In the context of IslamOnline.net’s special coverage of the issue of Muslims in South Africa, Shafiq Morton offers his perspective on the history of Islam in the country. Below is the first of a three-part series.
To understand contemporary Islam in South Africa one has to first take a historical journey down the centuries and across the world’s great oceans. The growth and survival of Islam in South Africa is a phenomenon possessing characteristics not always common to the rest of the Muslim world.
This is because Islam at the tip of Africa was not imported by Arab traders or Ottoman armies, but by oppressed slaves and political exiles. Many of these people came from the Malay-Indonesian archipelago at the hands of the Dutch who were trying to establish hegemony in the region in the 17th century.
Afraid of the consequences of executing or imprisoning their political opponents close to home, the Dutch East India Company chose to send many of these people to faraway Cape Town, where a refreshment station for their fleet was being established.
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Dutch settlers |
Many of the political exiles were prominent Sufi `ulama and Indonesian nobility, some of whom were descendants of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him).[1] Leaders such as Sheikh Yusuf of Makasar, who arrived on South African shores in chains in 1694 on board the Voetboog, had lectured in the Haram in Makkah (Abu Hamid).[2]
While the slaves and exiled `ulama of the Far East, India, and Africa are traditionally acknowledged as the forefathers of South African Islam, one has to also recognize the possible influences of previous visiting seafarers from the Muslim world. These peoples are known to have impacted southern African culture in some way or another, particularly its eastern seaboard.
Of interest in this respect is a map by Marino Sanudo,[3] the 14th century Venetian statesman and cartographer, that is said to reveal the tip of Africa, and even Robben Island in Table Bay just outside Cape Town. Arab geographers and Ptolemy would have informed Sanudo, a man who agitated for a return to the Crusades. Someone would have had to sail around Africa before that date for a mapmaker to mark this island on his charts, which he correctly positions west of Africa’s southern tip.
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Examination indicates that Jan van Riebeck—who arrived in Cape Town in 1652—may not have brought the first Muslims to the region as is commonly believed. |
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To this effect, the fifth century BC scholar Herodotus said that “Libya (Africa) was washed on all sides by the sea,” except where it was attached to Asia. Bartholomew Diaz, the famous Portuguese explorer, who rounded the southernmost tip of Africa in 1488, is believed to have used well-known maps for his navigation that showed Africa could be circumnavigated.
As we’ve said, the popular theory is that South African Islam came from the Far East via the medium of Dutch colonization. However, a brief examination of available knowledge and oral legend indicates that Jan van Riebeck—who arrived in Cape Town in 1652—may not have brought the first Muslims to the region as is commonly believed.
My limited research reveals that our indigenous African history and oral tradition, especially its encounters with Islam, are still hugely untapped. For example, how many historians know that ships of the great West African Islamic Empire crossed the Atlantic, and reached America’s eastern seaboard centuries before Columbus?
How many have discovered that Columbus and other European adventurers heard the Adhan and saw mosques in Cuba and the West Indies? (Quick).
Bartholomew Diaz would have probably seen mosque minarets only as far south as Sofala in modern-day Mozambique. However, accounts of an ancient fig tree and pre-Islamic “Arabic” artifacts[4] discovered in East London, South Africa’s only river port, 600 km south of Sofala (fig trees are not indigenous to South Africa) and the recovery in 1927 of a Malaysian kabang, or canoe, that had drifted to Port Elizabeth, some 300 km south from the Nicobar Islands, are titillating scraps of information.
Al-Biruni, the famous geographer and scientist, admitted in the ninth century that Africa had navigable oceans in the south. The discovery of two massive, ancient wooden shipwrecks in the sands of the Cape Flats outside Cape Town[5] in the 1800s provides another precious thread of evidence of ancient civilizations rounding the southern tip of Africa (Green).
Unfortunately, the wrecks no longer exist, but observers at the time reported that the semi-fossilized wood from the abandoned ships used to burn in the hearths of 19th century Cape Town with a sweet smell, possibly that of cedar. Some argue that these ships could have been Phoenician galleys dating from 600 BC when reports first emerged of ships rounding the Cape.
