Nafeesa condemns Wahabi movement

Nafeesa Mohammed
Nafeesa Mohammed

JOAN RAMPERSAD

Former politician Nafeesa Mohammed lamented the introduction of the Wahabi movement in this country in the 1970, saying that is changed the traditional values of the Muslim way of life in TT.

She was at the time speaking on the cultural and historical experience of the Muslim community in TT, at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Institute for Gender and Development Studies in St. Augustine yesterday.

Mohammed said: “There is a discernable turning point in our country from the days when we were basically a traditional moderate Muslim society with three or four main Muslim orgnisations to a point where now, there has been a rise of fundamentalism and that growing consciousness, but with fundamentalism we have had different permeations of it. The fact is, we now have about 50 groups and organisations, and a great measure of disunity and discord within the Muslim community. Whether that has been deliberately created or not, I have tried to link it to my own personal experiences at our Masjid and I can trace it to the day when Saudi Arabia became so very wealthy in the 1990s with the oil money that they started to pump money into the Western world, and a lot of the foreign ideologies then started to seep into our Masjid.”

Mohammed also brought up the subject of Isis saying, more and more information is coming to hand that suggest that there is a significant number of little children and women who are now stranded in those conflict zones and TT needs to have a deeper dialogue looking at each case in its own merit. “We would want to hope and pray that our state officials and law enforcement officials will see it fit from a humanitarian point of view to look at each case in its own right and to assist in having these families, if it is their wish to return to TT to be repatriated and reintegrated if possible.”

As far as Mohammed is aware, she based on a report by a university professor of Kent, he has identified some 42 children are involved but couldn’t say how many women. “What I’m aware of is that 14 members of one family who went, a husband and a wife, their three adult children with their husbands and their children, and of the lot, the men and the boys are missing. And where are the women? Two of them we read about in the newspapers that suggested that they were sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in Iraq I think it is, and the rest of them are being kept in some kind of detention facility.

“I have also seen a document with little children two and three years old, infant children who are involved.”

Asked what are the facts really, Mohammed said: “This is what we have to ascertain. We don’t know. Because between the two countries, whether it is Syria or Iraq, I am not aware that we have any diplomatic missions or ties with those countries but there are avenues that are available for the state to engage in a dialogue, and we in the Muslim community would need to be engaged in some further dialogue to see how we can help to develop a mechanism to eliminate the fears and concerns that anybody may have, be it law enforcement officials or otherwise.”

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