Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic lunar calendar and an obligatory month of fasting, started on September 25. What this means is that from sunrise until sunset, the majority of Egyptians (since Egypt is 95% Muslim) can't consume food, drink, nicotine, or caffeine. Add a little heat, a lot of noise, and the worst traffic jams of the year (which last all month) and you've got a lot of grumpy people walking around. But, once sunset hits (around 6:40) and the call to break fast comes over the mosque loudspeakers all over the city, then it's a party all night long (I think I'm deaf in one ear from the Ramadan firecrackers the kids set off right beside me). I thought about what would happen if you deprived millions of Americans or Canadians of their coffee and cigarettes every morning and decided that I wouldn't really want to find out.
Last weekend we went back to Sinai, this time with the students. We climbed Mt. Sinai in the dark and watched the sunrise and then headed to the Red Sea. I decided not to take a camel up the mountain, even though I've climbed it before, but by the time I hit some of the "Steps of Repentance" (built by a monk as his penance) near the top, I kind of regretted not taking one of the 50 camel men ("camel for you?") up on their offers. Not that camels can climb stairs, but at least by the time I got off the camel at the bottom of the stairs, I would have had a little more energy. Thankfully we took the easy route up and only had to climb a few stairs - the hard way involves the full 3, 750 "Steps of Repentance" (which I took on the way down). I'm pretty sure that if I had climbed every one of those going up, I would have done enough penance for the rest of my life and at 2 am after a 7 hour bus ride, I wasn't feeling quite that spiritual.
The other day we had a speaker come in from the Episcopal church and talk about a guy named Mazhar Mallouhi, a Syrian (living in Lebanon) who calls himself a "Muslim follower of Christ" whose basic statement of faith and being is: "Islam is my heritage, Christ is my inheritance." The speaker presented some simplified points from Mazhar Mallouhi's life (take the points as you will):
1. Wage peace on Islam
2. Demonstrate, don't proclamate (i.e. "Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words" - Francis of Assisi)
3. Build on the commonalities between Islam and Christianity
4. Appreciate the redeeming values in Islam
5. Be honest about your own faith and your own humanity and about the way you share that faith. God is bigger than any deception we may think we need to use.
6. Love the people and the culture
7. In the end, the only thing we have to share is Christ (and Christ wasn't a Christian - i.e. there's a huge difference between discipling and Christianizing. Mallouhi points out that we're all on a pilgrimage, regardless of in whom we believe).
8. Put yourself in a position to see through a Muslim's eyes
9. Simply be normal (because a lot of Christians aren't)
-this doesn't mean throw out the idea of being salt, it just means being human.
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3 comments:
are you going to do "out of the green" (is that what it was called?) this year?
dearest dena,
thank you for posting. i revel in your stories, all the memories rushing back! thank you thank you thank you.
i miss the craziness of Ramadan! i live about a two minute walk from a mosque, but it doesn't seem much different this week than other weeks--perhaps more people at the mosque at night, but other than that, nothing.
dena,
it's getting cooler here as autumn arrives, and the other day while walking past the mosque i actually stopped in my tracks as a question came to me that i've been thinking about ever since: what to the muslim women here do when it's winter? snowing? what do they WEAR??? it struck me that i've never been near muslim women in an environment where it ever got really cold.
so far, all the women i've seen wear oversized coats (men's and women's) over top of their burkas.
for some reason, i needed to tell you about this burning question of mine. very few people would understand! :)
i hope you're doing well. i think of you often.
--sara
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