Ahmadiyya harps on social media for Islamic propagation

EFFECTIVE usage of Information Technology (IT) tools on social media for tabligh Islamic preaching skills have impacted on over 800 members of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Nigeria (AMJN) across the country.

Speaking at the the just-concluded workshop, the Amir Sahib (National President), Dr Mashu’ud Adenrele Fashola, said the essence of the workshop was to familiarize members with the positive use of social media tools to propagate Islam.

Elders and Youths of the Jama’at participated in the a day It/social Media workshop held at the Jama’at headquarters, Ijaye-ojokoro, Lagos.

Fashola berates the negatives of social media on the society, saying: “Religion aspect for instance, some people use social media to cause kiosk, promote terrorism, persecution and to send the wrong teachings. So we need to counter this and we need to enlighten our members against this funny prey to this negative use of social media”, Fashola noted.

He however noted that, “we need to enlighten our members against funny use that’s the main reason we organize the workshop. We are teaching them how to use social media to promote peace and harmony with true teachings of Islam.”

“We want our members to contribute to positive application of social media, to use it to promote harmony, development through the teachings of Islam.

“The job of true teachings of Islam is enormous so everybody has to participate, we can’t leave it for leaders or missionaries, all hands must be on deck because of those who are using it to spread false teachings of Islam.

On the benefits of social media Dr Fashola said: “There are other benefits people can derive on social media, like operating for community and national development, promoting economy empowerment for the members.

Explaining monitoring mechanism he said the use of social media under the Jama’at has been put under constrain and regulations to protect their members from the evil but strictly moral use.

An IT specialist who is also member of the Jama’at, Missionary Abdul Azim Ahmad said the idea of organizing social media training for their members is to use the tools to reach out to the world “we want to use social media to reach out to the world, as we all know Islam is not conservative religion, Islam goes with modern trends. Modern man can learn what is relevance of Islam to him”, Ahmad stated.

He added, “Through this platform, we will use it to teach the world the true teachings of Islam.”

According to Ahmad, he enjoined members of the Jama’at to show good conduct in use of social media, such as free from prejudice, anti-party, coercion, imposing own thoughts on people “yours is to give them message and leave the rest for people to decide whether is right or wrong. We believe you can only teach through peaceful mean, so we want to use the social media to reach the masses with peaceful approach that’s what have taught them today.

The Jama’at used the event to unveil its web page and social media hash tag trueislam.ng; #trueislam; #messiahhascome.