Missing Europe
I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately; I think I’m a better Muslim overseas than at home.
Perhaps it is the distance that makes it so, and because I am a minority when I am away, that I am able to practise my faith better. Laugh if you wish, but this has been echoed by friends who have studied or worked overseas.
Maybe the reason why we feel this way is because of the isolation we feel, being away from home and the familiar. While we grab the many chances to explore and travel, we still hold on to our roots because they give us security and that we are something – Muslims – hence the strength to face a very different world that can be bleak and harsh.
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Friday prayers
When I was a graduate student at Lancaster University, I was invited by an Egyptian PhD student to participate in Friday prayers. It was very new to me, for women did not attend Friday prayers back in Malaysia. I thought I was quite exposed to other cultures, but I found a new world instead: the Muslim world.
There, women are allowed to attend Friday prayers. After prayers, tea is served, and the session becomes a congregation of like-minded women who want to fulfil their duty to God, and also to meet friends. Friday prayers become more than just satisfying a religious obligation. One gets to observe the many types of clothes and Islam practised, and goes home enlightened and delighted by the variety of ummah and in conversation.
To be honest, I was mildly shocked to say the least. Yes I had heard of the varying styles of solat (prayers), ablution and religious practice, but to see it in action was a different thing altogether.
Students milled about and gossiped, catching up with friends as they waited their turn to wash themselves. I blamed my jet lag and confusion as a new student at first when I prepared for ablution. I thought that because they were Arabs, they would know more about the Faith, and yet I was not ready for the differences in something as simple as preparing for prayers.
I watched in wonder the way they splashed little water on their feet and patted their cheeks wet with damp hands. Some didn’t bother taking off their socks, preferring to wet their clothed feet. One kept tapping the tip of her nose with water. I did not ask her why.
And the way they prayed. A young African woman came in and stood by me. She wore a knee length fitted skirt, woollen tights to protect her legs from the cold and a body hugging turtleneck sweater. She wrapped a scarf loosely around her head. Quite a number of women in the mosque were not properly attired by Malaysian standards (the Malaysian undergraduates who were standing behind me were mocking at their Muslim sisters’ attire in Bahasa. Only Malaysian and Indonesian female students donned the telekung – the prayer shroud).
Prayers began. My African princess recited all her duas so loudly I forgot my own supplications. Then she rocked left and right in ecstasy. Towards the end of Zuhur prayers, she unwittingly knocked me to the ground when she raised her hands for rukuk. What a glorious way to celebrate my first Friday prayers.
I asked Randa, the student that brought me to the mosque about the attire that was worn by the other female students.
“Sister, you Malaysians always ask the same thing,” she smiled, “Islam is international, and your sisters come in all colours. The important thing is that we pray to the same God. Why are our styles of praying, clothing, hijab, ablution so important to you?”
Berlin
My short but fulfilling year in the UK saw me travelling to London and Berlin. I found out that I had a half-German cousin, Mark, the son of a relative who had hopped on a boat in the early 60s to find herself an English Count.
It was in Germany that I met quite a number of Malays living there as German citizens. Many of them had come to Germany in the late 60s and 70s; some had followed German spouses back to their home, but for many, it was to seek love and fortune in a foreign land, just like my aunt.
Mark and his friend, Yentz, who was also half German and Malay, took me to a nearby pub, so I could break my fast. (It was Ramadhan then). They ordered a baked potato and Coke for me, while their dinner was a typical German fare – sauerkraut, sausages and beer.
“You don’t eat pork?” Yentz asked.
I shook my head.
“We are Malays too, but we eat pork,” he said.
“I consider myself German,” Mark announced.
“Ja, ja, but we have Malay blood too. But we eat pork. She doesn’t. Why don’t you eat pork?” he asked me, pointing at my potato.
“I’m Muslim?”
They looked at me. Two strapping and very good-looking men (as handsome as mixed-race children tend to be). They spoke to each other in German.
Yentz, the better looking one, tapped his head.
“But you don’t wear the scarf?”
“No. Not yet anyway.”
“You are okay if we eat pork?”
“Be my guest.”
We ate in silence. Occasionally my relative grunted as he appreciated his meal. I tried hard not to stare at the two gentlemen digging into their meal, as I took in the very fact that they were eating pork. It was akin to seeing a cannibal feasting on a boiled head.
