THE ARABIC-AFRIKAANS WRITING TRADITION: HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT

Professor Hein Willemse, University of Pretoria; Dr Shamiega Chaudhari, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Friday 24 January 3.00 pm COURSE FEES R110; Staff and students R55

This lecture on the Arabic-Afrikaans writing tradition will be situated within the history of the development of the Afrikaans language. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, local Muslim literates wrote Jawi, i.e., the Arabicised written form of Malayu. The reason for this development is that many slaves and political exiles originated from the Southeast archipelago, where this writing tradition was customary. It appears that by the beginning of the second decade of the nineteenth century – Cape Dutch, the precursor of Afrikaans – increasingly replaced Malayu as the language of religious instruction. By the mid-nineteenth century Muslim clergy committed Cape Dutch to writing, especially in the mad¯aris of Cape Town. Between 1862 and 1869 Shaykh Abu Bakr Effendi al Amjadi (1814–1880), an Islamic scholar from the Ottoman Empire, produced Bay¯an ud-Din, translated as ‘An explanation of the religion’ in which he explained ritual practices of Islam to adherents. The text is one of the oldest extant publications produced in a distinct form of early Afrikaans. Subsequently, several authors developed this written form into a writing tradition with a distinct Cape Dutch/ Afrikaans character.

 

Recommended reading

Davids, A. 2018. Die Afrikaans van die Kaapse Moslems, verwerk deur Hein Willemse. Bellville: Stigting vir Afrikaans. http://sbafrikaans.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/DIE-AFRIKAANS-VAN-DIE-KAAPSE- MOSLEMS-enkelbladsy.pdf

Davids, A. 2024. The Arabic-Afrikaans Writing Tradition 1815–1915, edited by Hein Willemse and Suleman E. Dangor. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Stell, G. et al. 2008. Religious and secular Cape Malay Afrikaans: Literary varieties used by Shaykh Hanif Edwards (1906–1958). In Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia. 163(2–3), pp. 289–325.

Van Bruinessen, M. A nineteenth-century Ottoman Kurdish scholar in South Africa: Abu Bakr Efendi. In Van Bruinessen, Martin. 2000. Mullas, Sufis and heretics: the role of religion in Kurdish society: Collected articles. Istanbul: The Isis Press. pp. 133–141.

Versteegh, K. 2011. An Afrikaans footnote to the history of Arabic grammar: Sheikh Ismail Ganief’s grammar of Arabic (ca. 1958). In In the Shadow of Arabic the Centrality of Language to Arabic Culture: Studies Presented to Ramzi Baalbaki on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. (n.d.). Netherlands: Brill.

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