South African Muslim Network

SAMNET plans second book and calls upon the muslim community

After the success of our first book "Muslim Portraits : The Anti Apartheid Struggle", SAMNET has decided to publish a follow up book. In order to put this idea in motion and for it to materialize we need you the muslim community to assist us.

 

SAMNET calls  for names and information of people in the community who deserve to be recognised and highlighted in the second book. The book is not only aimed at politicians but to the general muslim community that were involved in creating a difference in South Africa and in the muslim society in the time of Apartheid.

information can be sent to the following email addresses

  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Last Updated ( Monday, 08 October 2012 11:35 )

 

Books Now Available in Johannesburg

You can now purchase " Muslim Portraits - The Anti Apartheid Struggle " from 37 st Helen Street Mayfair West.

please call before hand.

 

R150.00 plus R 50.00 for posting and packaging

contact Kulsum 0118375756

Last Updated ( Monday, 08 October 2012 11:17 )

 

MUSLIM PORTRAITS : The Anti - Apartheid Struggle

Book Orders:

 

Kindly make payment into the account below.

 

Please send proof of payment to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

Your reference : Your Name e.g. Khan MH

 

The cost of the book = R150.00 plus R50.00 for posting and packaging

 

Or collect / purchase at our offices.

 

Shukran

 

SAMNET BANKING DETAILS: 

Please be advised that all future electronic deposits need to be processed directly into our debit card account, details as follows:

Account number             78600098088

Account                        SAMNET’s Projects

Bank name                    Albaraka bank

Branch code                 800 000

 

Please be advised that all cash and cheque deposits need to be processed via ABSA Bank, account details as follows:

 

 

Account number              4073412216

Account name                 Albaraka Bank

Bank     name                  ABSA Bank

Branch   code                 632005

Reference                      78600098088

Last Updated ( Monday, 08 October 2012 11:22 )

 

Muslim Portraits

The South African Muslim Network (SAMNET) is honoured to launch the book "Muslim Portraits - the “Anti-Apartheid Struggle”. The book entails short biographies on 125 Muslim Anti -apartheid activists.

 

The book is available for sale to the public, and any monies generated from the sales will be kept aside for the publication of a second book which Goolam Vahed has indicated that he has ideas for. We believe it is important to highlight the contributions of Muslims in various spheres of South African society and to document our history.

 

The book is available from select book stores as well as SAMNET offices. People are welcome to contact SAMNET offices for enquiries related to the stocking and selling the book.

 

The cost of the book is R150.00 Plus 50 for posting and packaging. There will be discounted rate for orders of 20 copies or more.

 

SAMNET’s details:

 

SAMNET

South African Muslim Network

 

263 Moses Kotane Road (Sparks Road)

Overport

Durban 

South Africa 

 

Tel : (031) 207 4223

Fax : +27 86 549 9786

eMail : This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

 

Foreword

By Ebrahim Rassool Ambassador of South Africa to the USA  

What a wonderful work! Muslim Portraits is one of those works that very few of the people portrayed would ask for in order to immortalise their contribution to the struggle against apartheid and for human rights. Almost without exception, they would invoke the injunctions to modesty and humility to make a case why they should not be eulogised or written about.

But they would be wrong. Part of the struggle in South Africa today is the struggle to remember, in order to appreciate the freedoms enjoyed now, and to ensure that we do not repeat any of the division, humiliation, oppression or subjugation of the past. The struggle for memory includes remembering the specifics of those who struggled, sacrificed, and won the battle for humanity.

Muslim Portraits does this job admirably. It does so despite very consciously courting controversy about whether to look specifically at ‘Muslim’contributions; about whether everyone included would fit anyone else’s definition of a ‘Muslim’;  or whether the diversity of perspectives represented by those covered in Muslim Portraits were not, at one or other time in the course of struggle, mutually exclusive or intolerant of each other.

But the courage of the work is precisely in its decision to ignore these doubts and to put the higher purpose of Muslim Portraits above sectional concerns. History and future generations may one day show, despite the danger of appearing to separate Muslims as a vital thread in the South African tapestry; why it was important now to show that Muslims could recognise the violation of Islam’s values and respond in concert with citizens of other faiths and ideologies. Future generations may marvel at how human beings seemed different in so many ways, but so much the same in crucial ways, when they read Muslim Portraits.

