Most stories about great speakers begin with a gift. This one begins with a boy who had nothing to say.
In the late 1930s, Ahmed Deedat was a teenager working the counter of a general store on the coast south of Durban. The shop sat near Adams College, a Christian mission school, and its students came in for bread and soap and, it seemed, for sport. They asked the Muslim shop boy questions. Why did the Prophet have so many wives? Wasn't Islam spread by the sword? Didn't Muhammad simply copy the Quran from Jews and Christians?
He had no answers. Years later he described himself and the other young Muslims of that time as "sitting ducks". They knew they were Muslims, and very little beyond that.
He said the questions kept him awake at night. Many people would have stopped going to work, or learned to change the subject. Deedat did something slower. He went looking.
The basement and the book
He had come to South Africa from India as a nine-year-old in 1927, to join a father he barely knew. His mother died months after he left. Money ran out after his sixth year of school, and he went to work. There was no seminary in his future and no teacher waiting to explain things to him.
What there was, in the end, was a book. Rummaging through old newspapers and papers in his employer's basement, he found a worn copy of Izhar ul-Haq, "The Truth Revealed", written in the 1860s by the Indian scholar Rahmatullah Kairanawi. Kairanawi had faced Christian missionaries in public debate in Agra in 1854, and the book set out his method. He did not just defend Islam. He went into the Bible itself and asked it careful questions.
For Deedat, it was the turn he needed. He read the book until he knew its arguments, then bought a Bible and read that too, marking passages, memorising references, rehearsing aloud. He began trying the arguments on the students who came into the shop. Some of them stopped coming.
A Bible in one hand
What he learned at the counter, he took into the open. By the 1940s and 50s he was lecturing in halls and cinemas around Durban, and speaking on street corners and at bus stops, with a Bible in one hand and a Quran in the other, quoting chapter and verse from memory.
At first, hardly anyone stopped. He kept speaking. The audiences grew from a handful to hundreds.
It matters where this was happening. This was apartheid South Africa, a country arranged by law to make people of colour feel small. An Indian Muslim who stood up in public and spoke back, calmly and with complete confidence, was saying something beyond his argument. To the Muslims listening, he was saying: you do not have to be embarrassed by who you are.
In 1957 he co-founded the Islamic Propagation Centre in Durban with two friends. The name was plain, and so was the idea. Christian missionaries had printed tracts and sent them around the world for a century. Why shouldn't Muslims do the same?
Pamphlets, tapes and a voice that travelled
Deedat began writing short booklets. Is the Bible God's Word? Christ in Islam. What the Bible Says About Muhammad. They were small enough to fit in a pocket and cheap enough to give away by the box, so people did.
Sailors carried them to Malaysia. Students took them to Pakistan. Visitors brought them home to Britain and the Caribbean. Then came cassette tapes, copied and recopied by the thousand, his voice working through a debate hall in Durban and arriving, a little hissy, in living rooms on the other side of the world.
His voice travelled long before he did. By the 1970s and 80s, the invitations followed: the Gulf, Britain, Kenya, Trinidad, Canada, Australia. Halls filled. In 1986 he received the King Faisal International Prize for service to Islam.
The debates
By the mid-1980s his debates were drawing crowds like big sporting events. People queued around buildings to get in. He walked on stage without notes, with both books in his memory.
The most famous came in November 1986, at Louisiana State University, against Jimmy Swaggart, then one of the most-watched television preachers in America. The question was the title of one of Deedat's own booklets: Is the Bible God's Word? Swaggart came with the polish of American broadcasting. Deedat came with his books.
The recording went everywhere. For a generation of Muslims, especially those who had grown up feeling like guests in someone else's country, it was a kind of proof. A man from a poor, colonised community could stand in front of the most confident preacher in the West and not flinch.
The question he asked most often, in that debate and many others, was simple. Where, in his own words, does Jesus say "I am God, worship me"? It is a fair question, and he asked it to make people think.
His style was not to everyone's taste. He was combative, sometimes sharp, and later scholars, Muslim ones among them, have argued that parts of his approach suited a debate hall better than a friendship between neighbours. That is a reasonable conversation to have. What is harder to argue with is what his work did for ordinary Muslims. It taught them that they were allowed to know their faith, and to say so.
Nine years of silence
In 1996, soon after returning from a lecture tour of Australia, Deedat had a massive stroke. It left him almost completely paralysed and unable to speak or swallow. The man who had memorised thousands of verses could move only his eyes.
For a life built on words, it is hard to imagine a heavier test.
He lived for nine more years. His family and carers made a chart of letters, and he spelled out sentences one letter at a time with his eyes. Visitors came from across the world to sit at his bedside, and through that board he kept doing what he had always done. He asked about the work. He answered letters. He encouraged younger people to keep going. His wife, Hawa, cared for him throughout.
Ahmed Deedat died at his home in Verulam, north of Durban, on 8 August 2005. He was eighty-seven.
What a shop boy leaves behind
The easy version of his story is about winning arguments. The truer version is about a boy who was embarrassed and chose to study rather than stay quiet.
Everything that came later started in a basement with one old book and the patience to read it properly. The pamphlets, the tapes, the packed halls and the nine years of spelling words with his eyes all followed from that.
The Quran asks, more than once, bring your proof, if you are truthful (al-Baqarah 2:111). Deedat took that as an instruction. He spent his life gathering proof and then offering it in public, in plain words.
He began as the shop boy who could not answer. He spent the rest of his life making sure the next boy at the counter would be able to.
Ahmed Hoosen Deedat, 1918–2005. May Allah have mercy on him.
