PM Modi has maintained cordial ties with leaders of the neighborhood. (File)
New Delhi:
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s go to to the Imam al-Hakim bi Amr Allah Mosque, a virtually 1,000-year-old construction within the coronary heart of the Egyptian capital of Cairo on Saturday, can have a particular reference to a neighborhood of Muslims in India that the PM has shared an outdated and heat relationship with for a few years.
According to the Egyptian authorities’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the mosque reopened following intensive renovations that took six years to finish. The renovations have been a part of a large-scale plan to spice up tourism to Cairo’s Islamic websites. The work was co-funded by the Dawoodi Bohra neighborhood, the identical neighborhood that PM Modi has typically thanked for serving to him govern the state of Gujarat properly and for being “patriotic, law-abiding, and peace-loving.” The mosque is a crucial cultural web site for the Dawoodi Bohra neighborhood in Cairo.
Who Are The Dawoodi Bohras?
The Dawoodi Bohras observe the Fatimi Ismaili Tayyibi faculty of thought. Their distinctive heritage originated in Egypt and later shifted to Yemen earlier than establishing a presence in India within the 11th century. After 1539, by which period the Indian neighborhood had grown fairly massive, the seat of the sect was moved from Yemen to Sidhpur (Patan district of Gujarat), India. Even now, Siddhpur has the enduring ancestral havelis (houses) that belong to the neighborhood. The males of this neighborhood put on distinctive white garments and golden caps, whereas the ladies are identified to put on vibrant burqas, and never the black ones another sections of Muslim ladies put on.
The Bohras have two principal teams – a merchant-class Shia majority and a Bohra minority, who’re primarily farmers. There are roughly 5 lakh Bohras in India alone, and across the similar quantity in different elements of the world. The Bohras derive their title from the Gujarati phrase “vahaurau,” which means “to trade.” While the neighborhood is discovered in numerous states, together with Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, Surat is taken into account their base.
PM Modi’s Long Connection With The Community
PM Modi has had a heat relationship with the Dawoodi Bohras even earlier than he grew to become Prime Minister. In 2011, as Gujarat Chief Minister, he invited the neighborhood to have fun the 100th birthday of the then spiritual head of the Dawoodi Bohra Community, Syedna Burhanuddin. After he died in 2014, PM Modi additionally went to Mumbai to supply condolences to his son and successor Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin.
In 2015, PM Modi paid one other go to to Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, the present spiritual head of the neighborhood, with whom he has at all times shared a cordial relationship. While inaugurating the brand new campus of the Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah (The Saifee Academy) in Mumbai’s Marol, the PM had advised the neighborhood he was part of their household. In 2016, Syedna referred to as on the PM, who fondly reminisced about his relationship with 4 generations of Dawoodi Bohra spiritual heads. He has typically praised the enterprise acumen and social reform measures initiated by the neighborhood, and at a diaspora occasion, praised their social service particularly within the context of preventing malnutrition to addressing water scarcity and reminded them of their very own previous of internet hosting Mahatma Gandhi after his Dandi march.
He additionally met with a delegation of Dawoodi Bohras when he went to Bangladesh. In 2018, he addressed the Ashara Mubaraka, the Commemoration of the Martyrdom of Imam Hussain (SA), organised by the Dawoodi Bohra neighborhood, at Indore’s Saifee mosque, the place over one lakh members of the neighborhood participated.
Dawoodi Bohras Have Been An Integral Part Of All Of PM’s Diaspora Events
The neighborhood too firmly stood by the PM when it mattered probably the most. For instance, they have been seen in massive numbers at PM Modi’s abroad occasions in 2014 – after he grew to become PM – together with the Madison Square Garden gathering in New York and the Olympic Park Arena handle in Sydney. The neighborhood too has responded to the PM’s admiration by typically reinstating how they’ve been dwelling peacefully within the nation for hundreds of years.
Challenges Before The Community
However, the neighborhood too is preventing its personal battles, from ladies difficult the apply of genital mutilation in younger women prevalent in lots of the sections of the neighborhood to the Supreme Court referring to a bigger bench a collection of petitions difficult the authority of Dawoodi Bohra neighborhood leaders to excommunicate their members earlier this yr.