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CHAPTER 15 lsJam 111 Soutl1crJ1 Africa, 1652-1998 Robert C.-H. Sheer 1tlc..\s follow tr..\tlc routes, but not necessarily voluntarily. This was the case when the first Muslim, Ibrahim van Batavia, a slave, splashed ashore in Table Bay in the second halfof the seventeenth century, shipped to southern Africa by an unlikely agent of Islam-the Dutch East India Company. I Islam arrived in southern Mrica as a coincidence ofgeography, colonization, slavery, and the geopolitics of mercantile commerce. A new society emerged, "where the South Atlantic joins the Indian Ocean, and Calvinist Christianity with Roman law bobbed, uneasily , at the confluence of a sad human sea that flowed as much from the Muslim East Indies as from the tip ofMrica."2 The number ofSouth Africas Muslims grew until, by the last census of1996, there were nearly 504,000 ofthem (in a population of some forty-one million). South African Muslims can boast one ofthe highest rates of hajj outside of the Middle East; however, while the study of Islam in North, West, and East Mrica has been well documented, the topic of Islam in southern Mrica is still in its infancy. After more than three centuries at this southern tip, South African Muslims afford fertile ground for further study: they comprise a well-documented, highly urbanized set of minority communities in a plural, modernizing society. Thc first Pl1"sc oflmmigr"tiot1 The Cape of Good Hope, which served the Dutch East India Company (hereafter the DEIC) primarily as a refreshment station for its fleets plying the Far East trade, simultaneously functioned as an effective place of exile for political leaders whom the company had dethroned in its eastern possessions. Most of these political exiles were Muslims, sometimes accompanied by a following of coreligionists. Ro6ert C.-H. Sheer Some two hundred spent time at the Cape between 1652 and the end of company rule in 1795. The arrival in 1682 of Makasserese political prisoners of state rank, including army officers and "three Makasserese princesses," marked the DEle decision to neutralize all Muslims at the Cape by isolating them on outstations. Sometimes, families were split apart.3 Among these early political exiles to the Cape was Shaykh Yusuf, a man widely regarded as an Islamic saint and a person who embodies the Cape exile experience.4 Yusuf, born at Maccassar (on Sulawesi, in modern Indonesia) in 1626, was a relative of the king of Goa, the ruling dynasty of Sulawesi. Converted to Islam, he went on hajj at eighteen. He studied for several years at Mecca, but who his teachers were is not known. Yusuf then established himselfat the court ofSultan Ageng of Bantam, in western Java, where in 1646 he married one of the sultan's relatives and became the leading religious authority. Regarded as a man of great piety and cultute, he spent many years teaching the sultan and his court about Islam. Some have argued he was a Shafii sufi.5 On 1 May 1680, Sultan Ageng, by then the last independent sultan in the archipelago , was forced off the throne by his son, Sultan Haji, one ofYusuf's pupils.6 This palace revolution was probably engineered by the DEle, who now held a controlling hand over the new, young, sultan. In 1682, the old sultan tried to engineer a countercoup, forcing his son to appeal to the Dutch at Batavia for help, who gladly seized this chance of crushing the Bantamese power. Shaykh Yusuf, however, continued the struggle in a protracted guerrilla operation, until, more than a year later, he was persuaded to give himself up on the promise of a pardon.? This promise was never honored by the DEle, and following Yusuf's imprisonment in Batavia and exile in Sri Lanka, the company resolved to send him to the Cape. In 1694, Yusuf, now sixty-eight years of age, arrived in the DEle flute De Voetboogwith his two wives, family, twelve disciples, friends, slaves, and followers. In all, there were forty-nine Muslims.8 The DEle had not forgotten Yusuf's revolutionary background, and the authorities at the Cape were given orders that Yusuf "was to be located at a distance from the roadstead in Table Bay so that he would not be able to get in touch with any adherents of the old regime." With this in mind, the DEle carefully interned Yusuf and his followers twenty miles from the roadstead, on the farm of a Dutch Reformed minister, the Reverend Petrus Kalden, at...

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