The true meaning of African heritage: rebuilding the walls of our broken history

Aerial view of some Mpumalanga stone circles, South Africa.

DO we miss the point when Heritage Day, celebrated on 24 September, becomes a national orgy of braaing? The barbecue might well have been one of early humankind’s finest culinary moments, but it does reduce our culture to a disappointingly low historical denominator.

Indeed, we Africans were probably the first humans to roast meat, so the question is whether we just want to remember ourselves this way. For the truth is that Africa has a rich and largely unrealised history.

I first truly understood this on a visit to the Cairo museum many years ago. As a repository of North African civilisation, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is an overwhelming adventure. With over 100,000 pieces, its dusty halls are a fascinating time-machine of stone, mummies, wood and papyrus.

On that day there was a particular fresco that caught my eye. In it was a black Nubian aristocrat being attended to by a bevy of fair-skinned slaves. As a South African, I was transfixed: there it was – a Middle Kingdom mural, over 3, 000 years old, debunking the racial stereotype of apartheid.

That image – and the idea that Africa has influenced history as opposed to being influenced by history – has obsessed me ever since. Civilisation has never confined itself to Asia, the Middle East or Europe.

The most striking example of this is the notion that the Greeks were the sole flag-bearers of modern civilisation. Some historians devalue the Islamic period which led to the Latin renaissance, and most certainly they ignore the possibility that early geometry and mathematics could enjoy an African heart.

This is because it was the Egyptians, who when building the pyramids, had to understand the concept of the right angle some 2,000 years before Eudemus of Rhodes, or Euclid. According to the Senegalese historian, Chika Anta Deop, Pythagorean theory emanated from Egypt, not Greece.

But that is not all, the world’s oldest-known mathematical artefact, the Lebombo Bone, was discovered 40 years ago in Swaziland. Dating back some 40, 000 years, the bone is the carved fibula of a baboon, and according to experts, is most likely a lunar counter to monitor menstrual phases. 

The Ishango bone.

The discovery is far from anecdotal, as a Belgian geologist discovered a similar artefact, the Ishango bone, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Ishango bone is about 20,000 years old. The notion that African women could have been humankind’s first mathematicians is certainly a poser for history.

Nor is it unrealistic that some of the world’s most ancient civilisations could hail from our very own shores. The discovery of a stone metropolis in Mpumalanga a few hundred kilometres west of Maputo, has raised historical eyebrows and is demanding that our orthodox narrative be seriously re-examined.

Said to be many thousands of years old, the circular dolerite stone structures – seen clearly on Google maps – cover a massive area. Predictably, early European explorers dismissed these stone circles as “cattle kraals”. The unearthing of an ankh symbol, a Horus bird and the alignment of a rock calendar called Inzalo Ye Langa (Birthplace of the Sun), raise fascinating questions about these ruins.  

It also begs the question, whether as a species, we were already advanced in terms of consciousness and technologybefore we migrated out of Africa across the continental land bridges into Europe and Asia?

There is much cryptic narrative in the work of Credo Mutwa, whose book Indaba My Children, is a compendium of Nguni legend. Mutwa’s narrative mentions battles with large apes (anthropologists do say Homo sapiens did once live side-by-side with Neanderthals) and white men (Phoenicians) who sailed up the Zambesi River.

Unfortunately, the Phoenicians – who came looking for gold, slaves and ivory – were an unwelcome, predatory force. Nonetheless, it is widely held that the Phoenicians used a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, and rounded the Cape in about 600 BCE. An account by the Greek historian, Herodotus, confirms this.

Local author Jose Burman, in Strange Shipwrecks of the Southern Seas, writes about two wrecks being discovered on the Cape Flats in the 19th century. Reports say their timber burnt well in Cape Town’s fireplaces, and gave off the scent of cedar – the wood from which Phoenician galleys are constructed.

Whilst some academics are unconvinced, an account by George Thompson in his Travels and Adventures in South Africa (1827), gives a credible first-hand account of an ancient, ribbed ship at the foot of the Tygerberg. The next fleet to round the Cape was, according to author Gavin Menzies, skippered by the Chinese Admiral, Zheng He, in 1421.

In the meantime, African empires across the Sahara from Senegal to Sudan rose to great heights. The Malian Madinkas and the Songhai controlled territories far greater than that of Europe, the madrasahs of Timbuktu enjoying international acclaim.

And when the emir, Mansa Musa, went on Hajj in 1324 he carried so much gold that he changed the economy of the towns he passed through. Then there is the 14th century Malian ruler, Mansa Abu Bakr II, who sailed across the Atlantic with 200 ships, but never returned. Archaeological evidence points to the African mariners landing near Mexico, and reaching the Americas 180 years before Columbus.

Indeed, Africa has given the world a lot we take for granted today: coffee, capsicum and so much more. Then there are the Dogon people of Mali, who before telescopes, knew that the Milky Way was spiral and that Saturn had rings. Africa had a huge edge in metallurgy too, Tanzanian, Ugandan and Rwandan furnaces being able to reach 1,800 degrees Celsius, and burn hotter than Roman ones.

