Secrets Behind the Burqa

Secrets Behind the Burqa

Secrets Behind The Burqa

EPUB File format

Isaac Publishing 

6729 Curran Street, 

McLean VA 22101 

Website: www.isaac-publishing.us

Published by Isaac Publishing 6729 Curran Street, McLean VA 22101 Copyright © 2008 Rosemary Sookhdeo

First US edition: May 2008 First published in the United Kingdom by Isaac Publishing 2004 Reprinted 2005 and 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopy or recording without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in brief quotations in written reviews.

All quotations from the Qur’an except otherwise stated are from The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an translated by Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall (Birmingham: UK Islamic Mission Dawah Centre 1997)

All quotations from the Hadith The Alim, (Silver Springs, Maryland US: ISL Software Corp. 1986-99)

ISBN: 978-0-9885930-4-6

Secrets Behind the Burqa

Rosemary Sookhdeo

Isaac Publishing

Introduction

In 1970 after theological college, my husband and I embarked on a ministry amongst the Muslim community in Britain. For five years we travelled the length and breadth of Britain presenting the needs and the challenge of reaching Muslims, to churches across all denominations. We conducted training seminars on how to understand Islam and the Muslim in our midst. In some areas we spent several months, and worked together with other organisations involved in the same work. At the end of the five years we were very disillusioned and disheartened by the lack of interest in the British churches and the antagonism and racism we had experienced. We found people were very fearful of what seemed the great unknown. It was only with the individual person here and there that we had found any interest at all. It was out of this disillusionment and what seemed the futility of our task, that we took the decision to settle down in an inner city area and pioneer a work ourselves.

During these five years I visited many Muslim homes and grew to understand Islamic culture and the women’s role and position within the family and home. I spent many hours with Muslim women in very much a learning situation. I realised very quickly that I could only have relationships with the women and girls, as relationships across the sexes were not acceptable in Islamic culture.

It was in 1975 that my husband and I formed an organisation called In Contact Ministries (later to be renamed Servants Fellowship International) and purchased the St Andrew’s Centre in Plaistow, East London, a very large redundant complex, with the specific aim of ministering to the Muslim and other ethnic communities in the area. In 1975 the Muslim community in Newham numbered 15,000; in 2001 it was 58,500.¹ The non-white community in the area was 60.6%, which was the highest of any borough in Britain.² With a staff of over forty at times, we taught English as a foreign language, started a drop-in centre for those who wanted help in various areas such as filling in DHSS forms, took people to hospital for their appointments, conducted a refugee ministry supplying furniture and physical needs, and a crisis pregnancy centre, amongst other things. Over the years many Muslim people were visited in their homes. We offered friendship to help overcome their loneliness and often depression, and had many discussions in Muslim homes on the differences between Islam and Christianity.

Although our main burden was for the Muslim community we ended up in ministering to any person who came across our path, including those from the other faith communities, believing that they had been sent by God. Thus the church that was planted was a multiracial church, and had some 28 nationalities.

The Context-The East End Of London

The context in which we worked is that of Plaistow in East London, which is in the borough of Newham and was historically a white working class area. It was in the 1950s, in the mass immigration that many West Indians and Asians moved into the area, the majority of Asians being from the Muslim community in Pakistan. It was as the non-white community moved in that the white community began to move out. As a result the various communities began to form pockets within the area, which we see to this day. It is not uncommon to see one side of a street almost totally Hindu, while the other side is Muslim. The majority of the Muslims who moved into the area came from the poorest classes in society and from the rural areas. Those that were educated found it almost impossible to find work in the area of their training and had to accept any work they could get. This often meant working in the factories such as Ford in Dagenham. The Muslim community didn't have its structures in place as it has today, and there were only a few house-mosques in the area.

It was in the ensuing years that many in the Muslim community started small businesses and became wealthy. All members of the family would be involved in the business, including the women, and would work long hours to be successful. With this came the desire to educate their children with the aim that they would become doctors, solicitors and lawyers. They wanted the best for their children and would sacrifice to educate them. However in many cases this would apply only to members of the male sex. Thus a new middle class arose. Interestingly enough, today the private schools in the area, including the Christian ones have many Muslims attending them. Today the Muslim community is well established in Newham with newly built mosques and many shops including their own bookshops.

Over the 23 years we lived in the area we saw Newham change from an area of extreme deprivation to an area that, in the latter part of eighties, became desirable for the young white middle class professional. Many moved into the area. However in the mid-nineties we saw the exodus of these self-same people. Newham was rapidly increasing its non-white population with large numbers of refugees. It became one of the two main receiving boroughs in Great Britain, and every year accepted between ten and twenty thousand refugees who lived in hotels and every place where it was possible to house them in bed and breakfast accommodation. The area became poorer once again, until it was designated the poorest area in Britain. The ethnic diversity of the population grew, with the proportion of non-white residents reaching 52%. Muslims who had made sufficient money moved to outlying ‘better class areas’ such as Ilford and further East into Essex.

As these changes took place within the community and the next generation was born in this country, Muslim young people began to exhibit the individualism of their English peers and society at large. Parents found it hard to understand what was happening. Young people were growing up in two cultures, and this brought tension and conflict between generations. It was at around this time that more Muslim women started going out to work, for economic reasons: to help establish the family (house prices were rising fast), and to make as much money as possible in what was considered a land of plenty. Cultural patterns were beginning to change.

The Motivation

Called by God, my husband and I went to the East End of London to work amongst the stranger and the alien. I lived there for the majority of my adult life, and it became my context both pastorally and theologically. I was born and brought up in New Zealand, so in the East End I felt very much a stranger and an alien in a foreign land. I was different from many other foreign-born residents in that I was white, that set me apart, but my husband is Asian so was in the same category as the Muslims and other Asians in the area. I found that my surname and marriage brought me more identification with the non-white community than with the white community. I certainly experienced, when out with my husband, the racism of the local white community, and probably more so than most. When we married in 1969 it was comparatively rare to have a mixed racial marriage, so I was very much looked down upon and despised.

The East End had been historically considered very racist, and as the white community saw the influx of immigrants moving into the area, they felt their existence was being threatened by foreign people bringing strange and different cultures to what they considered to be their land. This led to discrimination against people of other cultures.

In many cases racism became more overt and open. Feelings were not hidden, but expressed verbally and in violence. The difficulty for the Church was that the Asians in the area believed that all white British people were Christians, so what they were experiencing was directed at them by the Christian Church. In fact there was a certain amount of racism within the white Christian community and non-white people were often not welcomed into their churches. It was within this context that non-white people would be told by other churches in the area to go to St Andrew’s Church because it was a ‘black’ church, even though the congregation at that time was only 30% non-white.

There was no glamour or status living in the East End. It was a place where people didn’t want to come. Christians would go and work in the poorest of the Muslim countries but most wouldn’t come to the East End of London. We were fortunate to always have a team of about six or more young university graduates helping us. This would often bring consternation from parents, who sometimes would ring and beg us not to take their son or daughter to work with us.

In the Old Testament, the stranger was a permanent reminder to the Jews of their past and how God rescued them from their wretched situation in a foreign land. This same God had called me to love those who were not loved, but who were despised and looked down upon. I had to identify with them as equals and in any other way I could. Coming from the friendly and open culture of New Zealand, I didn’t find identification difficult as I always believed that I had to go to where people were, I couldn’t expect them to come to me. I sat with the Muslim women where they sat and I listened to them. I prayed that daily I might have God’s wisdom. If