On Piety

As Ramadan draws closer, more and more conversations have taken a turn towards religion. For PCVs in Morocco, this almost exclusively means answering the Most Frequently Asked Question: Are you Muslim?

As far as I’m concerned, Islam is a beautiful religion, and, as my grandfather once put it, though referencing Catholicism at the time, those who believe have a blessing. There is, however, a rather distinct gulf between the American-Western and Moroccan-Islamic conceptions of belief. Islam is the state religion of Morocco, and roughly 98.7% of the kingdom’s citizens are Muslim. The percentage of Muslim Peace Corps Morocco volunteers is significantly lower, and, thus, many who respond truthfully to the above question are then queried with the Second Most Frequently Asked Question: Why not?

Proselytizing is forbidden within Morocco, but, despite the fact that the Qur’an states: “There is no compulsion in religion” (a very well-established prohibition on proselytizing), Islam is excepted from this law. This is probably due to a different proclamation to the effect that anyone who brings another into the fold of Islam is going to Heaven. There’s a fine line between violating someone’s freedom of conscience and a little friendly concern for another’s eternal soul.

Whatever the reason, discussing your religious views can be a daily struggle. Every volunteer handles it differently, and every instance is unique. Sometimes it’s interesting to get into a conversation about theological relativism. Some of the most fascinating chats I’ve had have been on the tenets of the Islamic faith. A lot of the time it’s doing your best to politely – or not – change the subject from a zealot’s conversion pitch.

Aside from the Most Frequently Asked Questions we get a lot of: “What do you think of Islam?” “Is Islam a beautiful religion?” “Don’t you want to go to Heaven?” Some people ask you to say the Shahada (testament of faith), one of the Five Pillars of Islam and the necessary assertion for submitting to Islam. Others will try to trick you into saying it. They’ll say, “Repeat after me: ‘la ilaha ilallah’ (there is no god but God), ‘wa ana Muhammad urasul allah’ (and Mohammad is His messenger).” Most volunteers don’t, and are often met by a grin that seems to say, “Touché, but I almost got you.”

Once, in a taxi, an older woman asked me about religion. She was curious because I had been speaking Darija. Morocco gets plenty of visitors, but almost none of them speak Arabic unless they’ve come to learn about Islam, become a Muslim, or marry a Moroccan girl (which requires conversion). I tried to employ Peace Corps’s go-to training: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” It’s never worked. She asked me a simple question: “Is there God?” In the land of the pious, that’s an easy question. She followed it up with a much trickier one: “Is there Muhammad.” “Yes” could imply that he was as the Qur’an and Hadith state, or that he was simply a real man who did important things. “No,” would almost certainly be a denial of Islam. They cheered like I’d just been born again.

The absolute most incredible happened this past week. Freedonia gets a lot of summer tourist traffic, and a volunteer friend and I were waiting for a third in a little tagine bazaar. We decided to peruse the wares, and stopped to admire some dishes that we’d normally want to call “casseroles.”

“What do you cook in this?” we asked. “Fish,” replied the merchant. “Or lasagna,” I added, chuckling more so that he’d know it was a joke than because it was particularly funny. He didn’t laugh. Instead, he responded with “Are you Muslim?”

And there we were. Now, my companion had told me how he’d recently tried to explain the complexities of his faith to a taxi driver – “I see the good of many religions but don’t follow any one path” – and this had been met by the driver’s nearly not taking him all the way to his final destination. Perhaps he was looking for a validation of his beliefs, so he tried to explain this to our friend the casserole merchant. Once again, this line of argument proved unsuccessful, as our new friend countered with “Islam is the best.”

I’m not one to get involved in theological relativism, but I’m Western enough to think it’s impolite to push your religion on someone and I’m getting awfully tired of talking about my religion so much with people I’ve never met before. I found myself facing a choice that every volunteer finds on an almost daily basis: to roll your eyes and say “sure, whatever” or to accept the linguistic and cross-cultural struggle to stand for what you really believe in. I chose the latter.

And so I pointed out to the man that the Qur’an states that followers of all Abrahamic faiths are on the same path. Granted, it often refers to the Christians as “those who have lost their way” and the Jews as “those who have incurred God’s wrath,” but they and the Saidians (who don’t exist anymore) are all destined to walk in the same Paradise as the Muslims. I didn’t add this point – I didn’t have the chance to. He repeated his earlier position that “Islam is best,” we tried to diplomatically and using Qur’anic truth remove ourselves from the conversation. He once more averred (and loudly this time) that “Islam is best,” and, to make his point all the more clear, he took the casserole dish he had been holding in his hands all this time, and brought it down forcefully on his head, smashing it into pieces.

There was clearly no more need to argue, and my friend and I walked away. It was an experience both daily and unique. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to explain my religious views, or the number of uncomfortable theological conversations I’ve had thrust upon me. I’d never seen that before, though, nor have I ever found myself in a religious debate where the other demanded that I agree with him. That’s rare, and I don’t want to give the impression that Moroccans, though pious verging on zeal, are close-minded.

I did learn one thing, though. Those casseroles he had, apparently they break pretty easily. It’s too bad, I’d been thinking about buying one.