How empire sails in suits, and what it means to row in resistance.
🔰 Intro
There was a time when pirates came with cutlasses and black flags. You saw them coming. You heard the war drums. But today — the pirates wear uniforms. Or suits. Or diplomatic smiles. And while their ships sail under the banner of freedom, the wake they leave is full of oil, fire, and broken nations.
This is a story about empire. But it’s also a story about you. About where you sit — above deck, below deck, or paddling in a canoe. It’s about resistance. Memory. And the unseen rows of angels above.
“The sea is full of flags — but not one lowers its sails in grief.”
They told us flags were symbols of freedom. They said democracy wears red, white, and blue. They taught us that when their soldiers arrive, the people are being saved.
But the flag flaps like a warning now. The stripes stretch across oceans. The stars are stamped on missiles. The anthem plays over drone strikes.
This isn’t peace. It’s piracy with better branding.
The United States isn’t a country anymore — it’s a flagship. The lead ship in a fleet of multinationals, financial institutions, media empires, and war machines.
It doesn’t sail for justice. It sails for lithium. For land. For leverage.
Its flag is the Jolly Roger of the modern age — not because it’s outlawed, but because it’s above the law. And while the old pirates hoisted black flags to strike fear, these ones wave their colours with pride… and call it diplomacy.
You see them dock in Gaza, in Haiti, in the Sahel. They don’t drop anchor — they drop sanctions. They don’t build bridges — they bulldoze economies. They leave schools shattered, mothers weeping, aquifers poisoned — and they call it freedom.
Even the boldest voices still need trade. Even South Africa, with its lawsuit and legacy, still knocks on the same doors. Because when the pirates run the ports, you have to smile as they loot.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the killing continues. The children cry in Arabic, but no ship stops to help. The sea is full of flags, but not one lowers its sails in grief.
🏢 Section 2: The Pirates Have Offices Now
“You don’t need a coup when you can crash a currency.”
The pirates don’t need eye-patches anymore. They wear tailored suits. They don’t wave cutlasses — they carry clipboards. Their muskets have been replaced by metrics.
The modern pirate doesn’t kick down your door — he offers you a deal. An “investment.” A “development project.” A “partnership.”
But look closely: The lithium ends up in their electric cars. The water rights end up in their stock portfolios. The debt — always the debt — ends up around your children’s necks.
They’ve learned that you don’t need to invade a country if you can own its infrastructure. You don’t need to drop bombs if you can drop interest rates. You don’t need a coup when you can crash a currency.
BlackRock owns more land than many nations. Nestlé bottles water it didn’t pray for. Chevron calls oil sacred. Halliburton builds what the bombs destroy.
The empire privatized its violence. It outsourced the pillaging to companies with ethical mission statements. Its generals now wear CEO name tags. Its foot soldiers are analysts, consultants, lobbyists.
And when a country resists — like Bolivia, like Palestine, like Niger — it doesn’t get invaded at first. It gets discredited. Its leaders are called unstable. Its elections are called suspect. Its people are painted as dangerous, irrational, ungrateful.
This is how conquest works now: not with sails, but with spreadsheets. Not with warships, but with press releases. Not with swords — but with silence.
Somewhere, a young trade official — daughter of a struggle veteran — tries to resist. She sits in a Johannesburg office late at night, re-reading a contract with clauses meant to trap her people. She circles words in red. She drafts a softer version. She knows they won’t accept it. But still — she sends it.
🧠 Sidebar: They Stole the Thoughts Too
They didn’t just loot land and labour. They colonised knowledge. They broke open sacred libraries, and then wrote the footnotes in their own names.
The West calls it “intellectual property.” But it’s just patented plunder.
In Egypt, Plato sat at the feet of Black scholars. In Mali, the Dogon mapped the Sirius star system — long before telescopes. In South Asia, turmeric healed wounds before it had a bar code.
They burned the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Then they published “discoveries” about African medicine in European journals.
Today they say: “You owe us mobile phones.” But what they really mean is: “We branded what we stole.”
🛏 Section 3: Below Deck — The Ordinary Citizen
“The system is designed to keep the floor clean — even if the keel runs red.”
Empires aren’t only built by generals. They are built by people who go to work, come home tired, scroll a little, and sleep.
Below deck, life continues. The engines roar above, the orders are barked on the bridge — but here, the lighting is soft. There are supermarkets, streaming shows, lawnmowers, coffee shops.
No one hears the groans of the drowned. No one smells the smoke from the burning village.
Maybe they see something on the news — Gaza, Congo, Yemen. Maybe they feel a flicker of sorrow. Maybe not.
The comfort below deck is that you don’t have to know. The noise is muffled. The suffering is pixelated. The system is designed to keep the floor clean — even if the keel runs red.
And when someone does knock on the cabin door — a refugee, a witness, a protester — the citizens flinch. Not because they’re evil. But because it’s awkward. Disruptive. A crack in the illusion.
You see, this ship sells a story: “We are good.” “We bring freedom.” “We are the world’s hope.”
It’s a story whispered through education, hummed in entertainment, declared in politics. And most below deck believe it. Or want to. Or at least, want not to think about it too much.
One evening, a man in the suburbs clicks on a video about Gaza. He watches for seventeen seconds before an ad plays. He sighs. Skips it. Opens another tab. A special on air fryers. The horror slips away — not because he’s cruel, but because the system makes forgetting so easy.
Dissent is dulled with subscription bundles. A hundred shows to choose from. None of them about Palestine. And if that fails, there’s always a pill. A holiday. A hashtag that ends by Monday.
Because thinking leads to questions. And questions lead to guilt. And guilt demands action. And action? That rocks the boat.
🛶 Section 4: Canoes and Resistance
“These boats do not always win. But they do not drown quietly.”
Not every vessel sails under the pirate’s flag. Some float with patched sails and broken oars. They are small. Often sinking. But they do not bow.
They are the canoes of the world. Gaza, battered and besieged, still sings the Adhān through rubble. Haiti, dismembered by decades of debt and interference, still cooks its own rice. Congo, bleeding from every open vein of mineral wealth, still births drums and poems.
These are not nations that invade. They don’t fly drones or send tanks. They row.
And every stroke is resistance. Every preserved language, every intact culture, every refused bribe — resistance.
They are mocked for being poor. Starved for being proud. Punished for surviving.
Some truths no longer need footnotes. As the Spanish actor Javier Bardem once said, bluntly and beautifully: “Israel kills. The US funds it. And Europe supports it.”
That’s not politics. That’s a map. A map of complicity. A map of whose silence lets the ship sail on.
The empire calls them unstable. Calls their leaders corrupt. Calls their children threats. But what they fear is not chaos — it’s clarity.
Because the canoe does not pretend. It knows the sea is dangerous. It knows what the pirate ship is.
And still, it rows.
Some canoes are communities. Some are movements. Some are just one grandmother who still tells the old stories — even as the bulldozers arrive.
Some of the canoes ride rivers: the Amazon, the Orange, the Missouri. In them sit the Mapuche, the Nama, the Sioux. They chant in languages the empire once tried to burn. They still paddle. They still protect.
As the bombs fall, a boy in Gaza recites lines from Mahmoud Darwish: “We have on this earth what makes life worth living.” He whispers them into the dust. Into his mother’s lap. It’s not defiance. It’s remembering.
These boats do not always win. But they do not drown quietly. Their resistance echoes — in funeral processions, in ululations, in the smell of fresh bread rising where bombs fell.
And in the far distance, something stirs. Not a boat. Not a bomb. But a wave. A rising swell of memory and reckoning. The kind that even empires cannot out-sail.
❓ Section 5: What Now?
“Maybe you can’t leave yet. But you can plant questions in the cracks of the hull.”
You’ve seen the ship. You’ve heard the cannons. You’ve walked the quiet corridors below deck. You’ve watched the canoes struggle to stay afloat.
So now the question is simple. What now?
You don’t have to be a general. You don’t have to command a fleet. But you do have choices.
You can choose not to cheer when the ship fires. You can choose not to believe the stories they sell you — about the savages, the chaos, the necessary war.
You can choose not to mock the canoe. You can choose to listen when the drowned call out from beneath the waves. You can learn their names. Say their prayers. Tell their stories.
Maybe you’re below deck. Maybe you can’t leave yet. But you can plant questions like seeds in the cracks of the hull. You can make art that aches. You can whisper, even if your voice shakes.
And maybe, one day, when the ship hits a reef — you’ll already know how to swim.
🌌 Postscript: The Unseen Rows
“Above the pirate ships, the angels line up.”
For the ones who row. For the ones who remember.
Above the shipping lanes and air raids, above the pirate flags and surveillance drones, above the offices and engines and war rooms — there are rows they do not see.
