Day 4 – Mosques’, Pediga and Our First Gatekeeper

After breakfast, we headed out to a very snowy Oslo During our research in the UK about the Mosques within Oslo we found that they were close to the hotel, so we went and look for all the mosques as they were 5 within the space of 5 to 10 minutes of each other. We found three Mosques’, two of the three mosques were obvious as they had the Islamic symbol at the top of a tower or built into the wall. The third mosque was not so obvious; it was as though they had rented an old shop and made it into a mosque, from first observation this seemed only to be for men as there was only one entrance to the building. During the walk around the area where the mosques are we also found a Muslim primary school, which looked as though it had almost been abandoned, it was all open, with no gates or fencing to secure the school and its next to a main road and opposite one of the mosques. It was a very run down building with graffiti on the sides of the wall.

Oslo on first observation is very different to the UK in terms of mosques, there are no obvious signs at first glance, they are built into a row of shops and look like an ordinary building. It is not until you look at the up to the sky that you see the tiny Islamic symbol at the top of the spiral tower. The first one is the most common one. It is smallest of all mosques we saw today. We almost passed it when we realized that it is a mosque as it looks more like a office, blue windows and a square room, all the windows were blocked out with cardboard and curtains, you could not see in, unless you waited for someone to come out of the door, it wasn’t until this happened that we realized that it was a men’s mosque. There was some Islamic writing on the door, but you could barely see it, unless you walked up to the door, we were unsure of what this said. But passers by said that it was a mosque, but a very small mosque.

When walking around the area where the mosques’ were there was a lot of graffiti, some of the graffiti was writing, with words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘Satan is King’ written on the side of abandoned buildings are car parks. Some of the other graffiti was art; an individual had obviously taken their time to produce a piece of art of the side of the building to express how they are feeling. On observation it was clear that no one had even tried to scrub it away the graffiti, as it is very interesting to look at, it’s a way for people to express how they are feeling in the surrounding area.

Muslim Primary School

All three mosques all had different characteristics. The second mosque in comparison to the first was a lot bigger, it looked more like a mosque, as it had the Islamic symbol at the top and Islamic writing on the front of the building, but still it was built into a row of different shops, local shops, run down businesses, that were local to the Muslim community, selling cultural foods. Again, we tried to enter this mosque, but as we were not local to the area, we found it difficult to see which entrance we had to go in as it was predominantly males entering the mosque at this particular entrance. When observing the area, we noted that many of the women in the area were wearing traditional hijabs or full traditional clothing, whereas the males did not wear anything that identified them as Muslims. It is worth mentioning that majority of the dresses that they wear within the mosques’ are black; this was on observation, watching women walking into the mosques’.

After observing the mosques’ for a couple of hours we made our way back to the hotel for to prepare for the interview with PEDIGA at 3pm. The interview was very successful and went on for about an hour, with a lot of in-depth answers to help us with our project. The transcript is being completed by Lydia and will shortly follow this post. We had planned 12 questions to ask pediga, but the interview went beyond these 12 questions and went into a general chat about the work they do and how this affects Oslo and the Muslim community.

After the meeting with Pediga we met with our first gatekeeper at 5pm to go to the rest of the mosques that we had not seen.

The fourth one is a Pakistan mosque. It is the most beautiful one, which has a mosaic pretty wall with fantastic architecture with Islamic writing printed on the tiles, this is the one mosque that stands out from the building it sits in line with. It wasn’t until we started talking to our gatekeeper she informed us that there was a high security prison and police station in triangle with the mosque, Moving on from this we asked her about the public disorder and security within the area and she expressed that there wasn’t much of an issue.

She also mentioned that the male who carried out the shootings within Oslo in 2011 was put in the prison opposite the mosque for a few months. After being told that we were standing outside a high security prison, we became very uneasy within the area and felt slightly uncomfortable, the high security prison also over looked a child’s playground, and at the time we were there, there was a Muslim family in the playground. The last Mosque that we saw  was a Turkish mosque; which is not noticeable, it has a grey appearance and sits neatly back into the other buldings, we would not have noticed this mosque if we were not with our gatekeeper, the Turkish mosque was located by little boutique shops.

On walking to the mosques’ we visited a beautiful white bridge, which was a waste yard ten years ago. It leads us through a residential and office area of Oslo, waling over the top of the central station. It gave us a different viewpoint of the City of Oslo, which was nice to see. Especially as the sun was going down, we were able to see a new architecture and building project called ‘The Barcode’ which is new, modern and exciting for the City. This also lead us to opera house, which is amazing, they had built the Opera house on a slight modern slant, but made it so it has modern and traditional Scandinavia in one. The Opera house over looked the ocean; you could see many different parts of the City of Oslo, old and new. Different layers of architecture and the different spaces they had used for different things.

After a whole day’s tired exploring and interviewing, we bought a simple lunch-dinner together, and took it away to our hotel, because we wanted to interview our gatekeeper and ask her a few questions. During that period, we all felt delighted with the results of the day, we had gained so much insight of the Muslims community and the surrounding area.Not only because the chat and interview with our gatekeeper processed smoothly, but also we acquired a lot of meaningful things in yesterday. We all think it would be very helpful and useful to our project.