| 08 December 2009
I found this article last night.I often wondered about why certain things seemed so oddly familar to me. I'd say to myself, "Hey... there's something... familiar about that ... what is it, why, what's going on?" I mean, for heaven's sake, I was born in ATLANTIC CITY.
When I first began to study Islam, when I entered Islam, the first thing I was advised to do was to focus on the salat, the prayer.
Well, before you can do salat, you have to do the ritual washing, the wudu. So I studied about wudu.
When I read about what had to be done, I got this odd, odd feeling that I already knew how to do it. Now how can that be, I thought, how is it that I already know these steps??
It took a couple of seconds before I realized that as a young child, I'd seen my father do the same ritualized gestures that I was being taught as wudu. Who snuffs water up their nose?? Who washes to the elbow? Then there was the ear wipe and the head wipe. He didn't wash his feet every time as I recall, but he'd wash to the elbows and do that odd nose snuff dealie. He also had other habits I was told "are sunnah."
He was a staunch Sicilian Catholic guy who was very loyal to his church, and yet, the "wisdom sayings" he passed onto me I found much later in the "Forty Hadith" collection. Those 40 hadith are so familiar.
How did that happen?
His mother, my grandmother, was the Bubba Gump Shrimp Cookbook of eggplant ("You can boil them, fry them, sautee them, fricasse them, spin them around like tops...") She must have had a thousand ways to cook aubergine. And she never left the house without something on her head. As in, a scarf.
Grandma and my auntie chastised me roundly for even THINKING of moving out of the family home before I got married. Boy, they gave me the business about that. Just couldn't understand it, did NOT approve (special circumstances are my explanation... long story). When you came of age, in their world, you did not "date"....you COURTED. The difference is that you don't go through the modern American 'revolving door' pattern, but if a man had an interest in you, in terms of marriage, he came to the family house and sat in the parlor.
On the other side of the couch.
With your relatives in the room.
Not exactly what the rest of the 20th century was all about, but....their marriages did last a lifetime, so I guess we shouldn't knock it if we haven't tried it. And oddly enough, very little of what they tried to teach me diverges from Islam. As it turned out.
I dunno. Grandma had some ideas I've come to respect later in life, when I've been able to observe the effects of doing things "the American way." It's not always been such a good way, over the longer term.
Any of this beginning to sound FAMILAR to you?
Whenever the church bells would ring, which they'd do periodically throughout the day in those days, Grandma would say "God is calling... God is calling..."
He's still calling, Gran. He calls me five times a day now, and whenever the azan goes off, I go to wash the way I saw my father wash. Then I smile to myself and say:
God is calling.... God is calling....
Rest in peace, dad, gran, auntie. Thank you for giving me some good values that I appreciate to this day.
I just figure, I'm returning to the ancestral pattern.