Al-Ṣāffāt. “By those arrayed in rows…” (Qur’ān 37:1) The angels. Not scattered. Not confused. Lined up — like soldiers of mercy. Advancing — like winds of truth. Reciting — not data, but dhikr.
وَالصَّافَّاتِ صَفًّا فَالزَّاجِرَاتِ زَجْرًا فَالتَّالِيَاتِ ذِكْرًا By those arrayed in ranks, by those who drive forward, and by those who recite the Reminder… (Qur’ān 37:1–3)
These are not symbols. They are not myths. They are the architecture of heaven. And they do not forget the ones who row.
When the shayāṭīn of power rise to steal, when the liars reach for whispers of the unseen, they are met with stones of fire. Comets hurled from truth’s edge. The skies are not neutral. The divine has guardians.
“They cannot listen to the Higher Assembly… they are pelted from every side, repelled, and for them is a perpetual punishment.” (Qur’ān 37:8–9)
And we? We row. We remember. We recite.
We do not carry cannons — but we carry verses. We are not in fleets — but we are not alone. Somewhere, angels are already in formation.
✨ A Final Word from Rafiq al-Bunduqia
The Sage on the Jetty
So here’s what I say, ne:
Don’t let them fool you with fancy uniforms and offshore accents. A pirate in a suit is still a pirate. And just because the ship looks shiny don’t mean it’s not sinking.
Me, I seen this before. The old flags change — but the hunger stays the same. They used to come for your gold. Now they come for your soul — and your SIM card.
They sell you peace while sharpening knives. Call it “stability,” call it “the market,” call it “regime change.” But listen close, my bru — they only change regimes that say “no.”
Below deck, I know some of you are tired. I know some of you feel small, feel stuck. But remember: Empires fall when enough people stop pretending.
You can’t steer the whole ship, but you can stop rowing. You can stop clapping for the captain. You can light a fire in your corner. And when the time comes — you’ll know which way to swim.
And as for the ones still paddling in canoes? Rowing against the wave, barefoot, hungry, heart full?
May your names be written on the wind. May your stories outlast the storm. And may your grandchildren sail free.
shotgun click
We ride till the ship breaks, bru. Until then — we don’t hand over our compass.
“Salaam to the angels who line up when we can’t. Salaam to the ones who row even with leaking boats. Salaam to the ones who still make dhikr in the dark.
And to the empire?
May you one day see what light you tried to drown.”
Ameen, and ashraaf ʿalaikum ya ṣaffāt.
The seal of remembrance — for the ones who row, and the ones who remember.
— Rafiq al-Bunduqia, The Sage on the Jetty 🧭
“The Pharaoh. The Banker. The Builder.”
📜 Sidebar: The Three Faces of Tyranny Fir‘awn. Qārūn. Hāmān. These three figures appear repeatedly in the Qur’an — not just as villains of the past, but as types that recur across history. Fir‘awn: the dictator, the political oppressor. He claims divinity, demands obedience, and divides people to rule them. Qārūn: the hoarder, the economic elite. He flaunts his wealth, credits no one but himself, and forgets the source of all provision. Hāmān: the enabler, the bureaucrat and ideologue. He builds towers, writes the laws, manipulates truth, and justifies oppression in the name of order. Together, they form a system: the empire that marches with a flag in one hand, a contract in the other, and blood on its boots. Sound familiar?
“Today, they wear suits. They weaponise policy. But the triad still walks among us.”
The Pharaoh, the Banker, and the Builder
In the Qur’an, they stand together — a tyrant, a financier, and a master of infrastructure. Firʿawn ruled with cruelty. Qārūn hoarded with pride. Hāmān built towers for lies.
Centuries later, the empire shapeshifts. Today, they wear tailored suits. They pass laws. They sign cheques. They pave roads to ruin.
But remembrance makes them visible. And visibility is resistance.
“The Pharaoh. The Banker. The Builder.”
🧭 Parting Compass — A Note from Rafiq al-Bunduqia
Don’t wait for the ship to turn around. Grab an oar. Row memory forward. And if they ask who you are, say: I come from the ones who remembered.
In the heart of the Karoo, between silence and stone, stand three koppies known simply as the Three Sisters. But long before GPS and road signs, they were not just hills. They were memory, myth, and warning. This is their story — reworked, reimagined, and returned to light.
The Legend
In the time before breath, before bone, before the Karoo knew its name, there were storms. Not of rain, but of voice — wild, furious, generative. From these storms came three daughters of wind and flame.
Hurricane was the eldest. She spun slowly, singing in deep spirals, her voice the ocean’s moan. She remembered everything.
Tornado was the dancer. Sharp. Fast. She carved paths through time, her tongue flashing with lightning.
Desert Storm was the dream-weaver. She painted clouds, shifted shapes, left frost on mountaintops and fire in valleys.
One night, a celestial body tore across the sky — a comet called Naariq, the Thirstbreaker. It did not destroy. It wept.
Its tears fell like molten glass, planting seeds that bloomed into crystalline gardens. These gardens sang. They hummed the dreams of stars, mirrored the fears of jackals, held the footsteps of those yet born.
But the land cracked again. And the sisters knew: it was time to become stone.
So they stood, side by side, and let the wind turn them solid. The Karoo opened her chest, and from it rose three ribs — the Three Sisters.
Poems of the Three Sisters
HURRICANE – The Elder, Memory-Keeper
They called her Old Spiral, whose eyes held the sea’s sorrow. She sang in slow thunder, turning grief into guidance. From her lips, the language of whales. From her fingers, the first maps. When she wept, rivers returned. When she stood still, wind found its compass. Memory wrapped her like a shawl. She never forgot the beginning — nor the names of the drowned.
TORNADO – The Wild Dancer, Blade of Time
She moved like a question unasked. A flicker, a flame, a flash in the eye. Children say she could bend time’s neck, turning past into present with one step. She wrote her name on cliff faces, carved warnings into baobab bark. When Naariq came, she was the first to rise. Not to fight — but to dance so fiercely the sky itself split to watch. She whirled until stars blurred — until history collapsed into dust.
DESERT STORM – The Shapeshifter, Dream-Weaver
Cloud painter, frost bringer, the last to speak and the first to vanish. She hid her name in jackal cries, in mirages that teach the thirsty to pray. Her gift was silence that heals. Snow in summer. Rain in song. She once kissed a comet so gently it forgot to burn. And when the sisters turned to stone, it was she who shaped their spines. They say she still walks the salt pans — barefoot, barefoot, barefoot…
2. 🌠 Who (or What) Is Naariq?
Let’s not make Naariq a flat villain. Let’s make him:
A cosmic disruptor, yes — but also a catalyst.
A comet not sent to destroy, but to test the world’s memory.
He weeps. He plants crystal seeds. But his very arrival unravels time, thirst, and story.
Naariq, the Thirstbreaker
Not enemy. Not saviour. A comet born of forgotten prayers. He wept not because he was sad — but because he remembered water. Where he passed, memory frayed. Desire bloomed like wildfire. He brought seeds of crystalline dream — and the sisters, too strong to fall for gold, chose stone instead.
The Vanishing
When Naariq came — streaking across the Karoo sky like a blade of thirst — the world stilled. People ran. Wells dried. Time folded.
But the sisters did not flee.
They stood in silence, facing the comet’s weeping light. They did not strike, nor speak.
They absorbed him.
His heat. His ache. His longing. His memory of galaxies.
And when the light faded, there were no bodies left. Only three dark hills, humming softly at dusk.
That is why the koppies sing. Because they carry Naariq inside them. Because silence is the only song strong enough to hold fire.
The Return
A child stands at the foot of the middle hill. She thinks she hears thunder. But there are no clouds. Only wind. And her grandmother’s voice returning in the rustle of dry grass…
Closing Reflection
Today, travellers speed past on the N1, barely glancing. But those who pause — those who walk into the wind — may still hear the Sisters speak.
Author’s Note
This is one of many Cape myths whispered through stone and silence. As part of the Rafiq al-Bunduqia & Rabbānī scrolls, I offer it not as a fixed legend, but as a companion to your own remembering.
Before the baseball cap, the side-eye, and the wisecracks, there was something softer — a garden.
Not of vegetables or vines, but of words: words whispered, weathered, watered by prayer.
I wrote this piece years ago as a meditation on growth, loss, and language. Only now do I realise: this garden was the soil that gave us Rafiq al‑Bunduqia — the companion of pause, the superhero of syntax, the witness in the passenger seat.
🌱 Introduction
Not all heroes crash through walls. Some sit beside them and ask, “Who built this?”
He doesn’t leap tall buildings. He takes long pauses.
His name is Rafiq al‑Bunduqia. Shotgun companion. Keeper of silences. Superhero of the word.
