- Friday, February 28, 2025
Modi has strong ties with the Dawoodi Bohra community even before he became the prime minister in 2014.
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIAN prime minister Narendra Modi will visit the Imam al-Hakim bi Amr Allah Mosque, a structure which is nearly 1,000 years old, in the heart of Cairo during his visit to the North African state on Saturday (24) at the invitation of its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, which he extended in January this year after attending India’s Republic Day celebrations as the chief guest.
The visit will be of significance for the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community in India with whom the prime minister has had a warm relationship over the years.
According to the government of Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities, the mosque was reopened after extensive renovation work that continued for six years. The renovation was part of a large-scale plan to boost the Islamic sites of the Egyptian capital, NDTV reported.
It said the renovation work was co-funded by the Dawoodi Bohra community, which Modi has thanked in the past for helping him govern his home state of Gujarat well in the past and for being “patriotic, law-abiding and peace loving”. The renovated mosque is a key cultural site for the Dawoodi Bohra community, which follows the Fatimi Ismaili Tayyibi school of thought, in the Egyptian capital.
In India, the community is found in a number of states besides Gujarat but it is Surat in the western state which is considered their base. The Bohras reportedly derive their name from the Gujarati term “vahaurau” which means “to trade”.
Modi has strong ties with the Dawoodi Bohra community even before he became the prime minister in 2014. As the chief minister of Gujarat in 2011, he had invited the community to celebrate the centenary birthday of Syedna Burhanuddin, its then religious head. After his death in 2014, Modi also went to Mumbai to offer condolences to his son and successor and current head Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin.
Next year, too, he paid another visit to Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin with whom he shared a cordial relationship. In 2016, Syedna called on Modi, who fondly reminisced about his relationship with four generations of Dawoodi Bohra religious heads.
The prime minister also met with a delegation of Dawoodi Bohras when he visited Bangladesh in 2021.
In February this year, Modi inaugurated a new campus of an educational institute of the community in Mumbai in an outreach ahead of the high-stakes municipal elections in the financial capital.
The Dawoodi Bohra community has also stood by the prime minister at crucial hours. Members of the community turned up in large numbers at Modi’s overseas events in 2014 when he became the prime minister, including the Madison Square Garden gathering in New York, US, and the Olympic Park Arena address in Sydney, Australia.
The community has also responded to Modi’s admiration by often reinstating how they have been living peacefully in the country for many centuries.
