From the first chapters at UWC and UCT in 1969 to a nationwide network. Explore the milestones, the resistance against apartheid, and the triumphs that have shaped MSA Union over half a century.
Explore Our Journey
1958 – 1969
The story of Muslim students organising in South Africa begins with a Cape Town imam. Abdullah Haron was made Imam of Al-Jamia Mosque in Claremont in 1955, and from that pulpit he did what the state least wanted a religious leader to do: he took the young people seriously. In 1958 he established the Claremont Muslim Youth Association, and in 1960 he founded Muslim News, a community newspaper that ran until 1986. His discussion groups at the mosque turned the study of Islam towards the injustice outside its doors.
On 28 May 1969 the Security Branch summoned him to Caledon Square police station. He was held in solitary confinement for 123 days and interrogated daily. He died in detention on 27 September 1969, the first cleric of any faith to die in apartheid custody; the inquest of the day accepted a fall down a flight of stairs, despite two broken ribs and twenty-seven bruises. Forty thousand people walked his coffin ten kilometres to the cemetery in Mowbray. In 2023 a reopened inquest found the Security Branch responsible for his death.
Muslim students had organised on campus before, in a small way: an Islamic Association at Wits from 1952, one at UCT run as a sub-committee of the student council from 1962, and one at the University College on Salisbury Island in Durban from early 1969, with Suleman Dangor as its first secretary. What the Imam wanted was something bigger. By Ganief Hendricks's account, Imam Haron was keen to see a proper association of Muslim students and asked Imam Nordien, his teacher in District Six, to find the students who would found it. In 1969 the students at the University of the Western Cape formed the first independent Islamic Association at the Cape, chaired by Shaykh Faeek Gamieldien. In September that year, the month the Imam died in detention, it joined with the UCT association to found the Cape Muslim Students Association at the Liberman Institute in District Six. Over a thousand students came to the launch. It was a generation that had watched what happened to the Imam, and took his example, rather than his silence, as the lesson.
“The Security Branch of the South African Police are held responsible for the acts and omissions leading directly to the death of Imam Abdullah Haron.”
1974
From 1970 the Cape association's editors travelled to other campuses on student-press money and found Muslim students everywhere wanting the same thing. The Wits society was revived in 1971, Natal's founded the same year, Hewat's in 1972. At Easter 1973 delegates from UCT, UWC, the Natal medical school and Durban-Westville met at Assalaam on the Natal south coast; that July, Ganief Hendricks came back from a students' conference in Tripoli where it had been resolved to found MSAs across the world, and called a meeting on whether South Africa should have one.
In January 1974 the Cape Muslim Students Association hosted the inaugural conference of the Muslim Students' Association of South Africa in Cape Town, sponsored by Muslim News. UCT, UWC, the University of Natal, Durban-Westville and Hewat Training College took part, with Wits by proxy. Ganief Hendricks of UWC was elected the first president, Wasfie Jassiem secretary-general and Hassiem Boltman vice-president; the Bekoedratoellah Hall in Athlone became the headquarters, and the Cape association became the MSA's Cape chapter. What had been a handful of campus societies became one national body. The MSA Union that carries the work today was founded from it a generation later, in 2001.
The founders described what they had built as an ideological movement with Islam as its bedrock and sheet-anchor, and as a students' organisation dedicated to the upliftment of the student. Both halves of that description still hold. Over the following years the MSA published its own newsletters and journals, among them Islam at a Glance, Bulletin, World View, Al-Mizaan, Al-Talmiz and the magazine Inqilaab, edited in turn by the different campuses.
“An ideological movement with Islam as its bedrock and sheet-anchor; a students' organisation dedicated to the upliftment of the student.”
1976 – 1989
From 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising, the MSA was openly and consistently articulate against the apartheid government and its policies, even as it argued internally over how political a students' body should be. That argument cost it members. In 1976 Jamaluddin Hamdulay, unhappy with what he saw as an apolitical MSA, left to found the South African Students Association, Africanist in outlook and close to AZAPO and Qiblah; others went to the Black Students Society. The MSA continued.
The 1979 revolution in Iran changed the temperature of Muslim politics everywhere, and South Africa's Muslim youth were no exception. Two political organisations grew up alongside the MSA in those years: Qiblah, founded in 1979 around Imam Achmad Cassiem, and the Call of Islam, formed in Cape Town in 1984 by figures from the Muslim Youth Movement who also sat on the United Democratic Front's Western Cape executive, several of them students. In 1981 the MSA stood with the Islamic Council, the Muslim Youth Movement and others in calling on Muslims to boycott the Republic's twentieth-anniversary celebrations; in 1984 it put its name to the full-page rejection of the Tricameral Parliament.
The MSA saw itself as one part of a wider Islamic Movement in South Africa. Its own publications listed the others: the Muslim Youth Movement, founded in 1970 and sharing many members with the MSA; the Islamic Medical Association and its student wing; the associations of Muslim accountants, lawyers and social scientists; SANZAF, the zakah fund; and the Islamic Da'wah Movement. Those who lived through it remember the MSA as the mother body from which much of that movement drew its people, and count later foundations such as the Mustadafin Foundation and Radio 786, first on air on 24 September 1995, among its descendants. From the same circle came the two currents that split the movement's politics: Qiblah's pan-Africanist refusal, and the Call of Islam's road through the UDF into the ANC, taken by people such as Ebrahim Rasool and Imam Gassan Solomon. Most of those bodies have outlived the movement that produced them, and several are still at work.
1990 – 2004
By the early 1990s the national structure had collapsed. Every campus still had its Islamic Society or MSA, but nothing joined them. There was a brief revival around the first democratic election: in 1994 the Islamic Society at Durban-Westville put the ANC, AZAPO, the ACDP, the PAC and the African Muslim Party on one panel under the title Where shall we place our vote?, and MSA members served as voter marshals. After the election the activists were absorbed into the new politics and, as one member put it, the student bodies found it hard to stay relevant.
The rebuilding began in Gauteng. Between 1998 and 1999 the MSAs at Wits, the Wits medical school, the Rand Afrikaans University, the health-science students and the University of Pretoria formed MSA Gauteng, launched in 1999; a group in KwaZulu-Natal met the same year to revive theirs. When the Rhodes and Potchefstroom MSAs asked to join, the Gauteng body was renamed the MSA Union, an umbrella with a two-year executive over the one-year campus committees. Muhammad Cajee, Taahir Hoorzook, Zahed Ghoor, Humza Carrim, Mohamed Nanabhay and Mikaeel Collier were among the students who drove across the country's campuses laying the foundation. The MSA Union was formalised in September 2001, and its first structure adopted in 2003. Its officials are elected from the leaders of the campus MSAs, as they still are.
In 2001 the MSA at the University of Natal in Durban started a monthly newsletter, The Message, edited by Bilal Randeree and Mariam Jhaveri. By 2003 it was a full-colour magazine, still produced in Durban but written and read nationally. In KwaZulu-Natal the campus bodies had always been called Islamic Societies rather than MSAs; from 2003 they took the MSA name too, so that one name covered every campus.
2005 – today
The union's annual camp brings members from every chapter together to talk through what each campus is facing, and campaigns such as the annual Charity Week turned that network towards the communities around the campuses.
In 2014 the state that had killed Imam Haron awarded him, posthumously, the Order of Luthuli in Gold. In 2024 the MSA marked fifty years since the conference of 1974 with a historic dhikr at the Auwal Masjid, the oldest mosque in South Africa, led by Shaykh Ismail Londt. The chapters that gathered for it are the ones listed on this site.