Closer to home, we have the neglected narratives of the Khoi and the San, the original pastoralists and the original hunter-gatherers, whom I feel have been as ignored by the present regime as the past one. The Khoi (or Khoekhoe) used to graze their herds on the banks of the Liesbeeck River. But where are the public parks and where are the memorials?

Liesbeeck River

The Khoi-Gari-Qua used to live on the west coast. When they were creolised through mixing with other races, they became the Garigriqua, and under the leadership of Adam Kok, settled along the Orange River.

The creolised – or coloured – identity admixed with slave, European, Asian and African bloods, and as equally dispossessed as any black Nguni group, bears an unrecognised historical anguish; an anguish made even worse by current public policy. This is primarily because we don’t understand yesterday adequately enough to deal with today.

And that, perhaps, should be the challenge of the heritage month of September, and more particularly, Heritage Day. We need to rebuild the broken walls of our history, pull out the weeds of ignorance and cut down the thorn trees of Eurocentric cynicism sprouting in the ruins of our palaces. 

South African school hair protests are good for our democracy

What is wrong with traditional?

What has happened is a healthy harbinger of social change, and is yet another signal from our youth that the racist detritus of the past must go.

THE so-called “Afro-saga” surrounding the issue of multi-cultural hairstyles at schools, which burst dramatically into the public arena via recent events at Pretoria Girls High and Sans Souci, is something that has been brewing for years.

No-one should have been surprised when after decades of identity harassment, a group of Pretoria High learners would decide that enough was enough, and would mount a silent protest action by dressing in black and wearing doeks at the school fair.

That there was a realisation of what their rights were as citizens – albeit minors in many cases – speaks to the inherent problem in some schools, and the courage of these young people to actually speak out about them.   

The fact that the event went viral on social media shortly afterwards indicates that it had certainly touched a raw nerve – particularly amongst former learners who’d had to face exactly the same racial grammar at school in their day.  

Indeed, it is undeniable that we are witnessing a healthy unpeeling of what I call the apartheid onion, a social organism that constitutes layers of institutional, attitudinal and geographic racism. What has happened is a healthy harbinger of social change, and is yet another signal from our youth that the racist detritus of the past must go.

But let’s get back to the onion. Institutionalised apartheid may have been struck off the law books in 1994, but vestiges of it still remain in the realm of the attitudinal layer. That is why we have the Penny Sparrows of this world whose geographical space is not from the edges of society, but its privileged centre.

Then it has to be remembered that attitudinal apartheid is more difficult to dislodge from the national psyche as it is subliminally resident in the DNA of those citizens who can’t embrace the present. And, in many ways, attitudinal apartheid is often more insidious than in-your-face racism because it skulks behind veils.

It is ironic that “liberalism” is a key word here as the hair question – one of culture as opposed to fashion – has played itself out on the terrain of the Model C school. We have to remember that the first educational institutions to liberalise themselves in terms of admitting black learners in the 1990s were the Model C schools.

The liberality was well meant, of course, but there have been unintended consequences – largely due to the subliminal factors I’ve just mentioned. Many of the teachers who insist on English only during school hours, for example, seem to be unaware of their demeaning outlook.

South Africa is a multi-lingual society. English in the Republic is a lingua franca – in business, media, academia and the government – but to police English outside of this ambit, as some educators appear to do, is a form of identity politics that engenders the uncomfortable idea of group superiority.

Those educators who seem to think that all natural hair must be straightened, or relaxed, by rules and Alice bands also don’t seem to be aware that we have a right to our bodies, and that we are all not made the same. Again, our constitution acknowledges our differences, but on the basis of social equality.

That hair became the central matter is historically relevant. Hair in the 1960s was a political declaration of being, especially in the US civil rights movement. For instance, Black Panther founder, Huey Newton, wore an afro.

Activist Angela Davis – who said we had to liberate our minds as much as society – was celebrated for her afro too, which together with the raised fist, became a badge of Black Consciousness. Then there are dreadlocks, worn by the likes of Bob Marley not as a fashion statement, but as one of Rasta culture and belief.

So why – some may ask – has the hair question only arisen now, some 22 years after democracy? The answer is self-evident if we examine the history of black migration to Model C schools. Two decades ago, when we were a lot more naïve about the new South Africa, parents were focused on just getting the best education for their children.

With the first prize a solid academic grounding compared to the gutter education of the apartheid era, and prospects of tertiary education, certain concessions were made.  In those early days, issues of school governance and policy were secondary compared to the rising opportunities for social and economic advancement.

No one can be blamed for wanting the best for their children. But what happened in reality was that the geography of apartheid converged with a totally separate domain that had grown accustomed to privilege, as well as institutional and attitudinal superiority – something induced by 46 years of Afrikaner apartheid and three hundred years of colonial lordship by the Dutch and the British.  

In other words, the new learners from the townships – or the rapidly expanding grey areas of our cities and towns – entered a world that was very much on the terms of the existing status quo. That was the compromise; that was the sacrifice.

But times have moved on, and an unheralded battle – often against old-fashioned ignorance and conditioned responses – has been fought at many Model C schools as black parents have started to assert themselves on the School Governing Bodies on questions of culture, hair, toleration of religious holidays, the Muslim hijab, beards and the like.

