Tag: Britain

It's infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie. A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there's a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day. But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world. The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah. At the prize morning Carol Cooper, the RE teacher, says: "Boker tov," (Ivrit for "Good morning"). "Good morning Mrs Cooper," the children chant in reply. The entire school, Muslims, Jews, plus the handful of Christians and Sikhs then say the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer, all together. The Year Four violin club (five Muslims, two Jews) play "Little Bird, I Have Heard". Just as many prizes are being distributed to Hussains and Hassans and Shabinas as there are to Sauls and Rebeccas and Ruths. In fact, if anything, the Muslim children have beaten the Jewish ones. Thus does the Elsie Davis Prize for Progress go to a beaming little lad called Walid, the religious studies prize to a boy called Imran wearing a kipah and the progress prizes for Hebrew, to a boy called Habib and a girl called Alia.

Ali points to the manipulation of Islam by Republicans and Democrats. In other words, the theological or social components of 'Islam' are of secondary importance. What is more important is galvanizing their own troops in political battles.

The same happens in Europe. Christians who identify the narrative of 'Europe' very strongly with Christianity, use 'Islam' as a vehicle for their own anxieties about the loss of religious influence in Europe.

This is what Benedict XVI did when Popegate broke out last year. That is what Raztinger had been doing since before he became Pope.

This is what William Rees-Mogg does in today's Times.

Promoted to the front page 

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) have published a document: Towards Greater Understanding - Meeting the needs of Muslim pupils in state schools: Information & Guidance for Schools. I agree with many of its recommendations, but it’s politely didactic tone and its implicit assumption that British schools should seek to accommodate the needs of Muslim pupils so comprehensively is evidence, yet again, that the MCB appears to advocate for British Muslims in a locked and darkened room, without any sense of the current political or media climate. Remember the letter in which MCB et al told Tony his foreign policy was making Britain a terrorist target? Did it achieve anything more than invoke the wrath of politicians and Islamophobic media pundits? What is achieved by such posturing?

Okay, perhaps the issue is - should Muslim leaders speak truth to power or should they take a more low-key, pragmatic approach to seeking justice for the our community? As the MCB appear to plumped for the former, we now have another ‘provocative’ document published, and the right wing press have put the boot in (surprise surprise), and the government have dismissed it (surprise surprise). And all power to those bloggers who have robustly defended it against such an inexcusable tirade of hatred and contempt: Islamophobia Watch, Rolled Up Trousers, Indigo Jo and Five Chinese Crackers. It deserves defending, but as an educational document, not as an adjunct of Muslim identity politics. If we respond to the exploitation of legitimate criticism by bigotted little twerps like Harry’s Place by declaring such criticism either erroneous or irrelevant, we might as well just throw this document in the bin and forget it. Reports like this need to be debated and discussed or they are worthless.

The biggest story of this week, month and year in Britain so far. The government will announce that the numbers of troops in Iraq will be halved by the end of the year:

Prime Minister Tony Blair is expected to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq.

Mr Blair is set to make a statement to MPs in the House of Commons about the 7,200 British troops serving in Iraq.

It is thought he will say 1,500 troops are expected to return home in months, with 3,000 withdrawn by Christmas.

Downing Street has not confirmed the reports but Whitehall sources have told the BBC the process could be slowed down if the situation in Iraq worsens.

The plan is for the British troops remaining in Iraq to be based outside Basra for a period of time so they can provide support if needed and help monitor the border with Iran.

The Times has more:

The Times has learnt that Mr Blair will emphasise that his hopes of withdrawal will be conditional on signs that the Iraqi forces are able to fulfil their mission. The next rotation of troops in Basra — with 1 Mechanised Brigade taking over from 19 Light Brigade in the early summer — had been due to go ahead without any reduction in numbers.

There has been a growing view that the continued presence of British troops may have contributed to the violence in the city. Soldiers in Basra have predicted that the attacks will fall off when the British leave.

One factor in the move has been the assessment that the international force in Iraq will not recreate a perfect Western-style democracy. General Sir Richard Dannatt, chief of the General Staff, said in October that the Government should lower its expectations in Iraq.

Sir Richard, who took over from General Sir Mike Jackson in August, said that the continuing presence in Iraq of British troops was “exacerbating the security problems” and that they should come home soon.

This contrasted with Mr Blair, who told the Labour Party conference that it was important for troops to remain in Iraq to secure the peace. He said: “If we retreat now, we won’t be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.”

I suspect this will hand ammunition to those in the US who also argue for a withdrawal sooner rather than later.

