‘I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far way.’
—Orhan Pamuk, Snow.
Introduction
In the year 2001, a heated debate broke out among Muslim ‘ulama’ in Cape Town, subsequent to the screening of a documentary on Cape Mus-lims’ ritual practices by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) on New Year’s Eve 2000 (Long and Foster 2004: 67). The documentary had shown a group of Cape Muslims making ziyara to the kramat or shrine of Sayed Abduraghman Matarah or Tuan Matarah on Robben Island. One of twenty known karamat (pl. of kramat) of Sufi saints or awliya in and around Cape Town, this particular shrine has a particular significance for Cape Mus-lims, in that it is located on Robben Island. Robben Island was an historical place of banishment and imprisonment not only for black anti-apartheid leaders under apartheid,1 but also for a number of early Cape Muslim reli-gious leaders, such as Imam Abdullah ibn Kadi Abdus Salaam (‘Tuan Guru’, i. e. ‘Master Teacher’) who founded the first madrassa in South Africa upon his release after thirteen years imprisonment on Robben Island, Tuan Sayed Alawi as well as Tuan Matarah.2 After Robben Island ceased to be a place of imprisonment and became an historical monument to colonial oppression and a World Heritage Site in the 1990s, access to the kramat on Robben Island also became easier for local Muslims. A significant number of Cape Muslims travel to the Island once a year on ziyara. It is one of the most
impor-tant of karamat maintained by the so-called Cape Mazaar Society. The Cape Mazaar Society had been established in 1982.
The SABC documentary purportedly showed a group of Cape Mus-lims performing dhikr and du’a inside the kramat.3 This in itself was not a breach of the etiquette of visiting a kramat as understood by the Cape Mazaar Society.4 But what irked some local Muslim viewers was the foot-age showing a Muslim putting his forehead on the satin cloth of the tomb, an act “suggestive of prostration,” which the documentary appears to have presented as part of the ritual practices of Islam.5 Among the participants in this part of the documentary were Cape Muslims of South African Indi-an origin. They were allegedly muridin of the Chisti-Habibi Soofie tariqa in Cape Town. A day after the screening of the documentary, Cape Town’s most popular daily newspaper, the Cape Argus, published an angry letter to the editor penned by Sheikh Faa’ik Gamielden of the Masjid-us-Sunni in the upper-middle class suburb of Rondebosch East.6 In the letter to the editor, Sheikh Gamieldien made it clear that in his view, the practices shown in the documentary had nothing to do with Islam at all, and he suggested that what the documentary had shown in fact amounted to nothing less than shirk or idolatry. In spite of the fact that the publishing house Independ-ent Newspaper’s Cape Times and Cape Argus published a number of letters, the mainstream non-Muslim media in Cape Town soon lost interest in this emergent debate. After all, the specifics of this debate were probably of minor importance and interest to a largely non-Muslim readership, even though the initial reactions had been spurred by the perceived need to represent Islamic ritual practices in an appropriate manner towards non-Muslims. But in the following months, a series of heated exchanges relating to this particular issue was published by the monthly Muslim community newspaper Muslim Views, which is distributed from mosques across the Cape Peninsula free of charge. It was also followed by a number of pre-prayer khutab relating to the topic in mosques in and around Cape Town.7 It soon became clear that sections within Cape Muslim communities saw Sheikh Gamieldien’s attack on the documentary as an attack on Sufi prac-tices among Cape Muslims in general. Among the respondents were Sheikh Yusuf da Costa. Da Costa had subsequent to a visit by Sheikh Hisham Kab-bani to South Africa in 1998 been made the khalifa (spiritual leader and guide) of the Haqqani branch of the Naqhsbandiyya tariqa in South Africa.8 As such, but also due to the fact that he was a prominent and respected Cape Muslim academic,9 da Costa had been central to what some observ-ers (among them Tayob 1999c) had chosen to refer to as a “Sufi resurgence”
among Cape Muslims in the course of the 1990s. From da Costa’s response, it was clear that this was no longer a debate restricted to the specifics of what Gamieldien had criticised, but rather about the contestation between Sufi orientations and reformist orientations to Islam in Cape Muslim com-munities. In none too subtle terms, Sheikh Faa’ik Gamieldien was labelled a
“Wahhabi.” The “Wahhabis” were described as “butchers” comparable to the Kharijites in historical times,10 and it was alleged that Sheikh Gamieldien and some of his associates regularly travelled to the Saudi Arabian embassy in Pretoria for consultations and in order to receive funding.11 This debate has been rendered as a “Sufi-Wahhabi” debate (cf. Long and Foster 2004), a term which for reasons that will become apparent later in this chapter is something of a misnomer and quite misleading. These are, however, pre-existing, readily available and socially effective conceptual categories with demarcations with regard to content that are assumed to be relatively clear-cut among local Muslims. This fact goes some way towards explaining why the debate was referred to in those terms. The dust settled on this debate after some months. But the levels of antagonism generated by it are illus-trated by the fact that Sheikh Gamieldien withdraw from public meetings about the issue with reference to fears for his own safety,12 and that there had apparently in subsequent years been no personal contact whatsoever between Gamieldien and da Costa, who had in earlier times worked quite closely together in various professional capacities.
Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Sheikhs da Costa and Gamieldien share many fundamentals with regard to their views on ritual practices and their ontological grounding in Islam. It should also be noted that they both originally had a background in mainstream modern Salafi understandings.13 We should therefore conceptualise Sufi, reformist Sufi and Salafi/Wahhabi orientations to ritual in the context of contempo-rary Muslim Cape Town as part of a continuum, rather than as part of neces-sarily and inherently exclusive and antagonistic positions. This is important inasmuch as my exposition of the issues in this chapter will also demonstrate that Sufi positions with regard to Islamic ritual are often quite varied.
At stake in this debate were issues over internal and external legiti-macy, the right to speak for Cape Muslims’ pasts and presents, the role and place of rituals in variegated localised understandings of Islam, authority and influence among upwardly mobile Cape Muslim constituencies in the post-apartheid era, and normative views about what role and status views on ritual of other sections of a global and globalising umma should be accorded. These are some of the issues which this chapter will attempt at elucidating.
Deliberations over rituals are part of the life of any practicing Mus-lim in contemporary Cape Town. Antagonistic public deliberations over the appropriate role and function of ritual are but parts of the attempts of Cape Muslims in the contemporary era to delineate the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable ritual practice. The mutual vitriol unleashed in this particular debate was in part engendered by the performative character of the modern print and visual media, which often encourages simplifica-tions. It was through the media that the protagonists of this debate attempt-ed to create and sustain particular audiences among Muslim ‘publics’.14 My contention in this chapter is that contestations over ritual are significant for what they can tell us about the contestations over identity, power and legiti-macy within Muslim communities in contemporary Cape Town. They are also significant indicators of the globalisation of Islamic discourses and the his-torical shifts within such discourses, which for analytical purposes must be thought of as deriving from multiple points and locations within the Muslim world,15 to be multi-directional rather than uni-directional, and as generat-ing resistance as well as compliance. The contestation over ritual practice and interpretation has of course always been a global one in Islam. But the increasing density of trans-national contacts and networks enabled by the current phase of globalisation means that such contestations become more commonplace in Muslim communities previously thought of as ‘marginal’ or
‘peripheral’ in global Muslim imaginaries, such as those of Cape Town. Such contestations should however not be seen as mere masks for other interests, as the issues involved are seen as substantive and real for the adherents of the different and antagonistic positions. Reformist interpretations of Islamic practice and ritual among Cape Muslims are often seen as deriving from either Wahhabi/Salafi16 centres of learning in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait or from Deobandi seminaries in India or Pakistan, but the material presented in this chapter suggests that such influences are moderated by the preva-lence of Sufi rituals and practices among ordinary Cape Muslims, and that a number of ‘ulama’ in Cape Town have been affiliated with Sufi turuq and social networks in locations usually perceived as Wahhabi/Salafi or Deoban-di. I do not imply any equivalence between Wahhabi/Salafi and Deobandi normative views on Islamic rituals, since these are often quite distinct. The Deobandi tradition originated as a Sufi reformist tradition, draws heavily on Sufi nomenclature and imaginaries, and would therefore appear in a lot of contexts to have had a much greater tolerance for Sufi rituals than the Wah-habi/Salafi traditions. Common to both traditions in Islam is however the emphasis on anchoring Islamic rituals in and through core religious texts.
