As Salaamu Alaykum (Peace be with you)

We welcome another blessed month for which we are grateful to be its guests. Sharing with our community, stakeholders and service users the work we are doing, the services on offer to them and how we are using their donations is of vital importance and not a responsibility we take lightly.

Only a year ago, we were blessed to launch a very special project that was over 10 years in the making. What we had all been waiting for, the opportunity to purchase a space to establish a Mosque in our locality. a first step to moving away from rented halls and no permanent home to establishing a house dedicated to the worship of him SWT through prayer and righteous actions.

The task at hand was not going to be easy. to find £1.1 Million for a cash purchase of a 1204 square metre space located in an excellent location for local service.

By the grace of the Almighty, we were able to do it. By his assistance and generosity only, the community came forward during the blessed month of Ramadan and gave from what they could.

Dedicated volunteers gave from their time to set up taraweeh every evening and collect donations, we visited Mosques across the city to plead for support, went Live on Islamic TV Channels, organised events, ran campaigns and we even saw our community young people take on the good deed challenge to raise a Waqf 365 for themselves.

We were also graciously supported with a huge financial contribution by an anonymous Muslim Business to whom we are grateful and indebted for their kindness, i encourage all readers to remember them in your prayers.

The Journey is however not yet complete, we have acquired the space and now we work on a very exciting yet challenging project, we have a large amount of Debt to clear after which we can work to design and build a purpose built Mosque. The entire borough of Enfield has only 1 purpose built Mosque. We are excited at the prospect of building a second, a space built with purpose not only in its aesthetics but in how we serve our community practically.

This Ramadan, we are focused on not only working to build the physical elements of this Mosque but to build the most important component of it. The people that Mosque will serve.

Whether you simply turn up for prayers and leave or use a range of our services, you represent the community of the Heart of Enfield Mosque who we are grateful to know and serve.

I encourage you to read this publication thoroughly and reflect on the work and its impacts on this local area, one that no doubt has been neglected for a very long time.

May your Ramadan be blessed and honoured

Salim Ahmed

Chairman & Founder

Heart of Enfield Mosque

Alhamdulillah, we are pleased to announce that we have completed the purchase of the 2 adjacent properties at 651 – 653 Hertford Road to establish the new Heart of Enfield Mosque.

Through His mercy SWT, with the generous support and giving of the Muslim community, from Enfield and beyond, as well as the invaluable support of a Muslim charitable foundation, we were able to purchase the 1204 square-metre site for £1.1 million.

The Enfield Lock area is plagued by a range of social disadvantages and challenges that we have witnessed during our work in the community. We will reflect on our past 10 years of service and learning to serve as the central hub of this community with excellence, and to help make our community a nice place to to live, work and socialise under the faith values of Islam.

We wholeheartedly thank everyone who chose to support this project and believe in the vision of the Mosque. Our gratitude and prayers are for those who donated or volunteered, and especially those who have over this past decade given countless hours of support in anonymity. As we continue with Phase 1, we are still seeking 85 donors to contribute a Waqf 365 to help complete the first phase of three to establish the Mosque. We welcome those who can give to come forward.

May we be honoured in serving a blessed house of Allah SWT, and may we go forth with sincerity. Ameen.

Life without prayer is a life without a soul
Life without prayer is a human without hope
Life without prayer is but a narrow scope
Prayer is the unveiling of the mind
Prayer is but our main connection
The Kaaba is our Prayers’ direction
A place of reflection and to show our affection
A cleanser of our hearts and our sins
A peacemaker to our worries and our emotions
A conversation with Allah, our only salvation

Standing, sitting or even laying down
Arms folded or by our side
Heads facing lacking pride
Whether at a mosque, home or in a park
Recitations of the Qur’an continue to spark
The call to prayer brings a smile
A hope that truly knows no end
Bowing down in humility
Our egos hidden with nobility
He alone is the guide for our ways
He alone is the light for our days
He alone is the owner of the blaze
So We use our prayers to ask him for his mercy
We ask him for his guidance and his forgiveness
We ask him for open doors of the beloved Jannah

