April 10th 2026
There are cities one visits, and others with which one enters into a kind of emotional relationship. From the very first moment one sets foot in them, something stirs in the chest, and a bond is formed that, once one leaves, soon turns into nostalgia: because a piece of one’s heart has remained there, and with it the desire to return.
Cape Town, for me, belongs to the latter: it is a lover I adore deeply, despite her difficult character and elusive ways—she lets herself be pursued and brushed against, again and again, without ever fully surrendering.
This is the fifth time I have set foot here, and the mood accompanying me is heavier than in the past. An important bond with the city—my connection with its university—has been broken; and my heart is burdened by a nostalgia for a lost past—or perhaps one that never truly existed—which being physically here now sharpens rather than soothes.
Instead of telling the story of Cape Town as it is today, in this post I want to turn my gaze backward. It feels like the right moment to pause, and to recount how this city entered my life—how it began to work within me and transform me even before I ever encountered it in person.
Telling this story is a form of consolation, because despite everything, I believe it is a beautiful one. Tragic, in many ways, but still worth telling.
It was in Syria—more precisely in Damascus—that I first encountered Cape Town.
It was the end of 2010, just a few weeks before the spark was lit that would ignite the series of revolutionary situations later given the somewhat unfortunate name of the “Arab Springs.” I was there to attend an intensive Arabic course, as part of my Master’s degree at L’Orientale. I had been preceded by my friend Rosanna Maryam, who had pronounced her shahada in Syria, embarking on a path of faith that would profoundly shape me as well.
In retrospect, it was a dense and transformative time for both of us, even though at the time we were not yet fully aware of it. I stayed with her for the first week, and from her I learned how to live in and navigate this unfamiliar city whose language I spoke poorly. It was she again who found me a more stable accommodation, just a few steps from the university, in a shared house where a friend of hers had previously lived.
My housemates were a Kurdish-Syrian guy —B., who did not speak English and acted as a mediator with a landlord who was not particularly enthusiastic about mixed-gender living arrangements—and a guy from Cape Town, R., who had also come to Damascus to study Arabic.
Up until that moment, I knew virtually nothing about South Africa, except that it had been dominated for decades by a particularly brutal form of white supremacism (Apartheid), which only came to an end in 1994, when the first democratic elections brought to power the country’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela.
Nor did I have any idea that there was a Muslim community in South Africa.
It was through this young man—day after day, conversation after conversation—that I began to glimpse a world that felt at once deeply familiar and radically Other to me. In a sense, I developed a kind of crush—but one that had nothing to do with physical attraction, at least on my part. It was something more difficult to name: an intellectual and spiritual fascination.
I remember those conversations as the first time in which religious faith—any faith, not just Islam—did not appear to me as an object of study nor as a position to be deconstructed, but as a vibrant and living existential state, traversed by questions I could understand and share, sustained by a deep ethical rigor and, at the same time, an openness to the Other.
It was also through those conversations that I began to understand Rosanna. Her conversion, which at first had seemed unintelligible to me, suddenly acquired coherence and beauty: it appeared, at last, as something I might have wished to have —or perhaps, in some sense, already did have.
Then Syria ended— our experience ended, and the Syria we had known shattered into civil war. Our lives moved on, and contact gradually faded. R. stopped replying to my messages when he got married—leaving me with a wound that was predictable, and yet still deep.
And yet, something remained—a question, even before it was a memory: what kind of world had produced that form of thought that had struck me so deeply? What history, what tensions, what compromises, what possibilities lay behind that way of inhabiting faith?
For years, I had no way of following that trace. Academic life, with its promises and its traps, led me elsewhere. And yet, at a certain point—as happens with true passions—that question resurfaced and found someone willing to listen to it.
The second encounter with Cape Town took place in Palermo, in 2019—another peculiar turning point within an affective geography that would deserve a map of its own.
In the previous years, I had completed my academic training: my Master’s degree in 2011, and my PhD in 2016. I had continued working on Egypt, which had remained my main research horizon throughout that period, until, after the murder of Giulio Regeni, I no longer felt safe. After that deeply traumatic event, I decided that I did not want to continue taking the personal risks involved in doing fieldwork in Egypt, nor to pursue that line of research any further. My main subject of study had been the Muslim Brotherhood, who, after a brief period in power, had once again been classified as a terrorist organization—and, truth be told, I did not even particularly like them. It no longer seemed worth it.
And yet that decision—to abandon a field in which I had invested years of study—was neither linear nor painless. It coincided with a brief and unhappy experience at the University of Florence, and with a first moment in which I seriously considered leaving academic research altogether. I began to look around, to imagine alternatives, to come to terms with the possibility of a different life.
Then came a phone call.
A professor of the history of Christianity, secretary of a prestigious foundation based in Bologna, invited me to join a new and exciting project: the creation, from scratch, of a specialized library in Islamic studies, with an attached research center, in Palermo. It was an ambitious, even visionary operation, which promised—at least on paper—a rare space of intellectual freedom.
