Examination of Witnesses (Questions 315-319)
17 SEPTEMBER 2003
FR PHIL
SUMNER, FAZAL
RAHIM AND
MAHESH NIMAVAT
Q315 Chairman: Can I welcome you
to the final session of the Committee this afternoon and ask you
to identify yourselves for the record please?
Fr Sumner: I am Father Phil Sumner.
I am a Catholic priest. I was the original Chair of the Oldham
Inter-Faith Forum for a year.
Mr Rahim: Fazil Rahim, Partnership
Development Officer for the Inter-Faith Forum.
Mr Nimavat: Mahesh Nimavat. I
am a Hindu priest also working as Community Development Officer
at the community centre.
Q316 Chairman: Do you want to say
anything by way of introduction or are you happy for us to go
straight to questions?
Fr Sumner: I sent the presentation
and I presume that you have read that, so there is little point
in repeating that information.
Q317 Chairman: There is certainly
little point in doing that but would you like to tell me a little
bit more about what you see your role as in promoting social cohesion?
Fr Sumner: Clearly some of the
problem has to be identified with faith. I believe that we have
got to get, the relationship between Christian and Muslim right,
not just in Oldham but worldwide. That is a major problem for
so many of us. We have the opportunity here in Oldham to do something
about it. Faith has a major impact and the divisions and misunderstandings
between people of faith have a major impact. Certainly here in
Oldham I believe that the major conflict is not so much between
people of colour; there are people from the BNP who would claim
that they are very much in favour of the black community here
in Oldham but their problem has been seen to be much more with
the Muslim community and with Islam. We are working very definitely
in response to Ritchie coming in and saying to us would we like
to meet together first of all and then we came together as a group
of so-called faith leaders in town. We decided that that was what
we wanted to do, to meet together on a more regular basis, and
that if we could not do that then we had little hope for other
people from the different faith communities meeting together,
so we do that in order to give some sense of leadership but also
because we believe that that is what should be happening anyway.
We do meet together at different times, as I have said in the
presentation; we have prayed together, especially at the time
when there was the war in Iraq, and that produced a very useful
image. Just down the road here at the end of Union Street there
is a Catholic church and we had Muslim, Hindu and Christian praying
together, lighting candles (which is a very Catholic thing to
do) in a Christian church praying for peace and then coming out.
Unfortunately, at the end of this road there is a corner and the
cars going round the bend often miss the bend and go through the
wall of the church and it did cause some shock—I suppose
because of attitude—as people came past and saw Muslims
coming out of a Christian church, but I think it is a useful and
important sign in itself just to see us praying together, to see
us relating together on a regular basis. We eat together on different
occasions. All that is important, just to be seen together.
Q318 Chairman: So it is a visual
thing. What else have you managed to achieve in Oldham in the
just over 12 months that you have been in existence?
Fr Sumner: So much really. Fazal
is our faiths worker and that was not easy because of matching
funding together. The neighbourhood renewal funding is for two
years. We also had the church urban fund monies for three years.
By the time we tried to get the two together, to correspond, so
that we could employ somebody for three years, the money promised
by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund was running out. If we could
not spend it before May of the first year, and we were getting
up to March by this time anyway, then we had lost that money,
so we literally had to spend £12,000 of money in the first
week just to make sure we did not lose it, which was nonsense
but we had to do that to enable Fazal to have a job. Even now
we cannot guarantee that job for three years, which is what we
want to be able to do, because we have not got enough money; in
the last year it runs out. You take a leap of faith to enable
that to happen. In the very climate therefore when you would think
funding organisations should be supporting precisely what we are
trying to do it has not been easy to get that together. We have
had to take that leap of faith in the knowledge that there is
that support eventually.
Q319 Dr Pugh: You are all obviously
eminently civilised and tolerant people who get together and I
am sure it will do an awful lot of good, but beyond you there
are communities who maybe have rather unenlightened views of religions
other than their own. How do you get this spirit that you have
got amongst yourselves out there in the streets? How do you spread
it further? How do you make sure it permeates through the community
because that is what you want to do, is it not?
Fr Sumner: Perhaps Fazal could
say something about the harvest festival and so on.
Mr Rahim: There are people like
us who are involved in working or in some capacity or in other
voluntary organisations who we see everywhere. To involve people
of Oldham we have organised events that people can go to and then
make links with other religions. At Easter we held an Easter event
and we linked it with Ramadan because people of the Christian
faith fast before a feast and Muslims and Hindus, people of all
major religions or people coming from any faith, fast during the
year and in order to make a link with each other we invited them
to this Easter event.
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