Nazim Baksh

Nazim has had a distinguished 20 year career as a television and radio producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Based in Toronto, he is currently assigned a lead producer on Toronto’s daily supper hour television newscast which airs to an estimated 5.5 million households in the Greater Toronto Area. He has worked as a producer on Dispatches, an award-winning weekly national radio program; served as the foreign editor of As It Happens; produced for The National,  CBC’s nightly flagship news and current affairs show, the 5th Estate and the CBC’s documentary unit. Nazim has won numerous awards and in the years since 9/11 he has worked extensively on issues of national security and violent religious extremism. He has done extensive field work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the last few years he has visited the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba three times to cover the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has been held at Gitmo for the last eight years.

In 2006 he was the recipient of the prestigious Massey Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto. Nazim holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Western Ontario and a B.A. Hons. in Political Science and History from York University. Between 1995 to 2005 Nazim pioneered a series of Rihlas and Deen Intensive programs in North America, Spain, Morocco and the first program in what eventually became a series of successful Rihlas to Mecca and Madina. He has been a regular contributor to Q-News International, Islamica Magazine and a number of other publications. He is an activist, a translator and interpreter of the message of Islam in the modern context, a khatib, a teacher, a mentor to many young Muslim men and women in the GTA and most of all a father and husband.  Nazim has been named in The Muslim 500 – The World’s Most Influential Muslims.

Nazim was born in Guyana during a period of civil strife between Indians and Blacks in the years leading up to independence. As a teenager growing up in Georgetown he became an admirer of theprogressive politics of the late Dr. Walter Rodney.

In 1979 he attended the funeral of his fallen hero, a victim of Forbes Burnham’s tyranny.

Dr. Walter Rodney

Standing on the graves in the Le Repentir cemetery and watching the frustration and anger on public display he believed the Guyanese masses did not rise up against Burnham because the government controlled media refused to tell them Rodney was a victim of a bomb planted in his lap by Burnham’s henchmen. In 1980 Nazim migrated to Canada with his parents and settled on a career in the field of journalism.