Shortly before 10:00 pm the sun finally sets on Oslo, allowing Muslims gathered at the Minhal-ul-Quran mosque to break the first day of fasting for Ramadan, held this year in the shadow of the deadly July 22 attacks.
After breaking the fast with a fruit salad and dates, before praying together for a few minutes, around 15 men – the women are gathered elsewhere — sit down for a second serving, spread out on a tablecloth laid directly on the Pakistani mosque’s soft carpet. “There is a special atmosphere,” explains Methab Asfar, who heads the Islamic Council, an umbrella organisation for Muslim groups across Norway.
“These terrorist acts have brought people closer together. We are not talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’, we’re talking about ‘us’,” he says in Norwegian, dipping a piece of nan bread in a delicious chana, a special Pakistani stew made of spicy chickpeas.
“It’s more correct, legitimate and sincere to talk of ourselves as Norwegians from now on,” he says, adding: “It’s strange. I’ve met people who never thought doing so would be possible.”
Squeezed in between two sets of railway tracks and a highway, the Minhal-ul-Quran, or “Way of the Koran”, mosque was founded 11 years ago in an old square industrial building in the traditionally working class east side of Oslo.
With the steeple of a Protestant church towering in the background, the inconspicuous dark yellow facade of the mosque has been tagged with graffiti in places in defiance of a sign informing taggers: “This is a mosque. Show respect.”
For Perveiz Nisar, the head of the mosque’s board, this year’s Ramadan comes as “joy in the midst of misery”. “People need to think about something else. They want to forget, even though we can’t really forget, but at least gain a little distance from the attacks,” he says, as the evening’s last prayer begins, with men and women on either side of a large screen.
According to the 54-year-old Pakistani-born taxi driver, Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre, described by the killer as a “crusade” against Islam and multiculturalism, has already changed the mentality in Norway.
“We can see it already!” says Nisar, who had organised a conference for July 22 against extremism that in the end had to be cancelled. “Before, no matter what went wrong, it was always the Muslims’ fault. Now, people see that it can be anybody and that they can be as destructive as al Qaeda or Muslim extremists,” he adds.
Following the initial relief that the terror attacks were not carried out by Islamists, most Muslims were overcome by the same grief and disbelief that shook all of Norway, says Rafia Rauf, a 50-year-old woman wearing a cream-coloured headscarf and black dress. “I cried so much, to tell you the truth,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep for several nights. I kept waking up and going to check on my children,” says Rauf, who is active in a mosque-led group working to integrate Muslim women into society.
Mustafa Rahman, a 17-year-old who has spent most of his life in Pakistan, acknowledges that he on the other hand had not felt the deep grief he thought immigrants who had lived in Norway longer were going through.
“It’s sad because this was a safe country but I didn’t feel that sad to be honest,” says Rahman, who was born in Norway but who only moved back two years ago. “It’s sad because people lost their families (but) this kind of attack happens a lot in Pakistan,” he explains, preferring to speak in English.
