Revival From Below

by Brannon D Ingram

  It is difficult to ascertain who read these pamphlets. They were likely read by staunch partisans to these debates and perhaps ignored by most other Muslims. But as Deobandis and Barelvis issued these diatribes back and forth, a number of far more public confrontations took place in mosques and lecture halls during the same years—encounters that came to define both sides of these debates for those who had little at stake in them. This, in turn, unfolded within a broader Muslim public in South Africa that had become politically charged and increasingly critical of the ‘ulama in general and Deobandis in particular. To understand how the Deobandi brand became so fiercely contested by a wide swath of Muslim activists in this period, it is necessary to turn first to the events that galvanized them.

  7

  A Tradition Contested

  On 16 June 1976, thousands of South African students marched from the township of Soweto toward Johannesburg’s Orlando soccer stadium to protest, among other things, mandatory Afrikaans language instruction in public schools. In what is now known as the Soweto Uprising, apartheid security forces fired upon the swelling numbers of protesters, killing nearly two hundred on that day alone, mostly children. Subsequent riots would claim the lives of hundreds more.1 Soweto was, of course, not the first major event to awaken South Africans, and the world, to the horrors of apartheid. South Africans had already endured decades of institutionalized racism, extrajudicial detentions and killings, and the slaughter of protesters, most notably in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960.2

  Still, for a nascent Muslim anti-apartheid movement, the Soweto Uprising was a turning point, as it was for the movement as a whole. In its aftermath, Muslim politicians, community leaders, and organizations condemned the attack vociferously. The front page of the Cape Town-based Muslim News deemed it “South Africa’s Tragedy,” coupled with condemnations from an array of Muslim organizations.3 In its “Soweto Fatwa,” Cape Town’s Muslim Judicial Council declared itself to be “part and parcel of the oppressed,” and pledged its “full support and solidarity with the youth in their peaceful demonstrations and with all the oppressed in their legitimate aspirations for freedom.”4 In the ensuing years, Muslims joined people of other faiths in opposing the regime, marching by the thousands alongside Christians, Jews, and Hindus in the streets of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, and elsewhere.

  The year 1976 was also when the Majlisul Ulama of South Africa, led by Deobandi scholar Ahmed Sadiq Desai, began publishing its controversial periodical, The Majlis. Desai went on to spend the next two decades lampooning the very activists who had been roused by events in Soweto. Born in South Africa in 1939, Desai graduated from Miftah al-‘Ulum in Jalalabad (Muzaffarnagar), India—the Deobandi madrasa founded by his teacher and Sufi master, Masihullah Khan, who was in turn one of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi’s closest disciples and successors.

  This chapter puts Desai and his aversion toward Muslims’ political activism in the context of South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s and, more broadly, into the trajectory of global Deobandi tradition. It begins, first, with events that mobilized South African Muslims against apartheid, and details how these same Muslims began to connect actively and affectively to the suffering of Muslims globally. It then turns to public confrontations between Tablighis and Barelvis during this period, which were lambasted by activists for their perceived irrelevance to more urgent political concerns. Finally, in the crux of the chapter, it turns to Ahmad Sadiq Desai and his attempts to graft Thanvi’s politics onto the local context and the fierce opposition that he met in doing so.

  MUSLIM POLITICS UNDER APARTHEID

  As conflicts raged between Deobandis and Barelvis in the late 1970s and ’80s, as discussed in chapter 6, other South African Muslims looked to new forms of Islamic activism beyond their borders and became increasingly exasperated with the perceived inertia of South Africa’s ‘ulama. Even before Soweto, the ‘ulama came under increased scrutiny for their failure to speak out against a spate of detentions and arrests by the apartheid regime, the most noteworthy of which, for Muslims, was the arrest and murder of Imam Abdullah Haron in 1969.5 Muslim News, the most widely read and prominent Muslim newspaper in the Cape, first began to speak out in editorials against the ‘ulama for silence on the issue of detentions in 1974.6 In 1975 the newspaper issued an impassioned call for South African ‘ulama to become more politically active.7 The newspaper’s editors seemed genuinely surprised that they were not: “Our ulema and representative Muslim bodies have remained strangely quiet about the detention of almost 40 young people by the authorities.”8

