On a Thursday in early September, the 68-year-old locksmith Sakhawat Ali walked through the open gate that led from Maltravers Road into Wybourn Islamic Centre and noticed something lying at his feet. He’d come for Fajr — the earliest of the five daily prayers for Muslim worshippers, which begins when the first light appears on the horizon — so the sky was still too dark to properly make it out. Someone must have dropped their book, he remembers thinking as he picked it up. While rushing to start praying in time for the true dawn, he noticed it wasn’t closing fully, as if something bulky had been stuffed inside, but thought little of it.
It was only once Sakhawat had left his shoes by the door, padded over to the small library in a corner room and turned on the lights that he realised the book in his hands was the Holy Qur’an. When it fell open, he saw what was stuffed inside: rashers of cold, cooked bacon.
Sakhawat struggles to recall how he felt that morning on 3 September: it was so early, his thoughts were focused on prayer and, most of all, he was in shock. Without thinking, he hurled the bacon into an alleyway outside, upset at the thought of it defiling the sacred text. However, when he shared what had happened with the mosque’s committee members, they admonished him. It might be important evidence for the police. He went to retrieve the rashers, brushed off the dust and placed them back between the pages.
When Sakhawat arrived for Fajr about six weeks later, on Sunday 25 October, and spotted another Qur’an hurled on the ground, he was far less disorientated. This time, rather than being stuffed with bacon, the corners of some pages had been folded over, indicating where to find a drawing of the Prophet Mohammed (who is not supposed to be visually depicted) and a message scrawled in strange curly handwriting. “This is a human country,” it read. “Kill all adult Muslims.”
Screenshots of CCTV footage of the vandal, or vandals. Credit: South Yorkshire Police.
“My first thought was that it was somebody on drugs or who has a problem,” he tells me, when we met at Wybourn Islamic Centre earlier this week. He was eager to dismiss it as a bizarre act by someone who didn’t fully understand what they were doing. After further reflection in the weeks since, his view has shifted. “Someone’s trying to disturb us,” he says. “This hate crime, someone is doing it for a reason.”
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