But what is so significant about the protests at Pretoria High and Sans Souci – as well as other schools – is that learners have now decided to claim the educational space for themselves on their own terms.  Of critical importance, though, is that it is not a rebellion by young learners against the system, but rather, a demand that they become a part of the system. For our democracy this can only be good news.

ISIS, the world’s newest deviant Islamic sect

Jehad Awartini/Newsweek

AFTER a spate of terror attacks in the US, France, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Bangladesh, Turkey and Belgium being attributed to ISIS – wrongly or rightly – the question has to be asked: just who exactly is ISIS?

With the Muslim name being dragged into the mud every single time an Arab-looking, or Islamically attired person fits a stereotype, it is high time we confronted the hard truths about ISIS. Representing less than 0.002% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, ISIS has become a face of Islam.

What should be an insignificant numerical minority is, in the minds of many, a discomfiting majority. But as journalist John Pilger points out, only by dealing with state terror can we begin to understand the terror of smaller groups. But – given the plight of our Fox-friendly media nowadays – we know most people are not going to do that.

However, in trying to contextualise matters we are not exonerating ISIS, which claims to be creating a new Muslim order fighting an unjust global hegemony – a post-Ottoman hegemony that has caused humiliation, occupation and oppression in Muslim lands.  

Indeed, the sentiment of resistance may resonate, but its methodology certainly doesn’t. For as the Qur’an says in Surat ul-Fussilat: repel evil with something better, not something worse.

Or, to put it another way. Shaikh ‘Umar Mukhtar, Libya’s celebrated anti-colonial jihadist, was horrified when his mujahidin asked him if they could execute their Italian POWs. “What!” exclaimed a peeved Mukhtar, “do we stoop to their level? Must their law become our law?”

Before we proceed further, we have to contextualise ISIS. And whilst its policies are rightly considered repugnant by most of humanity, UN reports reveal that ISIS has killed some 20, 000 civilians as opposed to the 200, 000 Iraqis who died right after the US invasion. 

Again, we are not arguing moral equivalence – and social misery and displacement can have no measure – but Nigeria’s Boko Haram (an ally of ISIS) also killed more people last year.  

So, how was ISIS born? Its nascence can be attributed to several factors in a complex environment. Firstly, the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, witlessly fired Iraq’s security and civil services in a drastic de-Baathification process after 2003. It rendered 250,000 people jobless. 

Secondly, ISIS was influenced by Al-Qaeda and fostered in US detention camps.

Thirdly, the ensuing chaos in Iraq attracted Al-Qaeda. This saw the rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a tattooed former Jordanian convict, whose ignorance of Islam was matched by his brutal, psychopathic beheadings and bombings.

Zarqawi famously refused to pledge allegiance to Bin Laden, which became the first omen of an Al-Qaeda breakaway. However, Zarqawi was killed by a US drone in 2006, and Al Qaeda in Iraq was pushed back for a while by Iraqi and US forces.

The fourth factor of the birth of ISIS was the disastrous leadership of Nouri al-Maliki (2006-2014). As head of the Shi’ah dominated Islamic Dawa Party, he marginalised the formerly powerful Sunnis, which soon festered into a sectarian crisis.

It is important to note that this sectarianism – previously foreign to Iraq – was not initially caused by faith, but ignited more by political factors in 2013 when Maliki’s men fired on Sunnis protesting bread and butter issues.

ISIS declared its Caliphate in 2014, much to the shock of the uninformed world. Its founder was Hajji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Republican guard, who harnessed the leadership energies of a so-called religious student and a former Al-Qaeda member, Ibrahim ‘Awad al-Badri (soon to become Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi).

The presence of professional soldiers in ISIS ranks explains its rapid sweep across Iraq and Syria, as well as its skilful plundering of state resources. However, ISIS chose for itself an “Islamic” model. Based on the extreme edges of Saudi Arabian Salafi-Wahhabism, and misinterpretations of the mediaeval scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, it is by this value that it has to be measured.

Indeed, ISIS claims Shari’ah-centric governance. However, a review of the goals of Shari’ah betrays this notion. In Shari’ah, or Sacred Law, there are five governing principles accepted by the majority of scholars. They are: the preservation of life, the protection of religion, the safeguarding of progeny, the inviolability of wealth and property and the sanctity of the intellect.

There is no space to venture deeper into the above, but in previous articles we have shown how ISIS has flagrantly transgressed all these important Shari’ maqasid, including its takfiri notion that those who disagree with it become unbelievers who can be killed, and its gruesome suicide bombings (http://surfingbehindthewall.blogspot.co.za/2015/03/maqasid-isis-report.html).

Furthermore, ISIS has transgressed the codes of conflict enumerated by the Prophet Muhammad and his Four Righteous Caliphs, some of them being  that a Muslim army cannot harm non-combatants, that it must treat its prisoners well, that it must respect priests and rabbis and that it cannot destroy any places of worship.

Given its violations of Shari’ah, and disregard for the rules of engagement, ISIS has wandered from Sunni codes. Besides, Sunni, Shi’ah and Salafi clerics have all condemned ISIS on all the above principles.

