Declaring Ahmadis heretics to confirm Sunni Muslim identity in South Africa

What is it about?

This article explores the on-going construction of Sunni Islamic identity by excluding a self-professed "Islamic" community: the Ahmadiyya. In the highly charged political context of South Africa, when Muslims were already a threatened minority under Apartheid, they still initiated long-running, expensive cases in the Supreme Court to exclude the Ahmadiyya. Certain features of Sunni orthodoxy in fact came to be institutionalized only through this conflict with the Ahmadiyya, such as alienation of the local brand of Islam from local and other African context to build a linkage with exclusivist Sunni traditions in Pakistan, and building a moral authority for the local Sunni organization. But these features are also at play in marginalizing Ahmadis around the world, and are now being used to exclude other groups like Shia in South Africa and elsewhere. In this sense, I offer new insights into construction of global Sunni orthodoxy that is targeted not only against non-Muslims, but against those professing to be Muslims as well.

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Why is it important?

Much attention today is (rightly) drawn to radical Islamist Sunni groups like Daesh on the one hand and Islamophobia on the other. However, this research shows that exclusivist tendencies are more common in Islam worldwide, often with dangerous consequences. Such tendencies are pushing non-conformist Muslims, at odds with a singular Sunni worldview, into exclusion. This trend needs to be understood in this time of polarities, as it speaks to other exclusionary trends as well.

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