Superstitions

Superstitions we grow up with the middle east.

When I was the age of 14 or so, I recall going to play house with my Saudi girl cousins in Riyadh. They were aged eight Eman, nine and a half Safa, and eleven Sara. As we sat at the tiny pink plastic table drinking our fake tea and eating our plastic pastries. I picked up her plastic sparkling pink champagne-shaped glasses that we had filled with Coca-Cola and said, "Yay!" As I leaned my glass in to clink with Sara's, she trembled with fear and said, "La, La (No, No) It's haram" "How is it haram? We're just celebrating" "Baba said that if you clink any glasses together, what is in them will become haram." I was puzzled since, realistically, it seemed impossible that the Coca-Cola would magically turn into wine if we clinked them together. 

On a visit to an American home for the holidays, we were welcomed by the homeowners, a wonderful couple. The husband had once lived in Riyadh and worked at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital as my grandfather, mother, stepfather, and brother have worked. As I was exiting the back door to have a cigarette on their back porch, I was mortified by the sight of a red prayer rug. It was just like the ones we had when I was young, maroon red in color displaying a white outline of a mosque minaret with a crescent moon on the top. I froze and stepped ever so carefully around the rug, appalled and distraught at the sight of a prayer rug being used as a regular rug, stepped on by the shoes of people who have no idea of its significance. As I smoked, I asked myself… Why does it bother me so much? 

In most Muslim households, we leave our shoes in the doorway since any rug or surface in the house can be prayed upon. In the desert, we can pray on the sand if we don't have a prayer rug at our disposal. The same sand where camels, goats, sheep, and humans might have relieved themselves at any point before we arrived, even though its evidence is not apparent.  You can put down your jacket to pray. With that in mind, is this rug, therefore, any different from their living room rug? I stepped around it for days, afraid that to step on it would land me a one-way ticket to hell. 

I thought about the fact that I drink and how that has to be worse than accidentally stepping on this prayer rug. The homeowners were innocent in their intentions. To them, it was just a rug, and the truth was they were right. It is just a rug, even if it was of the popular prayer rug variety. It had no quranic verses of it, so why did it frighten me so? Prayer rugs of this variety are modeled after the fact that the Prophet Mohammed ﷺ was said to pray on a mat of woven palm tree leaves. It was small and only big enough for your face and hands as you prostate to pray. But the same style of weaving could have been done on a larger scale to cover an entire living area, and you would walk on that, although not with your shoes or maybe you would if it was a gathering where the hostess invited you to keep your pretty shoes on that matched your dress. In that case she would just vacuum the carpets after her guests left so then couldn't this rug just get thrown in the washing machine one day and be pure again for praying?

If the rug was never used for praying, then does that indeed make it not a prayer rug? Just a rug that looks like a prayer rug. There is no precedent except the superstitions I was raised with when I was young, being taught Islam by my Hijazi Grandmother. Indeed there are many such superstitions and contradictions I try to overcome daily, and this one got me thinking. 

The superstition that if you eat pork, you will turn into a pig, that if you clink a glass against another, its contents will become alcoholic. That if you look up as you pray, God will strike you blind. That if you own anything that has a face or resembles a living being, one day your ancestors will worship it. It will scare away the angels leaving your house unprotected from evil.  That if you don't say Mashallah (By Allah's Grace or What Allah has willed), then the evil eye will descend on that person and cause them harm. Scary shit!

To stay in God's good graces, does a rug no longer become just a rug? Should I shout at my hosts and tell them how disrespectful they are to the Islamic religion? 

After a few days of walking around the rug, I settled down and decided indeed it was just a rug. That two glasses clinked together don't turn their contents into alcohol. Everything I was taught as a child about how all manner of things that are interpreted as imitating the non-believers needed to be done away with. What would be next, cars? Modern medicine? Pants for women? 

Like many, I find it hard to distinguish at times my own learned superstitions from common sense. One day at a time, a situation like this arises, and I am forced to ask myself questions I never thought to ask before.

Signed,

Elise Evans