Goodbye dirty streets, fresh strawberry juice, and home-delivered McDonald's. No more 5 a.m. muzzeins, television programs I can’t understand and hijab. I’m supposed to be back among my co-Westerners here in Belgium. (And my “co-religionists,” so to speak.) But boy do I feel out of place.
Driving around on the streets of the capitol of the European Union, I took note of all of Mitt Romney’s empty churches standing where the mosques used to be. Little fruit stands and ahwas (sheesha stops) morphed into cozy bars and patisseries. I’ve gone from being able to talk to just about everybody to being able to get along with about half the population. And there’s this question, occurring to me on three separate occasions: What’s up with all the white people?
Day 1 back in the occident passed without a hitch. I sat in my family abode watching ESPN Sportscenter, something I hadn’t experienced since I left the U.S. on June 17. After three runs of it, I flipped over to “Deal or No Deal,” a brutal game show experience I had never previously experienced and hope to never again. I felt like I bit into a candy bar I enjoyed as a kid and, my stomach turning over a little bit, wanted to chuck the rest.
There’s more than just a little emotional displacement going on here, I think. I think this feeling I’ve having now is a much more useful tool for exploring “religion” than the typical scriptural route. I once read religion defined as “community and meaning together.” Religion in this model seems to me to be about emotional orientation, about the way we derive meaning from our community and push forward with our lives. Being a-religious, I feel open to be affected by various faiths in a way that perhaps those who are denominationally inclined might not be.
When my community was Muslims, I too was a bit more “Muslim,” so to speak. The questions I wondered about were ones Islamic ones. Now, getting used to the West isn’t really about remembering what microwave pizza tastes like or Christmas trees look like. Its about turning my whole spirit around in a different way. It’s about asking an entirely different series of questions, holding a whole different cache of hopes and concerns.
I’ll hopefully get more specific than this in the future, but I have to say, I feel for the immigrant populations trying to scratch their lives out in Western nations. I can see why people turn in on their communities, strengthen their identities: where everybody knows everybody back in The Old Country, so to speak, here I sometimes feel like folks are hermetically sealed in their social circles. We’re not the most welcoming, us Westerners.
More on this to come. But it’s now time to indulge in what I have had no trouble re-adjusting to: drinking Western beer.
Comments (1)
David, Interesting article.
Posted January 28, 2008 9:04 AM
Posted on January 28, 2008 09:04