Shamil Jeppie is a respected South African historian, valued for his work in popular memory and as an adviser to the South Africa-Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project. In his book, Language, Identity, Modernity — The Arabic Study Circle of Durban (HSRC Press), he shows us a fine example of how to write reflectively and critically, how to write from the vantage point of the present, yet showing sensitivity to the currents of the past, and how to write with integrity for different audiences.
While I have been vaguely aware of some of the players in the history of the circle, it was only on reading Jeppie’s book that a fuller picture of its genesis, development and contribution began to emerge. Using the methods of oral history, with detailed life history interviews, Jeppie assembles a riveting biography of the organisation and some of its key members.
The circle was inaugurated officially in 1954 in Durban, with Dr Daoud S Mall its founder. It comprised a coterie of men from mainly professional and trading backgrounds, all Gujarati-speaking and belonging to the Muslim faith. They were imbued with an all-consuming desire: ‘To promote the study of the Arabic language, culture, literature, sciences, and arts.”
Gujarati is spoken by both Muslims and Hindus and so it is understandable that those of the Muslim faith would show a penchant for the languages of Islam, which in South Africa were principally both Urdu and Arabic. (Persian is also used in some parts of the Islamic world.)
But why Arabic? Jeppie provides a fascinating account of why the circle chose to expend its energies on the study and promotion of Arabic. Urdu was used in learning and teaching the Qu’ran. With Urdu used in religious instruction, mainly in the madressahs, Arabic was reserved as the language of Islamic worship. This practice was similar, it seems, to the use of Latin in Catholic liturgy and the use of local languages for other religious purposes. Both Urdu and Arabic made claims on Muslim adherents, but in Durban, unlike in Cape Town, it was Urdu that was dominant.
The circle realised that the study of Arabic, the language of the Qu’ran, would afford wider opportunities for the study of the religion and cultural history of Islam. The use of Arabic would enhance an appreciation of the breadth of Islamic ethos and civilisation. In this way, Jeppie argues, the group was developing a commitment to Islam, but a commitment premised on ideas of reason and science, based on the values of the Enlightenment and modernity. Arabic would be the language both of prayer and debate.
The efforts of these enterprising laymen did not receive unreserved support. Local mawlanas — who were mainly trained in Islamic institutions, such as Darul Uloom Deoband in northern India — wanted to promote Urdu and looked askance at these developments. They feared their monopoly of Islamic knowledge would be threatened if Arabic were made accessible to all Muslims, who would then be able to interpret the Qu’ran without their intervention.
In a specific way this epitomises the contest between the competing claims of tradition and modernity, between sectarianism and secularism, which defines the larger Islamic landscape today, and faith communities universally. (Of course, the promise of modernity offered through the study of Arabic was to confront the modernity of apartheid with its barbarism, couched in cold rationality. But that’s another story, or is it?)
While Gujarati was the group’s main language of communication, it was used mainly as a vernacular language: literally, the ‘home language”. The promotion of Arabic opened up exciting possibilities. With their Gujarati roots circle members were naturally connected with South Asian histories, cultures and languages. This interest in Arabic expanded their links and contacts to include countries in the Middle East and spawned networks that promoted wider intellectual exchange. India was not seen as the sole ‘mother country” and circle members were able to draw from other Islamic cultural reservoirs. Their activities provide a more expansive understanding (if not a fraying) of ‘the Indian diaspora” and for scholars of diaspora studies.
Although the circle began as an elitist group, it helped to popularise Arabic through classes, lectures by local and visiting luminaries, conferences and speech contests and offered bursaries to study Arabic. The circle’s significant contribution was developing academic courses in Arabic and Islamic studies at school level and at the former University of Durban-Westville. All these contributed to what has been described as the ‘Arabisation” of Islam in Durban, in particular, and in South Africa as a whole.
The circle was not overtly political or activist but, in the context of a colonial and apartheid education, was providing a parallel education no less important than one that valued Shakespeare and Kipling. The choice of English as the medium of communication was itself instructive if not strategic.
Jeppie’s study, revolving thematically on the linchpins of language, identity and modernity, explores the dynamics of a particular ethno-linguistic group formed in the context of apartheid. Apartheid society naturally created enclaves that provided ‘psychic shelter” in an otherwise arid and alienating world. Yet, paradoxically, within these enclaves ‘horizons of significance” were being continually sought. This tendency might be seen in the development of sporting groups (as documented in the book, Blacks in Whites – A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu-Natal, by Desai et al, 2002), welfare and community organisations, trade unions, political and religious groupings, professional groups, such as teachers’ societies, and so on. As Jeppie points out, it is no accident that there were 44 associations of Indians in Durban in 1952.
Jeppie sensitively straddles an insider-outsider position. Avoiding a hagiographic account, sensitive to the challenges the circle faced, responsive to its achievements and its fault lines, Jeppie’s narrative ethnography remains a flesh-and-blood one of ‘life as lived”. In providing a rich and complex narrative of a single body, Jeppie shows that the notion of an ‘Indian identity” is a tendentious one. In this sense Jeppie is both writing of culture, of the location of culture and ‘writing against culture”, avoiding easy and reductive generalisations and the homogenising of groups and sub-groups.
He grapples with the question of ‘ownership”, conceding to narratives of circle members, yet wresting control as well, conscious of his role as a social historian, and negotiating the slippery slopes between researcher and researched.
The value of a micro story such as that of the circle is the way it assists in fleshing out a macro story of South Africa under apartheid. It contributes in some way to subverting the othering that defined colonial and apartheid scholarship in the 20th-century. Given apartheid’s separation of communities — indeed that ‘community” in South Africa is defined in exclusive rather than inclusive terms — Jeppie’s excavatory study is a necessary one. It anticipates more integrated projects on associational life in urban contexts in South Africa’s cultural mosaic, pointing to possibilities of transversal studies that might be undertaken. Such studies would upset the ‘incarceration”, to use a term by one cultural critic, of specific groups in time and place and see them not as bounded and discrete or as self-contained, but as part of our common world — as we continually redefine in South Africa what ‘our” means.