  After Soweto, Muslim News applauded some local ‘ulama for speaking out, but, pointing to Deobandi institutions in Transvaal (now Gauteng) and Barelvi institutions in Natal, the paper wrote that “the Ulama and Muslim organizations in Transvaal and Natal have remained mute on this most basic issue of justice and freedom for all South Africans.”9 A narrative that regarded South African ‘ulama as broadly “accommodationist” began to grow—one bolstered by the state itself, as when the pro–National Party paper Die Burger praised the ‘ulama as “moderates” (gematigdes) to distinguish them from Muslim activists.10

  In this period, public debate about the ‘ulama became entangled with a broader transnational political imaginary that animated many in the burgeoning Muslim anti-apartheid movement. These activists drew attention to the suffering of Muslims globally and called for solidarity locally with fellow victims of apartheid across religious divides. This activist imaginary energized Muslims in the Cape in particular, who came to see the Ummah as “a religious community of transnational suffering.”11 Deobandis and Tablighis were criticized for lacking this identification with the global Ummah as well as for eschewing both interreligious and intra-religious solidarity among Muslims.

  Three major Islamic activist movements emerged in the 1970s and ’80s, each with its own politics and its own relationship with the ‘ulama. (I will survey these briefly, then return to them again in the context of Ahmed Sadiq Desai and The Majlis.) Among the first was the Muslim Youth Movement (MYM). Growing in part out of the earlier Durban-based Arabic Study Circle, the Muslim Youth Movement was established in Durban in 1970. The Durban newspaper Al-Qalam, founded in 1971 as the movement’s mouthpiece, was vocal in its antipathy toward Deobandi ‘ulama in Natal and Transvaal.12

  The Muslim Youth Movement deployed a number of tactics. One was imploring lay Muslims to read the Qur’an as a form of political empowerment. In ways reminiscent of Thanvi, South African Deobandis dismissed the Arabic study groups as “modernist” contrivances that attempted to wrest authority of interpretation from the ‘ulama, noting that few if any members of these circles had traditional madrasa training.13 The MYM also mobilized Muslim students through organizing mass rallies. An MYM “rally manual” from 1983, Islam for All, Islam Forever, called on students to resist “anti-Islamic forces” from within and from without, and condemned bickering between Muslims over “trivial matters,” seeing such bickering as unwittingly supporting “Jahili systems” that “oppress, exploit and discriminate.”14 The MYM believed that divisive theological disagreements between Deobandis and Barelvis played into the ruling regime’s strategy of dominance: “The time has come again for the ulema to emerge from the theological barracks into the field of active politics. . . . The colonialists during the occupation of Muslim countries have made it part of their strategy to divide the ulema on petty theological issues. The ulema soon found themselves dissenting over minor issues of fiqh, while the colonialists were replacing Islamic shariah as a basis of government, with that of their own.”15 MYM appropriated Islamist language from figures such as Sayyid Qutb and Abul A‘la Maududi to cast Islam as a comprehensive “system” uniting politics, society, economy, and ethics. The MYM translated and published the works of Maududi, such as his Islamic Way of Life.16

  The second Muslim organization we will discuss here is Qibla, founded in June 1981 by the anti-apartheid activist Achmad Cassiem. Cassiem was arrested in 1964 under th
e Sabotage Act and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on Robben Island, the notorious island prison off the coast of Cape Town, where his sentence overlapped with Nelson Mandela’s. He was repeatedly detained or arrested throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Cassiem had long been involved in calling for armed struggle against the government, and sought to align what he saw as Islam’s revolutionary spirit with pan-African thought.17 Qibla issued a manifesto on the occasion of Ramadan 1981—the same Ramadan during which Muhammad Zakariyya Kandhlavi held his massive Tablighi ijtima‘ in Stanger—envisioning the physical and moral discipline of the fast as the ultimate preparation for total personal, social, and political revolution: “Islam has as its main objective the liberation of man and ending the domination of man by man.”18

