A mosque built on island traditions of faith and respect

OUR world is vast and noisy, complex and divided, but sometimes, in a moment, it can feel very, very small. This struck me on a lovely autumn day more than 16 years ago, when I happened to be visiting the Arnol blackhouse on Lewis.

It is a traditional thatched cottage, almost windowless, with a peat fire burning in the middle of the floor. As recently as 1947, most folk in rural Lewis lived in homes like this museum piece and one or two were inhabited into the 1980s.

But there was a strange murmuring outside. I stepped into the sunshine and found myself in a tiny group listening incredulously to a tiny transistor radio. Its owner, a drystone waller, continued silently to work as details unfolded, live, of appalling events in New York, far away over the nearby azure Atlantic.

I remember at the moment the first of the World Trade Center towers collapsed there was a tractor rambling up an adjacent croft. A skylark was singing and the billows continued to break on the shore, and thus life irrevocably changed beyond a scene that could have been painted by Bruegel. My mobile rang. An editor, in high emotion, called me to duty – a reaction piece, on the lines of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’.

I was reminded of that afternoon this month by the fumbled media reaction to news that – at a rate of knots – a mosque is being completed in Stornoway. The first thought seems to have been incredulity that there were Muslims on Lewis at all; the second that, surely, our staunchly Presbyterian and never-on-aSunday community would rise up against this construction in righteous horror.

But a London paper, visiting the other weekend, found work on the conversion of a derelict house proceeding at pace; men putting in 12-hour days, and locals – entire strangers to Muhammad – giving help and even money as our little Muslim community races to complete its first mosque in time for Ramadan.

Nor was the minister of Stornoway Free Church – the UK’s biggest Presbyterian congregation and the dominant church in Lewis – prepared to ‘hit out’ and ‘slam back’.

THE Reverend James Maciver said: ‘I don’t remember any animosity towards them [local Muslims]. Outsiders may have got the impression that the Christian community here has resisted the mosque but that’s not the case.’

Pointing out that two Syrian mothers regularly attend his congregation’s mothers and toddlers group, he added: ‘I come at this from the point of view of liberty of conscience, freedom of religion. I don’t personally see Islam as the way to salvation but they have a civil right to a place of worship.

‘I have no right to come between someone’s conscience and their god. Local people simply take the view that their faith is their business.’

There has been a small but respected Muslim community on the island for many years. Itinerant pedlars were stumping along its roads with their suitcases of wares before the Second World War, and by 1960 several families had settled in Stornoway.

They were – and remain – courteous, neatly dressed, hard-working people, of impeccable manners and winning smiles, who keep themselves largely to themselves and would never dream of opening their businesses on the Sabbath.

In my Harris days it was remarkable how often, when I needed something in a hurry – a baseball cap, a wash basket, a white shirt – it could be found, for a most reasonable price, in Akram’s cheerful maze of a general store.

The family regularly rustled up delicious curries for local charity functions and conscientiously appeared at local funerals, sitting in gentle state amidst the cascading notes of Gaelic psalm.

Akram’s brother-in-law, Abdul, was a prized tennis partner of mine. Out on the court the day after my fraught afternoon at Arnol he was visibly drawn and tired. His brother, he confided, worked – had worked – at the World Trade Center. It had been late, late that night before Abdul knew he was safe.

I suppose one reason why his community fits so serenely into ours is because of the fierce priority both traditions place on good manners. In a small rural community, where you grow up alongside folk you must see daily for the rest of your life, you learn to watch your tongue; avoid gossip about anyone whose kinsman, unbeknownst to you, may be listening avidly from a corner. We all have nicknames – essential amidst thickets of Murdos and Donalds, Morrisons and MacLeods – but to address someone by his is the height of rudeness.

And I suppose another is that my island is sadly no stranger to the tears of emigration. Thousands, from the early 1920s, had to flee overseas from the destitute Lewis of the time, fetching up in distant prairies, or New Zealand sheep stations, or the South Georgia whaling.

MANY died, sleeping amid the dustbins in grim North American cities in the terrible winters of the Great Depression. Most never returned to the island – or, if they did, only long after their parents had passed away.

A great-grand-uncle of mine was away so long he had quite lost his Gaelic; while two greataunts, whom I vividly recall as irreproachable Free Church matrons, had in girlhood been arrested, imprisoned and finally thrown out of the United States as ‘illegal aliens’.

And two years back, one local lady told me how, when her mother had died, an esteemed Asian merchant in Stornoway called at the family home with the gift of black mourning garb, dismissing any suggestion of payment.

‘I have never forgotten how your mother fed me,’ Mr Nazir told her, recalling how often he had been bidden to the family table during his daily door-todoor round when he was thin, young and chilled in a foreign land. That old woman, in turn, had sons overseas, and if she could not feed them she could at least feed him.

There is an abiding ethos of hospitality to the ‘stranger within your gate’. And there is, too, that respect of faith for faith, especially faiths both grounded in a sense of community and custom.

In true faith there is toleration and it is striking in our land today – and Lewis has known its meddling hate in recent months – that the real lash of bigotry is aggressive secularism: those who scream that there is no God, and they hate ‘Him’.

Sixty Muslims were murdered, we too readily forget, in the Twin Towers.

Weeks after the attack, the very first funeral of a British victim was held. Gavin Cushny, 48, had been working on the 105th floor. He was buried, after worship in the ancient church where he had been set to marry his fiancée, right here on Lewis, as all bowed in grief in a world so small.