One Faith Across Six Nations: Malawi's Muslim Women Return Inspired From Zimbabwe

For the Malawian sisters who travelled to Mutare this month, some of the most powerful lessons came not from the podium, but from simply looking around them.

They had come for the SADC Women's Ijtima 2026, an annual regional gathering that gathers Muslim women from six nations of the Southern African Development Community: Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and South Africa. Seventeen women travelled from Malawi under the banner of the Muslim Women Organization (MWO), the body that coordinates Muslim women across the country. This year the gathering met under a single, fitting theme: Unity. It is an open event, welcoming any Muslim woman with the means to cover her own transport, and it has become a fixture of the regional calendar, held in Zimbabwe every August.

What struck the Malawian delegation was how seriously the faith is lived in the places they visited. They arrived to find Islam visibly respected, the hijab everywhere they looked, the faith practised openly and without hesitation. They watched local mothers arriving with their own daughters beside them, bringing the next generation along so that faith and sisterhood are handed down rather than left to chance. For sisters who know how hard it can be, in this day and age, to raise a child in the way of Islam, that was a quiet and powerful lesson. Here were women treating that responsibility with real seriousness, and passing it on with intention.

The lectures reinforced the same spirit, practical and rooted in the daily life of a Muslim household. There were talks encouraging families to send their children to school, on managing the home and family well, and on the daily obligatory prayers that anchor a believer's life. This was not faith kept at a distance. It was faith brought right down into the everyday work of raising children, running a home and holding a family together, the very challenges the Malawian sisters live with back home.

According to Shameem Chakwana, MWO Secretary General, the heart of the gathering is this coming together across borders. The purpose, she said, is "to enhance sisterhood among the Muslim women in the SADC region," and the delegation's presence was important "to prove the sisterhood, and that Islam is global." It is a message she hopes the sisters will carry home and live out. "Unity and love amongst the sisters is vital to boost Islam," she said.

What also emerges is a picture of genuine regional friendship, built up year after year. These are not strangers meeting once. The same nations that gather in Zimbabwe in August also travel to Malawi each year, and in a point of real pride for the Malawian sisters, they come in part to learn from Malawi how such a gathering is organised. That standing will soon be on full display, because in October this year it will be Malawi's turn to host, welcoming these same countries onto Malawian soil for an Ijtima of its own.

The Ijtima opened officially on 14 August and closes on 16 August, with the Malawian delegation returning home on 17 August. They come back carrying more than memories. They return with new friendships across the region, practical lessons for their own homes, and the example of sisters in other lands who are raising a new generation in the faith with pride and purpose. It is an example they hope to carry into their own families, and into the gathering Malawi will host in just a few weeks.