I recently visited the mosque called Masjid Faizul Islam in inner-city Birmingham, a couple of blocks away from Villa Park, with the artist Mahtab Hussain, whose mother lives nearby. It’s a purpose-designed building in two shades of atypical yellow brick, positioned at the end of a street of terraced houses. There we met Imam Yousef Zaman. He is a structural engineer by profession, as well as also being an imam, and he told me that he designed the building, which replaced a scrapyard.

He was proud of the way that the steel structure had been tensioned to allow the wide prayer hall to be column-free. The orientation of the prayer hall towards Mecca, and the absence of visual interruption of the view towards the mihrab (the niche in the wall that indicates the direction of Mecca), are the only two mandatory factors that define a mosque, according to Yousef. Otherwise, anywhere can be a mosque.

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