Mother's Day

In Iran, as Shia Muslims, we celebrate Mother's Day on the birth anniversary of our Lady Fatima Zahra, the beloved daughter of our Prophet and the wife of our first Imam. And more or less like here, stores are the happiest with this celebration as people go on shopping sprees to buy gifts for their mother, wife, grandmother, mother-in-law or other loved ones who are somehow in a maternal role. And I admit that even as an anti-consumerist person, who believes that showing your love should not be limited to buying stuff, I wouldn't completely stay away from the material side of this certain day when I was in Iran.

There's a difference however between Mother's Day here and in Iran. Here in the US (and most western countries), there is a service known as collect call; you call somebody and that person is charged for your call. Although Father's Day ranks first all over the year when it comes to collect calls traffic, Mother's Day is not so much lagging behind. Fortunately, we don't have such an unsavory way of showing our affection in Iran (at least up until now). Read more about collect call and Father's (or Mother's) Day here.

However, there is a spiritual aura to this blessed day. More than giving gifts to our mother in blood, we ask our great mother in spirit for gifts. For us Muslims, it's Fatima Zahra (and for a Christian it would be Mary). And we visit religious places and pray to God for our mother. There are other rituals recommended for this day, like fasting, helping the poor and needy (following in the very footsteps of our Lady) and some special prayers.

It's the third year in a row that I'm away from my mother and religious places in Iran. In 2006, after my unfair rejection in Dubai, I applied for visa again in Nicosia, Cyprus. And my visa interview was right the day after Mother's Day. So, I thought I'd better find a religious place to pray for my mother, myself and also for my visa interview. And trivially, the religious places available to me in Nicosia were churches. I've written about it in more detail in a previous post on a day of worship with African Americans.

And it turned out that my prayers to God and asking for a special gift (visa in this case) from our Lady Fatima Zahra and the other great Lady that we Muslims believe in, Mary, was answered and I succeeded with the lengthy extensive visa interview the following day. And now, I'm here. The sad thing is, although my mother is very happy with my academic progress, she badly misses me (as her only son). And I'm stranded here on a single-entry visa, unable to go back home for the duration of my study in the US.

On this blessed day, I pray to God for my parents' health and patience so that I could go through the next stages of my academic endeavor. And I ask our Lady Fatima Zahra (who granted me my special gift in 2006) for the next gift on my wish list.

God, gas, prayer

In Islam, we're familiar with praying to God for rain in time of draught. So, praying for things in our daily life that seem out of our control, makes sense to me as a Muslim. But praying to God to lower gas prices? Come on.

I received an Email from one of my pastor friends at the Toledo First Seventh-day Adventist Church. I believe it's the first church I've ever visited where their senior pastor is younger than me. And he's a cool guy, not only as a pastor, but also as a blogger. And he finds it a mandate to update his Fortune Cookies blog frequently.

In his Email of today, he informed us about the National Pray Down The High Gas Prices Summit. Sounds funny? or too materialistic? Maybe, maybe not. He's explained here, why increasing gas prices should concern Christians. It would harm the car-less poor and needy more than the rich and wealthy with their luxurious cars. When transportation of goods becomes costly, it would raise prices of everything (even the junk food that the poor survive on).

And then, he heard about Pray at the Pump Movement and invited Rocky Twyman (a choir director from DC and the founder of this movement) to Toledo. And what do they do exactly? Just what the name of their movement implies: they go to gas stations and pray to God to lower gas prices. Read here for more. And now, they're going to have a prayer vigil at the church, from 7 pm tonight to 7 am tomorrow.

My experience with other Christian prayer vigils had shown me that (unlike Muslim prayer vigils at mosques) they really don't stay at the church for the whole night; they gather in the evening, say some prayers, and then leave the church and do the pledged prayer slots at the comfort of their home. I assumed the same would happen here also. I was wrong. They're going to actually stay at the church for the whole night and do pray and lots of other fun things (including tips on energy conservation, green energy, etc). Read here for more details.

As I had to return some CDs and a book that Pastor Mike had lent me, I found it the best opportunity to make some sociological field observation on a prayer service over something that sounds worldly and consumeristic (on the surface at least). Unfortunately, I couldn't have stayed for the whole night, but what I saw (and what I knew about Pastor Mike) would give me an idea on how this prayer vigil would go on: cool.

