My Meetings with Ayub.

Qari Muhammad Ayub of Bannu, Pakistan, was one of the gentlest human beings I was to meet on my journey to Karachi.  This was before all the present nonsense and its distortions and misrepresentations. I remember turning up on my first day - it was a Wednesday. I stood at the door, actually a side door, when a window opened above me and a head with a straggly beard wearing a little cap popped out then in again like a cuckoo in a cuckoo clock.

Moments later he stood in front of me. he was slight in build as far as I could tell, as he wore the long single-piece smock and a pullover on top. After I introduced myself, he always called me "brother Tony"  and took my right hand in his when we met and held it close to his chest.

He took me upstairs to a little room with a carefully placed desk and two chairs either side of it. I would usually prepare a little lesson with a drill and some vocabulary, then we would talk informally over a cup of stewed tea.

Ayub was the answer to my inquiries about Islam - a living embodiment from whom I could gain information. Eventually, I got to see the inside of the prayer area of a mosque. Then he took me back to his home on foot. Inside there was a large sheet covering the way to the kitchen (literally a purdah) and I sat in his rather spartan living room while he practiced some of his English with me.

Interior of a mosque.

Ayub also invited me to the Muslim Union of Reading University. It was a lively gathering of men, and I will always remember the first naat  I heard.  A large man ina scruffy pullover stood in the middle of the gathering, and without accompaniment opened his lungs and heart with a very beautiful rendering of a verse praising the Prophet (SAWS).

                                       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fb3NTkemJQ

Ayub never pressurized me. Rather he would ask me regularly whether I was reading my own book - The Bible.

Renowned Qari Waheed Zafar Qasmi.

The Road Not Taken 2

Reading Mosque (Jamia Masjid) Google Earth

In 1981 I was without work. I decided to do some volunteer English teaching in Reading. I was still reading voraciously and I moved to George Street to my own flat. I remember one particular book at the library. I would issue it again and again. It was about Islam and I had expected some sort of thumbnail theological guide - some pointers - as I had managed in Christian readings. It had none. There were drawings of a man in various postures, some very pithy ideas about God and very little actual discussion.

Christianity had boiled down, personally, to one 'stumbling block.'

After all the discussion, meetings and reading I found one obstacle standing in my way of acceptance of the Christian message: vicarious substitutionary atonement. This was the root of being 'born again.'

Reading Town Hall.

I went to a gathering of volunteer ESL teachers at the Town Hall. We were each given a 'target' and we were meant to arrange regular weekly meetings to practice conversation. When the Chinese and Malaysian and Europeans were being alotted, I was waiting.

"Mr. Furze?" said the man with the clipboard.

I raised a hand.

"You are to go to the mosque - you'll be teaching the Imam there."

"Oh."

I was given directions to the mosque in Alexander Road. Mohammad Ayub of Bannu, Pakistan, entered my life.

Reading Jamia Masjid.