This is his origin scroll.
📜 1. A Garden, Once Planted
Years ago, I wrote The Garden of Words. It was a meditation on how language grows: slowly, unexpectedly, in sunlight and ache.
I had no idea then that someone had been walking in that garden all along — listening to the leaves, laughing at the metaphors, sharpening a pencil beneath a loquat tree.
His name came later. But his presence? It was always there.
🦸🏽♂️ 2. What Kind of Superhero Is Rafiq?
Rafiq does not fly. He walks. Slowly. On purpose.
He doesn’t rescue you — he reminds you. He doesn’t dazzle — he decodes.
His weapons are:
A well-timed question
A half-smile that disarms
A quote from a street aunty that cuts deeper than any Hadith app
And a scroll, always a scroll
He moves through WhatsApp voice notes, bread queues, and Threads threads. You won’t notice him until it’s too late — and then you’re crying and breathing better.
📖 3. His Powers
Power
Description
The Pause
He listens long enough to hear the truth behind your noise.
The Compass
He helps you re-find your qiblah when algorithms have stolen your sense of direction.
The Scroll Drop
Short, sharp, soulful — he leaves them like seeds on sidewalks.
Code-Switching Cloak
Fluent in Kaaps, Qur’an, colloquialism, and meme. He’ll talk street or soul depending on what you need.
💭 4. Why the World Needs Him
In an age of constant noise, Rafiq carries something ancient:
Discernment. Mercy. Memory.
He shows us that to speak well is not the same as to speak wisely.
That sometimes, the most radical act is to say nothing — and let someone else be heard.
🪞 Moment 1: “Don’t Answer So Fast”
They were all arguing on the stoep — about Gaza, gangsters, grief, government. Everyone had an opinion. Except Rafiq.
He just watched, sucking on a toothpick. Then he said:
“Don’t answer so fast, my broer. Sometimes, your answer is just your trauma trying to sound clever.”
Silence. A pigeon flew off the roof. No one spoke after that.
🍵 Moment 2: “Make Tea Like You Listening”
One of the ouens asked Rafiq, “How do you know when someone’s fake?”
He grinned — slow like a gate that’s seen too many guests.
Flicked his gwai ash into a broken saucer.
“Easy. Watch how they make tea. If they rush the pour, they’ll probably rush your pain too.”
“Make tea like you listening. Let it draw. Let it breathe.”
He sipped from a chipped cup and added,
“You want to fix the world? Start by fixing how you boil water.”
🧃 Moment 3: “The Juice Box Gospel”
At the back of the masjid after Jumu’ah, a small laaitie gave Rafiq a juice box.
No reason. Just walked up, silent, and handed it over like a contract.
Rafiq took it like it was gold.
Sat down on the pavement with his legs crossed, plastic straw in hand, and sipped like he was performing dhikr.
The boy looked confused.
So Rafiq leaned forward, tapped the juice box with one finger and said:
“My lightie, never underestimate something small that still got sweetness in it.”
Then he looked up at the sky and whispered,
“Ya Rabb… give us the patience of those who still share, even when there’s just one sip left.”
🪶 5. A Scroll from Rafiq
Rafiq’s Scroll #14 – On Superpowers
To sit with someone long enough to hear the voice behind the noise — that’s Rabbānī. That’s mercy. That’s you.
— Rafiq al‑Bunduqia
✨ What if Rafiq’s Trinity is This:
Drip. Hikmah. Duʿāʾ.
⚡ Style that carries memory 📿 Wisdom that carries mercy 🕊️ Supplication that carries the rest of us
🟤 A Word That Wounds and Wakes Us: Rethinking “Coloured” in the Age of Memory
By Adli Yacubi
“The name ‘Coloured’ was forcefully given to us.” — Glen Snyman, Sunday Times, 20 July 2025
Last Sunday’s front page posed a question still burning through our national psyche: “Coloured: A term to ban or build around?”
In bold red and black, the Sunday Times article (20 July 2025) captured a moment of deep fracture — and opportunity. It spotlighted the voices of two public figures, Glen Snyman and Fadiel Adams, whose opposing stances on the term “Coloured” reflect long-simmering tensions within post-apartheid identity politics.
And yet, beyond the noise, a different current is rising. One that calls not for renaming or romanticising, but for remembering.
❌ Criminalise or 🔁 Reclaim?
Glen Snyman, founder of People Against Race Classification (PARC), argues that “Coloured” is not merely outdated — it is damaging, like the K-word:
“It disguises the true identity of the first inhabitants of South Africa. The government still refuses to recognise the Khoikhoi and San people on official forms after 30 years of democracy.”
Snyman’s activism led to national debates in parliament and institutions like the Western Cape Blood Service adding the “prefer not to say” option to racial forms. But his call for criminalising the term has stirred legal and ethical challenges — and provoked a backlash from those who feel erased by the erasure.
On the other end stands Fadiel Adams, leader of the National Coloured Congress, who says:
“We are decolonising the term and reclaiming our power.”
Adams believes in building around the identity — anchoring it in lived pain, community resilience, and political recognition. But critics say this collapses our histories into apartheid boxes, reinforcing labels that were never ours to begin with.
🪶 What’s In a Name?
Into this fire, Patric Tariq Mellet, historian and author of The Camissa Embrace, offers clarity beyond polemics:
“Goringhaicona was never a name people used for themselves. It was a derogatory Dutch term meaning outcast or scavenger. Autshumao’s people were known as the /Kamisons — water traders. They were a sub-group of the Cochoqua. The term Camissa remembers them not as fragments, but as a river of convergence.”
Mellet’s contribution is not merely semantic — it’s genealogical. It reveals that terms like “Coloured” and even “Brown” are colourist overlays that flatten our multiple ancestries: San, Khoe, Xhosa, enslaved African, Indian, Javanese, and European.
His critique of both Snyman and Adams is incisive:
“Both men reflect valid concerns — but both are caught in Apartheid’s trap. One criminalises. The other romanticises. Neither steps fully into the radical work of remembering, beyond state classification.”
🧬 Memory as Resistance
To stand in this in-between space — neither erasing the term nor enshrining it — is to do the work of memory. To say: we were misnamed, but we are not unnamed. We are more than what apartheid called us. And we are not only what the census categories offer us.
This blog, like others before it, is not a position paper. It is a growing reflection rooted in questions I’ve been asking for years: — What do we mean when we say “I am Coloured”? — Who gets to say so? — And what happens when our ancestors whisper different names?
We are not “non-white.” We are not “Other.” We are not “Coloured” in the way the law intended. And we are not simply “Brown,” either.
We are Camissa. We are from the river. We are still flowing.
📝 Postscript
We acknowledge the work of Patric Tariq Mellet, whose scholarship challenges colonial erasure. Through his writing, Camissa is no longer hidden — it is remembered as a place of sweet waters, of creolised identity, of sacred convergence.
His reminder to not confuse / reclaim / romanticise pejorative colonial terms (such as “Goringhaicona”) is especially important — and will be reflected in our future revisions.
We also draw from Stuart Hall, who wrote that nations are “narrated into being.” To say “I am from Camissa” is to resist imposed categories and to speak from the riverbed of relation — to narrate the nation otherwise.
The story of who we are is still being written. Let it not be in the language of our conquerors — but in the voice of our rivers, mountains, mothers and names.
💧 The Colour of God
صِبْغَةَ ٱللَّهِ ۖ وَمَنْ أَحْسَنُ مِنَ ٱللَّهِ صِبْغَةًۭ ۖ وَنَحْنُ لَهُۥ عَـٰبِدُونَ “This is the colour of Allah. And who is better than Allah in colouring? And we are His worshippers.” (Qur’an 2:138)
Not the colours of empire. Not the names imposed by maps or ministries. But the silver sap beneath the bark. The scent of rain on root. This is the ṣibghah of God. The sacred dye of those who remember.
Our Inheritance: The African and Islamic Civilisations That Shaped the World
Our Inheritance: The African and Islamic Civilisations That Shaped the World
“We don’t just have history. We have receipts.” — Yaw Kissi
For generations, our textbooks — even in Islamic schools — handed down a version of history in which Europe alone was cast as the cradle of civilisation, and Africa into darkness. This colonial retelling stripped countless people of their confidence and belonging.
As Shaykh Allie Khalfe insightfully reminds us, even the academic traditions we take for granted — like graduation caps and gowns — trace back to the Islamic ijāzah system, where a teacher would bestow a turban and robe upon a student to mark their mastery.
Europe adopted these symbols while erasing their origins. But today, the veils are lifting. And as African memory resurfaces — in scrolls, dreams, and digitised manuscripts — we realise something essential:
We don’t just have history. We have receipts.
