Africa’s liberal Mufti

 Kigali, Rwanda

To most outsiders, Rwanda is still synonymous with genocide. Nearly a million killed in 100 days; almost three quarters of the Tutsi population dead. The country’s attempts to rebuild have been much commented on, but something else is overlooked: Rwanda has become an astonishing oasis of tolerant Islam and, in many ways, an example to the West.

In Rwanda, there is an Islam which stands firm against the petrochemical ‘Gulf Stream’ of Wahhabi finance, despite lacking the huge wealth that Muslims in the Arab world enjoy. It also refuses to yield control to the neo-fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood now backed by Qatar and Turkey. This independence and liberalism are embodied by the spiritual leader of Rwandan Muslims, Sheikh Salim Hitimana. He is the Mufti of Rwanda, and as such he issues fatwas (religious edicts) on Islamic issues and is defender of the faith. We meet in his offices at the Al Quds Mosque in Kigali, which is busier than at any time in the country’s history. ‘Before the genocide, there were perhaps 200,000 Muslims in the country, and no Rwandans wanted to enter Islam,’ he says. During the genocide, Muslims stood out for refusing to take sides and for risking their lives to shelter those under attack. ‘People started to think: who are those people? Why don’t those people commit genocide like us? People became attracted to join us.’ The country’s Islamic population has grown fivefold, he says, to more than a million. What kind of religion have Rwandan converts joined? ‘I think Pakistan and many other Muslim majority countries have been hijacked by thinking which is not, basically, Islamic,’ he says. ‘In Rwanda we take Islam from our prophet, from our Quran. Which says: if you want to, you can convert to Islam; if you don’t, that is your freedom.