In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

I greet you with the salutation of Islam - Assalamu alaykum warahmatullahi wa barakatuh. May Peace be upon you and the Mercy and Blessings of Allah!

Mr President, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and honourable guests, it is indeed an honour for me to be delivering the second annual Desmond Tutu Peace Lecture. I regard it as a personal honour, but more important than that, I regard it as an acknowledgement - a welcoming acknowledgement - that my community, the community of Islam, has come home. It has come home to take its rightful place alongside other communities in the struggle against dehumanization and for justice and peace. Mr President, I deliberately avoid saying the struggle against oppression or against economic exploitation or against apartheid. I do so not because these terms are cliche-ic or because I don't believe that our struggle is against oppression or racist capitalism, but because these words do not adequately convey a comprehensive sense of what our struggle is all about.

People do not only trap words. Words also trap people. And so we find ourselves limited by the continuous use of certain words in a very definite sense. Oppression then comes to mean whites denying blacks fundamental human rights, but has nothing to do with the unwed pregnant mother who carries the burden of shame while the father walks around untainted by society. Exploitation then comes to mean the inability of a mother to afford a dress that she has sewn in a factory because she is underpaid. And yet our understanding of exploitation will say nothing about her 'duty' to cook for her husband when she returns from the factory at night. Apartheid talks about the dilemma of parents in a mixed marriage not knowing who of their children to send to which school but says nothing about how I, as a Muslim, am paralysed by the fear of my Christian neighbours.

One of the many painful aspects of the South African reality is the forced politicization of our struggle. The challenge to people of faith, is a commitment to justice and peace based on the comprehensiveness of our humanity. Albert Camus in his book 'The Rebel" talks about the contamination of revolutions when human beings are reduced to statistics. We talk of 'the people' or 'the masses' and become indifferent to the wholeness of humanity. I am not suggesting that people of faith should set themselves up as the guardians of revolutionary language. I am merely pointing to a duty that we have in terms of our own commitment to the comprehensiveness of our humanity. Yes, when internationally people of goodwill are striving for the elimination of nuclear arms and all its frightening consequences, here in South Africa we are still struggling for 'people's control' over it. We cannot deny the right of our people to struggle for complete control over all aspects of our lives but we can lament the limitations which three hundred years of apartheid and economic exploitation have placed on what our humanness and the consequently narrow defined vision of the future.

The inevitable preponderance of the 'black-white' theme in the struggle for justice and peace in South Africa has impoverished all of us. I am impoverished when a white hobo lying on the pavements of Mayfair does not disturb me. I am impoverished by instinctively wanting to call any black person comrade. I am impoverished because apartheid goes beyond the simplistic 'blacks vs. white' game;  Apartheid is also the complete ignorance of and indifference to that white hobo by the white business women passing by in her Mercedes; apartheid is also the tyres burning as barricades in one part of Soweto while the wealthier part complains of the bullet shots disturbing the quiet of their Sunday afternoon nap.

We must stubbornly oppose the 'ghettoisation' of our perceptions and begin to reflect on and draw the attention of our people to the fundamental oneness of humankind and to universal concerns. We must do so without willy-nilly using universalistic jargon to detract us from our essential responsibility in South Africa today. The struggle of our people is for a non-racial democratic South Africa free from economic exploitation. We cannot have a separate agenda but we can universalize that agenda. We must for example, talk to our people about how the oneness of humankind is being destroyed by the conflict between the few consumer nations and the many nations being consumed. Those who are obsessed with the creation of wealth, the power of capital, nuclear armaments and star wars have long since discarded narrow parochialism. People who are committed to a peace based on justice and humility have a duty to proclaim the oneness of humankind and to focus on universal concerns.

The Qur’an says:

O Prophets! Consume of the good things and do right for I am aware of what you do.
And indeed these peoples of yours are one people
And I am your Lord, So keep your duty unto Me.

I would like to focus on three such universal concerns. I focus on these three, because ignoring them is going to cost us very dearly in the long run and because they are three concerns that I personally feel deeply committed to.

i) The oppression of women
ii) The relationship of humankind with its abode, the earth, and
iii) The challenge of inter-faith dialogue.

I want to talk about these issues in the context of our struggle for justice and peace in South Africa. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if anyone committed to living with integrity can discuss anything without the necessary all pervasive backdrop of the struggle for justice and peace in our land. All else seems to be escapism and digression. I acknowledge that none of these three issues may come across as of immediate importance to us. In fact to our male comrades in detention or to starving children in the homelands these concerns may even come across as a luxury.

