Dear Members of the Community,

Bismihi’Ta’ala,

On behalf of The Council of European Jamaats, I join all of you around the world in celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr and sadly bidding farewell to the blessed month of Ramadhan.

We have spent the last month in devotion, prayer, and spiritual reflection, we realise that the Islamic values of advancing justice, tolerance, upholding the dignity and equality of all human beings, and progress are shared by all of us who are working for a brighter future. We must remember that for our community to make sustainable progress we need to be dynamic and the changes needed must first begin in our hearts, in our minds and in our communities.

At CoEJ, we are embarking upon a strategic planning initiative that has been long overdue. This will Insh’Allah pave a way and be an avenue for a brighter future, enabling our august body to develop with clarity of goals and in essence be led, truly from the helm.

We are actively listening to our community and as a regional body our role is predominantly to add value to our community. When it recently emerged from the European Women’s Needs Assessment that women in inevitable and unfortunate situations having usually obtained a decree nisi absolute, have great difficulty obtaining a divorce in accordance with Islamic law, at CoEJ we decided to address this issue. We have embarked on establishing a process with religious scholars, under the guidance of Al Uzma Grand Ayatollah Sistani whereby the women are assisted.

Whilst on the matrimonial front, we have also noted that amongst the younger generation, there is a general drift of feeling and a pressured expectation to find a spouse within our communities in some magical way when least expecting but with no real platform or support provided to achieve this. This paradoxical thinking it would seem may make the younger generation disconnected and discouraged about finding love within our own communities. It is time as a community we addressed these issues openly and create conditions acceptable and necessary for matchmaking in current times. At CoEJ we recently organised interactive matrimonial workshops primarily aimed at youths planning on getting married and in search of finding the right partner, as well as providing support to engaged couples, first year married couples and beyond. Our model is now also being adopted by Africa Federation. Through this initiative we hope to listen to and address the needs of our younger generation and consequently enhance matchmaking processes within our community.

Before I finish, it is important to mention the trying and turbulent times facing Europe. We were shaken by the tragic and poignant events in Oslo and more recently, our iftar times were clouded with news headlines that told a bleak story of UK communities under attack by gangs of rioters and rampant looting. We witnessed many vivid images, pictures of a woman leaping from a burning building, owners of a family shop seeing their life's work turned to ash, a youth who sat on the pavement in a pool of blood, surrounded by a group of youths who under the guise of appearing to help him, opened his rucksack and robbed him. This video has poignantly come to encapsulate the moral vacuum that is at the heart of these disturbances. The soul sinks at these sights and more. As a result of this mayhem and to safeguard our communities, some of our centres decided to close down until some sort of semblance of order and a sense of safety was restored in their localities before resuming their Ramadhan programmes again.

In these times of unrest, let us unite together as a cohesive community that is driven not just by the Islamic morals that we steadfastly uphold but by the very morals that all of humankind has been innately blessed with. Let us also pray for the tens of thousands of famine stricken people of East Africa who have been hit with the worst hunger emergency in a generation and let us help in any little way we can.

I wish you and your family a joyous Eid and request you to join me in prayer, for unity, peace and justice to prevail and for the hastened reappearance of our awaited saviour Al Mahdi (AS).


Dr Husein Jiwa
President - The Council of European Jamaats

Ramadhan 1432

Secretariat