Mathematics and Science
Consider al-jabr, or algebra — a foundational pillar of modern science, engineering, and finance. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, working in 9th-century Baghdad, formalised its rules, giving his name to the word algorithm — the very basis of every modern computer. His systematic approach to equations transformed the world.
In medicine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) produced the Canon of Medicine, a monumental text synthesising anatomy, treatments, and psychology, taught across Europe for over 600 years. Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi (Albucasis) in Andalusia created a 30-volume encyclopedia on surgical techniques, designing more than 200 surgical instruments that still influence modern practice.
Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), known as the “father of optics,” shattered ancient Greek theories by proving that light enters the eye to produce vision, and he introduced experimental methods that would inspire Europe’s later scientific revolutions. These figures were not footnotes in history — they were its authors.
Astronomy and Navigation
Muslim astronomers transformed the night sky into a navigational map, extending humanity’s reach across oceans and deserts. They refined Greek, Persian, and Indian observations and built on them with powerful new instruments and methods.
Al-Zarqali (Arzachel) of 11th-century Toledo developed the Toledo Tables — astronomical data so precise they became a cornerstone for European science, inspiring Copernicus and others. His universal astrolabe could be used at any latitude, freeing navigation from local constraints.
Mariam al-Asturlabi, a 10th-century woman scientist in Aleppo, constructed exquisitely precise astrolabes, allowing people to determine prayer times, measure the positions of stars, and navigate across continents. These tools formed the backbone of Muslim maritime routes linking East Africa, Arabia, and South Asia — centuries before Europe was ready to cross the Atlantic.
It is no exaggeration to say that the so-called Age of Discovery — Columbus, da Gama, Magellan — was made possible through navigational science and star charts inherited from the Muslim world. Yet most schoolbooks erase these global contributions.
Education and Intellectual Institutions
Muslim civilisation revolutionised education by designing institutions that united spiritual, legal, and scientific learning. Fatima al-Fihri, a Muslim woman in Morocco, founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in 859 CE, the world’s oldest continually operating degree-granting institution. Her legacy shows how women helped sustain and fund educational excellence.
In West Africa, Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu, who authored more than 40 books on law, biography, and ethics, embodied the intellectual brilliance that made Timbuktu as respected as any European centre of learning. Even when Moroccan invaders exiled him to Marrakesh, his scholarship commanded respect, and he eventually returned to revive Timbuktu’s traditions.
Equally inspiring, Nana Asma’u of 19th-century Nigeria trained networks of female educators (yan-taru) and wrote poetry and theology in Arabic, Hausa, and Fulfulde, extending literacy and spiritual knowledge throughout the Sokoto Caliphate.
These institutions offered far more than theology: their curricula included medicine, astronomy, mathematics, grammar, and philosophy, attracting scholars from across Africa, the Middle East, and even Europe. They were open, cosmopolitan spaces that nurtured critical thinking and diversity, centuries before Europe’s universities caught up.
Art, Culture, and Daily Life
Perhaps nowhere was cultural brilliance more visible than in the story of Abu l-Hasan ʿAli Ibn Nafiʿ — known as Ziryab, the ‘Black Bird’. Born to a family who had been enslaved, most likely of Black African descent, Ziryab arrived in Cordoba in the 9th century and redefined taste itself. He expanded musical scales, added a fifth string to the oud, and established a structured method of teaching music that would echo through Europe for centuries.
“The fork, now held up as the badge of ‘civilisation,’ was popularised in Europe by a Black African Muslim.” — from the section on Ziryab
“They weren’t relics. They were receipts.” — on the Timbuktu manuscripts
He also transformed daily life by introducing crystal drinking vessels, organising meals into separate courses, encouraging regular hygiene, designing seasonal wardrobes, and even popularising the small two-pronged fork for delicate foods — centuries before Europe claimed it as its own. That fork would eventually spread across France and the continent, yet no one credited its origins.
In today’s world, where politicians shame people like Zohran Mamdani for eating with their hands, there is a profound irony: the fork, now held up as the badge of “civilisation,” was popularised in Europe by a Black African Muslim.
A Note on Eating With the Hand
The uproar over Zohran Mamdani’s video of eating rice with his hands shows how colonial thinking still lingers. Across Africa, India, and the Arab world, eating with the hand is rooted in ancient tradition, mindfulness, and even spiritual symbolism — linking the five fingers to the five elements of nature.
Western colonisers once labelled this practice “uncivilised,” forgetting that their prized utensil, the fork, came into European culture through Ziryab’s refined innovations. France and other parts of Europe embraced the fork over centuries, yet rarely acknowledged its roots.
As Shaykh Allie Khalfe wisely reminds us, the problem is not about etiquette, but about power, prejudice, and historical amnesia — a colonial hierarchy that still tries to shame non-European cultures while quietly living on their forgotten innovations.
Conclusion
The Golden Age of Africa and Islam was never lost — it was hidden, buried beneath centuries of colonial arrogance, racism, and cultural erasure. From the hospitals of Cairo to the libraries of Timbuktu, from the universities of Fez to the concert halls of Cordoba, from the Grand Library of Baghdad — Bayt al-Ḥikmah — to the scholars who charted the stars, our ancestors nurtured a world of knowledge, beauty, and moral excellence that still resonates today.
These contributions were not accidental: they were born of a civilisation that valued intellectual curiosity, hospitality, faith, and human dignity. In their pursuit of learning, these scholars and visionaries created bridges between continents and cultures, carrying forward a spirit of trust in God (tawakkul) and service to humanity.
Today, recovering these stories is not about boasting or chasing nostalgia — it is an act of healing, of reclaiming the confidence, pride, and resilience that colonial narratives tried to crush. Our children deserve to inherit a truthful memory of who we are: people who illuminated the world, built institutions of compassion and reason, and shaped the very frameworks of science, art, and law.
Let us honour this legacy not with empty slogans, but by living it — teaching it, protecting it, and carrying it forward as a sacred trust (amanah). For if our ancestors could rise from the chains of conquest and slavery to become authors of civilisation, then we too can rise, with God’s help, to build a world of justice, knowledge, and mercy once more.
We were never just subjects of someone else’s story. We wrote. We built. We mapped. We healed.
And the pages are still here.
We don’t just have history. We have receipts.
And now — we remember.
References
1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilisation, ed. Salim T.S. Al-Hassani
George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007)
John Hunwick, “Ahmed Baba: Intellectual of Timbuktu,” Sudanic Africa (1997)
Beverly Mack & Jean Boyd, One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe (2000)
Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire (2009)
Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan (2005)
Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019)
The Mother Tongue of Tasbih: Afrikaans, Islam, and the Echoes of Resistance
An Interlude of Love, Argument, and Memory
We were driving down a quiet stretch of road — just Sadia and I, the Karoo light pouring in through the windscreen, dust swirling around like old questions. She had grown up in Worcester, her Afrikaans carefully folded by teachers and ‘ustaads’, wrapped in the formal tones of schoolbooks and sermons — so different from the swing and slang I had grown up with in the Cape. I, on the other hand, had grown up with a different register: kombuis-Afrikaans, spoken in kitchens and mosques, spiced with Quranic rhythm and Kaapse mischief.
Somewhere between the mountains and memory, we argued.
“That’s not real Afrikaans,” she said, teasing. “You make up words.”
“And who decided what’s real?” I asked. “The Broederbond? The DRC? The state that tried to baptize us in its accent?”
She laughed — but the question lingered.
This is not just a story of a couple’s linguistic banter. It is the story of a language born in exile, nurtured in slavery, softened by Qur’an, and carried through generations of prayer, protest, and poetry. This is a story of Afrikaans — not as the language of the oppressor, but as the tasbih of the oppressed.
1. Afrikaans: Not a White Invention
Let’s begin here: Afrikaans was not born in Stellenbosch.
Its roots run through Cape Malay kitchens, slave quarters, mosque courtyards, and prayer gatherings beneath candlelight. It was whispered by Javanese mothers exiled from Batavia, recited by Wolof imams from Senegambia, taught by Hadrami scribes, and softened by the Khoena tongues of this land — long before colonial grammarians arrived to cage it in rules..
The historian Achmat Davids was among the first to challenge the myth that Afrikaans was solely a “white man’s language.” His pioneering research, later extended by Hein Willemse and others, traced Afrikaans’ earliest written form to the Muslim community of the Cape — not in Latin script, but in Arabic-Afrikaans, or what was sometimes called Ajami Afrikaans.
One of the oldest surviving texts in Afrikaans is a du’a (supplication) manual written in Arabic script by enslaved Muslims. Another is the 1869 Bayān al-Dīn, a complete Islamic catechism in Afrikaans, used for madrassah instruction. These works prove something scholars of empire often resist: that enslaved and colonised peoples were not passive recipients of a language. They reshaped it. They sanctified it. They infused it with rhythm, resistance, and remembrance.
