Manchester mosque will rise from the ashes

Religion is often revived by persecution. Those bigoted yobs who torched the Nasfat Islamic Centre will never succeed in driving the Muslim community out

n July 15, the Nasfat family of mosques held a national peace rally in Trafalgar Square. The banners they waved said quite a lot about where they come from theologically: “Say no to extremism,” read one banner. “No to Boko Haram,” insisted another. There was even a union flag on the leaflet. But none of this made a blind bit of difference to the bigots who broke through the back window of the Manchester Nasfat mosque the very next day and set the place alight. Five fire trucks turned up, but there wasn’t much they could do: the place was gutted.

Bigotry is stupid, conducted by stupid people. The mosque leadership told me that the building had been attacked several times during the five years since it opened. A couple of severed pigs’ heads have been thrown in the mosque during worship. Their minibus has been torched. Even last week, as some of the community stood surveying the charred remains of their former place of worship, young white men jeered at them from passing cars. “We don’t want you here,” they shouted, gleefully laughing at what is left of their mosque. It all sounds a bit too Mississippi Burning to me. And given that many of those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire were Muslims, it feels especially vile that more Muslims have been targeted with fire in this way. The mosque believes the attack to be the work of local thugs. But however much they plead with the police, they don’t seem to have made catching them much of a priority. That, at least, is how the mosque feels.

But I’m pretty sure the mosque will have the last laugh. Because if the experience of the churches I have worked at is anything to go by, fire tends to revive religious devotion. Since becoming a vicar, all of the places I’ve been at have had a major fire in their past. St Mary’s, Putney, was burnt down by an arsonist in 1973. And within 10 years it had been rebuilt, and energised to become one of the liveliest parishes in south-west London. The parish I work in now was destroyed by the incendiary bombs of the Luftwaffe. It too was revived. And though the fire that began in a bakery on Pudding Lane in 1666 wasn’t deliberate, the destruction of the old St Paul’s Cathedral in the great fire made way for Christopher Wren’s magnificent new building and the renaissance of London. When Wren was picking through the stones of the old building, he noticed one carrying the single Latin word resurgam — “I shall rise again”. He had it carved above the cathedral’s south door, underneath the image of a phoenix.

An enthusiasm that can’t be dented

The Nasfat mosque will do the same. The faithful are coming together on Friday afternoon to pray in the car park next to the ruins. The community is very afraid of what has been directed at it, but it expects a good turnout — up to 3,000 people normally turn up for prayers. If the aim of the arsonists was to drive the community out, they won’t succeed. Founded in Nigeria, the Nasfat movement began in the 1980s as a series of prayer groups for young professional Yoruba Nigerians. In the often highly syncretistic culture of West Africa, it cross-pollinated with many features of Pentecostal Christianity that had proved so successful in Nigeria. So Nasfat became a sort of charismatic version of Islam — professionally minded, highly passionate, more interested in prayer than politics, and very concerned with numerical growth. A few yobs on a Manchester estate are not going to dent their enthusiasm.

So when a pig’s head is thrown at their place of prayer, it totally fits in with their world view about facing persecution. As does the commitment to a renewed enthusiasm that will rise from the ashes of their mosque. Dr Giles Fraser is priest-in-charge at St Mary’s Newington in south London and the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.

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