Journal for Islamic Studies

An intellectual journey in Islamic Studies: Navigating Islamic discourse with Faltah

Abdulkader Tayob — 2022-07-19

This essay offers a perspective on studying Islam as a complex discourse constituted by unexpected events (faltāt, pl. of faltah). The concept of faltah is developed from a close reading of statements attributed to the companions of the Prophet after his death. It is shown that the experience of faltah introduces fundamental features of Islamic discourse such as self-reflection, performance, debate and unresolvable contradictions. While faltah may be disruptive, these features have proven to be productive in the history of Islamic discourse. This essay, then, turns to religion as a discourse of colonial modernity that has impacted societies and traditions across the globe. It argues that religion in this form may be treated as a faltah, like other disruptions that Islamic discourse has encountered in the past. The discussion offers a perspective of Islam in its encounter with the discourse of religion through self-reflection, performance, debate and unresolvable contradictions.

Embracing the Barzakh: Knowledge, Being and Ethics

Sa’diyya Shaikh — 2022-07-19

Scholarly research on Muslim ethics is attentive to the ways that contemporary Muslim subjectivities and ethical concerns are informed by multiple sources and complex relationalities. These include relationships to what is thought of as tradition or the Muslim archive in all its diversity, as well as other prevailing intellectual and political traditions of virtue and justice. Muslim ways of being and becoming in the contemporary world are often derived in relation to cosmopolitan imaginaries, and this is in fact no different from other significant eras in Muslim history. Islamic feminism in its scholarly and activist iterations represents one such development among Muslims in the contemporary period, focused as it is on fostering ever more comprehensive forms of gender and social justice within their communities, and on expanding the ethical archive. In this paper, I trace key animating sources and developments in my scholarly trajectory focussing on Islamic feminism over the last 20 years by exploring metaphors of journeying and of in-betweenness (the barzakh) as a theoretically and epistemologically helpful posture. I conclude with some reflections on my current theorising on Islamic feminism.

Trajectories in Muslim family law reform in South Africa

Fatima Seedat — 2022-07-19

In the context of a review of the study of Islam in South Africa, this paper traces an intellectual and activist journey working in Muslim family law reform. Analytically, it focuses on changes in Muslim legal practice that were born from the hardships produced by the legal non-recognition of Muslim marriages in South African law, the social and legal marginalisation of Muslim women and the resultant impoverishment of Muslim wives. The paper finds that in the gap produced by legal non-recognition, some new legal practices have emerged. Bookended by the work of the Commission for Gender Equality in the late nineties and that of the Muslim Personal Law Network more than twenty years later, key themes running through the decades-long process include a concern for the nature and integrity of the shariah in the processes of reform, as well as the location and value of women’s experiences of (un)ethical outcomes in the application of Islamic laws of marriage and divorce. Responses to the law reform process bring to light a normative and reinterpretive approach, the former characterised by ideas of gender complementarity and the latter by gender equality. Further, as the State and Ulama have struggled over who and what would constitute shariah and the substance of Islamic laws on marriage and divorce, through the efforts of gender activists and reformminded scholars and practitioners there has emerged a parallel process of applied law reform, represented in the practice of personalised nikāḥ contracts and women’s khul’a pronouncements, both guided by the idea that women in Muslim marriage (ought to, if they do not already) hold full legal capacity. This legal responsiveness is producing new Muslim family law practices, which allows us to suggest that Muslim family law functions as a living law guided by ethical outcomes. The study of Islamic Law in South Africa is potentially set to encompass these new trends through a new degree offering at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Marginal Islam: Reconfiguring the Ummah

Nadeem Mahomed — 2022-07-19

This article fundamentally makes an argument for considering the margins as an important component to both understanding and enriching Islam as a religious tradition. It provides an assessment of how the margins are at once inconspicuous and transformative – of how life on the margins can contribute to navigating ethical dilemmas. Finally, it presents a reflection on marginalities as the portal through which the ummah can negotiate difference in a productive way.

Islamic studies during changing times: The discipline at Unisa from 1990 to 2017

Yousuf Dadoo — 2022-07-19

The University of South Africa (Unisa) is the oldest university in South Africa, boasting alumni who have contributed in diverse ways to this country and beyond. While it began as an institution offering its courses through correspondence, it has, over the years, kept abreast of the latest teaching technologies. Islamic Studies was first offered at Unisa, 32 years ago. This article appraises the motivations for its introduction together with its course contents, student enrolments, teaching approach, funding, politics and academic practice, research focus areas and future prospects. In the process, its unique features, coupled with its successes, challenges, problems and failures are disclosed against the backdrop of debates raging globally about the ontological status of Islamic Studies.

Islamic studies at UKZN: Personal reflections

Suleman Dangor — 2022-07-19

In this article I will discuss the founding of the Islamic Studies Department and the development of Islamic Studies through my personal reflections on the years I was associated with the discipline, that is, from 1974 to 2010, first at the University of Durban-Westville and subsequently at the Howard College campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Outsider and Insider: On being a historian of Islam and Muslims in South Africa

Goolam Vahed — 2022-07-19

I am a Muslim born in South Africa. As much as I am an insider practising the faith, as a historian trained in African Studies, I am an outsider to the study of Islam and Muslims in South Africa. I try to stand above the debates that rage, but feel them directly on my body. Being an insider has opened doors into the world of Muslims as much as it has sometimes closed them. Through a semi- autobiographical approach, in this article I present my experiences of studying Muslims and Islam in South Africa. This endeavour has seen me try to negotiate between my identity as a Muslim and my work as a historian, as I focus alternately on the everyday practices of Muslims, and on those who seek to structure Islam, give it direction, and entrench their role as shepherds of the flock. A focus on lived Islam underscores the diversity among Muslims and underlines the idea/fact that Islamic practices are a continuously changing construction both in relation to new theological influences and textual traditions as well as changing social, economic, and political forces.

Searching for an ethical Muslim self in conversation with Islamic studies scholarship in South Africa and beyond

Aslam Fataar — 2022-07-20

This article presents an account of my search for ‘ethical agency’ in interaction with South African-based Islamic Studies scholarship. Based on auto-ethnographic approaches, I reflect on the evolution of my ethical self in a productive engagement with selected sets of Islamic scholarly readings that formed a critical part of such formation. The article attempts to show how one person worked out his subjective responsiveness to unfolding events in the contingent fields of politics, popular culture and social justice-orientated activism. Readings in the history of my religious community, Islamic discourse and contemporary politics are pertinent to the subject’s unfolding ethical stances. The article illustrates how a reflexive engagement with these readings is central to an individual’s ethical discourses and subjectivity. It emphasises “the close relationships between reasoning, freedom, choice, power relations, and the creative influence of tradition in any example of ethical discourse and [self-]formation”.1 The article discusses three lines of ethical reading that represent how I have been processing my readings in the Islamic Studies discipline with respect to my ethical commitments. These commitments were developed in the context of opposition to apartheid and the socio-political exigencies of the democratic period after 1994. I end by reflecting on the shifting contingent terrain of the contemporary period in which the self establishes its ethical Muslim agency.

From the Editor

Auwais Rafudeen — 2022-07-19

No abstract