Here, a Deobandi mosque, built in , faces the Edwardian church of St Philip's, started in The church's congregation is about 30, mixed white, Indian and African; the mosque across the road holds people. And on Fridays "it's full: prostration room only, with another hundred outside on the pavement," says the rector of St Philip's, Alan Race. But Race does more than watch, with a certain wry envy.
His church is also the home of a study centre for interfaith relations. Nonetheless, they have come to see that a new way of being a parish church has to be invented, and shaped," he said. But although religion has provided ways for communities to define themselves politically, it does seem that the defining elements in the story have been cultural. There is a genuine and widespread belief in tolerance, which does not exclude conflict but does seem to bring politics down to the personal, where these difficulties can be resolved.
But to export Leicester's peculiar and hard-won tolerance is not easy. There are a couple of policy tricks that could work. The Church of England has helped manage the transition gracefully; the St Philip's parish has turned itself into a resource for the whole community, while the bishops' interfaith council provides a way for other religions into the establishment.
The Leicester Mercury's scrupulously anti-inflammatory reporting has helped; so too has the work of the Muslim Burial Council. This brings mosques together with each other, and with the unglamorous end of local politics, in a way which sidesteps theological differences and knits the religious into local, democratic politics.
She studied both English Translation and Creative Writing as an undergraduate. Xiaofan has an avid interest in understanding British culture. As an Art and Museums volunteer for Leicester City Council, she helps local museums with various events. Fayola Francis , 24, is Jamaican British. She has a degree in Modern Languages and can speak French and Spanish fluently.
Born and raised in Leicester, she has lived in 6 different cities across England, France and Spain. Fay likes to bake and write articles in her spare time.
Chunghui Wang , 41, comes from Taiwan and, as well as being a native Chinese speaker, is fluent in English and German. Chunghui has 13 years' work experience in the field of booth design and international trade fairs in Germany and the USA. The Partition of India in led to many people leaving India to try making a home elsewhere, and some of these emigrants came to Leicester which still had a busy clothing industry, guaranteeing work was always available. The formation of the agency was made possible through local support, local councillors and the Commission for Racial Equality.
From its inception, in the era of racial conflict and legislative interventions, TREC played a central, crucial role in the daily lived experiences of ordinary, everyday people from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean across gender, class and religious belief. In its earliest manifestation the organisation emerged as a broad based coalition which served as a focal point for unifying the community in response to fighting against racism.
Throughout its existence, TREC has, in addition to its anti-racist agenda, been engaged in establishing programs to improve the socio-economic position of the communities in Leicester. TREC is still undertaking this important work today with the aim to change public attitudes and to make racial discrimination socially unacceptable.
Find out more about TREC. These new communities have helped regenerate run-down parts of the city bringing work and life to places earmarked for demolition. Throughout this period and up to the present day people have arrived in Leicester either for work, education, or as refugees. In the s a large amount of emigrants came from Eastern Europe and joined the established communities that settled here after World War II. In the s, a number of people came to Leicester from Somalia and Eritrea establishing a community around Saint Matthews with new shops and places of worship.
This can be seen across the city with an influx of restaurants and supermarkets being set up to cater to this new community. In the Runnymede Trust stated that Leicester is home to faith groups across 14 different faiths and beliefs. Leicester is a city with a huge number of diverse communities and beliefs and a place that has a long history of welcoming and accepting emigrants from all over the world.
But when she first arrived in Leicester nearly 40 years before, she wanted to turn tail and run. She came with her husband, an Indian engineer who had a job with Marconi. We had a small flat in Highfields, a very old Victorian building and when I climbed the stairs, I thought, 'God, is this England? So I told my husband, 'I'm not staying here. Do something! New arrivals sensed this was a land of opportunity.
It was rich, the heart of the empire. But it was also cold, uncomfortable, unwelcoming. In , the dictator Idi Amin ordered Uganda's large Asian minority to leave the country within 90 days. For most of them, the imperial "motherland" was the most obvious destination.
And Leicester, where Manjula Sood and Surinderpal Singh Rai were already living, was one place to aim for — so much so that the city council took out advertisements to try to stop it happening. In particular, it went on, there were "several thousands of families on the housing list", "hundreds of children… awaiting places in schools", while social and health services were "already stretched to the limit". Leicester in looked into the crystal ball and did not like what it saw: that within a generation or so it would no longer be a city dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon Christians.
But the city fathers' efforts to stop this change had the opposite effect. And the Asian immigrants from East Africa — affluent professionals and businesspeople — were better equipped to prosper than any before or since. When the Ugandan Asians arrived, much of Leicester's traditional industry was on its last legs. All of these were collapsing. And the large factories and the machines they used were becoming redundant.
But the new arrivals grasped that this disaster was also an opportunity. And the old slogan 'Leicester clothes the world' is still true. In the 40 years since, Leicester has become the poster city for multicultural Britain, a place where the stunning number and size of the minorities — the 55 mosques, 18 Hindu temples, nine Sikh gurudwaras, two synagogues, two Buddhist centres and one Jain centre — are seen not as a recipe for conflict or a millstone around the city's neck, but a badge of honour.
After every act of Islamist terrorism, there has been a spasm of revulsion. The average white liberal finds his brain hijacked by unexpected emotions. What exactly are these people doing here? Why did we let them in? Why do some of them — even if only a tiny minority — hate us so much? As the city's advertisement in the Uganda Argus brings home, creating a city in which according to the census white Britons would constitute only 45 per cent of the population the figure for was 61 per cent was certainly never a political goal.
In historical terms, it is just as unprecedented a social experiment as the emancipation of women and gay people. And while the rest of Europe may be on the same page as us with women and the gay community, or even a page or two further on, when it comes to immigration, Britain is now in a league of its own.
And that's because, while "coloured" immigration was for a long time seen as a question of race, it has long been clear that it is much more significantly a matter of religion.
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