One of the things that I really like about the work Sheikh Abdullah and his community did, was the fact that he used to invite non-Moslems into the Mosque. For example the day the Mosque was opened, Christmas 1889, they brought inside over 250 homeless children and gave them Christmas dinner and that's an amazing thing. And he was also very keen on education because he was well educated himself and was a great traveller, and so in the, in the building, not in the Mosque itself, but in the buildings he used to hold various classes, for example photography, or classes in the Arabic language, science and physics. He also used to hold tea parties for his community where men and women used to sort of relate to one another quite naturally. There wasn't the same idea of segregating men from women and in England all those years ago, where I suppose Victorian England woman didn't have much of a say in life, in the Islamic community they actually participated very strongly.
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