Building Trusted Bridges Between People, Capital and Global Opportunities

ONE of the leaders of Jamaica’s Muslim community is seeking US$100 million over five years from rich Arab states to build an Islamic cultural centre in Kingston that, he said, will provide a range of services to Muslims and non-Muslims.

According to Imam Douglas Owen-Ali, the Islamic Cultural Centre of Jamaica is intended to be a satellite of Islamic values that will be so involved in the Jamaican way of life that it will be viewed as a culture within a culture.

“We have developed a five-year business plan,” Owen-Ali told the Observer in a recent interview. “I’m going, in a few weeks, to meet with some Arab ambassadors in New York and Washington and I’m saying there are some things that I need. I will be talking to the moderate Gulf states — Saudia Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.”

According to Owen-Ali, the Islamic cultural centre will comprise a national mosque, an Islamic educational centre, Islamic research and communication centre, lecture theatre conference centre, a life centre which would include a nursery, day-care centre, wellness centre, restaurant, bakery and meat market catering to the ethnic tastes of Muslims, a zakat (charity) house and a facility that will provide financial and business advice, as well as funding for projects.

“We would like to have Islamic banks that provide non-interest loans and offer profit-sharing,” explained Owen-Ali, who said that that concept is now being adopted in Europe.

He also wants to build an Islamic hospital “for all people”, a development that would help enable him realise a part of his greater plan to increase the Muslim population in Jamaica from the current 11,000 to at least 50,000 in the next five years.

Owen-Ali, who was last September named by the Universal Islamic Centre of America as their ambassador to Jamaica and the Caribbean, is convinced that to have that many Jamaicans become Muslims, he needs to offer something tangible.

“I am a friend of the unbefriended poor. I am a shepherd of the less fortunate. But to minister to these lost souls, I need to bring tangible things to the table.”

He believes that while man cannot live by bread alone, man cannot live without bread. Therefore, he intends to ensure that he has the financial backing to set up and sustain the kinds of programmes that will improve the lives of Jamaicans in need.

“We need sustainable programmes in communities,” he argued. “We have problems in the inner-cities of this country… how do we provide jobs, self-help programmes, education. You cannot go to somebody in this day and tell them come pray five times a day and read the Qur’an. You have to come first and give them tangible things.

“So, I will be seeking financial support to empower me to be an effective ambassador to Jamaica and the Caribbean.”

Owen-Ali said he was approached with the offer to become an envoy at an Islamic conference in Chicago last August attended by Muslims from about 35 countries.

“Allah has blessed me with a gift to speak,” said Owen-Ali. “I had delivered a moving speech, after which the Sheikh from Ghana came to me and said ‘brother, we have to encourage you. Imam, I’d like to you to be our ambassador’. That is how it emerged. Not because I’m any great scholar or great spiritual guru, but Allah has blessed me with the ability to move people and I’ve qualified myself by my own academic work.”

Owen-Ali holds as first degree in marketing and a Masters degree in International Law and Diplomacy from the University of Lagos in Nigeria.

He has written two books, the first, titled Islamic Law and International Relations, was launched in Kano state, Nigeria. Now, he said, he’s writing his third.

“I’m doing things. I’m a show me person. Tell me that you can recite the Qur’an all day long and you can’t show me what you’re doing has no meaning,” he said.

His instrument of authority, he said, mandates him as ambassador to accomplish the Universal Islamic Centre of America’s vision to not only build mosques and Islamic centres, but to “facilitate the increasing demands people from all over the world by teaching the knowledge and love of Allah”.

In order to fulfil that mandate, said Owen-Ali, he needs to establish a national mosque, an Islamic school, in Jamaica.

That mosque, he said, would be striking, easily recognised unlike the one on Red Hills Road where most of the city’s Muslims worship. “Something that represents the dignity of Islam. We need a monument to represent Islam and to attract Christians to our way of life.

“My mother keeps telling me ‘son, a so-called mosque at Red Hills Road is not going to make it’. My colleagues, who are university graduates, they want to come to something that is dignified.”

Owen-Ali is also adamant that in order to pull more people to his religion, he and the Muslim community must look at Islam as a product and make it attractive.

“One of the challenges Muslims must face is how to package Islam in a way that will make it attractive to the people of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean,” he argued.

“I believe that one of the ways for Islam to impact the people of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean is through commerce. We cannot see Islam in isolation from commerce,” he said. “If you’re commercially strong, government listens to you.”

Muslims, he said, must now work to become a strong lobby, through their numbers and through commerce. “We need to have a stronger sense of community. Many of us believe that it is good enough to sit in the mosque. Now we have to take Islam out of the mosque,” Owen-Ali said, while advising his Muslim colleagues to play a responsible role in politics.

“Politics is a way of life in Islam. I will say to my colleague Muslims that we must embark on a politics that is righteous and principled.”

That, he said, requires them living the ideals of Islam in its purity. “I’m saying to people, we want to give you paradise here on earth and we want paradise for you in the hereafter.”