Public Islam in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Radio Islam Controversy

Introduction

When South Africa’s first post-apartheid constitution came into effect in 1996, it authorized new sorts of religious publics and new forms of religious rights that were unthinkable under apartheid rule. Most notably, the constitution liberalized media – including radio, the focus of this article – in a way that had been unprecedented. Among those who sought to take advantage of a newly liberalized mediascape were South Africa’s Muslims. As they did so, competing voices within the South African Muslim community were amplified – literally and figuratively – as Muslim organizations that had developed highly politicized ideologies ¹ during the apartheid era were now vying to create radio stations to represent their specific interests.

This article demonstrates, first, how the emergence of these fissures within South African Islam is inseparable from the proliferation of religious publics enabled by the post-apartheid constitution, specifically its discourse of rights and its liberalization of media. Second, it then locates these new publics within the legacy of apartheid discourses on race and religion. Third, it situates these debates within genealogies of the secular and post-secular, focusing on the constitutional ‘dispensation’ that opened up public space, aural and otherwise, to new forms of religious contestation. Using South African archival sources, court documents, censuses and Islamic legal texts, it develops these claims through a close examination of a single event: the decision of a suburban Johannesburg radio station, Radio Islam, to forbid women’s voices on its airwaves in 1997. ² The station cited the notion that a woman’s voice is `awrah, the part of her body that must remain ‘private’. Its decision quickly became a heated controversy among the country’s Muslims and within South Africa more broadly. Radio Islam argued that barring women was not only justified on Islamic legal grounds, but was a decision that the post-apartheid constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom protected. Their opponents – an array of Muslim feminists, progressive activists, and government commissions – argued not only that prohibiting women’s voices in a public setting had little, if any, normative basis in Islamic law, but also that the constitution’s guarantee of gender equality mandated that Radio Islam allow women on the air. Both sides, moreover, staked their positions via an affective politics of ‘offense’ and the claim to represent true ‘majorities’ among the country’s Muslim population (approximately two percent of South Africa as a whole). In the Radio Islam case, ‘religious freedom’ and ‘gender equality’ became conflicting rights discourses, a clash that encapsulates how previously suppressed religious publics have clamored for space in a new postcolonial mediascape, one in which the official narratives of apartheid-era religion gave way to (tenuously) ‘post-secular’ religious contestation.

Religious Radio, Muslim Publics and Ulama Authority

There are three overlapping theoretical frames within the study of contemporary Islam and radio publics that are crucial for understanding these events. First, scholars of Muslim public life have attended primarily to expressions of Islam in public space, seeing the ‘ocular’ as the frame through which ‘Muslimness’ is performed, debated and contested, and as a site through which regimes of visibility and invisibility are constructed (e.g. Göle, 2002). More recently, scholars of religion and law (e.g. Weiner, 2013) and the anthropology of Muslim societies (e.g. Hirschkind, 2006) have shifted away from the ocular towards the aural dimensions of religious life. This article seeks simultaneously to contribute further to scholarship on aural publics and to challenge the neat distinction between regimes of visibility and audibility – the crux of the debate over women’s voices invoked Islamic legal language that was, and remains, traditionally concerned with representations of the body in public (read ‘visible’) space. The view proffered by Radio Islam – a relatively marginal one from an Islamic legal standpoint, as explained below – sees the vocal and the audible in a metonymic relation to the bodily and the visible.

Second, as scholars such as John Hartley (2000) and Brian Larkin (2008) have long recognized, radio publics are internally differentiated and ideologically contested zones of audition, characterized by a persistent tension between publics as idealized notions and as empirical entities. A station like Radio Islam, in other words, has an empirical public – the listeners who are tuning in at any given moment while at home, in their cars, or at work – but it also has an idealized, notional public, one that is part of a larger imaginary, those whom it considers its target audience. As we will see, when Radio Islam was confronted with objections to its decision to bar women from its programming, it attempted, quite literally, to ‘switch publics’ by altering the wording of its broadcasting license to state that it existed to serve only those Muslims who agreed with the ideology of its parent organization, rather than, as it originally stated, to serve those Muslims in the physical range of its broadcasting signal.

