Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi (1814–1880) was an Ottoman Qadhi who was sent in 1862 by the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I at the request of Qureen Victoria.
Coming from a region where the three major languages of Islam meet, Kurdish `ulama have often played the role of cultural brokers between the Arabic, Persian and Turkish speaking worlds. Scholars and mystics such as Ibrahim al-Kurani, Mawlana Khalid, Muhammad Amin al-Kurdi and Said-i Nursi played important roles as disseminators of mystical ideas across linguistic boundaries, from India and Iran to the Turkish and Arab worlds and hence to other parts of the world of Islam (van Bruinessen 1998). Perhaps even more remarkable than these well-known mystics is the feat of cultural brokerage performed by the Kurdish scholar Abu Bakr Efendi from southern Kurdistan, who in the 1860’s settled in South Africa and wrote a book on the religious obligations of Islam in the local Dutch dialect for the benefit of the ‘Malay’ Muslim community of South Africa.
This somewhat elusive scholar arrived in Cape Town in 1862, as an emissary of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz,2 in order to teach Islamic law and doctrine to the Muslim community and to resolve certain religious conflicts that were dividing that community.
He taught Arabic but also learnt the language of the local community, Afrikaans (which is a dialect of Dutch), and he wrote a major work, Bayan al-din, in the latter language, adapting to this purpose the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Not only is this one of the very few works in ‘Arabic-Afrikaans’ (as van Selms has baptised this literature), it is one of the earliest texts written in any variety of Afrikaans at all, and it is therefore of great interest to historical linguists.
He established a madrasa where he taught Arabic and the basic Islamic sciences, and he wrote his own teaching materials. The Bayan al-din was completed in 1286/1869 and printed in Istanbul at the government press in 1294/1877