Afrikaans was not merely a colonial bastard tongue. It was — and remains — a mother tongue for many, especially when that mother stood stirring boeber while reciting Qul Huwa Allahu Ahad under her breath.
2. Creole? Or Camissa?
I’ve always had difficulty with the word creole.
Not because I reject mixedness — quite the opposite. I honour our intertwined bloodlines, the sacred chaos of diaspora, the rivers that met and mingled here at the Cape. But because the term creole, as used by certain linguists, often carries a quiet violence: it frames our language as a compromise, a simplified system born of broken tongues. It reduces what is sacred into something stitched from scraps. As if kombuis-Afrikaans was the language of people who couldn’t speak properly — not of people who chose to pray differently.
And too often, creole becomes a coded term for “coloured.” A linguistic way of saying not-white, not-black, not-arabic, not-european — just other.
I prefer another term: Camissa. As Patric Tariq Mellet reminds us, Camissa was the name of the river that once flowed through the Cape Flats, long before the Dutch buried it under stone. It was also the name of the Goringhaicona clan who traded with the world before colonial maps erased them. To speak Camissa-Afrikaans is to remember we are not defined by brokenness — but by confluence.
So no, what we speak is not a creole. It is the tasbih of the kitchen, the dhikr of the dockyard, the language of longing. What they call kombuis, we call home.
3. The Language of Tasbih
In our home, Afrikaans was not the language of textbooks or term reports. It was the language of tasbīḥ — of remembrance, rhythm, and breath.
Thursday nights, just after maghrib, the living room would dim into stillness. A cloth was spread. The Rātib al-Ḥaddād would begin. First a whisper: Qul huwa Allāhu Aḥad… Then a swelling chorus — women’s voices, children’s murmurs, old men with trembling hands.
We called it the Gadat. It was recited in Arabic, but held together by Afrikaans: the instructions, the rhythm, the murmured cues. “Ouens, netjies!” “Hou die beat mooi!” “Moenie vinnig ry nie — luister na die kalmte.”
Sometimes, someone would break from the dhikr to hush a restless child. “Shhh, dis nou Allāh se tyd, my kind.” That now — that insistence that this moment of prayer was sacred and immediate — still echoes in my chest.
And when it was done, a sweetness returned: koesisters passed hand to hand, boeber ladled with care, stories resumed in Kaaps lilt. The tasbīḥ was complete — not just in recitation, but in the return to one another.
…
In his later years, my father told me how the elders taught Qur’an in Afrikaans before Arabic letters could be properly mastered. Children would chant: “Alif duwa detis, Alif duwa bowa, Alif duwa dappan, An In Oen.” It was a phonetic bridge — an echo of how Javanese, Malay, and Arab teachers preserved tajwīd in a tongue the children already knew.
This wasn’t a lack of Arabic. It was a path to it.
And it wasn’t unique.
In Senegal, Wolof Muslims chant dhikr in their own rhythms. In Indonesia, pegon script preserves the Qur’an in Javanese hearts. At the Cape, Afrikaans — even in its kitchen form — became the vessel through which the Names of God entered the ears of children.
Afrikaans was never just a tool of survival. It was a tool of transmission.
Of tawḥīd in a tongue our mothers understood.
4. Jawap: The Command to Recite
In the old madrassah, silence was not golden — it was a gap in the chain of transmission. A break in the rhythm. A forgetting.
And so, when your voice faltered or your memory stalled, the mu’allim would lean forward — not with cruelty, but with urgency — and say:
“Jawap, my kind!”
Not shout. Not plead. But command. Recite. Respond. Step back into the rhythm.
Because in the Cape, jawap was never just “answer.” It was a summons — to speak, to return, to carry what you’ve been given.
The word comes from the Arabic ج و ب — jawāb, meaning “reply,” and ijābah, the act of answering a call. But in Afrikaaps, jawap widened its reach. It meant:
Recite the ayah.
Step into the beat.
Don’t let the tasbīḥ fall silent.
You could hear it outside the masjid too — In a kitchen when someone moved too slow:
“Jawap nou! Die kos gaan brand!” In a playful quarrel between siblings: “Ek wag vir jou jawap, dan sal jy sien!”
But the root remained sacred.
To jawap was to not let the memory die. It was to pull the verse from the chest, even if the chest was tight. It was to let the breath carry the Names of God, even when the tongue stumbled.
…
Some nights, I’d sit with my father as he corrected a cousin’s recitation. He never raised his voice. Just waited for the right moment and said, gently but firmly:
“Jawap, my klong! Djy ken die beat. Ma’ moenie vergiet’ie.”
That sentence lives in me.
And I wonder now if that’s what the Qur’an itself asks of us:
Fa-ijībū li… So respond to Me… (Qur’an 2:186)
Not just with belief, but with voice. Not only with intellect, but with breath.
To live is to jawap. To remember is to jawap. To teach, to protest, to praise — is to jawap.
And maybe that’s why the Gadat still echoes through the Cape — Not because we’ve mastered every rule of tajwīd, But because someone once told us:
“Don’t keep quiet. Jawap.”
A salomie is how we hold history — wrapped in warmth, passed from hand to hand. To live is to jawap. To resist is to remember what we’re made of.
5. Echoes of Resistance: A Language That Refused to Die
To speak Afrikaaps was once considered vulgar. Uneducated. Low. The language of skollies, meidens, and kitchen girls. The official line was clear: proper speech belonged to white mouths and white pulpits.
But at the Cape — in Salt River, Bo-Kaap, Parkwood, Belhar, and Bonteheuwel — our people spoke tasbīḥ in their own tongue.
And that was resistance.
They recited Qur’an with Kaapse inflections. They sang dhikr in alleyways, under washing lines, between the Sunday curry and the Monday washing. They wrote duʿāʾ in Arabic script — with Afrikaans vowels — because the state’s education system wouldn’t teach them Arabic, and the imām couldn’t write Latin.
This wasn’t survival. It was sovereignty.
When the tongue of the oppressor tried to rename us, we jawapped back with remembrance. When they broke our schools, we turned kitchens into classrooms. When they mocked our accent, we sharpened it into poetry.
And in that echo, you can still hear the names of the early reciters: Tuan Guru teaching on Robben Island. Imam Saban writing Bayān al-Dīn for the children of slaves. Ouma Gatie sitting in her chair, reciting Yā Sīn in Afrikaans until her teeth ached — and her soul rose light.
Even Apartheid’s Bible — the 1933 Afrikaans translation — couldn’t erase the sound of tasbīḥ in our streets. Because we had our own Book, our own rhythm. Our mothers wrapped Qur’an verses in the same cloth they wrapped around your lunch tin: tight, warm, enough.
…
To remember in Afrikaans — to teach La ilāha illā Allāh with a Cape tongue — is not just a cultural artefact.
It is a form of sabr. Of jihād. Of wilfully remembering what empire tried to make us forget.
And so even now, when I hear a child reciting in Afrikaaps, I don’t correct the accent.
I listen for the memory in the melody. Because sometimes, the resistance is not in the grammar — It’s in the breath.
Theatre as Tasbīḥ: Walking Through 333 Years
In 1986, the Call of Islam commemorated 333 years of Islam in South Africa — not with a speech, but with a play.
“A Walk Through 333 Years” was a theatrical act of remembrance: combining Qur’anic recitation, storytelling, song, and dramatic re-enactment of Muslim life from enslavement to resistance.
Directed by a community professional, informed by the late Achmat Davids’ research, and carried by a cast of ordinary believers, the play jawapped our history with full breath. It wasn’t just performance — it was pedagogy.
The production travelled across the country and left audiences moved in ways no pamphlet or sermon could match.
Like tasbīḥ in the kitchen or dhikr in the alleyway, this was language at work — resisting, remembering, reclaiming.
Because sometimes, the resistance is not just in the grammar.
It’s in the gathering. It’s in the jawap. It’s in the walk through our own years — together.
6. Tongue, Tasbīḥ, and the Right to Return
So what is a language?
A dictionary will tell you it’s a system. A grammar. A structure of rules.
But we — the people of kombuise and kramats, of ratibs and roti — we know different.
We know that a language is also a holding. A way to wrap memory is like a salomie wrapped in a roti — not for perfection, but to preserve warmth.
We know that Afrikaans is not only the language of the jailer — it is also the jawap of the jailed. It is the rhythm of the Qur’an under colonial roofs. It is the sound of mothers whispering Bismillah while brushing a child’s hair. It is the beat of “Moenie vergiet’ie” — not as a threat, but as a prayer.