Third, recent literatures on public Islam (e.g. Eickelman and Anderson, 2003; Eickelman and Salvatore, 2006; Tayob, 2012) have emphasized the extent to which new self-styled religious authorities – “secular intellectuals, Sufi orders, mothers, students, workers, engineers, and many others” (Eickelman and Salvatore, 2006: xii) – have challenged the interpretive monopolies claimed, in theory if not always in practice, by traditionally educated Islamic religious scholars (the ulama). The ulama, in South Africa as elsewhere, have attempted to adapt to this terrain (Zaman, 2002), continuing a long tradition of public critique premised on the idea that a healthy polity depends on the moral integrity of individuals (Asad, 1993: 200–236). Radio Islam was, and remains, partly an extension of this claim to public authority. The voices that challenged it were, for the most part, not religious professionals or competing ulama. Some scholars have argued that we ought to see this new discursive terrain not so much as a ‘fragmentation’ of authority (Eickelman and Piscatori, 2004: 131–35) as its ‘proliferation’ (Krämer and Schmidtke, 2006: 12). Indeed, to say the authority of the ulama was ‘fragmented’ would imply it had once been a unified whole, and that new actors contested the ulama on their own discursive plane. By contrast, to speak of proliferation underscores not only the plethora of claims to authority but, in many cases, their incommensurability – suggesting that recent attempts to characterize such contests as a search for the ‘common good’ (Eickelman and Salvatore, 2006; Meyer and Moors, 2006: 12) might be misguided. As the Radio Islam controversy shows us, the parties involved could agree neither on the ‘common’ nor the ‘good’ – that is, neither on the terms of argument nor its ethical ends. It was a public sphere defined less by consensus and more by dissensus (Göle, 2014: 8).

The Radio Islam Controversy

In the constitution as adopted by the Constitutional Assembly on 8 May 1996, Sections 9.3 and 9.4 (part of the Bill of Rights) declare that neither the state nor individuals may “unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone” on grounds including gender, sex and religion (Constitutional Assembly, Republic of South Africa, no date: 7–8). At the same time, sections 15.1 and 31 protect “freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion” as well as the right of persons to “practice their religion” but only insofar as such practice is not “exercised in a manner inconsistent with any other provision of the Bill of Rights” (Constitutional Assembly, Republic of South Africa, no date: 8, 13–14). As we will see, this latent tension between individual and communal rights would be especially consequential for cases like that of Radio Islam’s.

One of the key tasks of the post-apartheid government was reapportioning airtime in radio and television to reflect South Africa’s religious diversity. To this end, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, or IBA, was created in March 1994 to distribute and regulate broadcasting licenses (IBA Act, 1994) including licenses for religious groups. In the coming years, numerous Muslim radio stations were created, each linked to a parent body that represented a wide spectrum of political and social viewpoints, including Voice of the Cape and Radio 786 in Cape Town, Radio Ansaar and Radio Azaania in Durban, and Radio Islam and The Voice in Johannesburg, among others (Mtimde, 2000).

Radio Islam is a station owned and operated by the Jamiatul Ulama (formerly Jamiatul Ulama Transvaal), a body of Islamic scholars founded in 1922 affiliated with the Deobandi network of Islamic seminaries (Tayob, 1995: 65–67). ³ Based in the Johannesburg suburb of Lenasia, it began operating in April 1997. Shortly thereafter, when a female Muslim called in during a talk show, she was promptly cut off by the presenter, who then explained that a woman’s voice is part of her `awrah and thus should not be heard in public.

Is a woman’s voice `awrah? Applied to both sexes, the term `awrah connotes those parts of the body that must be concealed from public view. There is some degree of consensus among the four schools of Sunni legal thought over the scope of `awrah; for men, it is typically from the navel to the knees, and for women, typically the entire body save for the face and hands. While some Deobandi scholars have argued that `awrah also encompasses the female voice in public settings, ⁴ this is largely a marginal view within Hanafi law (the school followed by Deobandis), and the vast majority of Islamic legal scholars of all schools have rejected this conclusion (Abou El Fadl, 2001: 188). The Mukhtasar of al-Quduri (d. 1037), for instance – widely considered among the most authoritative textbooks for Hanafi jurisprudence (Wheeler, 2003: 184–85) and one widely taught at Deobandi seminaries – defines the woman’s `awrah simply as “all of the body of a free woman except the face and hands” (al-Quduri, 2011: 65).

