The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

apartheid

The word “apartheid” entered South African politics in the post–World War II years and became an official ideology upon the National Party’s victory in the 1948 general elections. Until the first democratic elections of 1994, which brought majority rule to the country, the white National Party ruled the country on the basis of its philosophy of apartheid. “Apartheid” is Afrikaans (a creole language made by European settlers and slaves by the early 19th century) and translates as “separateness” or “apartness.” Its defenders argued that blacks were inferior and found biblical justification for these views; thus whites, with a superior civilization, had the right and responsibility to govern over blacks. After the end of apartheid, apologists argued that it had simply expressed a badly implemented belief in cultural autonomy for the separate groups that made up the country.

The National Party of Prime Minister D. F. Malan, from 1948 until the end of apartheid rule, implemented policies of separate and unequal development that radically discriminated against the country’s majority nonwhite population. Later administrations refined the legal and administrative practices by which apartheid was implemented. Apartheid entailed a series of laws such as the prohibition of marriage between whites and nonwhites, residential segregation and the appropriation of nonwhites’ property by whites, a register that classified the population into “races,” and other practices that seriously discriminated against the majority population. Apartheid also gave support to an exploitative economic system based on cheap labor, especially in the important mining sectors, and continued an extensive process of land dispossession in rural and urban areas. Although apartheid became the official ideology of the state only from the late 1940s, in many ways it had been the practice of the previous governments as well.

Given the cold war context in which it emerged, the major Western powers never condemned the apartheid state; instead, it was a Western ally in the sub-Saharan region. The apartheid state developed very close ties with Israel. Egypt and Lebanon were the only Arab states with representation in South Africa, but they cut ties with South Africa in the 1950s, and the Arab bloc countries came to be major supporters of the antiapartheid movement. Al-niẓām al-‘unṣuriyya, which is how apartheid came to be translated into Arabic, was heavily attacked in the Arabic media, not least for its connection to Israel. However, the Shah’s Iran maintained close ties to South Africa until the revolution of 1979, and Turkey never cut its ties with South Africa. Other Muslim states kept a safe distance from the apartheid state. Informal networks, however, existed with the country’s Muslim population.

Apartheid was provided with significant legitimacy by the Dutch Reformed Church, and the country was conceived as a “Christian country” ruled by Christian values and led by believing Christians. Opposition to apartheid was routinely dismissed as communist inspired and anti-Christian in origin. The country’s small Muslim population was largely classified as “Malay” or “Indian” and, in most cases, lived among the urban-based, nonwhite working class and small middle class. The Muslim religious leadership taught that, since Muslims were a minority and were allowed to practice their basic religious duties, they should not engage in antiapartheid political campaigns. Indeed, Muslims could build mosques, make the call to prayer, take days off for the religious festivals (‘īd), perform the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, and so forth. However, there was a long history of Muslims articulating various forms of resistance to segregation policies.

Opposition to apartheid by the black majority became increasingly radical throughout the 1950s, and eventually an armed struggle was launched in the early 1960s. Muslims were involved in all the major campaigns. But a response against racial discrimination based in the teachings of Islam took root among the youth only in the later 1950s, becoming more radical and finding a larger following with the 1976 countrywide student uprising until the end of apartheid. Imam Abdullah Haron, a young activist imam at a Cape Town mosque, represented this opposition to apartheid on firmly Islamic grounds. He was ultimately killed by the police while in detention in 1969. After his death, a series of Islamic initiatives addressed the apartheid question as a necessary issue for South African Muslims on explicitly Islamic grounds. Political action was an integral part of the faith as prayer was. Islamic views of social justice, explicated in English translations of works by Sayyid Qutb and Abul al-A‘la Mawdudi, were popular in the 1980s. After the Iranian revolution, the ideas of ‘Ali Shari‘ati, the Iranian thinker who had produced a body of thought founded on Islam and Marxism, circulated in the country. These ideas went beyond a condemnation of racial discrimination and also comprised a critique of class inequality and, later, of gender-based discrimination.

See also South Africa