The Waswahili Community Trust UK (Wadhamini wa jumuiya ya Waswahili)

INTRODUCTION

Waswahili at home and abroad: between piety and poverty by Professor Mohammed Hyder

I would like to say first of all how pleased I am once again to be honoured by your invitation to meet and address you. I always welcome the opportunity to meet you and to able to convey to you the greetings of your colleagues at home in general and of the MUSLIM CIVIC EDUCATION TRUST (MCET) in particular.

I am particularly grateful to your Committee led by our brother Bwantumu Moh'd Swaleh for their enduring persistence in caring and working very hard in the service of fellow Waswahili in the UK.

I would like to say to him and to his Committee members that serving fellow human beings is at once a thankless task but at the same time gives one a rare satisfaction, which nobody can take away from you.

You are lucky if you get posthumous recognition. Even then, do not expect any gratitude. Perhaps we should take a lead from the Holy Quran when it says:

I would thus urge you and your Committee to go on with the good work and your rewards will be somewhere else. If you as much as get an appreciative smile, thank your lucky star. That said, let me now turn to the subject at hand.

It is a long and somewhat complicated if nota convoluted story but I will try my best to tell it to you in an intelligible even if a somewhat contracted way. Let us begin at the beginning. The first question we want to get out of the way is: who are the waswahilis?. This will be examined in the following section.

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Copyright© March 2003: The Waswahili Community Trust (UK)
Registered Charity:1083065

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