Adapting Imam Haron’s legacy for modern times
We can draw from his life in order to help establish a caring, humane and inclusive society
AS WE enter the 50th year since the tragic passing of Imam Abdullah Haron, the question arises whether we dare read his legacy differently and put such a reading to productive work in our current times.
The seed was planted during the 11th annual Imam Haron Memorial Lecture which was delivered this year by his son, Professor Muhammed Haron, at the Zohra Noor Auditorium, Islamia College, on September 26.
Muhammed pointed to this by offering a nuanced and contemporaneous reading of his father’s life.
He combined personal insights with a portrayal of key formative events in the imam’s life.
Muhammed called for a broader and more incisive range of scholarly work that would bring his father’s life into a fuller, multidimensional view, which, I believe, would offer a robust “reading” of the meaning of such a life for complex contemporary times.
Imam Abdullah Haron was born in Claremont on February 8, 1924. He was killed in prison by the apartheid regime on September 27, 1969. He was the imam of the Al-Jaamiah Mosque in Stegman Road, Claremont, from 1955 until his death.
The political and broader discursive parameters have changed, and the imam’s legacy should be mined to allow us to work productively with a fuller more complex set of human dynamics that attend to our lives in Cape Town and the world. The impending 50th anniversary commemoration is an apt opportunity to begin this task.
Muhammed correctly and courageously portrayed his father as a “man (sic) for all seasons”, a person with a multidimensional personality, a photogenic family man, a great dresser, a brother and father who was actively engaged in the lives of his siblings, who loved his dear wife, Galima (née Sadan), and played a formative role shaping the sensibilities of his three children, Fatiema, Muhammed and Shamila, the latter who settled in the UK where she raised her own family.
The imam was an avid music lover. He had a piano in his house in Crawford and encouraged his children to appreciate music. He was involved in active inter-faith work and encouraged the reading of literature, religious and Islamic books, and the English translation of the Qur’an.
There are many photos of the imam surrounded by his younger congregants. Muhammed said his father loved children and young people. A powerful memory for Muhammed was his father’s constant recitation of the Qur’an – in other words, of a person who was a hafith-al-Qur’an (one who memorised the entire Qur’an). He had come to personify its ethical message.
The imam’s life was thus accompanied by the Qur’an, and he was motivated in life by its exhortation to fairness and justice. And so, as Muhammed said, he was always wont to give testimony to the injustices, big and small, which he encountered.
It was the injustices associated with racism and apartheid that became the imam’s imprimatur, the spiritual fuel that imbued his life with the clarity of moral purpose.
The imam for all seasons was, above all, a witness bearer for justice, in the way exhorted by the Qur’an which his life was immersed in. Bearing witness was what gave meaning to his life, and in displaying his commitments, in an often questioning and conservative community, his example shone like a very bright light.
He was a person ahead of his time, never fully supported by the broader Muslim community or its organisations. The community was mired in living its own accommodations with the brutal apartheid state, turning a blind eye to its repressive machinery as it tried to maximise some advantage in dire circumstances. Arguably, some prominent people in the Muslim community were compliant supplicants of the apartheid state, collaborators seeking advantage.
Imam Haron’s legacy was picked up and celebrated prominently only later, by young educated Muslim students and others, from the late 1970s. They appropriated his legacy as one of their key mobilising platforms for their activism, in the process correctly emphasising his anti-apartheid legacy and martyrdom.
The other dimensions of his life including art, reading, family, sport, interfaith advocate, retail worker and snappy dresser, in other words, the more mundane aspects, might have been underplayed. Offering a reading of his legacy by emphasising these aspects would be a first step, which together with his political commitments, would offer deeper understanding of Imam Haron’s legacy.
Based on asserting his multidimensional legacy, we ought to have an important conversation about how such a legacy could be put to work in current times. Imam Haron has much to offer us in democratic times, of hopes dashed, a faltering and corrupt state and multiple human rights tragedies occurring daily.
His legacy would have much to say about how we, as citizens of this country and the world, ought to go about establishing a caring, humane and inclusive society.
But, the route towards such a dispensation depends on us. Imam’s life provides many important clues but we have to step up to do the intellectual work and activism to make his legacy come alive in novel, inclusive, openminded and exciting ways in our city and country and the world.