Shaheed Moussa* attended Friday prayers regularly at his local mosque until he became a wheelchair user.
After a series of incidents left him feeling dehumanised and invisible, he stopped participating in the afternoon congregational prayer. As a disabled person not only did he have to manoeuvre his way on an unnavigable crumbling ramp leading to the mosque, but once at the entrance he would face more barriers.
Shoes scattered around the ablution area would make it impossible for him to go any further. In addition, he would be stopped from proceeding to the prayer room as his wheels were considered “unclean”.
Shaheed’s story is one of several case studies included in University of Cape Town PhD graduate Nafisa Mayat’s doctoral research on disability inclusion and Islam.
According to Mayat, despite disability affecting so many South Africans, ignorance about disability among faith-based populations, particularly in Muslim communities, is astonishing.
As a Muslim woman Mayat, who is a lecturer in UCT’s division of disability studies, opted for the road less travelled in research, to add more to the “very little scholarly work on disability and how it’s enacted in the broad Muslim community”. She said spirituality and religion are not part of mainstream discourse and narrative within critical disability studies.
“Religion and spirituality are key to the way many people, including those with disabilities, make sense of the world and their place in that world. However, in most scholarship focusing on disability, religion, as a way of understanding and dealing with disability, is sidelined or absent.”
Even with her background in social work and psychology, Mayat said she hadn’t really understood disability as it had not been taught or enmeshed in university curricula.
That changed when she enrolled for the postgraduate diploma in disability studies at UCT. She immersed herself in the field, working in KwaZulu-Natal and then in the university’s disability service unit before enrolling for her PhD.
“There was a huge gap in the Muslim community around understanding disability, and broadly within other faith-based organisations too,” she said. And even within critical disability studies, “religion and spirituality are not part of the mainstream discourse and narrative”.
As part of her research, Mayat visited Muslim communities in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg and interviewed disabled people with other family members, priests and able-bodied people on how they understood disability and inclusion in different spaces.
She was astounded by the general ignorance about disability, even among family and friends. In Shaheed’s case this ignorance played itself out in how other people at the mosque viewed his disability and wheelchair use.
Even though he always carried a towel in his bag to wipe the wheels of his wheelchair before proceeding to the prayer room, no-one bothered to ask or help him, Mayat said.
“Their lack of knowledge and understanding could have caused a rift.
“I got onto my prayer mat and asked God for guidance. If I didn’t work to change the understanding and perception of disability in my community, I would be as guilty of perpetuating these misconceptions,” she said.
In what Mayat has described as “unconscious exclusion”, when she interviewed the priests, they were aware they weren’t doing enough to recognise disability but were very open to change. “That was positive. In the Qu’ran there is no discrimination around disability and that needs to be highlighted. The full journey of inclusion means that more needs to be done on their part.
“It got them thinking about how this shift needs to happen, to get people to understand how exclusion happens; how we are not an inclusive community for those with disabilities, and why it’s our responsibility to make that change.”
Shaheed Moussa* (not his real name).
