Sorry, Not Sorry by Haji Mohamed Dawjee

Author:Haji Mohamed Dawjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776092673
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2018-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

My Islamic state of mind

The University of Pretoria is a segregated black hole waiting to swallow lost souls and outcasts. And I don’t just mean in the obvious black-and-white racial sense. I mean when it comes to intra-racial and intra-cultural discrimination. It is the actual worst. The only thing I give it credit for? It’s where I met my best friend.

If I hated school – and I did – I hated varsity even more. I did not enjoy the masses of people walking from point A to point B to settle in hall A or hall B where someone could talk at them instead of with them. I did not enjoy that it had structure but also no structure. I definitely did not enjoy being told what to learn, or what made some work good and some work bad and why the hell other people got to decide that. I was also academically paralysed by what I am convinced is ADHD and a life-threatening allergy to formal education. I made use of the library; abused it. I read all kinds of books on all kinds of things. I wrote all the exams because I had to, and when things required critical thinking, discussion or debate, I went to class. When I wasn’t doing any of these things, I was pissing off the Muslim students’ association by just being me, and smoking cheap dope. Kassam, hell hath no fury like a rich Indian Muslim from Laudium at the University of Pretoria.

The Indian Muslims at UP were all from Laudium, but we attended different schools and so we hadn’t grown up together. You know? Not in the way that comes from living in a close-knit community. There were rich kids who lived on the avenues up on the hill. They were constantly surrounded by other students who were also Muslim and wealthy. They got what they wanted when they wanted it. The only thing we got in my family, whether we wanted it or not, was more education.

In my heavenly little portion of Laudium, I was surrounded by Hindu, Tamil, Christian and Muslim kids of a lower economic demographic. We played on the street and used all the neighbours’ houses for hide-and-seek. A cooldrink was a weekend delicacy because our parents were strict, but those rich Indian Muslim students got Coke in their baby bottles. Lush. Everything in their lives was lush, except their minds. Like their view of the world, which included only cookie-cutter versions of themselves with the same beliefs and thoughts, their minds were small.

We didn’t even grow up with the same religious teachings. Where they attended conventional madrassas, my siblings and I received most of our religious education at home. Every Sunday night, my dad read and explained the Quran to us verse by verse (in English), and we were made to engage in analytical discourse so as to understand the philosophical meaning of spirituality. We also explored interpretations of the text and studied it in a historical and factual manner.

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