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  • Being a Muslim in South Africa

    This is a view from a layman, an average Muslim, who was born and raised in South Africa. This is not the view of an academic, or a scholar, nor someone that holds any other identifiable titles as a Muslim, other than being one of the masses.

    Given the generalisations about Islam in South Africa, I thought it prudent to share some real life experiences and observations about living here as a Muslim.

    Islam was introduced into South Africa over 300 years ago by a Malaysian political prisoner that was banished to South Africa from his own country. He is commonly known as Sheikh Yusuf. He was largely responsible for establishing unity amongst the other Muslim prisoners or slaves that were brought to South Africa under the auspices of the Dutch colonisers back then. I’m not a history boffin, so suffice to say that this is largely accepted as the beginnings of Islam in this part of the world, in Cape Town to be specific.

    Muslims from India were also amongst the indentured labourers brought to South Africa by the British colonialists. They subsequently established the biggest Indian community outside of India which is in Durban, on the South African east coast. A thriving and very active Muslim community exists there these days. So from the two opposite ends of the country, the Shafi’ee madhab was entrenched in the lives of the Muslim community in Cape Town with a strong Malaysian culture, while the Hanafi madhab was entrenched in Durban with a strong Indian culture. 

    From these two areas, Islam spread throughout South Africa with mosques and communities existing in every major city and most rural areas as well. Offshoots of these communities have dabbled in Sufism and have largely focused on establishing community services and charity organisations. Many large and very beneficial organisations that provide and facilitate burial services, orphanages, mosques, madrasahs and other essential services stem from the Sufi groups. However, there is also an active engagement across all communities of all madhaib throughout South Africa that play an active role in establishing such structures and support systems for Muslims in their communities.

    The overall culture in South Africa is largely conservative with a strong focus on individual piety in the Indian communities, with a more overt community-focused culture in the Malay communities. Limited success has been noted in the spread of Islam to the indigenous black communities in South Africa, with this largely being blamed on the same conservative and insular nature that was engendered in the Muslim communities as a result of apartheid. One of the benefits, but also curses of apartheid was that it strengthened communities of similar racial backgrounds, but in so doing, also led to very little efforts focused on inviting other race groups to Islam. Hence the relatively stagnant pace at which Islam has grown in the country over the last few decades.

    There is a significant interest being shown by other race groups in Islam these days, with reverts becoming more common than ever before. However, the Indian and Malay sub-cultures often isolates reverts from the rest of the Muslim communities when it comes to social events, but not when it comes to integration in the mosques. It’s a strange mix that takes some getting used to. Not that I’m condoning it in any way.

    Generally, there is no shortage of bid’ah and bickering in many parts of various communities as is existent in Muslim communities throughout the world. But there is also a concerted effort by many to break the silence and the dogmatic following of tradition in the way Islam is practised here. Politically, Muslims enjoy freedom of religion and are able to practise Islam openly. The sight of women in hijab and niqab in shopping malls and public spaces throughout the country is not a rare sight at all.

    The Tableeghi Jamaat is active predominantly in the Indian community, and have their own mixed bag of successes and failures regarding the ideas and principles that they seem to propagate. But I guess this is true about many groups and not just them. Overall, for a Muslim, South Africa is generally a very tolerant place to live, and the Muslim culture is mostly embraced, except by some of the old school predominantly white Christian communities that still hold onto the ideals of the apartheid era. This can be seen in the hurdles and obstacles that need to be cleared before mosques can be established in predominantly white neighbourhoods, and even more so in the resistance that we get in requesting permission to recite the adhaan out loud. But the Muslim communities have been able to overcome many of these obstacles, even though at times it takes up to 8 or 10 years to get permission to have a piece of land rezoned for the building of a mosque. So our struggles in this space mirror those of Muslim communities in other western countries as well.

    There is a high prevalence of men, women and children that have memorised the Qur’an. There are also many established institutions that offer formal studies in Islamic subjects, mostly aligned with the Hanafi madhab in the form of Darul Ulooms. There is room for much improvement, as is always the case, but overall, Alhamdulillah, being a Muslim in South Africa is not as trying as being a Muslim in most other non-Muslim countries around the world.

