Islamic Unity Convention, in
The Mark Gevisser Profile
The Imam of the Flats
AN hour before the faithful and the outraged are to gather at Vygieskraal Stadium in Athlone, I sit, in a small apartment somewhere on the Cape Flats, with one of the new footsoldiers of the revolution: a man who has discovered meaning — and a channel for his frustration — in the People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad).
A few kilometres away, a group of gangsters led by Rashied Staggie has gathered on a sportsfield. They are called “The Firm” and they are holding a press conference, protected by boot-polished hefty white men rumoured to be from Colombia. They march off to the Valhalla Park Police Station declaring that they have rights too, trailing behind them a wake of the dispossessed — alienated, booze-bleary people so desperate they’ll cheer any challenge to authority.
Although he legally carries a firearm, the Pagad man I am speaking to — let’s call him Dawood — is not a member of the movement’s trained “G-Force” of armed keffiyeh-clad mujahedin; the men who have brought to the Flats in the past couple of weeks an intifada image calculated to instill both fear and romance. No: Dawood is an ordinary guy, an artisan, who has sat in the mosques and heard the talk; who has listened to the calls that have come through on Radio 786 (one of Cape Town’s two Muslim community radio stations); who found himself on the very first march to a small-time smokkelaar’s house in Wynberg three weeks ago and who felt, afterwards, “so good, so strong, as if we were finally taking control of things, of our own lives”, that he’s been a devoted participant in all Pagad events since.
Why is he doing this? “I don’t want my son accusing me,” he says, “of having done nothing in my time, just like the kids of 1976 and 1985 accused their fathers.” Dawood was at the London Road march too, where they killed Staggie. Too far back to see the murder, but close enough to tell the cops: ” `Take your guns and get back into your Casspir.’ And you know what? They did it! I saw their fear. Imagine telling a cop to do that in 1976, or 1985, and them listening to you? We’ve got power now.”
A short while later, while the armed gangsters march with impunity into a police station to deliver their memorandum, Dawood files into Vygieskraal with thousands of other solid-looking, conservatively dressed people: the men in prayer-caps, the women in shawls. They sit, in absolute stillness, waiting for the proceedings to start, separated from the leaders by a sentry line of mujahedin who handle their semi- automatics with studied insouciance. These folk don’t toyi-toyi; they don’t sing freedom songs. Only when someone shouts “Takbir!” do they yell back, with precise unison, “Allahu Akbar!”
When Imam Achmad Cassiem, chairman of the Islamic Unity Convention (IUC) and leader of the Qibla movement, took the podium at Vygieskraal, he must have seen his dream come true. A political prisoner on Robben Island for 11 years and a banned person for another 11, he has spent his adult life advocating two objectives: unity in the ummah (community) around his vision of non-negotiable justice, and — consequently — the rise of the “oppressed masses” of South Africa into Islamic revolution.
A crowd of 20 000 was now cheering him. “Allah says,” he began, “that he will not change the condition of a people until they change themselves … There is an obligation to create a society sober from birth until death. The state doesn’t have the willpower, the manpower, any power to bring about a change in that direction. It is only a social movement of the people, like Pagad, which will bring about that change.”
“We love justice,” he concluded, “more than we love
peace, because peace emanates from justice.”
He was followed by a man identified only as “the Amir”; his voice electronically masked into hoarse severity and his features entirely covered by a red keffiyeh. He began with the Qur’anic injunction that is the basis of jihad: “To those against whom war is made, permission is given to fight, because they are wronged.” It was he who really got the crowd going with his quotes from Malcolm X (“we’re nonviolent, but to nonviolent people only”), his calls to victory or martyrdom and his chants of “One Gangster, One Bullet!”
The Amir might have appeared the firebrand polemicist to Cassiem’s schoolmasterly pedant but the ideology he was articulating was vintage Cassiem: like many of the militants who have become involved with Pagad, he is widely known to be a Cassiem protege.
Cassiem has no direct links with Pagad, save the fact that the IUC’s radio station, Radio 786, has been its primary mobilising tool. He is never at Pagad meetings, and some even say that those Qibla members who have joined Pagad are disenchanted with their leader because they feel he has become “too moderate”.
One Cape Muslim leader believes “Cassiem is piggybacking onto a grassroots movement and a legitimate cause, because Pagad is delivering the masses, and this is one thing Qibla was never really able to do.” Some intellegence sources are adamant that he exerts direct control over Pagad. Dawood is equally adamant that he doesn’t: he has never seen Cassiem around, he says, and word among the members is that “there’s been a split between the Qibla guys in Pagad and The Imam”, which is how Cassiem, Khomeini-like, is referred to.
