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A reflection on the various engagements the writer was involved in while discussing the Prophetic legacy across public worlds – from the southern tip of Africa to the Far East.
By PROFESSOR ASLAM FATAAR
Over the past few weeks, I have had the privilege of participating in several public discussions on our edited volume, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ at 1500: His Prophetic Legacy, Ethical Vision and Contemporary Resonance.
These engagements took place in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Malang, Indonesia. What stayed with me most deeply throughout these encounters was a recurring question: how do we carry the Prophetic legacy meaningfully into a fractured and rapidly changing world?
That question came alive most powerfully for me during the morning launch discussion of the book at the Islamia College Auditorium in Lansdowne on Friday, May 9.
The morning launch discussion at the Islamia College Auditorium in Lansdowne on May 9 brought these themes together with remarkable depth and resonance. The core panel of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, Prof Xolile Simon and The Revd Canon Michael Weeder each approached Prophetic legacy through different but complementary registers of ethical reflection. Professor Nico Koopman, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Social Impact, Transformation & Personnel at Stellenbosch University, added impromptu remarks.
Rasool reflected on the importance of reading religious traditions through what he called the ‘surround sound’ of history, struggle, context and moral responsibility. Simon engaged the book’s themes of coexistence, race, civic pluralism and multimodal meaning-making through richly layered scholarly reflection. Weeder, in turn, grounded these larger ethical questions in intimate human memory as he spoke about his mother, an Anglican woman in Elsies River who crossed the township boundary into Bonteheuwel to seek a taweez from a Muslim healer, known in the Cape as a doukum, for the protection of her children.
He recalled Qur’anic verses pinned beneath his vest as a child navigating difficult streets. He described his mother placing the taweez beside the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer before gathering her children to pray.
Before returning to Father Michael’s reflections, I found myself thinking about how many of these same ethical questions had emerged throughout the various discussions around the book.
One of the first discussions took place at the Beyers Naudé Centre at Stellenbosch University. Academics, students, members of the Prophetic Legacy Commission and public intellectuals, including Adnaan Adams, Shaykh Sadullah Khan and Dr Elias Parker, gathered for an open and searching engagement. Questions emerged about coexistence, Palestine, race, the ecological crisis, educational responsibility and the role of faith traditions in societies bearing deep historical wounds.
The discussions deepened further during later engagements in Southeast Asia. At Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, conversations focused on ethical leadership and educational responsibility. In Singapore, younger members of Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS), the equivalent of the MJC, raised sophisticated and animated questions about pluralism, co-living, gender equality, interfaith solidarity, AI-mediated life and the ethical pressures of hyper-modern urban societies.
What moved me was the seriousness with which these younger participants approached the conversation. They were not interested in easy answers or inherited slogans. They were searching for ethical companionship amidst accelerated social change. They were asking how the Prophetic legacy could come to life within their own social realities, shaped by digital mediation, economic precarity, loneliness, ecological anxiety and intense diversity.
At the University of Brawijaya in Malang, Indonesia, I reflected in a khutbah sermon on the travelling ethical archive of Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ and Shaykh Yusuf. The Prophetic legacy travelled historically through oceans, exile, migration, memory, recitation and embodied practice. It moved through ports, mosques, homes, schools, shrines and communities long before it became fixed in institutional structures. It continues to travel through communities seeking ethical ways of living amidst difficult conditions.
These conversations reinforced for me the importance of speaking about the Prophetic legacy through forms capable of carrying ethical depth into contemporary public life.
At the Islamia launch, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool offered a profound methodology for approaching religious traditions in complex times. Drawing on ideas of text, context, subtext, pretext and what he called the ‘surround sound’ shaping interpretation, he reminded the audience that ethical reading requires historical attentiveness, political awareness and moral depth.
Prof Xolile Simon offered a richly layered engagement with the book’s chapters on race, coexistence and civic pluralism. What struck me especially was his commitment to multimodal scholarly engagement. He listened to podcasts, watched online discussions and engaged contributors’ digital materials alongside the written text in order to better understand the ethical and intellectual textures shaping their work.
Their contributions reminded me that the Prophetic legacy now requires forms of ethical curation capable of carrying memory, dignity, attentiveness and beauty within the communicative worlds contemporary publics inhabit today.
