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Ambiguous Accommodation: Cape Muslims and Post-Apartheid Politics

This article explores how the elite among Muslim religious leaders in the Western Cape of South Africa, organised in the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), have positioned themselves with regard to political power in the post-apartheid era. We argue that the MJC's positioning may be characterised as premised on a ‘loyalist-accommodationist’ relation to power, in which the comforts and religious freedoms of a religious minority are seen as best ensured by accommodation with the party in power, the African National Congress (ANC). This strategy is closely linked to the interests of the middle-class elite, from which the elite among the ‘ulama’ is largely recruited. We demonstrate that this loyalist-accommodationist stance has survived the ideological and discursive shifts within the ANC over the course of the post-apartheid era, and attempt to explain why a politics of direct challenge to political power from the MJC is unlikely in the ‘new South Africa’, in spite of the ‘ulama's’ ambivalence with regard to societal secularisation.1