‘Those people make the place stink!’

I have lived in the South African Muslim community long enough to know of a range of vices that its members engage in. I even write and speak about them on a regular basis. However, I occasionally hear or witness something that shocks me and causes me to pull out my ‘Vices’ notebook to add yet another item to the long list there. I also pull out my ‘Ideas’ notebook to add yet another idea for a column I would like to write.
A recent such gem which resulted in shocked notes in both my pocketbooks – a difficult task for someone who is not ambidexterous – was a comment made by a certain maulana about immigrants to South Africa. He was not talking about immigrants in general; he was referring specifically to Muslim immigrants. His major complaint was about the negative effects of the influx of immigrants on mosques.
‘Our wudhu khannas (‘ablution facilities’ for those who do not understand this Urdu/Turkish/Farsi terminology),’ he opined, ‘now stink.’ Pointing to a particular mosque, he spoke about how the mosque infrastructure was ‘crumbling’. And he attributed both the stench and the crumbling infrastructure to the increased use of these facilities by immigrants. My guess is he was not referring to Indian, Pakistani, Bengali, Turkish, Iranian or European immigrants but those from our own continent.
The comments were mind-blowing. My brain was numbed into silence and I found myself unable to say anything in response (which most people who know me will find difficult to believe; my mouth usually leads the way – often with disastrous consequences). I could not even reach into my inside jacket pocket for the little booklets until much later when the full effect of the esteemed maulana’s statements hit me.
Let us, for a moment, ignore the fact that such xenophobic, racist remarks issued from the mouth of a person who is supposed to be part of the ‘leadership’ of the Muslim community. Clearly, this man had no concept of what it meant to be a Muslim. He certainly had no concept of what a masjid was. Anyone that did would not say such disgusting things with any degree of seriousness.
Did he think that the purpose of a masjid is to serve the interests of a small clique of people who rub each other’s back and who circulate money between themselves? Do these congregants of a masjid have to be of a particular nationality? Particular skin colour? Speak a particular language?
Are the immigrants and refugees (muhajiroon in Arabic) in our communities simply tolerated in our mosques? Is it a situation where we South Africans would really rather not have these foreigners there (what with the stink in the wudhu khanna and the crumbling infrastructure) but we put up with it because there really is nothing we can do about it?
Whatever happened to the notion of a mosque as a place of worship for all, a place of refuge, a place that was open to whoever wanted to make use of it? What happened to the idea of a mosque as a house of Allah that belonged to all Muslims? Or is one’s Muslimness compromised because one is an immigrant? The very fundamental understanding of a mosque is undermined and subverted by such comments.
The mosque should be available to anyone who might want to use it. And using it, for most people, simply means being able to pray in it, to perform their daily salah. I remember that, when I was growing up, my parents would allow into the house any stranger that came to the door with a sad story and said that all s/he wanted at that moment was a place for salah. They regarded this as a basic duty of a Muslim to another Muslim and, in fact, something of an honour to have a stranger pray in your house. Now, it seems, some of us get upset because unfamiliar people want to pray in our neighbourhood mosque. I use the word ‘unfamiliar people’ because in many cases the immigrants who pray in these mosques are not ‘strangers’; they live or work in the area where the mosque is located and, as such, ‘own’ the mosque.
I have heard many South African Muslims lament the fact that some immigrant communities prefer to set up their own mosques rather than using already-established ones. After hearing these disgusting remarks, can we blame any immigrant community if they wanted to have nothing to do with South African Muslims? With such attitudes in our community, I ask myself whether the stink in some of our mosques was not there from the time the intention to build it was made.
In a country beset with xenophobia, Muslims should be showing the way forward, teaching our compatriots the benefits of living with and accommodating ‘strangers’. If all our talk of a ‘global ummah’ is to mean anything, it must start with the way in which immigrant and South African Muslims interact with each other. This is a great opportunity for us to demonstrate what ‘global ummah’ means. But it is an opportunity we will rapidly lose if such attitudes become entrenched.
Perhaps our maulana should be given a good book on the sira (life story) of the Prophet Muhammad (s) – in English, Urdu or Gujerati, whichever he prefers. If he read it carefully, he might realise that the first community of Muslims would have ceased to exist if the Madinans were as xenophobic as he is. They would have just gotten rid of all those pesky, poor (and, after travelling on horseback or by foot from Makkah, I could add the word ‘stinky’) Quraish and former slaves from Makkah who came with nothing. In fact, unlike most of the immigrants in South Africa today, those refugees that journeyed with the Prophet (s) were given half of whatever was owned by the host population in Madinah. Surely there must be a lesson there somewhere.
And even before Muslims fled from Makkah to take up residence in Madinah, even before their refugee leader – Muhammad (s) – took up the leadership of the whole of Madinah – over Makkans and Madinans, Muslims from Makkah fled persecution to seek refuge in an African kingdom called Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. If the Abyssinian Negus had been concerned about the crumbling infrastructure in his kingdom, he would have handed them over to their fellow tribesmen and be done with the headache of those immigrants.
Instead, both the Negus and the Madinans welcomed the Muslim refugees. Islam started as a strange thing, developed among immigrants and refugees, and relied on immigrants to spread it to the four corners of the world. After knowing that, we should be dealing harshly with xenophobia in our community.