When Melbourne’s Tullamarine international airport recently unveiled ‘gender neutral toilets’ at the same time as gender-segregated Muslim prayer rooms, they made the grave mistake of tacitly telling the truth. The truth being that it’s all about making women submit to the demands of men. Non-Muslim women have to submit to the demands of mentally ill predators, Muslim women have to submit to the demands of… well, you get the picture.
Otherwise when it comes to submitting to the demands of Muslims, though, such inadvertent honesty is in short supply. Instead, we’re fed a barrage of lies. Not the least being the lie of ‘multi-faith prayer rooms’. The reality is that what was once a chapel becomes a Muslim-only no-go zone.
Of course, that’s not what they say, out loud. In practice, though, that’s exactly what happens: just as they do with their intimidating mass-prayer rallies in streets and parks and surrounding churches, Muslims aggressively co-opt what was once a public space for their own exclusive use.
Waiting in the ITN greenroom before a television appearance recently, I spotted a sign in the corridor for the multi-faith prayer room […] Inside, the room was arranged almost entirely around a wudu station, the low basin at which Muslims wash their feet before prayer. On the shelf: Qurans and prayer mats. Nothing else.
The room always tells the truth, even when the sign on the door does not.
To damn them with faint praise, sometimes the Muslims do, too.
“Do you use this room?” I asked him as we left. He did – that was how he knew the way. “Do you mind me asking what religion you are?” He was Muslim. “It’s not really a multi-faith room, is it?” I said. “No,” he smiled.
Once you start looking, these aggressively Muslim ‘spaces’ are everywhere. Airports, hospitals, shopping centres, public parks, an unmarked door in art galleries... Spreading like a virus.
Architect and academic Dr Andrew Crompton has documented the spread of this invasive species. In 2015, he was aware of 2,500 in Britain. Today, the count is up to 6000. Heathrow alone had 13 of them in 2015: today it has 39.
And nearly all of them, Crompton says, are in effect mosques.
Crompton describes them as “like a crime scene”: you can always tell what’s really gone on. The furniture shoved up against the walls tells you which religion really owns the space. Jews pray standing, Christians sitting: it’s Muslims who need all that empty floor space to prostrate themselves. Five times a day. No one bothers moving the pews back, because the Muslims will only shove them out of the way again in a couple of hours.
And while crosses are covered, because they ‘offend’ Muslims, and statues of Jesus are hidden behind curtains (and vandalised, anyway), the carpet stays aligned to Mecca, the shoes block the door and the foot-washing trough takes pride of place.
The really big question, though, is how we even got to this point. Muslims are just six per cent of the British population and three per cent in Australia. Yet, somehow, they’ve been allowed to claim public worship spaces from the nearly half of the population who are Christian.
Nor is there any law mandating them. Indeed, when a Muslim pupil demanded a right to pray at Michaela School, the High Court threw the case out. Nor is there a ‘multi-faith’ theology, and no minister ordering them, no matter how much the tilty-headed twits in the Anglican church might suicidally wish it.
Britain has produced, quite spontaneously, thousands of anonymous prayer rooms; and because almost the only people who use them are observant Muslims, it has in practice produced thousands of undeclared mosques. “Britain has built 5,000 mosques that you don’t know about,” Crompton told me. “That’s what it boils down to.”
So, why not just call them Islamic prayer rooms? Because that would mean saying it out loud. And then the whole jig would be up, as Tullamarine’s management found out.
It’s one thing, after all, to cravenly and sneakily replace the culture that built the West and hope nobody notices. Quite another to come right out and admit it.
