Mosqued

December 15

Back in the day when the Progressives were actually saying sensible things, one of their main concerns was the fact that the majority of American Muslims are ”unmosqued”--that is, they don’t regularly visit their local house of worship. The possible reasons were many: the lack of educated imams to lead prayers, ultraconservatism, shoddy arrangements for women. Anywhere in the world, it seems, it’s pretty tricky to find a really good mosque--in Cairo I didn’t regularly attend Friday prayers because it was typically all shouting and overcrowding, and even men went rather wearily. The gleaming exception was Sultan Hassan, a gorgeous, huge medieval mosque in the old quarter, where Sheikh Ali Gomaa has been the khateeb (that’s the person who gives the sermon, for those of you joining us from other walks of life) for years. Even though I got headaches trying to follow the classical Arabic, going there was always an illuminating experience.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never been to an American mosque. I had been told tales of crushing banality by Muslims who had--stories of sheikhs who could barely speak their native languages, let alone Arabic or English; hostility from other mosque-goers; the obsessive quotidian legalism of the clerical elite that has led to spiritual exhaustion all over the Muslim world, compounded in the US by isolation and vulnerability. The American mosque sounded more or less unbearable. Three weeks ago, however, driven by a need for familiarity and a break from the endless jabs at Islam and Arabs on TV (it’s gotten worse, not better, in the years I’ve been away), Omar and I set out for one of the larger Seattle-area mosques. When we got there, I was pleasantly surprised: the building was quite nice, built with a graceful coppery dome, and the space for women reminded me of an old Mamluke-era house: it was a kind of enclosed balcony above the men’s prayer area, fronted by a lattice. The mosque was patronized mainly by first and second-generation Somalis, along with a few Arabs and Bosnians. It was the first time I’d ever met European Muslims who weren’t converts.  In Egypt (and Iran) there was almost always a mini-interrogation before I was allowed into a mosque; people were always afraid I was a tourist looking for A Cultural Experience, who had come to stare at the congregation like it was some kind of open-air zoo. (I don’t plug this enough: it will sound strange, but responsible tourism is one of the silver bullets that will take care of this breach between ‘East’ and ‘West’, because irresponsible tourism is one of the biggest unreported factors creating it.) Here, no; I was accepted without question. The balcony was bustling with women and children; one young mother turned to me smiling and asked me to watch her child, a little boy named Bilal who was three or four years old, while she washed for prayer. He perched in my lap without any shyness, fluently interchanging English and Amharic as I asked him about his favorite colors--he had that confidence in the benevolence of strangers that children raised in tightly-knit communities are blessed with. It was a relief to be in an environment where help is expected, unquestioned and enjoyed. Just a few days earlier I’d been on a bus, and seeing an elderly woman struggling with her grocery bags, asked if she needed help; she turned to me scowling and said “Do you need help?” I almost laughed. I wanted to say yes, I do need help, because you have depressed the hell out of me. But I just smiled and turned up the volume on my iPod.

The khutba (that’s a sermon) was, in contrast to the company, dull. The sheikh, who was Moroccan, talked first in good Arabic and then in poor English about the necessity of dressing nicely, parking well and taking care not to disturb the neighbors when coming to the mosque--all good advice, but hardly worth the 20 minute drive. According to Omar, the men’s section was silent and withdrawn. We left feeling slightly demoralized.

Today, we decided to try another mosque for comparison. This one was markedly different: the sheikh and the main constituency were Pakistani, joined by a few Africans and Arabs and Bosnians. Most people looked as though they had come from work, and were dressed in shirts and ties. Some of the women were wearing pants. Pants! Even jeans! In a mosque! That alone was enough to brighten my day. Then the sheikh started talking, and I forgot all about outerwear: the sermon was good. The sheikh was trilingual. (Urdu, Arabic, English) His understanding of the Quran was nuanced enough to make me feel as though I’d learned something. There was nothing really transcendent about his speech--I want someday to walk away from a khutba with tears running down my face, and it hasn’t happened yet--but his understanding was sound, his words straightforward, and his faith unpretentious. We left feeling more cheerful than we have in many weeks. It seems there’s hope yet for the American mosque.

We’ll be back.

Identity vs. Affinity

November 26

Ali Eteraz recently wrote a piece for Comment Is Free about the insufficiency of identity politics. It raised an interesting question for me: Is affinity the same as identity? A long-running argument in The Conversation about modern Islam revolves around this subject; whether Islam, and by extension religion in general, is really the primary way people are or should be organized and identified. Could ethnicity be more important? Could class? Could language and geography? What is the ordinal factor of human identity? How much does a black Muslim from Ghana really have in common with a white convert from Chicago?

