Suliman Ghoor: A legacy of quiet philanthropy and vision

Suliman Ghoor, fondly known as ‘Uncle Solly’, leaves behind a largely unmatched legacy of philanthropy as a patron of Islamic education.

By PROFESSOR EBRAHIM MOOSA

On February 25, 2026 – 7 Ramaḍān 1447—South Africa lost one of its most consequential and visionary Muslim figures. Suliman Mohamed Ghoor, fondly known to all as “Uncle Solly” of Vryburg, passed away in Johannesburg at the ripe age of 93.

Businessman, philanthropist, and a tireless patron of Islamic education at home and abroad, he left behind a legacy that few could match and almost none would have kept so quietly.

He was born on September 29, 1932 in Ranavav, a village set in the Khatiavar Peninsula of Gujarat, India. Ranavav is today a small town of some 160,000 souls situated roughly 15km from Porbandar – the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, who himself had spent formative years in South Africa as a lawyer. This geography of coincidence is fitting. The region’s people are also known as Memons, a community with a distinct Gujarati dialect and culture that today constitutes an impressive and influential global diaspora. From such roots grew the Ghoor family’s story in South Africa.

The family ancestor, Cassim Abdulla Ghoor, was a farmer in Ranavav. He had two sons: Dada Cassim (DC) Ghoor and Mohamed Cassim (MC) Ghoor, whose mother died when the latter was just two months old. It was DC Ghoor who first made the crossing from India, arriving in South Africa at the tender age of ten in 1888, where he worked for a merchant. His younger brother MC Ghoor followed, also arriving at age ten, spending a few months in Dundee, then Pretoria, before joining his brother in Vryburg in 1898. MC Ghoor was Suliman Ghoor’s father.

Their destination, Vryburg, was itself a place of layered histories. Once the capital of the short-lived Boer Republic of Stellaland (1882–1885), and then the capital of the British Crown Colony of British Bechuanaland (1885 –1895), Vryburg was later annexed to the Cape Colony and is now part of the North West Province. Its population in the 19th century numbered 18 082 residents. Into this remote but historically charged town, DC and MC Ghoor were drawn by a network of Memon families also from Ranavav. The brothers alternated their stays between South Africa and India for several decades: while one kept the family hearth in Ranavav, the other worked in South Africa. In 1903 they formalised their presence, opening a general dealer partnership trading as DC Ghoor in the downtown area next to Vryburg’s Grand Hotel.

MC Ghoor continued his crossings. In 1933, he brought his wife and five children to Vryburg, the youngest of whom was Suliman, who was then barely a year old. Suliman began his schooling in the town but could not advance beyond the primary stage: apartheid’s brutal logic barred him from the only white high school, and no high school existed for non-whites. Circumstances thus pressed him into the family business. DC Ghoor and his brother MC dissolved their partnership in 1935. MC Ghoor then renamed the departmental store MC Ghoor & Sons but died five years later at the age of 52. Suliman Ghoor was only eight years old, and his older siblings assumed responsibility. Eventually Suliman joined them and later took charge, specialising over the decades in clothing, curtaining, fabrics, flooring, appliances and furniture. In the 1970s the Group Areas Act forced the business out of the downtown area toward the edge of what is today’s central business district. There it continues to flourish, serving a Vryburg which has now grown to 90 000 residents and functioning as a regional hub for a vast farming and mining hinterland.

Through the success of his business and the force of a sterling character, Suliman Ghoor gained recognition far beyond the Memon circles of South Africa. From seven to 10 Muslim families in the 1880s, Vryburg had grown to over a thousand Muslims, hosting a mosque whose committee Suliman Ghoor chaired at the time of his death. Yet modesty and self-effacement were his most distinguished marks. He would never disclose the extent of his own generosity. The most he would ever say – and I witnessed this firsthand – was “our family helped out a bit,” words offered as encouragement for others to give. What he withheld was that his contribution was almost always the lion’s share of any project he took to heart. He was among those who spent his wealth according to the Qurʾānic teaching, “secretly,” fully reassured that his reward is with his Lord (Q 2:274). This, too, is the teaching of an authentic ḥadīth: giving with the right hand such that the left hand does not know what the right hand gives.

