interpretations on classical texts. His bracketed meanings frequently point to traditional commentary from Al-Jalalain to Imam al- Ghazali (ra). For why would he  write in verse 34 ‘beat (lightly)?’

I think the answer is clear. Our Prophet (SAW) did not condone wife-beating, and nor did he ever smile upon domestic violence. Real men use miswaks for cleaning their teeth.