Two Mosques, One God

I have stood inside both of these mosques, in two different countries, separated by an ocean and by what feels like a thousand years of the same religion. --- In the first, the call to prayer doesn't come from a minaret. There isn't one. The building is modest — about five hundred square feet — and at the entrance sits a security guard, a young man in his early thirties, who nods you through. To the left is a sizable coffee shop, large enough to hold a hundred people. Young men and women sit hunched over laptops, headphones in, phones glowing beside their cups. Some talk quietly with friends, coffee cooling at their elbows. Light music drifts out of speakers mounted somewhere near the ceiling. When the call to prayer sounds — broadcast, not chanted from a tower — a few people rise and leave. Most don't look up from their screens. To the right, a hallway leads to the mosque itself, where on Fridays the room fills: the old, the young, the in-between. Prayer begins at one o'clock. Women aren't separated by a wall, or even a curtain — just a low partition, more suggestion than barrier. The sermon plays on a large Samsung television mounted at the front. The man who speaks wears a Western suit. No tie. No head covering. Friday is my favorite day here. By midmorning the coffee shop has turned into a banquet hall. The smell of chai and biryani replaces the smell of espresso. Children run between the tables. Women catch up on the week's news. Men laugh too loudly at something one of them said. The room that an hour ago held twenty people typing in silence now holds two hundred people talking over each other. --- The other mosque is a single building with a minaret, and from it, five times a day, the mullah's voice is amplified loud enough that birds leave the branches of the tree outside. Entry has rules. Islamic dress is required — robes, a beard, a head covering, a turban or something close to it. Ankles must be visible, never hidden under a trouser hem. Women are not present. I never once saw one inside. Before you reach the door, armed men search you, checking that you aren't carrying explosives. Inside, religious police circulate, watching to see that the rules are kept. Friday attendance isn't optional for anyone living in the surrounding district. Miss it once, maybe twice, and someone comes asking why. At the Friday sermon, the imam stands in a white robe, a long qamis underneath, one hand resting on an AK-47 propped against the pulpit. The speakers inside aren't tuned for the room — they're tuned to carry, so that every sentence echoes twice before it fades. He tells the congregation how God will punish those who listen to Satan instead of Him. How the United States and the West are conspiring against Islam. How Muslims who live like Westerners are collaborators, and how collaborators should be dealt with the way a Muslim deals with a kafir. Once, I watched a boy of maybe seven wander to the edge of the men's rows, more interested in a beetle crossing the carpet than in anything the imam was saying. An old man beside him — not his father, just a stranger from the next row — cupped a hand over the beetle so it wouldn't be stepped on, and let the boy watch it crawl free. It was the only soft thing I saw inside that building. Outside, when the worshippers leave, a crowd gathers — women, boys, the old — pressing close, hands out. They look as if they haven't eaten in days. Their clothes haven't been washed in longer. Their stomachs have pulled in against their ribs. Armed men stand at the edge of the crowd, making sure the women's faces stay covered, as if covering a face were the same as filling a stomach. One woman, maybe sixty, holds out both hands to no one in particular. A man walking past — not rich, judging by his own sandals — stops, presses a few bills into her palm without a word, and keeps walking. She doesn't thank God. She thanks him