WOMEN

The fact that the oppression of women does not make the headlines or that their suffering is condoned by our indigenous cultures and religious institutions does not make it any less real or less painful. Lamenting the constraints that racist capitalism has placed on our perception of justice and peace is one thing. Allowing these constraints to persist is quite another and will only lead to the further diminishing of our own humanness. All people genuinely committed to the establishment of a non-racial and democratic South Africa must face the issue of women's oppression squarely in the face. The shackles around our wrists will never be completely dismantled as long as women are tied to their apron strings. How many male political activists are there who still refuse to share domestic chores? How often does a politically aware couple get married and then the woman submerges her identity underneath that of the man's and Bernadette Menezes becomes Bernadette Dean because she married Derrick Dean? Our political, cultural and religious organizations establish women's wings to cater for 'them' as if they were semi-human. We never hear of a 'male's wing'! The symbol of our people's struggle and hopes, the African National Congress, has only one woman on a national executive council of thirty people.

The church speaks of the priesthood as being a 'calling'. 'God calls you into the ministry.' When it comes to women then we don't allow God to call those whom He wants to call. Then we play God and decide whom He ought to be calling. Muslims are forever speaking about the honour that Islam gave women as if it is some favour. Women, like all human beings, are born with dignity and honour. We speak about the rights of women confirmed by the Prophet of Islam (Peace and Blessings be upon Him) and refuse to speak about the rights that they are being denied today. There are theological assumptions common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam which are unjust towards women and must be challenged. We must challenge the apologetic myth that our theology does not discriminate against women even though sociologically, culturally and historically there is discrimination. Dr Riffat Hassan, an orthodox feminist theologian lists some of these theological assumptions:

The first assumption is that God's primary creation is man, not woman, since women is believed to have been created from man's rib. She is therefore derivative and secondary. The second assumption is that women and not man is the primary agent for what is described as man's fall or his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Hence all daughters of Eve are to be regarded with hatred, suspicion and contempt. The third assumption is that woman was not only created from man but also for man - which makes her existence merely instrumental and not of fundamental importance."

Confessional Theology must embrace justice to women. The church must confess its complicity in the crimes against women. Islamic theology must repent of subverting the revolutionary spirit of the Qur’an. Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam must forever turn their backs on unjust social norms that they so willingly adopted from their cultural milieu and sealed with theological stamps of approval.

Our comrades in organizations must be confronted with the injustices in our own alternative political structures. The question of the liberation of women as a condition for justice and peace is not merely academic because the discrimination that they suffer from is far from being merely academic. The freedom of women is not a pre-condition for the liberation of our people from oppression and neither is the political freedom of our people a pre-condition for the liberation of women. They are intrinsically linked.

AND WHAT OF THE EARTH?

The story of our country is like that of a small village. All the houses are interlinked and we live in one unit. Its original inhabitants were ousted and others have taken over. The original inhabitants are agitating for the return of the house but are presently only invited in for an occasional chat over a cup of tea. The Coloureds and Indians have been invited to occupy two small rooms at the back and plans are being made for a third little room for Blacks. It is obvious though that they want nothing less than the whole house - or at least control or power over it. This, however, does not mean that those who are occupying it illegally are going to be evicted. The miracle is that the displaced original inhabitants have enough humanness left to want the illegal occupants to stay. As the Freedom Charter says, "South Africa belongs to all those who live in it." However, while this struggle for the people to govern their own house continues, strange creatures are eating away at the foundation of the whole complex and are threatening all the houses. If those displaced original inhabitants are not going to give any attention to fighting those creatures because they are only concerned about their right to govern their house, then they could end up not having any house to govern. Nuclear armaments, uncontrolled industrialization, an economy that depends on expansionism and high productivity and depends on the limitless consumption of energy and creating obsessive waste from built-in obsolescence, the reduction in the earth's raw materials and its inevitable depletion, the increasing industrial waste and the pollution of our seas and the atmosphere - these are some of the creatures eating away at our universal village. These are not European issues or liberal concerns. Chernobyl is not only in the Soviet Union, Chernobyl is in Koeberg in the Cape. Lead poisoning is not limited to the U.S.A. It is on the streets of Johannesburg. We can't fight for people's power over these creatures. We fight to eliminate them. I know that there are few issues that can really be as safe and cushy as these issues, but I also know that there are few issues that have the potential to bind people as these issues do, though it may be for the very selfish reason that we all risk receiving eviction notices from these creatures.

