Stop 6: The Jamme Masjid Mosque
This plain but gracious rectangular brick property with tall arched windows which lets the light flood in, is today a mosque, the London Jamme Masjid. Set high up on the wall is a vertical sundial with the Latin inscription Umbra Sumus, meaning'we are shadows'. This inscription refers both to the workings of the sundial and as reminder that our life on earth is fleeting. The inscription has come to have an added significance for this area, as waves of immigrants have arrived and then moved on.
This building is the antithesis of Christ Church, the Hawkesmore church at the previous stop. Rather than being built by the authorities to quell nonconformity among immigrants, this place of worship has been at the heart of communities that have settled here since the early 1700s. Each wave of immigrants has established its own place of worship here and as such the building provides a physical timeline illustrating waves of immigration into the area. It was built in 1742 as a Protestant Church for Huguenots. Then, a century later in 1809 it was sold to the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews. But just like the church we saw in the previous stop it was unable to convert the local population to Christianity, so a mere 10 years later the building was taken over by Methodists. They stayed a bit longer, almost 80 years until 1898, after which it became the Spitalfields Great Synagogue for newly settled Jewish immigrants. Its most recent incarnation came in 1976 when it became a mosque, the London Jamme Masjid mosque it is today.
The Bangladesh Welfare Association, which is right next door on Fournier Street is associated with the first generation of Bengali immigrants and was set up to provide support to a community establishing itself in the area. It was first set up in the 1950s when it was known as the Pakistani Welfare Association, before changing its name when Bangladesh became independent in 1971.
Neither today, nor in the past have the immigrant communities living in this area been as homogeneous as they may have appeared. In 1904, for example, Jewish anarchists threw bacon sandwiches at Orthodox worshippers outside what was then a synagogue and held 'Yom Kippur Balls', (pork feasts) on the holy Jewish fasting day of Yom Kippur to annoy conservative rabbis and spread their radical secular message.
Today, when the Muslim community is discussed in the media it is also portrayed as a homogeneous and singular entity. As much as the government would like to have one central religious body or leader that can speak for the whole Muslim society in London or Tower Hamlets, the idea of a homogenous fixed cultural whole does not fit reality. Only 6% of Muslims see the Muslim Council of Britain (founded in 1997) as their representative. Muslims for Secular Democracy, launched in June 2006, has argued for the need to stop stereotyping Muslims as one group of 'dysfunctional people with burning resentments'.
It is important to realise that popular perceptions of Jews in the early 20th century and Muslims in the 21st are quite different. Jewish people, like the Irish before them, were portrayed as animals rather than humans and a physically inferior race. After the Holocaust such views of racial superiority were rightly discredited. In 1950 UNESCO, a department of the newly-formed United Nations, issued a statement affirming that the human race was one and the same. This sounded the death knell for 'scientific racism', but rather than usher in a new era of antiracist optimism, sadly the focus merely shifted from racial categorisation to cultural categories.