Islam in the Caribbean

In the panel discussion on the Muslim presence across the Caribbean islands, Muneera Williams said, “If you think about island culture, and the various different diversities that are involved and the various different migrations of people, it makes a really unique culture.”

“When I think about Islam and how Islam is supposed to be practiced, and how fluid it should be: like you look at Islam in Malaysia, it’s different to Islam in say Mali. But, I don’t know why, what’s wrong with England, in this country, it seems really sort of like restricted.

“You have to be this way, you have to be that way. But actually, I think in the Caribbean islands. If Islam was a location, I think it would be a cluster of Caribbean islands.”

Hassan Mahamdallie added, “What can I say about Islam in the Caribbean? To generalize horribly, it has a Caribbean look to it… When we celebrated `Eid the last time I was there, the Sikh boys who ran the type business across the road, they all came to the `Eid dinner. They were invited into the house as they had all grown up together with the (Muslim) boys of the house.”

“When I walk about Islam in the Caribbean there are certain things which I think are quite unique actually. If I look at my nieces, two of my nieces have married Hindus who are small farmers and to be honest there is not an issue with that.

“There are not many places in the world where this would not be an issue, but it is not an issue in the Caribbean, either in the Hindu community who are receiving the wife or in the Islamic community who are giving the wife.

“Another one of my nieces has married a Sikh, and again that is socially and religiously acceptable. It is not so that if you marry out that you lose your religion. So the nieces who have married into the Hindu family, she is not a Hindu, she is still a Muslim,” Mahamdallie added.

Speaking on the migration of Muslims to the Caribbean island, Hassan added, “…speaking of the Mali empire, that’s where these slaves were dragged from, they were Muslim. And there are historical chapters going back to the mid 19th century. You’d have a slave named John Foster, but when asked, he’d say his name is Sisai Muhammad.”

One of the most heavily subscribed events of the day was the Science Fiction panel. Noura Al-Noman, whose first novel Ajwan, featured a young woman, said, “My kids couldn’t read those books (poorly written Arabic literature), they couldn’t find anything interesting in them, so I decided to write… And I decided to write what I have always found very interesting from when I was 13 or 14 years old, which was science fiction, because in 1977 I saw Luke Skywalker swing across the chasm carrying Princess Leah, and so I was hooked (on science fiction) for life.”

Nafeez Ahmed, the author of Zero Point, said, “I felt that as a Muslim I was constantly expected to write about Muslims. Only. In some way. I experienced it with my agent… I had this experience. Why don’t you write about terrorism, why don’t you write about this or write about that. And I was like, I like sci-fi. I really like sci-fi. So Zero Point kind of bridged the two in a way. It allowed me to take my experience as a journalist, to take some of the themes I was seeing as a journalist, and take it into a genre that I really enjoyed. One thing that I have always found exciting about sci-fi is that bridge between what’s real and what’s not real.”

With over 19 talks and discussions, 4 performances and 5 workshops spread over two days, Mfest has set a new standard for cultural events targeting British Muslims.

Different to almost every other event which focuses on religion, MFest focuses simply on the reality of life as lived by British Muslims, whose interests are not limited within the confines of conservative theology, but in a much wider and diverse spectrum of thought, dialogue, community, and engagement.

It was a privilege to have been there and witness this much-needed initiative, one more step to bringing British Muslims and our non-Muslim neighbors together on the things we share in common; culture.