Our struggle for justice then, must enhance justice in our home and all the other species that inhabit it. People's power must specifically exclude our right to rape and plunder the natural resources as if there is no tomorrow. Our struggle for humanization must also be a struggle against the world of artificial environment, of the sophisticated manipulation of machines and techniques where the human element is being gradually eliminated. Phillip Sherrard, in Science and the Dehumanization of Man, talks about the loss to our humanness that our obsession with materialism has led to.

There is, however, a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment. The social form which we have adopted cuts our consciousness to fit its needs, its imperatives tailor our experience. The inorganic technological world that we have invented lays hold on to our interior being and seeks to reduce it to a blind inorganic mechanical thing. It seeks to eliminate whole emotional areas of our life, demanding that we be a new type of being, a type that is not human as this has been understood in both the religious and humanist ages - one that has no heart, no affections, no spontaneity and is as impersonal as the metals and processes of calculation in which it is involved. And it is not only our emotional world that is deadened. The world of our creative imagination and intelligence is also impoverished.

We must place ecological issues on the agenda of the liberation movement. We can't let the African National Congress get away with "We haven't paid much attention to it.' Yes, that's the type of answer that the Nusas delegation got when they questioned members of the National Executive Council on ecological issues. We need what Syed Hoosein Nasr refers to as an I-Thou attitude towards the earth. This is why the phenomena of people's parks in the black townships is such a powerful sign of hope. (I must confess though that I feel terribly confused when I still see trees being pulled on to the streets as barricades.)

I now come to the third and last of my universal (local) concerns -

The Challenge of Inter-faith Dialogue.

How often, Mr President, has our own humanity not been mutilated by our own fear of each other? How often have I as a Muslim feared that you as a representative of Christianity, are not going to con me as you have conned our forefathers on the sandy wastelands of the Cape of Good Hope three hundred and thirty four years ago or in Palestine thirty eight years ago or in India a hundred and twenty years ago? How often have I as a Muslim been impoverished by conspiracy theories - theories historically well founded - that there is an alliance betweeen the church and the power of capital? How often have we as Muslims in our obsession with ourselves not believed that those conspiracies were directed at us as Muslims? How many a time have I been warned by my Muslim brothers and sisters that all this talk about dialogue is nothing but one being co-opted for the strengthening of their influence? How many times have Muslims, Hindus and Christians from Fietas and District Six been evicted together and yet continued to live in fear of each other - even as we now queue up together for buses from 5.30 am in Lenasia and in Mitchell's Plain? How many an ordinary congregant has walked up to Dr Allan Boesak to warn him against the devilish designs of Islam even as Muslim and Christian children were shot together on the streets of Cape Town? And so when we speak of a struggle for humanization or about a confessional theology then we must also repent of the distrust and suspicion that our people feel for each other's faiths. For many of us the apartheid of religions may not be of importance because it is a silent one. We rave about the designs of the Tutus and the Boesaks in the quiet of our homes and Christians echo their disquiet about the Hassan Solomons and the Esacks in the corridors of Unisa. However, we must never underestimate the potency of religion as a secondary source of conflict. Look at Indian and Pakistan, Muslims and Christians in Lebanon - communities who have lived with each other in harmony for centuries have turned on each other with unparalleled inhumanity.

Gerrie Lubbe talks about the need for us to prepare our people for the day when the era of apartheid comes to an end.

When this separation is ended, people will be faced with the reality of religious pluralism in South Africa and will be forced to acknowledge the existence and the presence of people of other faiths in daily life. To prepare our people for this day, to do away with suspicion and mistrust and to remove ignorance about the different faiths are certainly great challenges, the enormity of which we can only guess.

How often have we not conveniently laid the blame for the inexplicable perversities of another group at the door of their faith and regarded ourselves as the sole repositories of trust and virtue? Let me relate to you a story with the theme of untouchability in India to illustrate this point. The curse of the untouchability of the Harijans has always been a blot on the conscience of one of the largest nations of the world. Its Hinduism we say. It may well be - but how do you explain the following?

