Even thought it started with me, it turned out, I was not the sole beneficiary of the manager’s empathy and system’s magnanimity. Other people of religious beliefs also immensely benefited. Because I worked in the university’s exam office, I was aware that students were given consideration when they observed sabbath (Jewish) or when their exams clashed with Friday prayers.
For example, whereas the start time for afternoon exams was 2.15, on Fridays Muslim students who wanted to observe Juma’a prayer were allowed to start a quarter of an hour later. And for the rest of my time there, there were no hitches to or eyebrows raised against the plan.
After leaving City University I found my time at Liverpool Hope University equally very memorable and inspiring. LHU was a college of Theology and it in is a huge Cathedral. But when I first arrived there fire had gutted the Cathedral and it was being rebuilt. I was told that in the Cathedral the small Muslim community was provided a separate prayer space.
But after the fire incident the Christian and Muslim communities were provided a prayer room each in Alexander Jones Building. My office was, incidentally, directly opposite the Muslim prayer room, where we often observed our daily and Friday prayers.
When the Cathedral was rebuilt the Muslims continued to maintain the small prayer room in AJB, until the entire building was evacuated. However, the university had other plans. One day the Vice Chancellor, Professor Gerald Pillay, a Professor of Christian Theology invited the Muslim community to the opening ceremony of a new building, which was given to the community. Within it were two well-separated male and female prayer and wudu’u spaces.
During the event the VC, a very honourable man that I had a firsthand experience with, told the story behind the building. One day, he said, he was seated in his office when a male student walked by the garden behind the office. The student, as if he’d suddenly remembered something, stopped and looked at his watch watch; he immediately stepped into the garden and began to perform his noon (Zuhr) prayer.
The student’s action, explained Professor Pillay, struck and joggled his memory back to the prayer room the Muslim community once had. And, there and then, he decided that the Muslim community needed a befitting place of worship. So, a building was reconstructed and converted to prayer rooms and wudu’u spaces for students and staff.
And the Muslim community continued to grow without any discrimination or impediment. The prayer rooms were well utilised and sisters, who previously had no dedicated prayer space, began offering prayers in congregation. I remember observing and sometimes leading daily or Juma’a prayers in the building and in the remaining time I was there, I cannot recall any problems arising from the use of the facility.
In the aftermath of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London an elderly white, Christian friend and I began visiting secondary schools, especially Sixth Forms, as external speakers to promote race relations. What I found most striking was in each of the nearly 80 schools we visited the students were more than willing to learn about Islam and, often, quite receptive to the dissimilarities it brings as a religion.
These examples may come across as subjective, isolated cases but they also highlight the fact that despite the media stereotyping of Islam and Muslims the British society is much more tolerant than one would expect in view of recent happenings. This is so because it is established on the rule of law and sacredness of rights, even of minorities, regardless of what others think.
Unfortunately, in societies such as ours back home, otherness has been elevated beyond wits and reason spanked to stupor. On a daily basis and at every opportunity in-groups and out-groups are erected as barricades between followers of the two main religions. Name-calling and other forms of hostility typify relations.
Debates about important national matters are trivialised and collapsed into religion and, in the end, people become even more divisive, intrusive and discriminatory. And so religion, like ethnicity, is the society’s lushest recruitment base for dubious politicians and provincialists.
Were it in a saner society, the heated debate over Firdausi Amasa’s exclusion from the Nigerian Law School’s Call to Bar ceremony would have had no basis. But in our society, being an epicentre of sensationalising and emotionalising simple matters, it has provided an ambience for the usual opposing sides to be at daggers drawn.
And because emotions were prioritised over reason, not even lawyers agree on whether there was any violation of fundamental human rights as enshrined in the country’s constitution or not. Or whether there were precedents on which such rights violation could be predicated and challenged or not. The focus was simply on Islam and how it could be ‘detoxified’, as it were.
While the Law School has its own rules we must not deny the fact that the constitution is supreme. If certain rights are held as fundamental in the constitution it amounts to an exercise in futility for any rules introduced by any entity within the country to set aside that provision of the constitution. So, Firdausi Amasa’s matter could easily be settled in a competent court of law.
In the meantime, the emotions it has triggered, especially as some arguments are deliberately targeted at and intended to undermine the Muslim identity, is worrisome. If Firdausi had been excluded because she attended a Muslim event dressed in something considered unacceptable by the event organisers the same people currently criticising her would have attempted suffocating everyone with screams of human rights, self-determinism and so on.
But on this occasion, because it suits their stereotypes of Islam and the Muslim identity, they are at variance with this self-assigned posture.
(Concluded)
