![\"Siddiq](\"https:\/\/ted.adventist.org\/sitenews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/images_news-2018_Siddiq-diversity-lecture-edit.jpg\")
<\/a>A Newbold student focus group had asked for more lectures on the question of identity. Maybe, they suggested, Adventists can learn something from another group\u2019s struggle with identity issues.<\/p>\nSiddiqi is a well-known broadcaster and writer, and former Director of the Muslim Society of Great Britain. Born and bred in Surrey, she is a white British convert.<\/p>\n
Siddiqi started by emphasizing that she was simply reporting her own experience including an openness and transparency about her own struggles with identity issues. She shared that Muslims in the UK are so different from each other because they come from different parts of the world, thus they are not one, unified, organised voice. As such, in her opinion, it really does not make sense to talk about \u2018the Muslim community\u2019. She equally spoke of her anguish when, after the first reports came through of the Manchester Arena atrocity, her young son asked her, \u2018Was it a Muslim?\u2019<\/p>\n
The Muslim population in the UK is currently 2 million, 4.8% of the national population. This is much less than people generally imagine. Of this number, over 50% are under the age of 25, which poses internal problems. Siddiqi dislikes the epithet, \u2018non-Muslim\u2019 but she did point out that over 90% of the non-Muslim population of the UK has never set foot inside a mosque.<\/p>\n Celebrity Muslims like Olympian Mo Farah and Bake Off<\/em> winner Nadia Hussain do help to reduce prejudice but, according to Siddiqi, small local initiatives are the main key. Muslims regularly give a percentage of their income to charity and were prominent helpers in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire in London.<\/p>\n Siddiqi has been involved in organizing various initiatives to help create understanding between different sections of the UK population. In a lifetime devoted to community activism, she has helped to rally Muslim, Christian and Jewish women to form a human chain of silent witness across Westminster Bridge in March 2017 after a Muslim man had wreaked havoc at the location just days before. She has inspired the \u2018Open My Mosque\u2019 movement and, during Ramadan, organised the \u2018The Big Iftar\u2019, open to all comers. \u2018Sadaqa Day\u2019 raised \u00a3100m for charity at the end of Ramadan. Most significant however are the local clean-ups, food banks and homeless shelters.<\/p>\n<\/a>During the evening, participants heard some interesting facts about Islam in the UK. The first purpose-built mosque was erected, surprisingly enough, in 1889, at Woking in Surrey. Now, there are approximately 1,500 mosques in this country, many of them small. About one third of these mosques have no designated place for women to be during Friday prayers, a situation Siddiqi described as unacceptable. <\/p>\n