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The principal issue which this paper addresses is the identity and status of the minority Ahmadi community within the larger majoritarian Sunni Muslim community in Cape Town (itself a minority in the country), which was characterised by hostility, violence and exclusion perpetrated against the Ahmadi community. By examining archival material, local Muslim publications and interviews regarding events that transpired during the 1960s, I will argue that the tools of public avowal and socio-economic boycotts were wielded as weapons to buttress the authority of a Sunni clerical leadership as custodians of an orthodox Islamic heritage and a Sunni iteration of Islamic theology and Muslim life against what was considered to be a heretical manifestation in the form of Ahmadiyyat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the present era has by some scholars been referred to as a post-ideological one, based on the argument that the so-called 'grand narratives' have by now become largely untrustworthy and suspicious, evidence suggests that ideology continues to play an important role in today's world. This paper will therefore seek to revisit the post-ideology thesis using Timothy Gorringe's distinction between ideology and hegemony. Gorringe defines ideology as an articulated system of meanings, values, and beliefs; to him, it is meaning in service of power. In contrast, hegemony for Gorringe is a taken for granted order of signs and practices whose power lies in what it silences. Employing this hermeneutic framework, the present paper will then explore what four recent major documents on mission and evangelism (The Cape Town Commitment, Together towards Life, Evangelii Gaudium and Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today's World , respectively) have to say on the theme of ideology. Finally, an attempt will be pursued to identify what implications the discovered results might have for Christian mission as part of missio Dei today, with a particular focus on the central and eastern European context. A constructive missiological suggestion will be made that rather than providing its own 'grand narrative,' Christian mission is first and foremost about living out faith, love, and hope in the everyday, while also countering various types of ideology and hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a 'social drama' of a lived experience of Muslims' ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad's idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses ethnographic data about the religious ethics undergirding the discourse and practices of development agents at Catholic Welfare and Development (CWD), a faith-based NGO in Cape Town, South Africa. It explores how the dynamic interrelation between faith and ethics permeated the development encounter and produced particular modalities for the ethical/moral development of the subjectivities of CWD's developers. Informed by their own experiences of development, developers attempted to 'develop' those they considered to be benificiaries. The paper argues, and provides evidence to demonstrate that, through the shared experience of development as an interpersonal and intersubjective encounter, both developers and beneficiaries were developed, while they also developed each other. It goes on to suggest that this finding challenges the binary representation of development relationships (developer/beneficiary) and that--despite the asymmetry of the reciprocities involved--it is misleading to think in such dichotomous terms, precisely because doing that misrepresents the power and agency wielded by each subject position in every development encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]