Putting our House in order

My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member of its management committee and that gave me, an infant, the right to roam freely the four floors — including its vast basement — as I waited for him to finish meetings. I remember seeing Hebrew writing on a plaque on the top floor. There were mezuzahs on doors, respectfully preserved by the Muslim elders. I played with my brother on the second floor amid the dusty ebony pews left over from the mosque’s days as a French Huguenot church. European Judaism, Christianity and Islam were woven into the historical fabric of Brick Lane Mosque.

At weekends, I learned how to recite the Quran in Brick Lane. On special occasions, such as the annual remembrance of the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, the Mawlid al-Nabi, we children loved the heartfelt collective singing of rhythmic Arabic odes with our Bengali elders. The powerful unison of melodious voices, with incense burning in the air, and the aroma of food waiting, Indian biryani dishes sent to the mosque by our mothers. But politics and puberty ended that pluralistic peace.

Architect Shahed Saleem’s marvellous The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History, published by the public body Historic England, an arm of English Heritage, is an indispensable guide to Britain’s approximately 1,300 mosques. ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,’ said Winston Churchill.

Aged about 16, I rebelled and turned to the East London Mosque, a purpose-built mosque with minarets, domes and a management committee dominated by a much more politicised and confrontational form of Islam. No loving Mawlid gatherings were permitted because they were considered an imitation of what the Christian West did. The imams were trained in Saudi Arabia, and we regularly hosted leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami.