Friday, 24th February 2006
Mosques make me sick
I went to another mosque on Wednesday night. It’s the largest one in Western Europe and incredibly beautiful. It has it’s own homeopathic centre, school, badminton court and teevee station too - it’s huge! The mosque was built by the Ahmadiyya movement, which was founded by an Indian named Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) who claimed to be the Messiah / Mahdi. Pretty interesting stuff as far as I am concerned, since eschatology and cosmology are my favourite parts about religion, and that’s most of what he talked about. Well that and dreams. Dreams and prophecy are important to them, and also heretical to mainstream Islam, although I think it’s more the part about Mister Ahmad being the Mahdi that bothers them. Ha! So, predictably, they are not recognised by the Ulama and essentially unbelievers (kufr) in the eyes of mainstream Muslims and that was really kinda sad actually.
Ages ago, in class, when the lecturer played us part of a verse of the Qur’an being recited I had the strangest reaction. Emotionally I was overwhelmed by the sound I was hearing. (Please remember that the Qur’an is only the Qur’an when it is recited in Arabic, everything else is an interpretation, not a translation.) I was actually really quite alarmed by my emotional response because it was so strong and I felt such a longing for that kind of beauty. “Fuck man,” my brain said, “you sound like you are ripe for reversion. Remember it’s just the pretty sounds you like, not the meaning! You don’t even know the meaning!”
So I went to my first Mosque back in December and this crazy French revert leapt on me trying to revert me. She was like 2 inches from my face, almost yelling through her burqa about the marvels of Islam. Uh no. NO!!! The Muslim woman I was with kept trying to save me and explain to her that my interest was academic, not personal, but she wasn’t hearing her or me - she knew what I needed and what I needed was to remember that I am a Muslim and give up my heathen ways. Uh no. NO!!! (Muslims believe we were all born Muslim and that kufr like me need to remember this and come back to Islam, hence reversion, not conversion. Although I do know plenty Muslims who think this is offensive and so won’t say it, but you know me, my soul is drawn to offensiveness like iron filings to a magnet. Weeeeee!) Despite her aggression, I stayed to watch the evening prayer and, again, experienced a huge emotional response to the whole experience. The call to prayer just sounds so fucking pretty and then silence, this thick and heavy silence as they pray, it’s, well, heavy.
Back to Wednesday. Again we hear the call to prayer and watch them file in. I stood to the side of the group, leaning over the balcony watching and at some point the TA comes up to me and says, “are you okay? Come sit with us.” Fuck, do I look like I wanna convert or something? So I go and sit with them and this time, when the silence hits, it’s so heavy. Thick, like a mask, and I couldn’t breathe. But Jesus, that shit is so powerful, so powerful and I was afraid. Afraid of my emotions I mean.
Oh but Jesus, I’m glad you crept in young man…
Each night that I have gotten home after a Mosque visit, I feel so tired and drained and half-way through the night I will wake up with a burning fever. The next day I will feel sick as a dog with a really, really bad cold. Snot galore. Hence the title - mosques make me sick. So I’ve decided - I have an inner Christian who is punishing me for having emotional responses to Islam. I mean, I was Christened after all and even though I’ve only been to one Church service when I was a teen, and even though I spent the entire time pretending I was Satan and trying to see if I could make my head spin on my neck, (I couldn’t - boo!), I think I have an inner Christian who is mad at me.
On a serious note though, the really interesting thing I have learned about myself during the few months of this degree is how much Christianity is all over us “secular” folks. I’ve only lived in Christian countries, and the more you learn about other religions and cultures, you see how much of that which we call “secular” is really just Christianity with the name rubbed out. If you think back to the Enlightenment, the shift towards the rational, the scientific, the “secular” was made by Christians in Christian countries and so inevitably, norms of Christianity like the work ethic, monogamy, laws, etiquette (both public and private), social interaction and myriad other small ways of being were carried over into the secular world making the air we breathe very Christian indeed, it’s just that now we don’t call it that, we call it “secular” instead. Sure, there are lots of things we do that aren’t Christian, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that the dominant paradigm of the West is Christianity. (For example, in Buddhist countries there are lots of things done that aren’t Buddhist, see Thailand for details. As with Islamic countries too. Etc.) Christianity is all over you dude, and scraping it off just isn’t gonna work. Even Western atheists are responding to a Christian paradigm, because outside of Christianity you come to see that religion isn’t necessarily about God, it’s just something you live, something you are, with or without a God. “Religion” is just the name they gave to the rest of the world when they invented “secularism”. In reality, there is no such division - our lives are our religion, whether or not we see or understand it as such.
Next year I think I can take a class on ‘Christian-Muslim Relations’ spanning from Napoleon to Bush and so I will take this and learn how to negotiate with my inner Christian, because I also want to take a class on ‘Mosaics, Manuscripts and Wall Painting in Islamic Art’ and I’m not trying to spend every class in a fever, snot running down my face.