Early one morning when I was in college, I walked into my anthropology professor’s office to find him praying. He was standing at a podium facing the attic window that leaked gray light, and he was reading aloud from the church hymn. This ancient man had lived in Ethiopia for thirty years and frequently lectured that there was no universal truth. He was grumpy and stubborn and obsessed with diagramming kinship rules; until I stumbled into his office that morning, I couldn’t imagine his humanity. How could someone so intellectually rigid, so culturally relative, close his eyes and find hope or solace in Episcopalian liturgical verse? I was immature in my understanding of religion, I think, and I felt a little duped.
This morning, I was walking past the mosque down the street and ogling at the main entrance (unmarked) and the women’s entrance that’s labeled–in English, curiously enough– off to the side. From what I can tell, the storefront mosque is frequented by the Senegalese in our neighborhood who are Sufi. A couple of days a week, female vendors from the mosque’s community set up on the sidewalk in front of the entrances and sell homemade treats, slippers and robes. The women wear bright, busy printed dresses and head scarves that appear more decorative than inhibitive; their children play on the sidewalk, darting around pedestrians and chasing after one another. What happens inside the mosque looks harsh and dark, and I have a hard time reconciling it with the colors and liveliness on the sidewalk in front.
When I got back from my walk this morning, I read an article about teenage girls coming of age in Saudi Arabia (Love on the Girls’ Side of Saudi Arabia). The article reports that some young women cross-dress to gain entry into male spheres or develop sexual relationships with their female friends; both practices are explained as ways these females play with their identity, test their curiosity and otherwise spend time before they get engaged. Why do these women, bold enough to draw whiskers on their chins with eyeliner, still long for the day when they will first show their faces to the husbands their parents arrange for them?
It is not my place to reconcile others’ cultures with my own cultural logic. I can only try to expand my logic to include more words like but, maybe and however. However, what do I lose in the process?… An ability to believe, unwavering, in a spiritual practice… to belong, without question, to a community… to know, without cynicism, a way of being.
