Dialogue: It's time to know Muslims better

By JOHN ROUGHAN

In a Muslim country last year I answered the call to prayer.

It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Like any tourist, I'd seen the inside of empty mosques, heard those enchanting calls several times a day, noticed the devout and had no desire to know them any better.

But that day I was a guest of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. I had a guide and our tour had arrived at a mosque a little too late. Men were inside and the midday prayers were starting.

On impulse I said I'd like to go in.

The guide, a woman, dressed like all Turkish Cypriots in ordinary European garb, said she was not allowed to go in but she had a word with two men sitting at the entrance.

A brief, intense debate in Turkish ensued.

She told me later that one of them regarded me, correctly, as an inquisitive tourist who should be told to shove off. The other insisted that since I wanted to come in, my heart must be open. He won, bless him.

So I dropped my shoes and padded across the carpet to join the last of several lines of men and boys. For the next few minutes I followed the ritual, concentrating so hard on matching the movements of those alongside me that I did not notice much else.

From the rostrum a prayer was read, I think. It was all over quite quickly.

Nobody had minded me. The few who caught my eye noticed I had no idea what I was doing. They seemed not at all annoyed or embarrassed, for themselves or me.

When Islam claims to be tolerant, I can say was to me.

Outside, I asked the guide why she could not go in. She giggled and said women could not attend the services lest the men have forbidden thoughts.

It is at moments like those that the gulf between the Islamic world and the rest is too wide for words. Right now, it is hard to see how a prolonged war in Afghanistan can avoid that chasm.

There is something deeply antagonistic between the Islamic way of life and others. From the Balkans to the Sudan, the Indian subcontinent, China and Central Asia, everywhere Islam rubs up with other cultures, there seems to be tension.

Why is it? I met a new immigrant from Macedonia not so long ago and asked what their problem was with Albanians in that country.

"When you get down to it," I said, "in ordinary daily life do you get along?"

"No," he replied.

It took some prodding before he nominated a precise reason.

"They will not let their women go out," he said. "But they [Albanian males] come around and try to pick up our women."

It was as basic as that.

In Cyprus I saw the divide from the Islamic side. The island has been partitioned since 1974, when Turkey seized the northern portion, fearing that a coup in Athens would lead to the genocide of Turkish Cypriots.

It was the end of 400 years of cohabitation with a Greek Cypriot majority who had been able to preserve their Eastern Orthodox Christianity under the Ottoman Empire.

For 400 years Muslims and Christians occupied the same cities, same countryside on the same small island. And in all that time there was almost no inter-marriage.

They lived in separate neighbourhoods and separate villages, a stone's throw from each other, attended different schools, followed different customs.

Within a few years of the island's independence in 1960, they were at each other's throats. "Why?" I asked the guide several times when the subject came up.

"They just don't like us," she said.

Western critics of the United States tell us we have no idea of the depth of resentment of the US on the streets of the Middle East. They ascribe it to the excesses of Israel and, more recently, the US air bases in Saudi Arabia that particularly incense Osama bin Laden.

But it probably runs much deeper. When George Bush and Tony Blair declare the enemy is not Islam but "evil" and they are fighting for "civilisation", Muslims probably hear different messages than we do.

They know, I suspect, what we really think of their religion, or at least of the outward signs of it. Through the pervasive influences of Western popular culture they know us far better than we know them.

They know exactly what we are thinking when we see those white-robed men striding about the Gulf with their wife draped head to toe in black, walking a few paces behind.

They may know we occasionally encounter a westernised woman from the Middle East and they may sense our disgust when she tells us about the pressure she has been under to veil herself.

The West deeply threatens their way of life without pointing a gun at it.

The US and Britain are doing their diplomatic utmost to keep this war from widening into the cataclysm that Osama bin Laden is doing his damnedest to foment.

Suddenly it seems a good idea to get to know Muslims much better.