The hours in which FMO broadcast during Ramadan are donated by EAVA FM Multilingual Radio. EAVA FM broadcasts in a variety of community languages including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Gujarati, Hindi, Ndebele, Punjabi, Shona, Somali and Urdu. English content is definitely a minority interest for the station and its listeners. I've been on EAVA FM once before, in April 2009, when I was a guest on the Andy Cooke Show (which I blogged here). The station is located in the Leicester Business Centre on Ross Walk, which runs parallel to Melton Road. The front of the Leicester Business Centre has been demolished and rebuilt since then, so I spend several minutes going back and forth on Ross Walk, looking for something that isn't there any more. By the time I give up and phone the studio for directions, it turns out I'm so close, someone in the Leicester Business Centre could have leant out of a window and waved me in! Some of the Radio Ramadan programmes are broadcast from the offices of the FMO in Highfields. I was originally told to ge ther, but the equipment at their offices isn't quite good enough to do programmes with a lot of speech content, so the venue was switched to permit a better quality broadcast.
I'm in the studio half an hour before the start of the show, which gives me time to chat with Dee, (Manager at EAVA FM), Ashokhbhai (who is presenting a Hindi programme which finishes just before 1000) and Ismael Bin-Sulaiman (AKA Izzy), producer of the Interfaith Hour. Dee dangles before me the possibility of the Council of Faiths having a weekly hour-long show on the station (dependent on us obtaining sponsorship for it). That's something worth following up. During this conversation, I learn that typical listening figures for the FMO's Ramadan broadcasts are around the 300,000 mark. Most of those listeners access the show online, through the FMO website. The largest concentration of listeners is in Chicago. Who'd have guessed?
Luman Ali at the the FMO invited me to do this programme a couple of weeks ago. I've been given carte blanche to fill the hour with my choice of content (within reason), so I've put together a programme about how the other seven communities represented on Leicester Council of Faiths approach fasting. I've recorded five short interviews with a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew and a Sikh, each one of them responding to my questions about how they think about and practise fasting. Following a belt-and-braces approach, I've brought those recordings to the studio in a variety of formats: one CD with the interviews saved as MP3 files; another CD with the interviews saved as data files; a memory stick with MP3 files; my laptop with MP3 and data files; even the handheld digital recorder that I used for the original interviews. I'm not taking any chances! Thankfully, the first of these formats works without any problems.
Each of the interviewees has something interesting and distinctive to say about their religious beliefs and practices on this topic, as well as their personal experience. I invited a Jain friend to contribute too but we couldn't arrange a recording session in the time we had available. Not for the first time, I present the Jain perspective (reading a brief extract from a published source), as well as speaking briefly on my own behalf as a Bahá'í. The recorded interviews are linked by a brief chat between me and Izzy, whom I prompt for a Muslim's response to some of the points raised in the recordings. I think it goes alright, though it's a little rushed toward the end. I fit in everything that I'd wanted to get in, which is good. And thanks to Suleman Nagdi, who sent an SMS to the station, wishing me luck, from a train en route to Manchester.
As I'm leaving the studio, two chaps are setting up for the next programme, which I'm told is a "requests show". What that means in this case is that listeners send in their requests (by email or SMS) for one of the presenters to chant verses from the Qur’án, Hadith or another Islamic source, to heighten the devotional experience during Ramadan. This is one of those moments where I'm grateful for the work I do, and how permits me insights into ways of living that would otherwise not be visible to me.
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