From dawn till sunset, Salah is but an obligation
A sign of us believers and our admiration
A signal for our devotion and submission
To the all mighty and merciful Allah we thanks for this blessing
He instructed us to establish our prayers
That prayer is better than sleep
That prayer is the path to success
So why dismiss such an opportunity
A reward of the best outcome awaits you
For our prayers are what bring us to unity

It has become tradition for Mosques & Islamic organisations to be reliant on donations and base their work around how much they receive from supporters. This model has been fantastic in developing an array of institutions and projects across the UK and one we will adopt for our immediate and medium term needs.

This model naturally came about owing to the only recent introduction of Muslims to Britain as a permanent community. It is however perhaps time to look beyond this and consider an alternative approach to financial freedom and if anything creating an organisation that is surplus in wealth and can with that seek to do even greater things.

The Church of England boasts an endowment fund of £10 Billion, providing £1 Billion in revenue every year – the Church’s single highest source of income and example of the potential endowments have.

Closer to our spiritual home, There are examples of Islam endowments creating impact for lives & communities. In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, you can find the Waqf (or locally Vakuf) of Gazi Husrev Beg, a 16th century philanthropist who used his wealth to develop institutions that have lasted till today. Mosques, Islamic Schools and several shops which continue to use their rental income profits to fund scholarships to this day are the legacy of Waqf endowments & generosity of Gazi Husrev Beg that have helped create a sustained system away from reliance on the continued ask for donations in Sarajevo.

The proposed acquisition already allows us to produce income through the already present house on site, allowing for the generation of rental income. Further than that we plan to dedicate a percentage of the space for further development of income generation, helping to wean the organisation off the need for fundraising.

The 2020 global pandemic saw our organisations donations drop to zero. Having recently acquired the space at 1A Turkey street our financial obligations remained. Within weeks, we partnered with a local business and rented out our facility which allowed the organisation to survive the pandemic, a proven example of our outlook and ability to effectively use business to sustain and build our charitable work.

In 2021, we launched ‘The Western Province’, an alternative approach Muslim tourism company with focus on Umrah that is active at the time of writing creating and delivering Umrah tours and is doing so with no shareholders or dividends paid and all surplus profits donated to the charity endowment fund.

We recently appointed a business development director to our management team – a dedicated person whose focus is towards helping develop the business activities and Waqf of the charity, exploring ethical investment opportunities with a focus locally to ensure we can also use our assets to provide benefits and support to local lives.

Acquiring a permanent facility from which we can realise the vision of the Heart of Enfield Mosque will be vital in making quite literally life changing differences to the lives of local people. Although the space will be a chance for us to cater to the spiritual needs of our Muslim community, which is fantastic and commendable in itself, it’s worth remembering that a mosque should not exist as an insular organisation but should rather be at the service of all its neighbours. This is especially true in Britain today.

Enfield Lock is a ward that suffers considerably in the way of quality of life. Enfield is a considerably disadvantaged borough with 32% of households in our ward living in poverty and the borough having the 11th highest rate of child poverty in the UK. Alongside this we have the 2nd highest rate of serious youth violence in London, with the borough seeing a 27% increase in knife crime offences in 2018 compared to a 5% increase throughout London. These realities further hit home when you consider the East-West divide of inequality in Enfield, further concentrating these problems within our ward & its surrounding areas.

Establishing a faith inspired facility with an open-door policy welcoming all those who seek support and guidance and upholding the Islamic values of neighbourly assistance and doing good unto others will help make Enfield Lock a better place to be. We are not just a large Muslim community in need of a mosque, we are a community in need of collective efforts to improve our neighbourhood.

It would have no doubt been easy to decide on the vision of establishing a mosque in the locality and hoped for the best, rather the initiative was taken to proactively take steps to engage with the community and within whatever limited capacity, provide services to the already large existent under served community.

