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The Cape Town launch opens a Prophetic conversation that speaks from the tip of Africa to the entire continent and beyond. Africa carries within it many histories of dispossession and colonial brutality. Yet it also carries within it the Prophetic capacities of endurance, hospitality, artistic expression and moral imagination.
By ASLAM FATAAR
THE launch of the Global Commemoration of 1500 Years of the Prophetic Legacy in Cape Town on July 9, 2025 marked a defining moment in how we remember, relate to, and carry forward the legacy of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
This event was attended by leaders of organisations, heads of institutions, ulama, academics, and educators. It marked both a moment of global remembrance and a local summons to ethical action, drawing deeply from our distinct histories of struggle, resilience, and spiritual inheritance.
Cape Town’s selection as the starting point of this commemoration is both significant and timely. As a place shaped by colonialism, slavery, exile, and enduring spiritual resistance, it offers a living archive of how the Prophetic legacy has been sustained, adapted, and reimagined under conditions of hardship. Here, at the southern tip of Africa, the Prophet’s memory continues to live in practices of remembrance, justice, and care.
The task before us now is to renew and extend that legacy by allowing it to shape how we live, organise, speak, and care in the face of today’s crises.
The launch in Cape Town sets in motion not only an act of reflection but an active re-engagement with the meaning and relevance of the Prophet’s legacy across Africa and the globe.
Commemoration as conversation
Marking 1500 lunar years since the Prophet’s birth invites more than nostalgia. It opens the way for conversation across generations, communities, and struggles. This is not conversation in the formal sense, but in the Quranic and Prophetic sense: a way of listening with depth, responding with integrity, and living with purpose.
Marking 1500 lunar years since the Prophet’s birth invites more than nostalgia. It opens the way for conversation across generations, communities, and struggles.
Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ lived in a time marked by injustice and social fragmentation. His mission involved not only delivering revelation but embodying mercy, truth, and presence amid real suffering. He paid attention to the voiceless, stood alongside the marginalised, and guided with patience and care.
In our time, marked by conflict, inequality, ecological degradation, and digital alienation, his legacy invites us to re-learn how to listen. How to stand with those who suffer. How to build spaces where new forms of dignity and solidarity can grow.
A Prophetic legacy for today
To carry the Prophet’s legacy into the present is to allow it to shape how we respond to our real conditions. We need an imaginative Prophetic vision that meets people in their actual struggles and helps them live with moral clarity.
In Cape Town, this includes youth unemployment, housing injustice, social isolation, and the ongoing effects of historical trauma. Our communities have drawn from Prophetic ethics through acts of feeding, learning, praying, caring, and organising. These are moral responses that reflect the Prophet’s presence in daily life.
A living Prophetic legacy must speak in the language of the people (bi lisāni qawmihi), in isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Wolof, English, Afro-French, Afrikaaps, Moesliem Afrikaans, Arabic, Urdu, and Swahili. When our languages carry the resonance of Prophetic meaning, they become more than tools of communication. They become vessels of ethical awakening, touching hearts, stirring critical consciousness, and cultivating a longing for knowledge, justice, and transformation. The eloquence (bayān) we nurture in our speech, poetry, and storytelling should emerge from prophetic values and give rise to action grounded in compassion, dignity, and solidarity.
The Prophetic legacy must resonate with the lived realities of a young woman in Bonteheuwel raising her siblings, a teacher in Mitchells Plain striving to inspire hope
The Prophetic legacy must resonate with the lived realities of a young woman in Bonteheuwel raising her siblings, a teacher in Mitchells Plain striving to inspire hope, a Senegalese Tijani murīd living with spiritual grounding, and the dreams of children growing up between Langa and Macassar. It must enter the everyday rhythms of endurance and the imaginative ways people craft lives of justice and dignity. That is where the Prophet’s light continues to shine.
For today’s youth, carrying the Prophet’s legacy involves navigating the digital, artificial intelligence and social landscapes of their time. Multimodal tools, such as videos, podcasts, storytelling, design, and social media platforms, offer them meaningful ways to articulate, embody, and share Prophetic ethics. These digital expressions provide accessible spaces where Prophetic principles of justice, dignity, and compassion can be translated into contemporary forms of activism, solidarity, and dialogue.
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Listening as ethical praxis
To speak of a dialogical Prophetic legacy is to foreground listening as an ethical posture. The Prophet’s way of listening was never detached. He listened with his whole being, presence, humility, and care. He listened to pain, to uncertainty, to the unspoken. He listened not to dominate, but to understand and respond.
This same ethic of listening is needed today. Dialogue is not debate. It is a mutual encounter in which something new can emerge. It requires slowing down, making room for silences, for discomfort, and the complexity of others’ experiences. It requires us to enter our communities not only with answers, but with questions. The Prophet ﷺ engaged his society by entering people’s lives with attentiveness and trust.
To build justice in our time, we must cultivate dialogical spaces in our homes, schools, mosques, and public forums. Spaces where listening itself becomes an act of service. Where we do not talk past one another but hear one another into healing. This is the Prophetic grammar of care that remains as urgent today as it was in seventh-century Makkah.
From Cape Town to Africa and the World
The Cape Town launch opens a Prophetic conversation that speaks from the tip of Africa to the entire continent and beyond. Africa carries within it many histories of dispossession and colonial brutality. Yet it also carries within it the Prophetic capacities of endurance, hospitality, artistic expression and moral imagination.
Muslim communities across Africa have long sustained Prophetic values amidst poverty, conflict, exile, and renewal. They have crafted legacies of remembrance and survival through madrasas and schools, in the worlds of business, labour, sport, and recreation, and interfaith engagement and struggles for justice and solidarity.
To carry the Prophet’s legacy from Cape Town to the world is to affirm that Islam in Africa is not marginal. It is generative. It holds vital keys to rethinking what ethical community means in a world shaped by displacement, ecological collapse, and a hunger for dignity.
As the commemorative project continues to unfold, our shared commitment is to keep the Prophetic legacy rooted in the everyday lives of people. It would continue to resonate within the textures of ordinary experience, nurturing new generations who carry its message with courage and creativity, translating the Prophetic imaginary into the languages, forms, and conditions of their own lives.
This global movement, emerging from Cape Town, reminds us that the Prophet’s ﷺ message was never limited to a single place or moment. It flowed through memory, struggle, migration, and love, carried by people who acted with conscience and care, even in the hardest of times.
Living Prophetic inheritance
Such resonance invites reflection on what it means to live his inheritance today. The commemoration rightly situates the Prophetic legacy as a living inheritance. Across generations, Muslims have sustained the Prophet’s example through prayer, remembrance, teaching, recitation, and communal rituals. In the face of adversity, they have embodied the values of justice, mercy, and resilience.
This inheritance is carried by both institutions and the everyday actions of mothers, teachers, youth, and workers. Their efforts in nurturing, teaching, resisting, and building form a living tradition of prophetic wisdom. These practices show that the Prophet’s legacy continues to be lived and renewed through acts of care, justice, and hope.
Aslam Fataar is Research Professor in Higher Education Transformation at Stellenbosch University and a contributor to the Prophetic Legacy Project launched in Cape Town in July 2025.
