Interview With A Masjid

I pulled up to the masjid and sat in my Jeep waiting for my friend Shahariar to arrive. Before my observation I did not know what I masjid was, but I learned that it is the same thing as a mosque and that the two terms are interchangeable. As I sat in the parking lot the first thing that stuck out to me about the masjid, was the cameras and the floodlights that blanket the property in a very obvious manner. Cameras and security precautions are by no means irregular in a place of worship, even the church that I grew up in had a very serious security detail that included several security guards, cameras, and even a small armory. The significance of the cameras in this case however, was how they were intentionally made very obvious to anyone near
Sohail, Shahariar, and I went into the room where Sohail was teaching the children earlier and took a seat. The beginning of the interview consisted of questions about the religion and his own experience with it. The first thing that I asked Hasanjes was how he came to believe in Islam, he explained to me that he was born to an Islamic family in Pakistan and first practiced Islam there, but he “really came to understand Islam here in the U.S.” I asked what effect Islam has had on his life, he told me that Islam affects every aspect of your life, It affects everything from how you interact with other people and that “all your moral values come from Islam.” Before I came to masjid I had known that prayer is one of the five pillars of Islam, or one of the things that a muslim must do. I asked Sohail “What happens if you miss a prayer,” he explained to me that you never miss prayer, that if you cannot do the movements you lift your arm, if you are in the hospital and cannot do anything but move a finger, then you move a finger. He said that you do not miss prayer if you can avoid it. He said that he even prays at work, that he has spoken to his boss in that other people will take smoke breaks, and that his boss can just count this as a sort of smoke break. He said “ I tell my supervisor I’m going to take a break and I do my prayers.” But what he told me next surprised me he said that God does not need our prayers, prayer is for us, not him; that “If you miss a prayer God is forgiving.” This surprised me, because in my own experience I had always heard people make the Islamic God sound like a bad guy, but the way these people described and worshipped him, he seemed like a very good