Eggers, etc.

My body is under assault again. Evidently, no matter how much I like being back in Indonesia, my immune system disagrees. While I’m awake waiting for an appropriate hour to head to the pharmacy, I figure I may as well crank these pink and puss-filled eyes open, and do some writing. I would rather wait for the sun to come up before heading to the pharmacy.

So. My pre-dawn insomnia offered me some extra time for reading, and the book of the week has been Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, a biographical account of a Syrian-American’s personal nightmare in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. It seemed almost serendipitous that I be awake, reading passages from the Qur’an (because Eggers includes certain passages as the main character looks to faith to give him strength) when the morning call to prayer began.

I’m not sure if I’ve described the morning call before, but it is one of the stranger sensations of living in a Muslim-majority country. The “call” is a musical recitation (through in Islam it is not considered music) of verse, amplified from neighborhood mosques over a loudspeaker and quite literally calling people out of sleep and to the mosque for prayer-time. The first prayer happens after “first light” and before sun-up, which is around 4.30am here. Throughout the day there are four more mandatory prayer times: mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon (pre sunset) and after sun-down. All of these times are based on the sun and so vary depending on where you are in the world.

(Incidentally, I asked one of the teachers in the office how they knew what time to pray when they were in Oberlin, where there isn’t a proliferation of mosques. He told me that initially he was unsure, but realized that you can get the exact times for your location on the internet, along with the weather. I love technology).

As my friend Anna described it after a trip to Turkey, the call is the one thing that breaks through the day and gives you the shivers every time. It’s beautiful, and never quite loses that exotic feeling of being very very far away from your native land.

In any case, it was during this pre-dawn dissonance—because there are several mosques in my neighborhood all reciting at slightly different moments, with different “melodies” in different keys—that I was reading about Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and thought that I would share an extended excerpt from the book.

During one of the more biographical chunks, Eggers relates the experience of Abdulrahman’s wife Kathy when she was first learning about Islam. She converted from Christianity before she and her husband ever met.

The excerpt is a bit long, but it’s crucial stuff. Eggers (or perhaps Zeitoun in her testimony) is spot-on in what he includes to bring a non-Muslim through the murky water of misconception to relate to this Muslim New Orleans family. About Kathy,

“At first she was simply intrigued by the basic things she didn’t know, and the many things she’d wrongly presumed. She had no idea, for instance, that the Qur’an was filled with the same people as the Bible—Moses, Mary, Abraham, Pharaoh, even Jesus. She hadn’t known that Muslims consider the Qur’an the fourth book of God to His messengers, after the Old Testaments, the Psalms, and the New Testament…

She was frustrated that she hadn’t known any of this, that she’d been blind to the faith of a billion or so people. How could she not know these things?

And Muhammad… She’d thought He was the actual god of Islam, the one whom Muslims worshipped. But he was simply the messenger who related the word of God. An illiterate man, Muhammad was visited by the angel Gabriel (Jibril in Arabic), who related to him the words of God. Muhammad became the conduit for these messages, and The Qur’an, then, was simply the word of God in written form. Qur’an meant ‘Recitation.’ ”

The next part captures exactly what I’ve tried for months to articulate about Indonesian (and Jogjakartan) Islam:

“She’d assumed that Muslims were a monolithic group, and that all Muslims were made of the same devout and unbending stock. But she learned that…there were the same variations in faith and commitment as there were in any church. There were Muslims who treated their faith lightly, and those who knew every word of the Qur’an and its companion guide to behavior, the Hadith.

There were Muslims who knew almost nothing about their religion, who worshiped a few times a year, and those who obeyed the strictest interpretation of their faith. There were Muslim women who wore T-shirts and jeans and Muslim women who covered themselves head to toe. There were Muslim men who modeled their lives on the life of the Prophet, and those who strayed and fell short.

There were passive Muslims, uncertain Muslims, borderline agnostic Muslims, devout Muslims, and Muslims who twisted the words of the Qur’an to suit their temporary desire and agendas. It was all very familiar, intrinsic to any faith.”*

This reminded me of an opinion piece printed in the New York Times a few months ago that offered up this idea: the greatest variance of ideas does not come up between Muslims and non-Muslims, but within Islam itself.** I think if that were a more widely accepted notion—that moderates of any faith have more in common with each other than with fanatics of their own religion—there could be a lot more tolerance in the world. Might be something to think about in a country built on the principle of religious freedom.

*[pg61-62 of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, McSweeny’s Book: San Fransico, 2009. Random House ed.]

**For a good contrasting book, I would recommend The Bookseller of Kabul. Arne Sierstad uses a similarly intimate and engaging but no-frills journalistic prose to give an account of a family in Afghanistan. It’s unsettling, but is interesting as an example of Islam on the other end of the spectrum from that depicted in Zeitoun.