Most of us taking advantage of the unseasonably warm autumn weather to walk around the Lady Eaton Drumlin these days probably aren’t thinking of the area, beautiful as it may be, as a place for prayer. For Nika Farahani, however, a first-year undergraduate student and practicing Bahá’i, at least it’s somewhere secluded. She, like many others, is running up against the frustration brought on by the lack of dedicated prayer space.

“I would never consider doing ablutions at campus,” Farahani says. The washing of one’s hands and face is part of the obligatory prayer required by the Baha’i faith. She says part of the reason she prays at home is because the only place to do it on campus is in the bathrooms. Because of this, and out of habit as much as the difficulties of scheduling around classes, she chooses the longest of the obligatory daily prayers, the one she can do at any time of day.

Maryam Monsef, Co-Chair of the Trent Muslim Students Association, says the requests for more space for religious communities on campus really aren’t too much to ask.

“A clean space where people haven’t brought dog shit in on the carpet,” would be a good start, she says. “To have it be ours and to be respected.” At the moment, students are struggling to book places like the LEC Pit and seminar rooms for gatherings, and individuals often find themselves in cramped and dirty corners of the library.

The open Ramadan dinners this fall were good for allowing Muslim students to practice their values, question, and debate, says Monsef. “How can we do that if we don’t get together as a community?”

“We’re not getting together to plot the destruction of the world,” she grins.

Lack of access to prayer space on Canadian campuses was among the concerns cited in a 2007 report investigating the needs of Muslim students issued by the Canadian Federation of Students. That report recommended that adequate prayer space be recognized as a human rights issue by universities, and made available accordingly.

Last year, the McGill Daily reported that Muslim students at that university have had to battle to get a permanent location since being forced out of their regular prayer space in 2005 to make room for lab and office space. Daily access to prayer space is seen by some as an especially important issue for Muslim students because three of five obligatory daily prayers usually fall during class time.

The issue is one of the reasons Monsef supported the proposed construction of a student centre, she says. Although budget constraints have forced Trent to put off plans for a student complex for the time being, the TCSA has agreed to put forward a referendum this March to charge a new levy for an $11 million Students Union Building (SUB). A multifaith prayer space has been one of the major uses identified for the project.

Farahani says religious groups across campus are very interested in putting together multifaith initiatives, but for that to happen, there needs to be permanent space. At the moment, she says groups spend a lot of time comparing notes on which rooms have been adequate for them in the past.

“Having your meeting space in the same prayer area [every time] makes you feel more relaxed,” she continues. “There are less reminders of organizational difficulties and stress.”

Reverend Glenn Empey, Trent’s new Spiritual Affairs Coordinator, says he’s heard the issue brought up by a number of students and faculty since taking on the post in September. As a human rights complaint now filed against McGill by the Muslim Students Association there has shown, debate over prayer space is just part of the conversation over what role religion and spirituality should have at a public university. Reverend Empey says accommodating the need is partly a symbolic gesture even for “secular” students, though, to invite them to ask some profound questions.

Nunc cognosco ex parte, the Trent motto, Reverend Empey points out, is taken from a passage in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13. He says “now I know in part,” as it is often translated, alludes to the place spiritual exploration has had in our stories about who we are and where we come from for a very long time.

Seeing the crowd that came out at Biko Library for Lama Llanang Rinpoche’s talk on his recent visit to Trent, Reverend Empey said he heard a glimpse of some of those “pretty profound questions” from students.

A quiet space for reflection would give the opportunity to explore “a whole dimension of the human condition and human experience” that gets left out in our post-modern world and institutions, he adds. And like those who don’t use the gym, he says, students aren’t obligated to participate in ceremonies of faith if they don’t want to.

Like Monsef, Reverend Empey thinks the suggestion of conflict between groups over the use of a common space is a non-starter. Taking into account the “holy hardware” required by different groups – things like a lectern, some candles, prayer mats and stands for the Qu’ran – he says a shared space could very easily accommodate the needs of diverse groups on campus.

University of Toronto students at the downtown and Mississauga campuses have access to both small and large multifaith prayer spaces, as do a number of universities across the country like Simon Fraser and Dalhousie.

 “It’s embarrassing that our university doesn’t have a prayer space,” says Monsef, “if we say we’re going to ‘make a world of difference.’”