When I was about to leave, Rocky (the founder of the movement) asked me to stay till 10:30 pm and say some Iranian prayers when they go live on Fox News. Sorry, I always remember poor people in my prayers, but I'm not interested so much in going live. And I'm not a big fan of Fox News.

There was just one thing that didn't quite make sense. These prayer warriors, like most of the western world, were brainwashed by the media that hiking gas prices was a result of OPEC keeping gas prices high, supply and demand and stuff. Well, not exactly.

First, there is a War of Terror going on and instabilities in the Middle East would do something to prices and these psychological shocks to the market play by their own rules (not necessarily by old dictates of supply-demand). And Russia, the biggest oil producer of the world, is not a member of OPEC. And although those Muscovites have considerably increased their oil production over last year (hence winning the first title from Saudi Arabia, the former good old ally of the US), they refuse to play the game by the rules of the Western Bloc (a note for people who believe the Cold War is over). And complications of a global economy with emergent superpowers-be (China and India) is another issue.

And last not least, there are some big creatures in the US called oil companies who benefit from high oil prices and as they hold an unscathed monopoly over production and refining of crude oil in the US, they enjoy high gas prices. Have refining utilization and capacity in the US increased at the same rate as consumption and demand? How many refineries have been shut down permanently over recent years? When was the last time they built a new refinery to increase refining capacity of crude oil?

I can anticipate outrage from both anti-God and anti-consumerism camps alike and how they would react to a gas prayer at a gas pump (of all places). Anti-God people would find new fuel to rant against those well-off church-goers who are so concerned about their cars and lifestyle under the disguise of prayer; and anti-consumerism guys (part of whom you can find among the leftist faithful), lamenting about reducing God to the temple of consumerism (i.e. gas pumps).

I wouldn't be very concerned about gas prices on a personal level; I've been riding my bike all along, in hot muggy summer and in cold snowy winter, regardless of gas price. As a poor student, I can't afford to buy a car, no matter what I read on gas pump boards. My only personal concern would be the price of the fruits (imported or transported from God-knows-where) that I rely on as a veggie (I eat fish and dairy though). And those tasteless inorganic fruits are already much more expensive than the organic delicious fruits I cherished back in Iran.

Anyway, even under simplistic assumptions about what's going on in our world (and that happens when you listen too much to Fox News), it's always good to pray to God.

Prayer in America

When I was a little kid, I grew up in an old neighborhood in Tehran. I refer to that neighborhood as Jerusalem. There, people of all major religions in Iran live side by side peacefully. Although it's a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, you could walk a block or two and see churches, synagogues and also a Zoroastrian temple. I knew Indians had a school not so far away from our neighborhood but I'm not sure if they had a place of worship nearby.

However, to meet people of other religions, you didn't need to walk too far away. We had Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Indians in the vicinity. Actually, first time I heard Hebrew was a night I was walking home from some shopping errand. And I had an Armenian friend at school. And my English teacher over my first grade at Iran-Swiss school was a lovely Indian girl. And seeing Sikhs with their turbans and tightly bound beards was a common occurrence. Although my fondness of this neighborhood was not merely a result of these things and I had other reasons to love my years there, living in such a highly diverse environment over those early years was a very interesting experience to me (that I took for granted).

My sweet childhood years didn't last long however. When Saddam invaded our country in 1980, almost all the world stood behind him and deluged him with all sort of support. And as if a war-time economy did not give our country enough hardship, the free world (led by the US) put further sanctions on us who were defending our country against that lunatic criminal.

And in times of economic trouble, people who live on a fixed meager salary (like my parents who were teachers), feel the heat the most. We began moving all around Tehran from one place to another to another. And each year, rents would go higher and higher with our home growing smaller and smaller. And add to that the stress of finding a place matching my parents' paycheck which gave us ever lower renting power each year. Not fun at all.

Despite all the stress of being a wandering jew, looking at the silver lining (or full half of the glass), living in different neighborhoods all over Tehran (though mostly in middle-class neighborhoods) was a rich experience for me as a future sociologist and it was further reinforced by my father taking me around Tehran as explained in my post after a year.

Yet, all over these years, I cherished my fond memories from my early childhood time in my little Jerusalem. And over my last year in college (which was probably one of the worst years in my life as mentioned in my commencement post), it was a great blessing to me when we ended up again in the same neighborhood after 14 years.

