RAMADAN HINDSIGHT

In a stone hut built on a mountain north of Santa Fe I first decided to learn the prayer, and no one was more surprised than me. Having been raised in a good catholic environment, taught by priests and going to church every Sunday, I had learned more than a little about prayer though with less than a little understanding. The "God" I was told of was beyond my comprehension, so talking to it was certainly nonsense. It seemed more likely that I was this God because when I prayed I just talked to myself. Nevertheless despite all my philosophical difficulties, "Give me a boy until he is twelve and I will make him mine for life" has been said by more than one Jesuit, and I was a dutiful churchgoer until I left home for university, where without the social and intellectual cushion of catholic segregation I had to deal with moral problems on my own and found that my conscience was far more flexible than I had previously thought possible. One of the first things to be jettisoned was talking to myself.

Outside the hut was a patch of earth where as the day began to warm I would run through my Tai-Chi and think about what was going down. I’d been meditating over the previous year, and it was good but no surprise. Prayer, however, was a horse of a different colour, and I thought “If it’s time to be working with prayer then I guess I should visit the ones most involved in praying.” So I went down to see the sheik, agreeing to attend daily to learn the prayer and after a few weeks join them for Ramadan. Being in one of my more schizophrenic phases, I was spending those weeks cooking twenty hours a day for a Vipassana meditation retreat. There on the kitchen floor I would throw down my prayer rug and stumble through my half learned Fatiha and Ikhlas amidst a hundred Wu Li dancers approaching nirvana on my chilli-rellenos. Finally looking out across the Rio Grande Canyon and the desert plains of the west I watched that moment when the sun blinks from view, and magically reveals the brilliant crescent of the Ramadan moon.

In the mud-brick mosque I no longer felt the need to attach myself to the very end of the prayer line, but stood shoulder to shoulder between my muslim brothers united in fasting and prayer. It seemed only natural to try to reflect that unity not only in straightness of line but in synchronicity of movement, bridging the variation between left and right. So in prayer we tried to move as one, like the wind in the long grass of the dzikr line. In the Glasgow mosque I seem to have on one side a soldier of God leaping to his feet, hair-spring triggered to the takbir, and on the other a Tai-Chi master of prayer, a slow loris lost in communion with his God, but old habits die hard and I still try to find a middle way. If such slight differences are so difficult to bridge, how much harder to span the divisions that split the muslim world, differences in Islamic thought and understanding.

I was fasting when I flew into Bali a couple of days later than intended, having seen my fourth Ramadan moon from a beach in Darwin. The dropping jaws of the local passengers when the becak driver asked for his fare encouraged me to offer half, and by his smug grin of acceptance I knew that I was at last in the Third World. The overpowering stench of the Denpasar drains confirmed this to my sanitized western nostrils as I wandered around the town that afternoon, when even the lo-fi system of the local mosque could not hide the beauty of the adzan, pulling me to my first prayers in a mosque in a muslim country. As I entered a man rushed towards me, miming quite clearly that this was no place for a tourist. While I tried to explain that despite being a tourist I was also a muslim, someone obviously in authority was brought over to deal with the problem in English. “Are you Sunni or Shia?” he said. I was beginning to be educated in the divisions of Islam.

So many spits the list seems endless. To learn of them all would take a lifetime, and should I spend my life in studying what divides muslims so as to decide which is right and which wrong? Some people pray this way and others pray that. It seems not a question of right or wrong, as perhaps both are wrong, but more likely both right and the prophet sometimes did one thing and sometimes another, and if that was his way then should it not be mine? Anyway, if centuries of study have given no clear answer why waste much more time in considering the question? What concerns me are the points on which we are in agreement, but lost in the distractions of specialization even the five pillars are given little more than lip service.

Muslims, like Catholics, must find it hard to relate to a God explained in terms of pedantic dogma, and prayer thought of only in terms of obligation. With no awareness of the extraordinary practicality of prayer in shaping ones relationship with everyday life, and its immediate experiential rewards, prayer becomes a struggle against reason attempting to conform to a defined duty to an unimaginable God. Not the most inspiring of acts, and easy to justify avoiding. Yet in prayer to the One God we can unit with our fellow man even beyond the confines of Islam.

In Ladakh I had fasted one Ramadan surrounded by the tinkling bells and tapping drums of Buddhist friends on spiritual retreat, and during our long night conversation they talked of a lama living in Italy. So when in Rome I went to see the Rimpoche. The house was full of students talking in Italian, and when the time came I left them seated around the lunch table to pray on the sunlit balcony of his apartment. As I finished I turned to see one of his students with a rather wild look in his eyes. “It’s alright. I’m just praying. I’m muslim.” I said. “I know” came the reply “I was born and raised a muslim. I never thought it made any sense.”