REMOVING YOUR SHOES
Ross Clark finds that
the Saddam Hussein Mosque has a security problem
Birmingham THE sign at the entrance to the red- bricked, golden-domed house of prayer appeared a little daunting. It read: 'Presi- dent Saddam Hussein Mosque', and the rest, probably a tribute to the generous founder, was in arabic script. Around the doorway all windows were firmly iron- barred as if it were the President's bunker. The street was dusty and filled with wind- blown rubbish and, somewhere above, the roar of traffic mingled with the bells of a nearby church: like so many buildings in our second city, President Saddam's Mos- que stands beside a four-lane flyover known locally as the Aston Expressway. If Birmingham is the most depressing city in Britain, Aston is by no means the leafiest part of it.
I knocked firmly on the solid wooden door and it was opened by a grey-bearded and watery-eyed man aged about 40 and decked out in linen as white and unruffled as anything village cricketers used to wear before pressing trousers went out of fashion. After reminding me to remove my shoes on the doormat, which I did, leaving them beside a pair of aging sandals, he smiled and showed me into what struck me as a sanctuary from the surrouding city, the noise deadened by thick walls and a lack of large windows. At a quick glance the workmanship appeared to be excellent, but then that is only to be expected of £2 million, straight from Saddam's purse. The man I had come to see, the trustee of the mosque, who had applied to Saddam's trust for a grant ten years ago, assured me that the President's generosity did not end there. 'You see that,' he said pointing to a patch of gravel next door, 'that will be a community centre, because he's promised the money, although it might be a little delayed now.' And he smiled.
Upstairs, in the trustee's office, we talked about the Muslim community in Birmingham. 'All this stealing, all this child-raping, this wouldn't go on in a Muslim country,' he said, shaking his head. 'You know in Saudi Arabia people leave their shops open when they go out to prayer. You couldn't do that here.'
It soon became apparent why one could leave one's shop open when going out to prayer in Saudi Arabia: as regards stealing, the stakes were too high. The trustee told me of how he had been in a street in Saudi and a child had come running down the street shouting 'Help me! Help me!' in a language the trustee did not fully under- stand. 'But I gathered what the situation was,' the trustee said, nodding. 'He had stolen something and he was running away from the police. I wanted to help him but I couldn't because I couldn't speak to him. Sooner or later the police did come, and I guessed what would happen. Sure enough, the next week I heard he'd had his hand chopped off.'
The trustee showed little emotion but shrugged his shoulders as if to say that was life. 'You see our laws go on and on. You can't change them, you know.' I asked him what he thought of our laws. 'I don't know about chopping off hands,' he said, 'but the government is far too lenient. The majority of people in this country would support capital punishment.'
A few minutes later, after an hour of talking, we wound up the conversation. We shook hands and he showed me down the stairs to the doormat, where we had both left our shoes. There was no footwear in sight. The trustee looked around the lobby, a little embarrassed, but could find nothing. Then he tried the door, which had been left unlocked.
'I should have locked this door,' he said apologetically, 'because sometimes the children come in off the street. They must have taken them.'
The trustee gave me a very large pair of sandals from the back room, and I shuffled along the street with him back to his house. While his young son played cricket in the hallway, breaking his bat on a piece of furniture in the process, eliciting not a telling-off but a hearty laugh from his father, the trustee asked his 'Mrs' to make us a cup of tea, and we chatted further. 'You know, I hope you're not going to get offended,' he said to me after telling me a little bit about his street, 'but it seems you don't have the same communities as we do. An old white woman was found in her house round the corner a few weeks ago. She'd been dead for several days. The postman found her; she didn't have any known relatives. You know, when ,my father was ill in this house I turned away the nurse and insisted I wash him myself.'
A little later the trustee drove me in his Volkswagen down to a shoe-shop. I went in and bought a pair of plimsolls, which would see me home to London. Then we parted. As we shook hands at Aston railway station I was thinking: it is a very pleasant country, this, of which we are both part.
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