Ramadan, part nine (Fajr)

On Friday night, after Dhuhur with the Ahmadis, and an afternoon and evening finishing work in my office, I gobbled some leftovers out of Tupperware to break the fast, and then headed off to a wine bar for a drink with kind of a blind date. We had a pleasant enough time, like so many first dates, but also no chemistry. He seemed too posh for me, too workaholic, and too hobby-free – a really friendly and sweet-tempered fellow, but probably better for somebody else.

As always with a new date, I inevitably quizzed him on religion, which I swear I don't do on purpose; it just always seems to come up. He had been raised in London by his London-born father and Portuguese mother as a Catholic, he said, though he no longer practices a religion. "I believe in doing good things," he said at one point. At another point, when he made a reference to "my faith," I said, "You mean your faith in doing good things," and he said, "Yes. I mean, no. I mean my faith in myself. In my own discipline."

On Saturday morning, I finally had the discipline to leave home for Fajr, early-early in the morning, and go pray in the huge, mainstream mosque on Embassy Row. I set my alarm for 4:15AM (noting that I was not yet in bed yet the previous weekend of the Equinamadan party...) and awoke to the sounds of both clock-radio-NPR and a pouring thunderstorm. I got up anyway and took a shower, ate a few spoonfuls of fruity tofu mix from the fridge, and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. I chose my Tevas for footwear, thinking they would be easy-off at the mosque, and that even if my jeans were sticking to me, I wouldn't have to deal with wet socks. The Koran in my backpack I wrapped in a plastic bag along with my cellphone. I put a bandanna in my pocket in case I might need a head-covering, and I pulled on my rain jacket before wheeling my bicycle out through the lobby of my building.

I've lived in DC for seven years, and it struck me that I have never gone biking around the city at 5AM. It seemed like another small, um, hmmm... the word I seem to want to use here is "blessing," but that seems so loaded, and so not like a word I would use... I'll just call it another "pleasant experience" you can derive from stepping out of your typical perspective to see how the mechanics of another religion might work in other people's lives -- or in a different version of your own life.

There were other bikers on the mostly car-free streets, but not many. I wondered if they were up early, going to work perhaps, or coming home after a long night. Most lights in the big, expensive houses between my apartment building and the mosque were off; those that were on made me curious. In one house a man sat in an easy chair in his living room reading a book under a bright lamp, with the curtains of his picture window fully open to the dark morning.

When I turned the corner onto Belmont St., I could see the gold-glassed cut-outs glowing on the side of the mosque from the light inside. Through a gap in two stone walls, I could see men chatting on the rain-slick but mostly covered front courtyard. The tableau made me feel warm and less miserable from the rain and excited to go inside. I locked my bike to a stop sign and walked in through the front gate.

Past the courtyard, but before the entrance to the mosque itself, sits a bank of cubbyholes for shoes. I put my Tevas in a cubby and my backpack and helmet on top. Walking in, I saw maybe 30 men and a few boys. Most were bareheaded, so I left my bandanna where it was, poking out of my pocket.

Low bookshelves partially lined the side walls of the large, cavernous room. Square marble columns supported the domes of the roof, and the walls and roof were inlaid with intricate mostly blue and black and gold Middle-Eastern designs. On the floor sat many overlapping woven carpets. Several men lay on the floor sleeping, and several others sat reading Arabic copies of the Koran from the bookshelves. Taking note, I started back toward the door to retrieve my English copy from my backpack (I tend to read it with a red pen in hand -- making notes -- but decided I should forego that for now), when I noticed the large, rectangular digital clock at the front of the mosque. It read 5:23. The Islamic Center's Web site had told me that prayers would begin at 5:24 (the times change everyday based on a formula I don't yet understand), so I decided to do without the Koran, and sat down next to a square column.

A stout, bearded, bareheaded imam in a floor-length, banded-collar white tunic stepped up to a microphone with his back to us and said a few words in Arabic, before allowing the group to proceed with prayers, each man at his own pace, much like the beginning of Dhuhur on Friday with the Ahmadis. The pacing is different for each prayer of the day, so I followed the movements of a good-looking, barefoot young Arab guy in a grey T-shirt and black jeans who stood in front of me and to my right.

Afterward, he sat back on his heels, looking up something on his Blackberry. He showed whatever he had found to the man next to him, and then went back to reading the printed Koran. For several minutes, the room was very quiet, reminiscent of Quaker meeting. I might even successfully have blanked my mind for a couple of seconds. But men continued to enter the mosque, and many of them began to talk with each other, some in English, some in Arabic, some in other languages. I found the continual increasing of the low murmuring to be very distracting and I began to wish I had brought my Koran in after all, so I'd have something on which to focus my mind. Growing impatient and peevish and bored, I just let my eyeballs roam, and watched the men as they entered and prayed and then sat and waited -- or started running their mouths. I kept one eye on the big red numbers of the digital clock. Around 5:50, the imam approached the microphone again, and all the men -- who had been spread randomly around the entire room -- rushed to the front to form three tight rows. We were maybe 150 men altogether.

I had been to this mosque once before. It was in the afternoon, four years ago, and the mosque had been very, very crowded. I thought we had been praying so close together because of the crowding, but after the Ahmadis had pulled me toward them into a tight row of three on my first visit, and after joining the rush to form the three cramped rows on Saturday, I understood that this is how it's done.

Nobody bothered to wake a sleeping boy in the middle of it all, and I almost ended up standing right next to him, which flustered me, so I hopped out of formation and went to the end of my line on the far left. There, a young black man stepped directly to my left -- the new end of the line -- and he squashed his muscular bicep into mine and slid his bare right foot flush against my left. Instinctively, like a subway passenger, I pulled my foot away. He pushed his closer, touching me again, and turned to give me an ever-so-slightly irritated look. I left us positioned as we were, and an imam led us through our Fajr prayers.

When we were finished, several men, including the good-looking guy in the grey T-shirt, continued with a few more cycles on their own, so I did too, before grabbing my sandals and backpack, and pedaling back to my neighborhood for a nice breakfast at the all-night diner around the corner.

As I cycled back past the front of the mosque through the slackened rain, my headlamp illuminated the mist and shone upon the headscarf of a woman who was walking out the front gate with a man. Of course, I had seen no women while I was inside.