The manager of Radio Islam, Molvi HA Dhorat, cited the scholar Muhammad Amin Ibn `Abidin (d. 1836) as a source for substantiating the claim of the woman’s voice as `awrah (Mujlisul Ulama of South Africa, 1998: 7), though he did not elaborate on the details of the citation. But in his famous Radd al-Muhtar `ala al-Dur al-Mukhtar – likewise, a central text in Hanafi jurisprudence – Ibn `Abidin did not regard the woman’s voice as `awrah categorically, but only contextually. Most often, the voice becomes `awrah in specific Islamic ritual contexts. Thus, the woman’s voice is `awrah during salat, according to Ibn `Abidin, as inferred by the Prophet Muhammad’s statement that “Reciting the tasbih [‘subhan Allah’, ‘Praise God’] is for men, and clapping is for women” (Ibn `Abidin, 1998: 72). Scholars understand this hadith to refer to the preferred means of informing an imam if he omitted words or otherwise erred in his recitation while leading congregational prayer. Men recite ‘subhan Allah’, whereas women clap, the implication being that women’s voices would distract men from the prayer (Katz, 2013: 181). Other ritual contexts in which a woman’s voice ought to be inaudible to men nearby include reciting the talbiya on the hajj pilgrimage (by which a pilgrim announces her presence before God) and reciting the Qur’an. Hence, it is preferred for women to learn Qur’an recitation from other women (Shaqfah, 1972: 103).

Therefore, the legality of the female voice as `awrah hinges on how and where it is used. Ibn `Abidin summarizes his view thus: “It is permissible for women to speak to strange men when the need arises, but it is not permissible for women to raise, stretch out, or soften their voices” nor should they speak in a “melodious” fashion (Ibn `Abidin, 1998: 72). Obviously, these legal sources could not have anticipated the dilemma of a woman’s voice being broadcast via radio. The question from a legal perspective then becomes whether a woman’s voice broadcast on the radio is inherently ‘melodious’ or ‘soft’ in tone, or if the radio ‘raises’ a woman’s voice by virtue of its being amplified. And in fact, the South African Deobandi ulama affiliated with the ultra-conservative periodical The Majlis stated, in no uncertain terms, that this was the case (Mujlisul Ulama of South Africa, 1998).

These legal minutiae were, for the most part, irrelevant to those who contested the station’s decision. Soon after the radio station prohibited women, a number of activists and institutions coalesced to challenge it. A group called Youth for Islamic Enlightenment and Development, or YIELD, claimed Radio Islam violated the Code of Conduct for Broadcasters, a code written to enforce constitutional guarantees of gender equality (Haron, 2004: 138–139). YIELD highlighted the Code’s provisions that “broadcasters must not broadcast material which, judged within context, amounts to … advocacy of hatred that is based on … gender” (ICASA, 1996: section 5.2). YIELD petitioned the IBA to demand that Radio Islam not only permit women’s voices, but have female hosts as well.

In a letter to YIELD on 26 May 1997, Radio Islam’s manager, the aforementioned Molvi Dhorat, wrote:

It is mandatory for Radio Islam to serve the interests of the Islamic community, in particular the mainstream majority, failing which it would not be fulfilling its obligations in terms of the [Independent Broadcasting Authority] Act, its radio license conditions and the fundamental tenets of Islam. It must do so by broadcasting in a manner that will not be offensive to the religious convictions of its listenership … About the voice of a woman the following is stated in the Qur’an: ‘And do not speak in soft tones, for then, he in whose heart there is a disease will lust’ [Qur’an 33:32] ⁵  … Based on the above Quranic [verses] as well as other clear indications of the Sunnah and the jurists of Islam it is unanimous that the female voice is also subject to the laws of intermingling of sexes and is to be concealed. (Mujlisul Ulama of South Africa, 1998: 6–7; emphasis added.)

Other Muslims in addition to YIELD sharply challenged Radio Islam’s claim to represent a ‘majority’. In August 1997, the feminist activist Shamima Shaikh, head of the Muslim Youth Movement’s Gender Desk, founded a separate Muslim radio station in Johannesburg, The Voice, whose broadcast area overlapped with Radio Islam’s and which explicitly sought to be a venue for Muslim women’s interests and viewpoints. ⁶ In response to the Radio Islam controversy, as well as to criticisms of The Voice, Shaikh circulated a petition among Muslim activists and submitted it to the IBA, which stated:

We, the undersigned South African Muslims, are deeply concerned about the message of discrimination against women being conveyed by the current controversy about the issue of women on radio. Islam is a religion of justice and promotes equality of men and women. We, therefore, believe that discrimination on the basis of gender goes against the very spirit of Islam. We are also concerned about the implications of a discredited minority religious opinion that purports that women may not be heard in public. This position implies that women are perpetual social minors and goes against the spirit of Islamic teachings. Perpetuating such a view lacks religious credibility, and militates against the hikmah (wisdom) the Qur’an exhorts all Muslims to employ in public life. (Quoted in Sonn, 2002: 261–262; emphasis added.)