Michael Weeder and the Cape’s ethical archive
It was within this wider atmosphere of ethical searching that Father Michael Weeder’s reflections resonated so profoundly. From the book itself, one of the central arguments is that the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ embodied an ethical grammar of mercy, attentiveness, justice, dignity and care in everyday human life.
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The volume is organised around themes of personhood, coexistence, justice, pedagogy and imagination, while iḥsān runs across the collection as an ethic of beauty, excellence and ethical responsibility. Listening to Father Michael, I realised that his reflections had given living expression to precisely these ethical themes.
His reflections moved gently across slavery, dispossession, District Six, Tuan Guru, motherhood, spiritual companionship and the sacred practices through which ordinary people carried one another through difficult lives.
As I listened, I found myself deeply moved because Father Michael’s reflections illuminated something profoundly important about the Cape’s ethical archive and about the deeper aspirations of the book itself.
His mother’s actions embodied an ethic of attentiveness, dignity, care and protection amidst vulnerability. Her actions interrupted fear through compassion. They carried people through uncertainty without surrendering tenderness or humanity.
That, to me, is the living work of iḥsān, an ethics of beauty and excellence. Iḥsān comes to life in gestures of care, ethical presence, restraint, memory and shared human responsibility. It comes to life when people refuse to give up in difficult circumstances. Father Michael’s reflections carried this ethical sensibility with extraordinary beauty and gentleness.
His presentation also illuminated the Cape’s long traditions of ethical co-living and anti-colonial existence. The sacred historically travelled across homes, kitchens, churches, mosques, madrassahs, neighbourhoods and shared struggles. Ethical life moved through people carrying one another.
The Cape’s social history is replete with examples of this intertwined existence. Ordinary people often lived across inherited religious, linguistic and cultural boundaries through neighbourliness, shared suffering, ethical intimacy and mutual care.
Father Michael’s story captured this world beautifully. His mother’s gesture did not erase her own religious commitments. Rather, it reflected a deeper recognition that protection, prayer, mercy and human vulnerability could be held together within shared ethical life.
Abdullah Ibrahim, memory and ethical co-living
As Father Michael spoke, on his prompting, I also found myself thinking about Abdullah Ibrahim’s music. Listening to ‘Mannenberg’, ‘Soweto’, ‘Tuan Guru’ or ‘Hoe Gaarie Padtjie Narrie Kramat Toe’ is to hear the Cape remembering itself through sound. Jazz, hymnody, mosque rhythms, slave memory, improvisation, grief, longing and hope flow together within one musical archive.
Dr Christine Lucia’s important essay on Abdullah Ibrahim describes how his music creates ‘spaces of memory’ through which people imagined dignity and future possibility amidst apartheid dislocation. His music carries the emotional textures of ordinary people’s lives: forced removals, labour, worship, celebration, yearning, resistance and survival.
That musical archive resonates deeply with Father Michael’s reflections and with the broader aspirations of the book itself. The Cape’s ethical traditions have long been shaped through hybrid forms of cultural and spiritual life grounded in shared vulnerability and human care.
Perhaps this is the deeper invitation of the book itself. The Prophetic legacy cannot remain confined to text alone. It must move through scholarship, the arts, science, pedagogy, storytelling, digital media and everyday ethical action. It must speak meaningfully to contemporary publics, especially younger generations searching for dignity, meaning and companionship in a rapidly changing world.
The discussions around this book over the past few weeks reminded me that the Prophetic legacy remains alive when carried by ethical presence, memory, compassion and shared human care.
Together, the reflections of Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, Prof Xolile Simon and Father Michael Weeder illuminated complementary dimensions of this ethical inheritance: historical attentiveness, intellectual depth, multimodal engagement, spiritual companionship and human care.
The Prophet Muḥammad’s ﷺ legacy continues to illuminate pathways towards mercy, justice, coexistence and human flourishing. Our responsibility now is to carry that ethical archive forward with wisdom, beauty and iḥsān.
Book details
Prophet Muhammad at 1500: His Prophetic Legacy, Ethical Vision and Contemporary Resonance, edited by Prof Aslam Fataar (Stellenbosch University), is published by Awqaf SA and the 1500 Legacy Project.
The book is available from Al-Ikhlaas Academia Library, Darul Latif Networks, Exclusive Books (Cavendish), Chapter 96 Books, Sawants Creations and Loot.co.za.
- Video by Awqaf SA
