Coexistence

Yesterday evening I witnessed an eerily beautiful sight while walking home. Empty streets. Not a car, not a pedestrian, not a peep. For the first time in Amman I felt the just-before-sunset breeze and heard nothing except its rustle.

Most people in this situation would ask, "Where is everybody? Am I missing something?" And in a way, I was. They were all in their homes waiting for the sundown call to prayer, which signals time to break their fast. This week is currently the first week of the holy month of Ramadan. And if I ever want a clear reminder that I am living against the grain here, all I have to do this month is walk the streets at sunset. It is an enamoring idea to imagine an entire country - or entire countries - sitting down at their dinner tables, restaurants, curb sides, car seats, picnic knolls, and where have you to eat after a long day of fasting. Although the Muslims I have talked to have not listed this feeling of unity as one of the primary reasons they fast, it certainly seems very powerful to me.

To refresh the memory of any non-Muslim readers, during this month Muslims fast from sunup to sundown in recognition of the month in which the Qur'an was revealed. It is a time of family (especially during the large dinners that people have to break their fast at the end of the day), prayer, and charity. Offices generally close early (mine closes at 3). Life here in general slows down during the day, and at night there is generally celebration.

I struggled with some practicalities in my office at the beginning of Ramadan: how to eat lunch? My office mate and I usually spend the day munching on digestive biscuits and fruit - not to mention that we usually have a sandwich at some point, and there is always water on our desks. My office mate is also not fasting, and at first I thought that we should close our door so that fasters would not have to come down the hallway and be reminded of food. (During Ramadan in Jordan it is illegal to eat or drink - or even chew gum - on the street, so people are kind of serious about not seeing food during the day.) I felt guilty if I accidentally ate in front of a colleague.

On the other hand, neither I nor my office mate wanted to isolate ourselves from everyone else. "We would be shutting out Ramadan," he commented.

So then, what to do? How to create a culture of coexistence among different religious practices? In the end, there is a bit of compromise all around - no one minds if I go to the water cooler to get water during the day, and I still munch as I work, albeit more discreetly. This is mostly out of respect - people know that I'm eating. And if we're eating a sandwich or something for lunch, we briefly close the door.

I have to say, though, I was encouraged to be bold and assert my need to eat because of the large number of non-fasting people in the office. (Some are much more brazen about their lunches than I dare to be.) If I was the only person not fasting, I might have even felt enough social pressure to fast with everyone else. It is sometimes beautiful to be the only person out on the street, and sometimes lonely or frightening.

All of this makes me think of an Amin Maalouf book that I recently read, called Balthazar's Odyssey. The book is set in the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, narrated by a Christian. Although he never has illusions of being part of the same broader community as the Muslims and Jews he knows, he has friends and acquaintances who are both. He expects them to be different from him, knows their customs almost as intimately as he knows his own, and accommodates accordingly when necessary. Perhaps because he knows them he does not fear or dislike them. And perhaps if I had lived as a religious minority in a Muslim country all my life, I would not worry about trying to sneak my sandwich during Ramadan.

In the broader scheme of the world, I think this demonstrates that people tend to fear less those they know. And if you live among a group of people all your life, you will know them. Yet in our globalized times, we are communicating with - and affected by - people that we do not live among and do not have a chance to know. So we must make an unnaturally strong effort to learn about those far away from us.