Main Event Hall
(Link to Part 1 of this article.)
I like the kind of pressure I put on myself. Yesterday I promised you part 2 of my report on GPU 2008. So whilst the lure of video games is strong and despite the ever-growing pile of books on Islam I’ve bought, yet to be read, I am here, fulfilling my promise.
So, a nice surprise as I said was seeing the halaal signs in the restaurants of the food court. There was supposedly some outdoor food as well, but I didn’t investigate. Like the archery I didn’t take part in, the talks I missed and the BMX session unwatched, all of this served only to inspire me to spend more time at the event next year.
I used to go to the NEC at Birmingham to see the Motorcycle Show. Come to think of it, there’s probably one quite soon, they usually happen in November. I know I could have googled it and pretended to be authoritative, but let’s stop playing that game. I don’t remember much and I’m not going to let Google keep filling in the gaps otherwise before you know it, we’ll have a Minitrue on our hands and my memory will be redundant. (This year the bike show runs from 28th November to 7th December and I might go, given my daughter’s new found interest in motorcycles….)
And on another sidetrack, can I just mention here how delighted I am with Liverpool’s form at the moment? I don’t for a minute think we’ll win the title, but I’m enjoying our table-topping position while it lasts. (We beat Portsmouth tonight and with Hull’s defeat, the top of the table is starting to take a more familiar shape)
So, we were talking about the Bike Show before I got misty-eyed. I used to be able to cover that in about four hours before I’d seen everything. Satisfied and heavy with brochures (before the web you see), I’d return to London. Well I spent two days at GPU 2008 and didn’t really get bored.
Towards the end of the Saturday, I went to the large book stall set up near the entrance of the exhibition hall and went nuts. I bought biographies of Abu Bakr (ra) and Uthman (ra), the first and third of the Rightly Guided Caliphs of Islam. I was desperate to find a good value biography of Umar (ra), one of my favourite figures in Islamic history and a paragon of morality and fairness, but nothing matched the shelf-busting value of the tomes I found. I also found a couple of good looking books on Islamic finance to add to my collection. Flicking open one of them at random got me the heading “fiat money”. “That’ll do me” I thought.
One of the ladies in my family bought some coloured contact lenses for occasional use. I know, I know, you want to know what on earth coloured contact lenses have to do with Global Peace & Unity and my answer is the same as yesterday. It doesn’t matter. As long as it isn’t un-Islamic, it’s fine by me. You’ll find that much of British life is perfectly Islamic and the bits that aren’t, can easily be adapted or dropped. That’s the beauty of a free country like Britain. You are free to live your life as you choose, so long as you don’t impinge on the rights of others. Oh hang on. That principle doesn’t apply to the lying, thieving elites but hey, let’s keep this clean and stay away from the politics shall we?
Some of you might ask why a British Muslim of Indo/Pak descent would want to change her eye colour? Isn’t that coconut behaviour? Well first, there is no such thing as a Muslim eye colour, so bang goes your prejudice about all Muslims having brown eyes and second, it’s just a bit of fun, not exactly skin bleaching a la Wacko Jacko. Don’t worry about it, these are my fig leaves too!
Was there any bad stuff?
I didn’t notice anything. Others did. The other conference going on had lots of people turn up in costume. It was a bizarre combination of events. A few people seemed unhappy and in that forum, racist. That’s to be expected. Stick 60 thousand people in a venue and you’re going to have a little but of crowd trouble. What amazed me was the complete absence of uniformed police. There were just a few security guards who were the considerate and respectful type. (I know how that reads.)
That made the event a rarity. A large, self-policing and generally well-behaved community.
I used to go to lots of Liverpool matches and plenty of others too. Just because a few people were being idiots, or worse, racist, didn’t mean that I wrote off the whole crowd. Unfortunately, it appeared that some of the costumed attendees were young, impressionable, racist and xenophobic. I didn’t notice a single incident of bad temper or shouting, or pushing, despite the crowd.
Case in point, you’d expect the teens at the dodgems to be hostile when going for a car, but they weren’t. They were competitive, but smiling. It was lovely to see the kids bumping into us and laughing with cheekiness, not derision.
You might imagine some of the young men would barge the older men out of the way. I didn’t notice any of that. I accidentally bumped some people ad apologised immediately. Nobody gave me the “did you spill my pint?” look.
You might expect an awful lot of swearing. I heard swearing twice. And it was very, very crowded. I couldn’t confirm that it was a Muslim who swore.
People complained about security checks. We didn’t get checked at any time.
Others complained that there was halaal food, that didn’t bother me.
Yet others complained that there wasn’t halaal food, but plainly, there was.
I think all things considered, in spite of the stabbing late at night (40 minutes after the event had closed), it was, by and large, a good-natured and well-run event. You know me, I’m sensitive, so I would have picked up on anything that might have annoyed me!
Sunday
On Sunday, I got to see one of my favourite scholars, Sheikh Yasir Qadhi. This man explains everything with exceptional clarity and detail. I got to sit right behind him and shook his hand at the end of his talk on learning in the West. He wasn’t as tall as me. I’m always surprised when I meet people I look up to and they aren’t as tall as me. Not many people are shorter, that’s for sure.
I left the seminar with a list of new books to follow up on and as I passed the exhibition hall, I heard Shahid Malik being introduced onto the stage as Britain’s first Muslim MP. Some people applauded. They obviously don’t know the politician very well. This is a family post, so suffice to say, I don’t think much of him. Perhaps “craven” would be too strong a word. Perhaps not.
The girls had a few more goes on the dodgems, a big hit and this got me to thinking… an event like this brings together Muslims and allows us to feel like an Ummah. A micro-ummah if you like, but nonetheless, a body of Muslims. It brings together the best of us, and those, like myself, who are not so stellar. It brings together young and old, male and female of every colour. It is not an event that makes it “Muslim” or not. That doesn’t even matter. It is we who make it Muslim. And we can do anything that we would ordinarily do at a get-together.
That’s it for 2008
We should celebrate the best of who we are. Yes, there should be the charities. Yes, the books and the clothes. Yes, the rides. Let’s see more! Let’s have sports. Let’s have readings of poetry from the past and the present as well as the average nasheeds. Let’s not try to Muslimise a Western form. Let’s just ignore those labels and do what we enjoy, what is halaal and what is tayyib.
Let us have more Qur’an recital. Let us have the best scholars interpret and explain. Let us have panels and question and answer sessions. Let us have awards in every walk of life. Let us have art and let us see technology. Let us have doctors and lawyers and IT professionals offering workshops and advice.
There are Muslims in all walks of life and we should be brothers and sisters to one another. I can’t imagine a better place to network! Yes, this headlined as a Global event, but where is it set? In Britain. Let us show our Muslim brothers and sisters around the world that Britain is still the best country in the world to be a Muslim. (If it wasn’t, I would have upped and left by now!)
Let us have costumes from around the world. Let us rejoice in our wonderful history and let us marvel at what were are still doing today, even without an empire and even in the face of hatred and vilification - let us stand up and be what we have been commanded to be, now and in the future insha’Allah - the Best of Peoples. Insha’Allah.
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