In a unpublished manuscript, Achmat Davids accepts the contention that the Constantia exiles established a tariqa, the Qadriyyah, at the Cape. He goes on to argue that Qadriyyah doctrines decisively shaped the beliefs and practices of the Cape Muslim community. The ratiep and other expressions of sufi mysticism were a vital part of Islamic practice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cape Town and played and important role bringing converts to Islam.
In April 1994 tens of thousands of Muslims gathered in the heart of central Cape Town to mark the 300th anniversary of Islam's presence in South Africa. The event celebrated the arrival in 1694 of Shaykh Yusuf al-Taj al-Khalwati al-Maqasari (more commonly, Shaykh Yusuf of Macassar), the scholar, statesman and Sufi mystic whom most Cape Muslims regard as the founder of their community. Exiled to the Cape because of his role in leading opposition to Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago, Shaykh Yusuf and his large retinue were the most visible early Muslim community south of the Limpopo. To this day Yusuf is venerated as a saint, and his kramat [tomb] thirty miles beyond Cape Town has been a place of pilgrimage since at least the end of the eighteenth century. [Slaves, Sufism, and Conversion to Islam at the Cape].
The Qadiri Order diffused to this country as early as 1667 when a number of political prisoners from Sumatra were exiled to the Cape [Arrival of Tariqa's in the Cape - Naqshbandi SA]. Shaikh Yusuf al-Taj al-Makasari was another great Sufi in the Indonesian archipelago who was also influenced by Ibn al-Arabi (may Allah be pleased with him). He was born in Makasar Sulawesi (eastern archipelago) in 1626, and at the age of 18 left for the Middle East via Banten and Aceh, in search of knowledge. Back in the archipelago, he settled down in the Kingdom of Banten, West Java, spread the tarikat Qadiriyah and Khalwatiyah and then became a very influential mufti under the rule of Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa. In South Africa, Sufism was the mainstay of Indian Muslims who continued their links with the great saints in the past.
Out of the sight of the Dutch, if never completely out of Dutch minds, the Shaiks quietly attracted followers from among the slaves and free blacks, instructed them in the tenets and practices of Sufism, and initiated them into their respective Sufi tariqa [literally, path or way; conventionally, order or brotherhood], thereby laying the foundations of Islam at the Cape. Bradlow argues that before these men died they ensured the survival of their tariqa, and of Cape Islam, by investing others with khalifah, the authority to initiate new members. In this way, "several tariqas came to be established at the Cape, each with [its] own network of Shaikhs and murids [initiated members of the tariqa]." Hence during the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, there were several Muslim communities at the Cape--small, secretive, isolated, and organized around the practices of Sufi mysticism.
