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Abstract
Ahmad Deedat is one of South Africa's well known Muslim missionaries whose contributions towards Christian-Muslim relations have been duly acknowledged by friend and foe alike. Even though Deedat's method was not approved by many Muslims, his labours in doing mission in and outside South Africa cannot be ignored. Deedat might not be regarded as a champion of Christian-Muslim dialogue in South Africa he obliquely pushed Christian and Muslims in that direction.
Though this essay is somewhat of a review of Goolam Vahed's Ahmad Deedat: The Man and His Mission (Durban: IPCI, 2013) it employs it as a platform to throw more light on Deedat as a transnational figure. Apart from providing a synoptic overview of the Vahed's text's rich contents and pointing out its merits/demerits, it veers off into looking closely at those events and individuals/organizations that played a part in influencing Deedat; in addition it evaluates the exclusivist approach that he determinedly adopted to counter Christian mission between the 1940s and the 1990s. In the process of doing this the essay attempts to assess Deedat's legacy.
Keywords: South Africa, Deedat, Muslim, Christian, mission, transnational
0. Introduction
During the 1980s and 1990s whenever South Africa's Muslims travelled abroad for pleasure or pilgrimage, they were usually quizzed by strangers about Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and Ahmed Deedat (1918-2005). Whilst the former was known to them via news reports for his courageous political escapades as the 'scarlet pimpernel' of the African National Congress against the apartheid regime, the latter was widely known to them via his booklets and video cassettes for his intellectual 'crusades' as the zealous Muslim da'wah combatant who countered unswerving South African Christian missionaries (referred to as the tent makers). In different parts of the world - particularly those residing in the South (i.e. Africa, Southwest and Southeast Asia) - many admired both men for their sterling contributions in their respective political and religious terrains. Well, since this is not a comparative study of these two individuals as transnational figures (Sadouni 2007; 2013), it is essentially - though not exclusively - an essay that reviews Goolam Vahed's wonderful text that focus on Ahmed Deedat: The Man and His Mission (Durban: IPCI, ISBN 978-0-6205-3897-8). It, however, uses Vahed's book - that took a...