Trading Places

I’ll be going to Friday Prayers today at the new mosque which has just opened adjacent to our taman – literally a three minute walk. The pictures above do a little justice to what is, at this point in time, a fine new building, but it’s a pity I haven’t managed to get any shots of the delightful interior yet. Very bright and cheerful in a solemn sort of way.

From our perspective having the mesjid so close is good news for a variety of reasons, not least being our proximity to the azans (calls to prayer) which are very audible indeed from where we are. In attempting to pursue an Islamic way of life it’s extraordinarily useful to have these constant reminders of the straight path – and there’s also something oddly comforting in this sound track to our lives. Sadly, and honestly, I don’t think our non-Muslim neighbours will welcome this change to our lives in quite the same way, though. There’re a lot of Chinese non-Muslims on our taman and I imagine they’d regard the noise as unwelcomely intrusive.

This is a reminder of the demands made upon people in this part of the world in terms of the need for toleration. In Malaysia it’s the non-Muslims who are forced to accept the noise of religion, well one religion anyway. In Singapore it’s Muslims who are forced to accept the limits on the volume of the prayers calls from the mosques there. It seems to me that neither way round is particularly right or wrong. Rather we need to deal realistically with what is expedient in a particular context and rely on people’s fundamental goodwill, backed up by fairly authoritarian social and political systems, to accept that, or, at least, put up with it.

Funnily enough the capacity of people of radically different beliefs to put up with each other and somehow rub along was brought home to me in Hillenbrand’s book about the Crusades. Christians and Muslims came to at least temporary understandings more often than you might think in this period. At least some of the understandings revolved around trade which goes to show that there is a good side to all that filthy lucre. I could almost make my peace with capitalism over this most positive of its features.