Rhoda , Ebrahim2026-08-202026-08-202006https://hdl.handle.net/10566/25232In this thesis I trace the origin and growth of the Strand Muslim community during the period 1822 to 1928. The year 1822 marks the coming of the community's first religious leader, Imam Abdol Sammat to Mosterd Bay and 1928 marks the year in which the community established their own state-aided mission school. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, this community was not founded by the descendants of the followers of Shaykh Yusuf as some local historians and others had long assumed. I offer an alternate answer to questions surrounding the origins of the community by discussing the movement of free blacks, a'immah and Muslim schoolmasters from Cape Town into the interior in the context of Muslim missionary activities in Cape Town idawah) and rural Stellenbosch towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. I contend that in the above period the Islamic leadership countered the activities of Christian missionaries in Cape Town with the establishment of the madrasah in the 1790s when Tuan Guru was released from Robben Island. I argue that the subsequent proliferation of maddris in the early nineteenth century was in fact a consolidation of Islamic da 'wah. I argue that the relative mobility of free blacks in the pre-emancipation period, as pointed out by Elphick and Giliomee, combined with their poverty stricken condition, (to which Shirley Judges and Robert Shell refer), aided and motivated some free blacks to move away from Cape Town to farms in the Hottentots Holland basin. I contend that in an early period (1795 -1840) of Christian and Muslim missionary activity at the Cape, Imam Abdol Sammat played a crucial role in the establishment of the Islamic enclave at Mosterd Bay. The Muslim community at Mosterd Bay is unique in that it was founded on Crown lands by freed slaves independent of state or missionary control. I contend that for almost sixty years the state did not act against the growing settlement because during that period its inhabitants became an integral part of the commercial and economic activity of the region. In 1882 the existence of this community was at last given formal recognition when the settlers became grantees of the land they had illegally occupied.enStrand Muslim communitya'immahMuslim schoolmastersCape TownThesis