One is struck not merely by Muslims’ distinctive identity within the South African diversity, but by the diversity of thought and motivation among Muslims themselves. If anything, the identity ‘Muslim’ emerges as a religious and cultural umbrella within which the oppressive conditions of apartheid fomented a diversity of politics, ideologies, nuances, actions, shades and fields of activism. In the strange democracy of the struggle for democracy and human rights, this diversity flourished off the basic Islamic and human instinct for dignity, equality, freedom and human rights. This is especially so when these principles and objectives are not overlayed with a desire to totalise interpretations, methodologies, and attitudes.

 

Muslim Portraits may have stumbled upon the meaning of the verse from the Quran: “Those who struggle in Our way, We will show them the way.”  In giving us a glimpse into how over 100 Muslims have contributed to struggle in South Africa, without fully comprehending the outcome, but trusting that when their intentions are good, the path will unfold, we can learn many lessons.

Through their, and many other Muslims’ example, has Allah not shown the way for Muslims in the world today to win trust in the face of mistrust? Can we illustrate that when we cherish our internal diversity, we foster a greater societal diversity that also values our difference? In building equal and inclusive societies do we not help to banish the capriciousness of ever-shifting decisions and definitions of

who are insiders and who are outsiders? Do we not see the enhancement of the South African Muslim fabric when such a high proportion (nearly 20 percent) of the portraits are those of women, who were actively engaged in the frontline of struggle!

In an emerging global context, Muslim Portraits must guide the millions of Muslims currently asserting their right to be free in the ‘Arab Spring’. It must guide the 25 percent of the Muslim Ummah who live as minorities in the face of many challenges. And it must be a guide to those amongst us who are consumed by righteous anger, but do not possess the tranquility of spirit to harness our emotions constructively.

We must pay tribute to the vision of SAMNET, the research and writing skills of Goolam Vahed, and the foresight of the sponsors for Muslim Portraits. Their work will mean that young Muslims can grow up in South Africa, confident that their preceding generations have earned them their place in this country as full and equal citizens. They only have the responsibility to be grateful and to utilise the

benefits of freedom and equality to find their own contributions to South Africa.

May they also be inspired to find worth causes to which their souls can respond.

 

 

Foreword 

By Ahmed Kathrada Rivonia trialist and long-serving political prisoner 

Glen Frankel, in Rivonia’s Children, makes the following points that are pertinent

          to the intentions of this book. He writes: In the end I see two purposes for this book : to tell an important but little known story about moral choice; and to try and rescue from obscurity a group of people and a body of work that deserves our critical attention, admiration and respect. At the end of a harrowing century, we need to collect and retell such stories, if only to remind ourselves from time to time of the need to be vigilant in protecting civil society from police states, large and small.

Frankel goes on to emphasise the importance of preserving history when he writes the following, citing Hannah Arendt, in her book Eichman in Jerusalem: One of the goals of a police state is to establish “holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear”. It is our duty, according to Arendt to preserve history by descending into those holes, rescuing those individual deeds and recounting them to ourselves and our children. The political lesson of individual heroism, she writes, is simple: “it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some will not.”

In much the same way, by staying true to their cause and themselves, the South African activists profiled in this book, despite any mistakes they may have made, helped to keep hope alive in their country, and pave the hard road to freedom. More importantly, these are all ordinary people who were caught up in an extraordinary environment. When talking about the contributions of Muslim activists, we must be mindful that most, if not all, were part of organisations and campaigns that had people of different races and religions. The common cause of defeating Apartheid required that such cooperation and unity was paramount. This unity is a common thread throughout the history of the Indian community from the time of Mahatma Gandhi’s campaigns to that of the 1946 passive resistance. Among Gandhi’s close associates were Nagdee, Cachalia, and Naidoo. We can never forget the pioneering work of Doctors Dadoo and Naicker who forged unity of the Indian community across religious and language lines. They took that quest for unity further when, on behalf of the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses respectively, they signed the 1947 Doctors Pact with Dr Xuma from the ANC. We can never forget the contributions of Molvi Cachalia (deputy national volunteer–in-chief) and Nana Sita (president of the Transvaal Indian Congress) in the 1952 Defiance Campaign. Their staunch religious outlooks did not prevent them from transcending religious differences and fighting for a common cause. The last example I would want to mention is that of Prakash Napier and Yusuf Akhalwaya. Muslim and Christian, yet part of an Umkhonto we Sizwe unit that saw it necessary to play the role of my protectors when I was released in 1989, and who later were killed in a bomb explosion in December of that year. United in struggle, and in death. Many of the activists in this book might not want to be identified as “Muslim” anti apartheid activists but just as activists in the cause of a moral and righteous struggle. While this project is of immense value for historical purposes, let us not forget that these were people who first and foremost understood the value of tolerance and unity. Many of them would have been inspired by the address of Madiba during the Rivonia Trial when he said: I have cherished the ideal of a democratic society in which persons live together in harmony and with equal portunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

