By GHK Lall- Yesterday was the birthday of the Blessed Prophet Mohamed. Greetings to Muslim brothers and sisters. Everyone. No exceptions, whether high or low. Whatever they have done. Whatever they have come to represent. Fellow Guyanese got a holiday. I took the time to reflect. It will not be liked by the Faithful. Not those of the Holy Prophet. But those who are faithful to the call of cash and the conman’s calculations.
I journey back a millennium plus four centuries. The business class, the propertied class, the money class, the ruling class ran the Prophet and his people out of Mecca. The hegira took them to Medina. The powerful celebrated. Nuisance expelled. Fourteen hundred years later, many of that clan still fool themselves.
They attend sacred spaces of prayer, desecrate them. With their presentations. With their presence and the desolation their spirit brings. More to the teachings of the sacred texts, less to physical structures.
For where in today’s Guyana are the tenets of the Holy Prophet Mohamed? Bypass an infidel of my low stature. Shine the spotlight and let it highlight those who call themselves believers, followers, worshippers. The simple and the little, being true to the calling, are excluded from those who profane those three words. Believers. Followers. Worshippers. The profaners are highfliers, speechmakers, and trash talkers, who by their blatant hypocrisies make others look at the Prophet Mohamed differently.
When a man or woman at the elevations can have neither time nor interest nor energy to engage sincerely with truth, honesty, integrity, and principle, then he or she is not a disciple of the leader, who was forced to take flight. He or she is a visible and audible representation of those dark forces that forced the Prophet to take flight.
Power and money were their gods. In Guyana, the same priorities: power and money cohabitate, reign. It’s thinly disguised idolatry. From the Golden Calf of Moses and the People of the Book, to the golden handshake and golden handcuff that compels prostration before the god of money.
It’s not what the sacred texts teach. The compulsive and controlling love of money cannot be. In such circumstances, how many has time, harbors a care, to live the teachings of the Prophet? Beyond lip service. In genuine devotion, and not C-Grade theater. The temples of the Lord should never be made into places subject to the whims and manipulations of the calculating. Their power and prominence should not count for anything in the holy spaces of worship.
Yet this has been the case across the denominational board. In fact, some from within the temples are among those who forget the Prophets, be he Moses, Jesus, or Mohamed. The ambitious, the money loving, those who crave closeness to power, create new prophets out of men and women of questionable moral compass and feathery ethical anchor.
Didn’t those traits characterize the enemies of the Prophet Mohamed; deniers of the will of Allah, the most merciful, the most beneficent? Nakedly displayed in Arabia in 622 CE. The Prophet Mohamed and his followers chased out of Mecca. A thousand plus years later, it is obscenely obvious in 2026 Guyana and from years before. It is more in the open now.
Look at them and listen to them. Their handiworks have sowed disunity and devastation, and still, there is pontification about fraternity. The poor of Guyana grow hungrier and weaker. Power and its substances, its possibilities, should have reversed, and lifted, from those conditions. Instead, the pocket and the greed of the tribe have been the priorities. Now brother is up in arms against brother.
The split. The fallout. It is not from Mecca to Medina in Guyana. It’s from the inglorious to the inconceivable. Out of respect for the Holy Prophet’s birthday, I waited. Though I don’t follow, his teachings penetrate. His flight reminds of its human sources. I see their vulgar unholy equivalents here in Guyana today.
