Apartheid Across Spaces: Solidarity in Difference

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I contend that members of the Claremont Main Road Mosque community, in Cape Town, South Africa, live out an alternative mode of interreligious camaraderie, not simply tolerance of difference, but rather solidarity with oppressed communities. While interreligious relations are generally cordial in the city of Cape Town, there are moments of tension, especially in relation to the Zionist occupation of Palestinian lands, culture, and heritage. Through a scriptural lens, the mosque leadership opens up an ethics of interreligious action for Palestine with anti-Zionist Jews and Christians. In post-apartheid Cape Town, this praxis, I suggest, subverts a cultural normativity silencing forms of critique of the state of Israel in interreligious spaces. Consequently, Jews and Muslims in Cape Town side-step an orientalist fantasy, framing the conflict and occupation in Palestine on religious difference, and an interreligious anti-colonial politics for liberation is lived out.