Church vs Mosque

A day came last year when I wanted to observe Christians on a Sunday. What drove me to this crazy idea? I infiltrated a Church because I wanted to understand how Christians lived.

Upon entering the church I locked myself in a bathroom and splashed cool water on myself. I was afraid everyone would find out that I was a Muslim attending a Church and I had no idea what Christians did to a non believer attending a Church. All I knew was that Mosques forbade women and went to war over the presence of non-Muslims in holy places.

Determined to engage in this social experiment I followed the crowd to this huge hall with red seats. I found a stage lined with flowers, a grand piano and a large square tablet with a cross on it. Upon entering the hall I began to slink towards the very last row of the church when an old man with a wrinkly forehead stopped me and I thought “Game Over” but he handed me a pamphlet instead.

The first page of the pamphlet had artwork of a woman and a man who looked like Jesus. I opened the page and it was filled with what I immediately recognized as musical notes. With my head buried between the pages I smelled a fragrance and caught a glimpse of a pink skirt. When I looked up there was a girl sitting right next to me. I had never sat next to a woman in a mosque; I had never even seen women at a mosque until I came to the US. But even in the “deviant” mosques of the US women were confined to another room or at best the back of the mosque with the children.

With a hot girl sitting next to me my first reaction was to look reverent and immerse myself in the recitation of the pamphlet. Before I got very far however everyone was standing up, a band had appeared and was playing music and everyone was singing. I took my cues from the Asian girl and joined in.

Even though I had taken classes to train my voice I had never sung a song with a piano, a violinist, trumpets and over a thousand people. At first I sounded like someone who didn’t know the words to a popular song as I tried desperately to keep up with everyone. I tried to look devoted, hoping that my failure to read the music would be overlooked in light of the mournful expressions on my face but there was an increasing fear in the back of my mind that if I didn’t fit the part the girl might run up to some priest and rat on the Muslim pretending to be a Christian. Then I heard the words coming from behind me and from all around me. The alto voices of the women were so subtle and so filled with melody that I was transfixed.

The longest I had sung anything as a Muslim was “Aaaaaaameeen” with a group of always baritone, sometimes sad, sometimes angry and sometimes stinking men. I remember walking into my neighborhood mosque with my uncle who had returned from America to find a bride in the Middle East. As we were walking inside my uncle whispered to my father “The man we just passed stinks of urine”. My father responded, “How long has it been since you have been to a mosque?” I recognized that day the smell emanating from carpets of my “diplomat” neighborhood mosque. To my relief I understood why I hated rubbing my nose into the dust and stench of the green carpet and why my father would empty an entire bottle of Atar on himself before he went to a mosque.

After the singing we sat down and I saw an effeminate young boy walk up to the stage and read the first passage from the pamphlet. The boy was dressed in a small suit and he obviously had not rehearsed the reading but I felt as though someone somewhere had recognized children because when it comes to recognizing children a mosque is not the best place.

You see every Juma the Imam of our mosque would declare “Please have the children stand in the back of the masjid because a non-Baligh (pre-pubescent) annuls the prayers of five men to their left and five men to their right”. Every Juma I was forced to abandon my uncles and my father and stand in the back row with children much younger than me who would start sleeping or playing in the middle of the prayers. I remember standing in the back row trying very hard to be a sincere Muslim while some other kid would steal my hat and place a thatched bamboo cap on my head.

If the guilt of being a child in a mosque was not enough torment (they once pushed me around so I was praying while wrapped around a pillar) the perverted adults who preyed upon the “children’s row” made it worse. My own story dwarfs in comparison to my cousin’s who was abducted by an Arab Muslim from the holiest of mosques and later left to die in the deserts.

After the effeminate boy was done speaking we stood up again to sing and this time recognizing the reading pattern I joined in the songs.

