Regarding Muslims , livre ebook

Regarding Muslims from slavery to post-apartheid
Gabeba Baderoon
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg, 2001
www.witspress.co.za
First published 2014
Copyright Gabeba Baderoon 2014
Foreword Rustum Kozain 2014
Published edition Wits University Press 2014
Photographs and artwork Individual copyright holders 2014
(see list of illustrations on page vii)
Cover image: Malay Bride - Irma Stern Irma Stern Trust DALRO
Sunday School by Yvette Christians in Castaway (1999) Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder www.dukeupress.edu .
Silhouette by Ladan Osman in The Kitchen Dweller s Testimony ( forthcoming in 2015 ).
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Senegal: Amalion Press.
Republished by permission of the copyright holder Ladan Osman.
Sea by Mxolisi Nyezwa in Song Trials (2000). University of KwaZulu-Natal Press/Gecko Books.
Republished by permission of the copyright holder Mxolisi Nyezwa.
Reclaiming the P Word by Mary Hames et. al. (2006). Republished by permission of the copyright holder Mary Hames.
Earlier versions of some sections have appeared in World Literature Today, Social Dynamics , the Arab World Geographer, Annual Review of Islam in South Africa, African and Asian Studies, Research in African Literatures and Ecquid Novi .
978-1-86814-769-4 (print)
978-1-86814-852-3 (digital)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Edited by Helen Moffett
Proofread by Margaret Ramsay
Index by Margaret Ramsay
Cover design by Abdul Amien
Book design and layout by Abdul Amien
Printed and bound by Paarl Media, South Africa
Contents List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Foreword by Rustum Kozain xv Introduction: Beginnings in South Africa 1 Chapter 1 Ambiguous Visibility: Muslims and the making of visuality 27 Chapter 2 Kitchen Language : Muslims and the culture of food 46 Chapter 3 The Sea Inside Us : Parallel journeys in the African oceans 66 Chapter 4 Sexual Geographies of the Cape : Slavery, race and sexual violence 83 Chapter 5 Regarding Muslims: Pagad, masked men and veiled women 107 Chapter 6 The Trees Sway North-North-East : Post-apartheid visions of Islam 133 Conclusion 153 Notes 161 Glossary 167 Bibliography 171 Index 199 Illustrations fall between pages and 108 and 109
List of illustrations
Cover: Malay Bride - Irma Stern. Reproduced with permission from DALRO Irma Stern Trust Irma Stern Trust | DALRO.
Illustrations in colour section:
P. van der Aa - D Almeida and his men killed by Hottentots on the shore of Table Bay in 1510 Copperplate 1707 : Source: Alfred Gordon-Brown, Pictorial Africana: A survey of old South African paintings, drawings and prints to the end of the nineteenth century with a biographic dictionary of one thousand artists . Reproduced courtesy of the South African National Library, Cape Town.
Hertzoggies from The Cape Malay Cookbook by Faldela Williams , Cape Town, Struik, 1988 . Photograph by Cornel de Kock. Reproduced with permission from Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd.
George French Angas - Cape Town from the Camps Bay Road . Lithograph printed by Charles Lovell. Source: The Kafirs Illustrated: In a series of drawings taken among the Amazulu, Amaponda, and Amakosa Tribes, Also, portraits of the Hottentot, Malay, Fingo, and other races inhabiting Southern Africa together with sketches of landscape scenery in the Zulu country, Natal and the Cape Colony , 1974 [1849]. Reproduced courtesy of the South African National Library, Cape Town.
Stamps in the passport of Auntie Galiema on her way to Mecca in 1951. Reproduced with kind permission of Auntie Galiema .
All pictures of the Hajji s and the pilgrimage to Mecca are from the private collection of the Haron family. Reproduced with kind permission of the Haron family.
Cape Times , 6 August 1996, On Guard photograph by B. Gool. Reproduced with permission of Independent Newspapers Cape, courtesy of the South African National Library, Cape Town.
The Argus , 7 August 1996, Mass Action on Gangs . Reproduced with permission of Independent Newspapers Cape, courtesy of the South African National Library, Cape Town.
Cape Times , 12 August 1996 Single Masked Man . Photograph by T. Dwayisa. Reproduced with permission of Independent Newspapers Cape, courtesy of the South African National Library, Cape Town.
Berni Searle - Untitled ( 1999 ). Reproduced with permission of the artist.
Acknowledgements