The proposal was more than appealing. It promised to be an adventure, one that carried with it an irresistible possibility: that of beginning again. Of attempting to formulate a new line of research, outside the most well-trodden trajectories of contemporary Islamic studies.
When I was asked what I would like to work on, I instinctively pulled out from the drawer of memory that old question born in Damascus; almost without thinking, I proposed to work on Islamic liberation theologies in South Africa.
I did not expect much enthusiasm, nor did I believe the proposal would take root: South African Islam is a relatively marginal topic, in disciplinary terms. Islamic studies still largely gravitate around the Arab world and what, with a certain geopolitical inertia, we call the “Middle East.” From this perspective, South Africa is a periphery, and is treated as such: perhaps as an object of anthropological interest, but not as an autonomous subject of intellectual production, capable of generating forms of knowledge that matter on a global level—least of all for “us” in the West.
And yet, the enthusiasm was there.
My somewhat unusual idea found space, interest, and—most importantly—funding. It was the first moment in which I had the sense that the fascination born years earlier could be transformed into something more structured. I began working with great enthusiasm on a project that, however, started in a particularly unfortunate historical moment.
I was only able to carry out my first period of fieldwork in South Africa between January and February 2020, in order to participate in a Summer School on Critical Muslim Studies and decolonial methods, and to undertake an initial exploratory trip in search of a case study.
This was, in every sense, my first real encounter with Cape Town. Almost ten years after the first intuition in Damascus, I was finally able to experience physically the journey to the other end of the African continent—the inversion of seasons and of the night sky, the impact with the long-imagined city. I did not think it would be possible, but the encounter exceeded all the expectations I had built over the years, and I fell deeply in love.
Even today, I am not entirely sure what it was that captivated me so much. The intense and vibrant intellectual atmosphere of the summer school certainly played a role: despite some difficult moments and the barely concealed hostility of certain participants, who looked unfavorably upon the presence of non-Muslims at the event, I met extraordinary people and engaged with brilliant critical minds—a true breath of intellectual and spiritual fresh air.
And then there was Table Mountain, whose incredible beauty left me breathless every morning, as I crossed the Company’s Garden on my way from my Airbnb to the summer school venue. A bold beauty, almost excessive, born from the continuous play of light and clouds on the rock, shaped with such astonishing aesthetics that one struggles to believe that no divine hand had a part in it.
Beneath that beauty, equally striking, is the poverty of those who live on the streets or in informal settlements, constantly exposed to a level of violence so high that some areas—the infamous townships—rank among the most dangerous in the world.
I left with a heart full of conflicting emotions, excited at the prospect of developing my research and determined to return to the country as soon as possible, with a more structured plan of work.
A Yiddish proverb, made famous through one of Woody Allen’s characters, goes that if you want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans.
Looking back, I imagine God must have laughed heartily at my enthusiastic research plans about Cape Town, because just a few weeks after my return to Italy, the world came to a halt. The Covid-19 pandemic abruptly interrupted any possibility of continuity; the field suddenly became distant and inaccessible, and it was unclear if and when I would be able to return.
In that context of uncertainty, I made a decision that at the time seemed pragmatic: I chose to focus my research on a case study that could, at least in part, be followed remotely. The Claremont mosque and its sermons offered a concrete possibility, since a significant portion of the material was available online.
With the typical optimism of desperation, I thought this would allow me to temporarily work around the problem; but I would soon realize that it was an illusion.
Writing the history of a place one has not truly experienced exposes one to a series of distortions that are difficult to control. The risk is not only that of “not understanding enough,” but of understanding wrongly—of filling the gaps of lived experience with projections and expectations that belong more to the observer than to what is being observed. A tension that has always shaped my relationship with Cape Town, unfolding in the penumbra between proximity and distance, between knowledge and imagination, between desire and reality.
***
Toward the end of the first year of the pandemic, something began to crack, and the director of the Palermo center started to show signs of impatience with my work.
To this day, I am not entirely sure what went wrong. The research was progressing slowly, it is true—but it was an unavoidable slowness, imposed by the impossibility of traveling and thus of accessing archives and gaining direct experience of the field. And in any case, the criticism did not seem to concern this aspect so much as the allegedly overly “ideological” nature of my work.
It is a word that recurs often in my life—“ideological”—and one that is sometimes thrown at me without ever being properly defined. It is always others who are “ideological”; and in particular, in this neoliberal world of the supposed “end of all ideologies,” the term is used to delegitimize those who still persist in maintaining communist sympathies (let alone anarchist ones).
I cannot help but think that, more than my research itself, it was the climate around it that had changed. That the political air was shifting, and that my subject—Islamic liberation theologies, the genealogies of a progressive and “leftist” Islam—suddenly appeared too “radical” to be sustainable within a political landscape that was increasingly turning to the right.
