A few days ago, I visited a mosque for something that shouldn’t have happened. On Friday, I visited another mosque for something that happens every week: a call to prayer.
It was a strange scene: 12 mostly white American girls, fiddling with multicolored scarves, wrapping them around their heads in some semblance of Islamic modesty. We’d just finished our Religion, Gender, and Sexuality final, and our hip young teacher offered to take the curious to services at a mosque right in the middle of the busy shopping district of Claremont. Being white, female, and rather obviously American, I knew that waltzing into a mosque on my own would be a much harder thing for me personally than popping into a church I didn’t belong to, as I’ve done whenever I need to rest my feet during the course of travels all over the world. So, with the anonymity of numbers, I kneeled on the floor with my pasty compatriots, and tried to look as penitent as possible.
Claremont is not your average mosque. In 1994, noted scholar Amina Wadud led the Friday prayer, causing a hubbub in the more conservative Muslim communities of the comparatively liberal Cape. It’s also one of the few mosques to allow women to sit on the main floor with men, separated only by a nylon airplane partition. The atmosphere felt very open, with construction workers coming in off the street to attend services during their lunch break alongside well-groomed professionals in slacks, the sound of traffic audible in the background. Afterwards, the imam explained that Claremont attracts people who like its progressive slant–for those who want their religion old-timey, there’s another mosque further down the road.
In some ways, the service felt like the Rosh Hashanah shindig regular shabbat I’d been to a few months ago. A few old ladies sat in the back chatting, knowing no one was going to tell them to be quiet. There was a lot of chanting in a language I didn’t understand, and people in long dark robes. But this one felt more concentrated, somehow. The imam’s sermon focused on unity of the umma, or Muslim people, and the injunction was clearly replicated in miniature in the synchronized bowing and standing of hundreds of people in neat rows, their movements quick and sure, made supple by repetition. At the end, when a woman grasped my hand and kissed me on both cheeks, I felt like I’d just gotten out of a movie; it had that same feeling of the lights turning on after a mesmerizing, otherwordly experience.
The whole time, I was sort of distracted by a little girl a few women over, happily coloring while her striking, black-swathed mother listened to the sermon, occasionally attending to her daughter with a sense of love and pride. When it came time for the group prayer exercise, she produced a black scarf for the girl to wear, and they bowed and stood in unison. I learned later that the woman was a UCT academic whose work we had read for class, now clearly practicing Islam and feminism with no discernable incongruity.
I think her daughter will grow up to be extraordinary.