In fact, one could argue that whilst ISIS may claim to be “Islamic”, its behaviour has been distinctly anti-Muslim in character. But whilst being anti-Muslim, ISIS cannot be regarded as “infidel” because it does believe in a God – albeit an angry and vengeful one unfamiliar to conventional Islamic theology. But, and this is a critical point, we cannot say that ISIS is unequivocally “non-Muslim” because of that.

So it begs the crucial question: is ISIS, despite its egregious claims of being Sunni, a new Islamic sect? The Webster dictionary defines a sect as “a group that is a smaller part of a larger group, whose beliefs differ from the larger one”. ISIS certainly fits that category.

Google proclaims that a sect is “a group of people with somewhat different religious beliefs (typically regarded as heretical) from those of a larger group”. ISIS would fit that definition too.

The well-known cult de-programmer, Steven Hassan, provides further pointers. According to him, cult leaders use loaded language, manipulate fear, discourage critical thinking and actively prescribe a “them” and “us” doctrine. Such movements, he says, use deception in recruitment and utilise a top-down leadership style. Again, ISIS fits the bill.

Perhaps, in conclusion, would it be fitting to say that the cultist ISIS is a brand-new – if not deviant – Islamic sect? That ISIS is a sect no less in the fashion of previous sects refuted by Islam, sects such as the Qadiriyyah, the Mu’tazilites, the Jabariyyah, the Khawarij and the Murj’iah? And then, the big question, what do we call ISIS from now on as Islam moves to take back its centre?

The ANC after the municipal elections, treating the cancer

The hopes of 1994 © Photo Shafiq Morton

I HAVE covered every single election since democracy, from the euphoric highs, the hope and the bonhomie of 1994 to the disillusionment, the uncertainty and the simmering rage of 2016.

Without doubt, in this month’s municipal elections South African voters have shown their feelings, whether by engaging with the ballot box, or choosing to stay away. Indeed, the public has indicated that the honeymoon is over. No longer will it tolerate those who don’t deliver.

In the post-Mandela era, South Africans – who are certainly not unmindful of historical imbalances – are becoming less and less seduced by the sentimentality of struggle politics, and more and more concerned about bread and butter issues.

Protest by ANC members about candidate lists was the first sign that the 2016 local government elections would be contested vigorously – even from within the ranks of the governing party – where dissatisfaction with non-performing councillors had come to a head.

Because of our constitutional framework, our politics plays itself out in two spheres. The first is the outer, or multi-party one, which exists at a municipal, provincial and national democratic stratum. It is meant to be a level playing field, but it does have a systemic drawback. As there is a proportional system, those voters outside any party have little say in who will be their representatives.

Over 22 years it has created a distance from power, and is an aspect of our system that might need review.

The second sphere of our politics is the inner one, where one party currently overwhelms the political landscape, its inner workings affecting the outside, greater population. The tri-partite alliance of the SACP, COSATU and the ANC is the dominant space from within which power emanates. 

However, all of this does not mean – as President Jacob Zuma once suggested in parliament – that because one party has a large majority it has more rights than the minority. Zuma’s other sentiment  – that the ANC will rule until Jesus comes – could haunt him if ANC support dips below 50% in the 2019, or 2025 national elections, as some commentators have predicted.

Coalition politics – very much in the municipal frame right now – could well determine his successor. It is largely hypothetical, but the EFF and DA could possibly be wrangling with the ANC executive over who should be our next president.

The ANC was definitely hurt in this year’s local government elections by national questions being conflated with municipal ones. These questions reflected not only a growing unease over the ANC's executive competency, but frustrations about economic growth, unemployment, corruption, state capture and service delivery.

Then in KwaZulu Natal there were 14 politically-related killings, all believed to be within the ANC fold.  In the Western Cape there was much hurrah, but no leader. In Vuwani, Limpopo – where a municipal demarcation dispute led to wide scale unrest and boycotts – less than 4% of registered voters went to the polls.

It is obvious that the ANC has had to pay for Zuma – from the Guptas and Nkandla to Nene-gate. It also has had to bear the criticism of those elders still inside the ANC, but outside the Zuma circle. When party heavyweights such as Kgalema Mothlante, Mavuso Msimang and Frank Chikane weigh in about the ANC, then South Africans should listen.

It was Msimang who suggested in the Mail and Guardian that the ANC was “broken”. It was Mothlante who said that when fear reigns within you end up with a “dead organisation”.  And Chikane, a former Mbeki aide, wrote a letter to Luthuli House predicting dire consequences if nothing was done about the malaise of the corruptibility of power within the ANC, which he described as a “cancer”.  

The ruling party faces a Rubicon on this. Can the cancer be cured? Zuma cannot be blamed for everything, but it is he who via Nkandla has dragged political debate to the level of parliamentary hooliganism and who will be associated with the nepotism, the parastatal looting and the self-enrichment that has so blighted Africa’s oldest liberation movement.

A pertinent question on every South African’s lips is the ANC’s persistence of cadre deployment at all costs. Incompetent hacks get appointed to key positions, and the party not only undermines itself, but the whole country. Patriarchal hierarchies only nurture mediocrity; they undermine independent thought, innovation and excellence.