  • Random thoughts about people and me

    I’ve often felt like life was a losing battle. No matter how often I would extend myself to those that I accepted as significant in my life, I found myself grovelling rather than being appreciated. Grovelling for attention or reciprocation that is. The more I extended myself, the less I was appreciated, which in some twisted way actually makes sense.

    We take for granted that which is most readily available. We only appreciate and nurture things that we realise are precious and hard to come by. Otherwise we kick into consumerism mode and forget about the blessings at hand (I hate the fact that I can’t even use the word ‘blessings’ and similar words without feeling like I’m being a religious zealot simply because of all the scripture-thumpers out there).

    Anyway, at the risk of sounding cryptic, I think that focusing on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of ourselves is more important than focusing on external factors that we cannot control. What I mean is the ‘what’ should be our decision about what is or isn’t truly important in the bigger scheme of our own lives, right? While the ‘how’ is our decision regarding how we choose to accept or achieve how the ‘what’ plays out in our lives.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that if the focus is on making conscious decisions regarding what affects us, and learning to accept the things we cannot influence about the behaviours and decisions of others, we’ll find ourselves less often in a position to be trampled upon or taken for granted. This approach, whilst it took forever to realise, has worked well for me. At times it threatened to isolate me from people that I wasn’t willing to let go of, but it also made me realise that if I was significant at all to them, they would realise the potential loss and do something about it to avoid the rift from happening.

    But the devil in all this is our often low self-esteem. When we assume that we’re not worth the effort, we become victims and martyrs to situations and desires that we believe we will never acquire for ourselves unless we sacrifice ourselves in the process. It’s a self-fulfilled unfulfilling prophecy. And if this is still sounding cryptic, it’s because that’s how life is. It’s the biggest puzzle we’ll ever try to assemble, which reminds me that the best way to build one of those massive 5000 piece puzzles is to start from the outside and work your way in. I think the same is true with life. We need to start by determining what our boundaries are, what we’re willing to compromise and what is non-negotiable. Once we have that nailed, we need to decide how we’re going to go about filling in the pieces that will complete us.

    This all reminds me of a simple thought process I often share in my workshops with others regarding brainstorming. It comprises of three simple components, and talks directly to the puzzle analogy. Output, Method, Resource. If we start by defining what the objective (output) is that we desire, we can then understand what methods or actions would be needed to achieve it. And once we know that, it will be that much easier to determine the resources required to make it all happen. That’s the easy part. Once we have that plan drawn up, it takes courage and determination to act on it and make it happen. That’s usually where most of us suck because of that same demon called self-esteem. A healthy self-esteem really is the best gift any parent can give their child, ever!

  • Lab pe aati hai dua…a beautiful song by Dr Allama Iqbal.

    I first heard this on radio when I lived in Cape Town many years ago. It always gave me goose bumps, and still does. I don’t understand Urdu, but the sincerity and melodious tone of it pierces through me each time I listen to it. It kept me company on many lonely nights before, despite it not being a love song in the typically romantic sense. I think the tasteful way in which the chorus is done by the children is also very appealing to me. I usually don’t like child choruses because they tend to scream at the top of their lungs in the name of fun. But such fun is usually unpleasant to sensitive ears like my own. 🙂

    (Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

  • Kerkennah, Tunisia

    Sunset on Kerkennah Island in Tunisia.

    (c) Zaid Ismail

    June 2008

  • Which version of Islam would you like today?

    Sadness is…seeing Islam being watered down on Tumblr in order to maintain follower counts and appease fans. Finding ways to make Islam more palatable to those that are deliberately looking for loopholes does not invite others towards Islam, but instead invites them to a new permutation of what used to be Islam. This is the slippery slope that got the disbelievers into the position that they’re in. Look around and you’ll quickly notice the trends. The clerical hierarchies, the supposed tolerance for unacceptable behaviour, the contortion of gender roles, the ‘intellectualisation’ of the Sunnah, the formalisation of the acquisition of religious knowledge, the abdication of responsibility in social commitments, and so much more.