It’s ingrained in almost every Muslim that when it comes to all matters pertaining to the swine family, it’s beyond haram. You can drink, do drugs, sleep around, kill, go to bomohs and keep a toyol in your toilet, but you don’t have anything to do with all things swine. For all our progress, there are some things we don’t do. Better to eat the flesh of a man, than the rump of a pig.
We are Germans
“We may have Malay blood, but we were not brought up as Muslims,” Mark offered. Yentz nodded his head. Religion wasn’t important, as assimilation was imperative. They were children of immigrants and mixed marriages. Islam was just something their Malay parents brought with to their new home, along with sambal belacan (shrimp paste), myths about big-breasted ghouls and tropical rain. So come hell or high water, they became what their parents wanted them to be: Germans.
“We are not Malays, and we are not Muslims,” they asserted.
Yentz took us back to the apartment he lived in with his family. I met his mother, a vivacious woman in her late 40s. His father had died a few years back. His sister, whose name escapes me now, was a stunning beauty.
“Oh you went to break fast just now? Bagus lah tu (Lovely) … come, come and let’s talk in Malay. It’s been such a long time since I heard a Malay word!” Yentz’s mother invited.
An old woman joined us later, her hair streaked burgundy and white. She wore a kurung top (tunic) and kain pelikat (sarong) beneath her coat. She smiled, and sat in a corner by herself.
“She’s just come back from Melaka…” my host explained, “… and what a welcome she received. First thing she got was a telling off, for not behaving like the 70-year-old she was. Everything was wrong: her dyed hair, her smoking, her ways. But you know, this woman, every Thursday night, she reads the Yassin. So what if she doesn’t cover up? So what if she wants to dye her hair until she becomes bald? She prays, she fasts, she doesn’t drink or eat pork.”
“When I went back last year, my brother and I had this big fight. Of course la, he will go to heaven. Pakai kopiah (Wears the skullcap), goes to masjid for all his prayers, and rotates between his two wives. In between these two women, he has a young girl on the side. But he will go to heaven, unlike me, his heathen sister, who ran off to marry a smelly Mat Salleh and has brought up ungodly children. But my children don’t take drugs and are doing okay, unlike my nephews who are on ganja and living off my brother. Ha ha ha! Melayu. I’ll let God judge me, and damn you if you do.”
That night, the boys took me to a trash metal club. As I watched the boys pogo-ing on the dance floor, whooping it up like only Germans can do (you don’t call it German precision for nothing; even fun was calculated. They’re serious, these Europeans), I thought to myself: what would happen when Yentz’s mother died one day? Who would read the Yassin at her funeral? Definitely not that old woman I met; she’d be gone way before Auntie did. Would her children rediscover their faith? Surely they would not go to hell, for they had exhibited kindness to me, a stranger.
After an hour of migraine inducing music, we left the club and Mark dared me to take off my winter jacket and run in the cold wintry night in my tee shirt and jeans, just like them. I had only one potato and Coke for dinner to warm me up, but I took up on the dare. There was a lot of guttural “Ja, ja, guut gurl, very brave”, heads nodding and snowballs whizzing past our heads.
There was a lot of laughter, that holiday.
I’m coming home Momma
I get asked a lot by friends, why did you come back?
Sometimes I wonder why I did.
I suppose this particular incident scared me out of thinking of living there. It’s silly, really.
I once stayed with an elderly Malay woman who was a housekeeper for the Malaysian rich. I’d visit her at her council flat, and we’d go out and have tea. She treated me like a daughter, and we had a ball walking up and down London, giggling, talking about love, my studies and Joan Collins.
One day she fell ill, and asked me to massage her. I attempted some form of massage, and as she belched her way to relief, she asked me to recite the Al Fatihah out loud.
“Why don’t you recite it?” I said.
“I can’t. I don’t remember. I can only say Bismillah.”
That stumped me.
You know, my family is pretty multi-racial, and a good number of them have lived overseas since they were born. Even the ones that are not practising Muslims know how to recite the Al Fatihah. It’s as basic as breathing.
“I come from a family of hafiz, you know. We’re quite religious,” she offered.
“Oh.”
“I just forgot. Haven’t recited it since I came here 40 years ago.”
I had a few good reasons to come home then: I fell in love. My scholarship required me to be back in Malaysia upon graduation. In my high-falutin’ moments I actually believed I had something to contribute to society. I didn’t want to grow old alone. I didn’t want to die in an old folks’ home, be cremated and have my ashes poured into a sewer. For all my modernity and secular upbringing, I didn’t want to forget.
So here I am.
