Sakina Bakharia is a Muslim woman who dared to break with cultural traditions, engaging in social work and joining the fight against gender-based violence in Barbados.
The Barbados-born Muslim whose great-grandfather and grandfather migrated to Barbados from India, grew up among the Kensington New Road, St Michael, East Indian community, the eldest of four children in a household fully immersed in the East Indian lifestyle. She attended Westbury Primary School, Louis Lynch Secondary and also spent some years at St Ursula’s Convent in between that period.
Having two sisters and a brother, she said: “It was a mix of emotions in our childhood because we were East Indian, so that was our ancestry; that was the culture that our grandparents and our parents lived in . . . so it was kind of merging our Barbadian culture with our East Indian culture with our Islamic faith and growing up, a lot of what was taught of the faith was taught with a cultural perception of the faith.”
Detailing her background, she continued: “So as you grow older and you start trying to explore and navigate for yourself, you realise that a lot of the things when it comes to faith, it is culture, not faith. How we were taught the faith was a lot of culture influence, not faith-based only and in going against certain things or as you are trying to understand certain things, you rebel.”
She confessed that she rebelled.
Created stir
As teenagers, Sakina and her younger sister created a stir in the Barbados East Indian community in 1997, with a widely-publicised escape from their home in search of refuge elsewhere.
Reflecting on that episode in her life, she explained: “As teenagers you had no safe space to go, you also did not know what you were doing. Looking back at it now, as confused teenagers you knew you wanted something different but you did not know how to get it.”
The sisters later capitulated and returned home and shortly after, Sakina entered the Barbados Community College to continue her academic studies.
At 19, she got married
to a fellow Muslim from her community. It was not an arranged marriage but she conceded: “I just fell right back into the patterns of what was expected of me”.
Now the mother of a 21-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, she and her husband left Barbados soon after marriage and went to live overseas “for quite a number of years”, later returning home to build a life.
The marriage has since failed and the couple are currently going through the legal process of divorce, having already been “Islamically-divorced”, a process initiated by Sakina.
She said: “I would say the process is in some ways misunderstood and misrepresented in some ways by the males because Islam is to protect the rights of a woman. Islam protects my rights, I can advocate for what I want but oftentimes we grow up with a cultural background. We are so entwined in patriarchy that there’s no differentiating what is the faith or what are the rights of the faith or what the culture perpetuates the faith to be and I think it’s important for us as women to understand our rights; to understand that it’s okay to advocate for your rights.”
The circumstances of her own marriage informed her decision to become a member of the Barbados Association of Muslim Ladies (BMAL) which was started by a group of Muslim women in 2010. She started volunteering casually with the association but eventually got more involved.
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