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This dissertation analyzes the careers of three Afrikaner missionaries, David Bosch, Carel Boshoff, and Nico Smith, who gained international reputations for pioneering alternatives to the South African Nation Party’s (NP) policy of apartheid over the second half of the 20th century. Afrikaners looked to missionaries to be moral leaders on questions of race relations, and missionaries’ public theologies carried significant moral weight. While numerous historians have argued that from the 1930s through the 1950s Afrikaner missionaries played a key role in developing and promoting the moral basis of apartheid in South Africa, they have not, however, addressed how Afrikaner missionaries responded to the political, social, and moral failure of apartheid. By the 1970s, the dissonance between the ideal and the actual implementation of apartheid led Bosch, Smith, and Boshoff—by that time leading public theologians—to a crisis of confidence in the NP, and they began to endorse divergent moral visions for the country’s future. David Bosch and Nico Smith embraced racial unity while Carel Boshoff pursued ethnic separatism. By the mid-1970s, Bosch became a leading proponent of “reconciliation,” which gave Afrikaners new moral language for thinking about themselves as part of a non-racial society. By the mid-1980s, both Bosch and Smith were key leaders in ecumenical and interracial organizations that endorsed a negotiated end to apartheid. They helped to form a growing interracial solidarity of Christians that encouraged and facilitated the democratic transition of 1990/1994. Conservative theologians, like Boshoff, attempted to stem the popularity of reconciliation in Afrikaner political and civil organizations. He was unable to successfully coordinate efforts with other conservatives, and he was increasingly marginalized. Ultimately, Boshoff opted for negotiated ethnic separatism with the African National Congress. This study demonstrates that far from being monolithic, Afrikaner religiosity and racial morality were dynamic and contested. Secondly, it shows that a number of Afrikaner public theologians and moral leaders were actively involved in ending white minority rule in South Africa. Conversely, it also shows that conservative religious leaders were able to transform Afrikaner nationalism, thereby prolonging its influence into the 21st century.

The experiences of white Muslims are often missing from scholarship on Islam in America, which tends to focus on black and immigrant Muslims. Yet conversion narratives of white American Muslims offer insights into how Islam addresses the spiritual needs of a cohort of white men who, though small in number, exert significant influence over Islam in the United States. This dissertation examines the experiences of several white men who converted to Islam during the 1960s and 1970s, in part in response to the social, political, and cultural upheaval of the time. Their conversion narratives touch on a number of common themes: disaffection with traditional American values, attraction to the counterculture ethos, and a longing for spiritual fulfillment outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream. This study focuses on the lives of Hamza Yusuf and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. Biographical chapters explore the family histories of these two men as well as their early lives, journeys toward Islam, conversions, and later lives as Muslims. The dissertation also provides brief biographies of six additional white American male converts. All of these subjects joined a community of converts led by Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a charismatic Scottish Muslim who was a convert himself. For them, as-Sufi embodied counterculture ideals even as he creatively translated Islam into an American idiom. All eventually left as-Sufi’s community yet remained Muslims. These men demonstrate that Islam in the United States has not been indigenized solely by African Americans and immigrants, but also by white Muslims. White converts add important dimensions to the history of Islam in America not present in the scholarly literature concerning other Muslim Americans. First, they bring together whiteness and Islam in a way that directly challenges how white Americans have historically constructed Islam in opposition to whiteness. Second, because the paths to Islam taken by these men were all heavily influenced by and rooted in the counterculture, their lives demonstrate how the Islamic tradition has interacted with and reacted to American cultural realities in ways that address the spiritual concerns not only of African Americans and immigrants from Muslim countries but also of white Americans. / 2027-01-31T00:00:00Z

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