By Neelam Rahim

There is widespread anger among Muslim academics and students for what they call the University of Pretoria’s forcible closure of the salaah facility at its health sciences faculty. The salaah facility, or the Musallah at the Prinshof Campus close to the Steve Biko Academic Hospital, was closed on June 20 to make way for renovations to the library.

Radio Islam discusses the issues with Mariam, the Vice-Chair of the Muslim Student Association at Tuks and PSC Chairperson Naseeha Jooma.

Having read the reports, the University claims that they give adequate notice of the building extensions and that the stipulated requirements from Muslim students made it difficult for them to allocate an alternative facility.

Mariam tells Radio Islam, “To clarify that point, the University didn’t initially even contact us. It was a private contractor that informed one of the Muslim medical students that was reading salaah on the facility and informed him and said, listen, we need to start working here. Please remove your stuff. And then, he contacted MSN and informed us. And we were baffled on the whole situation because if the University initially contacted us, we’d been able to make an arrangement and change everything. That’s why the whole situation started we had to understand what was going on. And then after that, the University claimed they made adequate changes and arrangements for us, but they expected us to book a room in order to pray when it’s somewhat over 110 students. And having to inform them weekly or even daily on changing the room wasn’t going to work out. So we couldn’t accept the requirements that they gave us.”

There are claims that the Vice-Chancellor and others were sympathetic. Where does the buck stop here? Who is responsible for this decision?

“From the reports, there was a sense of sympathy given to students, but there was not any resolution, so sympathy doesn’t really help in a situation like this. Responsibility boils down to Prof.De Yaha and Prof. Susan as they were responsible for this,” says Naseeha.

The one argument was that, look, It’s a secular university. There are people of so many different religious beliefs we can accommodate everyone’s needs all the time. That said, it seemed like the Salah facility allocated to Muslims was more used than any facility assigned to other religious faiths.

Mariam says, “That’s true. And the point that we as a Muslim state association trying to make is the fact that we are not against any religion, but no one needs to come down on us for putting forth and standing up our own religion. It’s a matter of us doing what we need to do to accommodate our religion and make sure that our religion is important in our lives.”

For more about this, listen to Radio Islam’s podcast below.