In the Punjab Province of Undivided India lots of lower caste Hindus, in order to escape social oppression and perhaps to win favour from the ruling colonialists, converted to Christianity. However, they remain sweepers - the personification of dirt on tthe sub-continent - since vertical social mobility is nearly non-existent. Undivided India became the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Muslims of Pakistan continue treating all those Punjabi Christians as untouchables - forcing them to walk miles for water in the more remote villages. When you ask them why they do this, they explain that these people are Christian whilst they are Muslim. (You can of course substitute Christian for 'inferior' and Muslim for 'superior'.) Now the Punjabi Christians, who are nearly all sweepers, are dark skinned and only speak Punjabi and a good bit of Urdu. There is, however, another Christian community, the Goan community. They are the coloured people of Indo-Pak, being of Portuguese-Indian descent. They are fair skinned, speak English fluently and a smattering of Urdu. These Christians are welcome guests at any Muslim function and are highly sought after secretaries, air stewards and business partners. When you ask the Muslims about this contradiction they stare at you with the horror that one receives at the suggestion that God Almighty may be a woman. And then one fine day, in the village of Padre jo Goth, good Christians from Germany decided to finance the digging and construction of a waterpump for the local Christians who had been deprived for decades by Muslims. And do you know what those Christians did? They loved their waterpump so much that they denied the use of it to all the local Hindus who were of course inferior to them!

The essential truth in all this is that all the actors in this very inhuman drama are people - just ordinary people. And so we too in South Africa cling to our little waterpump totally oblivious to the all-embracing Grace of the Almighty Bringer of rain. In our religious arrogance we hold on to our 'uniquely Islamic solutions', our little Kairos documents addressed to Christians only, our exhortations of Christian love.

To the Christians who are here today I say that we are tired. We are tired of your arrogance and indifference to us who are adherents of other faiths. We are tired of the way you came to South Africa and with your guns, took the land. We are tired of you, who today through your powerful church structures and access to money have acquired enormous influence in the struggle to regain the land. We are tired because your sacrifice in terms of sweat and blood does not commensurate with this influence. We are tired of the way you want to Christianize solutions to the problems of our country. We are tired of being ignored when the people of our country are being called upon to pray for the destruction and the unjust government of our land. You may hold on to your little water pump if you want to, but know that even as your physical thirst is quenched by it, the water of life shall pass you by. A new South Africa is being born today. That new South Africa is going to come about because you respect our integrity and indeed realize that for you to define your existence in a meaningful manner, you need me. To quote Gerrie Lubbe:

The reconciliation that we hope for will have to be born from a joint struggle in which people of religion will be forced to face each other, to acknowledge each other's right to this country and its future and to respect the inherent patriotism that each one has for this country and its people. Only in struggling together will we be able to discover in our neighbours of other religions virtues like peace, justice, love, forgiveness and hope.

It is not going to be an easy walk together in dialogue and hope. To find all that I hold dear and have regarded all my life as the exclusive prerogative of my religion, as also being held by people of other faiths is not without pain. This dialogue is going to require extraordinary courage because it must - if it is going to be meaningful - be rooted in the struggle of our people. It cannot be reduced to theological discourses or polemics although it may embrace it. In South Africa we have no alternative but to have a dialogue in confrontation. Trust among one another and trust between us as people of faith and our people are only going to materialize if we are seen to be where they suffer, where they struggle. If these struggles are on the streets, in halls, at gravesides, in prisons then that is where our experience in dialogue should be. Our inter-faith witness has to occur within the context of the broader struggle for justice and peace.

The Prophet of Islam engaged in dialogue with Christians and Jews. This dialogue was not only for purposes of understanding each other or societal harmony. It was also a dialogue in confrontation with the oppressors who were still in control of the city of Makkah.

The tremendous thing about people of faith is their hope. Hope, indeed, is central to all faiths and to proclaim this today is perhaps our first task. "Do not despair of the Mercy of Allah for indeed He is the Most Most Merciful". However, as Sol Jacobs in his critique on Kairos reminds us:

In the minds of black people in South Africa the concepts of hope and revolution are fused concepts which cannot be separated in the complex social and political structure in which they live [...]. Blacks have lost faith in a hope that is unrelated to extreme social pressure. If Prophetic Theology as a theology of hope seeks to speak meaningfully to the average black person in South Africa it must speak in some way to the actions that are going to help blacks realize immediate changes in the condition of their experience.

Mr President, I'd like to conclude with an excerpt from "Gitanjali" by a famous Hindu poet of Bengal. With all love and respect to that historical and profoundly relevant document of our people's hope and aspirations - The Freedom Charter - I truly feel that Rabindranath Tagore has said it better.

Where the mind is without fear,
And the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free
Where the world had not been broken down
by the fragments of narrow domestic walls
Where tireless hands stretch forth toward
perfection
Where the clear stream of reason had not lost
its fear in the dreary desert sand of dead
habit
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever
widening thought,
Into action
And into this heaven of freedom
My Father, let my country awake!
 

Wassalmu alaikum warahmatullahi wa barakatuh

And May the Peace, Mercy and Grace of Allah be with you.