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Language is no barrier for UAE mosques with English sermons What marks out the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque, however, is the fact that its sermons are in English....... What marks out the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque, however, is the fact that its sermons are in English....... in Dubai it's not unusual to find sermons broadcast in English. There are a number of mosques doing this from time to time........ One of these is the Abdulrahman Al Siddiq Mosque - commonly known as the Palm Jumeirah Mosque. Here, Ali Sekhr regularly translates the Arabic sermon ("khutbah") into English. ....... "The word for prayer in Arabic, for example, is 'salah'. This comes from the word 'salat', which means 'communication'. The whole point of the sermon is to communicate."...... "To live in a Muslim country is a dream for all Muslims who take their faith seriously," he says. "Here, there are many venues in which I can pray, and I can always take Friday off work to go to the mosque. It makes practising my religion easier."........ Although born Muslim, Sekhr only began to take his religion seriously 15 years ago. It was during Ramadan that he underwent an epiphany of sorts........... "It was the year I turned 40," he recalls. "I'd started to pray on my own at the time, but something was missing. I felt I needed to pray with other people. I remember walking into a mosque in Regent's Park in London and feeling suddenly overwhelmed with joy," he says. "There were so many people there, all of them praying, and the atmosphere was very spiritual. It suddenly struck me that that is what I'd been missing........ From then on, Sekhr was determined to study Islam as much as possible. He spent hours listening to tapes and reading as much material in both English and Arabic as he could lay his hands on........ close to 75 per cent of the local population here are non-Arabic speakers and therefore there's a need for sermons in English, as well as other languages......... "The congregation in the Palm Jumeirah Mosque reminds me a bit of London," he says. "There are people from all over the world - Europe, the US, Russia, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Pakistan and Kazakhstan are just some of the countries that spring to mind, and many of these people don't speak Arabic."........ He continues to study Islam and hopes to become an imam. "Not many of the current imams here speak English," he says. "It's my dream, however, to one day become one, but I have many more years of study ahead of me."........ "Life is a test and everything happens for a reason," he says. "We can rarely see these reasons at the time. That is why we need Islam to help explain our lives. It teaches us that everything is being recorded and that we must be patient in order to survive the test of life."........ We are open from 9am to 2pm and 5pm to 10pm every day during Ramadan. We aim to help as many as possible and everyone is welcome," he smiles......... Leena Fahri attends the ladies' section of the mosque. She also believes that it's important to have sermons in English. "It makes sense," says the 30-year-old housewife from Egypt. "There are more and more Muslims in Abu Dhabi who don't speak Arabic, and they should understand what is being said. It is a sign of our times."