Courtesy Nadir Nahdi

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Fuad Nahdi, a prominent British Muslim journalist and activist who published an influential Muslim-focused magazine and was a key voice in Britain’s Muslim community, died on March 21 after being infected by what his family later learned was the novel coronavirus, his son said.

Nahdi, 62, who had other health issues stemming from diabetes and cancer, fell ill and “spiraled really fast,” his son, Nadir Nahdi, told BuzzFeed News. His family called an ambulance, and Nahdi was taken from his home in Wembley, an area of northwest London. He remained in the hospital for about a day and a half before he died; his coronavirus test came back positive two days after his death, his son said. Friends and family remembered Nahdi’s charismatic personality, his talent for networking and mentoring, and his important role in shaping contemporary British Muslim identity. “Fuad Nahdi was a powerful force to be reckoned with, inside the Muslim community, but more generally in British civil society, as well as more broadly in international Muslim circles,” Dr. H.A. Hellyer, a friend of Nahdi’s and senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, said in an email. “He was fiercely independent, and deeply committed to the normative tradition of Sunni Islam that informed his sense of justice and spirituality.” Born in Tanzania in 1957, Nahdi grew up in Mombasa, Kenya, and went to the University of Nairobi. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1983 after winning a scholarship to attend SOAS University of London. In the UK, he met Humera Khan, and the couple married in 1989. They had two children together: Nadir, 30, founder of online platform Beni, and Ilyeh, 25, a speech and language therapist. Khan, 60, is also an activist in her own right as the cofounder of An-Nisa Society, a group focused on Muslim women.

Courtesy Nadir Nahdi

He founded Q-News in the early 1990s, a magazine that focused on young Muslims in the UK and was published until 2006.

“Fuad as a person and Q-News as a publication could be summed up in four ways: as progressive, cosmopolitan, attentive to context, and respectful but never deferential let alone obsequious towards religious and political authority,” Yahya Birt, a University of Leeds professor and another friend of Nahdi’s, wrote in a Medium post remembering him. Through Q-News, Nahdi mentored a generation of young Muslim activists and journalists. “I think every single person that wrote there, Fuad had something to do with their careers,” said Dr. Nabila Munawar, project manager of the Inclusive Curriculum program at the London School of Economics and longtime friend of Nahdi’s, who wrote for and served as an editor at Q-News. Munawar described how Nahdi was an attentive but sometimes challenging mentor. She recalled how, after she was getting ready to submit her master’s thesis about responses to 9/11 in the Muslim community, she asked Nahdi to look it over.