Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post- Apartheid by Gabeba Baderoon (Review)

Abstract

Regarding Muslims: Slavery to Post-apartheid is a timely book. It sits comfortably not only as a postcolonial analysis, but also as a methodological guide for postcolonial feminist research. The book helps postcolonial African feminist scholars to reconfigure the conceptual and visual habits used to define and represent Muslims and Islam, both historically and contemporarily. Gabeba Baderoon’s ambition to use alternative materials to “speak back to the history of infantilising, quietist and picturesque images of Muslims”, is exemplary and refreshing. It charges the book with reflexivity, without running the risk of romanticising or essentialising Islam or Muslims. The book is structured into six chapters, each adding texture and nuance to historically flat representations of Muslim subjects. Thematic foci – representation, food, movement, sexual and labour histories, violence, and post-apartheid identity – respectively characterise the chapters, but these chapters are held together methodologically and theoretically. Each chapter turns the gaze, as it were, to accustomed ideas of what Muslims are – “coloured”, or “Malay” – with alternative, but familiar sources – giving the book coherence and consistency...