Rights and responsibilities of minorities in Islam

“When the concepts of faith itself are under risk, as during the apartheid era in South Africa, doctrinal variations among beliefs become minor”, said Ebrahim Rasool,South Africa’s ambassador to the US, during a May 14 Symposium on Religious Freedom and the Rights of Minorities in Islam at Georgetown University.

While other scholars and academics at the event, co-sponsored by Georgetown’s Alwaleed  Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the Islamic Society of North America, described both the mandates of Islamic law, Shari’a, and the traditional treatment of non-Muslims in majority Muslim societies, Rasool, a follower of Islam from a majority non-Muslim nation, offered a counterpoint.

In South Africa, Muslims make up less than 3 percent of the inhabitants, and were long declined basic religious rights, Rasool said, observing that Islamic weddings were not acknowledged until 1990.

“We established ourselves in South Africa without the silver spoon in our mouths,” he said. Yet this community of less than 1 million nevertheless handled to generate “anti-apartheid warriors who went to prison with Nelson Mandela” and have since obtained considerable representation in govt.
How?

Rasool said the Islamic principle of Al-Amin, or trustworthiness, was a factor. (Al-Amin, The Trustworthy, was a nickname given to the Prophet Muhammad.)

“The deficit of trust always detracts from the message,” he said. “Muslims had earned their trustworthiness because they were prepared to die with the majority, to take their hard knocks with the majority.”

Interfaith services during the apartheid era were “places of great danger,” he said. Police were outside,shooting teargas, as the gatherings posed a risk to the current system of government.

In these situations, “your interpretation [of scripture] has to take second place to the preservation of faith itself, because it’s under siege,” Rasool said. “What binds you is the common faith that you have in the face of enormous danger.”

South Africa was less divided by religious belief than by apartheid, he said. Therefore it had people of all faiths who were having difficulties to follow the Aquaba, the step path of righteousness, (described in the Sūrat al-Balad, the Quran’s Ninetieth Sura) who found themselves in the streets protesting apartheid.

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