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.