As narrated in the hadith, a bedouin man is seen leaving his camel without first tying it to which the prophet peace be upon him asks why he chooses not to, the bedouin replies that he has trust in Allah to which the noble prophet asks that he instead ties his camel and then trusts in Allah.

It is in this oft mentioned incident that we find such a valuable lesson in our need to use the resources we have to create practical solutions and have reliance on god as alongside that as opposed to being the exclusive.

In November 2012, Jumuah was commenced in the Enfield lock area in a rented hall and locals invited through word of mouth. From recollection, 13 people prayed that day and the service grew week on week to its now regular service to a much larger audience.

In the summer of 2013, a decision was made to cater for the community during Ramadan with the same rented facility hired every evening for Taraweeh. A huge milestone for a community accustomed to travelling to mosques outside the locality.

Ramadan was being celebrated together with a service reachable by foot. Neighbours became friends and bridges in the community were built. Locals were now people who acknowledged each other and spread salaam in the street, recognising faces from prayer and learning.

The holy month was rounded off with several Eid jamaats that were packed to the brim, bringing alive the idea that there truly was a need for something permanent in the locality.

Since then, we have worked to offer a range of relevant services to the community. In 2013, we launched children’s supplementary education in the area, a service well received with classes quickly filled alongside ad hoc events and philanthropic work with partner charitable organisations. From our Summer BBQ fun days to free football sessions for local youngsters, and most notably our initiating of Eid in the Park in 2015 which has since 2017 now grown to a multi organisational gathering of thousands biannually. Despite our nomadic existence, Heart of Enfield has ventured to do what it can to be at the service of the locality.

In 2019, we secured a long lease at 1A Turkey street, Developing our first permanent home under the name ‘HeartSpace’ which gave us a foundation and base for our work. Having a place to call home has allowed us to better engage with local community members, meet with stakeholders and even launch Foodbank EN3 during the COVID 19 pandemic, a weekly service providing for local families in need that has since continued.

The past 10 years have also seen the organisation seek to better engage with external organisations from which we could learn and better deliver our work. We are pleased to have on several occasions worked with humanitarian organisations in helping provide life saving work across the globe, most recently in Ramadan 2022 through our community donating over £6000.00 to the Global Relief Trust.

We were also recognised for our environmental efforts by ‘MADE’, a Muslim charity focused on environmentalism and activism who awarded us for our work in reducing our carbon footprint and environmental impact.

We were thrilled when, in 2014, our chairman was invited to 10 Downing Street for a tour and to meet the Prime Minister David Cameron in recognition of the charity’s work and contribution to local life in the Enfield North constituency.

In 2022, we joined hands with other Islamic organisations and Mosques in Enfield & surrounding boroughs in forming the North London council of Mosques, a multi organisational platform dedicated to better coordinating the efforts of our local organisations from which we have already seen positive efforts and growth in our unity & collective efforts.

The past 10 years have not just been about delivering services, its also been a time for us as an organisation and team to better understand each other, identify our strengths and weaknesses and develop ourselves. Proactively nurturing our personal development in a range of fields and moulding a team that works in sync and with an understanding of each other will help us be efficient in what we do.

Utilising the past 10 years as an opportunity of experimentation and learning has helped us not only better understand the importance of establishing a Mosque but also better define and understand what being a Mosque in modern Britain should entail.

We have also sought to better understand the dynamics of the Muslim community of our locality and in a wider context, helping better understand the challenges in our community and how we can better help resolve them. Enfield Lock and its surrounding wards exist with several challenges unique to the area, ranging from knife crime to poverty. With that, we face the wider challenges that we as Muslims in general face as a collective.

The Muslim community of the locality has increased year on year and our services are strained with a much needed increase in space and facility. The release of the 2021 census data shows a jump in those identifying as Muslim in the UK from 4.9% to 6.5%,

We look back at these past 10 years as a community with fondness and gratefulness to Allah for allowing us to engage in this work, we now look forward to the next 10 with excitement as the chance to establish a permanent home for the Heart of Enfield Mosque is before us.