While I did not live in the East End, I would frequently take the District line from West London to visit Whitechapel and immerse myself in the Bengali culture of my grandparents. This would almost always include people watching the elderly uncles walking along the street toward the Bricklane mosque, as well as participating in one of its daily congregational prayers.

I was not part of the community per say and therefore never met the young imam, but it is good to see someone younger taking the helm at the mosque.

I do sometimes wonder about the mosque’s future as we enter the 2020s. With the exception of Friday prayers, it appeared to me that the mosque’s attendees were almost entirely composed of people in their 70s and older (this was in the mid-2010s). Meanwhile, there are other mosques in the local vicinity with much larger and younger congregations. Furthermore, the local Bengali community in Bricklane is diminishing in numbers. Delwar rightly alludes to this when mentioning his childhood friends moving into the London’s eastern suburbs (presumably due to a combination of ever rising rental prices and the desire to have a better quality of life and more space).

Perhaps this is just history repeating itself with communities coming and going (first with the Huguenots, then the Jews, and now the Bengalis). That said, I think something really special is being lost as Bricklane becomes more gentrified.

Anyway, I hope fate allows me to spend sometime in London again… perhaps post-Corona!