It was another day where I did not know what to expect. My trip to the Mosque drew quite a bit of anxiety prior to it. John Kim and I as well as another friend decided to go together and experience an Islamic worship service in the context of South Bend, IN. This is my own personal response to the experience. I went in with some presuppositions. About 90% of those presuppositions were wrong.
We were told the worship started at 1:00 p.m. We arrived at 1:02 and thought we were late. The parking lot was empty save for 6 cars. “I guess there aren’t that many devout Muslims in Michiana after all”, I thought. I thought that the building would be like a mini Islamic cathedral of some sort. I thought that as we entered, we would be told to take off our shoes by the shoe police. I thought that there would be a “woman” police outside ready to siphon our other friend in through a separate “woman’s entrance”. I thought we would look much different from those inside worshipping. I envisioned flowing white robes with fancy white embroidery. Why? I don’t know. I also thought that there would be chanting and that we would have to sit on the floor with our legs crossed in the midst of it. I thought we would be looked at strangely for not participating. I thought that Muslim worship had no sense of “conservative” and “liberal” only Sunni and Shia. I thought I knew something.
My thoughts were first obliterated by the fact that I almost walked in with my shoes on because I was so surprised that no one was guarding the rug like Fort Knox. After we removed our shoes, we were led by a young stout Muslim youth to the Imam who he called “our leader”. The Imam welcomed us and gave us brochures that showed the order of service and explained the prayer postures. He also directed us to our seats. Yes, seats. As I sat and looked around, I noticed that the building was modern and there was hardly any adornment. There was a man already chanting prayers from an unseen place and the six people who beat us there were reading the Koran by a window or kneeling, standing, then kneeling again in prayer. I turned to the Imam to ask him which part of the service we were observing. He looked at me with a strange glance and said, “We haven’t started yet”. And that is when I realized that there are some quirky similarities in this Islamic worship that every Southern Baptist (read “typical”) good ol' protestant Christian would recognize and some things that surprised me and obliterated my misconceptions about Muslims in the United States. These were my observations.
1. While the women were separated, they were not disrespected. They actually had visual sight of where the men were worshipping as they passed through to their worship area and some looked as though they passed inches away from the prayer rugs. There were no police anywhere.
2. Most everyone arrived about 15-30 minutes late. As we left 1 hour later, there were people still arriving. There were misbehaving children, and an old lady in the back ready to straighten them out. Sounds like church to me!
3. Most of the women had traditional garb. Some men did too. But most of them wore jeans and a nice shirt. The brochure said that many leave work to come to the service and may not be able to socialize with us afterwards because they were returning to work quickly.
4. The children love their fathers to death. The relationship between father and son(s) was clearly a large part of their culture. Most of the parents of young children looked older and well established. Out of the 150 (maybe more) people there, there was not one young couple or single teenage mother that I observed.
5. The sermon was about making sure to study the beliefs of Islam often and a warning about being too loose or too strict about pop culture. Too strict?
6. To get an idea of the socio-economics of the congregation I paid attention to the thing that often becomes a reflection of a bank account: The cars in the parking lot. There was a good mix of normal cars in the parking lot and “status symbol” cars. Probably a little more “status” cars than in a typical Adventist parking lot.
7. There was a chanting, prayer actually, but by only one person at a time and it only happened twice. And no, we didn’t have to participate in anything. We were simply observers.
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