How Cape Town Muslims preserved 200-year-old handwritten Holy Quran? Muslims in Cape Town proudly guard a handwritten copy of the Holy Quran that dates back more than 200 years and was discovered in a paper bag in the Auwal Mosque’s attic during renovations in the mid-1980s.
The elegantly handwritten copy of the Holy Quran was produced by an Indonesian imam who had been exiled by Dutch colonisers.
It is displayed in the South African city as a source of pride and cultural heritage.
How Cape Town Muslims preserved 200-year-old handwritten Holy Quran
Imam Abdullah ibn Qadi Abdus Salaam, better known by his moniker Tuan Guru or Master Teacher, is thought to have composed the Holy Quran at some point after being transferred as a political prisoner from Tidore island in Indonesia to Cape Town in 1780 as retaliation for joining the resistance movement against Dutch colonisers.
“It was extremely dusty, it looked like no one had been in that attic for more than 100 years,” Cassiem Abdullah, a member of the mosque committee said. “The builders also found a box of religious texts written by Tuan Guru.”
With the exception of a few ragged edges, the unbound Holy Quran’s loose, unnumbered pages are preserved in startling good shape and are inked with readable Arabic script calligraphy in red and blue.
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The preservation of a 1694 Quranic relic and maintaining the exact order of the nearly 6,000 verses on its pages posed a huge challenge to the local Muslim community. The assignment, which took three years to accomplish, was carried out by Maulana Taha Karaan, the chief judge of the Muslim Judicial Council of Cape Town.
After three failed attempts to steal the Quran from the Auwal Mosque, South Africa’s first mosque, the mosque’s committee finally secured it in a fire- and bullet-proof shell ten years ago.
According to Tuan Guru’s biographer, Shafiq Morton, the well-known anti-apartheid campaigner is thought to have penned the first of the Declaration of Independence’s five versions while detained on Robben Island between the ages of 80 and 90.
Given that Arabic was not his first language, his accomplishment is seen as exceptional.
Guru served two terms in prison on Robben Island, the first from 1780 to 1781 and the second from 1786 to 1791.
“I believe one of the reasons he wrote the Quran was to lift the spirits of the slaves around him. He realised that if he were to write a copy of the Quran he could educate his people from it and teach them dignity at the same time,” Morton says.
“If you go to the archives and look at the paper that the Dutch used it’s very similar to that used by Tuan Guru. It’s probably the same paper.
“His pens he would have made himself from bamboo and the black and red ink would have been easy to obtain from the colonial authorities.”
Tuan Guru, according to South African Islamic history instructor Shaykh Owaisi, was motivated by the need to uphold Islam among Muslim slaves and convicts in a Dutch colony.
“While they were preaching the Bible and trying to convert the Muslim slaves, Tuan Guru was writing the copies of the Quran, teaching it to the children and getting them to memorise it.
“It tells a story of resilience and perseverance. It shows the level of education of the people that were brought to Cape Town as slaves and prisoners.”
Ma’rifat wal Iman wal Islam (The Knowledge of Faith and Religion), a 613-page Arabic textbook written by Tuan Guru, has been used for more than a century to educate Muslims in Cape Town about their religion.
The Rakiep family, who are Tuan Guru’s heirs, owns the book, which is in good shape.
“He sat down and wrote down just about everything he could remember about his faith and he used that as a text for teaching others,” says Shaykh Owaisi.
There are still three of Tuan Guru’s five handwritten copies of the Holy Quran, two of which are in the hands of his relatives.
A total of 100 copies have been made; one was presented to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in April and a few others were given to dignitaries who were in town. His family and great-great-granddaughter are in possession of the remaining copies.
In order to take the oath of office as a member of parliament in May 2019, Ganief Hendricks, the head of the South African Muslim political party Al Jama’ah, utilised a replica of Tuan Guru’s handwritten Holy Quran.
A result of the Dutch government’s prohibition of Tuan Guru in southern Africa, Muslims today make up 5% (4.6 million) of the population of Cape Town.
“When he came to the Cape, Tuan Guru observed that Islam was in pretty bad shape so he had a lot of work to do,” Morton says.
“The community didn’t really have their hands on any texts — they were Muslims more from cultural memory than anything else. I would say that that first Quran he wrote is the reason why the Muslim community survived and developed into the respected community we have today.”
