Extraordinary stories can sometimes be found in ordinary letters. This is the discovery that awaits readers of this gentle and beautifully written correspondence between a political prisoner and a self-described housewife during apartheid's last decade. The circumstances of loss prompting Rivonia trialist Ahmed Kathrada to write a letter of sympathy to a former flat-mate Abdulhak "Bis" Bismillah are met with an unexpected reply from Bis's sister. Zuleikha Mayat, a Durban community organiser and editor of the best-selling cookbook Indian Delights, initiates a correspondence with Kathrada that continues until his release ten years later. Virtual strangers, they have in common their small-town Transvaal childhoods in Muslim shops in the early 20th century; and they find much to explore in their different approaches to questions of culture, politics and religion. The letters are written with wit and style, as they discuss both the issues of the day and the sustenance found in memory. These letters tell the story, all the more powerful for its ephemeral character, of a developing epistolary friendship between two people to whom history has brought different gains and losses. The collection is rich not merely in historical content and stylistic interest, but in the experience it offers to the reader of an unfolding conversation, reflecting both the immediate worlds of its authors and a tumultuous period of South African history.

The history of Muslim education in the east coast region of South Africa is the story of ongoing struggles by an immigrant religious minority under successive, exclusionary forms of state. Schooling Muslims in Natal traces the labours and fortunes of a set of progressive idealists who, mobilising merchant capital, transoceanic networks and informal political influence, established the Orient Islamic educational institute in 1943 to found schools and promote a secular curriculum that could be integrated with Islamic teaching. Through the story of their Durban flagship project - the Orient Islamic school - the book provides a fascinating account of the changing politics of religious identity, education and citizenship in South Africa. Across a century of changing political expectations, as the region transformed from colony to nation-state to multi-racial democracy, concerns for social mobility, civic inclusion and the survival of Islamic identity on the periphery of the Indian ocean world were invested in the education of the young. From the late nineteenth century, Gujarati Muslim merchants settling in Natal built mosques and madressas; their progeny carried on the strong traditions of community patronage and civic leadership. Aligned to Gandhi's congress initiatives for Indian civic recognition, they worked across differences of political strategy, economic class, ethnicity and religious identity to champion modern education for a continually ghettoised diaspora. In common was the threat of a state that, long before the legal formation of apartheid, managed diversity in deference to white racial hysteria over `Indian penetration' and an `Asiatic menace'. This is the story of confrontation, co-operation and compromise by an officially marginalised but still powerful set of `founding fathers', and their centrality in histories of education, urban space and Muslim identity in this region of Africa.