“Vois tout ce que Dieu a crée.” And with that began one of the best discussions about religion that I’ve ever had, and that with the eighteen-year-old high school student who earlier the same day was practicing his “see you later” on me on a pause from grumbling to his mother and nodding his head in rhythm to the Black Eyed Peas.
We were sitting in the living room, me on the floor leaning back against the couch, and he on the couch behind me, our fingers wrapped around mugs of hot and heavily sweetened and powdered-milk-infused tea. We had just broken the fast for the day and, as usual, the Ramadan special was on TV, a multi-channel mix of live broadcasts from Mecca, marabouts (brotherhood leaders) preaching in Wolof, and religious music videos. This one was on regularly: a montage of lovely nature scenes from every climate within hundreds of miles (that is, some desert, some rainforest, and some ocean) to an accompaniment of traditional Arabic chanting from the Koran. I had taken the point to be something to the effect of: “check out all of this awesome stuff that God made in the world,” which, given Aziz’s comment, seems to have been accurate.
“Yes, I see,” I replied. “It’s beautiful.”
And then, as I take another sip of my tea, he pulls out: “Do you believe in God?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not accustomed to being asked that question point blank. Lucky, then, that I have a fairly straightforward answer: “Yes.”
“Do you believe in one God?” he pressed. “Do you believe in one unique God who created all the world?” Okay. Now we’re really pulling out the big guns.
“Well,” I told him, “I’m Christian, and Christians believe in one God in the form of the Holy Trinity.” Unfortunately, I didn’t get too terribly much further than that: my French is flagrantly not adequate for the task of explaining the theology of the Trinity (then again, I’m not actually sure my English is up to that endeavor, either, but that’s a whole other tangent).
“What’s important is believing in God,” he told me. “God is everything, because God created everything. It’s crazy that some people can see the world and then set up idols for themselves.” He told me a story of Abraham tearing down statues in a temple and being saved by God from angry mobs. I returned with the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being thrown into a furnace for refusing to worship a statue and coming through the fire unharmed.
“I try to be a good Muslim,” he said. “School and friends and all that – that’s important, but what matters most is eternity. I’m not a child any more; it’s up to me to do good. Do you think I’m a good Muslim? I can’t ever know myself if I do well enough.”
“You have to be curious,” he told me, “because God created us with curiosity. Now we have television, phones, airplanes. People didn’t have those things, once – that’s God pushing. Now planes can fly far through the air without falling. That’s amazing.”
I asked him a bit about the marabouts, if it works hierarchically within the religion.
“No, no, not at all,” he replied. “It’s just that one person can’t find God alone. My great-grandfather [who, I’ve gathered, was an important spiritual figure] took the hand of his spiritual leader, who took the hand of the Prophet, who took the hand of God. I want to take the hand of my great-grandfather. Everyone’s here for a purpose, and only briefly. I have a lot to try to do.”
It was one of those conversations that wrapped me in its bubble for hours after it was over. It’s not that I agree with everything he said. It’s not even that I’m entirely comfortable with every aspect of the way Islam is expressed here: The marabouts wield huge social and political power in what to an observer often appears to be a sort of cult of personality, and loyalty to different brotherhoods drives Senegalese Muslims apart from each other. Islam is interpreted to allow polygamy and subjugation of wives to their husbands, even in some areas to the extent of physical abuse. It’s for mostly religious reasons that I can’t feel comfortable, even going running in the crippling heat or walking in my own house to and from the shower, showing any skin above the knee (I could write a whole blog post about my take on mandated modesty, but that’s even more tangential).
The point, though, is that the genuine faith and fervor in that young man and his directness in discussing it with me is comparable to almost nothing that I’ve seen in members of my own peer group in the United States. Most late-teen boys I’ve known would sooner be dragged through a set of thumbscrews or every clothing store in a shopping mall than discuss their personal relationship with the divine. And it’s not like my school experience is representative of the nation or Aziz is a perfect window into all Senegalese youth, but… suffice to say, it was striking. And I found it beautiful: his awe at the most mundane things in the world – it had never occurred to me to think of airplanes as gifts from God – his very individual thoughts and efforts coupled with his profound respect for tradition, and the self-consciously universal nature of most of his comments, certainly across monotheistic believers. He, just like everyone with whom I’ve spoken here, doesn’t see Christianity and Islam as fundamentally opposed: one may be more right than the other, sure, but we’re all children of the same prophets and the same God.
