KEYNOTE ADDRESS By Dr.EG Pahad, Minister, The Presidency.
Delivered at the International Symposium on Islamic Civilization in Southern Africa-Johannesburg, 1-3 September 2006.
His Excellency Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, (Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Conference)
Dr Halit Eren (Director General of IRCICA);
Dr Ihron Rensburg (Rector of the University of Johannesburg);
Trustees and management of the National Awqaf Foundation of South Africa;
Religious leaders;
Members of the diplomatic corps;
Honourable guests;
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I bring greetings from our President Thabo Mbeki who unfortunately took ill yesterday and is unable to be present with all of us today. He has asked me to convey to all of you his best wishes for a very successful symposium on a topic that has immense relevance for all of us in the contemporary era.
The Renaissance of Africa has to begin with our recognition, understanding and appreciation of African pre colonial history, andas we think about Islam in Africa, we will of course look to the golden era of Islamic civilization- We will reflect on the many positive contributions made by Islamic scholars to world science, literature, arts, philosophy and mathematics. We will rightly reflect on the destructive impact of European colonialism on our continent and we will root the current conflict in the Middle East In the period of colonialism.
We will talk of an African Muslim identity, but our task at this symposium is also to locate Islam and Africa in the current global conjuncture and come to an understanding of an identity that draws on the positive and the progressive dimensions of Islam. We must reclaim our past and simultaneously assert an identity that speaks to social justice, peace, security, humanity, respect and tolerance.
As many of you are aware our President Mbeki visited Timbuktu in November 2001 at the invitation of then President Konaré, and while there he was simply taken with the huge legacy of knowledge that he encountered in Timbuktu, He was also dismayed at the thought that the Timbuktu Manuscripts were being destroyed because of poverty, and the lack of adequate facilities for document preservation and restoration.
As part of his commitment to the African Renaissance, President Mbeki immediately pledged the support of the people of South Africa to the people of Mali to assist with the building of a knowledge centre to house the documents. And thus was born the SA-Mali project on Timbuktu. The project however goes beyondthe preservation of a body of valuable manuscripts in Timbuktu. For our respective governments, it is a project of great significance. It is about Africa and about humanity, it is about the past and the future, it is about religion and about culture more broadly defined.
And I must take a moment to thank all the people of South Africa for the phenomenal support they have given to the project -support which I believe reflects a deep commitment to reclamation and redefinition of us as African people with a history and with a future.
Timbuktu represents a number of very important dimensions of Africa's greatness and its contribution to the history of humanity. It is world renowned for being a centre of trade and a centre of research and scholarship in the fields of science, mathematics and religion. Timbuktu produced and attracted artists, academics, politicians, religious scholars and poets. Timbuktu was the original knowledge economy.
The over 700,000 manuscripts cover diverse subjects such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, optics, astronomy, medicine, Islamic sciences, history, geography, the traditions of The Prophet (peace be upon him), government legislation and treaties, jurisprudence and much more.
These manuscripts of Timbuktu need to be preserved and presented to the world, not simply as a shared heritage, but as proof of the civilization that emerged from the meeting of Islam andAfrica. It is for this reason that the South African government is active in this project because it affirms that our history predates the European Enlightenment and speaks of Islamic - African civilization long before colonialism.
Muchas scholars are now studying the Timbuktu manuscripts we must begin the study of pre-colonial Southern Africa. Research about Islam in Southern Africa is very limited. That is why this Initiative is so important. It serves to encourage an understanding of Islam in the SADC region. We need to do research on the migration patterns of Muslims along the East coast of Africa and into the interior of Southern Africa. We need to understand the way in which indigenous cultures received, accepted and adapted to these new migrants and we need to understand how Islam adapted to its new surroundings.
Evidence is emerging that the influence of this Islamic civilization did not leave our own country untouched. In the Limpopo Valley, our own antecedent, the civilization of Mapungubwe interacted with cultures in East Africa, Persia, India and China. Mapungubwe also traded through the East African ports, with Islamic societies in Arabia, with Egypt as well as with India and China. This represents a significant part of the history of Southern Africa. Most of you probably know about Mapungubwe, because it has been declared a World Heritage site. UNESCO, in its citation, says that the establishment of Mapungubwe as a powerful state represented a significant stage in the history of the African sub-continent.
The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape contains evidence of an important interchange of human values that led to far-reaching cultural and social changes in Southern Africa between AD 900 and 1300. The remains in the Mapungubwe cultural landscape are a remarkably complete testimony to the Mapungubwe state which at its height, was the largest kingdom in the African sub-continent.
