Schooling Muslims in Natal

The history of Muslim education in the east coast region of South Africa is the story of ongoing struggles by an immigrant religious minority under successive, exclusionary forms of state. Schooling Muslims in Natal traces the labours and fortunes of a set of progressive idealists who, mobilising merchant capital, transoceanic networks and informal political influence, established the Orient Islamic Educational Institute in 1943 to found schools and promote a secular curriculum that could be integrated with Islamic teaching. Through the story of their Durban flagship project – the Orient Islamic School – the book provides a fascinating account of the changing politics of religious identity, education and citizenship in South Africa.

Across a century of changing political expectations, as the region transformed from colony to nation-state to multi-racial democracy, concerns for social mobility, civic inclusion and the survival of Islamic identity on the periphery of the Indian Ocean world were invested in the education of the young.

From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim merchants settling in Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and civic leadership. Aligned to Gandhi’s Congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religious identity to champion modern education for a continually ghettoised diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over ‘Indian penetration’ and an ‘Asiatic menace’.

This is the story of confrontation, co-operation and compromise by an officially marginalised but still powerful set of ‘founding fathers’, and their centrality in histories of education, urban space and Muslim identity in this region of Africa.