As I write this personal review, it almost seems as if the ANC is so out of touch with the epoch that it has become an anachronism, a political relic in its own time. One thing we observed at this year’s elections was the absence of youth at the polls. Young South Africans simply don’t relate to pot-bellied elders in green-and-yellow tracksuits doing staged walkabouts on the SABC, which they don’t watch anyway.

In a cyber-age where South Africans use 66 million cell phones (22 million being smartphones), where 15 million are on WhatsApp and over 1 billion SMSs are sent every month, the ANC still gives the impression that knocking on people’s doors will win elections.

Indeed, if the ANC is to rescue itself from itself – and to uplift the country it currently rules – some hard work lies ahead, as it is going to have to break new ground, create new standards, banish old habits, become tech savvy and take serious note of the youth bulge in our population.

Of course, this is a challenge that all political parties will have to face. The nuts and bolts of constitutionalism, the commitment of participatory democracy, and how our political system works – right down to how to cast a vote – needs to be taught at our schools.

Undoubtedly, the next few years are going to be challenging – and not only for the ANC. As analyst Ebrahim Fakier has said, we are entering an era of uncertainty. As for the ruling party – to borrow from data analyst Andile Ngcaba – chemotherapy will be the only way to solve the cancer today, band aids will simply not be enough to save the ANC from disaster in 2019. 

TB Davie Memorial lecture: Flemming Rose should have faced music on Muhammad cartoons

Unlike the anarchic freedom of speech as expounded by Rose on the Muhammad cartoons, our constitution draws a line in the sand with regards to respect and ridicule

THE decision by the University of Cape Town (UCT) to stop former Jyllends Posten cultural editor, Flemming Rose, from delivering the 2016 TB Davie Memorial Lecture scratches at the scars of the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005, and opens up all the old questions of the freedom of speech in South Africa.

Invited by UCT’s Academic Freedom Committee (AFC) last year, Rose is said to be disappointed at the cancellation of his lecture. The cancellation was prompted by UCT’s fears of an inappropriate response from a sector of the Muslim community, and the volatile situation at local university campuses.

The TB Davie Memorial lecture is traditionally one of UCT’s main academic events, its stated purpose to celebrate academic liberty and freedom of speech. Previous guests have been celebrated intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and the Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, famed for his work on Orientalism.

The AFC had initially refused to rescind Rose’s invitation, but vice-chancellor Max Price, on behalf of the university’s executive, had informed the AFC that it would not be permitted to bring Rose onto campus. Stating that public order on South African campuses was in a “fragile state”, Price had said that it had been felt that Rose would retard, rather than advance, academic freedom.

Price had added in a letter that academic freedom was not unlimited, explaining that its exercise depended on a careful assessment of when such limits might pertain, “in line with the directives of our Constitution.”

And whilst to all intents and purposes the AFC, acting in the best interests of academia, had started out with a pertinent question on religious tolerance, and whilst the UCT authorities were forced to confront the question given today’s climate at universities, the whole process has to be interrogated as the main stakeholder – the Muslim community – was only consulted when UCT was reviewing the situation.

It has to be remembered that the Jyllends Posten cartoon feature became a very painful issue for Muslims when the Danish newspaper published twelve editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005 of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam.

The newspaper’s explanation that it was attempting to contribute to Islamic critique and self-censorship had not gone down well in the international Muslim community, which regards iconic or caricaturistic depictions of Muhammad as blasphemy – no matter the context. The Jyllends Posten cartoons were seen as yet another post 9/11 provocation.

Muslim groups in Denmark had petitioned unsuccessfully – losing a judicial appeal – and the issue had led to protests, some of them unfortunately violent with 200 fatalities, in the world’s capitals. It also led to trade boycotts of Denmark with eleven Muslim ambassadors requesting a meeting with then Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

In South Africa the Gauteng and Durban-based Jami’at ul-Ulama was granted a court interdict preventing local newspapers from publishing the cartoons. The gagging order was seen as a moment of pre-emptive overkill by the South African National Editor’s Forum (SANEF) and some of our country’s editors.

At the time Rose had said that modern, secular society was rejected by some Muslims and that they demanded “a special position, insisting on special consideration of their own religious feelings”.

He had gone on to say that this was incompatible with contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one had to put up with ridicule. It was not attractive, and it did not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price, but that was of minor consideration in the present context. He had said we were on a slippery slope if no-one could tell where self-censorship ended.

Jyllends Posten eventually issued an apology, regretting if it had caused any hurt, but maintaining it had a right to publish the cartoons.

In our local context, Rose – hailing from an almost belligerently secular society – would meet with stiff challenge on his assumptions. Our constitution – secular but framed within a believing community – considers all faiths equal, and special, in terms of their freedoms and the right to practice with dignity.

The question is not just Islam, but the standpoints of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, African traditionalists, Rastas and any other traditional belief.   

It is highly significant that the Prophet Muhammad was equally sensitive to these questions of identity over 1,400 years ago, when he specifically forbade his followers to harm churches and synagogues as well as rabbis and priests – which has led to mainstream Sunni scholars condemning even the burning of flags.  