    There is a huge difference, like night and day, between acknowledging our shortcomings in practising Islam the way it was intended to be practised, and trying to justify our shortcomings by assuming that some interpretations of Islam are incorrect so that we can condone our shortcomings. By the same token, there is an equally huge difference between practising Islam the way it was intended to be practised, and displaying an extremist view of how its rulings should be interpreted out of excessive piety. This is clearly reflected in the current state of scholarly pursuits because everyone feels a need to save Islam from incorrect interpretations but no one is willing to answer the question that begs to know what constitutes excessive questioning in terms of implementing the Sunnah. Something that I often contemplate, without arriving at an answer yet, is whether or not the actions of Rasulullah (SAW) was dissected to the nth degree by the first three generations, or was the dissection a response to the wanton deviance of those that followed?

    Determining this has resulted in pursuits that are blindly excessive in most cases, hence the disconnect between the scholars, the wannabe scholars and the layman. In response, the layman, tired of being constantly blasted with rhetoric and condescension for having a deficient Imaan, retaliates by trying to justify why their mediocre efforts are acceptable, if not more meritorious than the wannabe scholars. The wannabe scholars respond by lambasting everyone with labels of deviance, blasphemy and heresy. And so the chasm between the groups widen, and Islam gets bastardised into a flavour-of-the-month for whoever endeavours to justify their view for a misguided audience.

    Because of the wisdom of the current generation of ‘scholars’, we now have underdogs in the Ummah that see fit to establish their own institutions that promise to be more accepting and tolerant of the ‘deviants’ and those that are looking for loopholes. There are no loopholes in Allah’s laws. If you think you’ve found one, you’re either innocently ignorant, selectively obtuse, or downright deviant with insufficient sincerity to seek the truth. 

    Alas, my use of logic in trying to understand simple rules about being a Muslim will attract the venom of those that see logic as being a tool of those inspired by Greek philosophers because they (the accusers) are too blinkered to realise that Islam is logical in its practise, and divine in its faith. Every single ritual ever prescribed for us has a logical and practical purpose that either benefits us individually, or society collectively. And where the rights of society are impacted, such constraints will take precedence over individual liberties. But in the selfish atmosphere that we have engendered, it’s nearly impossible to even determine the rights of society any more simply because our focus is on individual piety only. We’ve lost the balance that Islam fosters, and instead have become obsessed with Islam as being a personal struggle and nothing more. 

  • There are times when the cowardly vagueness of some really threatens to unsettle me, but I quickly restrain myself with the knowledge that those that play for an audience will rarely engage in private. I believe that the true measure of our character is not determined by how we engage with others, but rather what thoughts and actions we entertain when we find ourselves alone, without an audience to appease. Everything else is a show, or an act, or both. Sometimes deliberately, but most times not. When we’re surrounded by others, no matter how intimately they may know us, there is always a barrier between who we are, and who we want them to believe we are. This is simply the innate nature of the human spirit that seeks to protect itself before it expresses itself. Accepting this truth allows me to master that which deludes others, while denying it allows me to delude myself whilst others achieve mastery over me.

  • This photo was taken with my cell phone from the plane just before landing. In this photo you can see the sprawling township of Soweto to the bottom left (probably less than 5% of the actual township which houses over 3 million people), three huge mine dumps in the front centre and left, and the national soccer stadium that is famed for being shaped like an African pot (or calabash) just off centre to the right. The CBD of Johannesburg is in the distance with one last notable land mark being the mine dump that is currently being demolished to the centre left. The removal of numerous mine dumps around the city in recent years has resulted in a massively changing landscape.

    Urban legend has it that the mine dumps, being a remnant of the very early mining days in and around Johannesburg, are still rich in gold dust because of the less than efficient mining practises of days gone by. After a Japanese firm offered to purchase the seemingly worthless land for a pretty penny, it sparked renewed interest in the dumps resulting in the sand being reprocessed and reasonable quantities of gold once again being extracted from these mine dumps. Whether or not there is any truth to this, I may never know. But it does make for an interesting tale to tell my grandchildren some day.

  • I pray that I will never be beholden to society. Such obligation has seen the most well-meaning turn into the most attention-seeking. And if the profession of humility is in itself arrogance, then I am already teetering on the brink of such filth by making this statement to begin with.