Browsing by Subject "Muslim"

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    Between sunnah and selfhood: exploring how South African Muslim men navigate sexuality and morality in the Mundane
    (2026) Bray, Aqeelah; Seedat, Fatima; Shaikh, Sa'diyya
    This dissertation strives to explore the diverse ways in which South African Muslim men navigate the intersection of faith, culture, sexuality and morality in their everyday lives. It is situated within a broader context shaped by Islamic teachings, cultural norms, individual agency, and the evolving gender dynamics of a globalised South African society. In doing so, the research addresses a significant gap in feminist scholarship, where Muslim men's perspectives on sexuality remain underexplored. The theoretical framework guiding this study is a multidimensional feminist one, drawing on feminist standpoint theory, Islamic feminism, and feminist embodiment. Together, these frameworks allow for an analysis that is both critical and empathetic. This study used qualitative feminist methodologies, specifically semi-structured interviews, to gather rich, in-depth narratives. A purposive and snowball sampling approach was used to recruit eleven participants - South African Muslim men who were born in, raised, and currently reside in South Africa. Given the sensitivity of the topic, trust and community networks were central to gaining access. The data were analysed thematically, with attention to the ways in which participants articulate and navigate their understandings of sexuality, faith and morality. The findings reveal that participants continuously grapple with the tensions between religious prescriptions and personal experience. The narratives illustrate the varied strategies employed by participants to reconcile faith with desire, ranging from reinterpretations of the Sunnah to the construction of private, alternative spiritual practices. Queer participants offered critical insights into how non-normative sexual identities are negotiated within a framework of Islamic ethics. Across the sample, there was a clear call for open, inclusive discourse around sex and sexuality within Muslim communities, as well as a reimagining of religious teachings that foreground dignity, justice, and human flourishing. Ultimately, this research contributes to broader conversations on gender justice, Islamic ethics, and sexuality in the South African context. It offers a textured account of Muslim men's lived realities that challenges dominant narratives of Islamic masculinity as inherently patriarchal or regressive. In doing so, it highlights the potential for transformative interpretations of Islamic principles that are more inclusive and responsive to contemporary lived experiences.
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    Code-Switching among Bilingual Speakers of Cape Muslim Afrikaans and South African English in the Bo-Kaap, Cape Town
    (2020) Cozien, Christine; Mesthrie, Rajend
    The Bo-Kaap is traditionally a Cape Muslim Afrikaans-speaking community, and sociohistorically it is particularly relevant to the development of Afrikaans at the Cape (Davids 2011, Mahida 1993). The Cape Muslim Afrikaans spoken in the Bo-Kaap is a sub-variety of Standard Afrikaans (Kotzé 1989, Davids 2011) and is distinguishable by its retained lexis (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008) from languages historically spoken by slaves at the Cape, such as Malay, Arabic, Gujarati, and Konkani. Over time a number of socio-cultural, geographic, and historical factors have introduced the use of South African English alongside Cape Muslim Afrikaans in this speech community. The goal of this study was to provide insight into the nature of bilingual talk in the Bo-Kaap community, and to make a useful contribution to the growing body of codeswitching1 (hereafter CS) research generally. Based on natural language data collected during group interviews with members of the community, the study explored the language contact situation in the Bo-Kaap today, taking the viewpoint that what is occurring presently may be considered CS Three aspects of the CS documented were analysed and quantified. Specifically, the study investigated language interaction phenomena (Myers-Scotton 1995, Deuchar et al 2007) triggers (Clyne 1987) and directionality (Muysken 1997, Deuchar et al 2017, Çetinoglu 2017). A quantitative approach was taken to the data analysis. The interview audio files were downloaded and transcribed in ELAN. (Max Planck Institute). The annotations2 produced in ELAN were organised in a spreadsheet for analysis, resulting in a data set comprised of 356 annotations. The full data set was divided into subsets and tagged for language interaction phenomena, triggers, and directionality. These data sets were then sorted and quantified to identify trends in these three areas of interest. The study found Intra-sentential switches to be the most common type of language interaction phenomenon in the CS of this speech community, being present in 79% of the sampled annotations. Results from other CS studies echo this finding in other speech communities (Al Heeti et al 2016, Koban 2012, Falk 2013). The most common trigger for Intra-word switching in this corpus was in the head of the past tense Verb Phrase. Out of 27 occurrences of Intra-word switching, 16 were of this nature. In all of those an English verb head was housed within an Afrikaans past tense structure. No exceptions were observed in the data set, a strong indicator of the relationship status of the two languages involved. Cape Muslim Afrikaans almost certainly playing the role of the Matrix language, with South African English embedded. In terms of directionality, switching from Cape Muslim Afrikaans into South African English was by far the most common, at 85%. This further supports what the findings on triggers suggest about the hierarchy between these two languages.
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    Freedom of Religion and the headscarf: a perspective from international and comparative constitutional Law
    (2013) Osman, Fatima; Chirwa, Danwood M
    his thesis analyses whether a legislative ban on wearing a headscarf breaches the right to freedom of religion, as such right is universally understood. It describes the ambit of the right to freedom of religion by examining the theoretical justification and importance of the right and thereafter analysing how the right is recognised in international and regional treaties and domestic constitutions. It demonstrates that religious freedom comprises of the right to hold a religion and the right to manifest a religion in the form of worship, observance, practice and teaching. Religious freedom, however, is not absolute and the thesis explains in the light of international and comparative case-law that the right to freedom of religion may be limited by a law that pursues a legitimate state interest and is reasonable. In light of this theoretical framework the thesis examines the practice of Muslim women wearing a headscarf and argues that the practice constitutes a manifestation of Islamic belief protected by the right to freedom of religion. Thereafter this thesis examines French, Turkish and German prohibitions on wearing a headscarf, the effect of these laws on Muslim women and the justifications furnished for such laws. It is argued that the state interest of preserving secularism relied upon to justify a headscarf ban is not legitimate and does not justify a headscarf ban. Furthermore, even where the state has a legitimate interest in preventing the coercion of young girls, promoting the equality rights of women and maintaining safety and order, a headscarf ban does not constitute a reasonable limitation of religious freedom. Ultimately, this thesis argues that a headscarf ban exacerbates the problems it is meant to solve and constitutes an unjustifiable infringement of religious freedom.