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Saturday 22 November 2008

An evening with the Muslim Facebook crew

Sarfraz Manzoor celebrates an iftar meal with homeless people and his fellow Muslims, a web-generated ‘flashmob’ observing an Islamic tradition of generosity to the needy

As a Muslim I was raised to believe in the centrality of hospitality to Islam. On holy days such as Eid my mother would cook pilau rice which she would scoop on to plates and cover with aluminium foil to retain the heat. My sister and I would be instructed to race to our neighbours and friends and hand them the food. In those days Islam did not have the unwelcome reputation it has now; people did not fear Muslims, they just did not know much about them. In a tiny way, sharing our Eid celebrations may have helped build a few bridges. Recalling how my own family celebrated Ramadan, I should not have been shocked by what Farah and Fatima had told me and yet the truth is that I was very surprised. It has become the norm to argue that British Muslims are, to a bearded man and burqa-clad woman, angry and alienated, with little or no affection for this country. The young British Muslims who rate a mention in the national press are those downloading terrorist manuals; those who are using the internet to organise feeding the homeless are less often reported.

‘This isn’t what you normally hear about Muslims,’ I suggested to Fatima. ‘That’s true, but it is what we normally do,’ she replied. ‘It’s just not what you read about in the media.’ ‘So you think the media concentrates too much on extremists?’ I asked. ‘No, the mistake is to think that we’re all just extremists or liberals,’ she said. ‘I could be extreme in my Islamic views but that doesn’t make me extreme in my politics — helping the less fortunate is the act of a Muslim extremist, if you want to use that language.’

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