This Ramadan, thousands will visit the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque to break their fast at iftar dinners and recite taraweeh prayers late into the night. Across the water are the makeshift mosques of Mussaffah.
The makeshift mosques of Abu Dhabi’s industrial section are where prayers are whispered by thousands every day. They are built from the bottom up, with gardens tended by off-duty mechanics and prayers led by off-duty drivers. For migrant workers far from home and away from family this Ramadan, the mosques provide a sanctuary from financial burdens, from heat, from loneliness.
They are no-name mosques in no-name neighbourhoods. They are built piece by piece from Mussaffah’s industrial flotsam: sheets of plywood, rolls of carpeting, flower seeds.
Images of Ramadan focus on the spectacular but for many, solace is found in the humble. Working men have little time to walk to big mosques. With prayers five times a day, it’s distance, not design that matters. Mussaffah has some of the most established migrant mosques, though thousands exist across the country.
These mosques are a disappearing piece of the cityscape. Prefabricated huts are being replaced by permanent and beautiful buildings where the call to prayer is broadcast from the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque itself. They are temporary structures for temporary workers, at the edges of labour camps. As often as not, the mosques and the men who built them stay for years and become a part of the city. As the city develops, these mosques and men are pushed out to make way for more permanent dwellings and residents.
These are the men of Mussaffah’s mosques.
Rustam Aluminium and Glass Mosque
Mohammed Shafkat, 51, a healer from Islamabad, an Abu Dhabi resident of 15 years and a company driver in Mussaffah, leads the congregation at the Rustam Aluminium and Glass Mosque.
When his voice cracks from a loudspeaker over the small prefab mosque, men appear from tea-houses and workshops on foot: the balding, the moustached and those with flowing white beards; men in tracksuits and shalwar kameez and collared shirts. One by one they step over the threshold of the mosque, which is soon covered by the pairs of shoes belonging to the worshippers inside.
Worshippers stand and kneel shoulder to shoulder under a roof marked with a cut-out crescent and star.
“Prayer is the same in a big mosque or small mosque, it’s no different,” says Rustam Sadiq, ushering people in at the gate. Sadiq, 50, is the mosque’s unofficial guardian and manager of the adjacent company that has given the mosque its name.
He was here when the mosque was raised in two days, some 18 years ago. It was never built to last, but over the years each worshipper has made his contribution – a box of skull caps, bookshelves, chain-link fencing, foam matting.
“All the people made it,” says Sadiq, a Pakistani national and an Abu Dhabi resident of 25 years. “This mosque is for people here who can’t go to a big mosque. It’s far, two kilometres. They want to pray nearby. Mussaffah, all Mussaffah, wants mosques.”
After prayers and dinner, men return from labour camps, in twos and tens, to play volleyball on an artificial courtx and cricket on the street.
The imam, the soft-spoken Shafkat, is known as a healer. He recites verses to men in pain. “Many people from Abu Dhabi know him,” says Sadiq. “If people want a photo, they go to a photographer. If you want window glass, people come to me. If people are in pain, they go to Mr Mohammed.
“He thinks of the whole world, that the whole world will be at peace,” continues Sadiq. “In all the Quran and Islam it says there shouldn’t be fighting. There should be peace in all the world. Peace between East and West.”
Sack Factory Mosque
“Every man in prayer thinks of his children and his country,” says Hosam Adin Sulamah, watering the garden outside his regular mosque.
At his home in Egypt, he grows rice and potatoes. In Mussaffah, he owns no land, but he tends the earth outside the Sack Factory Mosque near his work. He coaxes tubers and basil, chillies and mint from the earth and trains vines to grow up for shade.
An Abu Dhabi resident of 10 years, Sulamah is humble in his role as garden architect.
“All people do work on garden. It’s not the work of one person, we all work together,” says Sulamah, 46, a mechanic. “These men did the electricity, others did the garden. We all do what we can for this place. We started it 25 years ago and it grows.”
Neem trees planted long ago provide a canopy filled with birdsong in the late afternoon sun. Their branches hold up a green tarp shading a carpeted walkway to the mosque’s door, where men rest before sunset.
Others sleep inside. Decorations are sparse. A single bookcase holds prayer rugs, Qurans and a vacuum. Quran stands are made of plywood. Windows are covered in cardboard to keep out the light and heat.
It was Sulamah who suggested that his friend Faez Hosam serve as the mosque’s imam when he came to the country four months ago from Mansoura, Egypt. Faez, a machine operator, was the first in his family to become a hafiz, a title held by one who has memorised the Quran.
“He didn’t say he wanted this responsibility, no,” said Sulamah. “He was praying near me. His voice was near. It was a great voice.”
Once a month, the pair ride the city bus to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. It is Sulamah’s favourite place in the country. He likes its fountains.
“But,” he says of the Sack Factory Mosque, “each and every mosque is a grand mosque.”
Suber Fab Mosque #293
Mohammed Ibrahim is one of Mussaffah’s professional imams. He counsels the workers of his neighbourhood who have been away from their families for years at a time.
“Everyone who comes here works in companies, in garages. Arab families live far away in cities. Our people are from India, Pakistan. The people are good and very fine.
“People are very poor, their salaries are Dh500 or 600 or 800. Dh800 is not a lot. Their salaries are very low. Dh700 is a small bit of money. Life is good here but accommodation is expensive, food is expensive, water is expensive, many things are expensive. My brother is in Abu Dhabi. He is much older than me. He is a driver at a house, in an Arabic family’s house. He’s busy, busy, busy. I see him about once a month.”
Imam Ibrahim, originally from Peshawar in Pakistan, became a hafiz at the age of 20 and is the first in his family to be an imam. “I did this job for my father.” His wife and six children live with him at the mosque and he hopes his sons will follow his calling. “They all want this job,” he says tugging a lock of his thick, curly black beard. Abu Bakr, his second eldest, became a hafiz last month at age 15. His chin and cheeks have patches of downy fluff, the start of a beard. It’s growing.
Ice Factory Mosque
“I am a poor guy,” says Mohammed Obaidullah, a Bengali aluminium worker. “I am here to earn money. I am alone here. I was about 23 when I came here but I was not afraid.
“All Muslims want the same but in my life right now, I want money,” says Obaidullah, 28, who paid a steep recruitment fee five years ago. He is a father of five. “I don’t have a large salary.”
Abdul Kareem, a camp veteran from Pakistan, steps in. He arrived in Abu Dhabi “maybe 20 or 25” years ago. “I don’t keep track of the years,” he says.
“When I came here, I had no beard. Now I am an old man. I needed money. I have three daughters, two sons, one wife, one mother, one father and a sister. I needed money. They wanted school and this and that.”
The men are gathered at a prefab mosque outside their labour camp. Their neighbourhood is one of empty spaces. When men step off the bus at sunset, there are few places for them to go.
Abdul Kareem continues his counsel. “Money doesn’t bring profit in death,” he says. “If you’re in the ground, the only thing that will matter is whether or not you prayed, whether or not you followed the Quran, whether or not you went to the mosque. Do you want paradise or hellfire? If you don’t pray, fire is what you’ll get.”
azacharias@thenational.ae
