The Meaning of a Minaret

December 4, 2009

I suppose this article is more an editorial than a travel piece, but one of the reasons travelers love to travel is that ‘travel is so broadening,’ as Sinclair Lewis was wont to say. In my view, the term ‘broadening’ entails a readiness to learn about and perhaps even embrace the unknown and the unfamiliar: in some countries, people relish dishes with squid ink or bird’s nests, in some countries, people have unfamiliar art or dance forms, or customs or holidays or forms of worship.

Last year at this time I was in Dakar and watched as Muslim men of the Bocoum family prepared the ritual sleep for slaughter for the feast of Tabaski. This practice hearkens back to the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son when asked to do so by a higher power, and what I loved in Senegal was the way in which Catholics and Muslims lived side by side, in peace, sharing one another’s customs and holidays, inviting their neighbors of another faith to come partake of the feasting and celebration. I was an outsider, unable to speak their language and unfamiliar with many of the major tenets of Islam.

Yet I was invited to join and be part of the community: not with any view toward conversion, but as a gesture of inclusion, because I was a newcomer and would otherwise have spent a major holiday alone and isolated in my room at the school in which I taught. These people, who had so little, opened their homes and their hearts to me as readily as they did to one another. Such gestures of inclusion are my notion of what religious worship and religious tolerance should mean, and it hurts me to think that people in Switzerland, a country known for its ‘enlightened’ principles, should vote so overwhelmingly against the construction of minarets by the Islamic minority residing there. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html According to the New York Times, Amnesty International’s deputy program director for Europe and Central Asia called acceptance of the ban “grotesquely discriminatory.”  
If minarets are constructed, does it follow that all Christians will convert to Islam? Is that the fear? Will the construction of minarets perhaps lead to more terrorist activity, because Muslims are inherently more violent than Catholics? Or are those who ask such questions confusing ordinary Muslims with Islamic extremists? Have they forgotten some of the ugliest and most violent periods of the church’s own history, such as the Inquisition, or witch hunts?

Rather than cultivate paranoia about the spreading of Islam, why not learn from the example of peaceful coexistence we can see between Muslims and Catholics in Senegal, many of whom intermarry and live happily, even when children of such unions may choose to practice different faiths? Astonishingly, there is even a mixed cemetery – cimitiere mixte -  for Catholics and Muslims in Senegal, one that draws tourists to the village of Fadiouth because it is such a rare and unusual concept.

Once upon a time, I thought Switzerland was the most amazing country in the world: politically neutral, while at the same time home to all major international organizations; endowed with incredible natural beauty; multilingual and multicultural – the way a country truly ought to be. Now, I cannot help but be proud to be from a country that was founded in the name of religious liberty and which believes in allowing people from all people and places to exercise freedom of religion.

The ritual Tabaski greeting is “Deweneti,” or happy new year. At the same time, it is also a plea for forgiveness for the ways in which people might have hurt one another during the preceding year, and it occurs to me that perhaps mutual forgiveness for perceived wrongs rather than hate-mongering could make the world a much more harmonious place.

Please let the world not forget that the way we treat minorities expresses a lot about our willingness to embrace difference. Discrimination and xenophobia are most emphatically not the way to promote world peace and tolerance. Deweneti.

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dortmund, Germany after recently returning from teaching in Dakar, Senegal. You can follow learn more about Tamara’s experiences at her blog senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com