In other words, unlike the anarchic freedom of speech as expounded by Rose, our constitution draws a line in the sand with regards to respect and ridicule. There are actually limits; gross insult draws us into the domain of hate speech, a nasty territory that often engenders institutional discrimination, retributive anger and violence.

These are things Jyllends Posten did not understand all those years ago, and what led to the disaster of the cartoon saga in a case of catastrophically unintended global consequences.

The tragedy today is that the impression has been created, again unintentionally, that the local Muslim community would have had a violent, or inappropriate, response to the appearance of the former Jyllends Posten cultural editor on a UCT platform. That is far from the truth. Cape Town’s Muslim community is vociferous, yes, but violent? No.

It is a pity that Flemming Rose was not allowed to be part of a panel debate with Islamic and other experts where some of these matters could have been discussed. He would have learnt that modern, secular society is not spurned by Muslims – just some of its darker aspects such as corruption and xenophobia that the rest of humanity questions too.

Searching for the Imam: the legacy of Imam Abdullah Haroon revisited

Imam Haron's tombstone. Photo Shafiq Morton

THE story of Imam ‘Abdullah Haron, one of South Africa’s most renowned anti-apartheid martyrs, is something that has haunted me for years. I have never been able to forget the earthquake on the evening of his burial in September 1969, and how it literally shook the world. 

The narrative of Imam ‘Abdullah Haron, who was murdered in detention when he was 46,  is a bittersweet one, made accessible by Khalid Shamis’ documentary the Imam and I. Shamis, who grew up in England, was Imam Haron’s maternal grandson.

Shamis incorporated animation, rather than re-enactment, in his 2010 award-winning piece which borrowed from the iconic cover of Cardiff Marney and Barney Desai’s 1978 book, The Killing of the Imam. It shows the imam falling down a flight of stairs – the alleged cause of his death – while being held in incommunicado for 123 days under the Terrorism Act.

Imam Haron’s funeral was attended by over 30, 000 people, yet his family was left to fend for itself. Muslim News – of which he was an editor – dithered and prevaricated (the paper did eventually pay homage to the imam), and his widow, Galiema, received no aid from the community – legal or otherwise. As a sole breadwinner, she was forced to sell their house whilst the MJC, Ashura and the Muslim Assembly looked on.

And only when Muslims became emboldened to mobilise against apartheid in numbers (well a decade after the imam’s death) did awareness of him begin to stir amongst the youth, the Qiblah movement making him a cause celebre in the late 1980s.  

But only recently has Imam Haron got the recognition he has always deserved. The Order of the Disa was conferred on him by Premier Ebrahim Rasool in 2004. A section of Landsdowne Road was named after him in 2013. An honorary doctorate was awarded by UWC in 2014, and in the same year, the prestigious Order of Luthuli Gold was bestowed upon him by President Jacob Zuma.

Then there is the Imam ‘Abdullah Haron Educational Trust. It has granted over R1.5 million in bursaries since 2006, and hosts the annual Imam Haron Memorial lecture. But after a long search, it appears as if the IAHT – supported by the family – has been the only Cape Town institution to dignify his memory, other than Community House in Salt River.  

And this is our very great shame: the first Muslim to receive the tribute of a memorial service in St Pauls Cathedral in London has still never been truly honoured by his own community. It is an astonishing revelation.

So who exactly was Imam Haron? We know that he was one of the youngest imams of his day, appointed at Stegmann Road in Claremont in 1955 when he was only 32. We know that he refused to accept payment for his position. We know that he was a community man, a dapper dresser who loved sport and movies.

We know that he was a progressive leader, that he’d assimilated a wide spectrum of views ranging from the Coloured People’s Congress, the Non-European Unity Movement and the Teacher’s League to Hassan al-Banna.

We know that he was one of the first imams to extend invitations to non-Muslims in the mosque. We know that he empowered women. We know that he founded the Claremont Muslim Youth Association that published the Islamic Mirror, which became the Muslim News.

We also know that the imam had a solid theological grounding. His son, Dr Muhammad Haron, writes that his father studied with Shaikh Ismail Hanif and Shaikh Abdullah Ta Ha Gamieldien, both local scholars, and sat for two years at the feet Sayyid ‘Alawi al-Maliki in Mecca.

So how did he become politically aware? The late Barney Desai said that the imam was roused by his visiting Langa as a sales rep for Wilson-Rowntree. Nonetheless, Imam Haron became the first imam to support da’wah in a South African township.

His propagation occurred in an era of strict segregation and cultural isolationism. In the context of apartheid it was daring, if not revolutionary – especially given that the Afrikaner Nationalist government’s policy was that blacks were inferior to Coloureds, Indians and Malays.

It soon attracted notice from the anti-apartheid movement, as well arousing the interest of community informers and state security. He also became publicly outspoken, describing the Group Areas Act as a “tyranny” and “un-Islamic” at the Call of Islam rally in the Drill Hall in 1961.

Only a few imams signed the Call of Islam anti-apartheid document, and it is clear that Imam Haron’s activism did not appeal to most of his apolitical colleagues who’d advocated a quietist dichotomy of faith and government. It is evident that Imam Haron embraced a secular socio-political response to apartheid, but that as an individual he was informed by his faith.