The National Secular Society has risen to the defence of Robert Kilroy-Silk, the former BBC daytime television show:

MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk – whose TV career was an early victim of the Islamist “that-offends-my-religion” tactic – has set himself on another collision course with some Muslim groups when he claimed on the Today programme on Monday that most religious doctrine practised in the UK’s mosques was “backward, tribal and from a medieval period”. He was commenting on reports that claimed that around 60% of mosques in the UK do not admit women at all.

Who writes this stuff for the NSS? Do they bother to check their sources? Are they so keen to pin "crimes" and "wrongdoings" on religions, that they can't be bothered to use Google?

Robert Kilroy-Silk did not attack "Islamists" back in 2004 when he was sacked for remarks he made in his newspaper column, or even Muslim beliefs. He launched a racist diatribe against Arabs:

We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really? For liberating the Iraqis? For subsidising the lifestyles of people in Egypt and Jordan, to name but two, for giving them vast amounts of aid? For providing them with science, medicine, technology and all the other benefits of the West? They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders?

The NSS would rather applaude a moron like Kilroy-Silk, when in front of them is a Muslim woman who is interested in similar (if not the same) practical ends (like "equality for Muslim women"). And they say the religious are dogmatic...

The Times, amongst other newspapers, reported recently on some research conducted to gauge the public mood towards feeling 'British':

Research to be published this week argues that as the white population fragments into English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities, Asians and blacks are more likely to see themselves as British first.

The study, by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank close to Labour, quotes research finding that 51% of ethnic minority Britons describe themselves as British, compared with 29% of whites.

By contrast, 52% of whites describe themselves as primarily belonging to one of the United Kingdom’s four constituent nations, compared with just 11% of blacks and Asians.

The report suggests that, while Englishness and Scottishness are seen by minority groups as primarily ethnic terms, Britain, its flag and institutions are perceived as more neutral.

The IPPR argues that the contrast is greatest in England and points to “a growing divide between those who prefer English or British national identity”.

Promoted to the front page 

Thabet, in his posting on what is a traditional mosque, is, as usual, incisive. However, I think he is overly reductionist (read Salafi) when it comes to ennumerating what he thinks are the essential mosque features. Instead, we can talk of a number of features linked together like "family resemblances" (after Wittgenstein), that help to make up our inherited idea of the mosque. Alongside the core prayer function of the mosque, requiring the "mihrab" and a space for prayer, primordially shown by the nomad praying the desert mosque made of a few lines of stones, there are these other features that are widespread, notwithstanding the examples of Timbuktu and Xian. We might place them at the heart of the grammar of mosque architecture: the courtyard, the fountain (for ablution), the mimbar, the dome and the minaret. Whilst not absolutely essential, they are clearly widespread. One might add too, the propensity to horizontal and not vertical expansion, which is way the Hasan Thani mosque in Casablanca actually feels like a cathedral (in the style of Catholic monumentalism), despite the riches of Morrocan craft displayed in the tilework, whose delicacy is totally overwhelmed by the scale of the building.  There is not the feeling of infinitude in the interlocked arches of La Mezquita in Granada, receding as far as the eye can see.

But actually this is not the main issue at point here, it is rather a contemporary paradigm of literalist functionality that has no place in its heart for the grammar of aesthetics and our architectural tradition.  Its as if we can only create ugly modernist airhangers, kitsch Orientalist palaces as designed by Disney animators or arid Wahhabi fortresses, reflecting the intrumentalised rationality of modernity that has sucked the poetry of faith from our hearts.

In Britain, for the minority of mosques that are actually "purpose-built", you get the classic "1980s red-brick municipal" look, which is loyal to the dullness of modern British arhitecture of the period. The Islamic Cultural Centre at Regent's Park in London, built in greying seventies concrete, is not aging well and was never particularly inspiring. Leaving this rather well-funded rarity aside, the practical part of the problem was, of course, that working class Muslim communities struggled to get the shells of their mosques built and looked to make do with a lick of paint and a bit of carpet inside, without thinking much about beautifying either the interior and exterior. Additionally, the community in the diaspora does not have the right craft skills to hand in sufficient numbers to recitify this.

But to end on a positive note, some of the British mosques that I am inexplicably foud of are, in no particular order:

 1. Woking Shah Jahan Mosque (a Moghul minature in the stockbroker belt).

2. The incomplete Bradford Central Mosque, in West Yorkshire, looking to be built in late Victorian Gothic style, in the local sandstone, that actually looks like it might work.

3. The Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre, in North Kensington, London, where as much attention has been paid to the interior as the exterior, particularly the prayer hall. Terrible location though.

