Farid Esack

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Farid Esack (1959- ) is a South African Muslim scholar, writer, and political activist known for his opposition to apartheid, his appointment by Nelson Mandela as a gender equity commissioner, and his work for inter-religious dialogue.

Farid Esack was born into a poor Muslim family in the Wynberg suburb of Cape Town. While still a child, he and his mother were forcibly relocated as "non-Whites" under provisions of the Group Areas Act. At age nine, Esack joined the fundamentalist and revivalist Tablighi Jamaat movement, and by age 10 he was teaching at a madrassah. At the age of 15 he received a scholarship to pursue Islamic studies in Pakistan. By the time he left for Pakistan in 1974 he had also become the local chairman of an anti-apartheid group, National Youth Action, and had been detained several times by security police.

Although he found life in authoritarian Pakistan difficult, Esack spent eight years as a student in Karachi, completing the traditional Darsi Nizami program of Islamic studies and becoming a mawlana or Muslim cleric. As he noted in the introduction to his book On Being a Muslim, some of his fellow students later joined the Taliban in Afghanistan. Having grown up with Christian neighbors, Esack became critical of discrimination against Christians and other religious minorities in Pakistan.

Returning to South Africa in 1982, Esack helped form the Muslim anti-apartheid group Call of Islam, which became an important sub-organisation of the United Democratic Front. Esack addressed hundreds of protest meetings, formed ties with inter-faith opponents of apartheid, and became a leader of the World Conference on Religion and Peace.

In 1990 Esack left South Africa to continue his theological studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, England, and pursued postdoctoral studies in biblical hermeneutics at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology, Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

Esack has also been involved with the organisation Positive Muslims, dedicated to helping HIV-positive Muslims in Africa.

As of 2006-2007 Farid Esack is the William Henry Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[edit] Books by Farid Esack

• The Struggle. (1988) ISBN 0620125195
• But Musa went to Fir'aun! A Compilation of Questions and Answers about the Role of Muslims in the South African Struggle for Liberation. (South Africa, 1989) ISBN 0620141050
• Qur'an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression. (Oxford, 1997) ISBN 1851681213
• Islam and Politics (London, 1998) OCLC 67856723
• On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today. (Oxford, 1999) ISBN 1851681469
• The Qur'an: a Short Introduction. (Oxford, 2002) ISBN 1851682317
• Islam, HIV and AIDS: Reflections Based on Compassion, Responsibility and Justice. (NNNN) ISBN

[edit] References

• Profile of Farid Esack, March 2000.
• Harvard Divinity School, Visiting Faculty: Farid Esack.