Islam, it is clear, has had long connections with Southern Africa. There was no Muslim conquest of East Africa or of Southern Africa, there was no colonization- Islam was probably introduced by traders plying their trade along the East coast of the continent. These traders did not just come to trade; they became part of the local community. They inhabited local communities married into them and became African.
This was the beginning of the process of cultural, linguistic and religious fusion. Islam touched the heart of Africa, but did not dominate Africa, because the basis of the expansion of this civilization was integration with those it encountered.
One of the chief by-products of this integration process was Swahili culture which represents the fusion of the Arabic and East African cultures. Islam and Muslims did not replace the indigenous culture, but blended with existing practices in a gradual transition. In East Africa, the process of conversion was tied to peaceful expansion of traders, settlers, and teachers. By the 20th century, Islam became synonymous with anti-colonialism, uniting threatened indigenous populations to combat colonial imposition.
It is symposia such as this one that need to grapple with history, assert the anti-colonial project and popularise it with a view to reclaiming our history which must become a part of the region's consciousness.
But in claming place and space, in clearly articulating the role of Islam in Africa in general and in Southern Africa in particular, we must encourage active scholarship and critical enquiry.
In talking about Timbuktu, about Mapungubwe, and about African Muslim scholars of the past and the present, we are engaging in post-colonial conversations about identity and the assertion of identity borne of struggle. We are in fact contesting interpretations and colonial conversations in a manner that has immense significance for the future.
Our President once said “For our continent to take its rightful place in the history of humanity we need to shatter the misconceptions about the history of our continent engendered by the ideologues of European colonialism. Essential to the colonial project was control and with control came erasure, denial and the falsification of African pre-colonial history. ... We need to undertake, with a degree of urgency, a process of reclamation and assertion. We must contest the colonial denial of our history and we must initiate our own conversations and dialogues about our past. We need our own historians and our own scholars to interpret the history of our continent."
Islam's integration into Africa is neither depended on its numerical strength nor on the imposition of its legal system. Rather, Islam illustrated that integration by an enlightened civilization means that civilization possesses the necessary self-confidence to trade, intermarry, accept the best of the indigenous cultures it encounters, and, in turn, to give the finest of it's own value system, and ultimately, to share both the prosperity and the pain of those with which it chooses to integrate.
This symposium focuses on Islam and Southern Africa, and does so in the context of the existence of separate and inter-connected manifestation of great civilizations, and it is convened at a moment when Muslims face, amongst others, great challenges of conflict, Islamophobia and internal strife and contestation of ideas. And where Africa struggles to overcome marginalisation, poverty, underdevelopment and Afro-pessimism, this symposium has a responsibility to look back to great contributions to the very world that now seeks to exclude us.
Yes, Islam had a glorious past, but we must do more than look back to a glorious past. This symposium must seek to give impetus to our collective efforts to withstand the pressures of the present and lay the foundation for a better future. Certainly, the fact that Muslim and other intellectuals from the University of Johannesburg, IRCICA (an organ of the OIC) and Awqaf SA all gather here at this symposium creates the possibility to ask the hard questions about Islam.
It is symposia such as these that will lead us to reclaim our history and look to the future where we assert a positive Muslim identity. An identity that draws on the progressive, anti-colonial, tradition in Islam; an identity that loudly proclaims gender equality, that advocates giving, and sensitivity, and that preaches respect and tolerance in a multi-cultural, multi-faith pluralistic world: an identity that draws on the well spring of progressive humanism in Islam.
We must remain firmly wedded to the view that in a world characterized by many religions co-existing side by side, Islam must live in peaceful co-existence with these religions. This is one of the great strengths of Islam. This peaceful co-existence stands in marked contradistinction to colonialism whose impulse was to dominate and impose one religion on the colonized. The post-colonial stance therefore has to include respect for other religions;
it must be founded on a confident Islam willing to be a part of a multi-faith world.
The post-colonial stance also requires that Islam grapple with the critical challenges that face the vast majority of the world's population - poverty, underdevelopment, diseases, unemployment and conflict. Islam must confront these challenges not only in word but in deed.
We must contest and reject the simplistic view that the contemporary era is characterized by a clash of civilizations. Rather we must recognize that colonialism bears full responsibility for the present conflict in the Middle East.
We must deal decisively with those who threaten the safety and security of Innocent civilians. We must denounce individual and state acts of terror that do nothing to advance peace and security and do nothing to advance the peaceful resolution of conflicts and hamper post conflict reconstruction efforts.
Given the fact that the history and the future of Islam and Africa are so intertwined, I will conclude by suggesting that the role of the post-colonial African Islamic intellectual is to both interpret and change the world in which they live, and such an interpretation must start with reclaiming the progressive strands of the great religion itself.
Thank You.