All and sundry seemed to claim Achmat Davids as theirs at his funeral attended by a few thousand people including judges and cabinet Ministers. “Mawlana, do you know who I am? I am the son of his second-cousin”, one man told me, staking out his share of this larger than life figure. In a funeral oration, Shaikh Nazim Mohammed, President of the Muslim Judicial Council claimed that Boeta Achmat was a member of the Muslim Judicial Council. In a radio interview I claimed to have “lived at Achmat David’s house for two years”.  Upon closer reflection I discovered that the period was closer to one. While the details and the facts may be open to some negotiation, quite simply, people were desperate to be a part of Achmat’s life; a life that embraced very many people and from all walks of life.

I first encountered Achmat Davids as a small but somewhat precocious eleven-year old when I, as part of a group of Tablighis (preachers), went to knock on his door in Longmarket Street inviting him to attend a talk in the mosque. He engaged us and challenged our inability to make the link between our sermonizing and the social conditions of people in the Cape Flats. While Achmat steadfastly opposed the group’s “work on your personal faith and God will handle the rest” philosophy, he remained deeply supportive of me as I doggedly stuck to my guns – to the extent of allowing to me to host meetings in his house for the group’s women section. As countless others will testify, he recognized a better self in us that we ourselves had not become aware of as yet and he was going to stick around and wait for it to surface.

At the age of fourteen I needed a place to stay and I turned to Boeta Achmat. “Of course, if the lounge will do”. And there I lived for a year, folding and unfolding my bedding on a daily basis. As a part of that extraordinary family, “Boeta Achmat became ‘Apatjie’. Until today I cherish their incredible hospitality and notions of a door that was literally open to everyone. Many a night I came home to find my food missing from the oven. “Someone must have taken it.” Countless people from the area literally walked in and helped themselves to the contents of fridge and the oven!

Later I saw how this was reflected in his role as social historian. Every international visitor of mine would be taken to Achmat’s house after the obligatory tour of the Bo-Kaap and, if at home, they could expect to have the undivided attention of the guru himself. Achmat relished giving – of his time, his expertise, his money – whatever little he had - ; literally of his self.

Achmat was a founder member of the Muslim Assembly, a body founded in 1969 to challenge and transcend the narrowly defined religiosity of the `ulama (clerics). As a social worker in their employ, he sat in an ill-equipped office and did his ordinary social work thing – listening, assisting and referring. As a wonderfully insightful social worker he organized and forced people to reflect on their lot under apartheid and was the solitary Muslim spokesperson on socio-economic issues in the days of the Cape Herald.

Wedded essentially to the Bo-Kaap – his body awaited burial in the house where he was born in Longmarket Street and where he served as Secretary of the Home Pigeons Union at the age of fifteen – Achmat was the founder of the Boorhanol Islam. Here he organized pre-school education, the scouts and the brownies, religious education, soup kitchens and the renovation of a run-down community centre in the Bo-Kaap.

Achmat was in relentless pursuit of a multi-facetted approach to the problems of our people and authored countless papers on issues ranging from juvenile delinquency, drug abuse and dysfunctional families to the impact of the Group Areas on crime. Given the lack of space in the house and his administrative shoddiness most of the unpublished ones landed up in kitchen cupboards and drawers in the first part of their journey into oblivion.

Later Achmat moved on to researching the history of Muslims in South Africa. He wrote Mosques of the Bo-Kaap and History of the Tana Baru. The first especially become the definitive text on the early History of the Muslims. Every single scholar who ever had anything to say about Muslims in South Africa has had to take Davids as his starting point. They may then have decided to savage that starting point as Adil Bradlow has in his B.A. Honours thesis or they may have challenged him more gently as I did in my Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism. The facts, Achmat uncovered and we fought over their use and abuse. All of us though are indebted to the groundbreaking archival work that Achmat Davids undertook and he may rightly be described as the father of Cape Muslim History.

An extraordinary dimension to his scholarship was his own personal engagement in his work. For him history was not about the past but about the present. He fought for the preservation of Oudekraal and the restoration of the Tana Baru, the first Muslim graveyard on the slopes of Signal Hill. In a tendency which ‘objective scholarship’ would have difficult dealing with and one that Achmat Davids never mentioned publicly, he also believed that he was in communication with the people whose era and lives he was researching. Shaikh Yusuf of Macassar, the founder of Islam at the Cape, Tuan Guru, its first Muslim teacher, Saartjie van de Kaap, the woman who established a mosque in Cape Town more than a century ago were not mere historical figures for Achmat, they were literally ‘awliya’ - friends. Whereas other Muslims regard them purely as awliya Allah – the friends of Allah, Davids also saw them as personal friends.
 
During the course of his research on the history of Muslims in the Cape he became aware of the enormous contribution that they made to the development of Afrikaans and off he was again with a passion – uncovering subversive memories of the “lowly” origins of Afrikaans among Muslim slaves. His findings, covered in his Masters degree, awarded cum laude, became as significant for the study of the history of Afrikaans as his earlier equally seminal Mosques of the Bo-Kaap.

While Achmat was thoroughly enjoyed and used by academics and intellectuals and while he was an extraordinary challenger in intellectual discourse, ranging from issues if Sufism to the rise of neo-rationalism in the Muslim world, Achmat was never entirely home with the academy nor the academy with him. He was too unpolished, a bit like a resourceful and extremely knowledgeable village elder who is indispensable to anthropologists but who will not get tenure at a university. This notwithstanding, he was awarded two research fellowships at distinguished American universities and lectured in Holland, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Never an unengaged scholar, the period of this research activity, the early eighties, saw Achmat active in Salt River working as a drug counselor along with people like Imam Abdurrashid Umar. Achmat was deeply contemptuous of the hard-hearted, futile and destructive logic of “Kill the Drug Merchant – Kill!” He knew too much about the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of our people and the devastating role that apartheid played in giving birth to dysfunctional families and alienated individuals to seek refuge in simplistic rhetoric and easy victories. He was too involved in the task of enabling people to recognize and cultivate their better selves to find the time to sloganeer.

The Voice of the Cape was Achmat Davids final stop-over in his journey towards God. Boeta Achmat, was one of its most beloved presenters. Never disdainful of the ordinary person and avoiding the madness of linguistic purity he spoke the language of ordinary people; no, not in a condescending manner because it was his language. Here he hosted talk shows, took hundreds and thousands of people down memory lane making the lineages between where we come from, where we and where we ought to be. He worked for a radio station that sought to be a voice for the Muslims who are comfortable with the challenges of co-existence, intra-religious tolerance and all-embracing South Africanness.

In 1994 the ANC in the Western Cape sought for a Muslim figure with the widest across the board appeal, they found that person in Achmat Davids. More recently, the Welkom Trust, an economic empowerment scheme of Naspers also sought for such a person to appear in a promotional film. They found this person in Achmat Davids. No, it’s not that Achmat did not have any principles (Keen observers would have noticed the absence of a certain type of Muslim, otherwise very visible of late, at his funeral). It’s just that Achmat had a way of articulating his differences that always held his opponent sacred.

Apatjie, we will miss you.

Hamba Kahle