Post date: 28-Feb-2012 01:46:14
I received this text message,
“Salaams
We need to request for a Prayer Room (for Salaah/Namaz) in Birmingham Bull Ring shopping Centre One should be made available A.S.A.P.
If we all e-mail : enquiries@bullring.co.uk Goes straight to management team & if they get enough emails Insha'Allah manager said they will have to act upon it & take into consideration & Provide
So can we please all send a quick e-mail
EVERY TIME PRAYER ROOM IS USED, ANGELS WILL BLESS U
Your Reward is with Allah (swt) Please forward text
JazakAllah”
On the surface it appears a noble and worthy cause to help Muslims perform there religious duties but in reality an unwitting testimony to what Islam in the UK is deviating towards. My opinion is levered on the fulcrum of a simple question, “Whose responsibility is it to pray at specific times during the day?” To which the simple answer is, “A Muslim’s!” The individual responsibility to pray, the wajib al-ayni, is upon the shoulders of each Muslim and no other person or organisation. The exhaustive rulings in the books of Islamic fiqh leave no situation in which a Muslim may say, “I could not pray because…………” whether they are ill, on an airplane, the battlefield or in the tiniest imaginable jail cell. However, it seems that some Muslims today find praying in a shopping mall to be a challenge that cannot be overcome by reliance upon the collective wise efforts of 1400 years of pious scholarship and must turn instead to feeble excuses for themselves, blagging and begging for help from non-Muslims.
It would be bad enough if it ended with begging for help from those with no duty to provide for the prayer but the text message suggests coercing the lawful owners of the shops into reducing their right to profit and use their property as they see fit and satisfying the particular needs of one group of consumers. This usurps the property holder’s rights, it is ghasb. I believe that I need the freely given permission of a property owner to pray on his property, that the water used for the wudhu must be lawful for that use and that if necessary I should buy or rent either or both commodities to make them lawful for my needful use. Therefore, it must be asked are prayers in such a room valid or a least if they may be offered to Allah (swt) with a clear conscience?
Birmingham city centre has numerous sites where people may pray. I am told that the famous churches of St Philip’s in Colmore Row and St Martin’s, adjacent to the Bullring, allow Muslims that ask to read their prayers, assume that the Unitarians near Five Ways would not object and, although I do not know, suspect that the good people of Carr’s Lane Church Centre would not be unhelpful. Many commercial and civic organisations in Birmingham and other major cities provide their workers and customers with facilities for prayer as part of their perceived duty of care. I have been involved in the planning and implementation of several of these ‘Prayer Room’ projects and have always been delighted at the efforts those organisations make to prove that they care about their employees, customers, visitors and passers by. It was with genuine pride that managers at the Council House, Crown Courts and Children’s Hospital state that their prayer rooms in the city centre are available to anyone who needs them. A pride reminiscent of that felt by the guardians of the Ka’bah providing water for pilgrims or that of the Ansars in welcoming the Muhajirun. Personally, and as a Muslim, I wish to stand with the open handed rather than appearing amongst the empty handed. Thus while I am never shy to ask Allah (swt) for more I am always grateful that I am honoured by Him and have sufficient to share.
Since the responsibility to pray is upon the individual Muslim and each has a duty of care to other believers it naturally follows that the responsibility to provide a place for congregational prayers is shared, wajib al-kifayah, by all Muslims. As with the individual this may be the responsibility to gain permission to use a public space and its facilities or to bear the cost of renting or purchasing a suitable space. In the malls of Makkah and Medinah people carry their prayer mats on shopping expeditions and pray together in the concourses and streets but it seems that in the west we cannot carry prayer mats or pray without a ‘special’ room. Moreover, it is a room that should not be paid for by us. However, we could if we must have a room, invite our brothers and sisters to invest in a company, a waqf, that lawfully obtains and maintains a space for anyone to pray or meditate as a gift to the city from the people honoured by Islam.
My argument is brain numbingly simple. If we want the rewards for prayer, for helping others pray, providing a place of peace, water for the thirsty and promote Islamic values, whether in a city or a desert, then we Muslims must do it and pay for it. The alternative is to buy into a tortured and convoluted post-colonial discourse that presents me as a victim owed something by another people or to be believed that I can be rewarded for forcing someone else to do what I should be doing. Of course, Muslims acting as moral agents are rewarded for stopping others committing wrongful acts or encouraging good practice but the thought of twisting this high morality into a justification for scrounging for a room strains the complexities of my faith, culture, commitment to logical analysis and, not least, my moral sensibility.