How South Africa's oldest Quran was saved by Cape Town Muslims - BBC News

Written by a political prisoner, it is now kept in a bullet-proof casing in a Cape Town mosque.

12 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Mohammed AllieBBC News, Cape TownA Quran - neatly handwritten more than 200 years ago by an Indonesian imam who had been banished to the southern tip of Africa by Dutch colonisers - is the pride of Cape Town Muslims who jealously guard it at a mosque in the city's historic Bo Kaap district.

Builders found it in a paper bag in the Auwal Mosque's attic, while they were breaking it down as part of renovations in the mid-1980s.

Researchers believe that Imam Abdullah ibn Qadi Abdus Salaam, affectionately known as Tuan Guru, or Master Teacher, wrote the Quran from memory at some point after he was shipped to Cape Town as a political prisoner, from Tidore island in Indonesia in 1780, as punishment for joining the resistance movement against Dutch colonisers.

"It was extremely dusty, it looked like no-one had been in that attic for more than 100 years," Cassiem Abdullah, a member of the mosque committee, tells the BBC.

"The builders also found a box of religious texts written by Tuan Guru."