If they ask us who we are, we might say: We are the children of those who answered with breath when the world tried to silence them.
We are the ones who recited even when we could not read. Who made dhikr in a tongue they said was impure. Who kept the memory of revelation alive — in kitchens, classrooms, corners of mosques, and hearts that stammered but never surrendered.
…
And so, if anyone asks:
What kind of Afrikaans is this?
Tell them gently:
This is not the Afrikaans of the oppressor. This is the mother tongue of tasbīḥ. The language of jawap. The rhythm of remembrance. This is the tongue that taught us to speak back to the silence — and return to God with our own breath, in our own way.
Because what they called kombuis, we called home.
📚 Footnotes & References:
Achmat Davids, The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims from 1815 to 1915: A Socio-Linguistic Study, UCT PhD Thesis, 1987. Foundational in establishing the role of Arabic-Afrikaans and Cape Muslim literacy practices.
Hein Willemse, editor and scholar of Afrikaans literary traditions, particularly around marginalised and non-standard variants. Relevant essays include: “Language, Race and Power in South Africa.”
Patric Tariq Mellet, The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land, and various writings on Camissa identity and language reclamation.
Adli Jacobs, Punching Above Its Weight: The Story of the Call of Islam, Function Books, 2024, p. 84. Documents the Call of Islam’s 1986 theatrical production “A Walk Through 333 Years”, co-developed with historian Achmat Davids. This performance combined Qur’anic recitation, song, and drama to embody the memory of Islam’s journey from slavery to resistance in South Africa.
Qur’anic verse cited: Qur’an 2:186 — “So respond to Me (fa-ijībū li) and believe in Me, that they may be rightly guided.”
Oral traditions and family sayings (e.g. “Jawap, my klong. Jy ken die beat.”) Attributed to the author’s father, part of Cape Muslim living heritage.
Arabic-Afrikaans manuscripts (e.g. Bayān al-Dīn, Ratib al-Ḥaddād in Arabic-Afrikaans): Refer to holdings in the National Library of South Africa, Clarke Estate Mosques, and private Cape Muslim collections.
Laagu vs Tajwīd debates and Thursday night Gadat gatherings: Drawn from oral sources and lived practice in Cape Town’s Muslim communities. May cite the influence of Shaykh Seraj Hendricks, Imam Taha Gamieldien, and Imam Abdullah Haron’s legacy of fusing dhikr with defiance.
🪶 Related Articles in This Series:
The Forgotten Tongue of Remembrance A reflection on Arabic-Afrikaans, the erased voices of dhikr, and the linguistic tenderness that survived colonial erasure.
Tamat: A Sacred Completion, A Living Beginning Explores the Cape Muslim tamat ceremony as both rite of passage and living echo of West African, Javanese, and Arab pedagogical traditions.
A Khutbah for Jayden-Lee and Every Child We Couldn’t Save
By Adli Yacubi
“Our Lord! Grant us from our spouses and offspring the comfort of our eyes, and make us leaders for the righteous.” — Surah Al-Furqān (25:74)
🕯️ Khutbah Part One: The Dignity of Children in the Eyes of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم
All praise is due to Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Just. We bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad ﷺ is His servant and final Messenger. May peace and blessings be upon him, his family, his companions, and all who walk in his light.
Today, I want to speak not to power, nor to politics — but to something more vulnerable, more sacred: the hearts of our children.
Too often in our mosques and gatherings, we speak about parents, or we speak to the youth, but we rarely speak for the child — the one still learning how to speak, the one still waiting to be held, seen, protected.
The Prophet ﷺ saw children not as a nuisance, not as future workers, not as sinners-in-waiting — but as mirrors of mercy.
He ﷺ played with children. He kissed them on their foreheads. He carried Hasan and Husain on his shoulders, even during salah. He lengthened his sujūd because his grandson was sitting on his back — and he didn’t want to disturb the child’s joy.
He ﷺ said:
“He is not one of us who does not show mercy to our young and respect to our elders.” (Tirmidhi)
And when a man said, “I have ten children and have never kissed one of them,” the Prophet ﷺ replied:
“What can I do if Allah has removed mercy from your heart?”
This is who we are meant to follow. This is who we claim to love.
So let me ask: How then did we allow a child — eleven years old — to be beaten in a flat, left undressed on a staircase, while his body slowly faded not far from our schools, not far from our mosques?
Where were we? Where was the mercy of this ummah?
🙏🏾 Khutbah Part Two: Jayden-Lee Meek and the Silence That Kills
A child named Jayden-Lee Meek was reported missing in May 2025. He lived in Fleurhof, not far from where I once lived. He was found unconscious on the stairs of the very building where he stayed. He died in the hospital. He was 11.
The latest reports suggest this was no accident. Not a fall. Not mischief. But a beating. Possibly by someone who should have loved him. Possibly by someone he trusted to protect him.
And while he was being beaten — no neighbour intervened. No one called the police. And when he was missing — too many stayed quiet.
And maybe, we tell ourselves this is “not my business.” Or worse — maybe we’ve come to believe that hitting children is just discipline.
My own daughter once said to me, when she was still in school in Florida: “Daddy, some parents think it’s normal — to hit with a slipper, a belt, even a fist.” It shook me.
So when Jayden-Lee was killed, some didn’t see a crime — they saw something “familiar.” But where is the line? When does punishment become cruelty? And how far must it go before we decide it’s “too much”?
The truth is: The line was crossed the moment mercy was left behind. The line was crossed the first time we taught our children that pain is a form of love.
And Jayden tried to speak. At school — Royal College in Florida — classmates say he spoke of hunger. He said he was often left alone. He showed bruises. He said he was scared.
Some of this was reportedly shared with teachers. Enough for the Gauteng Department of Education to admit:
“There may be some truth to the allegations that the school knew.”
But nothing was done. The silence wasn’t only at home. It echoed in the corridors of a place meant to protect him.
So what is the line, if not this? How many times must a child cry before we believe them?
Ya Allah… What kind of silence is this?
The Qur’an says:
“And do not kill your children for fear of poverty. We provide for them and for you. Surely killing them is a heinous sin.” Surah Al-Isra (17:31) “When the girl (or child) buried alive is asked: for what sin was she killed…” Surah At-Takwir (81:8-9)
But what of those children not buried, but beaten? Not unborn, but unseen?
Who will answer for Jayden?
Who will answer for all the children who suffer in silence — whose bruises are explained away, whose cries are dismissed, whose names we forget until it is too late?
The Prophet ﷺ did not simply tolerate children — he honoured them. He treated them as people of dignity, not property. And he warned us:
“Each of you is a shepherd, and each of you is responsible for your flock.” (Bukhari, Muslim)
So let us ask again: Who is responsible for Jayden-Lee?
🤲🏽 Closing Duʻā
O Allah, You are the Protector of the weak. The Guardian of the orphan. The Avenger of the oppressed.
Grant Jayden-Lee peace in the next world. Forgive what he endured in this one. Do not let his pain return void. And awaken this ummah — awaken our communities — before another child suffers in silence.
Let our homes be filled with mercy. Let our schools be sanctuaries. Let our masājid echo with the laughter of safe, joyful children.
And let us never forget: To love a child is a form of worship. To protect a child is a form of jihad. To weep for a child is a form of duʻā.
🕯️
Justice for Jayden-Lee Meek. And justice for every child we were too distracted to see.
🔗 Sources
‘Jayden-Lee’s school knew about abuse’: Gauteng Department of Education investigates allegations, IOL, 16 July 2025.
Jayden-Lee Meek murder: How blood and school books led to his mother’s arrest, IOL, 15 July 2025.
Tiffany Meek faces charges: murder, crimen injuria, and defeating the ends of justice, IOL, 11–15 July 2025.
Afrikaans in Arabic Script and the Ratib al-Haddad
Bismillah. Among the rarest cultural gems of the Cape is this handwritten or printed Ratib al-Haddad in Arabic script — and beneath each sacred verse, a transliteration and translation in Afrikaans, also in Arabic script. This devotional work bears the title:
رَاتِبُ الْحَدَّادِ هَذَا الْمُسَمَّى الْحِصْنُ الْحَصِيْنُ The Ratib al-Haddad – This is Called the Well-Fortified Fortress.
It is more than just a document — it is a linguistic relic, a spiritual practice, and a memory map of how Qur’anic dhikr was carried across generations, even when Arabic as a language was no longer spoken fluently. The presence of Afrikaans — lovingly scribed in Arabic letters — reminds us that remembrance found its voice even in colonised tongues. This text is proof: the Divine was praised in the language of those who suffered, resisted, and healed.
This is no ordinary translation. It is a trace of the Cape’s earliest Muslim educational systems, where a now-suppressed form of Kaapse Afrikaans was used to teach, explain, and transmit the Qur’an and dhikr — long before formal Arabic learning was accessible.