  As other Muslim activists who typically fall under the rubric of “political Islam” or “Islamism” have argued, Cassiem, too, believed that Islam’s principle of divine oneness (tawhid) had clear social and political implications. The argument from theological tawhid to social and political tawhid has often seen the Islamic state as its telos.19 But Qibla’s goal was never an Islamic “state.” This would be, at the very least, an improbable goal in a country where Muslims made up less than 2 percent of the population. Instead, Cassiem and Qibla repeatedly called for a “just social order.” The political ramifications of tawhid were not statehood, but the unity of Muslims against all forms of oppression.20 “Islam is not only a message, but also a method” was one among several Qibla rallying cries.21 Qibla’s use of politically charged language complicates scholarly assumptions that the telos of “political Islam” is always statehood—an assumption that Noah Salomon has decisively refuted.22 Part of Cassiem’s campaign for a “just social order” was a critique of South African ‘ulama for not taking the lead on fighting apartheid. Although he recognized that individual ‘ulama have done important work in this regard, “for too long” South Africa’s Muslims have “sat apathetically expecting the ‘Ulama . . . to do their thinking, their decision–making, and their acting.”23

  The third Muslim organization, the Call of Islam, was founded in June 1984 and aligned itself with the United Democratic Front (UDF). The UDF formed as an umbrella organization for groups opposed to the tricameral parliament proposed by the National Party in 1983. This system, enacted in 1984, gave some parliamentary representation to Indians and Coloureds for the first time, but still excluded Black South Africans. Many saw this as a thinly veiled attempt to foster racial division in the anti-apartheid movement itself, and as a clear affront to the dignity of the majority black population. UDF resistance included major boycotts of white-owned businesses and products.24 Despite requests for their guidance on whether Muslims should support the tricameral system as a step in the right direction or resist it altogether, ‘ulama councils in Transvaal and Natal remained mum.25 A letter from a woman in Port Shepstone summarized many Muslims’ anger toward these councils: “What guidance have they given us in the recent tricameral elections?” she asked. “The Ulama, leave alone guiding Muslim communities, have accepted the colonial system. In fact they are executing the colonial plan against Islam. By this I mean they tell us that Arabic is too difficult to learn. They have divided the community on minor issues.”26

  The Call of Islam stepped in to fill this apparent leadership vacuum. One of its leaders, Farid Esack, had a seminary education (from a Deobandi institution, no less), and made arguments for supporting UDF boycotts and interfaith marches in Islamic terms.27 Esack saw Islam as the basis for unifying Muslims above and beyond the racial hierarchies that had been imposed on them by the state: “Apartheid has not helped us to preserve our identity as Muslims but as Indians and Malays. It has ignored the fact that there are blacks who share our Islam with us but who are not allowed to share a complete identity with us.”28

  The Call of Islam cast itself as an alternative to the overt militancy of Qibla.29 Qibla, in turn, looked to the 1979 revolution in Iran as an example of what the ‘ulama could do when properly galvanized against colonialism and imperialism. Meanwhile, Johannesburg-area Tablighis criticized Iran from the pulpit of area mosques, and the Jamiatul Ulama Transvaal denounced the revolution—animated, in part, by Deobandi anti-Shi‘a sentiment—and called for a “ban” on Muslims traveling to Iran. Ten South Africans, among them one of Cape Town’s foremost anti-apartheid activists, Hassan Solomon, defied the Jamiatul Ulama and flew to Iran to be a part of a “World Ulema Unity Week.” Qibla praised the Iranians and the South African delegation to Iran.30 A group called the Black Students Society slammed the Jamiatul Ulama: “The Jamiatul Ulama did not have the guts to hit out at oppression, racism, Zionism and imperialism the way the Shi‘a leaders in Iran are doing.”31 Fatima Meer, whom we encountered earlier for her criticism of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband fatwa legitimating the collecting of interest, was exasperated:

  In Iran the ulama (theologians) lead the people in the revolution against the tyranny of the Shah. In India, they took the forefront in the resistance against colonial oppression. In South Africa the ulama have a reputation for reaction, narrow orthodoxy, narrow conservatism, and rigidity. They are known for keeping their noses safely buried in ritual and avoiding any controversy that might result in the slightest confrontation with the state.32

  Muslim News was at the forefront of drawing attention to the evident apathy of the South African ‘ulama toward Muslim suffering at home and abroad. It issued rousing calls to arms in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as its “Message to the Oppressors and Their Supporters” of September 1979, “Islam’s Freedom Charter” of August 1980, and its “Revolutionary Manifesto of the Oppressed People” in August 1983, becoming banned on multiple occasions.33 In July 1982, the newspaper expressed its vision of transnational solidarity with political movements elsewhere in the Muslim world, in activist language that South African Deobandis found abhorrent:

  We in South Africa must look at ourselves in the context of the brave Mujahideen of Afghanistan who are toiling under the yoke of Soviet Afghanistan. We in South Africa must look at ourselves in the context of our suffering under this ungodly regime. The people of Lebanon and Afghanistan are suffering yet they are actively striving and sacrificing in the face of the assault on their human dignity. Muslims in South Africa suffer the indignity of being reduced to non-people yet we do not fight back. The moment the oppressed people resolve to destroy the system of oppression and actively engage the oppressors then they no longer suffer because they have now resolved to sacrifice. In any struggle, sacrifice is a necessity. Sacrifice towards achieving martyrdom is a fundamental principle of Islam.34

  TABLIGHI–BARELVI CLASHES IN THE MID-1980S

  Amid this widespread and variegated anti-‘ulama sentiment, clashes between Tablighis and Barelvis in the 1980s brought increased scrutiny on the Deobandi–Barelvi debate in a highly public way that the circulation of polemical pamphlets we discussed in the previous chapter did not. Some of these were tussles at various mosques and mawlud functions. In Cape Town, an imam was assaulted for siding with the Tablighi stance on giving salutations (salam) to the Prophet Muhammad.35 In Verulam, a predominantly Indian suburb of Durban, mosque trustees arranged for armed men to block the entrance of some one thousand congregants who had gathered to celebrate mawlud on the premises under the aegis of the Barelvi organization Ahl-e Sunnat wal Jammat.36

  But two events, in 1985 and 1987, exemplified for many South African Muslims the political myopia of the Deobandi–Barelvi rivalry. First, in January 1985, Ebrahim Adam (d. 2013), a graduate of the Dar al-‘Ulum Deoband and serving at that time on the Fatwa Committee of the Muslim Judicial Council, gave a lecture on Barelvis in a mosque in the Cape Town neighborhood of Bridgetown.37 In his lecture, titled “The Barelvi Menace,” Adam quoted Ahmad Raza Khan’s poetry in an attempt to prove that Ahmad Raza Khan claimed to receive revelation (wahy)—a grave charge, and reminiscent of claims by the founder of the Ahmadiyya, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), despised by both Deobandis and
Barelvis.38 From the Barelvi perspective, the charge implied that Ahmad Raza Khan was outside of the fold of Islam. (An irony of Adam’s lecture is that Barelvis have historically accused Deobandis of unbelief [kufr] far more than the opposite.)39 Adam also impugned one of Khan’s most prominent disciples, Abdul Aleem Siddiqui, who traveled and taught throughout South Africa in the 1950s,40 suggesting that Siddiqui regarded Khan to be a prophet.41 Two Barelvi scholars, Cape Town’s Ahmed Mukaddam and Durban’s Abdur Rauf Soofie, issued a public challenge to Adam “to prove in public his derogatory statements that . . . the followers of the Qadiri Silsilah,” widely associated with the Barelvi movement, “and all the SUNNIS, are KAAFFIR.”42 Editors of Durban’s Muslim Digest accused Adam of “sowing the seeds of disunity in the Muslim community of the Cape,” adding, “[F]or 300 years there was no division in the Muslim Ummah here. They (the Muslims) of the Cape knew little about the Deobandi-Brelvi [sic] subject. But since the Deobandi Ulama, the like of Ebrahim Adam, had come to the Cape, the hymns of hate against the so-called Brelvis had begun.”43 In a public forum on the event in Cape Town, Abdur Rauf Soofie dismissed the debate as a reactionary distraction from more pressing matters: “While . . . the world is looking at the [South African Defense Force] shooting innocent people, this man finds time to tell a group of people that there is a very big ‘Barelvi menace’ in this country.”44

  In the following months, similarly, Al-Qalam printed a series of letters from across the country from people who charged that contemporary South African politics left no room for “Indian” theological quibbles. Amid glossy color photos from Palestine and Afghanistan and articles on Malcolm X and Steve Biko, these letters assaulted the Deobandi ‘ulama. The principal of the Dar al-‘Ulum Newcastle wrote in defense of the Deobandis: “These ulema and experts of Deen [religion] have acquired their sound and true knowledge of Deen from those ulama of deen who are experts in their field . . . until this line of expert transmitters reached the Holy Prophet.”45 A community leader, Fatih Osman, gave a speech at the Dar al-‘Ulum Newcastle imploring the Deobandi ‘ulama directly to “stand up for justice” and entreating them not to let internal squabbles distract them from political causes.46