Radio Islam sought to maneuver its way out of this impasse by changing the wording of its broadcasting license. Clause 14 of its license conditions stated:

The licence has been granted in order to serve the interests of the Islamic Community within its broadcasting area. The licensee must ensure at all times that it serves the interests of this community by allowing membership, management, operation, participation and programming by members of the community concerned. The licensee must ensure that its programme content reflect the special interests and needs of the listeners it is to serve and must facilitate community access to its programming by clearly and regularly informing the community of the opportunities for such participation.

The IBA rejected the station’s request in March 1998, stating that, “The Authority does not believe that the public interest will be best served by licensing the applicant to broadcast exclusively to one sector of the community” (Galant, 1998: 83–84). Radio Islam retreated in order to stay on the air. But the controversy may have raised more questions than it resolved on all sides. For example, how might we interpret Radio Islam’s attempt to ‘switch publics’ in its broadcasting license? Radio Islam sought to dodge the complaints of other Muslims by narrowing the scope of the public it claimed to serve, even as letters from Lenasia to the editors of Muslim community newspapers evince the presence of dissenting viewpoints within Radio Islam’s broadcasting range and belie the notion that even its ‘revised’ public was ideologically seamless (e.g. Anonymous, 1998: 23). How did the IBA stake the claim that Radio Islam had to represent the entire Muslim ‘community’, and how is that community then defined? And how did Radio Islam, in turn, attempt to negotiate the tension between its claim to represent only the Muslims of its broadcasting area that accept the views of its parent organization, on the one hand, and its claim to speak for ‘Islam’, on the other? These tensions in the politics of representation are amplified by legal tensions within the constitution itself, which simultaneously guarantees individuals within a particular “religious … community” the right to “practice” that religion, and the right of individuals to be free from gender discrimination. The constitution is clear that, when these rights conflict, the latter trumps the former. In this framework, we can see South African Muslims attempting to live within what one scholar has called a “habitable hybrid … [a] mixture of group and individual identities and rights” (Zegeye, 2001: 3), even if that hybrid became quite inhabitable for specific Muslims in specific cases. Or as Mahmood Mamdani (2000: 13) has suggested, “no right can be absolute in practice. Every right has to be realised contextually, in tension with other rights and the rights of others.”

Racial Publics, Religious Counterpublics, and the Ambiguously (Post)secular

So far this article has examined the legal and religious dimensions of a specific controversy among South African Muslims after the end of apartheid. This section broadens the scope of inquiry by locating this controversy between two overlapping discursive frames and situating it at the precarious juncture between them: first, apartheid-era discourses that subsumed ‘religion’ within larger taxonomies of ‘race’ and regulated religion’s presence in public life; and second, post-apartheid discourses that authorized specific forms of ‘religion’ in public even as it censored others. I contend that we cannot fully understand the Radio Islam controversy without understanding the apartheid-era approaches to religion that preceded it. Given constraints of space, I am painting with broad strokes. I do not intend to suggest here that ‘religion’ in apartheid South Africa was some organic force that swelled beneath the surface of artificial racial categorizations until it was finally (and triumphantly) legitimated by the post-apartheid constitution, nor do I want to suggest that ‘race’ was purely a fiction imposed from above. In apartheid’s own logic, ‘race’ and ‘religion’ were too mutually constitutive to disaggregate. As Deborah Posel has shown, early architects of apartheid constructed racial classifications in an often haphazard and contradictory fashion, assigning individuals a range of biocultural markers, each tautologically confirming the others, in which one’s religion was de facto evidence of one’s race and vice versa (Posel, 2001a, 2001b). Notions of race and religion were both deployed – sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in opposition – by different groups at different times. Thus, even as the state’s racial inscriptions were in a sense rendered palpably real, on the one hand, religious counterpublics often functioned as political imaginaries on the other; neither ‘religion’ nor ‘race’ existed in the abstract.