And so, while I was receiving more or less explicit pressure from within to change direction, another possibility arrived from the outside. After noticing one of my presentations at an international conference on Qur’anic studies, a well-known German scholar offered me the opportunity to spend eighteen months in Germany, at the University of Freiburg, through a fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation. One of those opportunities that cannot be refused: not only because of the prestige of the scholar who invited me, but because it seemed like a way out of the precarity of my position in Palermo. Boarding the Humboldt train would at least give me a certification of significant value within an academic system that is increasingly underfunded and competitive, constantly demanding that one give one’s best—and more than one’s best—just to earn a place in the line for a place.
I was also particularly excited by the fact that I had not had to submit a traditional application: the offer came through a scouting program designed to increase gender and geographic diversity among Humboldt fellows. A dynamic that, on the one hand, made me feel flattered; on the other, forced me to reflect on how I was being read, selected, and categorized.
I would have preferred to stay in Palermo, and instead I chose to leave. Even knowing that those eighteen months would not lead to continuity, I decided to accept—in a stubborn attempt to save a project I still believed in, and out of the very real fear that I would have no future in Palermo anyway.
At the end of 2021, my Palermo experience came to an end, and at the beginning of the following year—after a brief escape to Cape Town—I left for Germany.
It was not a happy period; with impeccable politeness, Germany rejected me from the very moment I set foot in it. Freiburg is a pleasant town, but partly due to the language barrier (my German is almost nonexistent), I struggled to find any sense of belonging. I suffered from loneliness and acid reflux, dreaming of my beloved Cape Town while the days dragged into one another with a certain opacity.
My distress was so evident that I was allowed to spend a few months in the field—a rare concession for a Humboldt fellowship; a period I loved, though it was overshadowed by the growing anxiety as the end of the fellowship approached, and by the increasingly desperate search for new funding.
At the end of September 2023, the moment I had feared arrived, and I found myself without a job or any other source of income—a condition in which I remained for fourteen long months, while the genocidal war on Gaza was raging and the hope of finding space for my research was shrinking day by day.
When the news arrived that the project “Genealogies of Progressive Islam in South Africa” had been awarded the Marie Curie grant, it felt almost like a miracle—one that, perhaps, came too late. The exhaustion accumulated over the previous years had left its mark, leaving me with a form of burnout that is difficult to translate into the codes of productivity.
The stress surfaced in an apparently trivial incident, which in a different context would have been resolved without consequences more serious than a disciplinary warning, but which here had a disproportionate and devastating effect: the University of Cape Town withdrew from the project, and I found myself once again standing on shifting sands beneath my feet.
They say one should be careful what one wishes for, because it might come true—and I could not agree more, as I have unfortunately learned the hard way.
I longed to have the funding that would allow me to complete my research and to spend enough time in Cape Town to decide whether I might try to move there for good. I got the funding, and obtaining it exposed me to systems of power that had until then remained invisible; I did not want to see them, and no one had taken the trouble to correct my mistake. By the time I realized it, it was too late.
That bond I had been pursuing for years slipped away from me once again, precisely at the moment when it seemed finally within reach. A cruel gesture, and yet in some way a consistent one, on the part of this city that has never allowed itself to be fully grasped.
The research project was saved thanks to the intervention of the University of Johannesburg, which stepped in as the South African host institution; but the same cannot be said of my heart, which has remained cracked, nor of my enthusiasm, which has dwindled into a shadow of its former self. There is a certain irony in all this: I now finally have the funds to finish, and the opportunity to live in South Africa for two full years. But now that I know the price, an important part of me wishes I had never won this burdensome grant.
Disillusionment has not extinguished determination; because despite everything, I want to write this damn book.
I imagine it as both an act of restitution and of closure. It may well be my last academic work: the desire to move on to something else, once these years are over, is stronger than ever. Precisely for this reason, I feel the need to do it well. To write it not in order to build a career, but for the pleasure of telling a beautiful story—one capable of honoring the stubborn and difficult bond that continues to tie me to Cape Town.
Perhaps, in the end, this is the most honest way I have of inhabiting it: no longer by chasing the illusion of possessing it, but by accepting to write to it —and to write to myself —within this distance.
Author’s note:
“(De)colonial Travel Diary” is an experiment in travel blogging with a deliberate goal: to take the decolonial method I was trained in outside academic writing and bring it into the exposed, imperfect terrain of personal narrative.
I am a historian, and the language I have learned to master is a specialist one. I created this blog precisely to write in public without the armour of academic prose and so-called “scientific” journals, consciously accepting the risks this entails.
This writing project is grounded in a simple conviction: all knowledge is situated, and for this reason decolonisation is neither a universal nor a replicable process. It shifts according to bodies, their historical trajectories, and the position from which we look at the world.
For someone like me — white, European, educated, and yet precarious — thinking decolonially is therefore first and foremost an exercise in white consciousness: an attempt to move through places and memories without claiming innocence, and without confusing critique with absolution.
I write in open solidarity with all those whom colonial modernity condemns to structural, inherited, and essentialised precarity.
Not to speak on behalf of, but to interrogate the place from which I speak.
(written in Italian, translated in English with ChatGpt)