Ahmad Deedat: The Making of a Transnational Religious Figure

Abstract

Ahmad Deedat is one of South Africa’s well known Muslim missionaries whose contributions towards Christian-Muslim relations have been duly acknowledged by friend and foe alike. Even though Deedat’s method was not approved by many Muslims, his labours in doing mission in and outside South Africa cannot be ignored. Deedat might not be regarded as a champion of Christian-Muslim dialogue in South Africa he obliquely pushed Christian and Muslims in that direction. Though this essay is somewhat of a review of Goolam Vahed’s Ahmad Deedat: The Man and His Mission (Durban: IPCI, 2013) it employs it as a platform to throw more light on Deedat as a transnational figure. Apart from providing a synoptic overview of the Vahed’s text’s rich contents and pointing out its merits/demerits, it veers off into looking closely at those events and individuals/organizations that played a part in influencing Deedat; in addition it evaluates the exclusivist approach that he determinedly adopted to counter Christian mission between the 1940s and the 1990s. In the process of doing this the essay attempts to assess Deedat’s legacy.

Keywords: South Africa, Deedat, Muslim, Christian, mission, transnational