Under apartheid, the government rigidly policed any potentially subversive expressions of religion in the public sphere. To the extent that Muslim publics existed under apartheid, they are most accurately understood as counterpublics, manifest not through officially authorized venues but in subversive, unauthorized ones, ranging from manifestos distributed in mosques to Muslim newsletters constantly threatened with closure, from mass protests in the townships to the highly politicized funerals of anti-apartheid activists. Under apartheid there was no religious radio aside from what the government-run South African Broadcasting Corporation permitted, which was based almost exclusively on the Dutch Reform Christianity of the National Party (Hackett, 2006: 169–170).

Publicly mobilized religious identities would have clashed with the officially sanctioned racial publics that the apartheid government went to great lengths to foster and maintain. This is perhaps most evident in the apartheid government’s policy of ‘separate development’, which saw South Africa as composed of multiple cultures, each possessing its own distinctive ‘essence’ that ought to be nurtured independently of others. Radio became one means, among others, of fostering ‘separate development’, as in the case of Radio Bantu (Hamm, 1992; Lekgoathi, 2009). In the 1950s and early 1960s, this policy began to make its distinct imprint on both urban space and myriad forms of cultural expression. The government’s policy towards its Indian population neatly illustrates the principle of ‘separate development’. After granting formal citizenship to Indians only in 1961, the government cultivated the idea of ‘Indians’ as a singular, unified and separate cultural enclave. Annual reports from the Department of Indian Affairs, beginning in 1961, were almost uniformly unconcerned with the religious lives of the subjects about which it claimed to give an account. Its “broad objective” was, rather, “to promote the political, economic and social development of the Indian community” (Department of Indian Affairs, 1970). To this end, the government provided official venues for ‘Indian’ music, dance, and film, and subsidized the study of classical ‘Indian’ texts at universities, such as the University of Durban-Westville, at the time reserved exclusively for Indians. A 1965 Department of Information report, Indian South Africans, is a case study of the government’s vision of separate development in action, complete with rosy reports on the construction of (clean, orderly, self-sustaining) Indian townships. Tellingly, the book subsumes its brief discussion of Indian ‘religion’ – normatively ‘Hindu’, from the state’s point of view (Radhakrishnan, 2005) – in a chapter on ‘family stability’ (Department of Information, 1965), in line with its efforts to maintain “the supposedly naturally existing Indian propensity to nurture strong kin and community ties” (Hansen, 2012: 38). Here Indian ‘religion’ is, quite literally, ‘domesticated’.

The argument here is not that the apartheid state uniformly suppressed all forms of non-white or non-official religion or refused to recognize religious identities of any kind. To take just one example, in a number of cases the state recognized the de facto existence of Muslim marriages for the purposes of the law (e.g. in adjudicating inheritance disputes), even as it declined to recognize them de jure, deeming Muslim marriage as such to be intrinsically polygynous and thus contra bonos mores – against commonly accepted tenets of morality (Jones-Pauly and Tuqan, 2011; Moosa, 1996). But such dimensions of religion were safely within the realm of their adherents’ ‘private’ lives.

In public life, apartheid assimilated religion into the larger taxonomies of race. Thus the policy of ‘separate development’, ultimately, aimed to create “practices whose alleged incommensurability would, in turn, justify the project of separation itself. In this way, apartheid sought to produce its own cause – that is, to make effective the distinctions the state claimed were natural” (Hansen, 2005: 301). Apartheid era censuses reflect the ‘natural’ conditions the government sought to foster in cultural production. While the government recorded the religious affiliations of its citizens, the totalizing racial schematic of the apartheid census rendered religious affiliation nearly inconsequential in terms of the everyday exigencies of the state. Race became the arch-criterion according to which sub-criteria such as religious affiliation were quantified and arranged. This effectively denied the very possibility that specific ‘races’ might subsume complex forms of religious affiliation. Thus, under the racial group ‘Bantu’, the 1970 census allowed black South Africans to choose among the full gamut of Christian denominations, but did not offer ‘Islam’ as an option (South African Department of Statistics, 1970: 99). Whites, likewise, could not be Muslims. Rather, to become Muslim was to change one’s race. Thus, Posel tells of a white convert whom a local magistrate deemed “Coloured”. Her “light complexion,” he declared, “cannot sufficiently relieve her from her hereditary disability to lull a reasonable European into not suspecting a dusky admixture” (Posel, 2001b: 59). It was this sort of ascription of identity from above that prompted the Muslim activist and scholar Farid Esack to declare, in 1989, that apartheid “has not helped us to preserve our identity as Muslims but as Indians and Malays”, the latter referring to Muslims of the Cape. “It has ignored the fact that there are blacks who share our Islam with us but who are not allowed to share a complete identity with us” (Esack, 1989: 2).