His public engagement with Islamic life was no less devoted. In the 1970s he became active in the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa, which hosted important international figures and made a vital contribution to Islamic awareness in the country. He was especially moved by the Pakistani Islamic scholar and preacher Mawlānā Fazlur Rahman Ansārī (d. 1974) and by the Lebanese-American biochemist and Islamic preacher Dr. Ahmed Sakr (d. 2015), who advanced the cause of halal certification in the United States. Suliman Ghoor was also a regular member and contributor to the Quranic Study Circle in Vryburg. And he was deeply engaged with the South African National Zakah Fund (SANZAF), a premier Muslim faith-based socio-economic welfare and development organization.

His legacy is most indelibly marked by two major projects. He had a close personal relationship with the physician Dr. Imtiaz Suliman, the founder of the globally reputed NGO Gift of the Givers (GOTG). It was Suliman Ghoor, together with Dr Haroon Tayob and an established network of friends, who urged Dr. Imtiaz Suliman to commit himself fully to relief work. GOTG is today known as the unofficial “fourth arm of the state” in South Africa: a hyper-efficient, non-governmental disaster relief organisation that routinely arrives at crisis zones faster than the government itself, both at home and abroad.

The second project was the founding of the Islamic Academy of South Africa. In 1989, Suliman Ghoor and his network of donor friends formed the Academy and endowed, in perpetuity, two academic positions at the University of Cape Town (UCT): a junior lectureship and a full lectureship. The Academy also supported smaller ventures at other South African universities. It was an act of institutional vision, executed with the quiet determination that characterised everything he did.

After a national search, the inaugural hires for these two positions were Professor Abdulkader Tayob, a graduate of Temple University, USA, appointed as lecturer, and me as the junior lecturer. In his tribute, Tayob – now emeritus professor of Islamic Studies at UCT—noted “Uncle Solly’s” unique, quiet and understated manner: a businessman with a deep social commitment. Tayob, who knew him through family networks and later worked closely with him, added: “Uncle Solly represented a long line of visionaries in South Africa that committed themselves to its current crop of vibrant institutions, be it mosques, schools, or colleges. May that line not disappear. We need people like him, more than ever in our world.”

Without that endowment of the Islamic Academy embodying Suliman Ghoor’s vision, I often wonder what alternate trajectory my career would have taken, were it not for the opportunity he and his committed group of friends created for two South African scholars. Whatever contribution we make will always be indebted to his act of social benevolence and to the contributions of his colleagues in the Islamic Academy. We will never know for certain, but I carry an informed hunch that when additional fundraising for these positions slowed, Uncle Solly and his network of friends quietly covered whatever remained – asking nothing, saying less. The Muslim tradition is very explicit in the teaching of the Prophet ﷺ, who said: “Whoever inaugurates a good practice shall obtain its reward – as well as the reward of those who act upon it after the one who started it, without diminishing their reward.”

Suliman Ghoor was also deeply drawn to Islamic Sufism and the tradition of self-purification. In the 1990s he and his brothers sponsored the translation into English of the works of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (470–561 AH / 1077–1166 CE), the world-renowned Persian scholar, preacher, and founder of the Qādiriyya Sufi order. Through his patronage, several volumes were translated by Muhtar Holland and published, bringing this treasure of Islamic spiritual writings to new generations of readers.

Shaykh Saʿdullah Khan, the Chief Executive Officer of Islamia College in Cape Town, also a native of Vryburg, but never a permanent resident after his childhood, recalled “Uncle Solly as a kind and pleasant man with a heart of gold.” Endearing in his soft-spoken nature, Khan recalls conversations with Suliman Ghoor about translations of significant Islamic literature. It is during these “sittings at his home,” Khan said, “that I realised the remarkable insight of this quiet, unassuming man from a small town who had this incredible passionate interest in enlightening people the world over.”

All Suliman Ghoor’s siblings had predeceased him. He is survived by two children – Bashyr and Asima – five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. A middle son, Samir, died in a tragic accident in 1990.

With the passing of this great South African figure, all communities are the poorer. Yet none more so than South Africa’s Muslim community, for which he was a pillar, but whose height was largely invisible to those who stood under its shelter.

أَعْدَى الزَّمَانَ سَخَاؤُهُ فَسَخَا بِهِ

وَلَقَدْ يَكُونُ بِهِ الزَّمَانُ بَخِيلَا

His munificence has infected time itself, making it generous, though time, were it not for him, would be a miser.

— Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/965)

Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame in the USA.

This article was first published by Al-Qalam.
Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA.
(Photo supplied)