This copy, sourced and shared by Sheikh Jamiel Abrahams, is one of the most exquisite I have seen. It is more than a relic. It is the visual embodiment of a living legacy.
The Arabic-AfriKaaps hybrid in these pages is not just linguistics — it is resistance, devotion, and adaptation in motion. A tongue formed in the shadows of empire, now remembered in the radiance of dhikr.
This post offers a glimpse — a few carefully selected lines, an image scroll, and finally, the full PDF. We will not translate every line, for that would dilute the power of seeing, hearing, and feeling them in their original form. But we will linger on a few pages to taste the spiritual flavour of this inheritance.
One of the first lines to appear in the Ratib is the luminous opening:
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمـٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ Bismillāhir-Raḥmānir-Raḥīm In die Naam van Allah, die Meest Genadige, die Meest Barmhartige
Even this sacred formula, transliterated and translated into Afrikaans using Arabic script, glows with the care and creativity of the Cape’s early Muslim scribes. It reveals how rahmah—Divine Mercy—was not only recited, but lovingly inscribed in the mother tongue of those who carried it. A tongue made tender through hardship, and made holy through remembrance.
These pages are not just recitations — they are archives of survival.
The Cape’s Muslim community, born out of bondage and exile, did not merely memorize. They engraved, translated, sounded out — in their own accents, on their own terms. They bent Arabic script to capture the cadence of their Afrikaans. They bent Afrikaans to serve the memory of Allah.
In this Ratib, we witness the divine echo across generations.
To read it is to hear our grandparents whispering in candlelight, gathering children close, turning pages that looked like home.
This is not nostalgia. It is testimony.
May we become worthy inheritors of their voices.
Living Chains: A Note of Gratitude and Transmission
We are humbled to acknowledge those who have preserved and transmitted this treasure across generations.
Our deep thanks to Zaid Nordien, who reminded us that this version of the Ratib al-Haddad — written in Arabic-Afrikaans script — was transliterated and rendered by Shaykh Taha Gamieldien, the grandfather of ShaykhFaiek Gamieldien. It was widely copied and circulated in Cape Town, including in black-and-white prints. Zaid shared that his own journey began at the age of three, attending Gadat with his uncle, the late Boeta Faldie Behardien, and that his grandfather, Galiefa Ebrahim Nordien (Brayma Bokbaard), had received ijāzah for the Ratib from Shaykh Ismail Ganief. His father also received ijāzah from Shaykh Omar Abdullah of the Comoros — known throughout Africa as Mwyini Baraka — as well as from the late Shaykh Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki.
And here the circle returns home:
Zaid Nordien relayed that Shaykh Omar Abdullah gave express permission to grant ijāzah to all who recite the Ratib, all who love it, and all who seek it. He conveyed this instruction to me personally in Glen Austin, Midrand, during my recovery from a stroke. Now, alḥamdulillāh, it is finally recorded.
Even more striking: the ancestor of this very Shaykh — the deposed Sultan Abdallah II ibn Alawi of Anjouan, from the noble Ba ʿAlawī lineage — was exiled to Cape Town around 1834. Local oral tradition holds that he met Carel Pelgrim (Hassanuddin), the Cape’s first known Muslim pilgrim to Makkah, and may have encouraged him on his sacred journey. The silsila, both spiritual and historical, reveals itself in astonishing ways — alive, pulsing, and unfolding across time.
The Salawāt of Mwyini Baraka
We close with a salutation upon the Prophet ﷺ, taught by Shaykh Omar Abdullah — a direct descendant of the Messenger ﷺ through Sayyid Abu Bakr bin Salim.
Allāhuma ṣalli ʿalā Sayyidinā Muḥammadin ṣalātan tamlaʾu qulūbanā yaqīnan wa bihā Allāhu min kulli sūʾin wa makrūhin salīmā.
Translation:
“O Allah, send salutations upon our master Muḥammad — salutations that fill our hearts with certainty, and by them, may Allah protect us from all harm and from all that is detested.”
📜 Other Paths of Remembrance
This scroll is only one leaf in a growing tree of spiritual memory.
If this piece stirred something in you, you may also wish to explore:
These are threads in a larger weave — remembering the divine through the tongues of our mothers, the melodies of our fathers, and the whispered prayers of the unseen saints who still walk among us.
(Passed down through the mothers. Told now in your hands.)
My mother told me this story. She said her own mother heard it from her mother. So now, I pass it to you — like a seed in the wind — so that you, too, might send it down the line.
If you look toward our mountain — Table Mountain — you’ll see the cloth of cloud spread across its top like a table set for guests. To the right: the lion, his back forming Signal Hill, his mane rising into Lion’s Head. To the left: Devil’s Peak, brooding. The lion and the devil seated at the same table. What a sight for any ship entering Table Bay!
But this story is older than the ships. Older than the settlers who named those peaks. Older even than the first Khoi and San who walked these lands.
Long, long ago — perhaps 22,000 years or more — the people lived far inland. The land was green. Rivers ran deep. Wild animals moved in herds like shadows. The earth was generous.
But then the rains lessened. The land grew hotter, harder. Some clans became violent. The world was shifting.
And so it was that a man named Gubi — a fire-maker, a spark of a man — took his young son, Nori, and journeyed south along the Atlantic edge. Not fleeing. Seeking.
Their goods were wrapped in leather. Their bows slung across their backs. They followed the cold sea winds, walking toward a dream of sanctuary.
One night, as their fire danced in the dunes, hyenas came snarling through the dark — hunting porcupines. Gubi rose with fire in hand, casting its light wide, pushing the predators back into the night.
From the shadows came a porcupine. But this was no ordinary porcupine. She was old — a sage — her quills silver with wisdom. She stepped forward and spoke in a voice like rustling leaves:
“You have shown courage and care. For this, I give you a pouch.”
Inside: a handful of shimmering seeds — soft, silver-tipped, unlike anything they had seen.
She said: “As you walk, look for the place where the sea makes clouds. When you find it, plant these. If they grow, you’ll know: this is your place.”
And so they walked on.
And when they reached the foot of the mountain — flat, cloud-veiled, vast — Gubi and Nori felt the truth of it in their bones.
They planted the seeds.
And by dawn, the Silver Trees had begun to rise — shimmering, breathing, alive.
Not just plants. A blessing.
And that is how the Silver Tree — found only here — came to live beneath Table Mountain. Not brought by botanists. Not named by settlers. But gifted by a porcupine, Planted by Gubi and Nori, Rooted in fire, story, and seed.
And when the rains came, those Silver Trees drank from the river that flowed down the mountain — the one they called Camissa — the place of sweet waters, rushing underground, murmuring toward the sea.
Even now, that river runs — quietly — beneath the city that forgot it. But the mountain remembers.
It remembers its own name.
Not Table. But Hoerikwaggo — the Mountain of the Sea. To its right, the curled-back hill they once called The Sleeping Lion — its back arched into what settlers would name Signal Hill, its mane rising into Lion’s Head. To the left, the shadowed one — once called Windmaker’s Watch, now called Devil’s Peak.
The land is older than its names. And stories, like rivers, find their way back.
Epilogue
Some stories are planted, not written. They take root in silence. They grow in the shade of memory.
This is one of those.
Passed from mother to daughter, from father to son, from fire-circle to ear, from silence to word.
The Silver Tree still stands. The mountain still watches. And somewhere, Gubi and Nori are still walking — between cloud and coast, between the land’s longing and the sky’s answer.
So tell this story again.
When the mountain is misted, when the wind shifts, when the child beside you asks, “Where did we come from?” Tell them…
“Let me tell you the story of Gubi and Nori — the spark and the seeker — and the tree that shimmered with yes.”
Postscript
This story is told in honour of those who remind us that memory is a form of resistance.
We acknowledge Patric Tariq Mellet, whose book The Camissa Embrace reclaims the deep currents beneath colonial erasure. Through his work, Camissa is no longer hidden — it is remembered as a place of sweet waters, of creolised identity, of sacred convergence.
We also draw from Stuart Hall, particularly The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, which reminds us that nations are not simply born — they are narrated into being. To say I am from Camissa is to resist imposed categories and to speak from the riverbed of relation — to narrate the nation otherwise.
This reflection flows alongside the companion essay:
I wrote this story in honour of a voice passed through many generations — from my mother, to her mother, and beyond. It weaves ancestral memory with imagination, drawing from the wisdom of our lands, our rivers, and our people.
Gubi and Nori may be characters in legend, but they carry something real: the spirit of all those who walked before names, who travelled with seeds, and who listened deeply to the mountain’s silence.