Rituals are part of the ways in which Islam is localised (Lambek 2000:
63), which means that rituals constitute social and religious fields in which local and global traditions and interpretations intersect. Rituals are also per-formative media for the negotiation of power relationships (Bell 1997: 79) among Cape Muslims. But central to these negotiations of power relation-ships are also the status of certain rituals within and without Islamic traditions:
rituals that in such a process of negotiation and definition may be defined as
‘ibadat are generally much less amenable to alterations than rituals which are excluded from the ambit of ‘ibadat.
One can think of Cape Muslims as forming communities of interpreta-tion (cf. El Fadl 2001: 55) constantly engaged in constructing reality and mean-ing relatmean-ing to particular ritual practices through their argumentative delib-erations in public and in private contexts. Sen (2005: 12-16) has argued that argumentative deliberations are closely aligned to the inculcation of demo-cratic values in public spheres.17 Implicit in Sen’s argument is the assumption that such argumentative deliberations need not be about democracy per se in order to be linked to the inculcation of democratic values. Public argumen-tative deliberations tend to exclude a large number of people due to limita-tions to participation in the public sphere based on symbolic capital such as social status, levels of education, gender and level of interest in participation.18 Criteria of reasonableness are not always adhered to in such debates either.19 But this does not detract from the argument that I will be making, namely that argumentative deliberations over ritual practices within Cape Muslim communities in the post-apartheid era are premised on, and closely linked to, argumentative deliberations central to democratic practice. Contestations over ritual practices therefore have much wider implications for Cape Muslim polities than what it might at first seem. These contestations also implicate non-participants, inasmuch as the public debate among the positions are directed at imagined audiences which are Muslim as well as non-Muslim.20
I will also argue that the MJC as the largest and most influential Sunni
‘ulama’ organisation in Cape Town has responded to the contestations of the appropriateness of certain rituals by attempting to occupy a centrist middle-ground between the antagonistic positions of, for instance, Sheikhs da Costa and Gamieldien. It does so through advocating a reformed Sufism, which grants space for Sufi rituals that are well established and prominent among Cape Muslims historically, such as the mawlid al-nabi, and denying it to other rituals that are popular with working-class Muslims in the townships of Cape Town, such as the ratiep [ratib], which are anathema to middle-class and reformist Muslim sensibilities. Furthermore, I argue that one can see the MJC’s
attempts at positioning themselves as defenders of Islam in the context of post-apartheid Cape Town through issues on which there is broad consensus as an attempt to establish internal legitimacy through avoidance of or mini-mization of issues of internal contestation. This latter positioning can be seen as an attempt of generating impressions vis-à-vis non-Muslims of an internal consistency and homogeneity among Cape Muslims otherwise sharply frac-tured along the lines of social status, class, gender and ethnicity. The MJC’s positioning in the post-apartheid context is part of a religious populism, which presented itself as a viable strategy in a context in which class fractures within the Cape Muslim communities expanded at the back of rising levels of general unemployment coupled with improved opportunities for upward social mobility for the relatively small category of highly educated Muslims on the back of affirmative action policies.21 This religious populism has also emerged out of a changing societal context in which religious authority and legitimacy of the mainstream Cape ‘ulama’ is increasingly defined through their articulations of “Muslim interests” in the South African public spheres, and particularly through the visual and print media. In effect, this positioning is often exclusivist in that it defines “Muslim interests” as the only relevant parameters within which such positioning ought to take place (cf. also Moosa 1989: 78 on this), and “Muslim interests” as identical with the normative inter-ests of the educated religious middle-class among Cape Muslims.
