What It Means - Day 79

As I've said several times, this year-long (inshallah) reflection on Islam and the life of a Muslim will take several forms, mainly depending upon what I'm thinking about that day. Sometimes I'll focus on a passage from the Quran or a specific hadith, but other times I'll talking about experiences I've had or people I've met or articles I've read. And sometimes I'll show pictures of mosques I've visited, whether I've prayed in them or not. To me this is a way to express the extraordinary diversity of Islam and the Muslim world. Here are pictures of an old mosque on the island of Pemba in Zanzibar, which we visited a couple days into our student visit in January. The brothers and sisters treated us very kindly prepared a lengthy presentation on the faith. At the end we were given a tour of the entire mosque and the surrounding buildings, including some repairs that were paid for by the US government.

Oh, and as I say every so often, please keep in mind that these are my highly idiosyncratic musings. I speak for no one but myself. My goal is to discuss what one utterly ordinary and unimportant person thinks about when he thinks about his faith.

This is the mihrab, the semi-circular niche, which represents the qibla, or the direction of Mecca. Muslims face in this direction when they prey. If the mosque was designed as mosque then it will have an actual niche, but if the building has been re-purposed (such as our mosque) then it probably just has an outline on the wall. 

The brothers giving a series of talks about the faith itself and its history on Pemba. In the distance you can see kids looking in the window. Since the entire village showed up I had this feeling that the talk actually had several intended audiences.

For some reason I really like this picture. Muslims will come to a mosque at all hours to pray and to sit quietly. This picture reflects that, but also works as a fitting metaphor for the highly individualistic nature of the faith.

You can see some of the male students sitting and listening.  The women, both Pemban and Champlain students, were behind the orange curtain in the back. As you know, I have reservations about the separation of the sexes during the sermons, and I think the need for equality before God trumps questions of modesty. At the end I made it very clear to our friend Kombo and the Imam that our students had to have exactly the same tour of the grounds and time to walk around and explore inside the mosque. Kombo could tell that I was getting impatient. At the same time, our female students did get a sense of what a sermon was like inside that particular mosque, and, good or bad, I'd prefer that had an authentic experience and not one scripted for the visitors.

I was able to sneak off before it got started to pray. Mr. Mohammed, one of our friends, spirited me outside to make wudu (ablution) and then I prayed in a quiet corner. The students were in their own universe and none of them saw it (which was my hope; again, I don't hide my faith, but the point of the trip is not my faith).