Abu Bakr Effendi

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Sheikh Abu Bakr Effendi (1835–1880) was a qadi who was sent to the Cape of Good Hope to teach the Muslim community of the Cape Malays.

He was from an aristocratic Quraishi family from Mecca. At the request of the British government, the sultan of the Ottoman empire sent a religious teacher from Istanbul to the Cape Colony in 1862. Other imams in the Cape were mostly teaching the Shafi`i school of Islamic jurisprudence; he was a follower and the first teacher of Hanafi school, for which he also established a madrassa in Cape Town. He gained notoriety in 1869 after ruling that rock lobster and snoek, two staple foods in the Cape, were haraam.

He died aged 45, after having made several major contributions to Islam in South Africa. Firstly, besides his role as teacher he also published the Arabic Afrikaans Bayan ad-Din ("The Exposition of the Religion") in 1877. Printed by the Turkish Ministry of Education in Istanbul, it is an interesting and significant part of South Africa's history, and serves as a valuable reference of the Afrikaans usage during that era in the Islamic neighbourhoods of Cape Town. Secondly, he also introduced the fez for men, as well as reinstated the hijab for women.