An Afternoon Trip to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies

Unlike most of my excursions to other Oxford colleges, my visit to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies warrants a short blog post for its sheer bizarreness. The OCIS gardens are only open once a week for a mere two hours: Every Tuesday between four and six o’clock. They also lie quite far away from the city centre, facing Magdalen College from the other side of the river Cherwell. Thus, visiting the OCIS gardens on a whim is near impossible, and for many months I had made my calendar send me a weekly reminder of the gardens being open without ever having the time to follow through.

One benefit of having friends, however, is that they make things happen; or, at the very least, agreeing with them on plans makes it much more socially difficult to cancel them. One May afternoon, therefore, I finally found myself heading to OCIS in the company of Luqman. We entered the OCIS lodge not long after four o’clock. When we explained to the guard why we had come, he made a face as though this was the first time he had ever heard of the gardens’ opening hours. The expression was followed by action: the guard made a call to one of his colleagues just to make sure we were not pulling his leg.

Having confirmed that the OCIS gardens are – at least in theory – truly supposed to be open for two hours every Tuesday, the guard took his keys and walked us to the garden. He did not make himself unpleasant, but it was clear that he was bewildered and not entirely pleased to unlock the gates specifically for us. He told us multiple times that we should not try to enter the OCIS from the gardens; one too many times, perhaps, as he took the wrong keys and had to return to the lodge to get the right ones.

With the gardens to ourselves, we could not help speculating why on earth this place was accompanied by so many charades – and what might be happening in the giant yet silent compound. Who were the wealthy donors whose money had built the centre? And how was their money being used now?

We eventually did enter the OCIS – not through the garden, of course, but by walking back to the lodge and apprising the guard of our departure. The visit added yet another layer of wonder and mystery to the whole compound. As soon as we entered, we were welcomed by a giant black cloth covered in Arabic calligraphy that hung from the wall to our right. As we learned from the sign, it was a donated piece of cloth from the Ka’ba. We also visited the library, which seemed to be as fancy and modern as it was sparsely used. The librarian led us all the way down and past security doors to help us deposit our backpacks before letting us in.

All in all, we felt we had witnessed something strange and special, and all the more special because we could not understand why it had to be so strange.

The doors to the OCIS mosque
The gate to the OCIS garden
The OCIS tower
The fountain at the OCIS garden
More of the garden
The bench at the OCIS garden
The OCIS centre as viewed from the garden
Another fountain
The OCIS courtyard
The doors to the administrative part of the OCIS
The cloth from the Ka'ba
More cloth
The OCIS library
Arcades at the OCIS
University Parks

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