Shaykh Seraj Hendricks had been actively engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa during the 1980s and early 1990s, and identified, like so many, with the grassroots movement, the United Democratic Front. That commitment to integrity, and that open rejection of tyranny, while profoundly connected to a normative spiritual tradition, spoke to me tremendously. It was something he sometimes described as ‘radical traditionalism’ — progressive, in a sense, but so deeply rooted within the tradition that no normative assessment of his approach could really be faulted. They could try. They would fail.
From his perspective, being utterly human was, as a friend reminded me, the fatḥ of the Sunnah. The real Sunnah, indeed.
The commitment to justice was not something Shaykh Seraj invented. It was bred into the very bones of Azzawia. The Muslim community of the Cape was battle-hardened, having existed as a demographic minority that had suffered under severe repression in a country built on apartheid. That implanted a certain emphasis in and consciousness of all kinds of justice among Azzawia’s shaykhs. Shaykh Seraj’s own uncles had been offered white identity cards by the regime in 1947, as the apartheid state tried to garner votes ahead of its formal institution in 1948. Shaykh Ebrahim Hendricks rejected it completely and went on a campaign against it. In 1955, he had his passport removed. He had to smuggle people out of the country. The security apparatus planted operatives inside the very mosque, trying to record what the shaykhs were saying.
Shaykh Seraj inherited this spirit and carried it forward with his own hands.
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He found himself briefly in prison as a result. He recounted his time there in characteristic fashion — without bitterness, with moral clarity:
He had been asked to deliver a talk in prison by members of The Call of Islam, an anti-apartheid Muslim group. It was a risk he took. But he reminded those gathered, in the spirit of Islam, that people should not be judged by their colour, and that they should show no hostility to the guard standing at the door. He turned to the guard directly and said that oppression is not the provenance of a particular group of people or a particular race. It is a mindset, built on conditioned prejudices. And that the guard, as much as everyone else engaging in oppression, was a dehumanised being — that he needed help as much as anyone else when it came to freeing people from the shackles of oppressive attitudes.
The guard was angry about what Shaykh Seraj said. He turned the stun-gun on him and threatened to shoot. People started to panic. The guard closed the windows. But he did not go beyond that.
Shaykh Seraj reflected on this with characteristic sobriety: the focus was not on revolution as such, but on education — educating people in the ethics and morality of Islam. Because without that morality, he said, we could hardly call a revolution a revolution in the first place.
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When it came time for me to write my book on the Egyptian revolutionary uprising and its aftermath — including many discussions about the instrumentalisation of religion for partisanship — it was to Azzawia that I went. I went into something of an author’s seclusion to do it, spending all my days and nights at Azzawia, alternating between writing and sitting with the Shaykh, as what he called a huiskind — a child of the house, in Afrikaans. He constantly reminded me that the approach he upheld was one of coming together, and of mutual benefit.
The more one learned about his political orientations, the more one would grow to appreciate him as a rare breed indeed. Here was an ʿālim who could brook no injustice on the altar of ‘security’ or ‘stability.’ In the age of post-Arab Spring fallout, this was a type of gold dust, particularly towards the latter years of Shaykh Seraj’s life.
Even so, Shaykh Seraj was respectful of scholars he disagreed with, and he valued their learning where they had it. But he valued justice and the upholding of it before and after considerations of good etiquette. A son of the anti-apartheid struggle could be nothing else.
At the same time, Shaykh Seraj seldom mentioned individual names publicly in a negative context. One could have a discussion about a particular political event, with no one around, and it would be clear that the shaykh was opposed to this political stance by a scholar, or that politician’s stance. But the shaykh was always very careful about placing Azzawia into any kind of partisan position, at a time when the intricacies of the Muslim world have created slews of partisan silos where it is no longer about justice, but about one’s ‘team.’ Shaykh Seraj zealously protected the tradition of Azzawia of being independent. Whether it was figures in Cairo or Ankara, Abu Dhabi or Doha, the shaykh would be polite and courteous. Azzawia always had to be a place that could not be used by one side in an internecine war between Muslims. But no one could ever be in doubt about his principles, which he proclaimed loudly in his lessons and classes. It was always abundantly clear from his consistent discourse that he opposed authoritarianism of all kinds — as his close confidantes on political matters, such as Shafiq Morton, would undoubtedly attest.
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Azzawia’s tradition was built on openness — the number of families connected to Azzawia over the last century that were originally non-Muslim cannot really be counted due to their number. Unlike many other communities, there was no distinction made between recent converts and ‘established’ Muslim backgrounds. They all became part of the very same community, intrinsically and integrally. In a country still recovering from the trauma of apartheid, Azzawia is full of a wide array of different ethnic backgrounds.
But it is one thing to be full of diversity, and another to be actively inclusive of it. In this, Shaykh Seraj continued the tradition of his grandfather, who faced a good deal of opposition in the early twentieth century when he insisted on teaching and instructing women. Shaykh Seraj not only persisted in that regard, but discussed with me many times the need to empower women from within the tradition, and to encourage spiritual leadership therein. Beyond that, he was deeply disturbed whenever it came to his knowledge that the abuse of women by any person of religion took place. It was one topic that would make him angry, as he viewed it as such a profound betrayal.
That kind of commitment — to justice, to inclusion, to principle over partisanship — is what made Shaykh Seraj who he was. And it was inseparable from his scholarship and his spiritual path. For him, there was no contradiction between deep rootedness in the tradition and a fearless confrontation of injustice. The one demanded the other.
