Title: The Silent Minaret

Author: Ishtiyaq Shukri

Pages: 282

Publisher: Jacana

It is hard to decide what is more utterly fascinating about South Africa (SA); its unusually beautiful scenery or the irrepressible will of its people. Their passion and struggle for freedom is so distinctive, correlating it to the unique structure of their society. South Africa's complex racial structure probably has no equivalent throughout the world. I began to understand this clearly while reading Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret and came to realize many facts about South Africa's past struggle and the resemblance between it and present-day conflicts.

Ishtiyaq Shukri is a South African Muslim of Asian descent and the winner of the European Union Literary Award for Best First Novel. You feel the presence of Ishtiyaq Shukri himself in the story, as his combined South African and Muslim identity crystallizes through the main characters of the book. The book is a journey through the psyche of a typical South African activist (the book's main character, Issa Shamsuddin) whom we follow from his struggle to free his country, through the victory, all the way to his encounter with a harsher reality in London while doing his thesis on South African history.

To reduce the South African dispute to ultimately a conflict between “blacks” and “whites” would be unworthy of the real struggle and those who contributed to it. Shukri eloquently reveals the complex multicultural nature of this society and its “long walk to freedom”; paralleling it with events happening to this day. The amazing similarity between the 15th century colonial period and the 21st century affirms the cold fact that history is forever with us. As Shukri writes:

History is the science of reality that affects us most immediately, stirs us most deeply, and compels us most forcibly to a consciousness of ourselves. It is the only science in which human beings step before us in their totality. Under the rubric of the past, but the progression of events in general, history, therefore, includes the present.

The book provides information on different phases in South Africa's history, partly through abstracts from Issa's own doctoral thesis. The story begins with the disappearance of Issa, a fighter for freedom. The reader is left to contemplate whether Issa has disappeared or gone into a self-imposed exile. Shukri interweaves past and present alternately, braiding events and forming connections.

The beginning of a bloodstained history, which played an indelible role in the lives of present-day South Africans, started when Commander Jan van Riebeeck anchored his three ships off the shores of the Cape in 1652. The initial intention of the Dutch was to establish a station which was halfway between the Netherlands and their empire in Southeast Asia. At that time, the main visitors to South Africa were from the Dutch East Indian company, “the world's largest trading corporation.”

Although slavery had already been abolished in the Netherlands, the company directors began importing slave labor from Southeast Asia and some African countries to South Africa. The majority of the slaves were Muslims, thus Cape Town soon came to be known as Cape Malay, indicating the dominant presence of Asian Muslims. As Shukri says, "Initially, their influence was minimal and their religious practices curtailed, but within just a few decades, their contribution, as even the most fleeting visit to modern-day Cape Town will reveal, would be definitive."

Soon the Cape became a perfect prison for political exiles, namely resistance leaders banished from Dutch-occupied Asian countries. “The arrival of these exiles rekindled a new spirit of political resistance … and brought a new momentum to the struggle of the dispossessed and the subjugated against colonial domination.”

By far the most influential of these exiles was Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, the “founder” of Islam in South Africa. Although his exile in South Africa was brief—only five years till his death in captivity on May 23, 1699—he attracted many to Islam and “represented a symbol of resistance to European colonialism.” It is interesting that not only did the exiles establish a Muslim community in South Africa, but they also established a strong and memorable resistance movement, “so that the history of Islam in South Africa is, therefore, synonymous with the struggle against oppression.”

Thus, many of the recent anti-Apartheid resistance leaders were Muslim and of South Asian descent, as is the main fictional character of the book, Issa Shamsuddin.

Shukri emphasizes the point that the early colonial practices later became the foundations and models for current day occupation forces. Invading forces, he believes, now may use other methods to disguise what is in reality colonization. Though there may not be outright slavery, the stench of spoiled human conscience lingers in the air of prison cells in which torture is frequently used as a tool of humiliation to this day.

Issa, an activist also of Asian descent, is a zealous, pro-revolution operative as a young man. As Issa wears his T-shirt with Guevara's face imprinted on it, the parallel between Issa and the captivating Guevara is evident. A lover of freedom and principles, Issa takes us with him to the underground and the abode of South Africa’s activists.

Despite Issa's euphoria after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1989 and the first free elections in South Africa's history in 1994, confusion begins to set in while he is in London doing his thesis on South African history. During his stay in London, the tragic events of September 11 occur. The backlash of these events in the form of the “War on Terror” has a deep impact on Issa's life. He begins to realize that, decades after the end of outright colonization, there continues to be collective annihilation of innocent lives in the process of removing objectionable leaders.

Shukri makes many references to both Afghanistan and Palestine. He introduces into the story a Palestinian named Karim, who is the main reason Issa’s friend Katinka leaves London to work as a teacher in the occupied territories of Palestine—behind the Wall. Other than the fact that Karim is Palestinian, his character has no further significance to the story. The incomplete development of Karim's character is disappointing since he has so much influence on one of the story’s main characters.

Next to the Wall, “the wall that is meant to make people feel small,” Katinka sends a message from her cell phone to her “missing” friend Issa, again paralleling the past with the present. The message reads, “Im by da wal @ qalqilia. Wen jan landd @ cape he planted a hedj 2 sepr8 setlaz frm locls. Da histry of erly urpean setlmnt @ da cape is unversly & eternly pertnt.” [I'm by the wall at Qalqilia. When Jan landed at the Cape he planted a hedge to separate the settlers from the locals. The history of early European settlement at the Cape is universally and eternally pertinent.]

Shukri succeeds in smoothly connecting the past with the present. He also succeeds in developing another character as important as Issa, yet quite the opposite. His “brother,” Kagiso, or more accurately, the boy he grew up with. Kagiso is not an activist and does nothing more than live a relatively superficial life with the sole goal of having fun. However, although we do not find out where the main character of the story has disappeared to, we understand the reason for his disappearance or exile. It is this realization that transforms a part of Kagiso while he is searching for Issa.

Before traveling to London to find Issa, Kagiso was producing a documentary on the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. Before agreeing to finance the film, the sponsors set the condition that the narrator of the documentary must be a known figure, namely a white man. Kagiso agrees in order to carry out the film. Midway through his search for Issa, Kagiso decides to break his promise and get a native South African narrator, at one point asking himself why he should get “bullied” into having their history narrated to them by an old white man. Although a small incident in itself, it shows that Kagiso has learned how to protest against prejudiced decisions, if even only on a very small scale.

I began reading the story with the ultimate question in mind, will this captivating activist ever be found? At the end, I realized Shukri will not give us a direct answer to that question. I smiled and thought that like Kagiso, I had learned how important certain decisions are in life. Perhaps the whole objective of the story was not to find Issa, but rather to understand how to find ourselves. After all, history is forever pertinent.

The Silent Minaret presents the beauty of multiculturalism subtly and introduces us to a world of pride.