AN AFRIKAANS FOOTNOTE TO THE HISTORY OF ARABIC GRAMMAR: SHEIKH ISMAIL GANIEF’S GRAMMAR OF ARABIC (CA. 1958) 1 Kees Versteegh Since the middle of the 17th century, there has been a thriving Muslim community in South Africa. The first Muslims to arrive in the Cape Col- ony were free people from Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago, the so-called Mardijckers; they were joined by deportees and political exiles from the Dutch East Indies. At a later stage, larger numbers of Muslims were brought in as slaves and labourers from India and South Asia. In addition, many members of the Black community in South Africa con- verted to Islam. Collectively, the Muslims in the Cape were sometimes called ‘Cape-Malays,’ although the majority of them had no connection with Malaysia at all. 2 By the 19th century a rich scholarly tradition had been established in the Muslim communities, initially based on texts written in Arabic and/or Malay. 3 In the second half of the 19th century, however, many scholars started to write their treatises in Afrikaans, often transcribed in Arabic script. Afrikaans is a variety of the Dutch language that was brought by the colonists who founded the Cape Colony in 1652. Their language was taken over in creolized form by some of the inhabitants, who spoke Khoisan or Bantu languages. Although Afrikaans was the language variety spoken by the white and part of the black population, Dutch remained the standard language of the Cape Colony until 1925, when Afrikaans was recognized as an official language. There is a fierce controversy, fuelled by ideological considerations, about the extent to which this standard form of Afrikaans is based on the creolized variety or represents a somewhat modified ver- sion of the Dutch language. 4 1 I wish to thank my former student Iris Hoedemaekers, who collected a large number of photocopies of Arabic-Afrikaans literature during her stay in South Africa in 2005, among them the text of the grammar analyzed in the present article. In her M.A. thesis, Hoede- maekers (2006) presented an analysis of the writing system and the language of these works, see also Hoedemaekers and Versteegh (2009). I also thank my former colleague Abdulkader Tayob, now professor at University of Cape Town for helping me to procure some of the literature for this article and for his enthusiastic support of this research. 2 On the use of this label in the Cape Colony, see Stell (2007: 90, 93); Stell et al. (2007: 291–293). 3 Davids (1980). 4 Valkhoff (1972); Van Rensburg (1989). 177-194_Orfali_f8_CS4.indd 177 8/19/2011 5:26:30 PM