An Afrikaans columnist has written that she is reading more and more anti-Muslim messages on social media, and has asked what is feeding the hostility and how South Africans stop it from poisoning relationships further. The question deserves an answer — and the fact that it was asked in Afrikaans, in an Afrikaans publication, is part of the answer.

What Was Written

Writing in Binne+Land on 1 October 2026, Joan van Zyl asks: “Islamofobie: is dit aan die toeneem in SA?” — is Islamophobia increasing in South Africa? Her starting point is what she sees on social media: a rising volume of anti-Muslim messaging, and a hostility she describes as new. She asks what feeds it, and how it is kept from damaging relations in the country further.

Her article sits behind a members-only paywall, so most readers will not be able to open it. What can be said without reading it is that an Afrikaans writer chose to raise the alarm about anti-Muslim prejudice for an Afrikaans readership. That is not a small thing, and it is worth saying plainly: she is raising the concern, not causing it.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

South Africa has no published measurement of Islamophobia. There is no national dataset, no incident register and no index that can tell us whether anti-Muslim prejudice is higher this year than last. What there is, is a growing body of reporting — and that reporting points in a particular direction.

In July 2026 the Weekend Argus reported concerns over a rise in online Islamophobia following the displacement of migrants, after Muslim organisations stepped in with humanitarian assistance and drew a backlash for it. The rhetoric described there tied Muslims to illegal migration, to terrorism and to divided loyalty — the familiar three. In August 2026 Al Jazeera reported much the same online material: claims that Muslims are taking over the country, that aid work is a conversion strategy, that most foreigners here are Muslim. Both pieces located it on social media, principally X. Neither offered figures, because none exist.

Two things in that coverage are worth holding onto. The first is that the Al Jazeera report also found the opposite on the ground: in rural KwaZulu-Natal, ordinary coexistence, a convert whose conversion caused no stir, shopkeepers who are simply part of the town. The analyst Thembisa Fakude went further, arguing there is no widespread or orchestrated Islamophobia directed at South African Muslims. That view should be reported honestly alongside the concern, not filtered out of it.

The second is that none of this reporting identifies any one community as the source. The accounts named are anonymous or individual. Among those quoted defending South African Muslims was Cilliers Brink, who pointed out that the Muslim community has been part of this country for centuries. Hostility online does not come with a demographic label attached, and attaching one without evidence does the same work as the prejudice it objects to.

A Shared Respect Worth Remembering

Ask South African Muslims of an older generation about the Afrikaners they knew, and a particular answer comes back often enough to be worth recording. The racial prejudice of the time was real and it was general. But alongside it — sometimes in the same person — there was a recognition between two communities that took religion seriously. A faith observed rather than merely professed, families who ate and prayed together, modesty in dress and conduct, plain dealing, abstinence treated as ordinary rather than peculiar. Muslims were often read as people of faith first, in a way that other communities were not, and dealt with accordingly. It showed up most clearly among the better educated and better informed.

Set against the divisions, violence and prejudice of apartheid it looks almost like an anomaly. But it was a real one, and many families can still name the neighbour, the farmer, the colleague or the teacher who treated them with a respect the system did not require.

There is an older layer beneath that. Some of the earliest surviving texts written in what became Afrikaans came out of the madrasahs of Cape Town, written in Arabic script by Muslim teachers for their students. Seventy-four of these Arabic-Afrikaans works survive; the oldest intact manuscript dates to 1868, and Abu Bakr Effendi’s Uiteensetting van die Godsdiens followed in 1869. The language was being written down in a mosque school before it was respectable to write it down anywhere else.

None of this was shelter from apartheid. Muslim South Africans were classified, removed and dispossessed like everyone else the state decided against; District Six is the plainest record of it. The point is not that the relationship was benign. It is that something real existed underneath the system, it has a long history, and it is worth not losing now.

What Are We Doing About It?

Prejudice that is answered only with grievance grows. The more useful answer is contact — which is why SAMNET puts as much work into opening mosque doors as into objecting to what is said about what is behind them. The National Mosque Open Day exists for exactly this: a person who has been inside a mosque and asked their questions is a poor audience for the next post telling them what happens in there.

Three things are worth doing now. Engage rather than withdraw — and engage in Afrikaans where that is the language of the conversation, because an argument made in a person’s own language is heard differently. Report what you experience, because an incident that is never recorded does not exist as far as policy or the courts are concerned, and the absence of a record is routinely offered as proof that there is no problem. And resist the pull to answer a generalisation with a generalisation. Those who use prejudice to divide have never stopped at one group, and the only durable defence is a country in which that approach does not work on anyone.

If You Have Experienced or Witnessed It

Write to info@samnet.co.za or send a message on WhatsApp to 084 333 3979, with the date, the place and what was said or done. Keep screenshots.

Sources

  • Joan van Zyl, “Islamofobie: Is dit aan die toeneem in SA? (+ ’n Dilemma)”, Binne+Land, 1 October 2026 (members only).
  • “A dangerous trend: Concerns grow over alleged rise in online Islamophobia after migrant crisis”, Weekend Argus, 2 July 2026.
  • “Online anti-Muslim backlash collides with different reality in South Africa”, Al Jazeera, 30 August 2026.
  • On the Arabic-Afrikaans corpus of the Cape madrasahs, 1840s onwards — see the research of Achmat Davids and Hans Kähler.

Shared by the South African Muslim Network in the interest of a just, inclusive and dignified South Africa.