South Africa · africa
Abu Bakr Effendi
South Africa's forgotten Ottoman scholar.
In 1862, Sultan Abdülaziz sent a scholar from the imperial court to Cape Town to settle a century-old religious dispute among the city's Muslims. He stayed for twenty years, wrote the first Islamic book in Afrikaans, and shaped the culture of Cape Malays for generations.
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He arrived in Cape Town in 1862 speaking no English, no Dutch, and no Afrikaans. By the time he died in 1880, he had written the first Islamic text ever printed in Afrikaans — using the Arabic alphabet — and a generation of South African Muslims called him Efendi as though it were his first name.
What the article will cover
- Why Queen Victoria asked Sultan Abdülaziz for help with a Cape religious dispute
- The Ebubekir Efendi who arrived — trained at Şehzade Mosque, fluent in six languages
- Bayân al-Dîn — the first Afrikaans-language Islamic book, written in Arabic script
- The Effendi schools, the families that still carry his name, and a cemetery in Tana Baru
Come back soon to read the full story.