ان دي كُوْنِڠْ سْكَپْ اس بِيْدِيْ هُوْكَ الله تعالا ان ڨَارْلِكْ اللـه تعالا اِسْ بَاس فِـَرْ اَلْدِيْ اِتْسْ
“En die konungskap is by die hoege Allah ta`ālā en waarlik Allah ta`ālā is baas vir al die iets.”
(A sample of Arabic Afrikaans, quoting from the Qur’ān – Sūrat al-Mulk 67:1)
Afrikaans is a language that is spoken primarily in South Africa and Namibia, which has its origins in the Dutch and German languages. It evolved from the dialect of Dutch that was spoken by many of those Europeans who settled in South Africa around 1650-1700.
For many, it seems almost the antithesis of a ‘Muslim’ language. It was brought by the Dutch, coming from the Netherlands – a nation which historically had no interaction with Muslims, and they settled in the southernmost area of the African continent, which unlike the North, West and East of Africa was for the most part not greatly exposed to Islam. Very few Muslims lived in the South, especially not once you would pass Malawi.
So what then does this European language have to do with Muslims, and how could its history provide us with an insight into just how far Muslims had spread and had an influence in those remote areas to which they went?
Let’s take a look.
Long ago, the Dutch ruled over Indonesia and much of the Malay archipelago. The Dutch, like many European nations were colonialists, they would claim foreign lands as their own to rule over and gain great financial benefit from. These colonial ventures by the Dutch helped to spread the Malay people around the globe. When workers were needed in Suriname, one of the Dutch possessions in South America, many Malays were sent there. Because of this, we find today that 15% of Surinamese are Malays, and 20% of the population are Muslims.
A mosque in Durban, South Africa
When workers were needed then in Africa, the Dutch sent forth many Malays who were basically slaves to work. After some time, South Africa became somewhat of a refuge for many peoples escaping political problems in their own nations. People like Mahatma Gandhi left India to seek work in the new South Africa, also many Malays and Indonesians too left their lands to seek sanctuary there.
The society in which these Muslims lived was not one which granted non-Europeans many rights, they were regularly harassed by the Afrikaners, however they were allowed to live amongst their own societies and to build Islamic schools and mosques. The first ‘madrassas’ were run by the Malays, who we now refer to as the ‘Cape Malays’ due to their location in the Western Cape of South Africa. These Cape Malays were Shafi’īs in fiqh, so the Shafi’ī madhhab was taught amongst the people. Whilst Malay would have been the main language of instruction, the language of the wider public was a localized dialect of Dutch. Whilst all official business was carried out in the same Dutch as would have then been spoken in the Netherlands, the language of the street was what the Malays spoke. This language was non-standardised, it did not have a common way to be written or spoken, so when its speakers would use it there were no clear rules dictating how it should be spoken or spelt.
As Dutch was the formal language of the colonialists, the casual register used by the lower classes was viewed with some level of disdain. It was a slang speech which those running the country were not interested in.
It was at this time when the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz decided to send over to Cape Town a Qādī (judge) and scholar named Abu Bakr Effendi. His role was to act as a teacher and Imam for the Muslims. Abu Bakr Effendi himself was a Hanafī who hailed originally from Makkah, and this fact did cause much confusion as his Hanafī teachings sometimes differed from the Shafi’ī school followed by the Malays. However it was through his teachings that the linguistic innovation which we wish to look at evolved.
Shaykh Abu Bakr wrote a book called Uiteensetting van die Godsdiens which translates as ‘Exposition of the Religion’ (بيان الدين).
This work was written in the language being spoken by the Cape Malays in their everyday lives. In the time in which it was written, the language we know of as ‘Afrikaans’ was still not known. The language was as mentioned, still seen as a lowly variant of the official Dutch language.
The fact that Shaykh Abu Bakr chose to write in this language was then rather innovative, not just for the fact that he wrote in a ‘new’ language yet to have a literary existence, but the Shaykh also managed to write the entire book with the Arabic script.
Just as the Turkish and Malay languages were also written at those times with the Arabic alphabet, Shaykh Abu Bakr developed a system of writing Afrikaans with Arabic letters.
As such, the first book to be written in the Afrikaans language was written not only by a Muslim, but also in the Arabic script.
One of the reasons why this is interesting to learn about is not only does it help to provide us with an insight into how early Afrikaans was spoken, however it also offers a chance to give us a different way of looking at the history of South Africa as a nation.
South Africa of course is a nation which has a dark history in terms of its racial relations. The apartheid system meant that the European Afrikaners maintained a system whereby they subjugated and oppressed the non-Europeans. After many years of campaigning for their rights, the local Africans and the other non-Europeans won their right (on paper at least) to be treated as equals.
Now in historical revision, those people who were once the oppressed are now discovering their own histories within Southern Africa. The Muslim peoples are seeing the literary legacies left by their forefathers who strived to establish a place for themselves to practice Islam, despite the many hardships they faced. From these discoveries there is the opportunity for linguists to discover more about the evolution of the Afrikaans language and a chance to marvel at the fruits of the Muslim scholars wherever they travelled to. The Muslims’ thirst for Islamic knowledge amongst their communities is so evident here and it has helped produce this gem in the field of linguistics. Afrikaans does not have to be viewed only as an oppressive colonialist language, rather we can be proud in saying that the literary founders of the language were Muslim Malays and a Kurdish scholar from Makkah. This helps us to re-evaluate and to better understand the history of Muslims in the world, it is a reminder of the legacy which Muslims leave behind them wherever they go, and a wake up call to eurocentric historians to realise that even in the most seeming European strongholds, one finds that even the ‘second class’ peoples have had so much to contribute to the societies of the past, we just have to dig it up and find it.
A look at Arabic Afrikaans
The script of the language uses Arabic letters and is most similar to the Malay-Arabic (Jawi) script.
Whilst the original texts did not extensively use vowel markings, a standard system has since evolved for writing the vowels.
The system is innovative in combining vowels together to produce the vowels not present in Arabic and hence not able to be presented normally in the Arabic script.
The letters E and O for example have no way to be written in Arabic, however Arabic Afrikaans uses 2 vowels together to represent each.
For E, the letters A and I are both written, meaning that both a kasrah ( ِ ) and a fatħa ( َ ) are merged to prodouce the E sound – اَِنْ is the way to write the Afrikaans word ‘en’ (which means ‘and’)
en
For O, the letters A and U are merged, meaning that the fatħa ( َ ) and damma ( ُ ) are merged together to produce the O sound – پْرَُوفَِيت is how to write ‘profeet’ (which means ‘prophet’)
profeet
To be continued – Inshā’ Allāh
MuslimSpeak 