Isle’smiles better for us with a mosque
YESTERDAY’S Friday prayers marked a big day for Lewis’s Muslims. For the first time in the Gaelic speaking, Free Church-going island’s history, they worshipped together in a mosque.
Before now, prayers were held in living rooms. Dead bodies were washed and stored in garages until an imam could travel up from the mainland to perform a funeral.
Last year, Lewis’s 60-odd Muslims bought a dilapidated building and were granted planning permission to turn it into a mosque. But work had ground to a halt.
Then, six weeks ago, a builder in Leeds received an SOS call.
Aihtsham Rashid recalled: “A friend rang and said, ‘You need to come up here, we need some help’.”
Rashid assumed he was being summoned to somewhere else in Yorkshire. “When he said he was in Stornoway, I had never heard of it.”
After an alarming flight on a tiny twin-propeller plane, he arrived at an unpromising building with rotten timbers and fresh air where the roof tiles should be.
He said: “It was a shell. It looked as if it was about to fall down. I looked at it and assessed it and set a target of £50k to transform it. Then when I realised the cost of materials, skips, the cost of everything really, I needed more money.”
Rashid’s JustGiving page attracted interest and donations from across the UK and the rest of the world.
The total now stands at nearly £100,000. Via social media, Rashid appealed to fellow Muslims to support the new mosque, donate copies of the Koran and send prayers when the carpets were held up at the ferry H terminal in Ullapool. is arrival came as a shock to Stornoway, population 8000.
There have been Muslims living in the town since the 1950s, when the first travelling salesman arrived with a suitcase full of fabric. Recently, their numbers have been swollen by a handful of Syrian refugees.
This YouTubing Yorkshireman, however, was something new.
“I turned up and I’m not your typical builder,” Rashid explained. “I was young compared to other builders on the island. The general Muslim
Builder tells how an SOS call led him to Scotland and a remarkable community project to deliver a religious first for the Outer Hebrides