I knew, of course, that there are a lot of similarities between the two faiths. One, however, that I don’t think I had quite adequately grasped, is that Islam is just as fragmented as Christianity is. I tended to think of Islam as being one religion, only dimly aware of the splits between Sunni and Shia, the thread of Sufism, the deep rifts between Senegalese brotherhoods. I certainly never made distinctions in my head the way I would between Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics, etc.: it was just “Islam,” without the need for other modifiers. Aziz, on the other hand, I don’t think ever quite grasped what I meant when I said that I’m Orthodox Christian – the 5% of Dakar’s population that’s Christian is Catholic, and, apparently, the Muslims here in general think of that as the only kind of Christian there is, just “Christian” without reason for modifiers of any kind.
Islam permeates this world, and I arrived to see this at its height: Ramadan. Chanting cuts across the sound of the streets; it was the first thing I heard in the morning and often the last sound in my ears at night. Street vendors pause from their work to spread out their prayer mats. Then again, all this is still going on, even several days out from Korité, the celebration that marks the end of the fast, and, I’ve gathered, the second-largest holiday in the Islamic calendar. I had been told all of last week that Korité would fall either Friday or Saturday, leading me, of course, to the obvious question: “wait, um, you don’t know when it is?”
Like many religious calendars, it has to do with the moon. Unlike many religious calendars, this one has retained the traditional method of looking for the new moon with the naked eye. If, on Thursday night, you go outside and see the moon, then Ramadan is over and Korité is the next morning; otherwise, you’ve got more fasting to do. Modern communication has led to efforts at synchronization across the Muslim world: even if it happens to be cloudy in Dakar, we can rely on reports of someone spotting the moon in Cairo. In Senegal, however, the brotherhoods complicate things: sometimes maribouts see things differently and take their followings with them. It’s happened that some brotherhoods celebrate the holiday one day while others wait until the next.
This year, however, it was Friday for all concerned, and I got my first taste of Senegalese celebration along with my first notably annoying exposure to entrenched gender roles. The procedure of Korité, as it was explained to me without the faintest hint of apology, involves the men going to the mosque in the morning and the women cooking; in the afternoon the men nap and the women cook some more. My tubaab status, however, apparently trumps my female status: after asking multiple times if I could help with anything in the kitchen, I was finally granted one task: the arduous responsibility of cutting apart sugar packets and emptying them into a wooden bowl. Post-mosque breakfast is millet with some sort of unidentified but really good sauce, following which everyone walks from house to house to greet family and neighbors and ask each other for forgiveness. Lunch is massive to the extent that everyone basically just lies around afterwards for some time; I’ve managed to significantly augment my budding obsession with traditional brightly-colored iced fruit juice and shot-glass tea. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is indeed the sort of tea that is and ought to be taken in a shot glass, powerfully bitter and sweet in equal measure, nearly black with a white froth against your lips. In the evening, we all donned our new clothing, in a vast array of lovely colors. Yaay tried out several headscarf styles on me before constructing one with which she and her visiting eldest daughter were satisfied.
The clothing itself is an interesting window into Senegalese standards of beauty: you can tell just by glancing at billboards or watching TV that the trim waist idealized in the United States is less in vogue, for all that U.S. styles and standards are seeping into the younger generations and imported media, but having to wrap a skirt about four times around my waist under the billowy, ruffled and elastic shirt gave me a sensory gage of just how little the designer cared that I look thin, as well as how thin or otherwise he or she expected me to be. Sokhna took me to walk around with her friends, bringing me to the additional realization that the long, stiff fabric falling to the dusty ground is as effective a female-restraining device as any pair of high heels I’ve worn (this may or may not be due to my present level of knowledge about how to walk effectively in said skirt). After getting a number of semi-comprehensible comments on my appearance and marital-status inquiries, I ended up sitting with the girls on the top of a stone bench just off the road, in close proximity to several sheep, eating vanilla ice cream out of a plastic packet. I will note, though, about the comments from members of the male gender: they actually occasionally related to the clothes. To a noticeable degree, both men I did know and men I didn’t specifically remarked upon aspects of my outfit, a far cry from the “um, you look nice,” and “oh… those shoes are new?” that I’ve come to expect from American men (though, American men, know that I do appreciate the fact that you don’t tend to randomly and persistently ask me for my phone number on the street). At night Aziz, his older cousin, and his friends took me out. The day after Ramadan ends and everything is open again is such a popular time for celebrating that we had to go to three locations before we could get a table. The restaurant/bar had the air of an extended prom night, filled with teens and twenty-somethings in the traditional long and often sparkly skirts for women and robes with matching pants for men. We talked beneath the wide television playing a mix of traditional and American music videos, and then, eventually, left to walk along the nearby beach. I’m not exactly sure if 1:30 a.m. strolls at the surf are a common activity among young Senegalese males, but I very much enjoyed it, as well as their careful attention to whether or not I was having a good time, willingness to speak to me in French rather than zipping incomprehensibly along in Wolof, and excitement about showing me choice locations in the city in the coming weeks.