4.  Glasgow Central Mosque in Scotland. Very sci-fi nineteen-seventies, but for some odd reason it works. Plus it's in a fantastic landmark location, facing onto the city centre from the south bank of the Clyde.

5. Sixty million pounds sterling and counting, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies's new college with an attached Mamluk-style mosque, actually looks to be very restrained and tasteful. It's retro-classical with an intelligent weaving of Oxford college sandstone and Cairene Mamluk styling throughout. I was lucky enough to have a tour of the building site (somewhere at midpoint in its construction process), and when I walked into the college quad, I exclaimed, "Islam in England has arrived" (read that as you will).

But this is admittedly bare pickings. The other hideous efforts on display are truly depressing to pray in aesthetically. Masjid Umar in Leicester, for instance, some four million pounds, looks like part of the digital background from the Planet Naboo in The Phantom Menace. It looks as if the minarets are about to blast off into space. Birmingham Central Mosque is probably the ugliest purpose built mosque in the country, and looks already, after only a couple of decades, in need of serious repair if not knocking down. Its biggest crime is to hve a dome, but no sight of the inner dome from the main prayer hall, which has a crushingly low and claustrophobic ceiling, plus very poor lighting.

Give me a couple of knocked-together terraced houses any day of the week, if this is best we can do when we decide to throw hard-earned money away. Also there's less politics than at the big mosques, and at least you know what to expect when you get inside. So let's hear it for much neglected, rarely considered terrace-house mosque, like my local, Masjid Abu Bakr in West Leicester. They're even thinking of adding a minaret and a dome on top.  

A recent post by Yusuf Smith pointed to a Radio 4 programme on British mosques... but this time what was up for discussion was the state of mosque architecture rather than wide-eyed Muslims preaching inside them.

Sadly, I did not get to listen to programme, but Yusuf provides a synopsis:

On one side are those who favour traditional features such as minarets, while others say a building can have a much more modernist approach and still be perfectly valid as mosque architecture. There is an interview with [Ali] Mangera, who belongs to the latter school and is involved in the Abbey Mills "Olympic" mosque project. (The programme avoids the political aspects of that project.)

For those of you living under a rock, the Abbey Mills mosque project has been the subject of some controversy (eteraz.org covered this controversy last year). This is the "political aspect" that Yusuf refers to and it is not of interest to me here. What is of interest to me is the idea of what constitutes the "traditional features" of a mosque.

I am in full agreement with Ali Mangera, one half of the team working on the so-called 'Olympic mosque' (the other half being Yvars Bravo), when he told the Guardian last year that mosque architecture in Britain is of poor quality:

"Most British mosques built over the past 40 years are not exactly great architecture," says Mangera. "They have that cartoon look, all plastic domes and minarets."

This especially disappointing when you consider that mosques have provided inspiration for some magnificent pieces of architectural ingenuity and design. Yusuf's comments are not the only one's I've encountered, online or offline, that point out how "untraditional" the Mangera-Bravo design is.

So what is it that forms "traditional features" of a mosque? Of course, there will be some functional features that will have attained a near universal basis in mosque design, based on the primary use of a mosque: the performance of the ritual prayer in congregation. This would require mosques to have a niche which marks the direction of Makkah (the mihrab); the need for an open space to perform the actions of the ritual prayer (salat); perhaps there will be the luxury of having water/sewage facilities to allow worshippers to perform ablution; and some place from which to call the faithful to worship.

But beyond these functional features what makes a dome and a minaret part of the "traditional" features of a mosque? Apart from highlighting one of the many 'centricisms' that exist within the Islamic traditions, I feel there is some kind of internalisation of 'Western' depictions of architecture associated with 'Islam', which include many Islamophobic depictions of crescents, minarets and domes encroaching upon European soil, forming part of the 'Islamic menace'. Afterall, domes are not uniquely Islamic. One of the biggest domes in the world is on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And the Hagia Sofia in Constantinople had a dome long before the birth of the Prophet (upon whom be peace), which leads us to an interesting point. For if we say domes are an important component of traditional mosque architecture then we concede that a tradition from outside and prior to Islam (and even completely detached from the Hijazi milieu of the Prophet's era) has influenced and been absorbed by Muslims so much so that it has attained a normative quality (unless it can be definitely shown that domes were Hijazi in anyway, which I am not sure they were). In fact, right in one of the major heartlands of, speficially Sunni, Islam, lies the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus (above left). It has unmistakable Byzantine features, yet it is no less a mosque than the domed places of worship commonly associated with Islam. And how does the idea of "traditional" mosque features fit in with mosques around the Muslim world?