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This article identifies three sites of Islamic politics in South Africa for closer and critical analysis and appraisal. It proposes that Islamic politics inscribed an idealistic vision for the future. It promoted a utopian vision that was by definition unattainable. Secondly, the paper argues that Islamic politics was preoccupied with representation, a relentless and somewhat impossible task of representing Islam and Muslims in the public. Utopia and perfect representation, then, were the chimeral quests of Islamic politics.

Klappentext: From the mid-1970s, the awareness of injustice and apartheid in South Africa increased in the media and in scholarship. From the secular perspective, it was no surprise to find a Christian denomination directly involved in the formulation of the apartheid-doctrine. However, it was far more surprising to fing opposition leaders, even many members of the African National Congress, referring in their strucggle to religious doctrines. South Africa imposed a challenge to all the voices that claimed that the process of democratisation was only possible through secularisation. The contributions to this book represent a spectrum of religious and political perspectives in South Africa in their social context. Some tackle the important question of transformation within religions. Since the period of transition and democracy, the country is witness to a re-ordering and re-classification of values and priorities within society and religious traditions. The contributions also focus on the possible role of religions in fashioning values and identities on a broad national scale. They subject to evaluation multi-culturalism, education, and development under the impact of religious values, ethics and symbols.

This edited collection presents Islamic education in South Africa and a number of countries in Europe. It brings together general concerns of education among Muslims, together with current and unique developments in each country. Given the place of Islamic education in public debate, the collection includes a variety of contributions that respond to the goals and future of Islamic education, the context of terrorism and counter-terrorism, the place of religious education in the context of secular education and the role religious education plays in promoting or hindering social cohesion. It includes reflections on where Muslims should be directing education in the next few years to make it socially relevant and contribute to the democratization of society, as well as some comments on the unfortunate but real crosscurrents in educational policy and counter-terrorist initiatives. In between, it contains some reflective essays on the uniqueness and commonalities of Islamic education in various countries, on unexpected and unknown outcomes, and on new philosophies of education. In fact, the essays may be seen as critical contributions on a number of themes that are debated in the public sphere and within these schools.