Sir – Your report that last week, for the first time in its 400-year history, a Muslim Imam delivered a sermon in the chapel of Pembroke College, Oxford — the service preceded by the Muslim call to prayer — will these days raise few eyebrows.
The great majority of Oxford dons are either agnostic or atheist, and an event which, 50 years ago, would have been considered apostasy, is nowadays met with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.
How many people actually make up the congregations at these services, anyway?
Many years ago, the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple, in his fictional Way of the World column, recounted the hilarious activities of the liberal, go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, Dr Spacely-Trellis, for whom no week in his Christian ministry was complete without a gimmick or novelty to attract attention. The prescient Peter Simple saw the shape of things to come.
To its credit, Pembroke College is currently engaged in an energetic programme of fundraising among Arab leaders, King Abdullah of Jordan (who is an Honorary Fellow of the College) and Sultan Qaboos of Oman among them.
If this ingenious wheeze does anything to help attract Arab funds into the college’s coffers, it will at least have served some purpose, even if Oxford college chapels, founded along Christian lines to the glory of God, were never intended to be used in this way.
Robert Triggs, (Pembroke, 1967)
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