Midlands Blog - November 2008

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah,

FOSIS Midlands new committee was elected in the Fosis Annual Conference and since have done their utmost to further the Midlands region after the great work done by the previous committee. To start off with, FOSIS Midlands got freshers packs to more universities than ever before this year - a great achievement for the FOSIS Midlands committee and well as the student services committee.

After that, FOSIS Midlands went back to the outline from the previous committee in regards to what universities requested most from FOSIS Midlands - speaker tours. So, to start off with FOSIS Midlands toured with Maulana Khalil Patel on a "Dude, Where's My Deen?" tour that went from Wolverhampton University to Coventry University. This was actually held in the Charity Week - where the universities in the Midlands were working hard to raise as much money as possible for orphans around the world.

After this, we were offered James "Yusuf" Yee by the FOSIS Speaker Tour committee and he travelled to Oxford University, Nottingham Trent University and Warwick University. All three events were highly successful - especially the Oxford event that had a majority non-Muslim audience listening to James Yee and Moazzam Begg.

We also had our highest profile speaker tour of the first semester with Mufti Ismail Menk coming in from Zimbabwe to do a "Read and Understand" Qur'an tafsir tour. This went to De Montfort University, Nottingham University, Leeds University and Birmingham University. This was especially outstanding as this was Mufti Menk's first official tour of the UK and we were pleased that he chose FOSIS Midlands to tour with.

That covered the events for the first semester. FOSIS Midlands also concentrated on the more political aspects of student work. Along with SAC, FOSIS Midlands prepared for the NUS related issues with our SAC reps. Along with this, we held a media training seminar in conjunction with MCB Youth at Birmingham University with James Kirby (BBC) and Norreudine Miladi (Al-Jazeera) leading the seminars.

Looking forward, for the first semester we are aiming to hold a sisters' eid party at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 3rd December - this will aim to be multi-functional as will also be a FOSIS Midlands fundraiser. Also, it was intended that we would be having a road trip to the universities in the Midlands, but because of the time I spent on the Charity Week this year, we never had the opportunity to do so. So instead of travelling to see all the universities, we are inviting all the universities to come see us at a "Let the Isocs Speak" session (date and location tbc). We have spoken to the majority of the Isocs in the Midlands regions already in an informal capacity, but this session will be more of an interaction where the universities get the opportunity to ask how FOSIS Midlands can work for them and tell us how they can work for us insha-Allah. We will also be going on a recruitment drive to make the regional committee as strong as possible to make our work more effective, efficient and relevant to as many universities as possible - to strengthen the work of Islamic Societies on campuses across the region insha-Allah.

That wraps up the Midlands activities for the first semester. Our fundamental aim for the entire academic year was to offer every university at least on service. In our aim to complete this, in the second semester, we aim to host two more speaker tours (one focused more around politics), have another sisters event (to be held in conjunction with Leicester University and De Montfort University) and have a regional football tournament - with ideas still to be discussed.

Rehan Iqbal

Midlands Chair