Paper long abstract:

Islam in South Africa has been dominantly narrated and represented by the Indian and Malay Muslim communities and has sidelined or ignored the long history of Black African Muslims. This problematic seems to be linked to oriental and colonial discourses that view Islam as incongruent with Africa, that African Muslims are either new comers to Islam through conversion or their Islamic practices are syncretic. However, these narratives and discourses occlude a crucial aspect of Muslim Africans originality in their Islamic praxis. In South Africa, settler colonialism or colonial modernity has structured Islam according to race: Indian, Coloured/Malay, and Black African, these longstanding classifications have an impact on the post-apartheid South African society and the experience of being Muslim. Our argument is that Black African Muslims in South Africa embraced Islam during the anticolonial resistance struggles in order to articulate their subjectivity outside the missionary Judea-Christian framework and to embody freedom outside of the nationalist post-colonial post-apartheid secular framework. This is exemplified by three Jazz musicians Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Akhir Dyani and Zim Ngqawana who all performed Islam in order to expand the imaginary, history and geography of Blackness in South Africa. These sound scientists show us how Islam and being African is not incommensurable rather their music opens the myriad of connections between Africa, the Atlantic slave trade, the East and geographies of preconquest. These artists attest to Ware’s (2018) observation that Islam is about educating the whole of the human being rather than a narrow transmission of discursive knowledge.