In other words, his political awareness was a convergence – something that would be espoused by a breakaway group from the Muslim Youth Movement in 1984, which would interestingly name itself the Call of Islam.

There has always been conjecture whether Imam Haron was a member of the PAC.  His association with people such as Alex La Guma, Robert Sobwuke, Albie Sachs and the Black Sash proves that his brief was more common cause than a party one.

In 1966 the imam went on Hajj. He was interviewed by the Arab media, thus raising his security profile. He visited Cairo and London, where he met Canon John Collins of St Pauls Cathedral, who had collected money for political detainees under the International Defence and Aid Fund.

The IDAF would channel millions of rands into South Africa, and the imam would be one of its go-betweens. The special branch would never be able to penetrate the IDAF.

It’s at this stage of Imam Haron’s life that a spiritual aspect begins to appear, and where there has been little coherence. And whilst – as we’ve already stated – the imam’s politics were a convergence of faith and social conscience, his spirituality is another thing entirely.

By the late 60s Imam Haron was very much on the special branch radar, and they’d already questioned him several times when they detained him on 28 May 1969. It was on the day of the Milad un-Nabi.

Whilst in detention, Imam Haron was brutally beaten. His death, due to cardiac failure, had been directly caused by the trauma – baton blows, electric shocks and needles stuck into his spine.  His post-mortem revealed 28 bruises, a broken rib and an empty stomach.

When Khalid Shamis interviewed Dr Yusuf da Costa, celebrated historian and spiritual leader, he told Shamis that one day he’d visited the Salt River cemetery. Da Costa relates that an elderly person with him had asked him whose grave was emitting a blazing light. It was discovered to be Imam Haron’s. Da Costa asked Shamis if he could imagine the intensity of the imam’s ‘ibadah during his ordeal, and what it could have meant.

But in terms of inner worship, it is the imam’s fasting that stands out. When he was about to leave Mecca due to the Second World War, his Shaikh had asked him what he would do to serve his Creator. The 16 year-old Imam Haron had said he would obey the Sunnah of fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. By 1969, the imam would have been following this practice for 30 years.

Space precludes a discussion on the merits of the imam’s fasting, known only to Allah anyway. But it’s also the curious synchronicity of events surrounding his final days that deserve further study.

Imam Haron was snatched away on Milad. Was there significance in that? Then an earthquake of 6.3 on the Richter scale hit Tulbagh on the evening of his janazah. Bearing in mind that the last earthquake in the Cape had been 160 years previously, the co-incidence is uncanny.

Another curiosity is a dream experienced by the late Sayyid Abdul Qadir Naqshbandi, a former imam at Dar ul-Qarar in Wynberg. Imam Hasan Walele, a student, remembers Sayyid Abdul Qadir saying:

“I dreamt that I was sitting in the Haram about five rows from the holy Ka’bah. As I looked up I noticed two clouds coming speedily from the heavens and descending onto the roof of the Ka’bah.

“Suddenly the door opened and two persons appeared. I did not know the first one…. the second appeared with a beautiful nur, and I immediately recognised Imam Haron. He seemed to be searching…and when he saw me, his face lit up. Suddenly, he was standing next to me, and we were embracing each other.

“Imam Haron introduced me to the other person, and then addressed me saying that he had a message for me and the ummah. He then recited Qasidah Munfarijah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_W6WhTriMM , saying that if people recited this du’ah constantly, Allah would bestow great blessings upon them.”

Sayyid Abdul Qadir relates that he woke up with great joy. He would recite the du’ah weekly after that with his followers.

Qasidah Munfarijah is an extremely powerful invocation. It’s read with a galloping rhythm, and was penned by Sayyid ibn al-Nahwi al-Tawzari, a celebrated 11th century Tunisian jurist and saint. Does the Munfarijah, a du’ah written for warding off calamity and oppression, embody the legacy that Imam Haron wanted to leave us?

For he told Sayyid Abdul Qadir in his dream that the rewards for the Munfarijah would be compassion for one another, love for one another, solidarity with one another, succour for one another and unity with one another.

Given his obvious spiritual status, it is my view that the shaheed, Imam Abdullah Haron, should be associated with our historical forefathers. These are our towering pioneers, people such as Shaykh Yusuf, Tuan Guru and September van Bugis – who on the rack in 1709 for crimes he did not commit – did not utter a word other than the kalimah as he was left to die a painful death, his arms and legs torn from their sockets.

Like van Bugis, Imam Haron’s sacrifice was the ultimate one, and surely, it now behoves us to really understand what it all means. 

From Nice to Baghdad: the horror, the horror!

Terror truck driven by Bouhlel. Daily Mirror image.

IN Joseph Conrad’s famous novel, The Heart of Darkness – which is an anti-imperial statement on Africa – one of the main characters, Kurtz, utters “the horror, the horror” as he lies dying. These are the words of a man commenting on his crumbled sanity, as he faces the bitter truth of his dissolute life exploiting the Congolese.

What the suicide bombers and attackers uttered before their recent nihilistic acts of terror in Istanbul, Baghdad, Dhaka, Medina and now Nice, I do not know. All I’m sure of is that God would not have accepted their dying prayers. But on initially witnessing these incidences via social media, my first words were the same as Kurtz’s, “the horror, the horror!”

