Jonathan Sacerdoti has a nice little piece in the Spectator on the subject of ‘multifaith’ prayer rooms. Mr Sacerdoti points out that these rooms are really only used by one group which is Muslims.
Mr Sacerdoti said of his fascination with the phenomenon of ‘multifaith’ prayer rooms:
So it was a relief to discover I am not alone in this fascination. Dr Andrew Crompton is an architect and academic who has made probably the world’s most extensive study of these spaces, and recently sat down with me for an interview. (Regular readers may remember him as the professor of architecture who watched, aghast, as a police officer arrived at my door for having an opinion). In 2015, he counted 2,500 multi-faith rooms in Britain; today he estimates five or six thousand. At Heathrow, where a rather beautiful triple chapel – Anglican, Catholic, Nonconformist – was built in 1969, he counted 13 multi-faith spaces in 2015. Today he says there are 39, mostly airside for staff. Ask yourself where the greatest density of religious spaces in the United Kingdom is to be found. Oxford, perhaps, or the City of London with its forest of Wren steeples? It is Heathrow Airport. And nearly all of them, Crompton says, are in effect mosques.
This one by Mr Sacerdoti is well worth a short read.
Link
Mr Sacerdoti’s piece in the Spectator
It would be fun if the Salvation Army (for instance) took to visiting multifaith prayer rooms en masse on a regular basis, at peak prayer times. I wonder what “regulations” apply to prayer rooms? If it is OK to drone “Allahu Akbar” it is presumably OK to have a sing song about Boundless Salvation? Then the Jehovah’s Witnesses could engage about Good News and distribute a few copies of Watchtower. Who could object?
It would be an interesting test to see just how ‘multifaith’ these rooms are or even a group of Jews doing something similar such as singing that famous plea for peace ‘Od yavo shalom aleinu’