Whatever Cassiem’s involvement with Pagad, he remains — as the South African originator of a radical agenda based on a revolutionary reading of the Qur’an — the movement’s ideological father. This became clearer as Pagad leaders called for the resignation of the ANC government. Speaking on television last week, Cassiem told Max du Preez that, just as it was legitimate for freedom fighters to “take the law into their own hands” against the apartheid regime, so too is it legitimate for groups like Pagad to do the same against the ANC government. Underpinning this is a conviction that the current government is as illegitimate as the past one. In Cassiem’s political philosphy, no secular state can be legitimate.
“The demonstration,” Cassiem told me, “was a vote of no confidence in the government. People have not yet come to grips with the fact that the oppressed masses were in fact sold out at Kempton Park, the World Trade Centre, Codesa. We can’t,” he says, “just march in to the 21st century pretending Nelson Mandela is a saint, a saviour, because it’s oh so absurd for one to attain sainthood at the expense of the masses.”
Cassiem’s line is hard, non-negotiable. Chalk this down to his coming of age in the Cape, under the tutelage of Unity Movement teachers (he believes Islam is “anti-racist” rather than “multi-racial”); chalk it down to his unshakeable belief that Islam and truth are synonyms for each other. This allows him to effect the demeanour of a scientific rationalist. “Our philosophy,” he says, “has to be scientifically based. If one person is in possession of the truth, he or she will always remain a majority of one. We don’t have to go further than Galileo Galilei to see that.”
Cassiem wears the clothing of a debonair revolutionary: well-cropped silvery beard, polo- neck, parka, sometimes a keffiyeh around his neck, sometimes a woollen cap on his head. There’s no outward evidence of religiosity. He is engaging, twinkly, pedantic; a schoolteacher through and through, fond of itemising and illustrating. He is given to cleverly semantic epigrams — “if racism is absurd then multiracism is aburdity multiplied” — that often implode when tested. “Logic” and “intellect” are his weapons: anyone with intellect, anyone who employs logic, cannot but see that Islam is truth. He teaches this in his night school courses on “humanology”. There is a radical disjuncture, though, between his spoken reasonableness and the wild rhetoric of Qibla’s pamphlets, most of which he pens.
Aged 17 he was jailed for sabotage. He swears he has never been a member of the Pan Africanist Congress, although he clearly took a leadership role during his five years on Robben Island in the late 1960s. Although his father was a religious leader in District Six, his own devoutness seems to stem from that time in jail, when, in solitary confinement, the only book available to him was the Qur’an. He began to find, in its injunctions, a basis for revolutionary, liberatory Islam.
He founded Qibla in the late 1970s — around the
time of the Iranian revolution. Egalitarian, mass- based, and fundamentally based on Islamic law, the revolution gave him a model for Qibla — and Imam Khomeini became a hero. Qibla became a fusion of militant pan-Islamism and radical Pan-Africanism and held together by the shaky assertion that Africa is a “Muslim continent”.
In the 1980s Qibla armed and trained an indeterminate number of people — allegedly sending them to Libya — and it tried to mobilise Muslims in the Western Cape within Islam. Cassiem, for example, was arrested at a mass outdoor jumu’ah (prayer meeting) — along Khomeinian lines — in 1986. He was jailed again in the late 1980s for terrorism: the magistrate found the Qur’an — quoted at length in Qibla’s literature — to be seditious.
He was only released in late 1991 — on bail, because he refused to apply for indemnity — and, astonishingly, remained restricted throughout the negotiations period. His historic antipathy for the ANC — founded on a virulent anticommunism — now became extreme, and Qibla launched a strident “don’t vote” campaign. It was, however, largely ignored.
Out of jail, Cassiem also started attempting to realise his plans for “Islamic unity”: although never centre-stage until his appointment as chair of the IUC last year, he is widely regarded as the inventor of the Convention, which claims, contentiously, to have 254 constituent members. The influential Muslim Judicial Council stayed away from it because they saw it as an agent of Shiite Islam in Sunni South Africa. More damaging, an influential coalition of progressive groups boycotted it because they were certain he was attempting to use it to get Muslims to stay away from the 1994 elections. “Unity under the leadership of people or a group who have consisitently displayed a fascist-like abhorrence for those who disagree with them,” they wrote in a letter explaining their boycott, “can only mean that all others are expected to deny their understanding of Muslims’ role in South Africa and submit to the ideas of a single person”.
There is no doubt who that “single person” is. Cassiem has always exasperated his colleagues: “When he speaks of a majority of one,” one leading Muslim figure comments, “that majority is himself. He believes he incarnates the truth. It’s almost delusory.”
If indeed The Imam is deluded, you can almost forgive it. He operates, after all, in a province where gangsters hold press conferences and racists still rule. Cape Town’s hinterlands — like Chicago in the 1930s or Naples in the 1970s, or Medellin today — are lawless and forsaken. Such are worlds, biblical or filmic in resonance, in which prophets and gangsters thrive, and in which ordinary people like Dawood search for anything that will give them the sense of some control over their lives.