Customer Reviews

The Killing of the Imam: South African Tyranny Defied by Courage and Faith

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It is a bit disconcerting to read a book that starts out as nonfiction but its latter two-thirds is largely fictional. In retelling the story of Abdulla Haran, a religious leader in Cape Town, South Africa's Coloured Muslim community who fought against apartheid, the authors chose to devote most of this slender book to his arrest, torture and eventual death while in the custody of the police in 1969. Instead of rendering a useful social and political analysis of the Coloured population in the context of South Africa's racial hierarchy, the reader is burdened with the long, brutal ordeal of Haron's martyrdom reconstructed as it might have happened based on documented evidence and the melodramatic imagination of the authors complete with dialog.