Every night, when I came home from school, although I was exhausted from my day at the computer lab struggling with my thesis and course projects, I would choose the longer route when I took the late night bus from my college to downtown where I had to walk for about 1.5 mile. Walking that long distance through the neighborhood would let me vent off a lot of my daily stress. And I would always think to myself, if I ever get so rich to buy a home in Tehran, it would be definitely here.

So, it should be no surprise that despite coming from a very religious (yet open-minded) family and having most of my pre-college schooling (grades 3-12) in Alavi School (an elite evangelical school which taught us an exclusivist view of Islam, more or less like evangelical Christians here), I've remained a pluralist; although in my personal life, I'm conservative, somehow orthodox (I was ultra-orthodox for some period in my life). And trivially, one of the major incentives for choosing the US to continue my education was its religious and ethnic diversity (compared to EU countries or even Canada).

And when I landed in Toledo, I was temporarily brainwashed by negativist ever-nagging people around me who kept repeating to themselves (and others) like a mantra: Toledo is a boring place. Well, compared to a megacity like Tehran where I spent almost all my life, Toledo is more like a village and it certainly lacks the glamour of cities of that size.

But as I began to spread my wings and started riding my bike around, I realized that despite its size, Toledo is a decent place to enjoy life; you just need to stop negativism and look around to find things and places to have fun. And specifically for me, it was a very good place to study religion and religious diversity. As I'm about to leave Toledo this August for my PhD, I'm already beginning to miss the variety of churches here. Toledoans, bragging as they are in everything, claim to have the highest church per capita in the nation. Sounds plausible to me.

One of the religious bodies in Toledo is the Multifaith Council of Northwest Ohio. I visited their Multifaith Thanksgiving last year and it was an interesting experience. And when I got to know about their panel discussion on Prayer in America, I found it hard to resist (although I was kinda busy this afternoon). I had already watched the documentary on WGTE last year. I was familiar with the topic and specifically, I found it interesting to know more about the perspectives of people from other faiths about prayer and the Constitution in a group-discussion setting.

The most interesting (and to me, oddest) view came from the Jewish panelist. He maintained that although Jews pray a lot in their life, they are against prayer in public places. And the main reason? They find Christian prayers offending to their beliefs and kinda reminding them of brute efforts to proselytize them all over their history. Well, I beg to disagree. Jews in this country are generally secular and liberal. Al least, if you believe the vocal Jewish (and non-Jewish) intelligentsia or even liberal rabbis like Michael Lerner.

In my group, I guess we had the most diverse composition: Christians, Muslims (Arab-American and Iranian), Hindus (one American and the other one Indian) and the American Zen-Buddhist panelist (who got into Zen while she grew up in Amherst over her student years). She believed that new things show up first in the Coasts (East and West) and when they show up in the heartland, it's a proof that they've been established (and by that she meant Buddhism). Not a very politically correct comment in a group discussion that is about diversity. Or maybe she still carries some of her East Coast baggage.

And oddly enough for a proclaimed Buddhist, she asked at one point, is it true that Hindus have thousands of gods? And this led our Indian friend to defend and explain about Hinduism. And this turned our group discussion (which was supposed to be on finding a constitutional solution for public prayer) into some sort of theological roundtable.

And when it came to public prayer, he believed that a neutral, generic prayer to God is tasteless and does not make sense; although he (as well as the Hindu panelist) had earlier boasted about prayers from multiple religions in Indian schools. So, he suggested not mentioning God altogether.



(Our Indian friend heatedly explaining about his Hindu beliefs and his views on public prayer. The Blade/Andy Morrison)

Eventually, our group concluded that the best way for public prayer is a moment of silence. That way, nobody (including atheists who believe in no kind of deity) would be offended. And our recorder (who was a Christian) commented that such a solution would be constitutional; believers could silently pray to their God (whoever He is) and atheists could think about whatever they want at that moment.

If you are looking for a multifaith way of prayer, a moment of silence is not a form of prayer. The solution could be either a generic prayer or a combination of prayers from different faiths. Personally, I find the latter more multifaith and pluralistic. When you have prayers from various faiths in succession, each of them would preserve their identity (and taste) and people learn to know and respect (not merely tolerate) others. In each religion, you can find phrases that are not offending to others.

But in a country like America, how many prayers would you include in a prayer session? And in which order? And taking into account the concerns of atheists in a multifaith framework? It brings us back to the issue of constitutionality; atheists have the right not to pray or believe in anything. So, believers have to censor themselves and not pray in public. That seems to be the easiest solution. But is the easiest solution always the best?