Neelam Rahim reflects on the remarkable legacy of Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi, the 19th-century Ottoman alim who arrived in Cape Town in 1863 and spent the rest of his life teaching Islam, establishing schools and producing a landmark Islamic text in an early written form of Afrikaans. His influence also helped popularise one of the most recognisable symbols of Ottoman culture among Cape Muslims: the red fez.
His name was Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi, a 19th-century Ottoman alim whose extraordinary journey connected a Muslim community living under British colonial rule at the Cape with the wider intellectual and civilisational world of Islam.
Born around 1814 in Ottoman territory, Effendi came from a scholarly family and received an extensive Islamic education. His studies took him through important centres of learning in the Ottoman world and to Makkah before he emerged as a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence.
In 1862, the government of Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz selected Effendi for a religious mission to the Cape Colony following requests for assistance in addressing religious disagreements within the local Muslim community.
After travelling through Europe and spending weeks at sea, he arrived in Cape Town on 17 January 1863. He would never leave.
Connecting the Cape to the Muslim world
Effendi’s significance cannot be understood through language or jurisprudence alone.
His presence represented a direct intellectual link between Cape Muslims and the Ottoman world during an age when European colonial power was expanding across Muslim lands.
Geographically, Cape Muslims lived thousands of kilometres from the traditional centres of Islamic scholarship. Civilisationally, however, they were never completely isolated from them.
Scholars, pilgrims, books, letters and ideas continued to cross oceans. Effendi was part of that movement.
Through his teaching, writing and institutions, the Cape became connected to networks of Islamic knowledge stretching far beyond southern Africa.
His family continued those connections. His son Ahmed Ataullah Effendi later entered Ottoman service and became the Ottoman consul-general in Singapore, while other descendants maintained links with South Africa and the Ottoman world.
In 2020, 15 South African descendants of Abu Bakr Effendi were granted Turkish citizenship, formally renewing a connection established more than 150 years earlier.
In 2024, a school and museum dedicated to Effendi were opened in Erzurum, Türkiye, commemorating his life and legacy.
The red fez
One of the most visible traces of Effendi’s Ottoman heritage was the red fez.
The Ottoman-style head covering became increasingly associated with Cape Muslim men following his arrival and remained visible for generations at mosques, weddings, religious gatherings and community occasions.
Its significance went beyond clothing.
For Muslims living thousands of kilometres from Istanbul, Makkah, Cairo and other centres of Islamic civilisation, the fez became a visible expression of belonging to a world far larger than the colonial society surrounding them.
Effendi himself embodied that connection: an Ottoman alim had crossed continents and oceans to live among Muslims at the Cape, carrying with him books, jurisprudence and educational traditions.
But perhaps his greatest contribution came through what he created there.
Islam written in the language of the Cape
Effendi’s most remarkable intellectual legacy was Bayân al-Dîn — The Exposition of Religion.
Completed at the Cape and published in Istanbul in 1877, the work provided instruction on Islamic belief and practice, drawing principally on Hanafi jurisprudence. It covered purification, salah, zakat, fasting, slaughter and other aspects of Muslim life.
What made Bayân al-Dîn extraordinary was its language.
Effendi wrote Islamic instruction in the local Cape vernacular using Arabic script — part of a literary tradition that became known as Arabic-Afrikaans, or Afrikaans Ajami.
Instead of requiring ordinary Muslims to master another language before accessing religious instruction, Islamic knowledge was communicated through words they already spoke while retaining the Arabic script associated with the Qur’an and Islamic scholarship.
Effendi even adapted Arabic letters to represent sounds found in the Cape vernacular but absent from Arabic.
The result was more than a religious textbook.
It became part of the evidence showing that Muslims were among the earliest communities to write Afrikaans.
Long before Afrikaans was formally standardised, Cape Muslims were using their spoken language to teach Islam, transmit knowledge and preserve religious identity.
Arabic-Afrikaans therefore stands at the intersection of two histories often told separately: the development of Afrikaans and the preservation of Islam under colonial rule.
His final resting place
Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi died at his home in Bree Street, Cape Town, on 29 June 1880.
He was buried at Tana Baru, one of Cape Town’s oldest surviving Muslim cemeteries and the resting place of some of the city’s most important early Muslim figures.
His grave remains there today, but his greater monument lies beyond the cemetery.
His legacy survives in Cape Muslim education, the Arabic-Afrikaans literary tradition, the Hanafi presence at the Cape and the cultural traces of an Ottoman scholar who made southern Africa his home.
His story is ultimately one of Islamic scholarship in motion: an alim crossing continents, entering an established Muslim community and adapting the knowledge he carried to the language and circumstances of the people around him.
It also places Effendi within a much longer story.
Tuan Guru’s journey from Southeast Asia and Effendi’s later journey from the Ottoman world were separated by decades and thousands of kilometres, yet both became part of the same remarkable history: scholars crossing oceans and helping Islam take deeper root at Africa’s southern tip.
More than 160 years after Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi stepped ashore in Cape Town, his life remains a testimony to something colonial borders could never completely sever, the movement of Islamic knowledge across oceans, languages and generations, and the enduring connection of South African Muslims to the wider Ummah.
You can read more of One Nation Media’s Islamic civilisation and African history features here.