 

Madiba further went on to stress the importance of religion in the struggle when, in his address to the Parliament of World Religions in Cape Town in December 1999 he said:

I do appreciate the importance of religion ... you’d have to be in a South African jail under Apartheid where you could see the cruelty of human beings to each other in its naked form. But it was religious institutions, Hindus, Muslims, leaders of the Jewish faith and Christians who gave us hope that we would one day come out. We would return.

Now in the 18th year of our democracy, we still face many challenges in building the society of the Freedom Charter. Poverty, hunger, unemployment, corruption and climate change are amongst the many challenges that the country has to grapple with. It is in how we and future generations respond to these challenges that will determine whether we have learnt the lessons from the activists profiled

in this wonderful book.   

 

 

People profiled

 

 

 

Faried Ahmed Adams / Feroza Adams / Ameen Akhalwaya / Yusuf Akhalwaya /Cassim Amra / Abdul Kader Asmal / Mohamed Asmal / Abu Baker Asvat / Zainab Asvat / Saleem Badat / Omar Badsha / Cassim Bassa / Ahmed Bhoola / MphutlaneWaBofelo / Amina Cachalia / Azhar Cachalia / Firoz Cachalia / Moulvi Cachalia / Yusuf Cachalia / Ameen Cajee / Yunus Carrim / Achmat Cassiem/ Fatima Chohan / Ghadija Christopher / Zuleika Christopher / Hoosen Coovadia / Yusuf Dadoo / Ayesha Dawood / Amina Desai / Barney Desai / AKM Docrat / Cassim Docrat / Jessie Duarte / Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim / Gora Ebrahim / FaridEsack / Suliman Esakjee / KarrimEssack / Omar Essack/ AlieFataar / CissieGool / GoolamGool/ Halima Gool / JainubGool / Hoosen Haffejee /  Fatima Hajaig

Imam Haron / EnverHassim / Kader Hassim/ Nina Hassim / Hassan Howa / Mohammed Abdulhai Ismail  / Aboobaker Ismail / Johnny Issel / Shahieda Issel / Adli Jacobs / Yusuf Jacobs  / Zubeida Jaffer / Mohamed Jajbhay / Abdulhay Jassat / Essop Jassat / Mohseen  Jeenah / Na’eem Jeenah / Ahmed Kathrada / Cassim Kikia / AI Limbada / Ebrahim Vally Mahomed  / Ismail Mahomed / Hassen Mall / Omaruddin Don Mattera / Juby Mayet / SM Mayet / AI Meer / Farouk Meer / Fatima Meer / IC Meer / AS Minty / Sayed Iqbal Mohamed / Yunus Mohamed  / Mosie Moolla / Hassen Moosa / Vali Moosa / Rahima Moosa / Chota Motala / Rabia ‘Choti’ Motala  / Shaikh Hassan Mowla / SM Nathie / ‘Dullah’ Omar  / Rashied Omar / Yacoob Abba Omar  / Amina Pahad / Aziz Pahad / EssopPahad / Goolam Hoosen Pahad / NalediPandor / Ahmed Ebrahim 'Aggie' Patel / Ebrahim Patel / Ebrahim Patel / AH Randeree / SA Randeree / Ebrahim Rasool / Rafiq Rohan / AH Sader / RAM Salojee / Ebrahim “Cass” Saloojee / Khalil Saloojee / Suleman ‘Babla’ Saloojee/ Yusuf Saloojee / Dawood Seedat / Fatima Seedat / Hassim Seedat / Moe Shaikh / Yunis Shaikh / Mohammed Iqbal Sheik / Imam Gassan Solomon / Goolam Suleman / Enver Surtee  / Mohammed Tikly / Ahmed Timol / M I 'Beaver' Timol / Richard Turner  / Ismail Vadi / Errol Vawda / ZacYacoob

 

 

Last Updated ( Monday, 08 October 2012 11:48 )

 

Muslim Portraits - the anti-apartheid struggle

Price R150 plus R50 postage and packaging
Discount rate for bulk purchases for corporates to give as gifts etc

 
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