ISLAM
I don’t know very much about Islam, what it feels like to be a Moslem. I haven’t read much of the Koran. I have learned a smattering of the life of Mohammed and of the Islamic expansion and conquest stretching across North Africa to Spain and extending to the Moghul conquest and rule of India and then further proselytizing that led to the spread of Islam to parts of Russia and China and across south east Asia to Indonesia. I know that Islamic culture is rich with art and literature and architecture. In India the miniature paintings done under the patronage of the great Moghuls are striking and the curves and inlay in the Taj Mahal are exquisite. In Varanasi, where I have spent time again and again, there is an Islamic section of town that controls the trade in silk shimmering saries, for which Varanasi is famous. There are several mosques there and the sound of the call to prayer can be heard. Moslems men in Varanasi wear long white knee length shirts and loose fitting pants and often a vest with a round cap. Women wear a burqua that covers them from head to toe with a screen over their eyes to look out of.
But in India and Pakistan there is always the long memory of Moslem Moghul rule leading up to British colonial rule and Hindu resentment at being ruled by Moslems and having the stones of their temples used to build mosques. Now with Hindu domination of politics in India it is the turn of Moslems to feel persecuted, which increasingly they are, being scapegoated by Hindu nationalists. So in India tensions between Moslems and Hindus still run deep although India’s Moslem minority makes India the home of as many Moslems as any country in the world.
In the United States one rarely meets a Moslem and if you do you can’t distinguish him or her from other Indians. But American attitudes toward Moslems have been formed by 9/11 and Moslem fundamentalism in the Middle East and in Afghanistan where the United States has been drawn into conflicts that we were unable to deal with and have now retreated from. Moslem fundamentalism in Iran is still considered a threat and the Moslem fundamentalism in Afghanistan still inexplicable to us and there is considerable grumbling about women wearing a hijab in the United States.
But in Morocco there is nothing at all threatening about Islam. Islam is the norm. Everyone is a Moslem and the sound of the call to prayer from the mosques or the sight of men bowing in prayer as you walk by a mosque is completely normal. And of course the clothing worn by Moslem men and women seems completely normal. It is the skimpy clothing worn by Westerners that seems odd and out of place. It is the ordinariness of Islam that strikes me here, as ordinary as Christianity in the United States or in Europe. Mosques here are as ordinary here as churches are on every corner in Buncombe County. One of the reasons I wanted to come to Morocco was to see what it feels like to live in a completely Moslem country. And what I have discovered is that it feels completely ordinary and natural. There is no threat here, no demand that Moslems dress or act like the rest of us, no sense that Islam is radical or threatening in any way. Islam is as normal in Morocco as apple pie is in the United States.
And there is nothing threatening about being an ordinary Moslem in the United States, either, and a hijab is no more subversive than are blue jeans. But I don’t know how to explain that to my barber or anyone else who is threatened by immigrants from the Middle East or anywhere else.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 