Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

R ace, Ideology, and Islam in Contemporary South Africa 2 6 5ments prodded the Muslim Judicial Council and other cultural bodies to rejectthe “Cape Malay” identity for the Muslim community. Malayism, they argued,had been constructed as a way of being Muslim in the service of apartheid. TheMuslim Teachers Association was successful in mobilizing Muslims to reject thisconstruct, and as it did so, it injected elements of an antiapartheid discourse inthe midst of Muslim religious life. In 1961, Muslims came together to declareapartheid an abhorrence to Islamic values. As the emerging leader of thismovement, the charismatic Cape Muslim leader Imam Haron stood up againstapartheid until he was killed in police custody in 1969. However, other movementsfor such mobilization followed until the fall of the apartheid regime.The second major feature of this period, that of Muslim modernism, wasmore pronounced in the Transvaal and Natal among Indian Muslims. In contrastwith the Muslim Teachers Association in the Cape, the Natal MuslimCouncil in the 1940s supported women’s rights, the integration of secular andreligious education, and a generally more modern outlook on Islamic life. Atone of its conferences, for example, the Natal Muslim Council expressed itsdesire to found a religious institution that would train people to “lecture on Islamicsubjects” who were “qualified in religion, modern technique and moderneducation” (Tayob 1995, 94). These were merely aspirations at this stage,but they expressed the frustrations of a growing body of individuals with the attitudesand approaches of traditional religious leaders. In contrast to thefounders of the Natal Muslim Council, who were businessmen, professionals,and students at secular institutions, the Muslim religious leaders knew littleEnglish and were seen as being out of touch with the demands of life in a modernurban city such as Durban. The proliferation of Muslim youth organizationsrepresented a generation gap within Islamic communities between religiousleaders and professionals, between those who were raised in India andthose who were socialized in South Africa, and between modernity and tradition.In addition to an antiapartheid ethos, then, this paradigm shift in Islamicthinking was characterized by more general aspirations to become modern, sociallyrelevant, and respectable.The Cape Youth associated with Imam Haron and the Natal Muslim Councilwas among the number of religious organizations that proliferated in thec o u n t ry during the second half of the twentieth century. Like their individualreligious leaders, such organizations developed links with international organizations,such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt and the Jama’at-i Islami inIndia. The first phase of such developments emerged in South Africa duringthe 1950s with organizations such as the Arabic Study Circle, the Islamic PropagationCentre, and the Wo m e n ’s Cultural Group. As the tide of Islamic revivalincreased in the 1970s, the groups proliferated in South Africa and developedalongside nationwide organizations such as the Muslim Students Association,the Muslim Youth Movement, the Qiblah Mass Movements, and the Call of Is-