Damian Daniels
A Second Look
Within days of the deadly attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, terrorism with an international dimension has escalated the levels of violence in Cape Town with the bomb attack on Planet Hollywood at the Waterfront.
Months earlier a spate of pipe-bomb attacks on the homes of businesspeople, academics, police and mistaken targets suggested urban terrorism had become part of the Western Cape’s violent landscape. And the recent deaths of two People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) activists believed to have been killed by their own pipe-bomb should be a grisly reminder of the consequences of contemplated acts of savagery. These bombs were clearly meant to murder and maim other people.
Not only is it time to shed Pagad’s veneer, but it may also help to put into perspective developments within South Africa’s Muslim community.
Pagad is today far removed from its original claim of being a pressure group in civil society, intent on ridding the community of drugs and criminal gangs. Since its inception, Pagad has not made even a dent on any of its declared goals. Many sincere people fell for its emotive and charged propaganda disguised in the rhetoric of religious obligation.
But the group showed little commitment to the values of Islam when it publicly torched a drug dealer. Many of those who supported Pagad did so out of frustration with a deteriorating criminal justice system.
Pagad’s aims became clearer once its leadership was infiltrated by the militant group, Qibla, whose main architect is a former Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) activist and inmate of Robben Island. After a few spells of prison, Achmat Cassiem discovered a militant brand of Islam.
As soon as Qibla’s fingerprints were detected in Pagad, it spelled trouble for all. Cassiem became the eloquent defender of Pagad’s relentless spectacles of public violence in conflict with police and its Ku Klux Klan-type marches in Cape Town.
These actions in 1996 were designed to attack the underbelly of the Cape economy -tourism. Pagad laid siege to the Mother City’s most popular attraction, the Waterfront, claiming it was a drug trafficking route. Its next goal, to paralyse the airport, failed after President Nelson Mandela personally gave orders that the protest should be stopped.
Mandela pulled Minister of Justice Dullah Omar out of talks with Pagad after nearly a year-long series of negotiations proved to be futile. The only outcome was that Pagad grew in stature and Omar was suckered by Cassiem.
The Qibla Mass Movement, founded in the 1980s, espoused the slogan “One Solution, Islamic Revolution”. It frequently upped the ante in the conflict with the apartheid state with its ultra-radical rhetoric – to the delight of revolutionaries. The group was at the time deliriously pro-Iran and devoted to its deceased revolutionary and spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Cassiem, who has no formal credentials in the study of Islam, soon fancied himself to be a local Khomeini. His followers addressed him as “Imam”, which is an honourific reserved for locally trained mosque leaders.
Cassiem considered himself to be the “Imam” in the Iranian sense. To his cohorts this meant he was the anointed political and spiritual leader of South Africa’s Muslim community. This ruse went unnoticed.
The Iranian government heavily courted Cassiem’s movement. It may even continue to do so today under various guises. Obviously, Iranian government representatives would contest this claim.
These days local enthusiasm for Iran may have somewhat abated with a mood of disappointment over Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s moderate policies. But Iranian skill in selling carpets is legend. Funds channelled to various local militant and troublesome Muslim groups, though not illegal in terms of South African law, have also not dried up.
Failing to take centre stage within the Muslim community and lacking in credibility, Qibla found a sufficiently motivated pool of domestic middle-class financial backers who would part with their money in the belief they were fighting off the myriad of imagined and half- baked conspiracies.
Most of these concoctions are fabrications of the minds of militants and demogogues in different parts of the Muslim world and there is no local shortage of such types. This is in itself a sign of the perversity prevalent in a section of South Africa’s Muslim community.
In the 1980s Qibla, under Cassiem’s leadership, called for the execution of those clergy whom it considered passive and complacent against apartheid. It is a matter of public record that it called for the killing of members of the Cape- based Muslim Judicial Council (MJC).
Though several Cape Town sheikhs and imams were harassed, fortunately none were killed at the hands of Qibla activists. Two disaffected Qibla members were sentenced to death by the movement’s high command. Both subsequently died: one of a heart attack and the other in a car crash.
Prior to the 1994 elections Qibla, especially Cassiem, condemned the negotiated settlement between the African National Congress and the National Party government as an “imperialist”-inspired conspiracy against the people of South Africa. Cassiem’s final disappointment was when the PAC joined the talks and participated in the elections.
Sensing the need to revamp Qibla’s discredited and marginalised image, Cassiem floated the idea of an Islamic Unity Convention (IUC), in a bid to represent all Muslims in South Africa. It was announced that for the first year of the new body’s existence, no Qibla member would take office.
Once again, sincere but naive Muslim businesspeople funded the venture. Today most of them have left the IUC, disgruntled by Cassiem’s modus operandi and feeling betrayed by some of the scandalous practices within the organisation.
The first president of the IUC was Sheikh Abdulkariem Toffar. At the next elections, after the one-year moratorium on Qibla members had ended, Cassiem was elected president.
