The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

South Africa

The first group of Muslims came to the Cape in successive waves from 1658 to the end of the 18th century. Most of them came from the Malay Archipelago and the coastal regions of India as servants, slaves, and political exiles. The most prominent religious figures among them were Shaykh Yusuf (d. 1699), a Sufi thinker who died several years after his exile to the Cape, and Imam ‘Abdallah b. Qadi ‘Abd al-Salam, better known as “Tuan Guru” (d. 1807), an Islamic philosopher, Sunni theologian, and mystic who was banished to Robben Island in 1780. Upon his release in 1791, he established the first mosque (Awwal Mosque) and school (madrasa) in the Bokaap. The early Muslims generally were not militant, but they were not slow to confront the colonial state if they felt that their Islamic faith and practices were threatened.

With the emergence of the secular Turkish Republic in 1924, the classical concept of the caliphate and sultanate came to an end. With the Salafi scholars, however, especially Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida, Islam as an ideology was revived in response to the needs of a modern Muslim nation-state. Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Mawdudi were representatives of this Islamic revival. These scholars, among others, had a profound impact on Muslim political thought in South Africa.

Political Thought during Apartheid

The first notable South African leader to be inspired by the teachings of Banna and Qutb was Imam ‘Abdallah Haron (d. 1969), whose sermons at the Stegman Road mosque emphasized the social message of Islam. The imam was critical mainly of the racial inequality and social injustice of the apartheid regime. Consequently, he was arrested and killed by the state security police on September 27, 1969. Attendance at his funeral was overwhelming, and soon he became a symbol of the revolutionary message of Islam, especially for the Muslim Youth Movement (MYM), established in 1970; the Muslim Students Association (MSA), established in 1974; and the Qibla movement, founded in 1980. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, these movements developed a culture of commemoration of the imam’s martyrdom, which became a catalyst for social programs that sought to bring about transformation from complacency to activism against apartheid.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the MYM was interested not only in the writings of Mawdudi and Qutb but also in those of ‘Ali Shari‘ati (d. 1977) and Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989). It did not see the Iranian model of establishing an Islamic state as something to be emulated in South Africa, however, and preferred to focus on Islamic education and training. By 1982 the MYM’s members expressed reservations about the Shi‘i vilification of the first three caliphs in Islam. Thus the MYM accommodated the teachings of Shari‘ati but not Shi‘i theology. A graduate of the Sorbonne, Shari‘ati was inspired by existentialism and Marxism. He denounced not only Western capitalism and imperialism but also the Shi‘i teaching of the Hidden Imam who will return to the world to rectify the injustices. In his view, the clerics used that idea to justify a passive Islam rather than the evolutionary Islam exemplified by the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. He believed instead that Islam’s mission was the liberation of the “oppressed” (mustaḍ‘afīn), who included the poor and the exploited in Iran and elsewhere in the Third World.

Other Islamic resurgent organizations emerged in the South African Muslim community that challenged the MYM ideology. Achmat Cassiem, a leading antiapartheid activist who also had been imprisoned on Robben Island, was inspired by the Iranian Revolution and the ideological thought of Shari‘ati. He launched the Qibla Mass Movement, which married the revolutionary message of the Iranian Revolution with local, antiapartheid politics. Qibla worked closely with the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a group that had broken away from the African National Congress (ANC) in 1959 to espouse an Africanist program as opposed to a nonracial one based on the Freedom Charter of 1955.

Another example of a resurgent organization that resisted the political direction of the MYM was the Call of Islam, founded by Mawlana Farid Esack. This organization, committed to the struggle against the injustice of apartheid, aligned itself with the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. The UDF represented a cross section of the South African cultural and religious organizations opposed to the apartheid state. Like Qibla, it espoused a clear, unequivocal political program and addressed the broader liberation struggle. While Qibla worked with the PAC, the Call of Islam remained aligned with UDF and, by extension, the ANC. By contrast, the MYM merely identified itself as the local manifestation of the global Islamic movement but did not make antiapartheid activity central to its program.

Furthermore, the Call of Islam drew its inspiration from the South African experience and not from international Islamic movements. It was committed to the creation of a nonracial, nonsexist, democratic, and just South Africa. It searched for a South African Islam, not one inspired by “outside” models as in the case of Qibla and the MYM. The Call of Islam presented Islam as social conscience linked to mass democratic movements. Imam Hasan Solomons, a member of the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC, established in 1945), also became attracted to the contextual approach to Islam and therefore joined the Call of Islam. Subsequently, the MYM sought to express Islam in the local context of the struggle for social justice against apartheid.

Political Thought during Democracy

The turning point in the history of Islamic political thought and practice in South Africa came in 1994, which marked the end of apartheid and the inception of democracy. The new democracy protected human rights, including gay and abortion rights. Although the legalization of abortion and the granting of equal rights to gay people were perceived as contrary to Islamic morality, Islamic political parties that campaigned against these measures in 1994 did not gain much support from Muslims. Taking into account that Muslims constituted only 1.46 percent of the total population, their support for these Islamic political parties was still well below the national average. Like the MYM and Qibla, who projected the utopian vision of an Islamic state, the Islamic political parties projected the vision of a utopia with an emphasis on Islamic morality; however, they showed little sign of attempting to respond to the real ethical challenges of a democracy that wants to protect the rights of all citizens.

Ebrahim Rasool, a former MYM and UDF member, was elected as the premier of the Western Cape in August 2004. Rasool was committed to religious pluralism, not to the “fundamentalist” Islamic discourse that avoided the real challenges of society. For him, just as the religious leaders developed a theology of liberation during the struggle against apartheid, so developing a theology of complementing religion with politics was now crucial for guiding religiously diverse communities. Thus he saw no contradiction between being a politician and having a religious identity. A politician with a religious identity could be more sensitive to the concerns not only of his own religious community but also of others.

The MJC supported the 2009 elections on the grounds that, for a Muslim minority, an Islamic state in a non-Muslim country was unrealistic. Thus they argued that Muslims should support the political party that served Muslim objectives, which included the establishment of a just and moral order for all South Africans. Furthermore, they argued that Muslims should become an integral part of the political structures of the country and participate in shared values but without sacrificing their Islamic principles.

From the preceding information, we can conclude that the Islamic political thought of persons and organizations in South Africa changed in accordance with the changes in the sociopolitical conditions of the country. During the apartheid era, Muslims made a significant contribution to the struggle for justice in South Africa for all South Africans. After the establishment of a democratic state, Muslims came to terms with the new challenges of a secular constitution that protected the rights of all its citizens. Muslim religious leaders encouraged the support of political parties that could also serve Muslim objectives but cautioned against sacrificing Islamic principles and values as a result of that support.