Today marked a bit of a break in the usual routine. It's a public holiday here, for the Buddhist feast? festival? of Vesak Day. So after a morning spent marking scripts from the May IB examination it was off to my local mosque, Mesjid Abdul Aleem Siddique for Friday Prayers. The mosque is within reasonable walking distance - it takes about fifteen minutes to get there - and happens to be right next to a small Buddhist temple on a sleepy little side street off Telok Kurau Road. It wasn't quite so sleepy today though. Parking is usually difficult there, the mosque itself being a small building with no car-park, hence the fact that I invariably walk to prayers there, except when it's raining. Today parking was next to impossible with both temple and mosque going full throttle.
And what a delight it was to witness the ease with which worshippers at both locations negotiated what elsewhere might have been regarded as the awkwardness of their proximity. There was merely a sense of business as usual and a mild curiosity on both sides as to what the other was up to. I suspect each was up to pretty much the same thing.
The intense heat of a post-noon Friday leant a strange sense of almost stepping out of time to the proceedings, for me at least. And the fact that the experience is in the best sense a shared one - shoulder to shoulder in prayer - heightened the welcome otherness of it all.
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