This was the topic of discussion on Radio Islam’s News Hour on Monday.
During 80s and well into the early 90s certain items were gifted to family members when they returned from Hajj or Umrah.
While people would laugh at getting a tasbhee, “Makkah green medicine” a musallah or maybe a doilies topee, many kept these sentimental items and passed them on from generation to generation.
Commonly the red musallah with the Haram in Makkah and Medina are found on this prayer mat.
Aaliyah Ahmed, a budding anthropologist thesis on the famous musallah says the simple item brought back a sense of nostalgia for many pushing the story to the top of the trend list.
“The inspiration for this project grew which was firstly to show the collective memory of the Muslim Ummah or community and secondly to portray the stories of hope, lost joy. There was travel, faith and obviously deep emotions and memories people carried.”
As part of her thesis, Aaliyah had to turn her research into a curated exhibition which took place in November last year.
Aaliyah had to transform an art studio into an exhibition space.
She says the gathered 23 musallah’s from the Cape Town Muslim community which had a written or audio narrative of each musallah sharing a favourite memory of theirs.
“I has a lot of non-Muslims come to the exhibition and they’d all come to me afterwards saying how they felt the weight and significance of these stories and memories and it may realize that, although this was a Muslim object, the stories that came out were stories of the heart which everyone can relate to.”
If you want to look through the digital archive and share your own memory or picture of the Prayer Mat We Share, click here.
Faizel Patel
Listen to the interview with Aaliyah Ahmed
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