Gurgaon as a city scares me. It is considered unsafe for women because it sees a large number of incidents of assault or harassment of women. It is also a city that I consider unsafe for Muslims now. Just recently, two incidents occurred which made me feel this way — Muslims offering their Friday prayers in an open ground were attacked on the 6th of April in one incident and a Muslim youth was attacked and his beard shaved off in another incident on the 31st July.

Am I generalising in haste? Maybe.

Two incidents might be too small a sample size to call a city unsafe for an entire population. So I guess I will let my initial reaction subside for the sake of statistics and talk of why Muslims pray in the open and why it’s not a bigger nuisance for us than it is for others for whatever inconceivable reason they may consider it one.

It is not fun to pray in the sweltering heat on a dusty piece of land or on a side of the road with a thin piece of plastic spread beneath your feet. It is not fun to travel many miles before reaching an excuse of a praying space. It is not fun to rush back and also miss maybe one’s lunch. Yet, we do it and it’s a personal choice. We do not ask for any special favours to be bestowed on us for this.

It becomes a problem when people start coming to beat you up while you’re trying to pray with all the above problems already weighing you down. The general objections people raise to us praying in such places is that why should we be allowed to pray in the open. My question is why not? What disservice does it do to anyone if a place that is lying waste gets used for an hour a week? The answer that we get in return is that it is just a plot for land encroachment and this is how Muslims spread their religion. I really don’t know how to answer this except call it Islamophobia.

The case with Gurgaon is a special one. For a city so vast, it has only 22 mosques. These combined would have a capacity close to 10,000 only. The largest of these is entangled in legal disputes and the authorities seem to be in no mood to allow new mosques to come up. In such a scenario, these open spaces come as a relief. At least one can pray in such a place and return to their daily life. However, with the growing threats by some groups and their implicit endorsement by the chief minister of Haryana, it seems Muslims might have to face a lot of trouble in fulfilling such basic obligations of theirs in their country.

When I compare this with Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, I realise the difference. While growing to pray in Gurgaon, I travel 6–7 kilometres and just squeeze in between a sea of humanity on a dusty ground or someone’s mat. (In adversity, people share — most locals bring mats from their homes and try and accommodate as many people as they can.) Now, they do it constantly under the risk that someone might attack them. In Mumbai, there’s a Lord Ganesh idol and gate dedicated to him right outside the entrance to the mosque I pray in. In Hyderabad, there was a Lord Shiv temple 10 metres away from our mosque. People never felt threatened or scared by one another.

I really don’t know if this comes across as a rant. More importantly, I don’t care today. It’s something that has been bearing on my mind for some time now and I just wanted to say it. I have. I don’t feel any better. I hope I do. I hope things get better too. Till then, live long and prosper!