Omsalama Ahmed was born and raised in the city of Kosti, in Sudan, during the 1960s. She was the only girl amongst eight siblings. She lost her father at the age of six years and her mother placed great emphasis on ensuring that all her children would receive a good education.
Omsalama moved to live in Khartoum when she began university there. She describes her university years as “when I started to develop my own character … at university there were a lot of activities – cultural, political, social … we became independent for the first time and have your own convictions.” She says was always more of a ‘crowd leader’ than a ‘crowd follower’ and it was while she was at university that she began to wear hijab at time when it was uncommon to do so among her peers. She became active in working with women to become more ‘practising’ in their faith.
She met her husband through a friend whilst studying at university. They got married one month after graduating. Her husband then left Sudan to the UK to pursue his post-graduate studies and she followed him a month later. About her move, she describes a mixture of excitement about the future, as well as anxiety and sorrow about leaving family behind. She arrived in the UK during winter: upon seeing her husband at Heathrow airport she could see frost smoke coming out of his mouth and thought he had started smoking cigarettes.
They began life in the UK in Reading. She found it difficult to adapt to the cold weather and trying to walk in the snow while pregnant. Initially, she would go to the university with her husband would sit in the library or walk to the city centre while he was studying or at lectures. Omsalama describes people in Reading at the time were unaccepting of ‘foreigners’: she recalls that when she caught a bus, “all the women would rather stand up than sit next to me.”
In 1980, they moved to Birmingham where her husband began a PhD at Aston University. Birmingham is a big city [compared to Reading] … we found about 100 Sudanese families in Birmingham … the Arab community was bigger … the bigger number were the Egyptian, Iraqi and Sudanese people who had come here for post-graduate studies.” While planning a social gathering at the University Students Union building to celebrate the arrival of their second child (aqiqah), they were first referred to the Yemeni ‘zaywiyya’ in Balsall Heath to borrow pots and serving dishes large enough for cooking for their gathering. This was the first time they realised there was a large Yemeni community established in Birmingham. Upon learning from Shaykh Muhammad Qasim that that there many children who were not able to learn Arabic, Omsalama, another wife of a Sudanese student (and later male Arab post-graduate students) began teaching Arabic and Islamic Circles. They were first held at Birmingham Central Mosque, then at a house, and later a community centre. Eventually the students raised money to purchase a derelict church (now known as ‘Muslim Students House’) on Edward Road-Moseley Road: “it was in a state … and we don’t have money so literally we had to go … men and women, children to clean that place and make it hospitable.”
The Muslim Student House was not just a place to teach Arabic it was a home for the Arab student community and the children they taught: “… I remember our first Ramadan in that place … we had a really good community … gradually we started to attract the local Yemeni community.” She became a mentor to many of her students and was sympathetic to the struggles they faced. It is difficult to summarise the achievements of Omsalama, but they include gaining post-graduate qualifications, teaching Arabic and RE at Joseph Chamberlain College, becoming an examiner for the Arabic A Level, and establishing ‘Arabica’.
