Fighting for the right to pray

They knelt in the road to pray, despite the cold. Four or five hundred young men had left their offices in City law firms and banks on Friday lunch time to come hurrying through the streets of Spitalfields for the salaat al-jumma, the most important prayer of the Muslim week.

Shoes slipped off, they had nothing to protect their pinstriped knees but a tarpaulin.

"We are not trying to prove anything," said Adam, an IT worker in his twenties.

"We come here because it is the closest mosque to our offices and we pray in the open air like this because there is not enough room inside."

The mosque is a rented room in a community centre that can only hold a hundred people at most, so the service is broadcast through tinny speakers to the street outside.

The sight of so many young men shoulder to shoulder, bent towards Mecca in a public show of devotion among the parked cars and washing lines of a council estate, was actually quite touching, although some non-Muslims have found it challenging.

"The other mosques around here are too big. I prefer to pray this way," said Adam.

"I feel closer to nature, and maybe to God, under an open sky. This is not a show of strength."

It is, however, a sign of Islam's growing confidence – and a contrast to the identity crisis being suffered by the state faith, Christianity.

Even as Allah was praised in Spitalfields, across London in the High Court a judge was ruling that it was unlawful for councils to start meetings with prayer.

Mr Justice Ouseley had heard a test case brought against Bideford council by the National Secular Society.

His judgment was condemned as "deeply illiberal and intolerant" by the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, who is now said to be considering emergency legislation to remove the block.

Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, told the Sunday Telegraph yesterday that he also now intends to present a Bill allowing councils to vote themselves the right to conduct prayers.

"Personally, if I was a councillor then I would probably vote against - but they should be allowed to make that choice."

The minister, Mr Pickles, said: "This still remains a Christian country. We have an established Church of which the Queen's the head, these kind of ceremonies have been taking place for a long time and I think it's only right they should be respected.

"I think there's nothing wrong in standing up for part of British traditional Christian culture, as indeed I think it's absolutely right that we should stand up to defend British Muslims."

The right to worship was, he said, "a fundamental and hard-fought British liberty".

The question now is, how should the State and the judiciary defend that liberty, in a land whose people now have a thousand gods instead of one, and in which atheists demand to be heard? And what part can the beleaguered national church play?

The Church of England is caught up in yet more arguments about the ministry of women, as last week's painful General Synod proved.

One tactic for those who believe we've lost touch with our Christian heritage is to come out fighting, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, did yesterday: "Will the next step be scrapping the prayers which mark the start of each day in Parliament?

"These legal rulings may also mean army chaplains could no longer serve, and that the Coronation Oath, in which the King or Queen pledges to maintain the laws of God and the lessons contained in the Gospels, would need to be abolished.

This is a truly terrifying prospect. It is clear that these sensitive matters can no longer be left in the hands of judges."

Lord Carey has campaigned on behalf of a worker forbidden to wear a cross while on duty, and a registrar who refused to carry out civil partnerships on the basis of her faith.

Yesterday he told the Daily Telegraph: "Judges say that the law has no obligation to the Christian faith, but I say 'rubbish' to that. Historically, there has been a great interlocking of Christianity with our laws in this country."

The trouble is that the interlocking is coming undone, by necessity.

Christianity gave the British a sense of fair play: and fair play suggests that those who call God by a different name, or have no god at all, must be treated equally.

One worshipper at the Spitalfields mosque, a well-dressed man in his 30s who had come from a bank and did not want his name to be used, said: "I don't want to sound harsh but look at the buildings they have. Look at the way they behave, running the show at the royal wedding and so on. Look at their influence in places like the House of Lords. What is it the Christians are complaining about?"

However, Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, an Islamic charity, said the judgment was an attack on all faiths: "As people of faith – whether we take inspiration from Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Hinduism – we should take pride in that and be able to say prayers."

The congregation at Brune Street has grown dramatically in recent years, as new office blocks have gone up close by.

The street signs are in Bengali as well as English, but Barik Miah, a veteran member of the mosque, said: "The people come here from all over the world, from Pakistan and India and parts of Africa and from England, as well because many more are coming to Islam."

And Islam is engaging with many more people in this country, according to Therese O'Toole of Bristol University.

"Over the last few decades a rich landscape of highly diverse and politically literate and mature Muslim civil society organisations has developed," she said at a meeting on Tuesday as part of the Religion & Society programme, a £12 million cluster of research projects attempting to map out what we believe in.

"Britain has allowed religious people from many different communities to become agents in national and local life in a way which was perhaps only possible for clergy and leading Christians and Jews in the past," said her colleague Professor Kim Knott of Lancaster University.

"They have a growing sense of their own power. They know what they contribute to the economy, understand the scale of their voluntary activities and are better mobilised to intervene in public debates."

So what should the Church of England do? Apart from complaining, one way forward is to take advantage of its structures and influence to become what Dr O'Toole calls a "broker and arbiter" between the State and people of all faiths.

This can be seen in the new Near Neighbours fund, which has released £5 million of Government money for projects that bring communities together. The money is administered by the Church Urban Fund and anyone who applies – whatever their faith – must get the signature of their parish priest.

"Some rubber stamp anything that comes their way but others see it as an opportunity for active engagement," said Dr O'Toole.

"The logic of the Coalition seems to be that of muscular liberalism: that we should reassert our core values within the context of a multi-cultural society. The people on the ground seem to say instead that the Church of England can be an enabler, that it has the capacity to create space for people of all faiths to be active in the public square."

Amid the sound and fury of Synod last week, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu said: "If the Church is going to engage with the world as it is, not just how we remember it to be, then helping young Christians befriend Muslims has to be taken seriously."

His words resonated with Gerard Loughran, headmaster of Christ Church Primary School, just around the corner from the mosque in Spitalfields.

"That is what we are trying to do," said Mr Loughran, whose school has a clear Christian ethos and conducts regular acts of worship, but whose pupils are almost all from other faiths, and mostly Islam.

The church to which it is attached was built in the 1700s, when Huguenots exiled from France lived here, the first of many immigrant communities to settle in Spitalfields. The vast Christ Church built by Nicholas Hawksmoor was a symbol of authority and power as imposing as the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf are now.

After being restored magnificently at great cost, it was reopened eight years ago. You might say the mosque was a large group of people in search of a building, and Christ Church a large building in search of more people, but that wouldn't be quite fair.

The beauty of the place is testimony to the way the Church of England works hard to preserve our shared architectural heritage. Christ Church has a history of ministry to the homeless, and on Friday a man came in from the cold looking for shelter and food and was helped.

There is an energetic, enthusiastic congregation of 100 or so believers, committed to serving their community as well as enjoying charismatic evangelical worship.

The Rev Andy Rider and his team preach and pray on the streets in summer, as John Wesley did in the revival that swept London just after the church was built- and as their Muslim neighbours do now.

Judges and ministers may argue over how best to conduct faith in a changing nation, but the believers of Spitalfields would still agree with GK Chesterton, who wrote: "A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."