Articles - Miscellaneous

A Grand Night Out

I had never before been inside a mosque until I took up Joyce Sundram's offer to join her and her Concord friends for a visit to The Leeds Grand Mosque in Burley a few weeks ago. The visit was at 7:45pm for refreshments, then a talk followed by questions. The visit was to end with an observation of evening prayer at sunset. By coincidence this is the mosque at which my next door neighbours worship. They had explained to me that some mosques are regional - most worshippers having the same country of origin. The Grand Mosque attracts worshippers from many backgrounds being particularly popular with students and academics.
The Mosque has one entrance for men and another for women. I discovered this by going through the wrong one. Shoes have to be removed and women are expected to wear scarves. My first impression of the Mosque was that it was very light and open. There were three worship spaces; the main prayer hall, a side "chapel" separated from the main hall by a glass partition and a balcony on 3 sides of the main prayer hall again with a glass partition. The main prayer hall is for male worshippers (although there were some women who prayed at the back at the sunset service), the balcony for women and children. There are no chairs in the main prayer hall so those who were frail or for some other reason needed to sit used the side "chapel" which had seats. The carpet in the main prayer hall had a beautiful pattern of arch shapes each arch defining a prayer space. (When the men arrived for prayer later I noticed that the first man to arrive stood at the front in the middle near the imam. The second man to arrive stood to his right, the third one to his left and so on alternately until the front row was filled. My neighbour explained that this meant you often stood next to people you did not know well so when they wished one another peace they would be saying this to a variety of people. This seemed a good idea to me as a way of broadening fellowship). I arrived a little early and walked around the prayer hall. At several places there were recessed shelves with beautiful bound copies of the Koran. At the front there were six clocks showing different times. As I was trying to guess in which part of the world it was 4am when it was 8pm here our hosts for the evening, Hassan and his wife Sana arrived. (It turned out that the clocks showed the times of the 5 daily prayers and the extra payers for Friday.) Hassan is the assistant imam and Moslem chaplain at the university where he lectures in engineering. He gave us an excellent insight into the principles and practices of Islam for almost an hour without notes and answered our questions clearly.

At around 9pm the haunting call for prayer sounded and worshippers started to arrive. The prayers were quite short maybe 15 minutes or so spoken melodically by the imam. One closing point sticks in my mind. Muslims are very particular to present themselves respectfully to God in prayer by washing ritually beforehand and wearing clean clothes. That Wednesday I had been to mid morning Communion at St Edmunds straight after gardening and a visit to the tip to dispose of some rubbish so I was far from well presented. I wondered if it really mattered. What do you think?

David Everett

27 June, 2004