The end of apartheid witnessed an abrupt shift away from the attempt to control or suppress subversive religious publics to the management of officially authorized ones. The novelty of ‘religious’ media is evident in that as late as 1992 an interfaith anti-apartheid conference, the World Conference on Religion and Peace, issued its ‘Declaration on Religious Rights and Responsibilities’, calling for “religious communities [to] have access to the public media” (World Conference on Religion and Peace, 1992). The Declaration was, in turn, endorsed by groups such as the Muslim Youth Movement (MYM) and reprinted in its paper, al-Qalam (al-Qalam, November 1992: 2).

But what kind of ‘religion’ did the post-apartheid constitution authorize? The Radio Islam case was borne of a particular aporia embedded in the constitution itself: it charted new public venues through which private religious belief could be performed without fully accommodating its political implications. Indeed, Ebrahim Moosa called the constitution a “turnkey” document, suggesting it attempted to import a generic liberal secularism without fully adjusting it to local proclivities. In his words, its “genealogical affiliation is to post-Enlightenment European thought, not post-colonial Africa” (2000: 129). ⁷ Its ambivalence about religion in public is reflected in the individual at the center of the constitutional imaginary, whom Albie Sachs, one of its authors, called the “reasonable South African”:

[One who] neither attempts relentlessly to purge public life of even the faintest association with religion for fear of otherwise descending the slippery slope to theocracy, nor at the other extreme, regards the religiously-based practices of the past to be as natural and non-sectarian as the air one breathes simply because of their widespread acceptance. (Sachs, 2009: 157)

Just like this individual, comfortably inhabiting the liminal space between extremes of complete secularity and theocracy, the constitution is defined by its tolerance of legal ambiguities, as we have seen here. But the tolerance itself has limits: individual rights trump communal ones, and the right to avoid gender discrimination trumps the right to impose it on religious grounds. It would seem, then, that just as the constitution rejects a core element of the ‘master narrative’ of secularism – relegating ‘religion’ to an imagined private sphere (Taylor, 2009) – it is apprehensive about the public implications of belief. It is, more precisely, discomfited by public manifestations of illiberal religious belief.

If the constitution is to some extent a liberal secular ‘turnkey’ document, it is also an expression of what Hent de Vries calls a secularism “loosen[ed] and lighten[ed] up,” chastened by the resurgence of “global religion” and denuded of its liberal foundationalism (2013: 204). It is comfortable with public religion, but not too comfortable. There is no ‘wall of separation’ in the Jeffersonian sense, but rather a ‘door’, to draw on Moosa’s apt metaphor, the “doorkeepers” of which are the “constitutional values, which regulate the flow of religion into the public arena” (Moosa, 1996: 153).

But an attenuated secularism may not necessarily be a post-secularism. I would suggest that the Radio Islam case, and the conflicting rights discourses that gave rise to it, point to the limits of demarcating a post-secular ‘moment’ (Gorski et al., 2012). To be clear, I have not argued that the apartheid state was a secular one, nor that the post-apartheid state is post-secular. Rather, I have sought to show how the South African constitution, like the Radio Islam case itself, illustrates the porousness of the ‘secular’ and ‘post-secular’ in a specific legal and political arrangement. It may be the case, as Arvind-Pal Mandair asserts, that “the very idea of a post- of secularism is a chimera” (2012: 133). This does not simply mean that the secular casts a long shadow. Rather, in this case, there are limits to the constitution’s willingness to countenance religion’s plenary inheritance of the space ostensibly vacated by the secular. Yet, ironically, the quasi-theological language with which anti-apartheid activists, religious leaders and politicians described the constitution as a new ‘dispensation’ and ‘miracle’ suggests the document is itself a theological intervention in history, a new juridico-theological order, and a “sovereign” exception to “ordinary” politics (Hansen, 2012: 14; cf. Posel, 2014). The constitutional dispensation was a space clearing gesture, but it was not (and never could be) absolute in doing so. The afterlives of apartheid in the post-apartheid era and the afterlives of the secular in the ‘post-secular’ era are, perhaps, part of the same thoroughly muddled concatenation.