In fairness to myself, we'd been so engrossed in all of the details of daily life here--everything from finding out where to get our blood typed in order to get our residence permits to shopping for PE uniforms for Morgan to looking for decent pizza--that I hadn't been able to step back and reflect on it all. The question started me thinking, and I finally have an answer: the thing that has surprised me the most about living here has been the extent to which religion permeates every aspect of daily life.
By way of example, the annual report of my employer, Qtel, starts off with the following: "In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful." It's hard to imagine seeing that in the annual report of a publicly-traded American company. It's even harder to imagine a company back home (apart from one with a clearly religious focus) that devotes several hundred feet of floor space to a prayer room, but Qtel does and I understand that this is pretty commonplace. Each shopping mall has prayer rooms, segregated by gender, and public restrooms contain basins for ritual foot-washing (they look a lot like bidets). And of course, you can't spend much time here without hearing the call to prayer, which happens six times per day. Not long ago, you would only hear it over the loudspeakers on the minaret of your local neighborhood mosque. Since it's impossible to hear the muezzin perform the call to prayer at a nearby mosque from inside a large, air-conditioned shopping mall, and shopping is the unofficial national pastime, the malls all pipe the call to prayer in through their sound systems as shown in the video below.
The things above are a few of the most visible reflections of the role that Islam plays here, but there are more subtle indicators, too. For example, when a Muslim talks about a future event, such as "let's have lunch tomorrow," the statement is typically accompanied by "inshallah" (God willing). I also wonder to what extent the view that everything is in God's hands may explain other things such as the "carefree" attitude (to put it nicely) that the locals take toward road safety. (At least they are consistent--they show the same lack of concern for their own children riding unbuckled on their laps in the front seats of their Land Cruisers as for the passengers in other cars that they cut off and tailgate.) It may be a stretch to tie the two together, but I'm not sure it's totally unreasonable.
I hope this answers your question, Aaron, albeit belatedly, and I hope it gives anyone else who reads this some food for thought.
2 comments:
Nice observations. What I found most odd here was that when you do hear call to prayer at the malls, NO ONE pays attention to it. My thoughts were that people would stop in their tracks & drop in prayer or bow in respect. I was taken aback that nothing stopped. Locals & fellow Muslims continue their phone conversations without skipping a beat, while I feel guilty for not acknowledging prayer call in some fashion! My understanding, though, is that they have until the next prayer call to complete that set of prayers.
Thanks, Sybil! I had the same reaction as you. Hope all's well.
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