No God But God

One of the memories I have of the Middle School years I spent in Lima, Peru was of all of my classmates getting excited about Christmas. We would spend hours in class talking about what gifts everyone wanted to receive and what they would be doing to celebrate. As a predominantly Catholic country, Peru really got into the holiday spirit. They sold large Christmas Panetons at almost every supermarket and blasted Feliz Navidad on repeat. At the tender age of 11 I really wanted to celebrate Christmas with everyone else and thought; “how come I’m that only one that is not Christian? ” I too wanted a popular Latin-American name like Maria Carla, a huge Confirmation after-party and a big green tree in December.

So when it came time for Eid, I tried to play it up to my friends as though it was a Christmas of sorts.

“Oh Eid is the most exciting time of the year for us we…wait for months and wake up early to see the sheep get slaughtered. It’s all very exciting.”

Not suprisingly, they thought it was gross rather than exciting. One girl told her mom that my family killed animals and her mom told her to stay away from me. I even tried to convince them that instead of presents, for Eid we recieved gifts of money (we find the money in socks made from the sheep’s wool, I would fib) but somehow the spirit did not come through. I so badly wanted to belong but instead I failed and felt really left out.

My highschool years were spent in Kazakhstan, a predominantly Muslim country, yet one that practices Islam in a way that is very dissimilar to the way that it is practiced in Egypt. The way Kazakhs look at religion has certainly been tinted by 70 years of living under Communist rule. The recent collapse of the USSR has only gone so far in allowing religion to penetrate the depths of people’s day to day. As a result, I noticed that Kazakhs went through the motions of Islam at times almost to the T, but the meaning behind these motions did not really resound. Their understanding of Islam was limited because they were not exposed to it enough; their parents weren’t and their grandparents really weren’t either. Also, as Arab speaking Muslims we overlook the degree of difficulty that comes with practicing a faith that is documented and followed in a language that is not our native tongue. Both Kazakh and Russian share barely any similarities with Arabic and that definitely attributes to an average Kazakh’s perception of religion.

However, by observing the Kazkh practice of Islam, I saw from a totally different perspective the beauty of the religion’s rituals as the mere acts of it became amplified through the society’s avid attempts to be Muslim in the only way that they knew how.

Years later I found myself in one of the most liberal institutions in America,one of the more liberal countries in the world. My freshman-year dorm had a number of Jews, a devout Catholic from the Mid-West and a number of Atheists. Everyone was very different in that respect, but it didn’t seem of relevance. I don’t want to say that it didn’t matter, but right then and there when I was a freshman embarking on an exciting new college life it just did not seem relevant.

That year Ramadan started around the month of September or October, right after move-in. My parents told me that I didn’t have to fast if it was too hard and that I could make up for it later on, but I discounted that and decided to do ramadan like I did any other year. I wanted to fast not because I was forced to, but I had the desire to belong to something when I was for the first time completely independent of it all.

So I fasted, but I did it undercover. Not on purpose, it just ended up that way. I went to meet people for coffee at Starbucks and just passed on the lattes. Met my friends for lunch in the dinning hall and just sat and chatted instead of waiting in-line to get food. It didn’t really come up very much that I was fasting, but I did it and it meant a lot to me personally. It made me feel like I was tied to something much bigger and much more constant and enduring than just me the individual.

I remember once in college getting invited to Seder at Hillel – a pretty renowned Jewish community center at Harvard. It was an interesting experience, not like anything I had seen. At that time I thought back to my days in Peru and how badly I wanted to belong to the more widespread faith of my classmates.

Yet, as an Egyptian sitting at a Seder and hearing a Haggadah that spoke about the Jewish exodus from my home country, I saw the beauty of the nuances that differentiated our faiths.

A Seder is not like any ritual we practice in Islam and so it was enriching to see. The dedication that the members of Hillel had towards trying to emulate a perfect Seder just like Jewish tradition had documented, proved to me that they too wanted to belong to something bigger and more rooted just like I did. In a sense, we shared a very similar desire while practicing two faiths that the world viewed as directly in conflict with one another. All the while, we never really discussed it and it just came through . That was relevant.

I look around me now in Egypt and see a relative uniformity of faiths when compared to the incongruous environment I was once a part of. Though we are similar in that sense, we strive to highlight the differences between us. Even I am guilty of this. Sometimes when a male friend stops shaving for a few days I joke with him and say: “Oh you’re Ikhwani now?” But really that is not funny at all. It’s too real.

Right now in Egypt it has become far too easy to confine people in boxes depending on their degrees of Islamic radicalisim. I don’t mean radical in a bad way, I mean it in the exact sense of the word. We look at a guy with a beard and assume he is a follower of the Muslim Brotherhood. We assume that he camps out in Raba’a.

Faith seems so outward facing to the extent of it being fixed on ones face.

It seems neither intrapersonal nor even personal. Though 90% of the country practices the same religion in its varying degrees of dedication, we are now attempting to confine ourselves to the group that practices it in a similar way to each of us as we oppose the other side. I know the problems in Egypt now are far too complex to be given the over generalized label of sectarian strife alone, yet it seems to me that this is a contributing factor.

It is ironic that though we are trying to belong to Islam – all trying to belong in general like I was and like the people at Hillel were — we fight with each other about who belongs better and who belongs more.

• No God But God is actually the title of a book by Islamic Scholar Reza Aslan, but I thought it was a fitting way to describe this post in a different sense than he used his title.