In all my years of going to places of holy worship I have gone through many emotions. I have cried holding the cloth of the Ka’aba, I have been angry when listening to the sermons of Imams narrating the plight of the holy warriors. I have even seen other Muslims go through very strong emotions. However as I stood in that church singing the words in those songs I could not help but smile. I was not smiling at a joke the Maulana had cracked if you can imagine a Maulana cracking a joke; I was smiling because I was singing. Particularly the song titled Offertory – Air by Johan Sebastian Bach “I shall, on eagles’ wings soar. I shall behold beauty, I shall beauty adore, and sing the wonders of love’s grace forever more”

When we sat down I was beginning to form a low opinion of my mosque-going experience. I was beginning to think, “We as Muslims are so uncouth, so primitive and so uncivilized, we don’t even sing! Sure a Muezzin tries to sing the words of the same Azans over and over again but not all Muezzins can recite it well and those who are bad are awful and besides where are the words I can understand? Where is the poetry? Where is the music? … ooh we suck”

Now an elderly gentleman dressed in a suit appeared. I understood him to be the priest. He approached the microphone and started speaking about the sin of Satan. He said that Satan committed one sin for which he was thrown out of Paradise. Satan became proud and started to view others with contempt. “You despise the promiscuous because you are proud of being chaste. You disdain until disdain becomes a part of your identity and you justify your hatred by quoting your identity, an identity based on hatred of people of different religions, sexuality and race and that was Satan’s sin: disdain”, he said. I resonated with this because I was just then suffering from a bitter disdain for the Arab-Islamic prayer rituals.

That was the sermon. It was not an hour long and rambling filled with Hitler-esque hand waving, angry accusations like “The Jews are killing our Muslim brothers”, or guilt like “When was the last time you got up 5 am for Fajar prayers, brother?” or sad stories of the plight of Muslims around the world “The Bosnians, Chechens, Palestinian, Philipino, Algerian Muslim women are being raped”.

I looked around and saw the candles, the stained glass, the woodwork and the congregation all gathered for a five-minute sermon that I would remember for the rest of my life. Then amidst the closing statements of the priest I noticed that some members of the church were passing a silver plate around. The silver collection platter is the Christian equivalent of the Islamic collection turban. This is how the silver plate works. The plate is passed around from one person to the other. People put money in it and when it fills up its emptied into a dainty picnic basket.

In mosques there are one or two people who use either the long lapels of their shirts or their turban to collect money. Sometimes the collectors make a brief speech before asking for donations like the men in green turbans who often request financial assistance in order to wage Jihad against a variety of deviant sects. The collector then opens his turban up and people put coins and notes in it as the collector walks to each squatting worshipper shaking and airing the turban in their faces.

The silver church platter reached me as the Reverend was making the closing remarks of his short and sweet sermon. He was inviting us to a meeting to “check out the finances of the church”. Was the Reverend really inviting us to an exciting evening involving accounting? Do Christians not trust their priests with the money they give them? In contrast no one knows about the flow of funds from a mosque with the exception of God and the FBI and the Anti Terrorism Task Force.

After the announcement of the “accounting meeting” we all got up and sang again while the orchestra burst into music that turned out to be Mozart. The song was about love and forgiveness. After the song the priest asked us to introduce ourselves to the people around us and I finally got the chance to say hello to the hot Asian girl standing next to me and the brunette standing in front of me and the older lady standing behind me and some guy to my left. As I shook everyone’s hands the older lady grabbed me and pressed me hard against her breasts for reasons I dared not think about right then.

Confident of my charm as evidenced from the hug of the elderly lady I turned to the Asian girl and said “You know that violinist looks familiar, oh now I remember we went to the music conservatory together … Hi my name is Shiraz and you are … ” It’s a good thing she didn’t ask me “Which conservatory?” because I didn’t know of any. Instead she did introduce herself to me and smiled warmly as I fantasized about taking her out, getting her drunk on wine and making out with her.

Believe it or not but at this point someone offered us both a small cup of wine. For a minute it was scary. Was the chemistry between us so obvious that our fellow Christians had decided to get us drunk so we may make out? But then I looked around and I saw that everyone had a small cup of red wine. Then we were given a cracker. Now the last time I had had crackers and wine it was at an art reception at a gallery in SOHO so just when I began to look around for some cheese to go with the crackers the girl emptied the wine in one gulp. Watching her frail figure swallow the wine encouraged me to do the same. But then I hesitated considering that I was after all a Muslim and I realized that wine might contain alcohol.

However since I still didn’t know what Christians did to Muslims pretending to be Christians I drank the wine while praying for forgiveness. It tasted sweet. I was totally into another cup of wine if the Asian girl would agree but the crowd was now dispersing. They were moving to a room where they could eat muffins and bagels and coffee.

I ought to have discussed more religion with the girl but instead I ran outside the church and skipped all the way home. Then I called my mother and told her about my new hobby. Today my mother has found a church nearby and goes there now and then – which is at least every time they forbid her and my sisters from entering a mosque, which is like all the time.