I think we’re running up against a barrier that is essentially emotional: the way we want to identify ourselves is often different from the way we can identify ourselves. I think a lot of Muslims would like to believe that loving God and speaking to Him in Arabic matters more than the baggage you inherit by being born into a certain class and culture and having a certain color skin. They’d like to believe that ascribing to the Five Pillars is enough overcome those other factors; that if the black Muslim from Ghana and the white convert from Chicago were to get married, it would be enough to prevent their union from becoming a complete walking disaster. And to be fair, it would probably help. But anyone who has been in a culturally mixed marriage knows that no amount of spiritual affinity blunts the guilt and bewilderment of knowing you can hurt the person you love simply with your history. That is a fact, oh evangelical optimists, and a mystery of inherited human pain.

Is religion--or the lack thereof--the primary organizational factor of identity? No--I don’t think anything you can choose and unchoose could possibly be. I think I’ve said this before in a comment thread somewhere: I could choose to be a Unitarian Universalist tomorrow, but I couldn’t choose to be Chinese. Ultimately, and this is not meant to sound cynical, it’s the things you can’t escape that make the deepest impression on who you are. The indulgent reigning philosophy would have us believe that what we choose is more important that what is chosen for us, and while it sounds nice, and I’d certainly like it to be true, I just don’t think it is.

Religion, then, is less a factor of identity than of affinity; of preference. Unlike identity, which limits choice (I can’t choose to have been born in another place, to have learned another first language, to have inherited a different color of eyes or skin or hair), affinity requires choice. Though someone could be forced to practice a religion, there is no earthly way to force him to believe in what the rituals of that religion represent. He chooses to believe or not as he sees fit--emotional state, personality and experience (deeply individual, changeable variables) all come into play. Though we struggle with the place of religion in identity, I think this difference is something we as a culture have unconsciously realized: on all manner of forms (voluntary, in the US), you are asked for your ethnic identity, but your religious affiliation.

There are two exceptions to the identity-vs-affinity construct that I want to point out before someone points them out for me: first, the significance of religion in countries where religion is enforced, and second, the phenomenon of special-interest groups in the west which identify themselves as “culturally” religious, resulting rather ironically in an identical problem. In Egypt, in Iran, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia, if the state labels your parents as “Muslim”, the state will consider you a Muslim no matter what you believe or how vocally you believe it. If a woman labeled ‘Muslim’ by the state decides she no longer wishes to believe in or practice Islam, and wants to marry a Christian man, she is legally unable to do so: by law she can neither convert nor marry a man of a different religion. She is and will be Muslim whether she likes it or not. Since she does not have a choice, isn’t Islam by default a factor of her identity, not of her personal affinity? Certainly. However, I ask: is this Islam a religion? From where I’m sitting, it looks much more like a tribal identity enforced by an autocratic regime that needs to label its citizens in order to keep them segregated and oppressed. On to the second scenario. The progressive Muslim movement was replete with pundits who were self-described ’cultural Muslims‘; ie were born into Muslim families or Muslim cultures but were themselves atheists or agnostics. Since this phenomenon is explicitly linked to birth culture, cultural Islam (modeled closely on Secular Judaism) is absolutely a factor of identity rather than affinity. But like the previous example, it can’t be called religion, if religion is “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” (Dictionary.com)

What I mean to say with all of this is not that religion is less important than we thought, but that affinity--groups created by choice rather than circumstance--is more important than we give it credit for. Political affinity shapes minds and agendas and elections; religious affinity creates poetry, brotherhood, violence. Rather than continuing our obsession with the perfect box, the identity that spans culture and preference and belief in one tidy leap (impossible), we should be asking why people from different backgrounds are continually drawn, by choice, to the same ideas. 

Black Sabbath Iftar

September 28

On Tuesday Omar and I went to see the remnants of Black Sabbath (minus Ozzy Osbourne) in Denver. It was a unique experience to break the fast while cruising down the highway, calculating sunset with the dashboard clock and tucking into a styrofoam box of Chinese takeout at the appointed moment. Over the years, Ramadan has become, to me, a wholly Egyptian experience, celebrated with Egyptian foods at big ’azoomas of relatives and friends, capped off by soccer games. Ramadan in Egypt is how I learned to cook without needing to taste the food. Now that we’re back in the US, I can buy chicken stock in cans, already strained and seasoned--no need to go to a fararghi and select a live rooster, throw him in a pot, and season the broth myself, gauging the level of salt and onion by sight and smell alone in the last hours of fasting. In the west it seems there’s no need to cook by sense--everything is already prepared and measured out. It’s the perfect place for a fasting cook. There’s some small uneasy irony there that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Right. Here’s how other people are spending the holy month:

Ali Eteraz writes a series of Ramadan Reconciliations that are definitely worth reading, especially if you’ve kept up with his other work over the years.

Muse chronicles her first Ramadan in Cairo.

As the full moon makes its appearance, Aziz of City of Brass reflects on the halfway mark of the month.