Faithfully reporting Nairobi

Muslims gather for Friday prayers at Nairobi’s Jamia Mosque, the largest in Kenya

CITY CENTER, April 23, 2011 (Daily Dispatches) – Nairobi, cosmopolitan city that it is, hosts people of pretty much all faiths and religions you can imagine. By numbers, the most prominent are Christians, then Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and a plethora of traditional belief systems.

This weekend, as the city shuts down for the Easter holidays, Daily Dispatches is taking a little time out from the hustle of turning around a story a day. We’ve not stopped the work though – far from it. We’re talking to religious leaders from the three main faiths, and to their congregations, about what faith means to them, and how it is changing as the city modernizes and expands around us.

We’ll post the Dispatch we hope late Sunday or early Monday. We’re really keen to hear what kinds of questions you would want us to put to these leaders: an evangelical Christian preacher, the Imam of Kenya’s largest mosque, and a Hindu priest at one of Nairobi’s many temples. Please leave us a comment here, or on our Facebook page, and we’ll do our best to feature their responses in the Dispatch.

Happy Holidays to all, if you’re lucky enough to be off work this weekend.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 at 2:24 pm. It is filed under Features, Working. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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bint Ali says:

April 23, 2011 at 2:59 pm

Sounds like it’ll be a really good article, looking forward to it.

I do hope you’ll manage to get views from more than just one authority on each faith. With the many denominations amongst the faiths, I find that even as a Muslim, some of the opinions expressed by a particular Muslim leader may tend to be filtered quite strongly through their own personal opinions.

That said, I’d like to know what the Muslim Imam you speak to says about what the Muslim leaders/teachers are doing to keep the young people connected to Islam while living in a modern society. How are they teaching the young (and old) to find a balance between the spiritual and secular – a balance which is essential in the faith and yet so challenging given that there are many practices in current society that conflict with core Islamic principles.

Thanks!
bA.