Islamic Organizations in Guyana: Seventy Years of History and Politics, 1936–2006

This paper is an exploratory attempt to document the history and politics of Islamic organizations in Guyana from the 1930s and, in doing so, it exposes the schism that exists among them. For a country with a small Muslim population, Guyana has a plethora of Islamic organizations. These organizations have had antagonistic relationships and it seems that competing for organizational supremacy supersedes the interests of Islam. Conflicts between these organizations stem from differences between “traditionalists” and “reformists” over so-called “ancestral practices” brought from the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent (where their ancestors originated), and they have become the core issue of contention. Conflict exists over political allegiances, and as demonstrated, this dates back to the 1950s over the volatile issue of whether Muslims should support communism or not. While the divide between the traditionalists and the reformists is closing, Islamic organizations are far from uniting due to the egos of those in leadership positions, and they lay the blame on one another for the stalemate. The weakness of the Muslim leadership in achieving their organizations’ goals as well as their inability to effectively bargain with the secular state of Guyana could be attributed to the differences that exist among them.