Voice of British Muslim Women

Ayesha Naseem, Blackburn

Often in life, you want to turn to someone for guidance, for advice, or simply to be heard and to be understood. After our parents, the people we often look towards are our siblings or our closest friends.

They say family is your safe haven, it is your comfort place, and the place you can call home. My definition of family, however, transcends its generic meaning. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and particularly, the auxiliary organisation for women, my beloved Lajna Ima’illah, is also my family. For an Ahmadi, an extended medium of support and guidance can come from various ways. It can be directly sought from the Khalifa of the time. But it can also come from auxiliary organisations and their elected presidents if required.  

An entire Community that we can call our home. A leader we call our spiritual father. Just typing these words makes me realise once again, how great, and how magnificent a blessing this Community of Allah the Almighty is. 

As we celebrate the centenary of Lajna Ima’illah this year, I want to take this opportunity to zoom in and reflect specifically on what this organisation means to me.

Attending local meetings and events as a young child is little to do with learning big things and more to do with creating memories about winning competition prizes or making friends. But it is really when you enter the fold of Lajna Ima’illah in your teenage years that you truly come to understand and put into practice the training and learning you once received in your childhood.

The friends in the Community who grow up with you from your childhood or the people you meet and befriend during your first volunteer duty at Jalsa Salana or at Lajna’s National Ijtema, in every place, you are welcomed and looked after. Suddenly, you are among a huge family of women who are like your sisters and mothers. These women become your point of contact when you are away from your biological family. They are the ones who you would find beside you to celebrate your happiness and also to console you in your sadness.

I have not forgotten the morning when I learnt of my aunt’s demise just over a month ago, and how difficult it was for me to manage the atmosphere at home with no family nearby. Anyone who wanted to come and share our grief needed hours which were already passing by as if they were long decades. In that time, when I found it the hardest to cope, I turned to a friend from my local Lajna group to offload my mind. Because I knew I could. I knew it was my safe space, a place where I will be heard and understood.

Or if I recount to when we travelled for my aunt’s funeral and the mosque was filled with women who knew her through Lajna Ima’illah. The ones telling us the most about the kind of person she was for them were not members of her immediate family, but women who knew her because of their mutual association to Lajna Ima’illah. At times, it felt, they knew her better than any of us from her own family did.

In life, you will always have moments where you need someone’s advice. Where I have felt the need, I have turned to my friends, my elders in Lajna Ima’illah for that guidance, and I have never returned empty handed. Recently, I was able to seek guidance from the National President of Lajna Ima’illah UK Dr Fariha Khan on a personal matter. Despite her busy schedule, she took out time to respond to my query and that too in such a detailed and affectionate way that even through an email response, I felt understood and protected.

I cannot really think of anyone beyond the confines of my immediate family or friends, to whom I would open up like this. But I can think of Lajna Ima’illah because it is different. it is our safe haven. It is made of people I can trust and the people I can call, family.

This compassion, this genuine sense of belonging and sisterhood entrenched in this organisation is a blessing from Allah the Almighty. It is a great proof of the truth of Islam Ahmadiyyat, and it is a result of all the guidance and all the nurturing we have, and we continue to receive from Khilafat-e-Ahmadiyya ever since Lajna’s foundation.