Allahu akbar!

“Allahu akbar! AllaaaaaaaAAAhu akbar!” calls the muezzin from the minaret behind my house – I still love it, every time! Many who live here for long, loose the appreciation of it. It’s maybe related to the fact that many of us don’t appreciate prayer and consider it something archaic or maybe for the weak.
“Ashaddu anna la allahi illallaaaaaaah! Ashaddu anna Mohammadan rassuuuuul allaaaah!”
A few days ago I sat in the open library section of a nearby café, researching for my thesis. A man of about my age had been sitting next to me for some time, also at his laptop. The call for prayer came and he got up, took out a little carpet and walked to the glass front of the big, elevated room overlooking the whole of downtown Amman. He laid the carpet on the floor and prayed, touching the carpet with his forehead several times and standing or kneeling inbetween, silently whispering parts of the Holy Qur’an.
When he came back to the table, he said: “there was a study done in Germany that showed that Muslims working on computers are five times less likely to die of a heart attack than non-Muslim screen-slaves. And you know why? Because we have to get up and pray every few hours, while you just sit there.”

There is one reason to pray!

As I sit here, in the room of our small house that me and my flatmate have converted into our “thesis lab” (actually it’s his bedroom), the sky outside is quickly darkening with hues of dark purple over the houses, minarets and church towers on Jabal al-Weibdeh (the hill that marks the view from house) and the tree’s branches outside the window are slowly becoming indiscernible from the falling darkness. A cup of anise tea is steaming next to my laptop and I am preparing for the cold. We have decided against using the central heating that our house does have and that guzzles expensive diesel. Instead, we prefer to heat only the rooms we’re actually using with a small but decent gas oven called a “soba”. That is also the reason my flatmate and I are sharing a room for the hours of the day, while we both type away into our keyboards, occasionally letting out long sighs or songs of frustration and frequently getting up to warm our hands at the rectangular flame of the stove. We’ve been doing so for a week now, from about 9 in the morning till around 8 at night… no weekends, only extended lunch breaks in the warming sun on our roof. Now it’s getting too cold for the roof and the deadline is looming too soon to allow for extended lunch breaks – only two weeks to go! How will we manage?