Abu Bakr Effendi

Who was Abu Bakr Effendi?

Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi was an Osmanli qadi who was sent in 1862 by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I at the request of the British Queen Victoria to the Cape of Good Hope, in order to teach and assist the Muslim community of the Cape Malays. His birth date has often been mistaken to be in the year 1835.

Effendi was from the aristocratic Kurdish family from Arbil. He is a Sayyid, direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through Emir Zaid, son of Imam Zayn al-Abidin. Other imams in the Cape were mostly teaching the Shafi`i school of Islamic jurisprudence; he was a follower and the first teacher of Hanafi school, for which he also established a madrassa in Cape Town. He gained notoriety in 1869 after ruling that rock lobster and snoek, two staple foods in the Cape, were sinful. Many mistake him for being a Shafi'i on the basis of him being a Scholar of the 4 schools of Sunni Islam, and being able to issue religious edicts according to each one.

He died after contracting from reportedly travelling to Dera Mozambique, after having made several major contributions to Islam in South Africa. He introduced the fez for men, as well as reinstating the hijab for women. More importantly, besides his role as teacher he also published the Arabic Afrikaans "Uiteensetting van die godsdiens" in 1877.