As a blogger, I try not to comment inaccurately but one of the reasons why my comments are always open is so if I have errored, other people can and will correct me. Melanie Phillips on the other hand, is a professional columnist, people pay her to write and so, I believe, she has a duty to undertake reasonable research for her topics.
So, we have this piece in which she says the following.
"no fewer than 88 per cent [of young Muslims in the UK] want schools and workplaces to accommodate Muslim prayer times —five times daily — into the normal working day."
Which does give the impression that Muslims are demanding the right to disappear from the workplace five times a day. Now I happened to know that one of the prayers is before sunrise and another is after sunset, and it didn't seem like all the prayer times would fit into the normal working day so I decided to do some research. Five minutes of googling later I had my answer, the prayer times doesn't fit into a normal working day.
I work normal office hours, 8:30am to 5:00pm with an hour for lunch. The first has to be taken before 7am and the last after 6pm (1) so they don't affect work, the second and third can be taken either end of a 1pm - 2pm lunch break. The only one that might affect work (and only in the winter) is the fourth prayer which should be taken within 20 minutes of the sunset, but even there there is an exception which says that you can delay it until about 90 minutes after sunset if it's not possible to pray earlier. So if I were Muslim and my employer said that it wasn't allowed for me to take a quick break at 4:15pm, then I could pray at 5:00pm and that would be okay.
So why has Melanie decided to misrepresent the situation in order to support her argument? I don't know, but as she doesn't provide a comment facility I guess we'll never know.
(1) because the prayer times are based on the sun, the times are only correct for December, in the summer, the first prayer has to be earlier and the last prayer has to be later.
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