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>> 177 4 Retrieving Tradition Pedagogical Forms and Secular Reforms Khidr on Fridays After a long semester in Jordan, Richard’s tutor, Amin, announces that he has to return home to Damascus before his wife has their baby. Richard likes Amin, and since he already has a tourist visa, he decides to follow him to Syria. Richard finds the ugly beauty of Damascus’s dusty, winding roads and aged, crumbling buildings far more appealing than Amman’s expansive highways and sparkling neighborhoods of newly constructed white apartment complexes. Damascus looks the part of a historic Islamic city better than Amman does, but Richard remains unsettled by the gaps between his expectations for his studies abroad and what he is learning. “My problem was I thought coming to the Middle East would be like an ISNA conference, getting spiritually reenergized. But this experience is nothing like ISNA. ISNA lectures are kind of passively absorbing information, and so you can just sit there and feel inspired, let Hamza Yusuf just blow your mind open. Here, to be a student, to learn anything , you have to work. It’s not a passive learning experience at all.” Amin takes a special interest in Richard, with daily lessons in the mornings and visits and suppers most evenings. Amin acts as Richard’s guide in Damascus, taking him to museums and ancient ruins and offering impromptu history lessons. Richard notices how Amin quietly curses the ubiquitous effigies of Presidents Bashar and Hafiz Assad as they drive through Damascus. Once when Richard commented that he felt sorry for the young men in fatigues, armed and stationed throughout the city, Amin warned him not to be taken by their youth. Only God knew what kinds of acts of torture they commit behind closed doors. 178 > 179 same stained-glass window, and watches the red and blue carpets fill with bodies, freshly showered and scented for the prayer. Every time the scratch of the imam’s voice first comes over the battered speakers, Richard is reminded of the history of the ancient mosque, the people that have prayed there, burying their faces in prostration in his same spot. Not always, but sometimes, in the unison of standing, bowing, prostrating, and sitting, the moment swells and shivers through his body. With his eyes closed, he takes in the heavy scent of musk and sweat, the thick brush of the rug against his skin, the sounds of thousands of bodies rising and falling, babies crying, chandeliers tinkling in the breeze, and the throaty recitation of eternal verses. “The building has changed, rebuilt and rebuilt on the same land . . . and before that, a temple and a church [in that same location]. But if you think about it, the smells and sounds in that mosque are the same now as they always have been—well, except for the fans and speaker feedback. But that’s really powerful for me because that takes you out of your time. You feel like you’re in this ocean of people, one single drop, but not just the people with you now but all the people that have ever prayed there, and it makes you feel so insignificant. We take these false positions, we think our life is so valuable or we’re so irreplaceable, and then you realize, no, I’m nothing, I’m just a drop in time, but at the same time, you feel God’s attention is on you.” As Richard makes his way out of the mosque, he always scans the crowd, but he is not looking for his friends or his teachers. He searches profiles, studies the smiles and eyes of strangers, hoping to recognize a light in a glimpse of a face he has never seen before. “Shaykh Waleed told me that Khidr [Moses’s spirit guide] prays here every Friday. Allahu ‘alam [only God knows] in what shape, in what form, but I imagine that I would be able to tell if I saw Khidr even from far away. Maybe that’s not the point, Allahu ‘alam.” Destination Tradition As we will see again and again, Muslim Americans’ travels abroad for Islamic knowledge are preeminently acts of the religious imagination . As they traverse the urban centers of the Middle East, studying Islam in unofficial study circles in cafes, classrooms, and on the floors 180 > 181 institutions at the time. In Syria, as in most Muslim societies, nationalization programs have since subsumed Islamic educational systems, and...

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