This idea is not as farfetched as it sounds. Geographers and sailors note that the prevailing ocean currents that flow around southern Africa—the Mozambique and the Benguela—run from Kenya to Cape Point, and then north from Cape Point towards the Ivory Coast. However, this does militate against the Phoenician galleys sailing from Sidon across the Mediterranean and past the western bulge of Africa against the prevailing currents.
What strengthens the Phoenician story, though, is their reporting that the sun was on their right-hand side as they sailed around Africa, indicating that they had at least penetrated the southern hemisphere. The knowledge of the ancient Phoenicians would no doubt have been passed on to other mariners who would have voyaged to India, the Far East, and China.
For this reason, there is also an argument that the wrecks could have been abandoned by the 15th century Chinese admiral Zheng He, whose huge junks explored the African coast from 1411. Zheng He was known to be a devout Muslim.[6]
The Portuguese used to call the yellow-skinned, slit-eyed coastal Hottentots, “Chinese Hottentots.” The South African author Lawrence Green says in his book Great African Mysteries that the traditional pagoda-style hats of the inland Tswana tribe indicate that they also came from Chinese stock.
Apart from many possible foreign influences on South African indigenous peoples (still to be seriously investigated), the early Muslims, by all accounts, did not penetrate inland farther south than the Transvaal (where Johannesburg is situated), although San rock paintings in the Drakensberg mountains southeast of Johannesburg depict men in “Arab garb,” and another at Makgabeng in the northern Transvaal shows five men in Oriental clothing in the position of ruku` (Hall and Marsh).
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Of further interest is a little-known legend that a man called Musa, the half-Ethiopian son of a companion of the Prophet Muhammad lies buried somewhere in the Western Cape, just outside Cape Town. |
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Sofala in Mozambique was a well-known port for Zimbabwe’s gold and ivory, which had to be transported hundreds of kilometers overland before reaching the sea. The social fabric of Mozamibiquan Islam was smashed by the Portuguese and given its last rites by the communist rule of Samora Machel. Islam did, nevertheless, survive in neighboring Malawi.
It is said that the famous Zimbabwean stone citadels were built by an African civilization that mined its gold reserves and traded with the Arabs. Eastern traders must have known the Zambezi River and the mighty Victoria Falls long before Livingstone blundered into the bush.
Of further interest is a little-known legend[7] that a man called Musa, the half-Ethiopian son of a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) lies buried somewhere in the Western Cape, just outside Cape Town. Apparently Musa, fired up with the spirit of da`wah, caught a ship for Africa but was shipwrecked and saved by the local tribes.
The story goes that the local San tribesmen became good Muslims under Musa’s guidance. A German convert to Islam, Tariq Knapp, claims to have unearthed this legend in Fez, Morocco, when a sheikh told him about it and instructed him to find the grave of Musa and to build a mosque near its site. Financial constraints and old age have prevented Knapp from furthering his ijazah.
Another fascinating legend is told by a tribe called the Ba-Lemba,[8] who today live as minority groups in the northern Transvaal, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. They believe themselves to be of Jewish origin and of Yemeni extraction.
However, one man from the tribe who had embraced Islam, Saeed Shaikh, said he believed that he was descended from Zaid, a grandson of Hussain, the son of the Prophet’s Companion `Ali. He said that the emoZaid, the people of Zaid, moved down the east coast of Africa into the interior. By 950 CE they were in Zimbabwe and according to reports, co-existed peacefully with other tribes and were originally known as the “Aba Araba.”
While Shaikh’s claims of lineage could be fanciful, a subsequent DNA test by Jewish scholars[9] has revealed that the Lemba have strong Levite origins. While debate now rages whether the Lemba are one of the “Lost Tribes” or not, the customs of the Ba-Lemba are distinctly and undeniably “Abrahamic.” Circumsion, the abolition of pork, and the burial of the dead in a shroud form an integral part of their tribal culture.
The advent of the 18th century saw the rise of European colonialism and the blockage of Islam’s gradual osmosis into southern Africa from the north and east. The topic of our next article, in sha’ Allah, will show how the oppression of Islam in one part of the world brought it to another and, ironically, caused it to flourish in isolation from the rest of the continent for over 300 years.
