Later today, the annual Ramadan Village will return to the grounds of the Muslim Youth Organisation (MYO) in Thomas Lands, three days ahead of the lunar Islamic month during which Muslims will abstain from food and drink, idle talk and worldly distractions from dawn to sunset. Difficult as that may sound in a warm, sometimes very hot, tropical country, Ramadan comes wrapped up in a familiar spirit of community and spirituality.

 

The keynote address this evening will be delivered by leasha Prime, an accomplished Muslim female scholar and a familiar friend of Guyana. In her case, the familiarity isn’t due to her popularity on social media platforms. As it turns out, this is her third visit to Guyana, and it took more than two days to get here.

 

That she would make the long trip again, to join us in welcoming the sacred month of Ramadan, speaks to the depth of her affection and regard that she holds for the people of this country, and for good reasons. We have a bold and confident president in Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, who has, to put it bluntly, captured the imagination of many Muslims who reside in the West and are consumed by the plight of the global Muslim Ummah (community).

 

To appreciate what that means, one would have to situate our president in that same global Muslim conversation, which has been overshadowed by a genocide in Gaza that has claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinians. I refuse to state the death count because there should be no numerical yardstick to measure the scale of Israel’s killing fields of Gaza and the West Bank. Now in its third year, the Israeli military machine continues to wreak havoc on Palestinians who have been reduced to skeletons eking out scraps of food from the rubble of Gaza.

 

Although the 2025 edition of the Muslim500, a list of the most influential Muslims, names President Ali, I am surprised that he wasn’t among the top 50. President Ali is neither an imam nor a religious scholar, and Guyana is not a Muslim country, yet what he has accomplished in five years is nothing short of remarkable. It would be a huge mistake to carve him out only as a Muslim leader, and equally, it would be a terrible mistake to ignore the fact that he is a sitting president who happens to be a practising Muslim.

 

He is the kind of political leader that young Muslim activists in Europe and North America thirst for, but one who is also a conscientious Muslim who is not compromised, shackled or dead. At this moment, I am thinking of the ageing Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who has been imprisoned for 23 years and is so formidable that Israel dares not swap him in any prisoner exchange deal.  There is also the principled Imran Khan, former captain of Pakistan’s cricket team, another leader with an ethical spine, who has been wrongfully imprisoned in a Lahore jail cell with 100 books, two dumbbells, a prayer mat and a TV that does not work. No wonder he has gone blind in his right eye.

 

That’s the context, I believe, in which we need to situate our Ramadan Village. Our guest, leasha Prime, was in New Zealand last month when I messaged her to invite her to visit Guyana on behalf of the organisers of the Ramadan Village. I imagine that she was visiting the Muslim community in Christchurch. Readers might recall that a White supremacist terrorist opened fire at two mosques in that city on March 15, 2019, killing 51 Muslim worshippers and injuring nearly 100 others. The timing of the Friday congregational prayers made it a deliberate and calculated attack designed to kill and maim as many Muslims as possible.

 

To mark the horrific and senseless violence inflicted on Muslims, the United Nations declared March 15 as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. Yet, just last week, a deplorable incident outside Sydney Town Hall in New South Wales, Australia, reminded me how fortunate Muslims are to call Guyana home.

 

After a peaceful protest against the visiting President of Israel, a group of Muslims stepped aside from traffic and pedestrians to perform their sunset Maghrib prayer. As they prayed, police reportedly received an order to clear the area and, for reasons unclear, decided it included the worshippers. Nearly a million Muslims live in Australia, and one would expect most Australians, especially trained officers, to recognise the simple posture and rhythm of Muslim prayer, which makes what happened next all the more absurd. Riot police descended on worshippers in prostration, pepper-spraying, pushing, and dragging them away. Several were injured, one man suffered “massive” bruising and possible kidney damage, and women reported knee injuries from being thrown to the ground.

 

In Guyana, President Irfaan’s Ramadan Village stands as living proof of a shared sense of community that unites us regardless of creed or ethnicity. It is a space where Muslim and non-Muslim Guyanese can come together not as “us” and “them,” but as one people, where President Ali’s “One Guyana” vision shines as bright as the lanterns on the lawns of the MYO tonight and throughout the month of Ramadan.