There are a number of ritual practices among Cape Muslims that are con-tested, and it would be simplistic to suggest that contestations follow clear Sufi and reformist delineations in each and every instance. This is why the debate between Sheikh Gamieldien and Sheikh da Costa often masked more than it revealed. Nor is there any clear-cut causal linkage between Sufi dispositions and a specific social status/class and/or educational background.22 One of the clearest issues of contestation is, however, ziyara or the visiting of karamat and the practices and understandings it involves. It was questions pertaining to this ritual which formed the basis of the said debate, and it is therefore on this ritual that I have chosen to focus most of my attention in this chapter.
The research
In order to understand what kind of audiences the public deliberations over ritual practices that Sheikh Gamieldien and Sheikh da Costa engaged in were directed at – and what kind of audiences their deliberations were geared at generating, it is important to understand more about the broad-er social and religious contexts in which they took place. It is namely from
these contexts that their significance in the main is derived. The empirical research on which this chapter is based was undertaken in 2003 and 2004-05. In the course of this research, I interviewed a number of ordinary Mus-lims from different communities in Cape Town about their views on, and understanding of, certain rituals that are common among Muslims at the Cape. I also interviewed Sufi muridin and shuyukh, ‘ulama’ generally held to have more reformist23 understandings of Islamic practice than adherents of tasawwuf, as well as musalees or followers24 of the Tabligh Jama’at (TJ). The TJ is a Deobandi proselytizing and reformist organisation known in South Africa, and in Cape Town in particular, for its historical opposition towards certain Sufi understandings and rituals. The Sufi practitioners interviewed for this research belonged to the Naqshbandiyya-Haqqani and Tijaniyya-Niassene turuq, or were unaffiliated.25 I also attended a number of Sufi gath-erings, such as ‘urs, various khattams, as well as adhkar, both in private and in organisational settings, as a participant observer. The interviews focused on the practice of ziyara (or, in common parlance among Cape Muslims,
“visiting the karamats”), the issue of the so-called “two Eids” [‘ids]26 and the issue of performing the dhuhr (regular midday prayer) after congregational jum’a prayers on Fridays. These are all issues that have been subject to much contestation within Cape Muslim communities in the course of the last dec-ades, and significantly, are issues through which tension between local and global understandings of Islamic rituals are refracted. An important aim of my research was to ascertain how and where local Muslims of different per-suasions draw the line between rituals which they define as part of “culture”
(and therefore, non-essential, non-obligatory, and potentially problematic) and rituals defined as “religious”, and to what extent their understandings and practices had undergone shifts attributable to local appropriations of global discourses of Islam.
Rituals in Islam and in the Anthropology of Islam
Even if observers have alleged that studies of Islamic ritual form the smallest subset of anthropological research on Islam (Starrett 1999: 293), the ethnographic literature on the rituals of Islam and of Muslims throughout the world is voluminous (see f. ex. Tapper and Tapper (1987); Combs-Schill-ing (1989); Boddy (1990); Abu-Zahra (1997); Werbner (1986); Holy (1989) for some examples). There are obvious reasons for making the distinction between rituals of Islam and rituals practiced by Muslims27 – given that the definition of what elements of particular rituals, and the definition of which
rituals are ‘Islamic’ – vary according to variables such as context, ethnicity, social status and gender. Asad (1993) has suggested that ritual might be an altogether inappropriate analytical category in the study of Islam, inasmuch as it is intimately linked to a modern ‘Western’ understanding of ritual as symbolic activity, premised on culturally specific notions of self and socie-ties. It seems more reasonable to suggest though – with reference to Bowen (1992: 656) – that anthropologists have traditionally focused on local ritual elements, rather than ritual and scriptural forms which most explicitly link Muslims across societal boundaries. In part, this might be explained with reference to the historical division of labour between anthropology and religious studies. Anthropologists appear to have had a Weberian ‘elective affinity’ for Islamic and other traditions that were definable as ‘local’ and
‘exotic’. A common assumption in the so-called “anthropology of Islam” has also been that there was a relative paucity of exotic symbols and rituals in
‘exotic’. A common assumption in the so-called “anthropology of Islam” has also been that there was a relative paucity of exotic symbols and rituals in