TayoBlog

On 26 August 2008, the Islamic Peace University of South Africa (IPSA) launched  its research findings on Muslim attitudes to South African politics with a panel of the most notable male political commentators within the Muslim establishment in the Western Cape. The former Premier of the Western Cape was the central attraction.

If you expected to hear anything juicy about the backroom politics of the ANC from Rasool, you would have been disappointed. But you would not have been disappointed if you wanted to listen to Muslim leadership, civil and religious, anguishing about the role of Islam in democratic South Africa.

The most significant of the presentations for me was the key result of the survey. Middle-class Muslims and their religious leaders were the most positive about South Africa’s politics. The SA constitution had clearly given Islam a respectable place since centuries of marginalization and denial.
Muslim identity was thus basking in the freedoms of South Africa’s liberal constitution and political establishment. Even foreign Muslim groups were rushing headlong to enjoy this freedom. It was an added bonus that South Africa also boasted the most beautiful cities like Cape Town, or the most functioning infrastructure if you had the money to pay for it.

But the lower one went down the class divide, said editor of the Muslim Views Farid Sayed, the more you heard the anger and despair of Muslims towards the new politics and politicians. Democratic South Africa had failed them, and failed them dismally. They wanted better schools, healthcare, food on the table (jobs) and social security. The survey clearly threw down the gauntlet to South African (Muslim) leadership.

Following this survey, all the speakers tried to propose an Islamic politics that need not be confined to the specific practices and forms of the past. The values of Sharia lay not in slavery or the denial of women’s rights, but in ultimate goals (Shaykh Seraj Hendricks). The insight (fiqh) of politics required respectful distance from the state and support for NGOs (Imam Abdul Rashied Omar). Muslims needed to recognize the threats of globalization against all traditions and all religions. Together with an alliance of the faithful, Muslims ought to draw deep from the tradition to stand up against this threat (Rasool).

The responses from the floor added to this critical engagement with the tradition. It was a discussion that apparently relativized the tradition, as one participant managed to slip in, in favour of an open-ended approach to values and principles. Against a general trend that fretted and worried about the length of a beard, the lock of hair dangling out of a tightly- woven scarf, the exact scientific calculation of the moment to break one’s fast, the panel and discussants threw open the doors to engagement, justice and humanism.

But the discussion completely ignored the survey. The responses of the majority of Muslims seemed to evade the speakers. The middle class Muslims were happy with the freedom of religion that they enjoyed. There were no critical voices about Islam in South Africa that other Muslims communities faced. The state’s support for culture and religions provided a cover for religious practices.

Elsewhere, Muslims came under microscopic observation. The local media treated Muslims with kid gloves. Other capitalist institutions treated Muslims with the respect that all customers deserved. In response, Muslim observance thrived in every corner of the country. And they seemed to feel no anguish about living in a democracy.

Poorer Muslims were unhappy with SA politicians, but they were hardly concerned about who led the prayer at the President’s inauguration, or how many minutes Islam got on national media. They called politicians to account for their promises, and found them deeply wanting. Their demands were clearly secular, and their appraisal of Muslim politics was also clearly secular.

So I wondered why the panellists were agonizing about the relationship between Islam and democracy; and Islam and values. Why did they want a religious justification for social and political values?

Why did they miss the meaning of religion among middle class Muslims who enjoyed the fruits of neo-liberalism, and enjoyed the fruits of religious freedom? And why did they miss the secular yearnings of poor Muslims, who were either comfortable with their religion they lived, or were hardly interested.

My tentative answer to this self-imposed question was that Muslim leadership in Cape Town and elsewhere has been blind to the dance of the secular and the religious that is a feature of the modern world. Committed to the past, traditionalist or reformist, they feel compelled to sing the praises of a holistic civilization.

Muslims leaders themselves enjoy the fruits of the secular if they are wealthy enough. Or they mobilize the secular aspirations of the downtrodden, in promise of a fabulous utopia called the Islamic state. The secular is part of the religious, and Muslim leadership lives on its fruits and promises.

To deny the secular is surely to miss something. To ignore the secular yearnings of a people, and feed it with religious rhetoric of any kind, begs some serious questions.