Fuad Abu Bakr, son of 1990 in­sur­rec­tion­ist Imam Yasin Abu Bakr be­lieves that no one will ever be able to fill the role left by his fa­ther who died of a heart at­tack on Thurs­day night.

His fa­ther, leader of the Ja­maat Al Mus­limeen has left a lead­er­ship void in an or­gan­i­sa­tion that was found­ed in the late 1970s.

Fuad Abu Bakr

ABRAHAM DIAZ

“Peo­ple use the word ‘pow­er’ but I pre­fer to use the word re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. We are very clear in Is­lam about the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of lead­er­ship. Peo­ple al­ways looked up to him. In our or­ga­ni­za­tion, there are a num­ber of per­sons who have been car­ry­ing a huge re­spon­si­bil­i­ty just to make what we do pos­si­ble,” he said.

He ex­plained that the Ja­maat is in­volved in many ac­tiv­i­ties which in­clude so­cial out­reach, help­ing the poor, me­di­a­tion in high-risk com­mu­ni­ties, and ed­u­ca­tion.

At the mo­ment he said there are over 10,000 reg­is­tered mem­bers while there are af­fil­i­at­ed Ja­maats.

He spoke about the next steps to fill the lead­er­ship void left by his fa­ther.

On Sat­ur­day he said, “Next week we have a num­ber of meet­ings to try to so­lid­i­fy po­si­tions and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. It is not some­thing we take light­ly and mu­tu­al con­sul­ta­tion is what is en­cour­aged in the Quran. We will look at when our leader was in a po­si­tion and who he se­lect­ed for lead­er­ship po­si­tions when he was ill. It is es­sen­tial that peo­ple are cho­sen based on mer­i­toc­ra­cy and the abil­i­ty to lead. At this point, I don’t want to give more de­tails.”