Islam Blooms in Rwanda Genocide's Wake

Rwandans jump to faith they view as tolerant

By Laurie Goering
Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
Published August 5, 2002
Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune online

KIGALI, Rwanda -- Long before the call to prayer begins each Friday at noon, Rwanda's Muslim faithful jam the main mosque in Kigali's Nyamirambo neighborhood, the overflow crowd spreading prayer rugs on the mosque steps, over the red earth parking lot and out the front gate.

Almost a decade after a horrific genocide left 800,000 Rwandans dead and shook the faith of this predominantly Christian nation, Islam, once seen as a fringe religion, has surged in popularity.

Women in bright tangerine, scarlet and blue headscarves stroll the bustling streets of the capital beside men in long white tunics and embroidered caps. Mosques and Islamic schools are overflowing with students. Today about 14 percent of Rwandans consider themselves Muslim, up from about 7 percent before the genocide.

"We're everywhere," says Sheik Saleh Habimana, the leader of Rwanda's burgeoning Muslim community, which has mosques in nearly all of the country's cities and towns.

Countries around Rwanda--Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda--have large Muslim communities. But the religion never was particularly popular in Rwanda until the 1994 genocide, which spurred a rush of conversions.

From April to June 1994, militias and mobs from the country's ethnic Hutu majority hunted and murdered hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis at the government's urging. Within a few months, three of four Tutsis in the country had been hacked to death, often with machetes or hoes. More than 100,000 suspected killers eventually were jailed.

Rwandan refugees in Tanzania in 1994, after the genocide.

The genocide stunned Rwanda's Christian community. While clergy in many communities struggled to protect their congregations and died with them, some prominent Catholic and Protestant leaders joined in the killing spree and are facing prosecution.

Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the head of Rwanda's Seventh-day Adventist Church, is on trial, charged with luring Tutsi parishioners to his church in western Kibuye province, then turning them over to Hutu militias that slaughtered 2,000 to 6,000 in a single day.

The day before the massacre, Tutsi Adventist clergy inside the church sent Ntakirutimana a now-famous letter, informing him that "tomorrow we will be killed with our families" and seeking his help. Survivors report that he replied: "You must be eliminated. God doesn't want you anymore."

Muslims offered haven

At the same time, Rwanda's Muslims--many of them intermarried Tutsi-Hutu couples--were opening their homes to thousands of desperate Tutsis. Muslim families for the most part succeeded in hiding Tutsis from the Hutu mobs, who feared entering the country's insular Muslim communities.

Yahya Kayiranga, a young Tutsi who fled Kigali with his mother at the start of the genocide, was taken into the home of a Muslim family in the central city of Gitarama, where he hid until the killing was over. His father and uncle who stayed behind in Kigali were murdered.

"We were helped by people we didn't even know," the 27-year-old remembers, still impressed.

Unable to return to what he considered a sullied Roman Catholic Church, he converted to Islam in 1996. Today he is studying Arabic and the Koran at a local madrassa and most mornings awakens for the dawn prayer, the first of five each day.

His job as a money changer in downtown Kigali conflicts with Islam's prohibitions on profiting from financial transactions, but he thinks he has mostly adapted well to his new faith.

"I thought at first Islam would be hard, but that fear went away," he said. "It's not easy at the beginning, but as you practice it becomes better, normal."

Rwanda's Muslim leaders have struggled to impart the importance of unity and tolerance to their converts, who number as many Hutus as Tutsis.

Reconciliation at mosques

Habimana is one of the leaders of the country's new interfaith commission, created to promote acceptance, and in a country still seething with barely masked anger and fear after the mass killings, Rwanda's mosques are one of the few places where reconciliation appears to have genuinely taken hold.

"In the Islamic faith, Hutu and Tutsi are the same," Kayiranga said. "Islam teaches us about brotherhood."

Muslims in Kigali, capital of Rwanda

While Rwanda's ethnic Tutsis mostly have come to Islam seeking protection from purges and to honor and emulate the people who saved them, Hutus also have come, seeking to leave behind their violent past.

"They all felt the blood on their hands and they embraced Islam to purify themselves," Habimana said.

Becoming Muslim has not been an easy process for many Rwandans, who chafe at the religion's dress and lifestyle restrictions. Despite Islam's new status, Rwandan Muslims traditionally have been second-class citizens, working as taxi drivers and traders in a society that reveres farmers.

Muslim women in Rwanda

"Because we were Muslim we weren't considered Rwandanese," Habimana said. Now, as the religion's popularity grows, that is changing.

Today "we see Muslims as very kind people," said Salamah Ingabire, 20, who converted to Islam in 1995 after losing two brothers in the killing spree. "What we saw in the genocide changed our minds."

Below is a separate but related article:

Rwanda Wakes Up To Islam

Islamic Voice, December 1999

Kigali (IINA): The Muslim Association of Rwanda is doing everything possible within its means to help new Muslims in learning more about the faith they have chosen, and the practices that are enjoined by it, such as circumcision, the eating of Halal food, the mode of dress, and other related matters. Islam entered Rwanda in 1901, through Arab merchants, and then from 1908 there followed several waves of Muslim immigrations during the period of German colonisation of the country. The first mosque to be built in Rwanda was built in 1913. But it was not easy for Islam to spread in Rwanda, because there was no studied plan for such work to be done, and the successive colonial powers did not make matters any easier. For example, the first Muslim school was built in 1957, but was confiscated by the authorities, though it was returned to the Muslim community in 1997. Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, and though the new rulers recognised Islam as such, there still are stumbling blocks that were and are being put in the way of the educational advancement of Muslims in the country, and the image of Islam as such is very much distorted.

However, things took a different turn after the 1995 civil war that led to the death of more than half a million Rwandans, but in which the Muslims had not taken any part. From that time the picture of Islam in the minds of the Rwandans took a 360 degrees turn, and from then on the authorities in the country started to allow Muslims to expand their propagation activities and to teach Rwandans about Islam.

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