The IUC claims it has enlisted the support of nearly 400 organisations. Not one of the main and credible religious organisations are part of it, such as the Council of Theologians in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the Muslim Judicial Council or groups like the Muslim Youth Movement and the Call of Islam.
On the strength of semi-fictional and largely paper-organisations, the IUC managed to secure a community radio license for Radio 786 from the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). Radio 786 broadcasts every alternate day. The frequency is shared with Voice of the Cape, a MJC-backed station.
To an outsider the community radio arrangements may seem bizarre. But on closer inspection it is indicative of a deeper malaise in the heart of Cape Town’s Muslim community.
The religious leadership, namely the de facto clergy, are not only incoherent in this new context but also ill-equipped to deal with the realities of the modern world.
These religious conservatives receive their training both locally and in the Middle East or Indo-Pak subcontinent.
Nothing in their training relates to contemporary realities or even 20th- century developments in Islamic thought. Theology and law, the main subjects of instruction, as well as Qur’an exegesis, either reflect the realities of the medieval Muslim world or, at best, they resonate the ideas of the 15th and 16th centuries.
So it should come as no surprise that the Jamiatul Ulama, the council of theologians behind the Johannesburg- based community radio station, Radio Islam, ruled that a woman’s voice was not to be heard by other men, except her spouse and immediate blood relations and, therefore, women could not participate in its radio broadcasts. For this discriminatory practice it lost its broadcasting licence.
But even more worrying was that the ultra-conservative Port Elizabeth- based clergy group, the Majlisul Ulama, chastised, demonised and declared the Gauteng theologians to be close to heresy and unworthy of respect for launching an ill-fated radio station.
But the women’s debate has deeper roots. As recently as 1994 the MJC mounted a campaign of hate speech and intimidation against a mosque for allowing an African-American Muslim woman scholar to address the congregation at a Friday prayer service.
Early this year the super-federation of Muslim religious leaders, the United Ulama Council, met with Mandela and appealed to him to exempt any contemplated legislation on family law that recognised Muslim marriages and divorce proceedings from the human rights provisions of the Constitution.
If anything, these events indicate an official clergy that is completely out of touch with the realities of a post- apartheid South Africa. In effect the clergy are playing the role of prayer leaders and functionaries of ritual but are unable to provide visionary leadership, while the militants represent Islam publicly.
Progressive groups like the Call of Islam and the Muslim Youth Movement are struggling for survival due to dwindling resources. Their liberal and socially relevant religious ideas are regularly dismissed as un-Islamic by both the clergy and the militants.
Given the major social changes in South Africa, even otherwise secular- minded or moderate Muslims seek refuge in conservative interpretations of Islam since there is less onus to adopt unpopular religious positions. The ANC government, by and large, seems to patronise the conservative clergy in the erroneous belief that these groups can influence voters at the ballot box.
But the government should not under- estimate the capacity of militants in South Africa to pull off urban terrorist attacks on the scale of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
In the Cape the leadership vacuum has been filled by Cassiem’s henchmen ranging from the IUC, Qibla, Radio 786 and Pagad. Employing the emotive rhetoric of Muslim unity, these militants effectively use the airwaves to brainwash nearly 200 000 listeners.
Any dissent from their interpretation of Islam is heresy, they say. Anyone who disagrees with Pagad, for instance, is a hypocrite. Those branded become the legitimate target of militant terror. Mosque preachers steer clear of criticising Pagad, understandably fearing for their lives. The MJC either maintains a stoic silence or calls for moderation, but has no plan to counter religious terror.
The home of Sheikh Nazeem Mohamed, MJC president, who initially supported Pagad, was earlier this year the target of a grenade attack. Imam Sadullah Khan of the Gatesville mosque, who also once bedecked a Pagad platform, received death threats. And a fake bomb was sent to the Gatesville mosque, Pagad’s congregating place when mosque committee members indicated that its premises were off- limits to the group.
Intellectuals and academics are the pet hate of militants. In recent months they have singled out UCT academic Ebrahim Moosa, who has criticised Pagad, the IUC and its radio station. Muslim intellectuals are also repeatedly criticised by the conservative clergy whose main concern is to guard their power base.
Fearing an erosion of their own base, they too regularly incite the public against those interpretations of Islam that would undermine their monopoly of religious ideas. Militants too believe that only their single interpretation of Islam is the correct one.
While Pagad’s leaders are perversely intelligent individuals with a hard core of defiant supporters who are normally a few chromosomes short of being garden furniture, most of them are driven by blind rage and are clueless about the subtleties of religious discourse.
Pagad and its allied groups are intent on unleashing a wave of anarchy in the Western Cape. As recent as 1994 Cassiem announced his intention to turn South Africa into an Islamic state. This could have been dismissed as ridiculous if it were not that recent urban terror ominously signals that people who think like that may be dead serious.