I offer this story as a small act of remembering — a quiet prayer that memory may once again run like water beneath the city.
– Adli Yacubi Writer. Listener. Wordsmith of the Sweet Waters.
The Ratib al-Haddad: A Symphony of Spiritual Resilience
Introduction
In the centuries-old Cape Muslim tradition, the Rātib al-Ḥaddād stands as a spiritual symphony. Its composer, Imam ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād, drew upon a Qur’anic verse known as the Verse that Faces Outward at the Rawdah of the Prophet ﷺ, giving it a protective resonance. This rhythmic litany unfolds like movements of a musical masterpiece, each moment drawing the heart closer to Divine presence. Inspired by Imam al-Haddad’s mission to guide believers through fear and trial, the Ratib remains a living masterpiece of faith.
Movement I: The Prelude of Protection
O you who fear, gather at the gate of forgiveness; Bismillah like a banner above your heart, Ayatul Kursi as your armour, verses of Baqarah as your shield. In this dawn of remembrance, let salawat fall on your lips like rain upon a thirsty earth, and trust flow through your veins until your soul is clothed in light. This is the first movement: a prayer of protection woven from the very breath of Revelation.
Movement II: The Rhythms of Remembrance
Subḥānallāh, transcendence like the sky’s endless horizon; Alḥamdulillāh, gratitude flowing through every breath; Allahu Akbar, awe striking the heart; Lā ilāha illallāh, unity beyond all boundaries. These dhikr, recitations, rise and fall like ocean waves, polishing the mirror of the heart until it shines with trust and surrender.
Movement III: The Pulse of Tawhid
Al Maʿbūd, meaning The Worshipped One, calls the believer to recite Lā ilāha illallāh fifty times, each repetition chiseling away fear and confirming pure oneness. It circles the heart like a crown of certainty. The three Quls stand as guardians, their verses sealing every crack against doubt. This movement is a fortress of tawhid, where the soul forgets every other reliance and trusts only Allah.
Movement IV: The Prayerful Crescendo
Duas rise like incense, interlaced with Al-Fātiḥa, each plea a petition for healing, protection, mercy, and light. The tongue becomes a river of hope, carrying the soul to a calm shore. Here the believer surrenders every burden, resting in the assurance that Allah is the One who hears and responds.
Closing Invocations
Al-Fātiḥa on the soul of our master, our beloved, our intercessor, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad ibn Abdillah, his family, his Companions, his wives, and all his noble household.
Al-Fātiḥa on the soul of our master al-Muhajir Ahmad ibn Isa and his descendants.
Al-Fātiḥa on the soul of our great teacher, the jurist al-Muqaddam Muhammad ibn Ali Ba Alawi and his lineage.
Al-Fātiḥa on the souls of our noble Sufi masters wherever they may be, east or west, that Allah may raise their ranks.
Al-Fātiḥa on the soul of the compiler of the Ratib, the Axis of Guidance, Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad and his family line.
Al-Fātiḥa on the souls of all the pious servants of Allah, our parents, our teachers, those who have rights upon us, and the believers who have passed away in this land.
Cape Ritual Practice
In South Africa, especially in the Cape, families often recite the Ratib al-Haddad after a loved one passes away, beginning from the first night and continuing for seven nights, then gathering on the fortieth day, the hundredth day, and each year on the anniversary of the passing. The Ratib is also recited at birthdays, during Mawlud celebrations, generally every Thursday night, sometimes Sunday mornings, a week before weddings, at engagements (known as lambary), and at naming ceremonies (doekmal or doopmal). This tradition anchors the community in remembrance and prayers for all occasions of joy, transition, and remembrance.
About Dhikr
The term dhikr refers to remembering, remembrance, or reciting and chanting the names of Allah, specific prayers, or Qur’anic verses. It is a rhythmic practice that roots the soul in the Divine, and is central to the Ratib al-Haddad tradition.
Individual or Group Practice
The Ratib al-Haddad can be recited alone or in a group, with equal blessing. Allah says in the Qur’an: “And men and women who remember Allah often — for (all of) them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward” (Quran 33:35). The Prophet ﷺ said: “People will not sit in an assembly in which they remember Allah without the angels surrounding them, mercy covering them, and Allah mentioning them among those who are with Him.”
Foundations
The Ratib al-Haddad stands upon the firmest pillars of faith, a radiant string of pearls drawn from the Qur’an and Sunnah. It opens with the best Surah — Sūrat al-Fātiḥah, flows into the greatest verse — Āyat al-Kursī, affirms the Shahādah — the finest declaration of oneness, and continues with the enduring praises of al-Bāqiyāt al-Ṣāliḥāt. It includes the daily istighfār of the Prophet ﷺ, abundant ṣalawāt upon the Beloved ﷺ, and concludes with the dhikr by which Imām al-Bukhārī sealed his Ṣaḥīḥ.
Composed in sacred sequence by Imām ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād — a noble grandson of the Messenger ﷺ — this Ratib is not merely a litany, but a luminous map of remembrance. It is a symphony of Qur’anic light and Prophetic rhythm, preserved across centuries as a living trust.
And its resonance reached far beyond Ḥaḍramawt: both the Wird al-Laṭīf and the Ratib al-Ḥaddād were introduced and supported within the Harams of Makkah and Madinah under the patronage of Sultan Muḥammad IV of the Ottoman Empire (r. 1648–1687). This formal recognition affirms the Ratib’s deep-rooted legitimacy — not as invention, but as a distillation of the best of revelation, transmitted and treasured by the global Ummah.
Ijāzah: A Living Trust of the Ratib
For those who wish to benefit from the Ratib al-Haddad, we carry with us a sacred ijāzah — a scholarly and spiritual transmission — conveyed through four chains (asanīd) that reach back to the Composer of the Ratib, Imām ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAlawī al-Ḥaddād**, may Allah sanctify his soul.
Shaykh Jamiel Abrahams writes:
“Ijāzah for those who wish to benefit from the four asānid to the Composer of the Ratib… Say: Qabilnā al-Ijāzah — ‘We have accepted the scholarly permission to recite the Ratib of Imām al-Ḥaddād.’”
“We say Composer, not Author — for the adhkār are drawn from the finest pearls of the Qur’an and the most radiant lights of the Prophetic Sunnah.”
This ijāzah is not just scholarly — it is a living trust passed down through centuries of remembrance. To receive it is to stand in the river of continuity, with the awliyāʾ and scholars who preserved this path of dhikr through love, hardship, and sincerity.
And as for those who label such remembrance a bidʿah…
رَغِمَ أَنْفُ مَن صَرَّحَ بِأَنَّهَا بِدْعَةٌ “May the nose be rubbed in dust of the one who declares it an innovation.”
Let the river flow. Let the remembrance remain. And let every breath that utters His Name be a proof of mercy, not division.
My Personal Ijazah
This symphony carries my own transmission: an ijāzah granted by Zaid ibn Umar to me, Adli ibn Ibrahim, written in his own hand, linking me to the chain of Imam al-Haddad. That blessing lives within every note of this symphonic meditation, reminding me of the trust, humility, and sacred responsibility that this heritage confers. This ijazah is more than a note: it is a living chain, a breath carried from master to student across centuries, reaching back to Imam al-Haddad and forward into my heart. It binds me to the rhythm of this Ratib as if to a heartbeat, reminding me to hold it with care, reverence, and gratitude, so its protection and blessing might continue to resonate for future generations.
Historical Echoes
The Ratib was recited by enslaved Muslims at the Cape as a shield of hope and protection during times of oppression, helping them hold fast to faith. Generations later, it became a spiritual companion for many who resisted apartheid, its verses reminding them of divine justice, courage, and unity against all forms of tyranny. It is said that in the darkest nights of slavery at the Cape, the Ratib became a quiet liberation, whispered in hidden corners. Its rhythms reminded believers they were still seen by Allah, still dignified. During the anti-apartheid struggle, activists turned to these same verses, finding courage and calm as they faced injustice, with the Ratib a spiritual sword against oppression and despair.
Conclusion
From Yemen to the Cape, from ancient gatherings to modern hearts, the Ratib al-Haddad remains a living breath of resilience and unity. Its movements still guide communities to remember Allah, to stand together in hope, and to place trust in Divine mercy across the centuries. Like a living river, its currents still flow, nourishing communities with remembrance and calling them to a higher trust in Allah’s mercy. Imam al-Haddad, inspired by the symbolism of the Verse that Faces Outward, wove its spiritual meanings into the Ratib, transforming it into a shield that echoed both the Prophetic sanctuary and the everyday lives of worshippers from Yemen to the Cape.
May its verses guard every heart, and may its blessings gather our children and their children into the same ocean of divine love, until the final day.
Adli Yacubi 