I’m not Kurtz, but his deathbed utterance did seem to express what I was feeling at a time when I was lost for words. The sheer effrontery of it all and the darkness of the minds that must have concocted the idea of killing innocent people in public places during Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic year and during Bastille Day, one of France’s biggest holidays, just beggars belief.

Medina, the Saudi Arabian city where the Prophet Muhammad lies buried, is regarded by Muslims as one of the most sacred places on earth, and yet, a misguided young man with explosives strapped to his body wanted to kill innocent worshippers. It’s the horrible equivalent of someone trying to bomb St Peter’s Square at the Vatican over Easter.

The same can be said about the young men who attacked a restaurant in Dhaka (killing 20), those who blew themselves up in a Baghdad market-place (killing 250) and the wild shooters at the Attaturk Airport in Istanbul (killing 41) who also ignited suicide vests when security guards closed in. And then, what about Mohamed  Bouhlel driving a truck into a crowd in Nice and killing 84 more innocent people?

The attacks have been accredited to the Islamic State, and even if a subsidiary group was responsible for the terror (which is likely in some instances), IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s edict in the IS magazine, al-Dabiq, that IS supporters should commit terror attacks on “infidels” should be borne in mind as the nucleus of the evil that started it all.

However, whilst centres outside of the IS caliphate have been targeted – especially as IS takes a hammering from coalition forces inside Syria and Iraq – historically it is mostly Muslims who’ve had to bear the brunt of IS, as utterly tragic as any other fatality has been.

Indeed, it is ironic that IS, claiming the voice of true Islam, has proved to be totally anti-Muslim in its behaviour. Fostered by its belief that every Muslim who disagrees with it is an infidel, and whose blood it is permissible to spill, IS in reality represents less than 1% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

IS’s enemies within Islam are expansive: Sufis, Sunnis, Shi’as, political leaders, religious leaders, Deobandis, Barelvis, inter-faith workers, journalists, scholars, the Islamic Brotherhood and even Salafis.  And in addition to being anti-Muslim, IS is also anti-faith. And in addition to being anti-Muslim, IS is also anti-faith, as faith universally holds human life sacrosanct.

Space precludes an examination of the political, if not secular, birth of IS in the US detention camps in Iraq in 2003, and the political vacuums it exploited in Syria and Iraq, especially in 2014, when it finally captured world imagination by declaring a “caliphate”.

IS is, however, different to its extremist forerunner, al-Qaeda, in that it became an identifiable geographical entity with the primitive strappings of statehood – and an economy – when it robbed the banks of Mosul, Raqqa and Fallujah and gained access to northern Iraqi and Syrian oilfields.

But back to the terror attacks. Istanbul can easily be attributed to revenge for Turkey’s role in combating IS, and Turkey’s vulnerability due to its porous 1,200 km border with Syria and Iraq. However, stories that the attackers had merged with refugees is unlikely as most of the three million Syrians in Turkey were fleeing IS themselves.

What is not widely acknowledged is that Turkish security guards fingered the three attackers early, and had they not done that, possibly thousands could have died. Without detracting from the fatalities, Istanbul was an epic IS failure. But not so Baghdad, where most of the victims were innocent Shi’ah shopping for the post Ramadan ‘Eid festival. And not so Nice, where people were innocently celebrating a French public holiday.

The attacks on three Saudi Arabian cities, Jeddah, Qatif and Medina (which caused a minimum of casualties) were – according to my sources in the kingdom – locally engineered and directed against the Royal family’s patronage of the Holy Sites, the US embassy in Jeddah and the Shi’as in Qatif.

But what sent a tremor throughout the Muslim world on the eve of the Eid ul-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan was the attempt to blow up the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina. The bomber raised suspicion, and when four security officers spotted him at the breaking of the day’s fast, he detonated his vest.

Without the sharp eye of the security – and the Saudis use the eagle-eyed Bedouin for such purposes – one can only wonder at how many innocent people would have perished had the bomber succeeded. Again, thankfully, another IS failure – although four young men had to sacrifice themselves to save thousands.

Unfortunately, whilst we all reel from the tragedy of terror, trying to locate the roots of extremism – and even creating a psycho-social identikit of an extremist who would join IS – is an almost impossible task. This is something that the French, who’ve had the worst of it in Europe, would agree with.

Dr Madawi al-Rasheed, visiting professor of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, says the task is indeed made difficult because there are different streams of localised grievances in different states that feed into a global IS – or even al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or al-Shabab – perspective. This is something she feels we need to understand.

Amidst all the dust and aftershock of places such as Nice and Baghdad there is perhaps one lonely certainty with regards to Islamic extremism: the most vulnerable are usually the most ignorant about Islam, and the most naïve about world politics. This is something we’ve witnessed in Lebanon, Europe, Somalia, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, the Far East and even, now recently, South Africa.

However, the solution does not lie entirely in the lap of Islam – which is trying hard to face the challenges – but also in the domain of world leadership where the bitter wars, the political power plays and the simmering conflicts need to be peacefully resolved, the affected countries rebuilt on the foundations of true justice and the hopeful youth given jobs.