I see all the book spines there ever were, their colours and textures like women bent in prayer on a high holy day. My voice is small as it asks, What will it matter to them if I make a book?
- Ladan Osman, Silhouette
Recently in Pennsylvania, I was recalling with a South African friend that the Afrikaans language textbook we were given at school contained the idiomatic saying: so dronk soos n Kleurling onderwyser (as drunk as a Coloured 1 teacher). Hearing this idiom - devastatingly familiar to me - my American partner felt the visceral shock of recognition of what apartheid meant. Just as education was for him a revelatory experience, for me, it was an induction into my place in a painfully and overtly unjust world. And yet it was also revelatory.
Because there was the official account - the textbook version of apartheid education - but at Livingstone High School, I was also taught the radical and progressive version. We refused the identity offered to us by the racially separate Coloured education system, of which my school was a part. As a child, I learned both what was in the textbooks and what was left out.
The idiom about the commonplace sight of a drunk coloured teacher was meant to signal the impossibility of black intellectual life. The contempt with which this saying highlighted the failure of the black intelligentsia also conveyed the heartbreak induced by apartheid s attack on all of black life. Of course, through the idiom, apartheid tried to erase the long history of black intellectual achievement in South Africa, and therefore, crucially, any resistance to apartheid had to engage in an intellectual battle too.
This book claims a modest place in such a contest.
A book is a collective effort and an intellectual autobiography. Under apartheid, an entire social infrastructure existed to turn me into a compliant subject of a racist and authoritarian state. In some ways it succeeded, and in others, it failed. The failure of the apartheid project on the small scale of one human being I ascribe to several heroic people and institutions.
I trace my genealogy to the neighbourhood pre-schools and madressas of Athlone, a Catholic primary school named St Ignatius, and a great hive of black intellectual accomplishment called Livingstone High School (both of which were located in the segregated suburb of Claremont from which black residents were removed in the 1960s), the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape, Sheffield University, Sheffield Hallam University and Pennsylvania State University. I thank all my teachers.
At Livingstone, I was seen by my teachers, some of whom had taught my mother decades before, as clever (an ambiguous word for a child). Thirty years before, my mother was brilliant at Livingstone, and went on to medical studies at the University of Cape Town. She told me a story about being a student there that has haunted me for long years.
I forget to look

The photograph of my mother at her desk in the fifties has been in my purse for twenty years, its paper faded, browning, the scalloped edge bent then straightened.

The collar of her dress folds discreetly. The angle of her neck looks as though someone has called her from far away.

She was the first in her family to take the bus from Claremont up the hill to the university.

At one point during the lectures at medical school, black students had to pack their notes, get up and walk past the ascending rows of desks out of the theatre.

Behind the closed door, in an autopsy black students were not meant to see the uncovering and cutting of white skin.

Under the knife, the skin, the mystery of sameness.

In a world that defined how black and white could look at each other, touch each other, my mother looks back, her poise unmarred.

Every time I open my purse, she is there, so familiar I forget to look at her.
- Gabeba Baderoon, A hundred silences , 2006
My mother, the luminous intellectual, countered apartheid s racist and sexist myths and allowed me to embark on that path too.
Since I was designated clever, it seemed inevitable that I too would go to medical school. However, in standard eight, two years before matric, my love of English directed me toward literary studies instead. At the University of Cape Town, I was shy, out of place, not a very good student at first, but eventually literature offered me a home and, more importantly, an intellectual community. My foundational friendships and scholarly partnerships were born at that time, both at the University of Cape Town, and its more radical and far less affluent neighbour, the University of the Western Cape.
At UCT, I was fortunate to be surrounded by a cohort of superb graduate students and my teachers and colleagues Eve Bertelsen, Dorothy Driver, John Coetzee, Stephen Watson, Abdulkader Tayob, Shamil Jeppie, Mahmood Mamdani, Amina Mama, Nigel Worden, Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ebrahim Moosa, Muhamed Haron and Johnny van der Westhuizen became lifelong influences. At UWC, the incomparable Desiree Lewis, Zo Wicomb, Patricia Hayes, Premesh Lalu, Ciraj Rassool, Mary Hames, Suren Pillay, David Bunn and Jane Taylor were an inspiration.
In 2003 I moved