On the 29th of July Babylon Trust held an Open Mic Night event in Khans Restaurant, London.
As this event was taking place in the holy month of Ramadhan, the event kicked off with a beautiful Quran Recitation by Ali Fadhel. I then welcomed everyone to the event and introduced our chairman, Hussain Al Hilli. The event involved a number of guest speakers who covered a range of categories – Poetry, Story telling, Experiences and even some Comedy! The programme started with the first guest speaker Mohsin Shah who told us a story, followed by the Poet Ibrahim Sincere who read 3 of his beautiful poems and Zahra al Kurbasi who touched up on her experience of losing a loved on. Mohammed Ali Zaini explained peoples different characters and the Ramadhan lifestyle, following him was Thuha Al Shimmary who spoke about her personal experience and how everything happens for a reason. The final two guest speakers of the night, before iftar, were Eisa Ali who shared his experience and the story of his struggle whilst growing up and to end the session was the comedian Haseeb Rizvi who was extremely funny!
At around 9.10pm it was time for dinner, the Khans team were busy running around giving out food, whilst some people tucked in, others went to pray. The evening carried on with dinner and a lot of chatting and socializing for about an hour. The games started at 10.10pm with the raffle draw being the first. There were 3 draws for 3 different prizes – the first prize being a voucher for two at Khans Restaurant itself, the second prize was a box of Assorted Krsipy Kremes and the third prize was a bag of pretty scarves. The games carried on with the ‘Jar of Beads’, where all the attendees upon arriving to the restaurant had to guess the amount of beads in the jar, the closest answer was the winner, the winner won prayer beads. The excitement carried on through the pop quiz, where various questions were asked about what the guest speakers covered and some general questions too, guests called out the answers and chocolates and sweets went around to those answering correctly. The final quiz was the 60 second challenge, whereby different topics on paper were folded up in a hat and each person who offered to have a go had to come up and talk about the topic they randomly picked out, some of these topics included – Teddy Bears, Eskimos, Obama and even Dogs. The event was wrapped up with Ghadeer Zaini speaking on behalf of the Trust and thanking everyone.
It was definitely a night to remember and we are very glad that everyone left pleased and happy!
Fatima Horrami
“Great Night!!! Well done Babylon.”