Sources
Abu Hamid. Syekh Yusuf Makassar: `Alim, Sufi, Author, Hero. Indonesia: Hasanuddin University, 1994.
Davids, Achmat and Yusuf da Costa. Pages from Cape Muslim History. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1994.
Green, Lawrence. Great African Mysteries. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, circa 1960.
Hall, Sian and Rob Marsh. Beyond Belief, Murders and Mysteries of Southern Africa. Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 1996.
Menzies, Gavin. 1421 – the Year China Discovered the World. Great Britain: Bantam Books, 2003.
Quick, Abdullah Hakim. Deeper Roots: Muslims in the Americas and the Caribbean from Before Columbus to the Present. London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1998.
Shaikh, Saeed. Interview. Muslim Views. Cape Town, South Africa. September 1990.
“South Africa First Inhabited by Muslims.” Saudi Gazette. 8 January 1990.
** Shafiq Morton is a senior South African journalist and a presenter at the Voice of the Cape radio station.
[1] Islam was brought to the Far East chiefly by Arab traders and da`is who married into the local populations. Sayyid Abdur-Rahman Matarah (also known as Haji Matarim) and Tuan Sayyid `Alawi, for example, both originally hailed from Yemen. They were exiled to the Cape from the Far East by the Dutch. The Ba `Alawi Sufi practices of many of these South African Islamic pioneers carried down the generations in Cape Town are strong evidence of Arab influence. The Ba `Alawi originate from Hadhraumat when a leader of the Prophet’s descendants, Ahmad ibn `Isa (Imam Muhajir), emigrated from Baghdad during the Abbasid period. Shaikh `Abdullah ibn Qadi `Abd us-Salam, a prince from Tidore who arrived in Cape Town in 1780, enjoyed the title “Tuan Guru (Master teacher), one only given to descendants of the Prophet (s). The links of the Hadhrami Sayyids to the families of Indonesia is well-known in the region, although some of the silsilah (family chains) are forged. Sources: Shaikh Seraj Hendricks, Dr Achmat Davids, Professor Yusuf da Costa. Also see: “A General Theory on the Islamisation of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago” by Dr Syeed Naguib al-Attas, Kuala Lumpur, 1969.
[2] See: “In the footsteps of the Companions, Shaykh Yusuf of Macassar (1629-1699)” from Pages From Cape Muslim History by Dr Achmat Davids and Prof Yusuf da Costa.
[3] Saudi Gazette. The map shows an island to the west of the southern tip of Africa. The only island to the west of Africa in that position is Robben Island.
[4] Discovered by a former Rhodes University geologist called van Wyk. The site was on his farm near the Chalumna river mouth. This is in the same area where author Lawrence Green in his Great African Mysteries cites Brother Otto, of the Marianhill monastery in KwaZulu-Natal, unearthing clothed figures painted in caves in the Kei River valley. These figures, depicted with white skins, wore clothing similar to that of the peoples of the “Asia Minor” about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus.
[5] See Eight Bells at Salamander, p 17. Green is, incidentally, cynical about Arabs circumnavigating the Cape. Gavin Menzies, the author of 1421 – The Year China Discovered the World and a proponent of Chinese pioneering the route, agrees. Jose Burman in his book Strange Shipwrecks (publisher unknown as I have a Photostat copy) supports the Phoenician theory.
[6] See Gavin Menzies.
[7] Tariq Knapp’s theory is undeniably controversial, highly esoteric, and somewhat difficult to prove—despite his detailed research. His account first appeared in the Saudi Gazette of 8 January 1990, and in Muslim Views, Cape Town, South Africa, August 1990. I interviewed him, already an old man, on Voice of the Cape radio station in 2002. Shaikh Ahmad Hendricks of the Azzawia in Cape Town was given a copy of Tariq Knapp’s ijazah, written in Arabic. Knapp’s account is recounted as legend, one that needs further investigation.
[8] Interview with Saeed Shaikh.
[9] See: Neil Bradman and Mark Thomas "Y Chromosomes Traveling South: The Cohen Modal Haplotype and the Origins of the Lemba, the "Black Jews of South Africa". Published electronically February 2000. (This does preclude the possibility of the Lemba becoming Muslims or Christians while in the Diaspora.)