Malaysia’s educational efforts in Southern Africa: creating opportunities, developing partnerships

During this era of globalization and over the past two decades which coincides with post-Cold War developments, the world has witnessed major transformations taking place in international relations on different levels. The Southern Africa communities have observed radical transformation in the educational system as well as changes in educational policies and structures elsewhere in the region. They have, for example, seen the establishment of new educational institutions such as branches of Lim Kok Wing University of Creative Technology (LUCT) in Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, and they witnessed the formation of educational partnerships between institutions such as the International Peace College (IPSA) of Southern Africa and the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM). These developments have undoubtedly contributed towards empowering individuals from the region and this demonstrated the viability of creating new educational opportunities and educational partnerships that have thus far taken place between Malaysia’s educational institutions and Southern African communities. The essay’s purpose is to reflect upon Malaysia’s educational interventions in Southern Africa; it does so by (1) reflecting upon the IIUM’s educational partnership with the Cape Town based IPSA, (2) commenting on Dunia Melayu Dunia Islam’s (DMDI) language programme in Cape Town, and by (c) reviewing the Botswana based LUCT’s educational contributions in Botswana. Adopting a historical reflective approach and based upon the respective assessments and reviews, the essay’s findings underlined that these significant educational connections have created new academic opportunites for certain sectors of the Southern African communities; and since this the case the general conclusion is that academic interventions and partnerships can make a huge difference in educational development

The ‘Cape Malay’ culture as represented in the South End Museum and the Dr. Nortier’s Rooibos Museum

Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstrac

Making South Africa’s Muslims creatively visible

Making South Africa’s Muslims creatively visible. South Africa’s Muslims have generally been well represented in different sectors of the society over the years. Since the arrival of the forefathers such as Shaykh Yusuf al-Makassari (d.1699) at the Cape, Muslims viewed themselves an integral part of the soil. During both the colonial and apartheid areas, however, they—as a religious minority—were depicted and portrayed by the creative artists such as painters, photographers and writers rather negatively. Gabeba Baderoon’s book Regarding Muslims is a critical study that highlights how Muslim representations moved from the margins to the centre and from the picturesque to the menacing. This review essay this reflects on the contents of this invaluable and informative text.&nbsp

South Africa and Malaysia: identity and history in South-South relations

The focus of this thesis is on the bilateral relationship between South Africa and Malaysia. The thesis appropriates ‘critical theory,’ and as a flexible theoretical tool, and, as an open-ended, loose frame in order to give voice to the marginalized and voiceless from the South. The thesis thus looks at the politico-economic ties that have been developed and brings into view the socio-cultural relations that had been established between the peoples of the two sovereign nation-states during the apartheid and post-apartheid eras respectively. The basic purpose of this study was fivefold: (a) to contribute to the extant literature that concentrates on South Africa’s relations with Malaysia, (b) to examine the relationship at political and economic ties in some detail, (c) to demonstrate that apart from the afore-mentioned bonds IR specialists should also take into account the socio-cultural dimensions of international relations, (d) to bring to light the nation-state’s limitations when discussing the role of non-state actors and considering the contributions of other factors such as globalization, and (e) to stimulate further research on bilateral and multilateral relations in the South – particularly between South Africa and other states in Asia and Latin America - that would assist to better understand the past, present and perhaps the future

Achmat Davids places the Cape Muslims on the South African linguistic map

South Africa’s Cape Muslim religious leaders creatively contributed towards the formation of Afrikaans linguistics, an issue that the South African academia seemed to have ignored and overlooked. By the beginning of the 20th century, the literary output of these religious leaders developed to form a unique genre of literature; a genre that is popularly referred to as “Arabic-Afrikaans” within the South African linguistic circles. Achmat Davids (1939–98), who may be regarded as the doyen of “Cape Islamic Studies,” was among a handful of scholars who devoted much of his time to study carefully this type of literature. As aconsequence of his labour, he produced one of the most significant contemporary works in South African linguistics. This review essay reflects upon the importance of Davids’ path-breaking and invaluable study, which was recently co-edited by Hein Willemse and Suleman E. Dangor

Selected Sufi texts of Shaykh Yusuf: Translations and commentaries

Shaykh Yusuf Al-Khalwati Al-Maqassari has made his mark in Southeast Asia as a heroic figure who fought valiantly against the Dutch. However, it was his position as a Sufi shaykh that catapulted him into prominence. Before and during his period of exile, the shaykh wrote a number of important texts on tasawwuf (Sufism) that have circulated among and influenced many of his companions and students. In this article we have translated three short treatises that had been attributed to him. Although none of them was written whilst he was in exile at the Cape of Good Hope between the time of his arrival there in1694 and the time of his death in 1699, he was able to disseminate its contents to members of the nascent Cape Muslim community who had come into contact with him

Non-destructive detection of machining-induced white layers through grain size and crystallographic texture-sensitive methods

Detection of machining-induced white layers is currently a destructive inspection process with a form of cross-sectional microscopy required. This paper, therefore, reports on the development of a novel non-destructive inspection method for detecting white layers using grain size-sensitive and crystallographic texture-sensitive techniques. It is shown that x-ray diffraction can be used to detect white layers as thin as 5 μm in Ti-6Al-4 V through measurement of diffraction peak breadths and diffraction peak intensities, due to the influence of the sub 100 nm grain size and high lattice strain in the white layer, as well as the strong crystallographic texture in this titanium alloy. Compared to the existing optical microscopy inspection method, which can take days due to the number of steps involved, the x-ray diffraction peak breadth method offers non-destructive white layer detection in a matter of minutes at a resolution of 5 μm or less that competes directly with the optical method. Spatially resolved acoustic spectroscopy, a laser-generated ultrasonic surface acoustic wave detection method, can also be used to identify anomalous surfaces, containing a white layer or swept grain material, due to its sensitivity to the crystallographic texture changes that arise in severely plastically deformed Ti-6Al-4V as in Titanium with 6 % Aluminium and 4% Vanadium