A tale of two Iftars

"Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high" Isaiah 58:4


Everyone nowadays is organising an ‘iftar’, the breaking of the fast for Muslims during the month of Ramadan. As a community meal, it is on its way to becoming the Islamic equivalent to a Christmas Lunch or a Harvest Supper. It’s the sort of occasion to which you can invite your mother-in-law or those neighbours with whom you rarely get beyond trading views on dog fouling or poor television reception.

Last week I went to two. First I went to the East London Mosque in Whitechapel for its annual ‘iftar’ gathering, organised by the East London Council of Mosques. As we were shown up to a room with rows of tressle tables and burco boilers simmering away in the background and lots of helpers busily ferrying plates and glasses around, it had the feel of a jolly good patronal festival. Something smelled great. It was all looking really quite promising.

Then, as some serious looking young men started to sound check the mics, it became clear that there were going to be speeches and that these would take place before the food. When are the speeches ever before the food? This is certainly not how we do things in the C of E.

The main fare for the evening was quite clearly not curry but politics. The honoured and esteemed guests took their place on the platform. The Home Office Minister (with responsibility for policing, security and community safety) told us that Islam was a religion of peace. The Deputy Chief Constable for the Met told us that Islam was a religion of toleration.The leader of Tower Hamlets council told us that Islam was a religion of social responsibility and that there was money available for them to prove it. Pots of it, in fact, as a result of the 2012 Olympics coming to town.

Dr Bari, the President of the Muslim Council of Britain, (and former Mosque Secretary here in Whitechapel) then told us about some of the problems within the community. Quoting chapter and verse of local deprivation statistics, he went on to describe what the Mosque was doing about these: Healthy Living projects, Improving School Attendence programmes, a Women’s Link etc. Then he went for the Big Ask. The Mosque, he said, was needing to raise money for its ambitious expansion. £5M should cover it. Inshallah.

On the next evening I found myself in the midst of those deprivation statistics at an altogether different type of ‘iftar’. I was in Bethnal Green at the St Hilda’s Centre, sitting between a couple of old Bengali residents from the local Boundary Estate. They were ‘cut make and trim’ tailors suffering the vicissitudes of seasonal (un)employment. One of their daughters came and joined us and sat her own son on her lap. She told me she was working for a women’s collective along Brick Lane, run by a local housing association. She asked me about getting her son into the local church primary school. We actually had a conversation. We may even have discussed poor television reception.

When the local imam and the local vicar made their speeches (after the meal), there was a lot of good humour. They challenged each other to a sponsored fast. I stayed behind to help with the washing up.

And what was the difference between these two? In Bethnal Green we had the meeting of the small platoons, networks of association learning to depend on each other and contributing mutually to civic life. In Whitechapel we had the big battalion dealing directly with Government and its Saudi funders, essentially disinterested in the required mutuality of local civic relations. Bethnal Green was chaotic and familiar. Whitechapel was organised and impersonal, the fellowship of the football stadium and, in the end, really quite worrying.

La donna è mobile

"But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love that you had at first." Revelation 2:4

When I broke my collarbone last year, after the doctor had screwed it back together again, I spent six weeks pottering around waiting for the fracture to knit. I made a lot of jig saw puzzles, re-read all the Bond books and played a lot of Snake on my mobile telephone. As a consequence of this last form of distraction therapy, I effectively erased all the characters on the rubber pad of my phone; the Nokia 1100, if you're interested.

After I got better, I became somewhat embarrassed by this defaced pad. I would not leave my phone out on the table during meetings and I was very reluctant to let anyone borrow it. Once or twice I even pretended not to have it, when someone needed to make a call.

A few weeks ago, I made up my mind that I was going get a new one. I decided to bite the bullet, to make the move from pay-as-you-go and on to a contract. While I know there is no such thing as a permanent relationship in the world of mobile telephones, I felt that I was getting too old for the hurly burly of the top-up card. Time to go steady.

I went to the Carphone Warehouse opposite Liverpool Street Station in the City. I have to say, it was a bit of a shock. I wasn’t prepared for all the tariff deals, the offers and discounts and personal use permutations. Did I want free weekend calls or discounted international calls? Was I more concerned about network coverage or price? Was I a big texter? What were my pixel and MP3 requirements? Interestingly, there was no mention of Snake.

“My advice to you,” said the pretty saleswoman, “is spend a little more money and get more free speaking minutes. You’ll have a nice new phone and you’ll want to use it.” She showed me all the handsets. They all looked lovely. One particularly caught my eye. “Great battery life that one,” she said encouragingly and then added [hiss hiss], “if you chose it, we’ll offer you half price redemptions every three months for 11 months. You’ll want to upgrade anyway, then.”

What more could I want? Free time and redemption every three months. I filled in the direct debit forms and went off with my nice new phone. But maybe it’s harder to move on from one’s first handset than I had thought. When I got home, and put the phones side by side, the new one (the Samsung X820 Ultra, no less) looked, frankly, a bit sharp. Was it really ‘me’, I wondered? Was I being a little hasty?

It sat on my desk for a week. In the meantime, I made some comfort calls with my old phone. I did some recreational texting. I played a game of Snake, for old times sake. Something was nagging me. "Upgrade" after only a year? Apart from anything else, why would I want to go through the whole "did I want to flick or did I want to slide" routine again?

In the end I took it back within the two week 'cooling off' period. But now the pretty saleswoman was less helpful. “I’m afraid you need a valid reason if you want to cancel the contract,” she said. “Is it the wrong phone or the wrong contract? Also you need to be aware that cancelling the contract will effect your credit rating. They'll think you don't have the money.”

Should I say that I was returning the phone in defiance of the false consciousness generated by the consumer fetishism of late capitalism? Would this be considered a valid reason? Instead I said, “It’s just that I now realise, as I was about to dump it, how much I love my old phone and how much I have always loved it.” There was a long queue and she wasn't going to argue.