And, now, Ramadan is over, and I’m still trying to figure out the regular life blueprint sans the fast that had defined my homestay since I arrived. The entire rhythm of the day bore towards the demands of the holy month. I set my alarm every morning for 4:45 a.m., though often the chanting woke me up before the beeping even started. Pulling on clothes, I would meet my family downstairs, everyone trickling blearily onto the mat for a Ramadan TV-accompanied breakfast of bread, onions, and either meat or eggs (always, of course, out of the communal plate), and sometimes oatmeal-like millet and cream in mugs. By 6:15 I had brushed my teeth, removed my clothes, and gotten back in bed for another hour or two of sleep before rising for school. The lengthy classes and breaks in between mean that I finish every day at 6:30 p.m., just in time for me to take my leave at a leisurely pace and walk back to the house for the breaking of the fast at sunset, around 7:20 p.m. We started out with two dates each, just, apparently, as the Prophet did every day to break his fasts, and then progressed to bread with butter or chocolate spread and the afore-mentioned (non shot-glass) tea. Dinner was at 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., and most people didn’t seem to start moving towards bed until midnight or later. I take it that everyone napped a lot; elsewise I remain baffled as to how that sleep schedule was sustainable in any way. That, actually, is the part I found the hardest, in my fairly limited experience with Ramadan: by the end of two weeks of never sleeping for more than four and a half hours consecutively, I could feel myself getting fatigued with more regularity than I generally prefer. All told, I actually fasted seven days: two separate occasions the first week and then the last five days straight, and I only did the last one the real way, without even drinking water from sunrise to sunset. That last was the worst by far: the other days my huger peaked around 11:00 a.m. but by afternoon my stomach clenched up and I didn’t much notice; I even went running without much problem on two of the days I didn’t eat. On the Thursday that I didn’t drink water, however, my throat was scabby and my head ached by evening. Hauling myself back from campus through the gelatin humidity I had to use quite a lot of willpower get through the obligatory cloud of extensive greetings to every person who passed within ten feet of my trajectory. The thing about this, of course, is that nearly all of those people were doing exactly the same thing as I was – and they had been doing it every single day straight since before I even arrived in Senegal.
Even the minimal taste I gave myself of Ramadan, though, got me thinking. It’s an interesting contrast to the kind of fasting I’ve done in the past. Clearly, my points of comparison are nowhere near universal, but, well… blogging is an inherently self-centered activity, anyway. Trying to pretend I’m writing about something other than my personal, and, therefore, biased, experience would be no more than disingenuous – if you want an unbiased picture of Senegal, go to Wikipedia or something. Point being: as an Orthodox Christian, I’ve fasted most notably for Lent and Advent, forty-day periods during which it is forbidden to eat meat, dairy products, and a few extra things like wine and oil. This is a very different type of fasting than Ramadan, and it makes me wonder (no, I don’t at present have an answer to this question – do please let me know if you do) what the spiritual, historical, or cultural implications are of eating a restricted diet at any time of day you fancy versus eating anything you want only when it’s dark outside. According to, ahem, Wikipedia, the basic point of Ramadan seems to be the same as that of fasting in the Church: purification and, of course, perspective.
Speaking of which: I got one of the loveliest perspectives I’ve heard lately from my History of Islam professor at the end of last week. Lecture concluded, he asked us what we thought of the proposed September 11 Koran-burning back in the U.S. I’ll admit that my personal reaction when I’d heard about it was anger. The thought that someone would want to perpetuate violence and disrespect even in the name of a religion that teaches forgiveness and compassion, that people would be so ignorant as to blame an entire religion for the actions of a few of its far-flung members, that far-flung members of a branch of my own religion and citizens of my country would provide good reason for an entire religion to blame us… let’s just say that this may be another place where my French skills don’t quite cover it. My professor, however, was calm to his smile.
“I don’t think they’re going to burn the Koran,” he said. “The Koran can’t be burned, no more than the Bible can. I prayed with the Koran this morning. They might burn some paper, and then I’ll pray again with the Koran that night. These books aren’t in pages. They’re in the hearts of people.”
And, here, he’s right. Islam is the gravity cradling people hurdling through their daily orbits. It provides a physical framework and a psychological worldview. I, by virtue of my own limited experiences, may not be able to shove those glasses onto my face – but, I think, I’m getting something of a glimpse of this world filled with things that God created.
