Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

It was a great pleasure for this week’s Nostalgia Interview to meet Safeer Khan. Safeer is Imam at a mosque in Gillingham where he has been based since 2014.  He leads the prayers every day and takes classes at the mosque. We learn about the Indian origins of his Ahmadiyya community which has about 35,000 members in the UK. Safeer talks about misunderstandings around caliphs and the role of the mosque as helper for the wider community and the importance of challenging misconceptions. We discuss Islamophobia, and how Safeer tries to combat that, and Safeer recounts confrontations he has experienced with Britain First. We talk about different ways of dealing with violence and what happens when people are fed hate, and why we should never give up on people. We talk about Israel-Gaza and whether it’s a political or a religious war and Safeer recounts his experience of meeting a former IDF officer on Rochester High Street. We talk about whether the conflict in Israel and Gaza will ever end, and the dangers of f