COVID-19

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